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diff --git a/old/8wrr210h.htm b/old/8wrr210h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9cf4b68 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/8wrr210h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,5845 @@ +<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> +<html> +<head> +<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II, by Mrs. Humphry Ward</title> +<meta HTTP-EQUIV="content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> + <style type="text/css"> + * { font-family: Garamond;} + P { text-indent: 1em; + margin-top: .75em; + font-size: 14pt; + text-align: justify; + margin-bottom: .75em; } + a:link {color:blue; + text-decoration:none} + link {color:blue; + text-decoration:none} + a:visited {color:blue; + text-decoration:none} + a:hover {color:red} + + H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; } + HR { width: 33%; } + pre {font-family:Times New Roman; + font-size:12pt} +.c {text-align:center;} + </style> +</head> +<body> +<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook of<br> + A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes),<br> + Volume II,<br> + by Mrs. Humphry Ward</h1> + +<pre> +Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the +copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing +this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook. + +This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project +Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the +header without written permission. + +Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the +eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is +important information about your specific rights and restrictions in +how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a +donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved. + + +**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** + +**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** + +*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!***** + + +Title: A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II + +Author: Mrs. Humphry Ward + +Release Date: February, 2006 [EBook #9821] +[This file was first posted on October 20, 2003] + +Edition: 10 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: iso-8859-1 + +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS +(IN TWO VOLUMES), VOLUME II *** + + + +</pre> +<h3> +E-text prepared by Andrew Templeton, Juliet Sutherland, David Gundry,<br> +and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team +</h3> + +<br><hr><br><br> +<h1>A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS<br> +(IN TWO VOLUMES), VOLUME II</h1> +<h2>BY<br> +MRS. HUMPHRY WARD</h2> +<h3>Published November, 1918.</h3> +<br> +<br> +<p class="c"><i>Author of</i><br> +"ELEANOR" "LADY ROSE'S DAUGHTER"<br> +"THE TESTING OF DIANA MALLORY" ETC.<br><br> +ILLUSTRATED</p> +<table width="80%" align="center"> +<tr> +<td> +<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br> +<h2><a name="151"></a>CONTENTS</h2> +<br> +<p>CHAPTER</p> +<p><a href="#141">I. LONDON IN THE 'EIGHTIES</a> +</p> +<p><a href="#142">II. LONDON FRIENDS</a> +</p> +<p><a href="#143">III. THE PUBLICATION OF "ROBERT ELSMERE"</a> +</p> +<p><a href="#144">IV. FIRST VISITS TO ITALY</a> +</p> +<p><a href="#145">V. AMALFI AND ROME. HAMPDEN AND "MARCELLA"</a> +</p> +<p><a href="#146">VI. "HELBECK OF BANNISDALE"</a></p> + +<p><a href="#147">VII. THE VILLA BARBERINI. HENRY JAMES</a></p> + +<p><a href="#148">VIII. ROMAN FRIENDS. "ELEANOR"</a></p> + +<p><a href="#149"> EPILOGUE</a></p> + +<p> </p> +<h2><a name="152"></a>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2> + +<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br> + +<p> <a href="#james">HENRY JAMES</a></p> + +<p> <a href="#balfour">ARTHUR BALFOUR</a></p> + +<p> <a href="#goldwin">GOLDWIN SMITH</a></p> + +<p> <a href="#jusserand">M. JUSSERAND</a></p> + + +<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br> +<h2>A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS</h2> + + + +<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br> +<h2><a name="141"></a><a href="#151">CHAPTER I</a></h2> +<br> + +<p class="c">LONDON IN THE 'EIGHTIES</p> + +<p>The few recollections of William Forster that I have put together in the +preceding volume lead naturally, perhaps, to some account of my +friendship and working relations at this time with Forster's most +formidable critic in the political press--Mr. John Morley, now Lord +Morley. It was in the late 'seventies, I think, that I first saw Mr. +Morley. I sat next him at the Master's dinner-table, and the impression +he made upon me was immediate and lasting. I trust that a great man, to +whom I owed much, will forgive me for dwelling on some of the incidents +of literary comradeship which followed!</p> + +<p>My husband and I, on the way home, compared notes. We felt that we had +just been in contact with a singular personal power combined with a +moral atmosphere which had in it both the bracing and the charm that, +physically, are the gift of the heights. The "austere" Radical, indeed, +was there. With regard to certain vices and corruptions of our life and +politics, my uncle might as well have used Mr. Morley's name as that of +Mr. Frederick Harrison, when he presented us, in "Friendship's Garland," +with Mr. Harrison setting up a guillotine in his back garden. There was +something--there always has been something--of the somber intensity of +the prophet in Mr. Morley. Burke drew, as we all remember, an +ineffaceable picture of Marie Antoinette's young beauty as he saw it in +1774, contrasting it with the "abominable scenes" amid which she +perished. Mr. Morley's comment is:</p> + + But did not the protracted agonies of a nation deserve the tribute<br> + of a tear? As Paine asked, were men to weep over the plumage and<br> + forget the dying bird? ... It was no idle abstraction, no<br> + metaphysical right of man for which the French cried, but only the<br> + practical right of being permitted, by their own toil, to save<br> + themselves and the little ones about their knees from hunger and<br> + cruel death.<br> + +<p>The cry of the poor, indeed, against the rich and tyrannous, the cry of +the persecuted Liberal, whether in politics or religion, against his +oppressors--it used to seem to me, in the 'eighties, when, to my +pleasure and profit, I was often associated with Mr. Morley, that in his +passionate response to this double appeal lay the driving impulse of his +life and the secret of his power over others. While we were still at +Oxford he had brought out most of his books: <i>On Compromise</i>--the fierce +and famous manifesto of 1874--and the well-known volumes on the +Encyclopedists, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot. It was not for nothing that +he had been a member of Pattison's college; and a follower of John +Stuart Mill. The will to look the grimmest facts of life and destiny in +the face, without flinching, and the resolve to accept no "anodyne" from +religion or philosophy, combined with a ceaseless interest in the human +fate and the human story, and a natural, inbred sympathy for the many +against the few, for the unfortunate against the prosperous; it was +these ardors and the burning sincerity with which he felt them, that +made him so great a power among us, his juniors by half a generation. I +shall never lose the impression that <i>Compromise</i>, with its almost +savage appeal for sincerity in word and deed, made upon me--an +impression which had its share in <i>Robert Elsmere</i>.</p> + +<p>But together with this tragic strenuousness there was always the +personal magic which winged it and gave it power. Mr. Morley has known +all through his life what it was to be courted, by men and women alike, +for the mere pleasure of his company; in which he resembled another man +whom both he and I knew well--Sir Alfred Lyall. It is well known that +Mr. Gladstone was fascinated by the combination in his future biographer +of the Puritan, the man of iron conviction, and the delightful man of +letters. And in my own small sphere I realized both aspects of Mr. +Morley during the 'eighties. Just before we left Oxford I had begun to +write reviews and occasional notes for the <i>Pall Mall</i>, which he was +then editing; after we settled in London, and he had become also editor +of <i>Macmillan</i>, he asked me, to my no little conceit, to write a monthly +<i>causerie</i> on a book or books for that magazine. I never succeeded in +writing nearly so many; but in two years I contributed perhaps eight or +ten papers--until I became absorbed in <i>Robert Elsmere</i> and Mr. Morley +gave up journalism for politics. During that time my pleasant task +brought me into frequent contact with my editor. Nothing could have been +kinder than his letters; at the same time there was scarcely one of them +that did not convey some hint, some touch of the critical goad, +invaluable to the recipient. I wrote him a letter of wailing when he +gave up the editorship and literature and became Member for Newcastle. +Such a fall it seemed to me then! But Mr. Morley took it patiently. "Do +not lament over your friend, but pray for him!" As, indeed, one might +well do, in the case of one who for a few brief months--in 1886--was to +be Chief Secretary for Ireland, and again in 1892-95.</p> + +<p>It was, indeed, in connection with Ireland that I became keenly and +personally aware of that other side of Mr. Morley's character--the side +which showed him the intransigent supporter of liberty at all costs and +all hazards. It was, I suppose, the brilliant and pitiless attacks in +the <i>Pall Mall</i> on Mr. Forster's Chief-Secretaryship, which, as much as +anything else, and together with what they reflected in the Cabinet, +weakened my uncle's position and ultimately led to his resignation in +the spring of 1882. Many of Mr. Forster's friends and kinsfolk resented +them bitterly; and among the kinsfolk, one of them, I have reason to +know, made a strong private protest. Mr. Morley's attitude in reply +could only have been that which is well expressed by a sentence of +Darmesteter's about Renan: "So pliant in appearance, so courteous in +manner, he became a bar of iron as soon as one sought to wrest from him +an act or word contrary to the intimate sense of his conscience."</p> + +<p>But no man has a monopoly of conscience. The tragedy was that here were +two men, both democrats, both humanitarians, but that an executive +office, in a time of hideous difficulty, had been imposed upon the one, +from which the other--his critic--was free. Ten years later, when Mr. +Morley was Chief Secretary, it was pointed out that the same statesman +who had so sincerely and vehemently protested in the case of William +Forster and Mr. Balfour against the revival of "obsolete" statutes, and +the suppression of public meetings, had himself been obliged to put +obsolete statutes in operation sixteen times, and to prohibit twenty-six +public meetings. These, however, are the whirligigs of politics, and no +politician escapes them.</p> +<table align="center"> + +<tr> + <td><a name="balfour"></a><img src="049AJ_Balfour.gif" alt="image of Balfour" border="1"></td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td align="center"><a href="#152">A J Balfour</a></td> +</tr> +</table> + + + +<p>In my eyes Lord Morley's crowning achievement in literature is his +biography of Mr. Gladstone. How easy it would have been to smother Mr. +Gladstone in stale politics!--and how stale politics may become in that +intermediate stage before they pass finally into history! English +political literature is full of biography of this kind. The three +notable exceptions of recent years which occur to me are Mr. Churchill's +<i>Life</i> of his father, the Disraeli biography still in progress, and the +<i>Gladstone</i>. But it would be difficult indeed to "stale" the story of +either Lord Randolph or Dizzy. A biographer would have to set about it +of malice prepense. In the case, however, of Mr. Gladstone, the danger +was more real. Anglican orthodoxy, eminent virtue, unfailing decorum; a +comparatively weak sense of humor, and a literary gift much inferior to +his oratorical gift, so that the most famous of his speeches are but +cold reading now; interminable sentences, and an unfailing relish for +detail all important in its day, but long since dead and buried; the +kind of biography that, with this material, half a dozen of Mr. +Gladstone's colleagues might have written of him, for all his greatness, +rises formidably on the inward eye. The younger generation waiting for +the historian to come--except in the case of those whose professional +duty as politicians it would have been to read it--might quite well have +yawned and passed by.</p> + +<p>But Mr. Morley's literary instinct, which is the artistic instinct, +solved the problem. The most interesting half of the book will always, I +think, be the later half. In the great matters of his hero's earlier +career--Free Trade, the Crimean War, the early budgets, the slow +development of the Liberal leader from the Church and State Conservative +of 1832, down to the franchise battle of the 'sixties and the "great +Ministry," as Mr. Morley calls it, of 1868, the story is told, indeed, +perhaps here and there at too great length, yet with unfailing ease and +lucidity. The teller, however, is one who, till the late 'seventies, was +only a spectator, and, on the whole, from a distance, of what he is +describing, who was indeed most of the time pursuing his own special +aims--<i>i.e.</i>, the hewing down of orthodoxy and tradition, together with +the preaching of a frank and uncompromising agnosticism, in the +<i>Fortnightly Review</i>; aims which were, of all others, most opposed to +Mr. Gladstone's. But with the 'eighties everything changes. Mr. Morley +becomes a great part of what he tells. During the intermediate +stage--marked by his editorship of the <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>--the tone of +the biography grows sensibly warmer and more vivid, as the writer draws +nearer and nearer to the central scene; and with Mr. Morley's election +to Newcastle and his acceptance of the Chief-Secretaryship in 1885, the +book becomes the fascinating record of not one man, but two, and that +without any intrusion whatever on the rights of the main figure. The +dreariness of the Irish struggle is lightened by touch after touch that +only Mr. Morley could have given. Take that picture of the somber, +discontented Parnell, coming, late in the evening, to Mr. Morley's room +in the House of Commons, to complain of the finance of the Home Rule +Bill--Mr. Gladstone's entrance at 10.30 P.M., after an exhausting +day--and he, the man of seventy-seven, sitting down to work between the +Chief Secretary and the Irish leader, till at last, with a sigh of +weariness at nearly 1 A.M., the tired Prime Minister pleads to go to +bed. Or that most dramatic story, later on, of Committee Room No. 15, +where Mr. Morley becomes the reporter to Mr. Gladstone of that moral and +political tragedy, the fall of Parnell; or a hundred other sharp lights +upon the inner and human truth of things, as it lay behind the political +spectacle. All through the later chapters, too, the happy use of +conversations between the two men on literary and philosophical matters +relieves what might have been the tedium of the end. For these vivid +notes of free talk not only bring the living Gladstone before you in the +most varied relation to his time; they keep up a perpetually interesting +comparison in the reader's mind between the hero and his biographer. One +is as eager to know what Mr. Morley is going to say as one is to listen +to Mr. Gladstone. The two men, with their radical differences and their +passionate sympathies, throw light on each other, and the agreeable +pages achieve a double end, without ever affecting the real unity of the +book. Thus handled, biography, so often the drudge of literature, rises +into its high places and becomes a delight instead of an edifying or +informing necessity.</p> + +<p>I will add one other recollection of this early time--<i>i.e.</i>, that in +1881 the reviewing of Mr. Morley's <i>Cobden</i> in the <i>Times</i> fell to my +husband, and as those were the days of many-column reviews, and as the +time given for the review was <i>exceedingly</i> short, it could only be done +at all by a division of labor. We divided the sheets of the book, and we +just finished in time to let my husband rush off to Printing House +Square and correct the proofs as they went through the press for the +morning's issue. In those days, as is well known, the <i>Times</i> went to +press much later than now, and a leader-writer rarely got home before 4, +and sometimes 5, A.M.</p> + +<hr style="width: 25%;"> + +<p>I find it extremely difficult, as I look back, to put any order into the +crowding memories of those early years in London. They were +extraordinarily stimulating to us both, and years of great happiness. At +home our children were growing up; our own lives were branching out into +new activities and bringing us always new friends, and a more +interesting share in that "great mundane movement" which Mr. Bottles +believed would perish without him. Our connection with the <i>Times</i> and +with the Forsters, and the many new acquaintances and friends we made at +this time in that happy meeting-ground of men and causes--Mrs. Jeune's +drawing-room--opened to us the world of politicians; while my husband's +four volumes on <i>The English Poets</i>, published just as we left Oxford, +volumes to which all the most prominent writers of the day had +contributed, together with the ever-delightful fact that Matthew Arnold +was my uncle, brought us the welcome of those of our own <i>métier</i> and +way of life; and when in 1884 my husband became art critic of the paper, +a function which he filled for more than five and twenty years, fresh +doors opened on the already crowded scene, and fresh figures stepped in.</p> + +<p>The setting of it all was twofold--in the first place, our dear old +house in Russell Square, and, in the next, the farm on Rodborough +Common, four miles from Godalming, where, amid a beauty of gorse and +heather that filled every sense on a summer day with the mere joy of +breathing and looking, our children and we spent the holiday hours of +seven goodly years. The Russell Square house has been, so to speak, +twice demolished and twice buried, since we lived in it. Some of its +stones must still lie deep under the big hotel which now towers on its +site. That it does not still exist somewhere, I can hardly believe. The +westerly sun seems to me still to be pouring into the beautiful little +hall, built and decorated about 1750, with its panels of free scrollwork +in blue and white, and to be still glancing through the drawing-rooms to +the little powder-closet at the end, my tiny workroom, where I first +sketched the plan of <i>Robert Elsmere</i> for my sister Julia Huxley, and +where, after three years, I wrote the last words. If I open the door of +the back drawing-room, there, to the right, is the children's +school-room. I see them at their lessons, and the fine plane-trees that +look in at the window. And up-stairs there are the pleasant bedrooms and +the nurseries. It was born, the old house, in the year of the Young +Pretender, and, after serving six generations, perhaps as faithfully as +it served us, it "fell on sleep." There should be a special Elysium, +surely, for the houses where the fates have been kind and where people +have been happy; and a special Tartarus for those--of Oedipus or +Atreus--in which "old, unhappy, far-off things" seem to be always +poisoning the present.</p> + +<p>As to Borough Farm--now the head-quarters of the vast camp which +stretches to Hindhead--it stood then in an unspoiled wilderness of +common and wood, approached only by what we called "the sandy track" +from the main Portsmouth Road, with no neighbors for miles but a few +scattered cottages. Its fate had been harder than that of 61 Russell +Square. The old London house has gone clean out of sight, translated, +whole and fair, into a world of memory. But Borough and the common are +still here--as war has made them. Only--may I never see them again!</p> + +<p>It was in 1882, the year of Tel-el-Kebir, when we took Peperharrow +Rectory (the Murewell Vicarage of <i>Robert Elsmere</i>) for the summer, that +we first came across Borough Farm. We left it in 1889. I did a great +deal of work, there and in London, in those seven years. The <i>Macmillan</i> +papers I have already spoken of. They were on many subjects--Tennyson's +"Becket," Mr. Pater's "Marius," "The Literature of Introspection," Jane +Austen, Keats, Gustavo Becquer, and various others. I still kept up my +Spanish to some extent, and I twice examined--in 1882 and 1888--for the +Taylorian scholarship in Spanish at Oxford, our old friend, Doctor +Kitchin, afterward Dean of Durham, writing to me with glee that I should +be "making history" as "the first woman examiner of men at either +University." My colleague on the first occasion was the old Spanish +scholar, Don Pascual de Gayangos, to whom the calendaring of the Spanish +MSS. in the British Museum had been largely intrusted; and the second +time, Mr. York Powell of Christ Church--I suppose one of the most +admirable Romance scholars of the time--was associated with me. But if I +remember right, I set the papers almost entirely, and wrote the report +on both occasions. It gave me a feeling of safety in 1888, when my +knowledge, such as it was, had grown very rusty, that Mr. York Powell +overlooked the papers, seeing that to set Scholarship questions for +postgraduate candidates is not easy for one who has never been through +any proper "mill"! But they passed his scrutiny satisfactorily, and in +1888 we appointed as Taylorian Scholar a man to whom for years I +confidently looked for <i>the</i> history of Spain--combining both the +Spanish and Arabic sources--so admirable had his work been in the +examination. But, alack! that great book has still to be written. For +Mr. Butler Clarke died prematurely in 1904, and the hope died with him.</p> + +<p>For the <i>Times</i> I wrote a good many long, separate articles before 1884, +on "Spanish Novels," "American Novels," and so forth; the "leader" on +the death of Anthony Trollope; and various elaborate reviews of books on +Christian origins, a subject on which I was perpetually reading, always +with the same vision before me, growing in clearness as the +years passed.</p> + +<p>But my first steps toward its realization were to begin with the short +story of <i>Miss Bretherton</i>, published in 1884, and then the translation +of Amiel's <i>Journal Intime</i>, which appeared in 1885. <i>Miss Bretherton</i> +was suggested to me by the brilliant success in 1883 of Mary Anderson, +and by the controversy with regard to her acting--as distinct from her +delightful beauty and her attractive personality--which arose between +the fastidious few and the enchanted many. I maintained then, and am +quite sure now, that Isabel Bretherton was in no sense a portrait of +Miss Anderson. She was to me a being so distinct from the living actress +that I offered her to the world with an entire good faith, which seems +to myself now, perhaps thirty years later, hardly less surprising than +it did to the readers of the time. For undoubtedly the situation in the +novel was developed out of the current dramatic debate. But it became to +me just <i>a</i> situation--<i>a</i> problem. It was really not far removed from +Diderot's problem in the <i>Paradoxe sur le Comédien</i>. What is the +relation of the actor to the part represented? One actress is +plain--Rachel; another actress is beautiful, and more than beautiful, +delightful--Miss Anderson. But all the time, is there or is there not a +region in which all these considerations count for nothing in comparison +with certain others? Is there a dramatic <i>art</i>--exacting, difficult, +supreme--or is there not? The choice of the subject, at that time, was, +it may be confessed, a piece of naïveté, and the book itself was young +and naïve throughout. But something in it has kept it in circulation all +this while; and for me it marks with a white stone the year in which it +appeared. For it brought me my first critical letter from Henry James; +it was the first landmark in our long friendship.</p> +<table align="center"> + +<tr> + <td><a name="james"></a><img src="001HenryJames.gif" alt="Henry James" border="1"></td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td align="center"><a href="#152">Henry James</a></td> +</tr> +</table> + + + +<p>Beloved Henry James! It seems to me that my original meeting with him +was at the Andrew Langs' in 1882. He was then forty-two, in the prime of +his working life, and young enough to be still "Henry James, Junior," to +many. I cannot remember anything else of the Langs' dinner-party except +that we were also invited to meet the author of <i>Vice Versa</i>, "which Mr. +Lang thinks"--as I wrote to my mother--"the best thing of its kind since +Dickens." But shortly after that, Mr. James came to see us in Russell +Square and a little incident happened which stamped itself for good on a +still plastic memory. It was a very hot day; the western sun was beating +on the drawing-room windows, though the room within was comparatively +dark and cool. The children were languid with the heat, and the +youngest, Janet, then five, stole into the drawing-room and stood +looking at Mr. James. He put out a half-conscious hand to her; she came +nearer, while we talked on. Presently she climbed on his knee. I suppose +I made a maternal protest. He took no notice, and folded his arm round +her. We talked on; and presently the abnormal stillness of Janet +recalled her to me and made me look closely through the dark of the +room. She was fast asleep, her pale little face on the young man's +shoulder, her long hair streaming over his arm. Now Janet was a most +independent and critical mortal, no indiscriminate "climber up of +knees"; far from it. Nor was Mr. James an indiscriminate lover of +children; he was not normally much at home with them, though <i>always</i> +good to them. But the childish instinct had in fact divined the profound +tenderness and chivalry which were the very root of his nature; and he +was touched and pleased, as one is pleased when a robin perches on +one's hand.</p> + +<p>From that time, as the precious bundle of his letters shows, he became +the friend of all of us--myself, my husband, and the children; though +with an increased intimacy from the 'nineties onward. In a subsequent +chapter I will try and summarize the general mark left on me by his +fruitful and stainless life. His letter to me about <i>Miss Bretherton</i> is +dated December 9, 1884. He had already come to see me about it, and +there was never any critical discussion like his, for its suggestion of +a hundred points of view, its flashing of unexpected lights, its witness +to the depth and richness of his own artistic knowledge.</p> + + The whole thing is delicate and distinguished [he wrote me] and the<br> + reader has the pleasure and security of feeling that he is with a<br> + woman (distinctly a woman!) who knows how (rare bird!) to write. I<br> + think your idea, your situation, interesting in a high degree--But<br> + [and then come a series of most convincing "buts"! He objects<br> + strongly to the happy ending]. I wish that your actress had been<br> + carried away from Kendal [her critical lover, who worships herself,<br> + but despises her art] altogether, carried away by the current of her<br> + artistic life, the sudden growth of her power, and the excitement,<br> + the ferocity and egotism (those of the artist realizing success, I<br> + mean; I allude merely to the normal dose of those elements) which<br> + the effort to create, to "arrive" (once she had had a glimpse of her<br> + possible successes) would have brought with it. (Excuse that<br> + abominable sentence.) Isabel, the Isabel you describe, has too much<br> + to spare for Kendal--Kendal being what he is; and one doesn't feel<br> + her, see her, enough, as the pushing actress, the <i>cabotine</i>! She<br> + lapses toward him as if she were a failure, whereas you make her out<br> + a great success. No!--she wouldn't have thought so much of him at<br> + such a time as that--though very possibly she would have come back<br> + to him later.<br> + +<p>The whole letter, indeed, is full of admirable criticism, sprung from a +knowledge of life, which seemed to me, his junior by twelve years, +unapproachably rich and full. But how grateful I was to him for the +criticism!--how gracious and chivalrous was his whole attitude toward +the writer and the book! Indeed, as I look over the bundle of letters +which concern this first novel of mine, I am struck by the good fortune +which brought me such mingled chastening and praise, in such long +letters, from judges so generous and competent. Henry James, Walter +Pater, John Morley, "Mr. Creighton" (then Emmanuel Professor at +Cambridge), Cotter Morrison, Sir Henry Taylor, Edmond Scherer--they are +all there. Besides the renewal of the old throb of pleasure as one reads +them, one feels a sort of belated remorse that so much trouble was taken +for so slight a cause! Are there similar friends nowadays to help the +first steps of a writer? Or is there no leisure left in this choked +life of ours?</p> + +<p>The decisive criticism, perhaps, of all, is that of Mr. Creighton: "I +find myself carried away by the delicate feeling with which the +development of character is traced." But--"You wrote this book as a +critic not as a creator. It is a sketch of the possible worth of +criticism in an unregenerate world. This was worth doing once; but if +you are going on with novels you must throw criticism overboard and let +yourself go, as a partner of common joys, common sorrows, and common +perplexities. There--I have told you what I think, just as I think it."</p> + +<hr style="width: 25%;"> + +<p><i>Miss Bretherton</i> was a trial trip, and it taught me a good deal. When +it came out I had nearly finished the translation of Amiel, which +appeared in 1885, and in March of that year some old friends drove me up +the remote Westmorland valley of Long Sleddale, at a moment when the +blackthorn made lines of white along the lanes; and from that day onward +the early chapters of <i>Robert Elsmere</i> began to shape themselves in my +mind. All the main ideas of the novel were already there. Elsmere was to +be the exponent of a freer faith; Catharine had been suggested by an old +friend of my youth; while Langham was the fruit of my long communing +with the philosophic charm and the tragic impotence of Amiel. I began +the book in the early summer of 1885, and thenceforward it absorbed me +until its appearance in 1888.</p> + +<p>The year 1885, indeed, was one of expanding horizons, of many new +friends, of quickened pulses generally. The vastness of London and its +myriad interests seemed to be invading our life more and more. I can +recall one summer afternoon, in particular, when, as I was in a hansom +driving idly westward toward Hyde Park Gate, thinking of a hundred +things at once, this consciousness of <i>intensification</i>, of a heightened +meaning in everything--the broad street, the crowd of moving figures and +carriages, the houses looking down upon it--seized upon me with a rush. +"Yes, it is good--the mere living!" Joy in the infinite variety of the +great city as compared with the "cloistered virtue" of Oxford; the sheer +pleasure of novelty, of the kind new faces, and the social discoveries +one felt opening on many sides; the delight of new perceptions, new +powers in oneself--all this seemed to flower for me in those few minutes +of reverie--if one can apply such a word to an experience so vivid. And +meanwhile the same intensity of pleasure from nature that I had always +been capable of flowed in upon me from new scenes; above all, from +solitary moments at Borough Farm, in the heart of the Surrey commons, +when the September heather blazed about me; or the first signs of spring +were on the gorse and the budding trees; or beside some lonely pool; and +always heightened now by the company of my children. It was a stage--a +normal stage, in normal life. But I might have missed it so easily! The +Fates were kind to us in those days.</p> + +<p>As to the social scene, let me gather from it first a recollection of +pure romance. One night at a London dinner-party I found myself sent +down with a very stout gentleman, an American Colonel, who proclaimed +himself an "esoteric Buddhist," and provoked in me a rapid and vehement +dislike. I turned my back upon him and examined the table. Suddenly I +became aware of a figure opposite to me, the figure of a young girl who +seemed to me one of the most ravishing creatures I had ever seen. She +was very small, and exquisitely made. Her beautiful head, with its mass +of light-brown hair; the small features and delicate neck; the clear, +pale skin, the lovely eyes with rather heavy lids, which gave a slight +look of melancholy to the face; the grace and fire of every movement +when she talked; the dreamy silence into which she sometimes fell, +without a trace of awkwardness or shyness. But how vain is any mere +catalogue to convey the charm of Laura Tennant--the first Mrs. Alfred +Lyttelton--to those who never saw her!</p> + +<p>I asked to be introduced to her as soon as we left the dining-room, and +we spent the evening in a corner together.</p> + +<p>I fell in love with her there and then. The rare glimpses of her that +her busy life and mine allowed made one of my chief joys thenceforward, +and her early death was to me--as to so many, many others!--a grief +never forgotten.</p> + +<p>The recent biography of Alfred Lyttelton--War Minister in Mr. Balfour's +latest Cabinet--skilfully and beautifully done by his second wife, has +conveyed to the public of thirty years later some idea of Laura's +imperishable charm. And I greatly hope that it may be followed some day +by a collection of her letters, for there are many in existence, and, +young as she was, they would, I believe, throw much light upon a crowded +moment in our national life. Laura was the fourth daughter of Sir +Charles Tennant, a rich Glasgow manufacturer, and the elder sister of +Mrs. Asquith. She and her sisters came upon the scene in the early +'eighties; and without any other extrinsic advantage but that of wealth, +which in this particular case would not have taken them very far, they +made a conquest--the younger two, Laura and Margot, in particular--of a +group of men and women who formed a kind of intellectual and social +<i>élite</i>; who were all of them accomplished; possessed, almost all of +them, of conspicuous good looks, or of the charm that counts as much; +and among whom there happened to be a remarkable proportion of men who +have since made their mark on English history. My generation knew them +as "The Souls." "The Souls" were envied, mocked at, caricatured, by +those who were not of them. They had their follies--why not? They were +young, and it was their golden day. Their dislike of convention and +routine had the effect on many--and those not fools--of making +convention and routine seem particularly desirable. But there was not, I +think, a young man or woman admitted to their inner ranks who did not +possess in some measure a certain quality very difficult to isolate and +define. Perhaps, to call it "disinterestedness" comes nearest. For they +were certainly no seekers after wealth, or courters of the great. It +might be said, of course, that they had no occasion; they had as much +birth and wealth as any one need want, among themselves. But that does +not explain it. For push and greed are among the commonest faults of an +aristocracy. The immortal pages of Saint Simon are there to show it. +"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also," says the +Gospel. Now the "treasure" among The Souls was, ultimately--or at least +tended to be--something spiritual. The typical expression of it, at its +best, is to be found in those exquisite last words left by Laura +Lyttelton for her husband, which the second Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton has, +as I think, so rightly published. That unique "will," which for thirty +years before it appeared in print was known to a wide circle of persons, +many of whom had never seen the living Laura, was the supreme expression +of a quality which, in greater or lesser degree, The Souls seemed to +demand of one another, and of those who wished to join their band. Yet, +combined with this passion, this poetry, this religious feeling, was +first the maddest delight in simple things--in open air and physical +exercise; then, a headlong joy in literature, art, music, acting; a +perpetual spring of fun; and a hatred of all the solemn pretenses that +too often make English society a weariness.</p> + +<p>No doubt there is something--perhaps much--to be said on the other side. +But I do not intend to say it. I was never a Soul, nor could have been. +I came from too different a world. But there were a certain number of +persons--of whom I was one--who were their "harborers" and spectators. I +found delight in watching them. They were quite a new experience to me; +and I saw them dramatically, like a scene in a play, full of fresh +implications and suggestions. I find in an old letter to my mother an +account of an evening at 40 Grosvenor Square, where the Tennants lived.</p> + + It was not an evening party--we joined a dinner party there, after<br> + dining somewhere else. So that the rooms were empty enough to let<br> + one see the pretty creatures gathered in it, to perfection. In the<br> + large drawing-room, which is really a ball-room with a polished<br> + floor, people were dancing, or thought-reading, or making music, as<br> + it pleased them.<br> + +<p>Mr. Balfour was there, with whom we had made friends, as fellow-guests, +on a week-end visit to Oxford, not long before; Alfred Lyttelton, then +in the zenith of his magnificent youth; Lord Curzon, then plain Mr. +Curzon, and in the Foreign Office; Mr. Harry Gust; Mr. Rennell Rodd, now +the British Ambassador in Rome, and many others--a goodly company of +young men in their prime. And among the women there was a very high +proportion of beauty, but especially of grace. "The half-lit room, the +dresses and the beauty," says my letter, "reminded one of some <i>festa</i> +painted by Watteau or Lancret." But with what a difference! For, after +all, it was English, through and through.</p> + +<p>A little after this evening, Laura Tennant came down to spend a day at +Borough Farm with the children and me. Another setting! Our principal +drawing-room there in summer was a sand-pit, shaded by an old ash-tree +and haunted by innumerable sand-martins. It was Ascension Day, and the +commons were a dream of beauty. Our guest, I find, was to have come down +"with Mr. Balfour and Mr. Burne-Jones." But in the end she came down +alone; and we talked all day, sitting under hawthorns white with bloom, +wandering through rushy fields ablaze with marsh marigold and orchis. +She wrote to me the same evening after her return to London:</p> + + I sit with my eyes resting on the medieval purple of the<br> + sweet-breathing orchis you gave me, and my thoughts feasting on the<br> + wonderful beauty of the snowy blossom against the blue.... This has<br> + been a real Ascension Day.<br> + +<p>Later in the year--in November--she wrote to me from Scotland--she was +then twenty-one:</p> + + I am still in Scotland, but don't pity me, for I love it more than<br> + anything else in the wide world. If you could only hear the wind<br> + throwing his arm against my window, and sobbing down the glen. I<br> + think I shall never have a Lover I am so fond of as the wind. None<br> + ever serenaded me so divinely. And when I open my window wide and<br> + ask him what he wants, and tell him I am quite ready to elope with<br> + him now--this moment--he only moans and sighs thro' my outblown<br> + hair--and gives me neuralgia.... I read all day, except when I am<br> + out with my Lover, or playing with my little nephew and niece, both<br> + of whom I adore--for they are little poets. We have had a houseful<br> + ever since August, so I am delighted to get a little calm. It is so<br> + dreadful never, never to be alone--and really the housemaid would do<br> + just as well! and yet, whenever I go to my sanctum I am routed out<br> + as if I was of as much use as plums to plum pudding, and either made<br> + to play lawn-tennis or hide-and-seek, or to talk to a young man<br> + whose only idea of the Infinite is the Looking-glass. All these are<br> + the trials that attend the "young lady" of the house. Poor devil!<br> + Forgive strong language--but really my sympathy is deep.<br> + + I have, however, some really nice friends here, and am not entirely<br> + discontented. Mr. Gerald Balfour left the other day. He is very<br> + clever--and quite beautiful--like a young god. I wonder if you know<br> + him. I know you know Arthur.... Lionel Tennyson, who was also here<br> + with Gerald Balfour, has a splendid humor--witty and "fin," which is<br> + rare in England. Lord Houghton, Alfred Lyttelton, Godfrey Webb,<br> + George Curzon, the Chesterfields, the Hayters, Mary Gladstone, and a<br> + lot more have been here. I went north, too, to the land of Thule and<br> + was savagely happy. I wore no hat--no gloves--I bathed, fished,<br> + boated, climbed, and kissed the earth, and danced round a cairn. It<br> + was opposite Skye at a Heaven called Loch Ailsa.... Such<br> + beauty--such weather--such a fortnight will not come again. Perhaps<br> + it would be unjust to the crying world for one human being to have<br> + more of the Spirit of Delight; but one is glad to have tasted of the<br> + cup, and while it was in my hands I drank deeply.<br> + + I have read very little. I am hungering for a month or two's<br> + silence.<br> + +<p>But there was another lover than the west wind waiting for this most +lovable of mortals. A few days afterward she wrote to me from a house in +Hampshire, where many of her particular friends were gathered, among +them Alfred Lyttelton.</p> + + The conversation is pyrotechnic--and it is all quite delightful. A<br> + beautiful place--paradoxical arguments--ideals raised and<br> + shattered--temples torn and battered--temptations given way<br> + to--newspapers unread--acting--rhyming--laughing--<i>ad infinitum</i>. I<br> + wish you were here!<br> + +<p>Six weeks afterward she was engaged to Mr. Lyttelton. She was to be +married in May, and in Easter week of that year we met her in Paris, +where she was buying her trousseau, enjoying it like a child, making +friends with all her dressmakers, and bubbling over with fun about it. +"It isn't 'dressing,'" she said, "unless you apply main force to them. +What they <i>want</i> is always--<i>presque pas de corsage, et pas du +tout de manches!</i>"</p> + +<p>One day she and Mr. Lyttelton and Mr. Balfour and one or two others came +to tea with us at the Hotel Chatham to meet Victor Cherbuliez. The +veteran French novelist fell in love with her, of course, and their +talk--Laura's French was as spontaneous and apparently as facile as her +English--kept the rest of us happy. Then she married in May, with half +London to see, and Mr. Gladstone--then Prime Minister--mounted on the +chair to make the wedding-speech. For by her marriage Laura became the +great man's niece, since Alfred Lyttelton's mother was a sister of Mrs. +Gladstone.</p> + +<p>Then in the autumn came the hope of a child--to her who loved children +so passionately. But all through the waiting time she was overshadowed +by a strangely strong presentiment of death. I went to see her sometimes +toward the end of it, when she was resting on her sofa in the late +evening, and used to leave her listening for her husband's step, on his +return from his work, her little weary face already lit up with +expectation. The weeks passed, and those who loved her began to be +anxious. I went down to Borough Farm in May, and there, just two years +after she had sat with us under the hawthorn, I heard the news of her +little son's birth, and then ten days later the news of her death.</p> + +<p>With that death a ray of pure joy was quenched on earth. But Laura +Lyttelton was not only youth and delight--she was also embodied love. I +have watched her in a crowded room where everybody wanted her, quietly +seek out the neglected person there, the stranger, the shy secretary or +governess, and make her happy--bring her in--with an art that few +noticed, because in her it was nature. When she died she left an +enduring mark in the minds of many who have since governed or guided +England; but she was mourned also by scores of humble folk, and by +disagreeable folk whom only she befriended. Mrs. Lyttelton quotes a +letter written by the young wife to her husband:</p> + + Tell me you love me and always will. Tell me, so that when I dream I<br> + may dream of Love, and when I sleep dreamless Love may be holding me<br> + in his wings, and when I wake Love may be the spirit in my feet, and<br> + when I die Love may be the Angel that takes me home.<br> + +<p>And in the room of death, when the last silence fell on those gathered +there, her sister Margot--by Laura's wish, expressed some time +before--read aloud the "will," in which she spoke her inmost heart. +Since its publication it belongs to those records of life and feeling +which are part of our common inheritance.</p> + +<p>"She was a flame, beautiful, dancing, ardent," writes the second Mrs. +Lyttelton. "The wind of life was too fierce for such a spirit; she could +not live in it."</p> + +<p>I make no apology for dwelling on the life and earthly death of this +young creature who was only known to a band--though a large band--of +friends during her short years. Throughout social and literary history +there have been a few apparitions like hers, which touch with peculiar +force, in the hearts of men and women, the old, deep, human notes which +"make us men." Youth, beauty, charm, death--they are the great themes +with which all art, plastic or literary, tries to conjure. It is given +to very few to handle them simply, yet sufficiently; with power, yet +without sentimentality. Breathed into Laura's short life, they affected +whose who knew her like the finest things in poetry.</p> + + +<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br> +<h2><a name="142"></a><a href="#151">CHAPTER II</a></h2> +<br> + +<p class="c">LONDON FRIENDS</p> + +<p>It was in 1874, as I have already mentioned, that on an introduction +from Matthew Arnold we first made friends with M. Edmond Scherer, the +French writer and Senator, who more than any other person--unless, +perhaps, one divides the claim between him and M. Faguet--stepped into +the critical chair of Sainte Beuve, after that great man's death. For M. +Scherer's weekly reviews in the <i>Temps</i> (1863-78) were looked for by +many people over about fifteen years, as persons of similar tastes had +looked for the famous "Lundis," in the <i>Constitutionnel</i> of an earlier +generation.</p> + +<p>We went out to call upon the Scherers at Versailles, coupling with it, +if I remember right, a visit to the French National Assembly then +sitting in the Chateau. The road from the station to the palace was deep +in snow, and we walked up behind two men in ardent conversation, one of +them gesticulating freely. My husband asked a man beside us, bound also, +it seemed, for the Assembly, who they were. "M. Gambetta and M. Jules +Favre," was the answer. So there we had in front of us the intrepid +organizer of the Government of National Defense, whose services to +France France will never forget, and the unfortunate statesman to whom +it fell, under the tyrannic and triumphant force of Germany (which was +to prove, as we now know, in the womb and process of time, more fatal to +herself than to France!), to sign away Alsace-Lorraine. And we had only +just settled ourselves in our seats when Gambetta was in the tribune, +making a short but impassioned speech. I but vaguely remember what the +speech was about, but the attitude of the lion head thrown back, and the +tones of the famous voice, remain with me--as it rang out in the +recurrent phrase: <i>"Je proteste!--Messieurs, je proteste!"</i> It was the +attitude of the statue in the Place du Carrousel, and of the +<i>meridional</i>, Numa Roumestan, in Daudet's well-known novel. Every word +said by the speaker seemed to enrage the benches of the Right, and the +tumult was so great at times that we were still a little dazed by it +when we reached the quiet of the Scherers' drawing-room.</p> + +<p>M. Scherer rose to greet us, and to introduce us to his wife and +daughters. A tall, thin man, already white-haired, with something in his +aspect which suggested his Genevese origin--something at once ascetic +and delicately sensitive. He was then in his sixtieth year, deputy for +the Seine-et-Oise, and an important member of the Left Center. The year +after we saw him he became a Senator, and remained so through his life, +becoming more Conservative as the years went on. But his real importance +was as a man of letters--one of the recognized chiefs of French +literature and thought, equally at war with the forces of Catholic +reaction, then just beginning to find a leader in M. Bourget, and with +the scientific materialism of M. Taine. He was--when we first knew +him--a Protestant who had ceased to believe in any historical religion; +a Liberal who, like another friend of ours, Mr. Goschen, about the same +time was drifting into Conservatism; and also a man of strong and subtle +character to whom questions of ethics were at all times as important as +questions of pure literature. Above all, he was a scholar, specially +conversant with England and English letters. He was, for instance, the +"French critic on Milton," on whom Matthew Arnold wrote one of his most +attractive essays; and he was fond of maintaining--and proving--that +when French people <i>did</i> make a serious study of England, and English +books, which he admitted was rare, they were apt to make fewer mistakes +about us than English writers make about France.</p> + +<p>Dear M. Scherer!--I see him first in the little suite of carpetless +rooms, empty save for books and the most necessary tables and chairs, +where he lived and worked at Versailles; amid a library "read, marked, +learned, and inwardly digested," like that of Lord Acton, his English +junior. And then, in a winter walk along the Champs-Élysées, a year or +two later, discussing the prospects of Catholicism in France: "They +haven't a man--a speaker--a book! It is a real drawback to us Liberals +that they are so weak, so negligible. We have nothing to hold us +together!" At the moment Scherer was perfectly right. But the following +years were to see the flowing back of Catholicism into literature, the +Universities, the École Normale. Twenty years later I quoted this remark +of Scherer's to a young French philosopher. "True, for its date," he +said. "There was then scarcely a single Catholic in the École Normale +[i.e., at the headwaters of French education]. There are now a great +many. <i>But they are all Modernists!</i>" Since then, again, we have seen +the growing strength of Catholicism in the French literature of +imagination, in French poetry and fiction. Whether in the end it will +emerge the stronger for the vast stirring of the waters caused by the +present war is one of the most interesting questions of the present day.</p> + +<p>But I was soon to know Edmond Scherer more intimately. I imagine that it +was he who in 1884 sent me a copy of the <i>Journal Intime</i> of Henri +Frédéric Amiel, edited by himself. The book laid its spell upon me at +once; and I felt a strong wish to translate it. M. Scherer consented and +I plunged into it. It was a delightful but exacting task. At the end of +it I knew a good deal more French than I did at the beginning! For the +book abounded in passages that put one on one's mettle and seemed to +challenge every faculty one possessed. M. Scherer came over with his +daughter Jeanne--a <i>schöne Seele</i>, if ever there was one--and we spent +hours in the Russell Square drawing-room, turning and twisting the most +crucial sentences this way and that.</p> + +<p>But at last the translation and my Introduction were finished and the +English book appeared. It certainly obtained a warm welcome both here +and in America. There is something in Amiel's mystical and melancholy +charm which is really more attractive to the Anglo-Saxon than the French +temper. At any rate, in the English-speaking countries the book spread +widely, and has maintained its place till now.</p> + + The <i>Journal</i> is very interesting to me [wrote the Master of<br> + Balliol]. It catches and detains many thoughts that have passed over<br> + the minds of others, which they rarely express, because they must<br> + take a sentimental form, from which most thinkers recoil. It is all<br> + about "self," yet it never leaves an egotistical or affected<br> + impression. It is a curious combination of skepticism and religious<br> + feeling, like Pascal, but its elements are compounded in different<br> + proportions and the range of thought is far wider and more<br> + comprehensive. On the other hand, Pascal is more forcible, and looks<br> + down upon human things from a higher point of view.<br> + + Why was he unhappy? ... But, after all, commentaries on the lives of<br> + distinguished men are of very doubtful value. There is the<br> + life--take it and read it who can.<br> + + Amiel was a great genius, as is shown by his power of style.... His<br> + <i>Journal</i> is a book in which the thoughts of many hearts are<br> + revealed.... There are strange forms of mysticism, which the<br> + poetical intellect takes. I suppose we must not try to explain them.<br> + Amiel was a Neo-Platonist and a skeptic in one.<br> + + For myself [wrote Walter Pater], I shall probably think, on<br> + finishing the book, that there was still something Amiel might have<br> + added to those elements of natural religion which he was able to<br> + accept at times with full belief and always with the sort of hope<br> + which is a great factor in life. To my mind, the beliefs and the<br> + function in the world of the historic Church form just one of those<br> + obscure but all-important possibilities which the human mind is<br> + powerless effectively to dismiss from itself, and might wisely<br> + accept, in the first place, as a workable hypothesis. The supposed<br> + facts on which Christianity rests, utterly incapable as they have<br> + become of any ordinary test, seem to me matters of very much the<br> + same sort of assent we give to any assumptions, in the strict and<br> + ultimate sense, moral. The question whether those facts are real<br> + will, I think, always continue to be what I should call one of the<br> + <i>natural</i> questions of the human mind.<br> + +<p>A passage, it seems to me, of considerable interest as throwing light +upon the inner mind of one of the most perfect writers, and most +important influences of the nineteenth century. Certainly there is no +sign in it, on Mr. Pater's part, of "dropping Christianity"; very much +the contrary.</p> + +<hr style="width: 25%;"> + +<p>But all this time, while literary and meditative folk went on writing +and thinking, how fast the political world was rushing!</p> + +<p>Those were the years, after the defeat of the first Home Rule Bill, and +the dismissal of Mr. Gladstone, of Lord Salisbury's Government and Mr. +Balfour's Chief-Secretaryship. As I look back upon them--those five +dramatic years culminating first in the Parnell Commission, and then in +Parnell's tragic downfall and death, I see everything grouped round Mr. +Balfour. From the moment when, in succession to Sir Michael Hicks Beach, +Mr. Balfour took over the Chief-Secretaryship, his sudden and swift +development seemed to me the most interesting thing in politics. We had +first met him, as I have said, on a week-end visit to the Talbots at +Oxford. It was then a question whether his health would stand the rough +and tumble of politics. I recollect he came down late and looked far +from robust. We traveled up to London with him, and he was reading Mr. +Green's <i>Prolegomena to Ethics</i>, which, if I remember right, he was to +review for <i>Mind</i>.</p> + +<p>He was then a member of the Fourth Party, and engaged--though in a +rather detached fashion--in those endless raids and excursions against the +"Goats"--<i>i.e.</i>, the bearded veterans of his own party, Sir Stafford +Northcote in particular, of which Lord Randolph was the leader. But +compared to Lord Randolph he had made no Parliamentary mark. One thought +of him as the metaphysician, the lover of music, the delightful +companion, always, I feel now, in looking back, with a prevailing +consciousness of something reserved and potential in him, which gave a +peculiar importance and value to his judgments of men and things. He was +a leading figure among "The Souls," and I remember some delightful +evenings in his company before 1886, when the conversation was entirely +literary or musical.</p> + +<p>Then, with the Chief-Secretaryship there appeared a new Arthur Balfour. +The courage, the resource, the never-failing wit and mastery with which +he fought the Irish members in Parliament, put down outrage in Ireland, +and at the same time laid the foundation in a hundred directions of that +social and agrarian redemption of Ireland on which a new political +structure will some day be reared--is perhaps even now about to +rise--these things make one of the most brilliant, one of the most +dramatic, chapters in our modern history.</p> + +<p>It was in 1888, two years after Mr. Forster's death, that we found +ourselves for a Sunday at Whittinghame. It was, I think, not long before +the opening of the Special Commission which was to inquire into the +charges brought by the <i>Times</i> against the Parnellites and the Land +League. Nothing struck me more in Mr. Balfour than the absence in him of +any sort of excitement or agitation, in dealing with the current charges +against the Irishmen. It seemed to me that he had quietly accepted the +fact that he was fighting a revolution, and, while perfectly clear as to +his own course of action, wasted no nervous force on moral reprobation +of the persons concerned. His business was to protect the helpless, to +punish crime, and to expose the authors of it, whether high or low. But +he took it as a job to be done--difficult--unpleasant--but all in the +way of business. The tragic or pathetic emotion that so many people were +ready to spend upon it he steadily kept at a distance. His nerve struck +me as astonishing, and the absence of any disabling worry about things +past. "One can only do one's best at the moment," he said to me once, <i>à +propos</i> of some action of the Irish government which had turned out +badly--"if it doesn't succeed, better luck next time! Nothing to be +gained by going back upon things." After this visit to Whittinghame, I +wrote to my father:</p> + + I came away more impressed and attracted by Arthur Balfour than<br> + ever. If intelligence and heart and pure intentions can do anything<br> + for Ireland, he at least has got them all. Physically he seems to<br> + have broadened and heightened since he took office, and his manner,<br> + which was always full of charm, is even brighter and kindlier than<br> + it was--or I fancied it. He spoke most warmly of Uncle Forster.<br> + +<p>And the interesting and remarkable thing was the contrast between an +attitude so composed and stoical, and his delicate physique, his +sensitive, sympathetic character. All the time, of course, he was in +constant personal danger. Detectives, much to his annoyance, lay in wait +for us as we walked through his own park, and went with him in London +wherever he dined. Like my uncle, he was impatient of being followed and +guarded, and only submitted to it for the sake of other people. Once, at +a dinner-party at our house, he met an old friend of ours, one of the +most original thinkers of our day, Mr. Philip Wicksteed, economist, +Dante scholar, and Unitarian minister. He and Mr. Balfour were evidently +attracted to each other, and when the time for departure came, the two, +deep in conversation, instead of taking cabs, walked off together in the +direction of Mr. Balfour's house in Carlton Gardens. The detectives +below-stairs remained for some time blissfully unconscious of what had +happened. Then word reached them; and my husband, standing at the door +to see a guest off, was the amused spectator of the rush in pursuit of +two splendid long-legged fellows, who had, however, no chance whatever +of catching up the Chief Secretary.</p> + +<p>Thirty years ago, almost! And during that time the name and fame of +Arthur Balfour have become an abiding part of English history. Nor is +there any British statesman of our day who has been so much loved by his +friends, so little hated by his opponents, so widely trusted by +the nation.</p> + +<hr style="width: 25%;"> + +<p>As to the Special Commission and the excitement produced by the <i>Times</i> +attack on the Irish Members, including the publication of the forged +Parnell letter in 1887, our connection with the <i>Times</i> brought us, of +course, into the full blast of it. Night after night I would sit up, +half asleep, to listen to the different phases of the story when in the +early hours of the morning my husband came back from the <i>Times</i>, +brimful of news, which he was as eager to tell as I to hear. My husband, +however, was only occasionally asked to write upon Ireland, and was not +in the inner counsels of the paper on that subject. We were both very +anxious about the facsimiled letter, and when, after long preliminaries, +the Commission came to the <i>Times</i> witnesses, I well remember the dismay +with which I heard the first day of Mr. Macdonald's examination. Was +that <i>all</i>? I came out of the Court behind Mr. Labouchere and Sir George +Lewis, and in Mr. Labouchere's exultation one read the coming +catastrophe. I was on the Riviera when Pigott's confession, flight, and +suicide held the stage; yet even at that distance the shock was great. +The <i>Times</i> attack was fatally discredited, and the influence of the +great paper temporarily crippled. Yet how much of that attack was sound, +how much of it was abundantly justified! After all, the report of the +Commission--apart altogether from the forged letter or letters-- +certainly gave Mr. Balfour in Ireland later on the reasoned support of +English opinion in his hand-to-hand struggle with the Land League +methods, as the Commission had both revealed and judged them. After +thirty years one may well admit that the Irish land system had to go, +and that the Land League was "a sordid revolution," with both the crimes +and the excuses of a revolution. But at the time, British statesmen had +to organize reform with one hand, and stop boycotting and murder with +the other; and the light thrown by the Commission on the methods of +Irish disaffection was invaluable to those who were actually grappling +day by day with the problems of Irish government.</p> +<br> + +<p>It was probably at Mrs. Jeune's that I first saw Mr. Goschen, and we +rapidly made friends. His was a great position at that time. Independent +of both parties, yet trusted by both; at once disinterested and +sympathetic; a strong Liberal in some respects, an equally strong +Conservative in others--he never spoke without being listened to, and +his support was eagerly courted both by Mr. Gladstone, from whom he had +refused office in 1880, without, however, breaking with the Liberal +party, and by the Conservatives, who instinctively felt him their +property, but were not yet quite clear as to how they were to finally +capture him. That was decided in 1886, when Mr. Goschen voted in the +majority that killed the Home Rule Bill, and more definitely in the +following year when Randolph Churchill resigned the Exchequer in a fit +of pique, thinking himself indispensable, and not at all expecting Lord +Salisbury to accept his resignation. But, in his own historic phrase, he +"forgot Goschen," and Mr. Goschen stepped easily into his shoes and +remained there.</p> + +<p>I find from an old diary that the Goschens dined with us in Russell +Square two nights before the historic division on the Home Rule Bill, +and I remember how the talk raged and ranged. Mr. Goschen was an +extremely agreeable talker, and I seem still to hear his husky voice, +with the curious deep notes in it, and to be looking into the large but +short-sighted and spectacled eyes--he refused the Speakership mainly on +the grounds of his sight--of which the veiled look often made what he +said the more racy and unexpected. A letter he wrote me in 1886, after +his defeat at Liverpool, I kept for many years as the best short +analysis I had ever read of the Liberal Unionist position, and the +probable future of the Liberal party.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Goschen was as devoted a wife as Mrs. Gladstone or Mrs. Disraeli, +and the story of the marriage was a romance enormously to Mr. Goschen's +credit. Mr. Goschen must have been a most faithful lover, and he +certainly was a delightful friend. We stayed with them at Seacox, their +home in Kent, and I remember one rainy afternoon there, the greater part +of which I spent listening to his talk with John Morley, and--I +think--Sir Alfred Lyall. It would have been difficult to find a trio of +men better worth an audience.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Goschen, though full of kindness and goodness, was not literary, +and the house was somewhat devoid of books, except in Mr. Goschen's +study. I remember J.R.G.'s laughing fling when Mrs. Goschen complained +that she could not get <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>, which he had recommended +to her, "from the library." "But you could have bought it for sixpence +at the railway bookstall," said J.R.G. Mr. Goschen himself, however, was +a man of wide cultivation, as befitted the grandson of the intelligent +German bourgeois who had been the publisher of both Schiller and Goethe. +His biography of his grandfather in those happy days before the present +life-and-death struggle between England and Germany has now a kind of +symbolic value. It is a study by a man of German descent who had become +one of the most trusted of English statesmen, of that earlier German +life--with its measure, its kindness, its idealism--on which Germany has +turned its back. The writing of this book was the pleasure of his later +years, amid the heavy work which was imposed upon him as a Free-Trader, +in spite of his personal friendship for Mr. Chamberlain, by the Tariff +Reform campaign of 1903 onward; and the copy which he gave me reminds me +of many happy talks with him, and of my own true affection for him. I am +thankful that he did not live to see 1914.</p> + +<p>Lord Goschen reminds me of Lord Acton, another new friend of the +'eighties. Yet Lord Acton had been my father's friend and editor, in the +<i>Home and Foreign Review</i>, long before he and I knew each other. Was +there ever a more interesting or a more enigmatic personality than Lord +Acton's? His letters to Mrs. Drew, addressed, evidently, in many cases, +to Mr. Gladstone, through his daughter, have always seemed to me one of +the most interesting documents of our time. Yet I felt sharply, in +reading them, that the real man was only partially there; and in the new +series of letters just published (October, 1917) much and welcome light +is shed upon the problem of Lord Acton's mind and character. The +perpetual attraction for me, as for many others, lay in the contrast +between Lord Acton's Catholicism and the universalism of his learning; +and, again, between what his death revealed of the fervor and simplicity +of his Catholic faith, and the passion of his Liberal creed. +Oppression--tyranny--persecution--those were the things that stirred +his blood. He was a Catholic, yet he fought Ultramontanism and the +Papal, Curia to the end; he never lost his full communion with the +Church of Rome, yet he could never forgive the Papacy for the things it +had done, and suffered to be done; and he would have nothing to do with +the excuse that the moral standards of one age are different from those +of another, and therefore the crimes of a Borgia weigh more lightly and +claim more indulgence than similar acts done in the nineteenth century.</p> + + There is one moral standard for all Christians--there has never been<br> + more than one [he would say, inexorably]. The Commandments and the<br> + Sermon on the Mount have been always there. It was the wickedness of<br> + men that ignored them in the fifteenth century--it is the wickedness<br> + of men that ignores them now. Tolerate them in the past, and you<br> + will come to tolerate them in the present and future.<br> + +<p>It was in 1885 that Mr.--then recently made Professor--Creighton, showed +me at Cambridge an extraordinarily interesting summary, in Lord Acton's +handwriting, of what should be the principles--the ethical +principles--of the modern historian in dealing with the past. They were, +I think, afterward embodied in an introduction to a new edition of +<i>Machiavelli</i>. The gist of them, however, is given in a letter written +to Bishop Creighton in 1887, and printed in the biography of the Bishop. +Here we find a devout Catholic attacking an Anglican writer for applying +the epithets "tolerant and enlightened" to the later medieval Papacy.</p> + + These men [<i>i.e.</i>, the Popes of the thirteenth and fourteenth<br> + centuries] [he says] instituted a system of persecution.... The<br> + person who authorizes the act shares the guilt of the person who<br> + commits it.... Now the Liberals think persecution a crime of a worse<br> + order than adultery, and the acts done by Ximenes [through the<br> + agency of the Spanish Inquisition] considerably worse than the<br> + entertainment of Roman courtesans by Alexander VIth.<br> + +<p>These lines, of course, point to the Acton who was the lifelong friend +of Dollinger and fought, side by side with the Bavarian scholar, the +promulgation of the dogma of Papal Infallibility, at the Vatican Council +of 1870. But while Dollinger broke with the Church, Lord Acton never +did. That was what made the extraordinary interest of conversation with +him. Here was a man whose denunciation of the crimes and corruption of +Papal Rome--of the historic Church, indeed, and the clergy in +general--was far more unsparing than that of the average educated +Anglican. Yet he died a devout member of the Roman Church in which he +was born; after his death it was revealed that he had never felt a +serious doubt either of Catholic doctrine or of the supernatural mission +of the Catholic Church; and it was to a dearly loved daughter on her +death-bed that he said, with calm and tender faith, "My child, you will +soon be with Jesus Christ." All his friends, except the very few who +knew him most intimately, must, I think, have been perpetually puzzled +by this apparent paradox in his life and thought. Take the subject of +Biblical criticism. I had many talks with him while I was writing +<i>Robert Elsmere</i>, and was always amazed at his knowledge of what Liddon +would have called "German infidel" books. He had read them all, he +possessed them all, he knew a great deal about the lives of the men who +had written them, and he never spoke of them, both the books and the +writers, without complete and, as it seemed to me, sympathetic +tolerance. I remember, after the publication of the dialogue on "The New +Reformation," in which I tried to answer Mr. Gladstone's review of +<i>Robert Elsmere</i> by giving an outline of the history of religious +inquiry and Biblical criticism from Lessing to Harnack, that I met Lord +Acton one evening on the platform of Bletchley station, while we were +both waiting for a train. He came up to me with a word of congratulation +on the article. "I only wish," I said, "I had been able to consult you +more about it." "No, no," he said. "<i>Votre siège est faite</i>! But I think +you should have given more weight to so-and-so, and you have omitted +so-and-so." Whereupon we walked up and down in the dusk, and he poured +out that learning of his, in that way he had--so courteous, modest, +thought-provoking--which made one both wonder at and love him.</p> + +<p>As to his generosity and kindness toward younger students, it was +endless. I asked him once, when I was writing for <i>Macmillan</i>, to give +me some suggestions for an article on Chateaubriand. The letter I +received from him the following morning is a marvel of knowledge, +bibliography, and kindness. And not only did he give me such a "scheme" +of reading as would have taken any ordinary person months to get +through, but he arrived the following day in a hansom, with a number of +the books he had named, and for a long time they lived on my shelves. +Alack! I never wrote the article, but when I came to the writing of +<i>Eleanor</i>, for which certain material was drawn from the life of +Chateaubriand, his advice helped me. And I don't think he would have +thought it thrown away. He never despised novels!</p> + +<p>Once on a visit to us at Stocks, there were nine books of different +sorts in his room which I had chosen and placed there. By Monday morning +he had read them all. His library, when he died, contained about 60,000 +volumes--all read; and it will be remembered that Lord Morley, to whom +Mr. Carnegie gave it, has handed it on to the University of Cambridge.</p> + +<p>In 1884, when I first knew him, however, Lord Acton was every bit as +keen a politician as he was a scholar. As is well known, he was a poor +speaker, and never made any success in Parliament; and this was always, +it seemed to me, the drop of gall in his otherwise happy and +distinguished lot. But if he was never in an English Cabinet, his +influence over Mr. Gladstone through the whole of the Home Rule struggle +gave him very real political power. He and Mr. Morley were the constant +friends and associates to whom Mr. Gladstone turned through all that +critical time. But the great split was rushing on, and it was also in +1884 that, at Admiral Maxse's one night at dinner, I first saw Mr. +Chamberlain, who was to play so great a part in the following years. It +was a memorable evening to me, for the other guest in a small party was +M. Clémenceau.</p> + +<p>M. Clémenceau was then at the height of his power as the maker and +unmaker of French Ministries. It was he more than any other single man +who had checkmated the Royalist reaction of 1877 and driven MacMahon +from power; and in the year after we first met him he was to bring Jules +Ferry to grief over <i>L'affaire de Tongkin</i>. He was then in the prime of +life, and he is still (1917), thirty-three years later,<a name="FNanchor1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1"><sup>[1]</sup></a> one of the +most vigorous of French political influences. Mr. Chamberlain, in 1884, +was forty-eight, five years older than the French politician, and was at +that time, of course, the leader of the Radicals, as distinguished from +the old Liberals, both in the House of Commons and Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet.</p> + +<p>How many great events, in which those two men were to be concerned, were +still in the "abysm of time," as we sat listening to them at Admiral +Maxse's dinner-table!--Clémenceau, the younger, and the more fiery and +fluent; Chamberlain, with no graces of conversation, and much less ready +than the man he was talking with, but producing already the impression +of a power, certain to leave its mark, if the man lived, on English +history. In a letter to my father after the dinner-party, I described +the interest we had both felt in M. Clémenceau. "Yet he seems to me a +light weight to ride such a horse as the French democracy!"</p> + +<blockquote><a name="Footnote_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor1">[1]</a> These lines were written shortly before, on the overthrow +of M. Panlevé. M. Clémenceau, at the age of seventy-seven, became Prime +Minister of France, at what may well be the deciding moment of French +destiny (January, 1918).</blockquote> + +<p>In the following year, 1885, I remember a long conversation on the +Gordon catastrophe with Mr. Chamberlain at Lady Jeune's. It was evident, +I thought, that his mind was greatly exercised by the whole story of +that disastrous event. He went through it from step to step, ending up +deliberately, but with a sigh, "I have never been able to see, from day +to day, and I do not see now, how the Ministry could have taken any +other course than that they did take."</p> + +<p>Yet the recently published biography of Sir Charles Dilke shows clearly +how very critical Mr. Chamberlain had already become of his great +leader, Mr. Gladstone, and how many causes were already preparing the +rupture of 1886.</p> + +<hr style="width: 25%;"> + +<p>I first met Mr. Browning in 1884 or 1885, if I remember right, at a +Kensington dinnerparty, where he took me down. A man who talked loud and +much was discoursing on the other side of the table; and a spirit of +opposition had clearly entered into Mr. Browning.</p> + +<p><i>À propos</i> of some recent acting in London we began to talk of Molière, +and presently, as though to shut out the stream of words opposite, which +was damping conversation, the old poet--how the splendid brow and the +white hair come back to me!--fell to quoting from the famous sonnet +scene in "Le Misanthrope": first of all, Alceste's rage with Phillinte's +flattery of the wretched verses declaimed by Oronte--"<i>Morbleu! vil +complaisant, vous louez des sottises</i>"; then the admirable fencing +between Oronte and Alceste, where Alceste at first tries to convey his +contempt for Oronte's sonnet indirectly, and then bursts out:</p> + + "<i>Ce n'est que jeu de mots, qu'affectation pure,<br> + Et ce n'est point ainsi que parle la nature</i>!"<br> + +<p>breaking immediately into the <i>vieille chanson</i>, one line of which is +worth all the affected stuff that Célimène and her circle admire.</p> + +<p>Browning repeated the French in an undertone, kindling as he went, I +urging him on, our two heads close together. Every now and then he would +look up to see if the plague outside was done, and, finding it still +went on, would plunge again into the seclusion of our tête-à-tête; till +the <i>chanson</i> itself--"<i>Si le roi m'avoit donné--Paris, sa grand' +ville"</i>--had been said, to his delight and mine.</p> + +<p>The recitation lasted through several courses, and our hostess once or +twice threw uneasy glances toward us, for Browning was the "lion" of the +evening. But, once launched, he was not to be stopped; and as for me, I +shall always remember that I heard Browning--spontaneously, without a +moment's pause to remember or prepare--recite the whole, or almost the +whole, of one of the immortal things in literature.</p> + +<p>He was then seventy-two or seventy-three. He came to see us once or +twice in Russell Square, but, alack! we arrived too late in the London +world to know him well. His health began to fail just about the time +when we first met, and early in 1889 he died in the Palazzo Rezzonico.</p> + +<p>He did not like <i>Robert Elsmere</i>, which appeared the year before his +death; and I was told a striking story by a common friend of his and +mine, who was present at a discussion of the book at a literary house. +Browning, said my friend, was of the party. The discussion turned on the +divinity of Christ. After listening awhile, Browning repeated, with some +passion, the anecdote of Charles Lamb in conversation with Leigh Hunt, +on the subject of "Persons one would wish to have seen"; when, after +ranging through literature and philosophy, Lamb added:</p> + + "But without mentioning a name that once put on a semblance of<br> + mortality ... there is only one other Person. If Shakespeare was to<br> + come into the room, we should rise up to meet him; but if that<br> + Person was to come into it, we should fall down and try to kiss the<br> + hem of His garment."<br> + +<p>Some fourteen years after his death I seemed to be brought very near in +spirit to this great man, and--so far as a large portion of his work is +concerned--great poet. We were in Venice. I was writing the <i>Marriage of +William Ashe</i>, and, being in want of a Venetian setting for some of the +scenes, I asked Mr. Pen Browning, who was, I think, at Asolo, if he +would allow me access to the Palazzo Rezzonico, which was then +uninhabited. He kindly gave me free leave to wander about it as I liked; +and I went most days to sit and write in one of the rooms of the +<i>mezzanin</i>. But when all chance of a tourist had gone, and the palace +was shut, I used to walk all about it in the rich May light, finding it +a little creepy! but endlessly attractive and interesting. There was a +bust of Mr. Browning, with an inscription, in one of the rooms, and the +place was haunted for me by his great ghost. It was there he had come to +die, in the palace which he had given to his only son, whom he adored. +The <i>concierge</i> pointed out to me what he believed to be the room in +which he passed away. There was very little furniture in it. Everything +was chill and deserted. I did not want to think of him there. I liked to +imagine him strolling in the stately hall of the palace with its vast +chandelier, its pillared sides and Tiepolo ceiling, breathing in the +Italian spirit which through such long years had passed into his, and +delighting, as a poet delights--not vulgarly, but with something of a +child's adventurous pleasure--in the mellow magnificence of the +beautiful old place.</p> + +<hr style="width: 25%;"> + +<p>Mr. Lowell is another memory of these early London days. My first sight +of him was at Mr. and Mrs. Westlake's house--in a temper! For some one +had imprudently talked of "Yankeeisms," perhaps with some "superior" +intonation. And Mr. Lowell--the Lowell of <i>A Certain Condescension in +Foreigners</i>--had flashed out: "It's you English who don't know your own +language and your own literary history. Otherwise you would realize that +most of what you call 'Yankeeisms' are merely good old English which you +have thrown away."</p> + +<p>Afterward, I find records of talks with him at Russell Square, then of +Mrs. Lowell's death in 1885, and finally of dining with him in the +spring of 1887, just before his return to America. At that dinner was +also the German Ambassador, Count Hatzfeldt, a handsome man, with a +powerful, rather somber face. I remember some talk with him after dinner +on current books and politics. Just thirty years ago! Mr. Lowell had +then only four years to live. He and all other diplomats had just passed +through an anxious spring. The scare of another Franco-German war had +been playing on the nerves of Europe, started by the military party in +Germany, merely to insure the passing of the famous Army law of that +year--the first landmark in that huge military expansion of which we see +the natural fruit in the present Armageddon.</p> + +<p>A week or two before this dinner the German elections had given the +Conservatives an enormous victory. Germany, indeed, was in the full +passion of economic and military development--all her people growing +rich--intoxicated, besides, with vague dreams of coming power. Yet I +have still before me the absent, indecipherable look of her +Ambassador--a man clearly of high intelligence--at Mr. Lowell's table. +Thirty years--and at the end of them America was to be at grips with +Germany, sending armies across the Atlantic to fight in Europe. It would +have been as impossible for any of us, on that May evening in Lowndes +Square, even to imagine such a future, as it was for Macbeth to credit +the absurdity that Birnam wood would ever come to Dunsinane!</p> + +<p>A year later Mr. Lowell came back to London for a time in a private +capacity, and I got to know him better and to like him much.... Here is +a characteristic touch in a note I find among the old letters:</p> + + I am glad you found something to like in my book and much obliged to<br> + you for saying so. Nobody but Wordsworth ever got beyond need of<br> + sympathy, and he started there!<br> + + +<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br> +<h2><a name="143"></a><a href="#151">CHAPTER III</a></h2> +<br> + +<p class="c">THE PUBLICATION OF <i>ROBERT ELSMERE</i></p> + +<p>It was in 1885, after the completion of the Amiel translation, that I +began <i>Robert Elsmere</i>, drawing the opening scenes from that expedition +to Long Sleddale in the spring of that year which I have already +mentioned. The book took me three years, nearly, to write. Again and +again I found myself dreaming that the end was near and publication only +a month or two away, only to sink back on the dismal conviction that the +second, or the first, or the third volume--or some portion of each--must +be rewritten, if I was to satisfy myself at all. I actually wrote the +last words of the last chapter in March, 1887, and came out afterward, +from my tiny writing-room at the end of the drawing-room, shaken with +tears, and wondering, as I sat alone on the floor, by the fire, in the +front room, what life would be like, now that the book was done! But it +was nearly a year after that before it came out, a year of incessant +hard work, of endless rewriting, and much nervous exhaustion. For all +the work was saddened and made difficult by the fact that my mother's +long illness was nearing its end and that I was torn incessantly between +the claim of the book and the desire to be with her whenever I could +possibly be spared from my home and children. Whenever there was a +temporary improvement in her state, I would go down to Borough alone to +work feverishly at revision, only to be drawn back to her side before +long by worse news. And all the time London life went on as usual, and +the strain at times was great.</p> + +<p>The difficulty of finishing the book arose first of all from its length. +I well remember the depressed countenance of Mr. George Smith--who was +to be to me through fourteen years afterward the kindest of publishers +and friends--when I called one day in Waterloo Place, bearing a +basketful of typewritten sheets. "I am afraid you have brought us a +perfectly unmanageable book!" he said; and I could only mournfully agree +that so it was. It was far too long, and my heart sank at the thought of +all there was still to do. But how patient Mr. Smith was over it! and +how generous in the matter of unlimited fresh proofs and endless +corrections. I am certain that he had no belief in the book's success; +and yet, on the ground of his interest in <i>Miss Bretherton</i> he had made +liberal terms with me, and all through the long incubation he was always +indulgent and sympathetic.</p> + +<p>The root difficulty was of course the dealing with such a subject in a +novel at all. Yet I was determined to deal with it so, in order to reach +the public. There were great precedents--Froude's <i>Nemesis of Faith</i>, +Newman's <i>Loss and Gain</i>, Kingsley's <i>Alton Locke</i>--for the novel of +religious or social propaganda. And it seemed to me that the novel was +capable of holding and shaping real experience of any kind, as it +affects the lives of men and women. It is the most elastic, the most +adaptable of forms. No one has a right to set limits to its range. There +is only one final test. Does it interest?--does it appeal? Personally, I +should add another. Does it make in the long run for <i>beauty</i>? Beauty +taken in the largest and most generous sense, and especially as +including discord, the harsh and jangled notes which enrich the +rest--but still Beauty--as Tolstoy was a master of it?</p> + +<p>But at any rate, no one will deny that <i>interest</i> is the crucial matter.</p> + + There are five and twenty ways<br> + Of constructing tribal lays--<br> + And every single one of them is right!<br> + +<p>always supposing that the way chosen quickens the breath and stirs the +heart of those who listen. But when the subject chosen has two aspects, +the one intellectual and logical, the other poetic and emotional, the +difficulty of holding the balance between them, so that neither +overpowers the other, and interest is maintained, is admittedly great.</p> + +<p>I wanted to show how a man of sensitive and noble character, born for +religion, comes to throw off the orthodoxies of his day and moment, and +to go out into the wilderness where all is experiment, and spiritual +life begins again. And with him I wished to contrast a type no less fine +of the traditional and guided mind, and to imagine the clash of two such +tendencies of thought as it might affect all practical life, and +especially the life of two people who loved each other.</p> + +<p>Here then, to begin with, were Robert and Catharine. Yes, but Robert +must be made intellectually intelligible. Closely looked at, all +novel-writing is a sort of shorthand. Even the most simple and broadly +human situation cannot really be told in full. Each reader in following +it unconsciously supplies a vast amount himself. A great deal of the +effect is owing to things quite out of the picture given--things in the +reader's own mind, first and foremost. The writer is playing on common +experience; and mere suggestion is often far more effective than +analysis. Take the paragraph in Turguénieff's <i>Lisa</i>--it was pointed out +to me by Henry James--where Lavretsky on the point of marriage, after +much suffering, with the innocent and noble girl whom he adores, +suddenly hears that his intolerable first wife, whom he had long +believed dead, is alive. Turguénieff, instead of setting out the +situation in detail, throws himself on the reader: "It was dark. +Lavretsky went into the garden, and walked up and down there till dawn."</p> + +<p>That is all. And it is enough. The reader who is not capable of sharing +that night walk with Lavretsky, and entering into his thoughts, has read +the novel to no purpose. He would not understand, though Lavretsky or +his creator were to spend pages on explaining.</p> + +<p>But in my case, what provoked the human and emotional crisis--what +produced the <i>story</i>--was an intellectual process. Now the difficulty +here in using suggestion--which is the master tool of the novelist--is +much greater than in the case of ordinary experience. For the conscious +use of the intellect on the accumulated data of life, through history +and philosophy, is not ordinary experience. In its more advanced forms, +it only applies to a small minority of the human race.</p> + +<p>Still, in every generation, while a minority is making or taking part in +the intellectual process itself, there is an atmosphere, a diffusion, +produced around them, which affects many thousands who have but little +share--but little <i>conscious</i> share, at any rate--in the actual process.</p> + +<p>Here, then, is the opening for suggestion--in connection with the +various forms of imagination which enter into Literature; with poetry, +and fiction, which, as Goethe saw, is really a form of poetry. And a +quite legitimate opening. For to use it is to quicken the intellectual +process itself, and to induce a larger number of minds to take part +in it.</p> + +<p>The problem, then, in intellectual poetry or fiction, is so to suggest +the argument, that both the expert and the popular consciousness may +feel its force, and to do this without overstepping the bounds of poetry +or fiction; without turning either into mere ratiocination, and so +losing the "simple, sensuous, passionate" element which is their +true life.</p> + +<p>It was this problem which made <i>Robert Elsmere</i> take three years to +write, instead of one. Mr. Gladstone complained, in his famous review of +it, that a majestic system which had taken centuries to elaborate, and +gathered into itself the wisest brains of the ages, had gone down in a +few weeks or months before the onslaught of the Squire's arguments; and +that if the Squire's arguments were few, the orthodox arguments were +fewer! The answer to the first part of the charge is that the +well-taught schoolboy of to-day is necessarily wiser in a hundred +respects than Sophocles or Plato, since he represents not himself, but +the brainwork of a hundred generations since those great men lived. And +as to the second, if Mr. Gladstone had seen the first redactions of the +book--only if he had, I fear he would never have read it!--he would +hardly have complained of lack of argument on either side, whatever he +might have thought of its quality. Again and again I went on writing for +hours, satisfying the logical sense in oneself, trying to put the +arguments on both sides as fairly as possible, only to feel despairingly +at the end that it must all come out. It might be decent controversy; +but life, feeling, charm, <i>humanity</i>, had gone out of it; it had ceased, +therefore, to be "making," to be literature.</p> + +<p>So that in the long run there was no other method possible than +suggestion--and, of course, <i>selection</i>!--as with all the rest of one's +material. That being understood, what one had to aim at was so to use +suggestion as to touch the two zones of thought--that of the scholar and +that of what one may call the educated populace; who, without being +scholars, were yet aware, more or less clearly, of what the scholars +were doing. It is from these last that "atmosphere" and "diffusion" +come; the atmosphere and diffusion which alone make wide penetration for +a book illustrating an intellectual motive possible. I had to learn +that, having read a great deal, I must as far as possible wipe out the +traces of reading. All that could be done was to leave a few sign-posts +as firmly planted as one could, so as to recall the real journey to +those who already knew it, and, for the rest, to trust to the floating +interest and passion surrounding a great controversy--the <i>second</i> +religious battle of the nineteenth century--with which it had seemed to +me, both in Oxford and in London, that the intellectual air was charged.</p> + +<p>I grew very weary in the course of the long effort, and often very +despairing. But there were omens of hope now and then; first, a letter +from my dear eldest brother, the late W.T. Arnold, who died in 1904, +leaving a record as journalist and scholar which has been admirably told +by his intimate friend and colleague, Mr. (now Captain) C.E. Montague. +He and I had shared many intellectual interests connected with the +history of the Empire. His monograph on <i>Roman Provincial +Administration</i>, first written as an Arnold Essay, still holds the +field; and in the realm of pure literature his one-volume edition of +Keats is there to show his eagerness for beauty and his love of English +verse. I sent him the first volume in proof, about a year before the +book came out, and awaited his verdict with much anxiety. It came one +May day in 1889. I happened to be very tired and depressed at the +moment, and I remember sitting alone for a little while with the letter +in my hand, without courage to open it. Then at last I opened it.</p> + + Warm congratulation--Admirable!--Full of character and color....<br> + <i>Miss Bretherton</i> was an intellectual exercise. This is quite a<br> + different affair, and has interested and touched me deeply, as I<br> + feel sure it will all the world. The biggest thing that--with a few<br> + other things of the same kind--has been done for years.<br> + +<p>Well!--that was enough to go on with, to carry me through the last +wrestle with proofs and revision. But by the following November nervous +fatigue made me put work aside for a few weeks, and we went abroad for +rest, only to be abruptly summoned home by my mother's state. +Thenceforward I lived a double life--the one overshadowed by my mother's +approaching death, the other amid the agitation of the book's appearance +and all the incidents of its rapid success.</p> + +<p>I have already told the story in the Introduction to the Library Edition +of <i>Robert Elsmere</i>, and I will only run through it here as rapidly as +possible, with a few fresh incidents and quotations. There was never any +doubt at all of the book's fate, and I may repeat again that, before Mr. +Gladstone's review of it, the three volumes were already in a third +edition, the rush at all the libraries was in full course, and Matthew +Arnold--so gay and kind, in those March weeks before his own sudden +death!--had clearly foreseen the rising boom. "I shall take it with me +to Bristol next week and get through it there, I hope [but he didn't +achieve it!]. It is one of my regrets not to have known the Green of +your dedication." And a week or two later he wrote an amusing letter to +his sister, describing a country-house party at beautiful Wilton, Lord +Pembroke's home near Salisbury, and the various stages in the book +reached by the members of the party, including Mr. Goschen, who were all +reading it, and all talking of it. I never, however, had any criticism +of it from him, except of the first volume, which he liked. I doubt very +much whether the second and third volumes would have appealed to him. My +uncle was a Modernist long before the time. In <i>Literature and Dogma</i> he +threw out in detail much of the argument suggested in <i>Robert Elsmere</i>, +but to the end of his life he was a contented member of the Anglican +Church, so far as attendance at her services was concerned, and belief +in her mission of "edification" to the English people. He had little +sympathy with people who "went out." Like Mr. Jowett, he would have +liked to see the Church slowly reformed and "modernized" from within. So +that with the main theme of my book--that a priest who doubts must +depart--he could never have had full sympathy. And in the course of +years--as I showed in a later novel written twenty-four years after +<i>Robert Elsmere</i>--I feel that I have very much come to agree with him! +These great national structures that we call churches are too precious +for iconoclast handling, if any other method is possible. The strong +assertion of individual liberty within them, as opposed to the attempt +to break them down from without; that seems to me now the hopeful +course. A few more heresy trials like those which sprang out of <i>Essays +and Reviews</i>, or the persecution of Bishop Colenso, would let in fresh +life and healing nowadays, as did those old stirrings of the waters. The +first Modernist bishop who stays in his place forms a Modernist chapter +and diocese around him, and fights the fight where he stands, will do +more for liberty and faith in the Church, I now sadly believe, than +those scores of brave "forgotten dead" who have gone out of her for +conscience' sake, all these years.</p> + +<p>But to return to the book. All through March the tide of success was +rapidly rising; and when I was able to think of it I was naturally +carried away by the excitement and astonishment of it. But with the +later days of March a veil dropped between me and the book. My mother's +suffering and storm-beaten life was coming rapidly to its close, and I +could think of nothing else. In an interval of slight improvement, +indeed, when it seemed as though she might rally for a time, I heard Mr. +Gladstone's name quoted for the first time in connection with the book. +It will be remembered that he was then out of office, having been +overthrown on the Home Rule Question in 1886, and he happened to be +staying for an Easter visit with the Warden of Keble, and Mrs. Talbot, +who was his niece by marriage. I was with my mother, about a mile away, +and Mrs. Talbot, who came to ask for news of her, reported to me that +Mr. Gladstone was deep in the book. He was reading it, pencil in hand, +marking all the passages he disliked or quarreled with, with the Italian +"<i>Ma</i>!"--and those he approved of with mysterious signs which she who +followed him through the volumes could not always decipher. Mr. Knowles, +she reported, the busy editor of the <i>Nineteenth Century</i>, was trying to +persuade the great man to review it. But "Mr. G." had not made up +his mind.</p> + +<p>Then all was shut out again. Through many days my mother asked +constantly for news of the book, and smiled with a flicker of her old +brightness when anything pleased her in a letter or review. But finally +there came long hours when to think or speak of it seemed sacrilege. And +on April 7th she died.</p> + +<hr style="width: 25%;"> + +<p>The day after her death I saw Mr. Gladstone at Keble. We talked for a +couple of hours, and then when I rose to go he asked if I would come +again on the following morning before he went back to town. I had been +deeply interested and touched, and I went again for another long visit. +My account, written down at the time, of the first day's talk, has been +printed as an appendix to the Library Edition of the book. Of the second +conversation, which was the more interesting of the two since we came to +much closer quarters in it, my only record is the following letter to +my husband:</p> + + I have certainly had a wonderful experience last night and this<br> + morning! Last night two hours' talk with Gladstone, this morning,<br> + again an hour and a half's strenuous argument, during which the<br> + great man got quite white sometimes and tremulous with interest and<br> + excitement.... The talk this morning was a battle royal over the<br> + book and Christian evidences. He was <i>very</i> charming personally,<br> + though at times he looked stern and angry and white to a degree, so<br> + that I wondered sometimes how I had the courage to go on--the drawn<br> + brows were so formidable! There was one moment when he talked of<br> + "trumpery objections," in his most House of Commons manner. It was<br> + as I thought. The new lines of criticism are not familiar to him,<br> + and they really press him hard. He meets them out of Bishop Butler,<br> + and things analogous. But there is a sense, I think, that question<br> + and answer don't fit, and with it ever-increasing interest<br> + and--sometimes--irritation. His own autobiographical reminiscences<br> + were wonderfully interesting, and his repetition of the 42d<br> + psalm--"Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks"--<i>grand</i>!<br> + + He said that he had never read any book on the hostile side written<br> + in such a spirit of, "generous appreciation" of the Christian side.<br> + +<p>Yes, those were hours to which I shall always look back with gratitude +and emotion. Wonderful old man! I see him still standing, as I took +leave of him, one hand leaning on the table beside him, his lined, +pallid face and eagle eyes framed in his noble white hair, shining amid +the dusk of the room. "There are still two things left for me to do!" he +said, finally, in answer to some remark of mine. "One is to carry Home +Rule; the other is to prove the intimate connection between the Hebrew +and Olympian revelations!"</p> + +<p>Could any remark have been more characteristic of that double life of +his--the life of the politician and the life of the student--which kept +him fresh and eager to the end of his days? Characteristic, too, of the +amateurish element in all his historical and literary thinking. In +dealing "with early Greek mythology, genealogy, and religion," says his +old friend, Lord Bryce, Mr. Gladstone's theories "have been condemned by +the unanimous voice of scholars as fantastic." Like his great +contemporary, Newman--on whom a good deal of our conversation turned--he +had no critical sense of evidence; and when he was writing on <i>The +Impregnable Rock of Scripture</i> Lord Acton, who was staying at Hawarden +at the time, ran after him in vain, with Welhausen or Kuenen under his +arm, if haply he might persuade his host to read them.</p> + +<p>But it was not for that he was born; and those who look back to the +mighty work he did for his country in the forty years preceding the Home +Rule split can only thank the Powers "that hold the broad Heaven" for +the part which the passion of his Christian faith, the eagerness of his +love for letters--for the Homer and the Dante he knew by heart--played +in refreshing and sustaining so great a soul. I remember returning, +shaken and uplifted, through the April air, to the house where my mother +lay in death; and among my old papers lies a torn fragment of a letter +thirty years old, which I began to write to Mr. Gladstone a few days +later, and was too shy to send.</p> + + This morning [says the letter, written from Fox How, on the day of<br> + my mother's funeral] we laid my dear Mother to rest in her grave<br> + among the mountains, and this afternoon I am free to think a little<br> + over what has befallen me personally and separately during this past<br> + week. It is not that I wish to continue our argument--quite the<br> + contrary. As I walked home from Keble on Monday morning, I felt it a<br> + hard fate that I should have been arguing, rather than listening....<br> + Argument, perhaps, was inevitable, but none the less I felt<br> + afterward as though there were something incongruous and unfitting<br> + in it. In a serious discussion it seemed to me right to say plainly<br> + what I felt and believed; but if in doing so I have given pain, or<br> + expressed myself on any point with a too great trenchancy and<br> + confidence, please believe that I regret it very sincerely. I shall<br> + always remember our talks. If consciousness lasts "beyond these<br> + voices"--my inmost hope as well as yours--we shall know of all these<br> + things. Till then I cherish the belief that we are not so far apart<br> + as we seem.<br> + +<p>But there the letter abruptly ended, and was never sent. I probably +shrank from the added emotion of sending it, and I found it again the +other day in a packet that had not been looked at for many years. I +print it now as evidence of the effect that Mr. Gladstone's personality +could produce on one forty years younger than himself, and in sharp +rebellion at that time against his opinions and influence in two main +fields--religion and politics.</p> + +<hr style="width: 25%;"> + +<p>Four days later, Monday, April 16th, my husband came into my room with +the face of one bringing ill tidings. "Matthew Arnold is dead!" My +uncle, as many will remember, had fallen suddenly in a Liverpool street +while walking with his wife to meet his daughter, expected that day from +America, and without a sound or movement had passed away. The heart +disease which killed so many of his family was his fate also. A merciful +one it always seemed to me, which took him thus suddenly and without +pain from the life in which he had played so fruitful and blameless a +part. That word "blameless" has always seemed to me particularly to fit +him. And the quality to which it points was what made his humor so +sharp-tipped and so harmless. He had no hidden interest to serve--no +malice--not a touch, not a trace of cruelty--so that men allowed him to +jest about their most sacred idols and superstitions and bore him +no grudge.</p> + +<p>To me his death at that moment was an irreparable personal loss. For it +was only since our migration to London that we had been near enough to +him to see much of him. My husband and he had become fast friends, and +his visits to Russell Square, and our expeditions to Cobham, where he +lived, in the pretty cottage beside the Mole, are marked in memory with +a very white stone. The only drawback to the Cobham visits were the +"dear, dear boys!"--<i>i.e.</i>, the dachshunds, Max and Geist, who, however +adorable in themselves, had no taste for visitors and no intention of +letting such intruding creatures interfere with their possession of +their master. One would go down to Cobham, eager to talk to "Uncle Matt" +about a book or an article--covetous, at any rate, of <i>some</i> talk with +him undisturbed. And it would all end in a breathless chase after Max, +through field after field where the little wretch was harrying either +sheep or cows, with the dear poet, hoarse with shouting, at his heels. +The dogs were always <i>in the party</i>, talked to, caressed, or scolded +exactly like spoiled children; and the cat of the house was almost +equally dear. Once, at Harrow, the then ruling cat--a tom--broke his +leg, and the house was in lamentation. The vet was called in, and hurt +him horribly. Then Uncle Matt ran up to town, met Professor Huxley at +the Athenaeum, and anxiously consulted him. "I'll go down with you," +said Huxley. The two traveled back instanter to Harrow, and, while Uncle +Matt held the cat, Huxley--who had begun life, let it be remembered, as +surgeon to the <i>Rattlesnake</i>!--examined him, the two black heads +together. There is a rumor that Charles Kingsley was included in the +consultation. Finally the limb was put in splints and left to nature. +All went well.</p> + +<p>Nobody who knew the modest Cobham cottage while its master lived will +ever forget it; the garden beside the Mole, where every bush and +flower-bed had its history; and that little study-dressing-room where +some of the best work in nineteenth-century letters was done. Not a +great multitude of books, but all cherished, all read, each one the +friend of its owner. No untidiness anywhere; the ordinary litter of an +author's room was quite absent. For long after his death the room +remained just as he had left it, his coat hanging behind the door, his +slippers beside his chair, the last letters he had received, and all the +small and simple equipment of his writing-table ready to his hand, +waiting for the master who would never know "a day of return." In that +room--during fifteen years, he wrote <i>God and the Bible</i>, the many +suggestive and fruitful Essays, including the American addresses, of his +later years--seeds, almost all of them, dropped into the mind of his +generation for a future harvesting; a certain number of poems, including +the noble elegiac poem on Arthur Stanley's death, "Geist's Grave" and +"Poor Matthias"; a mass of writing on education which is only now, +helped by the war, beginning to tell on the English mind; and the +endlessly kind and gracious letters to all sorts and conditions of +men--and women--the literary beginner, the young teacher wanting advice, +even the stranger greedy for an autograph. Every little playful note to +friends or kinsfolk he ever wrote was dear to those who received it; but +he--the most fastidious of men--would have much disliked to see them all +printed at length in Mr. Russell's indiscriminate volumes. He talked to +me once of his wish to make a small volume--"such a little one!"--of +George Sand's best letters. And that is just what he would have wished +for himself.</p> + +<p>Among the letters that reached me on my uncle's death was one from Mr. +Andrew Lang denouncing almost all the obituary notices of him. "Nobody +seems to know that he <i>was a poet</i>!" cries Mr. Lang. But his poetic +blossoming was really over with the 'sixties, and in the hubbub that +arose round his critical and religious work--his attempts to drive +"ideas" into the English mind, in the 'sixties and 'seventies--the main +fact that he, with Browning and Tennyson, <i>stood for English poetry</i>, in +the mid-nineteenth century, was often obscured and only slowly +recognized. But it was recognized, and he himself had never any real +doubt of it, from the moment when he sent the "Strayed Reveller" to my +father in New Zealand in 1849, to those later times when his growing +fame was in all men's ears. He writes to his sister in 1878:</p> + + It is curious how the public is beginning to take my poems to its<br> + bosom after long years of comparative neglect. The wave of thought<br> + and change has rolled on until people begin to find a significance<br> + and an attraction in what had none for them formerly.<br> + +<p>But he had put it himself in poetry long before--this slow emergence +above the tumult and the shouting of the stars that are to shine upon +the next generation. Mr. Garnett, in the careful and learned notice of +my uncle's life and work in the <i>Dictionary of National Biography</i>, says +of his poetry that "most of it" is "immortal." This, indeed, is the +great, the mystic word that rings in every poet's ear from the +beginning. And there is scarcely any true poet who is not certain that +sooner or later his work will "put on immortality." Matthew Arnold +expressed, I think, his own secret faith, in the beautiful lines of his +early poem, "The Bacchanalia--or the New Age":</p> + + The epoch ends, the world is still.<br> + The age has talk'd and work'd its fill--<br> + +<hr style="width: 25%;"> + + And in the after-silence sweet,<br> + Now strife is hush'd, our ears doth meet,<br> + Ascending pure, the bell-like fame<br> + Of this or that down-trodden name,<br> + Delicate spirits, push'd away<br> + In the hot press of the noonday.<br> + And o'er the plain, where the dead age<br> + Did its now silent warfare wage--<br> + O'er that wide plain, now wrapt in gloom,<br> + Where many a splendor finds its tomb,<br> + Many spent fames and fallen nights--<br> + The one or two immortal lights<br> + Rise slowly up into the sky<br> + To shine there everlastingly,<br> + Like stars over the bounding hill.<br> + The epoch ends, the world is still.<br> + +<hr style="width: 25%;"> + +<p>It was on the way home from Laleham, after my uncle's burial there, that +Mr. George Smith gave me fresh and astonishing news of <i>Robert +Elsmere's</i> success. The circulating libraries were being fretted to +death for copies, and the whirlwind of talk was constantly rising. A +little later in the same month of April, if I remember right, I was +going from Waterloo to Godalming and Borough Farm, when, just as the +train was starting, a lady rushed along the platform, waving a book +aloft and signaling to another lady who was evidently waiting to see her +off. "I've got it--I've got it!" she said, triumphantly. "Get in, +ma-am--get in!" said the porter, bundling her into the compartment where +I sat alone. Then she hung out of the window, breathlessly talking. +"They told me no chance for weeks--not the slightest! Then--just as I +was standing at the counter, who should come up but somebody bringing +back the first volume. Of course it was promised to somebody else; but +as I was <i>there</i>, I laid hands on it, and here it is!" The train went +off, my companion plunged into her book, and I watched her as she turned +the pages of the familiar green volume. We were quite alone. I had half +a mind to say something revealing; but on the whole it was more amusing +to sit still!</p> + +<p>And meanwhile letters poured in.</p> + +<p>"I try to write upon you," wrote Mr. Gladstone; "wholly despair of +satisfying myself--cannot quite tell whether to persevere or desist." +Mr. Pater let me know that he was writing on it for the <i>Guardian</i>. "It +is a <i>chef d'oeuvre</i> after its kind, and justifies the care you have +devoted to it." "I see," said Andrew Lang, on April 30th, "that <i>R.E</i>. +is running into as many editions as <i>The Rights of Man</i> by Tom Paine.... +You know he is not <i>my</i> sort (at least unless you have a ghost, a +murder, a duel, and some savages)." Burne-Jones wrote, with the fun and +sweetness that made his letters a delight:</p> + + Not one least bitter word in it!--threading your way through<br> + intricacies of parsons so finely and justly.... As each new one came<br> + on the scene, I wondered if you would fall upon him and rend<br> + him--but you never do.... Certainly I never thought I should devour<br> + a book about parsons--my desires lying toward--"time upon once there<br> + was a dreadful pirate"--but I am back again five and thirty years<br> + and feeling softened and subdued with memories you have wakened up<br> + so piercingly--and I wanted to tell you this.<br> +<br> + +<p>And in the same packet lie letters from the honored and beloved Edward +Talbot, now Bishop of Winchester, Stopford Brooke--the Master of +Balliol--Lord Justice Bowen--Professor Huxley--and so many, many more. +Best of all, Henry James! His two long letters I have already printed, +naturally with his full leave and blessing, in the Library Edition of +the novel. Not his the grudging and faultfinding temper that besets the +lesser man when he comes to write of his contemporaries! Full of +generous honor for what he thought good and honest work, however faulty, +his praise kindled--and his blame no less. He appreciated so fully +<i>your</i> way of doing it; and his suggestion, alongside, of what would +have been <i>his</i> way of doing it, was so stimulating--touched one with so +light a Socratean sting, and set a hundred thoughts on the alert. Of +this delightful critical art of his his letters to myself over many +years are one long illustration.</p> + +<p>And now--"There is none like him--none!" The honeyed lips are silent and +the helping hand at rest.</p> + +<p>With May appeared Mr. Gladstone's review--"the refined criticism of +<i>Robert Elsmere</i>"--"typical of his strong points," as Lord Bryce +describes it--certainly one of the best things he ever wrote. I had no +sooner read it than, after admiring it, I felt it must be answered. But +it was desirable to take time to think how best to do it. At the moment +my one desire was for rest and escape. At the beginning of June we took +our eldest two children, aged eleven and thirteen, to Switzerland for +the first time. Oh! the delight of Glion! with its hay-fields thick with +miraculous spring flowers, the "peak of Jaman delicately tall," and that +gorgeous pile of the Dent du Midi, bearing up the June heaven, to the +east!--the joy of seeing the children's pleasure, and the relief of the +mere physical rebound in the Swiss air, after the long months of strain +and sorrow! My son, a slip of a person in knickerbockers, walked over +the Simplon as though Alps were only made to be climbed by boys of +eleven; and the Defile of Gondo, Domo d'Ossola, and beautiful +Maggiore--they were all new and heavenly to each member of the party. +Every year now there was growing on me the spell of Italy, the historic, +the Saturnian land; and short as this wandering was, I remember, after +it was over, and we turned homeward across the St. Gothard, leaving +Italy behind us, a new sense as of a hidden treasure in life--of +something sweet and inexhaustible always waiting for one's return; like +a child's cake in a cupboard, or the gold and silver hoard of Odysseus +that Athene helped him to hide in the Ithacan cave.</p> + +<p>Then one day toward the end of June or the beginning of July my husband +put down beside me a great brown paper package which the post had just +brought. "There's America beginning!" he said, and we turned over the +contents of the parcel in bewilderment. A kind American friend had made +a collection for me of the reviews, sermons, and pamphlets that had been +published so far about the book in the States, the correspondences, the +odds and ends of all kinds, grave and gay. Every mail, moreover, began +to bring me American letters from all parts of the States. "No book +since <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i> has had so sudden and wide a diffusion among +all classes of readers," wrote an American man of letters, "and I +believe that no other book of equal seriousness ever had so quick a +hearing. I have seen it in the hands of nursery-maids and of shopgirls +behind the counters; of frivolous young women who read every novel that +is talked about; of business men, professors, and students.... The +proprietors of those large shops where anything--from a pin to a +piano--can be bought, vie with each other in selling the cheapest +edition. One pirate put his price even so low as four cents--two pence!" +(Those, it will be remembered, were the days before Anglo-American +copyright.)</p> + +<p>Oliver Wendell Holmes, to whom I was personally a stranger, wrote to me +just such a letter as one might have dreamed of from the "Autocrat": +"One of my elderly friends of long ago called a story of mine you may +possibly have heard of--<i>Elsie Venner</i>--'a medicated novel,' and such +she said she was not in the habit of reading. I liked her expression; it +titillated more than it tingled. <i>Robert Elsmere</i> I suppose we should +all agree is 'a medicated novel'--but it is, I think, beyond question, +the most effective and popular novel we have had since <i>Uncle +Tom's Cabin</i>."</p> + +<p>A man of science, apparently an agnostic, wrote, severely: "I regret the +popularity of <i>Robert Elsmere</i> in this country. Our Western people are +like sheep in such matters. They will not see that the book was written +for a people with a State Church on its hands, so that a gross +exaggeration of the importance of religion was necessary. It will revive +interest in theology and retard the progress of rationalism."</p> + +<p>Another student and thinker from one of the universities of the West, +after a brilliant criticism of the novel, written about a year after its +publication, winds up, "The book, here, has entered into the evolution +of a nation."</p> + +<p>Goldwin Smith--my father's and uncle's early friend--wrote me from +Canada:</p> + + The Grange, Toronto, <i>Oct. 31, 1888.</i><br> + + My dear Mrs. Ward,--You may be amused by seeing what a stir you are<br> + making even in this sequestered nook of the theological world, and<br> + by learning that the antidote to you is <i>Ben-Hur</i>. I am afraid, if<br> + it were so, I should prefer the poison to the antidote.<br> + + The state of opinion on this Continent is, I fancy, pretty much that<br> + to which Robert Elsmere would bring us--Theism, with Christ as a<br> + model of character, but without real belief in the miraculous part<br> + of Christianity. Churches are still being everywhere built, money is<br> + freely subscribed, young men are pressing into the clerical<br> + profession, and religion shows every sign of vitality. I cannot help<br> + suspecting, however, that a change is not far off. If it comes, it<br> + will come with a vengeance; for over the intellectual dead level of<br> + this democracy opinion courses like the tide running in over a flat.<br> + + As the end of life draws near I feel like the Scotchman who, being<br> + on his death-bed when the trial of O'Connell was going on, desired<br> + his Minister to pray for him that he might just live to see what<br> + came of O'Connell. A wonderful period of transition in all things,<br> + however, has begun, and I should like very much to see the result.<br> + However, it is too likely that very rough times may be coming and<br> + that one will be just as well out of the way.<br> + +<hr style="width: 25%;"> + + Yours most truly, GOLDWIN SMITH.<br> +<table align="center"> + +<tr> + <td><a name="goldwin"></a><img src="104GoldwinSmith.gif" alt="Goldwin Smith" border="1"></td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td align="center"><a href="#152">Goldwin Smith</a></td> +</tr> +</table> + + + +<p>Exactly twenty years from the date of this letter I was in Toronto for +the first time, and paid my homage to the veteran fighter who, living as +he did amid a younger generation, hotly resenting his separatist and +anti-Imperial views and his contempt for their own ideal of an equal and +permanent union of free states under the British flag, was yet +generously honored throughout the Dominion for his services to +literature and education. He had been my father's friend at +Oxford--where he succeeded to Arthur Stanley's tutorship at University +College--and in Dublin. And when I first began to live in Oxford he was +still Regius Professor, inhabiting a house very near that of my parents, +which was well known to me afterward through many years as the house of +the Max Müllers. I can remember the catastrophe it seemed to all his +Oxford friends when he deserted England for America, despairing of the +republic, as my father for a while in his youth had despaired, and sick +of what seemed to him the forces of reaction in English life. I was +eighteen when <i>Endymion</i> came out, with Dizzy's absurd attack on the +"sedentary" professor who was also a "social parasite." It would be +difficult to find two words in the English language more wholly and +ludicrously inappropriate to Goldwin Smith; and the furious letter to +the <i>Times</i> in which he denounced "the stingless insults of a coward" +might well have been left unwritten. But I was living then among Oxford +Liberals, and under the shadow of Goldwin Smith's great reputation as +historian and pamphleteer, and I can see myself listening with an angry +and sympathetic thrill to my father as he read the letter aloud. Then +came the intervening years, in which one learned to look on Goldwin +Smith as <i>par excellence</i> the great man "gone wrong," on that vital +question, above all, of a sane Imperialism. It was difficult, after a +time, to keep patience with the Englishman whose most passionate desire +seemed to be to break up the Empire, to incorporate Canada in the United +States, to relieve us of India, that "splendid curse," to detach from us +Australia and South Africa, and thereby to wreck forever that vision of +a banded commonwealth of free nations which for innumerable minds at +home was fast becoming the romance of English politics.</p> + +<p>So it was that I went with some shrinking, yet still under the glamour +of the old Oxford loyalty, to pay my visit at the Grange in 1908, +walking thither from the house of one of the stanchest Imperialists in +Canada, where I had been lunching. "You are going to see Mr. Goldwin +Smith?" my host had said. "I have not crossed his threshold for twenty +years. I abhor his political views. All the same, we are proud of him in +Canada!" When I entered the drawing-room, which was rather dark, though +it was a late May afternoon, there rose slowly from its chair beside a +bright fire a figure I shall never forget. I had a fairly clear +remembrance of Goldwin Smith in his earlier days. This was like his +phantom, or, if one may say so, without disrespect--his mummy. Shriveled +and spare, yet erect as ever, the iron-gray hair, closely shaven beard, +dark complexion, and black eyes still formidably alive, made on me an +impression at once of extreme age and unabated will. A prophet!--still +delivering his message--but well aware that it found but few listeners +in a degenerate world. He began immediately to talk politics, denouncing +English Imperialism, whether of the Tory or the Liberal type. Canadian +loyalty to the Empire was a mere delusion. A few years, he said, would +see the Dominion merged in the United States; and it was far best it +should be so. He spoke with a bitter, almost a fierce energy, as though +perfectly conscious that, although I did not contradict him, I did not +agree with him; and presently, to my great relief, he allowed the talk +to slip back to old Oxford days.</p> + +<p>Two years later he died, still confident of the future as he dreamt it. +The "very rough times" that he foresaw have indeed come upon the world. +But as to the rest, I wish he could have stood with me, eight years +after this conversation, on the Scherpenberg Hill, held by a Canadian +division, the approach to its summit guarded by Canadian sentries, and +have looked out over that plain, where Canadian and British graves, +lying in their thousands side by side, have forever sealed in blood the +union of the elder and the younger nations.</p> + +<p>As to the circulation of <i>Robert Elsmere</i>, I have never been able to +ascertain the exact figures in America, but it is probable, from the +data I have, that about half a million copies were sold in the States +within a year of the book's publication. In England, an edition of 5,000 +copies a fortnight was the rule for many months after the one-volume +edition appeared; hundreds of thousands have been circulated in the +sixpenny and sevenpenny editions; it has been translated into most +foreign tongues; and it is still, after thirty years, a living book. +Fifteen years after its publication, M. Brunetière, the well-known +editor of the <i>Revue des deux Mondes</i> and leader--in some sort--of the +Catholic reaction in France, began a negotiation with me for the +appearance of a French translation of the whole or part of the book in +his <i>Revue</i>. "But how," I asked him (we were sitting in his editor's +sanctum, in the old house of the Rue de l'Université), "could it +possibly suit you, or the <i>Revue</i>, to do anything of the kind? And +<i>now</i>--after fifteen years?"</p> + +<p>But, according to him, the case was simple. When the book first +appeared, the public of the <i>Revue</i> could not have felt any interest in +it. France is a logical country--a country of clear-cut solutions. And +at that time either one was a Catholic or a free thinker. And if one was +a Catholic, one accepted from the Church, say, the date of the Book of +Daniel, as well as everything else. Renan, indeed, left the Church +thirty years earlier because he came to see with certainty that the Book +of Daniel was written under Antiochus Epiphanes, and not when his +teachers at St. Sulpice said it was written. But while the secular world +listened and applauded, the literary argument against dogma made very +little impression on the general Catholic world for many years.</p> + +<p>But now [said M. Brunetière] everything is different. Modernism has +arisen. It is penetrating the Seminaries. People begin to talk of it in +the streets. And <i>Robert Elsmere</i> is a study in Modernism--or at any +rate it has so many affinities with Modernism, that <i>now</i>--the French +public would be interested.</p> + +<p>The length of the book, however, could not be got over, and the plan +fell through. But I came away from my talk with a remarkable man, not a +little stirred. For it had seemed to show that with all its many +faults--and who knew them better than I?--my book had yet possessed a +certain representative and pioneering force; and that, to some extent, +at least, the generation in which it appeared had spoken through it.</p> + + +<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br> +<h2><a name="144"></a><a href="#151">CHAPTER IV</a></h2> +<br> + +<p class="c">FIRST VISITS TO ITALY</p> + +<p>I have already mentioned in these papers that I was one of the examiners +for the Spanish Taylorian scholarship at Oxford in 1883, and again in +1888. But perhaps before I go farther in these <i>Recollections</i> I may put +down here--somewhat out of its place--a reminiscence connected with the +first of these examinations, which seems to me worth recording. My +Spanish colleague in 1883 was, as I have said, Don Pascual Gayangos, +well known among students for his <i>History of Mohammedan Dynasties in +Spain</i>, for his edition of the Correspondence of Cardinal Cisneros, and +other historical work. <i>À propos</i> of the examination, he came to see me +in Russell Square, and his talk about Spain revived in me, for the time, +a fading passion. Señor Gayangos was born in 1809, so that in 1883 he +was already an old man, though full of vigor and work. He told me the +following story. Unfortunately, I took no contemporary note. I give it +now as I remember it, and if any one who knew Don Pascual, or any +student of Shakespearian lore, can correct and amplify it, no one will +be better pleased than I. He said that as quite a young man, somewhere +in the thirties of the last century, he was traveling through Spain to +England, where, if I remember right, he had relations with Sir Thomas +Phillipps, the ardent book and MSS. collector, so many of whose +treasures are now in the great libraries of Europe. Sir Thomas employed +him in the search for Spanish MSS. and rare Spanish books. I gathered +that at the time to which the story refers Gayangos himself was not much +acquainted with English or English literature. On his journey north from +Madrid to Burgos, which was, of course, in the days before railways, he +stopped at Valladolid for the night, and went to see an acquaintance of +his, the newly appointed librarian of an aristocratic family having a +"palace" in Valladolid. He found his friend in the old library of the +old house, engaged in a work of destruction. On the floor of the long +room was a large <i>brasero</i> in which the new librarian was burning up a +quantity of what he described as useless and miscellaneous books, with a +view to the rearrangement of the library. The old sheepskin or vellum +bindings had been stripped off, while the printed matter was burning +steadily and the room was full of smoke. There was a pile of old books +whose turn had not yet come lying on the floor. Gayangos picked one up. +It was a volume containing the plays of Mr. William Shakespeare, and +published in 1623. In other words, it was a copy of the First Folio, +and, as he declared to me, in excellent preservation. At that time he +knew nothing about Shakespeare bibliography. He was struck, however, by +the name of Shakespeare, and also by the fact that, according to an +inscription inside it, the book had belonged to Count Gondomar, who had +himself lived in Valladolid and collected a large library there. But his +friend the librarian attached no importance to the book, and it was to +go into the common holocaust with the rest. Gayangos noticed +particularly, as he turned it over, that its margins were covered with +notes in a seventeenth-century hand.</p> + +<p>He continued his journey to England, and presently mentioned the +incident to Sir Thomas Phillipps, and Sir Thomas's future son-in-law, +Mr. Halliwell--afterward Halliwell-Phillipps. The excitement of both +knew no bounds. A First Folio--which had belonged to Count Gondomar, +Spanish Ambassador to England up to 1622--and covered with contemporary +marginal notes! No doubt a copy which had been sent out to Gondomar from +England; for he was well acquainted with English life and letters and +had collected much of his library in London. The very thought of such a +treasure perishing barbarously in a bonfire of waste paper was enough to +drive a bibliophile out of his wits. Gayangos was sent back to Spain +posthaste. But, alack! he found a library swept and garnished; no trace +of the volume he had once held there in his hand, and on the face of his +friend the librarian only a frank and peevish wonder that anybody should +tease him with questions about such a trifle.</p> + +<p>But just dream a little! Who sent the volume? Who wrote the thick +marginal notes? An English correspondent of Gondomar's? Or Gondomar +himself, who arrived in England three years before Shakespeare's death, +was himself a man of letters, and had probably seen most of the plays?</p> + +<p>In the few years which intervened between his withdrawal from England +and his own death (1626), did he annotate the copy, storing there what +he could remember of the English stage, and of "pleasant Willy" himself, +perhaps, during his two sojourns in London? And was the book overlooked +as English and of no importance in the transfer of Gondomar's own +library, a hundred and sixty years after his death, to Charles III of +Spain? And had it been sold, perhaps, for an old song, and with other +remnants of Gondomar's books, just for their local interest, to some +Valladolid grandee?</p> + +<p>Above all, did those marginal notes which Gayangos had once idly looked +through contain, perhaps--though the First Folio does not, of course, +include the Poems--some faint key to the perennial Shakespeare +mysteries--to Mr. W.H., and the "dark lady," and all the impenetrable +story of the Sonnets?</p> + +<p>If so, the gods themselves took care that the veil should not be rent. +The secret remains.</p> + + Others abide our question--Thou art free.<br> + We ask and ask. Thou standest and art still,<br> + Outtopping knowledge.<br> + +<hr style="width: 25%;"> + +<p>One other recollection of the <i>Robert Elsmere</i> year may fitly end my +story of it. In September we spent an interesting afternoon at +Hawarden--the only time I ever saw "Mr. G." at leisure, amid his own +books and trees. We drove over with Sir Robert and Lady Cunliffe, Mr. +Gladstone's neighbors on the Welsh border, with whom we were staying. +Sir Robert, formerly an ardent Liberal, had parted from Mr. Gladstone in +the Home Rule crisis of 1886, and it was the first time they had called +at Hawarden since the split. But nothing could have been kinder than the +Gladstones' reception of them and of us. "Mr. G." and I let theology +alone!--and he was at his best and brightest, talking books and poetry, +showing us the octagonal room he had built out for his 60,000 selected +letters--among them "hundreds from the Queen"--his library, the park, +and the old keep. As I wrote to my father, his amazing intellectual and +physical vigor, and the alertness with which, leading the way, he +"skipped up the ruins of the keep," were enough "to make a Liberal +Unionist thoughtful." Ulysses was for the time in exile, but the "day of +return" was not far off.</p> + +<p>Especially do I remember the animation with which he dwelt on the +horrible story of Damiens, executed with every conceivable torture for +the attempted assassination of Louis Quinze. He ran through the +catalogue of torments so that we all shivered, winding up with a +contemptuous, "And all that for just pricking the skin of that scoundrel +Louis XV."</p> + +<p>I was already thinking of some reply both to Mr. Gladstone's article and +to the attack on <i>Robert Elsmere</i> in the <i>Quarterly</i>; but it took me +longer than I expected, and it was not till March in the following year +(1889) that I published "The New Reformation," a Dialogue, in the +<i>Nineteenth Century</i>. Into that dialogue I was able to throw the reading +and the argument which had been of necessity excluded from the novel. +Mr. Jowett was nervous about it, and came up on purpose from Oxford to +persuade me, if he could, not to write it. His view--and that of Mr. +Stopford Brooke--was that a work of art moves on one plane, and +historical or critical controversy on another, and that a novel cannot +be justified by an essay. But my defense was not an essay; I put it in +the form of a conversation, and made it as living and varied as I could. +By using this particular form, I was able to give the traditional as +well as the critical case with some fullness, and I took great pains +with both. From a recently published letter, I see that Lord Acton wrote +to Mr. Gladstone that the rôle played by the orthodox anti-rational and +wholly fanatical Newcome in the novel belonged "to the infancy of art," +so little could he be taken as representing the orthodox case. I wonder! +I had very good reasons for Newcome. There are plenty of Newcomes in the +theological literature of the last century. To have provided a more +rational and plausible representative of orthodoxy would, I think, have +slackened the pace and chilled the atmosphere of the novel. After all, +what really supplied "the other side" was the whole system of things in +which the readers of the book lived and moved--the ideas in which they +had been brought up, the books they read, the churches in which they +worshiped, the sermons to which they listened every week. The novel +challenged this system of things; but it was always there to make reply. +It was the eternal <i>sous-entendu</i> of the story, and really gave the +story all its force.</p> + +<p>But in the dialogue I could put the underlying conflict of thought into +articulate and logical form, and build up, in outline at least, the +history of "a new learning." When it was published, the dear Master, +with a sigh of relief, confessed that it had "done no harm," and "showed +a considerable knowledge of critical theology." I, too, felt that it had +done no harm--rather that it had vindicated my right to speak, not as an +expert and scholar--to that I never pretended for a moment--but as the +interpreter of experts and scholars who had something to say to the +English world, and of whom the English world was far too little aware. +In the preface to one of the latest editions of his Bampton Lectures, +Canon Liddon wrote an elaborate answer to it, which, I think, implies +that it was felt to have weight; and if Lord Acton had waited for its +appearance he might not, perhaps, have been so ready to condemn the +character of Newcome as belonging "to the infancy of art." That +Newcome's type might have been infinitely better presented is indeed +most true. But in the scheme of the book, it is <i>right</i>. For the +ultimate answer to the critical intellect, or, as Newman called it, the +"wild living intellect of man," when it is dealing with Christianity and +miracle, is that reason is <i>not</i> the final judge--is, indeed, in the +last resort, the enemy, and must at some point go down, defeated and +trampled on. "Ideal Ward," and Archdeacon Denison, and Mr. Spurgeon--and +not Doctor Figgis or Doctor Creighton--are the apologists who in the end +hold the fort.</p> + +<p>But with this analysis of what may be called the intellectual +presuppositions of <i>Robert Elsmere</i>, my mind began to turn to what I +believed to be the other side of the Greenian or Modernist +message--<i>i.e.</i>, that life itself, the ordinary human life and +experience of every day as it has been slowly evolved through history, +is the true source of religion, if man will but listen to the message in +his own soul, to the voice of the Eternal Friend, speaking through +Conscience, through Society, through Nature. Hence <i>David Grieve</i>, which +was already in my mind within a few months of the publication of <i>Robert +Elsmere</i>. We were at Borough Farm when the vision of it first came upon +me. It was a summer evening of extraordinary beauty, and I had been +wandering through the heather and the pine woods. "The country"--to +quote an account written some years ago--"was drenched in sunset; white +towering thunder-clouds descending upon and mingling with the crimson of +the heath, the green stretches of bracken, the brown pools upon the +common, everywhere a rosy suffusion, a majesty of light interweaving +heaven and earth and transfiguring all dear familiar things--the old +farm-house, the sand-pit where the children played and the sand-martins +nested, the wood-pile by the farm door, the phloxes in the tumble-down +farm-yard, the cottage down the lane." After months of rest, the fount +of mental energy which had been exhausted in me the year before had +filled again. I was eager to be at work, and this time on something +"more hopeful, positive, and consoling" than the subject of the +earlier book.</p> + +<p>A visit to Derbyshire in the autumn gave me some of the setting for the +story. Then I took the first chapters abroad during the winter to +Valescure, and worked them in that fragrant, sunny spot, making +acquaintance the while with a new and delightful friend, Emily Lawless, +the author of <i>Hurrish</i> and <i>Grania</i>, and of some few poems that +deserve, I think, a long life in English anthologies. She and her most +racy, most entertaining mother, old Lady Cloncurry, were spending the +winter at Valescure, and my young daughter and I found them a great +resource. Lady Cloncurry, who was a member of an old Galway family, the +Kirwans of Castle Hackett, seemed to me a typical specimen of those +Anglo-Irish gentry who have been harshly called the "English garrison" +in Ireland, but who were really in the last century the most natural and +kindly link between the two countries. So far as I knew them, they loved +both, with a strong preference for Ireland. All that English people +instinctively resent in Irish character--its dreamy or laughing +indifference toward the ordinary business virtues, thrift, prudence, +tidiness, accuracy--they had been accustomed to, even where they had not +been infected with it, from their childhood. They were not Catholics, +most of them, and, so far as they were landlords, the part played by the +priests in the Land League agitation tried them sore. But Miss Lawless's +<i>Grania</i> is there to show how delicate and profound might be their +sympathy with the lovely things in Irish Catholicism, and her best +poems--"The Dirge of the Munster Forest" and "After Aughrim"--give a +voice to Irish suffering and Irish patriotism which it would be hard to +parallel in the Nationalist or rebel literature of recent years. The +fact that they had both nations in their blood, both patriotisms in +their hearts, infused a peculiar pathos often into their lives.</p> + +<p>Pathos, however, was not a word that seemed--at first sight, at any +rate--to have much to do with Lady Cloncurry. She was the most energetic +and sprightly <i>grande dame</i> as I remember her, small, with vivid black +eyes and hair, her head always swathed in a becoming black lace coif, +her hands in black mittens. She and her daughter Emily amused each other +perennially, and were endless good company, besides, for other people. +Lady Cloncurry's clothes varied very little. She had an Irish contempt +for too much pains about your appearance, and a great dislike for +<i>grande tenue</i>. When she arrived at an Irish country-house, of which the +hostess told me the story, she said to the mistress of the house, on +being taken to her room: "My dear, you don't want me to come down smart? +I'm sure you don't! Of course I've brought some smart gowns. <i>They</i> +[meaning her daughters] make me buy them. But they'll just do for my +maid to show your maid!" And there on the wardrobe shelves they lay +throughout her visit.</p> + +<p>At Valescure we were within easy reach of Cannes, where the Actons were +settled at the Villa Madeleine. The awkwardness of the trains prevented +us from seeing as much of them as we had hoped; but I remember some +pleasant walks and talks with Lord Acton, and especially the vehement +advice he gave us, when my husband joined us and we started on a short, +a very short, flight to Italy--for my husband had only a meager holiday +from the <i>Times: "Go to Rome</i>! Never mind the journeys. Go! You will +have three days there, you say? Well, to have walked through Rome, to +have spent an hour in the Forum, another on the Palatine; to have seen +the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter's; to have climbed the +Janiculum and looked out over the Alban hills and the Campagna--and you +can do all that in three days--well!--life is not the same afterward. If +you only had an afternoon in Rome it would be well worth while. But +<i>three days</i>!"</p> + +<p>We laughed, took him at his word, and rushed on for Rome. And on the way +we saw Perugia and Assisi for the first time, dipping into spring as +soon as we got south of the Apennines, and tasting that intoxication of +Italian sun in winter which turns northern heads. Of our week in Rome I +remember only the first overwhelming impression--as of something +infinitely old and <i>pagan</i>, through which Christianity moved about like +a <i>parvenu</i> amid an elder generation of phantom presences, already gray +with time long before Calvary--that, and the making of a few new +friends. Of these friends, one, who was to hold a lasting place in my +admiration and love through after-years, shall be mentioned +here--Contessa Maria Pasolini.</p> + +<p>Contessa Maria for some thirty years has played a great role in the +social and intellectual history of Italy. She is the daughter of one of +the leading business families of Milan, sister to the Marchese Ponti, +who was for long Sindaco of that great city, and intimately concerned in +its stormy industrial history. She married Count Pasolini, the head of +an old aristocratic family with large estates in the Romagna, whose +father was President of the first Senate of United Italy. It was in the +neighborhood of the Pasolini estates that Garibaldi took refuge after +1848; and one may pass through them to reach the lonely hut in which +Anita Garibaldi died.</p> + +<p>Count Pasolini's father was also one of Pio Nono's Liberal Ministers, +and the family, at the time, at any rate, of which I am speaking, +combined Liberalism and sympathies for England with an enlightened and +ardent Catholicism. I first made friends with Contessa Maria when we +found her, on a cold February day, receiving in an apartment in the +Piazza dei Santi Apostoli--rather gloomy rooms, to which her dark head +and eyes, her extraordinary expressiveness and grace, and the vivacity +of her talk, seemed to lend a positive brilliance and charm. In her I +first came to know, with some intimacy, a cultivated Italian woman, and +to realize what a strong kindred exists between the English and the +Italian educated mind. Especially, I think, in the case of the educated +<i>women</i> of both nations. I have often felt, in talking to an Italian +woman friend, a similarity of standards, of traditions and instincts, +which would take some explaining, if one came to think it out. +Especially on the practical side of life, the side of what one may call +the minor morals and judgments, which are often more important to +friendship and understanding than the greater matters of the law. How an +Italian lady manages her servants and brings up her children; her +general attitude toward marriage, politics, books, social or economic +questions--in all these fields she is, in some mysterious way, much +nearer to the Englishwoman than the Frenchwoman is. Of course, these +remarks do not apply to the small circle of "black" families in Italy, +particularly in Rome, who still hold aloof from the Italian kingdom and +its institutions. But the Liberal Catholic, man or woman, who is both +patriotically Italian and sincerely religious, will discuss anything or +anybody in heaven or earth, and just as tolerantly as would Lord Acton +himself. They are cosmopolitans, and yet deep rooted in the Italian +soil. Contessa Maria, for instance, was in 1889 still near the +beginnings of what was to prove for twenty-five years the most +interesting <i>salon</i> in Rome. Everybody met there. Grandees of all +nations, ambassadors, ecclesiastics, men of literature, science, +archeology, art, politicians, and diplomats--Contessa Pasolini was equal +to them all, and her talk, rapid, fearless, picturesque, full of +knowledge, yet without a hint of pedantry, gave a note of unity to a +scene that could hardly have been more varied or, in less skilful hands, +more full of jarring possibilities. But later on, when I knew her +better, I saw her also with peasant folk, with the country people of the +Campagna and the Alban hills. And here one realized the same ease, the +same sympathy, the same instinctive and unerring <i>success</i>, as one might +watch with delight on one of her "evenings" in the Palazzo Sciarra. When +she was talking to a peasant woman on the Alban ridge, something broad +and big and primitive seemed to come out in her, something of the <i>Magna +parens</i>, the Saturnian land; but something, too, that our Englishwomen, +who live in the country and care for their own people, also possess.</p> + +<p>But I was to see much more of Contessa Maria and Roman society in later +years, especially when we were at the Villa Barberini and I was writing +<i>Eleanor</i>, in 1899. Now I will only recall a little saying of the +Contessa's at our first meeting, which lodged itself in memory. She did +not then talk English fluently, as she afterward came to do; but she was +learning English, with her two boys, from a delightful English tutor, +and evidently pondering English character and ways--"Ah, you +English!"--I can see the white arm and hand, with its cigarette, waving +in the darkness of the old Roman apartment; the broad brow, the smiling +eyes, and glint of white teeth. "You English! Why don't you <i>talk</i>?--why +<i>won't</i> you talk? If French people come here, there is no trouble. If I +just tear up an envelope and throw down the pieces, they will talk about +it a whole evening, and so <i>well</i>! But you English!--you begin, and then +you stop; one must always start you again--always wind you up!"</p> + +<p>Terribly true! But in her company, even we halting English learned to +talk, in our bad French, or whatever came along.</p> + +<hr style="width: 25%;"> + +<p>The summer of 1889 was filled with an adventure to which I still look +back with unalloyed delight, which provided me, moreover, with the +setting and one of the main themes of <i>Marcella</i>. We were at that time +half-way through the building of a house at Haslemere, which was to +supersede Borough Farm. We had grown out of Borough and were for the +moment houseless, so far as summer quarters were concerned. And for my +work's sake, I felt that eagerness for new scenes and suggestions which +is generally present, I think, in the story-teller of all shades. +Suddenly, in a house-agent's catalogue, we came across an astonishing +advertisement. Hampden House, on the Chiltern Hills, the ancestral home +of John Hampden, of ship-money fame, was to let for the summer, and for +a rent not beyond our powers. The new Lord Buckinghamshire, who had +inherited it, was not then able to live in it. It had, indeed, as we +knew, been let for a while, some years earlier, to our old friends, Sir +Mountstuart and Lady Grant Duff, before his departure for the +Governorship of Madras. The agents reported that it was scantily +furnished, but quite habitable; and without more ado we took it! I have +now before me the letter in which I reported our arrival, in mid-July, +to my husband, detained in town by his <i>Times</i> work.</p> + + Hampden is enchanting!--more delightful than even I thought it would<br> + be, and quite comfortable enough. Of course we want a multitude of<br> + things--(baths, wine-glasses, tumblers, cans, etc.!) but those I can<br> + hire from Wycombe. Our great deficiency is lamps! Last night we<br> + crept about in this vast house, with hardly any light.... As to the<br> + ghost, Mrs. Duval (the housekeeper) scoffs at it! The ghost-room is<br> + the tapestry-room, from which there is a staircase down to the<br> + breakfast-room. A good deal of the tapestry is loose, and when there<br> + is any wind it flaps and flaps. Hence all the tales.... The servants<br> + are rather bewildered by the size of everything, and--like me--were<br> + almost too excited to sleep.... The children are wandering<br> + blissfully about, exploring everything.<br> + +<p>And what a place to wander in! After we left it, Hampden was restored, +beautified, and refurnished. It is now, I have no doubt, a charming and +comfortable country-house. But when we lived in it for three months--in +its half-finished and tatterdemalion condition--it was Romance pure and +simple. The old galleried hall, the bare rooms, the neglected +pictures--among them the "Queen Elizabeth," presented to the owner of +Hampden by the Queen herself after a visit; the gray walls of King +John's garden, and just beyond it the little church where Hampden lies +buried; the deserted library on the top floor, running along the +beautiful garden-front, with books in it that might have belonged to the +patriot himself, and a stately full-length portrait--painted about +1600--which stood up, torn and frameless, among lumber of various kinds, +the portrait of a beautiful lady in a flowered dress, walking in an +Elizabethan garden; the locked room, opened to us occasionally by the +agent of the property, which contained some of the ancestral treasures +of the house--the family Bible among them, with the births of John +Hampden and his cousin, Oliver Cromwell, recorded on the same fly-leaf; +the black cedars outside, and the great glade in front of the house, +stretching downward for half a mile toward the ruined lodges, just +visible from the windows--all this mingling of nature and history with +the slightest, gentlest touch of pathos and decay, seen, too, under the +golden light of a perfect summer, sank deep into mind and sense.</p> + +<p>Whoever cares to turn to the first chapters of <i>Marcella</i> will find as +much of Hampden as could be transferred to paper--Hampden as it was +then--in the description of Mellor.</p> + +<p>Our old and dear friend, Mrs. J.R. Green, the widow of the historian, +and herself the most distinguished woman-historian of our time, joined +us in the venture. But she and I both went to Hampden to work. I set up +in one half-dismantled room, and she in another, with the +eighteenth-century drawing-room between us. Here our books and papers +soon made home. I was working at <i>David Grieve</i>; she, if I remember +right, at the brilliant book on <i>English Town Life</i> she brought out in +1891. My husband came down to us for long week-ends, and as soon as we +had provided ourselves with the absolute necessaries of life, visitors +began to arrive: Professor and Mrs. Huxley; Sir Alfred Lyall; M. +Jusserand, then <i>Conseiller d'Ambassade</i> under M. Waddington, now the +French Ambassador to Washington; Mr. and Mrs. Lyulph Stanley, now Lord +and Lady Sheffield; my first cousin, H. O. Arnold-Forster, afterward War +Minister in Mr. Balfour's Cabinet, and his wife; Mrs. Graham Smith, +Laura Lyttelton's sister, and many kinsfolk. In those days Hampden was +six miles from the nearest railway station; the Great Central Railway +which now passes through the valley below it was not built, and all +round us stretched beechwoods and commons and lanes, untouched since the +days of Roundhead and Cavalier, where the occasional sound of +wood-cutters in the beech solitudes was often, through a long walk, the +only hint of human life. What good walks and talks we had in those +summer days! My sister had married Professor Huxley's eldest son, so +that with him and his wife we were on terms always of the closest +intimacy and affection. "Pater" and "Moo," as all their kith and kin and +many of their friends called them, were the most racy of guests. He had +been that year pursuing an animated controversy in the <i>Nineteenth +Century</i> with Doctor Wace, now Dean of Canterbury, who had also--about a +year before--belabored the author of <i>Robert Elsmere</i> in the <i>Quarterly +Review</i>. The Professor and I naturally enjoyed dancing a little on our +opponents--when there was none to make reply!--as we strolled about +Hampden; but there was never a touch of bitterness in Huxley's nature, +and there couldn't have been much in mine at that moment, life was so +interesting, and its horizon so full of light and color! Of his wife, +"Moo," who outlived him many years, how much one might say! In this very +year, 1889, Huxley wrote to her from the Canaries, whither he had gone +alone for his health:</p> + + Catch me going out of reach of letters again. I have been horridly<br> + anxious. Nobody--children or any one else--can be to me what you<br> + are. Ulysses preferred his old woman to immortality, and this<br> + absence has led me to see that he was as wise in that as in<br> + other things.<br> + +<p>They were indeed lovers to the end. He had waited and served for her +eight years in his youth, and her sunny, affectionate nature, with its +veins both of humor and of stoicism, gave her man of genius exactly what +he wanted. She survived him for many years, living her own life at +Eastbourne, climbing Beachy Head in all weathers, interested in +everything, and writing poems of little or no technical merit, but +raised occasionally by sheer intensity of feeling--about her +husband--into something very near the real thing. I quote these lines +from a privately printed volume she gave me:</p> + + If you were here,--and I were where you lie,<br> + Would you, beloved, give your little span<br> + Of life remaining unto tear and sigh?<br> + No!--setting every tender memory<br> + Within your breast, as faded roses kept<br> + For giver's sake, of giver when bereft,<br> + Still to the last the lamp of work you'd burn<br> + For purpose high, nor any moment spurn.<br> + So, as you would have done, I fain would do<br> + In poorer fashion. Ah, how oft I try,<br> + Try to fulfil your wishes, till at length<br> + The scent of those dead roses steals my strength.<br> + +<p>As to our other guests, to what company would not Sir Alfred Lyall have +added that touch of something provocative and challenging which draws +men and women after it, like an Orpheus-music? I can see him sitting +silent, his legs crossed, his white head bent, the corners of his mouth +drooping, his eyes downcast, like some one spent and wearied, from whom +all virtue had gone out. Then some one, a man he liked--but still +oftener a woman--would approach him, and the whole figure would wake to +life--a gentle, whimsical, melancholy life, yet possessed of a strange +spell and pungency. Brooding, sad and deep, seemed to me to hold his +inmost mind. The fatalism and dream of those Oriental religions to which +he had given so much of his scholar's mind had touched him profoundly. +His poems express it in mystical and somber verse, and his volumes of +<i>Asiatic Studies</i> contain the intellectual analysis of that background +of thought from which the poems spring.</p> + +<p>Yet no one was shrewder, more acute, than Sir Alfred in dealing with the +men and politics of the moment. He swore to no man's words, and one felt +in him not only the first-rate administrator, as shown by his Indian +career, but also the thinker's scorn for the mere party point of view. +He was an excellent gossip, of a refined and subtle sort; he was the +soul of honor; and there was that in his fragile and delicate +personality which earned the warm affection of many friends. So gentle, +so absent-minded, so tired he often seemed; and yet I could imagine +those gray-blue eyes of Sir Alfred's answering inexorably to any public +or patriotic call. He was a disillusioned spectator of the "great +mundane movement," yet eternally interested in it; and the man who loves +this poor human life of ours, without ever being fooled by it, at least +after youth is past, has a rare place among us. We forgive his insight, +because there is nothing in it Pharisaical. And the irony he uses on us +we know well that he has long since sharpened on himself.</p> + +<p>When I think of M. Jusserand playing tennis on the big lawn at Hampden, +and determined to master it, like all else that was English, memory +leads one back behind that pleasant scene to earlier days still. We +first knew the future Ambassador as an official of the French Foreign +Office, who spent much of his scanty holidays in a scholarly pursuit of +English literature. In Russell Square we were close to the British +Museum, where M. Jusserand, during his visits to London, was deep in +Chaucerian and other problems, gathering the learning which he presently +began to throw into a series of books on the English centuries from +Chaucer to Shakespeare. Who introduced him to us I cannot remember, but +during his work at the Museum he would drop in sometimes for luncheon or +tea; so that we soon began to know him well. Then, later, he came to +London as <i>Conseiller d'Ambassade</i> under M. Waddington, an office which +he filled till he became French Minister to Denmark in 1900. Finally, in +1904, he was sent as French Ambassador to the United States, and there +we found him in 1908, when we stayed for a delightful few days at the +British Embassy with Mr. and Mrs. Bryce.</p> +<table align="center"> + +<tr> + <td><a name="jusserand"></a><img src="135M_Jusserand.gif" alt="M. Jusserand" border="1"></td> +</tr> +<tr> + <td align="center"><a href="#152">M. Jusserand</a></td> +</tr> +</table> + + + + +<p>It has always been a question with me, which of two French friends is +the more wonderful English scholar--M. Jusserand or André Chevrillon, +Taine's nephew and literary executor, and himself one of the leaders of +French letters; with whom, as with M. Jusserand, I may reckon now some +thirty years of friendship. No one could say that M. Jusserand speaks +our tongue exactly like an Englishman. He does much better. He uses +it--always, of course, with perfect correctness and fluency--to express +French ideas and French wits, in a way as nearly French as the foreign +language will permit. The result is extraordinarily stimulating to our +English wits. The slight differences both in accent and in phrase keep +the ear attentive and alive. New shades emerge; old <i>clichés</i> are broken +up. M. Chevrillon has much less accent, and his talk is more flowingly +and convincingly English; for which, no doubt, a boyhood partly spent in +England accounts. While for vivacity and ease there is little or nothing +to choose.</p> + +<p>But to these two distinguished and accomplished men England and America +owe a real debt of gratitude. They have not by any means always approved +of <i>our</i> national behavior. M. Jusserand during his official career in +Egypt was, I believe, a very candid critic of British administration and +British methods, and in the days of our early acquaintance with him I +can remember many an amusing and caustic sally of his at the expense of +our politicians and our foreign policy.</p> + +<p>M. Chevrillon took the Boer side in the South African war, and took it +with passion. All the same, the friendship of both the diplomat and the +man of letters for this country, based upon their knowledge of her, and +warmly returned to them by many English friends, has been a real factor +in the growth of that broad-based sympathy which we now call the +Entente. M. Chevrillon's knowledge of us is really uncanny. He knows +more than we know ourselves. And his last book about us--<i>L'Angleterre +et la Guerre</i>--is not only photographically close to the facts, but full +of a spiritual sympathy which is very moving to an English reader. Men +of such high gifts are not easily multiplied in any country. But, +looking to the future of Europe, the more that France and England--and +America--can cultivate in their citizens some degree, at any rate, of +that intimate understanding of a foreign nation which shines so +conspicuously in the work of these two Frenchmen the safer will that +future be.</p> + + +<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br> +<h2><a name="145"></a><a href="#151">CHAPTER V</a></h2> +<br> + +<p class="c">AMALFI AND ROME. HAMPDEN AND <i>MARCELLA</i></p> + +<p>It was in November, 1891, that I finished <i>David Grieve</i>, after a long +wrestle of more than three years. I was tired out, and we fled south for +rest to Rome, Naples, Amalfi, and Ravello. The Cappucini Hotel at +Amalfi, Madame Palumbo's inn at Ravello, remain with me as places of +pure delight, shone on even in winter by a more than earthly sun.</p> + +<p>Madame Palumbo was, as her many guests remember, an Englishwoman, and +showed a special zeal in making English folk comfortable. And can one +ever forget the sunrise over the Gulf of Salerno from the Ravello +windows? It was December when we were there; yet nothing spoke of +winter. From the inn, perched on a rocky point above the coast, one +looked straight down for hundreds of feet, through lemon-groves and +olive-gardens, to the blue water. Flaming over the mountains rose an +unclouded sun, shining on the purple coast, with its innumerable +rock-towns--"<i>tot congesta manu praeruptis oppida saxis</i>"--and sending +broad paths over the "wine-dark" sea. Never, I think, have I felt the +glory and beauty of the world more rapturously, more <i>painfully</i>--for +there is pain in it!--than when one was standing alone on a December +morning, at a window which seemed to make part of the precipitous rock +itself, looking over that fairest of scenes. From Ravello we went back +to Rome, and a short spell of its joys. What is it makes the peculiar +pleasure of society in Rome? A number of elements, of course, enter in. +The setting is incomparable; while the clashing of great world policies, +represented by the diplomats, and of the main religious and Liberal +forces of Europe, as embodied in the Papacy and modern Italy, kindles a +warmth and animation in the social air which matches the clearness of +the Roman day, when the bright spells of the winter weather arrive, and +the omnipresent fountains of the Eternal City flash the January or +February sun through its streets and piazzas. Ours, however, on this +occasion, was only a brief stay. Again we saw Contessa Maria, this time +in the stately setting of the Palazzo Sciarra; and Count Ugo Balzani, an +old friend of ours and of the Creightons since Oxford days, historian +and thinker, and, besides, one of the kindest and truest of men. But the +figure, perhaps, which chiefly stands out in memory as connected with +this short visit is that of Lord Dufferin, then our Ambassador in Rome. +Was there ever a greater charmer than Lord Dufferin? In the sketch of +the "Ambassador" in <i>Eleanor</i>, there are some points caught from the +living Lord Dufferin, so closely, indeed, that before the book came out +I sent him the proofs and asked his leave--which he gave at once, in one +of the graceful little notes of which he was always master. For the +diplomatic life and successes of Lord Dufferin are told in many official +documents and in the biography of him by Sir Alfred Lyall; but the key +to it all lay in cradle gifts that are hard to put into print.</p> + +<p>In the first place, he was--even at sixty-five--wonderfully handsome. He +had inherited the beauty, and also the humor and the grace, of his +Sheridan ancestry. For his mother, as all the world knows, was Helen +Sheridan, one of the three famous daughters of Tom Sheridan, the +dramatist's only son. Mrs. Norton, the innocent heroine of the Melbourne +divorce suit, was one of his aunts, and the "Queen of Beauty" at the +Eglinton Tournament--then Lady Seymour, afterward Duchess of +Somerset--was the other. His mother's memory was a living thing to him +all his life; he published her letters and poems; and at Clandeboye, his +Ulster home,--in "Helen's Tower"--he had formed a collection of +memorials of her which he liked to show to those of whom he made +friends. "You must come to Clandeboye and let me show you Helen's +Tower," he would say, eagerly, and one would answer with hopeful +vagueness. But for me the time never came. My personal recollections of +him, apart from letters, are all connected with Rome, or Paris, whither +he was transferred the year after we saw him at the Roman Embassy, in +December, 1891.</p> + +<p>It was, therefore, his last winter at Rome, and he had only been +Ambassador there a little more than two years--since he ceased to be +Viceroy of India in 1889. But he had already won everybody's affection. +The social duties of the British Embassy in Rome--what with the Italian +world in all its shades, the more or less permanent English colony, and +the rush of English tourists through the winter and spring--seemed to me +by no means easy. But Lady Dufferin's dignity and simplicity, and Lord +Dufferin's temperament, carried them triumphantly through the tangle. +Especially do I remember the informal Christmas dance to which we took, +by the Ambassador's special wish, our young daughter of seventeen, who +was not really "out." And no sooner was she in the room, shyly hiding +behind her elders, than he discovered her. I can see him still, as he +made her a smiling bow, his noble gray head and kind eyes, the blue +ribbon crossing his chest. "You promised me a dance!" And so for her +first waltz, in her first grown-up dance, D. was well provided, nervous +as the moment was.</p> + +<p>There is a passage in <i>Eleanor</i> which commemorates first this playful +sympathy and tact which made Lord Dufferin so delightful to all ages, +and next, an amusing conversation with him that I remember a year or two +later in Paris. As to the first--Lucy Foster, the young American girl, +is lunching at the Embassy.</p> + + "Ah! my dear lady!" said the Ambassador, "how few things in this<br> + world one does to please one's self! This is one of them."<br> + + Lucy flushed with a young and natural pleasure. She was on the<br> + Ambassador's left, and he had just laid his wrinkled hand for an<br> + instant on hers--with a charming and paternal freedom.<br> + + "Have you enjoyed yourself?--have you lost your heart to Italy?"<br> + said her host stooping to her....<br> + + "I have been in fairyland," said she, shyly, opening her blue eyes<br> + upon him. "Nothing can ever be like it again."<br> + + "No--because one can never be twenty again," said the old man,<br> + sighing. "Twenty years hence, you will wonder where the magic came<br> + from. Never mind--just now, anyway, the world's your oyster."<br> + + Then he looked at her a little more closely.... He missed some of<br> + that quiver of youth and enjoyment he had felt in her before; and<br> + there were some very dark lines under the beautiful eyes. What was<br> + wrong? Had she met the man--the appointed one?<br> + + He began to talk to her with a kindness that was at once simple and<br> + stately.<br> + + "We must all have our ups and downs," he said to her, presently.<br> + "Let me just give you a word of advice. It'll carry you through most<br> + of them. Remember you are very young, and I shall soon be very old."<br> + + He stopped and surveyed her. His eyes blinked through their blanched<br> + lashes. Lucy dropped her fork and looked back at him with smiling<br> + expectancy.<br> + + "Learn Persian!" said the old man, in an urgent whisper--"and get<br> + the dictionary by heart!"<br> + + Lucy still looked--wondering.<br> + + "I finished it this morning," said the Ambassador, in her ear.<br> + "To-morrow I shall begin it again. My daughter hates the sight of<br> + the thing. She says I overtire myself, and that when old people have<br> + done their work they should take a nap. But I know that if it<br> + weren't for my dictionary I should have given up long ago. When too<br> + many tiresome people dine here in the evening--or when they worry me<br> + from home--I take a column. But generally half a column's<br> + enough--good tough Persian roots, and no nonsense. Oh! of course I<br> + can read Hafiz and Omar Khayyam, and all that kind of thing. But<br> + that's the whipped cream. That don't count. What one wants is<br> + something to set one's teeth in. Latin verse will do. Last year I<br> + put half Tommy Moore into hendecasyllables. But my youngest boy,<br> + who's at Oxford, said he wouldn't be responsible for them--so I had<br> + to desist. And I suppose the mathematicians have always something<br> + handy. But, one way or another, one must learn one's dictionary. It<br> + comes next to cultivating one's garden."<br> + +<p>The pretty bit of kindness to a very young girl, in 1892, which I have +described, suggested part of this conversation; and I find the +foundation of the rest in a letter written to my father from Paris +in 1896.</p> + + We had a very pleasant three days in Paris ... including a most<br> + agreeable couple of hours with the Dufferins. Lord Dufferin showed<br> + me a number of relics of his Sheridan ancestry, and wound up by<br> + taking me into his special little den and telling me Persian stories<br> + with excellent grace and point! He is wild about Persian just now,<br> + and has just finished learning the whole dictionary by heart. He<br> + looks upon this as his chief <i>délassement</i> from official work. Lady<br> + Dufferin, however, does not approve of it at all! His remarks to<br> + Humphry as to the ignorance and inexperience of the innumerable<br> + French Foreign Ministers with whom he has to do, were amusing. An<br> + interview with Berthelot (the famous French chemist and friend of<br> + Renan) was really, he said, a deplorable business. Berthelot<br> + (Foreign Minister 1891-92) knew <i>everything</i> but what he should have<br> + known as French Foreign Minister. And Jusserand's testimony was<br> + practically the same! He is now acting head of the French Foreign<br> + Office, and has had three Ministers in bewildering succession to<br> + instruct in their duties, they being absolutely new to everything.<br> + Now, however, in Hanotaux he has got a strong chief at last.<br> + +<p>I recollect that in the course of our exploration of the Embassy, we +passed through a room with a large cheval-glass, of the Empire period. +Lord Dufferin paused before it, reminding me that the house had once +belonged to Pauline Borghese. "This was her room and this glass was +hers. I often stand before it and evoke her. She is there somewhere--if +one had eyes to see!"</p> + +<p>And I thought, in the darkening room, as one looked into the shadows of +the glass, of the beautiful, shameless creature as she appears in the +Canova statue in the Villa Borghese, or as David has fixed her, +immortally young, in the Louvre picture.</p> + +<p>But before I leave this second Roman visit of ours, let me recall one +more figure in the <i>entourage</i> of the Ambassador--a young attaché, +fair-haired, with all the good looks and good manners that belong to the +post, and how much else of solid wit and capacity the years were then to +find out. I had already seen Mr. Rennell Rodd in the Tennant circle, +where he was everybody's friend. Soon we were to hear of him in Greece, +whence he sent me various volumes of poems and an admirable study of the +Morea, then in Egypt, and afterward in Sweden; while through all these +arduous years of war (I write in 1917) he has been Ambassador in that +same Rome where we saw him as second Secretary in 1891.</p> + +<p>The appearance of <i>David Grieve</i> in February, 1892, four years after +<i>Robert Elsmere</i>, was to me the occasion of very mixed feelings. The +public took warmly to the novel from the beginning; in its English +circulation and its length of life it has, I think, very nearly equaled +<i>Robert Elsmere</i>; only after twenty-five years has it now fallen behind +its predecessor. It has brought me correspondence from all parts and all +classes, more intimate and striking, perhaps, than in the case of any +other of my books. But of hostile reviewing at the moment of its +appearance there was certainly no lack! It was violently attacked in the +<i>Scots Observer</i>, then the organ of a group of Scotch Conservatives and +literary men, with W.E. Henley at their head, and received unfriendly +notice from Mrs. Oliphant in <i>Blackwood</i>. The two <i>Quarterlies</i> opened +fire upon it, and many lesser guns. A letter from Mr. Meredith Townsend, +the very able, outspoken, and wholly independent colleague of Mr. Hutton +in the editorship of the <i>Spectator</i>, gave me some comfort under these +onslaughts!</p> + + I have read every word of <i>David Grieve</i>. Owing to the unusual and<br> + unaccountable imbecility of the reviewing--(the <i>Athenaeum</i> man, for<br> + example, does not even comprehend that he is reading a<br> + biography!)--it may be three months or so before the public fully<br> + takes hold, but I have no doubt of the ultimate verdict.... The<br> + consistency of the leading characters is wonderful, and there is not<br> + one of the twenty-five, except possibly Dora--who is not human<br> + enough--that is not the perfection of lifelikeness.... Louie is a<br> + vivisection. I have the misfortune to know her well ... and I am<br> + startled page after page by the accuracy of the drawing.<br> + +<p>Walter Pater wrote, "It seems to me to have all the forces of its +predecessor at work in it, with perhaps a mellower kind of art." Henry +James reviewed it--so generously!--so subtly!--in the <i>English +Illustrated</i>. Stopford Brooke and Bishop Creighton wrote to me with a +warmth and emphasis that soon healed the wounds of the <i>Scots Observer</i>; +and that the public was with them, and not with my castigators, was +quickly visible from the wide success of the book.</p> + +<p>Some of the most interesting letters that reached me about it were from +men of affairs who were voracious readers, but not makers of books--such +as Mr. Goschen, who "could stand an examination on it"; Sir James, +afterward Lord Hannen, one of the Judges of the Parnell Commission; and +Lord Derby, the Minister who seceded, with Lord Carnarvon, from +Disraeli's Government in 1878. We had made acquaintance not long before +with Lord Derby, through his niece, Lady Winifred Byng (now Lady +Burghclere), to whom we had all lost our hearts--children and +parents--at Lucerne in 1888. There are few things I regret more in +relation to London social life than the short time allowed me by fate +wherein to see something more of Lord Derby. If I remember right, we +first met him at a small dinner-party at Lady Winifred's in 1891, and he +died early in 1893. But he made a very great impression upon me, and, +though he was generally thought to be awkward and shy in general +society, in the conversations I remember with him nothing could have +been more genial or more attractive than his manner. He had been at +Rugby under my grandfather, which was a link to begin with; though he +afterward went to Cambridge, and never showed, that I know of, any signs +of the special Rugby influence which stamped men like Dean Stanley and +Clough. And yet of the moral independence and activity which my +grandfather prized and cultivated in his boys, there was certainly no +lack in Lord Derby's career. For the greater part of his political life +he was nominally a Conservative, yet the rank and file of his party only +half trusted a mind trained by John Stuart Mill and perpetually brooding +on social reform. As Lord Stanley, his close association and personal +friendship with Disraeli during the Ministries and politics of the +mid-nineteenth century have been well brought out in Mr. Buckle's last +volume of the Disraeli <i>Life</i>. But the ultimate parting between himself +and Dizzy was probably always inevitable. For his loathing of +adventurous policies of all kinds, and of any increase whatever in the +vast commitments of England, was sure at some point to bring him into +conflict with the imagination or, as we may now call it, the prescience, +of Disraeli. It was strange to remember, as one watched him at the +dinner-table, that he had been offered the throne of Greece in 1862.</p> + +<p>If he accepts the charge [wrote Dizzy to Mrs. Bridges Williams] I shall +lose a powerful friend and colleague. It is a dazzling adventure for the +House of Stanley, but they are not an imaginative race, and I fancy they +will prefer Knowsley to the Parthenon, and Lancashire to the Attic +plain. It is a privilege to live in this age of rapid and brilliant +events. What an error to consider it an utilitarian age! It is one of +infinite romance. Thrones tumble down and crowns are offered like a +fairy-tale.</p> + +<p>Sixteen years later came his famous resignation, in 1878, when the Fleet +was ordered to the Dardanelles, and Lord Derby, as he had now become, +then Foreign Secretary, refused to sanction a step that might lead to +war. That, for him, was the end as far as Toryism was concerned. In 1880 +he joined Mr. Gladstone, but only to separate from him on Home Rule in +1886; and when I first knew him, in 1891, he was leader of the Liberal +Unionist peers in the House of Lords. A little later he became President +of the great Labor Commission in 1892, and before he could see +Gladstone's fresh defeat in 1893, he died.</p> + +<p>Speculatively he was as open-minded as a reader and follower of Mill +might be expected to be. He had been interested in <i>Robert Elsmere</i>, and +the discussion of books and persons, to which it led him in conversation +with me, showed him fully aware of the new forces abroad in literature +and history. Especially interested, too, as to what Labor was going to +make of Christianity, and well aware--how could he fail to be, as +Chairman of that great, that epoch-making Commission of 1892?--of the +advancing strength of organized labor on all horizons. He appeared to +me, too, as a typical North-countryman--a son of Lancashire, proud of +the great Lancashire towns, and thoroughly at home in the life of the +Lancashire countryside. He could tell a story in dialect admirably. And +I realized that he had thought much--in his balanced, reticent way--on +matters in which I was then groping: how to humanize the relations +between employer and employed, how to enrich and soften the life of the +workman, how, in short, to break down the barrier between modern +industrialism and the stored-up treasures--art, science, thought--of +man's long history.</p> + +<p>So that when <i>David Grieve</i> was finished I sent it to Lord Derby, not +long after our first meeting, in no spirit of empty compliment, and I +have always kept his letter in return as a memento of a remarkable +personality. Some day I hope there may be a Memoir of him; for none has +yet appeared. He had not the charm, the versatility, the easy classical +culture, of his famous father--"the Rupert of debate." But with his +great stature--he was six feet two--his square head, and strong, +smooth-shaven face, he was noticeable everywhere. He was a childless +widower when I first knew him, and made the impression of a lonely man, +for all his busy political life and his vast estates. But he was +particularly interesting to me as representing a type I have once or +twice tried to draw--of the aristocrat standing between the old world, +before railways and the first Reform Bill, which saw his birth, and the +new world and new men of the later half of the century. He was +traditionally with the old world; by conviction and conscience, I think, +with the new; yet not sorry, probably, that he was to see no more than +its threshold!</p> + +<p>The year 1892, it will be remembered, was the first year of American +copyright: and the great success of <i>David Grieve</i> in America, following +on the extraordinary vogue there of <i>Robert Elsmere</i>, in its pirated +editions, brought me largely increased literary receipts. It seemed that +I was not destined, after all, to "ruin my publishers," as I had +despondently foretold in a letter to my husband before the appearance of +<i>Robert Elsmere;</i> but that, with regular work, I might look forward to a +fairly steady income. We therefore felt justified in seizing an +opportunity brought to our notice by an old friend who lived in the +neighborhood, and migrating to a house north of London, in the real +heart of Middle England. After leaving Borough Farm, we had built a +house on a hill near Haslemere, looking south over the blue and purple +Weald; but two years' residence had convinced me that Surrey was almost +as populous as London, and that real solitude for literary work was not +to be found there--at any rate, in that corner of it where we had chosen +to build, and, also, while we were nursing our newly planted shrubberies +of baby pines and rhododendrons, there was always in my mind, as I find +from letters of the time, a discontented yearning for "an old house and +old trees"! We found both at Stocks, whither we migrated in the summer +of 1892. The little estate had then been recently inherited by Mrs. +Grey, mother of Sir Edward Grey, now Lord Grey of Falloden. We were at +first tenants of the house and grounds, but in 1896 we bought the small +property from the Greys, and have now been for more than twenty years +its happy possessors. The house lies on a high upland, under one of the +last easterly spurs of the Chilterns. It was built in 1780 (we rebuilt +it in 1908) in succession to a much older house of which a few fragments +remain, and the village at its gates had changed hardly at all in the +hundred years which preceded our arrival. A few new cottages had been +built; more needed to be built; and two residents, intimately connected +with the past of the village, had built houses just outside it. But +villadom did not exist. The village was rich in old folk, in whom were +stored the memories and traditions of its quiet past. The postmaster, +"Johnny Dolt," who was nearing his eighties, was the universal referee +on all local questions--rights of way, boundaries, village customs, and +the like; and of some of the old women of the village, as they were +twenty-five years ago, I have drawn as faithful a picture as I could in +one or two chapters of <i>Marcella</i>.</p> + +<p>But the new novel owed not only much of its scenery and setting, but +also its main incident, to the new house. We first entered into +negotiation for Stocks in January, 1892. In the preceding December two +gamekeepers had been murdered on the Stocks property, in a field under a +big wood, not three hundred yards from the house; and naturally the +little community, as it lay in its rural quiet beneath its wooded hills, +was still, when we first entered it, under the shock and excitement of +the tragedy. We heard all the story on the spot, and then viewed it from +another point of view--the sociopolitical--when we went down from London +to stay at one of the neighboring country-houses, in February, and found +the Home Secretary, Mr. Matthews, afterward Lord Llandaff, among the +guests. The trial was over, the verdict given, and the two murderers +were under sentence of death. But there was a strong agitation going on +in favor of a reprieve; and what made the discussion of it, in this +country-house party, particularly piquant was that the case, at that +very moment, was a matter of close consultation between the judge and +the Home Secretary. It was not easy, therefore, to talk of it in Mr. +Matthews's presence. Voices dropped and groups dissolved when he +appeared. Mr. Asquith, who succeeded Mr. Matthews that very year as Home +Secretary, was also, if I remember right, of the party; and there was a +good deal of rather hot discussion of the game laws, and of English +landlordism in general.</p> + +<p>With these things in my mind, as soon as we had settled into Stocks, I +began to think of <i>Marcella</i>. I wrote the sketch of the book in +September, 1892, and finished it in February, 1894. Many things went to +the making of it--not only the murdered keepers and the village talk, +not only the remembered beauty of Hampden which gave me the main setting +of the story, but a general ferment of mind, connected with much else +that had been happening to me.</p> + +<p>For the New Brotherhood of <i>Robert Elsmere</i> had become in some sort a +realized dream; so far as any dream can ever take to itself the +practical garments of this puzzling world. To show that the faith of +Green and Martineau and Stopford Brooke was a faith that would wear and +work--to provide a home for the new learning of a New Reformation, and a +practical outlet for its enthusiasm of humanity--were the chief aims in +the minds of those of us who in 1890 founded the University Hall +Settlement in London. I look back now with emotion on that astonishing +experiment. The scheme had taken shape in my mind during the summer of +1889, and in the following year I was able to persuade Doctor Martineau, +Mr. Stopford Brooke, my old friend Lord Carlisle, and a group of other +religious Liberals, to take part in its realization. We held a crowded +meeting in London, and an adequate subscription list was raised without +difficulty. University Hall in Gordon Square was taken as a residence +for young men, and was very soon filled. Continuous teaching by the best +men available, from all the churches, on the history and philosophy of +religion, was one half the scheme; the other half busied itself with an +attempt to bring about some real contact between brain and manual +workers. We took a little dingy hall in Marchmont Street, where the +residents of the Hall started clubs and classes, Saturday mornings, for +children and the like. The foundation of Toynbee Hall--the Universities +Settlement--in East London, in memory of Arnold Toynbee, was then a +fresh and striking fact in social history. A spirit of fraternization +was in the air, an ardent wish to break down the local and geographical +barriers that separated rich from poor, East End from West End. The new +venture in which I was interested attached itself, therefore, to a +growing movement. The work in Marchmont Street grew and prospered. Men +and women of the working class found in it a real center of comradeship, +and the residents at the Hall in Gordon Square, led by a remarkable man +of deeply religious temper and Quaker origin, the late Mr. Alfred +Robinson, devoted themselves in the evenings to a work marked by a very +genuine and practical enthusiasm.</p> + +<p>Soon it was evident that larger premises were wanted. It was in the days +when Mr. Passmore Edwards was giving large sums to institutions of +different kinds in London, but especially to the founding of public +libraries. He began to haunt the shabby hall in Marchmont Street, and +presently offered to build us a new hall there for classes and social +gatherings. But the scheme grew and grew, in my mind as in his. And when +the question of a site arose we were fortunate enough to interest the +practical and generous mind of the chief ground landlord of Bloomsbury, +the Duke of Bedford. With him I explored various sites in the +neighborhood, and finally the Duke offered us a site in Tavistock Place, +on most liberal terms, he himself contributing largely to the building, +granting us a 999 years' lease, and returning us the ground rent.</p> + +<p>And there the Settlement now stands, the most beautiful and commodious +Settlement building in London, with a large garden behind it, made by +the Duke out of various old private gardens, and lent to the Settlement +for its various purposes. Mr. Passmore Edwards contributed £14,000 to +its cost, and it bears his name. It was opened in 1898 by Lord Peel and +Mr. Morley, and for twenty years it has been a center of social work and +endeavor in St. Pancras. From it have sprung the Physically Defective +Schools under the Education Authority, now so plentiful in London, and +so frequent in our other large towns. The first school of the kind was +opened at this Settlement in 1898; and the first school ambulance in +London was given to us by Sir Thomas Barlow for our Cripple Children. +The first Play Center in England began there in 1898; and the first +Vacation School was held there in 1902.</p> + +<p>During those twenty years the Settlement has played a large part in my +life. We have had our failures and our successes; and the original idea +has been much transformed with time. The Jowett Lectureship, still +devoted to a religious or philosophical subject, forms a link with the +religious lecturing of the past; but otherwise the Settlement, like the +Master himself, stands for the liberal and spiritual life, without +definitions or exclusions. Up to 1915 it was, like Toynbee Hall, a +Settlement for University and professional men who gave their evenings +to the work. Since 1915 it has been a Women's Settlement under a +distinguished head--Miss Hilda Oakeley, M.A., formerly Warden of King's +College for Women. It is now full of women residents and full of work. +There is a Cripple School building belonging to the Settlement, to the +East; our cripples still fill the Duke's garden with the shouts of their +play; and hundreds of other children crowd into the building every +evening in the winter, or sit under the plane-trees in summer. The +charming hall of the Settlement is well attended every winter week by +people to whom the beautiful music that the Settlement gives is a +constant joy; the Library, dedicated to the memory of T. H. Green, has +400 members; the classes and popular lectures have been steadily held +even during this devastating war; the Workers' Educational Association +carry on their work under our roof; mothers bring their babies to the +Infant Welfare Center in the afternoon; there are orchestral and choral +classes, boys' clubs and girls' clubs. Only one club has closed +down--the Men's Club, which occupied the top floor of the Invalid +Children's School before the war. Their members are scattered over +France, Salonika, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, and the Roll of Honor is +a long one.</p> + +<p>Twenty years! How clearly one sees the mistakes, the lost opportunities, +of such an enterprise! But so much is certain--that the Settlement has +been an element of happiness in many, many lives. It has had scores of +devoted workers, in the past--men and women to whom the heart of its +founder goes out in gratitude. And I cannot imagine a time when the +spacious and beautiful house and garden, with all the activities that +have a home there, will not be necessary and welcome to St. Pancras. I +see it, in my dreams, at least, half a century hence, when all those who +first learned from it and in it have gone their way, still serving "the +future hour" of an England reborn. To two especially among the early +friends of the Settlement let me turn back with grateful +remembrance--George Howard, Lord Carlisle, whom I have already +mentioned, and Stopford Brooke. Lord Carlisle was one of the most +liberal and most modest of men, an artist himself, and the friend of +artists. On a Sunday in Russell Square, when the drawing-room door +opened to reveal his fine head and shy, kind eyes, one felt how well +worth while it was to stay at home on Sunday afternoons! I find a little +note from him in 1891, the year in which we left Russell Square to move +westward, regretting the "interesting old house" "with which I associate +you in my mind." He was not an easy talker, but his listening had the +quality that makes others talk their best; while the sudden play of +humor or sarcasm through the features that were no less strong than +refined, and the impression throughout of a singularly upright and +humane personality, made him a delightful companion. There were those +who would gladly have seen him take a more prominent part in public +life. Perhaps a certain natural indolence held him back; perhaps a +wonderful fairness of mind which made him slow to judge, and abnormally +sensitive to "the other side." It is well known that as a landlord he +left the administration of his great estates in the north almost wholly +to his wife, and that, except in the great matter of temperance, he and +she differed in politics, Lady Carlisle--who was a Stanley of +Alderley--going with Mr. Gladstone at the time of the Home Rule split, +while Lord Carlisle joined the Liberal Unionists. Both took a public +part, and the political differences of the parents were continued in +their children. Only a very rare and selfless nature could have carried +through so difficult a situation without lack of either dignity or +sweetness. Lord Carlisle, in the late 'eighties and early 'nineties, +when I knew him best, showed no want of either. The restrictions he laid +upon his own life were perhaps made natural by the fact that he was +first and foremost an artist by training and temperament, and that the +ordinary occupations, rural, social, or political, of the great +land-owning noble, had little or no attraction for him. In the years, at +any rate, when I saw him often, I was drawn to him by our common +interest in the liberalizing of religion, and by a common love of Italy +and Italian art. I remember him once in the incomparable setting of +Naworth; but more often in London, and in Stopford Brooke's company.</p> + +<p>For he was an intimate friend and follower of Mr. Brooke's, and I came +very early under the spell of that same strong and magnetic personality. +While we were still at Oxford, through J.R.G. we made acquaintance with +Mr. Brooke, and with the wife whose early death in 1879 left desolate +one of the most affectionate of men. I remember well Mr. Brooke's last +sermon in the University pulpit, before his secession, on grounds of +what we should now call Modernism, from the Church of England. Mrs. +Brooke, I think, was staying with us, while Mr. Brooke was at All Souls, +and the strong individuality of both the husband and wife made a deep +impression upon one who was then much more responsive and recipient than +individual. The sermon was a great success; but it was almost Mr. +Brooke's latest utterance within the Anglican Church. The following year +came the news of Mrs. Brooke's mortal illness. During our short meeting +in 1877 I had been greatly attracted by her, and the news filled me with +unbearable pain. But I had not understood from it that the end itself +was near, and I went out into our little garden, which was a mass of +summer roses, and in a bewilderment of feeling gathered all I could +find--a glorious medley of bloom--that they might surround her, if only +for a day, with the beauty she loved. Next day, or the day after, she +died; and that basket of roses, arriving in the house of death--belated, +incongruous offering!--has stayed with me as the symbol of so much else +that is too late in life, and of our human helplessness and futility in +the face of sorrow.</p> + +<p>After our move to London, my children and I went for a long time +regularly to hear Mr. Brooke at Bedford Chapel. At the time, I often +felt very critical of the sermons. Looking back, I cannot bring myself +to say a critical word. If only one could still go and hear him! Where +are the same gifts, the same magnetism, the same compelling personality +to be found to-day, among religious leaders? I remember a sermon on +Elijah and the priests of Baal, which for color and range, for +modernness, combined with ethical force and power, remains with me as +perhaps the best I ever heard. And then, the service. Prayers +simplified, repetitions omitted, the Beatitudes instead of the +Commandments, a dozen jarring, intolerable things left out; but for the +rest, no needless break with association. And the relief and consolation +of it! The simple Communion service, adapted very slightly from the +Anglican rite, and administered by Mr. Brooke with a reverence, an +ardor, a tenderness one can only think of with emotion, was an example +of what <i>could</i> be done with our religious traditions, for those who +want new bottles for new wine, if only the courage and the imagination +were there.</p> + +<p>The biography of Mr. Brooke, which his son-in-law, Principal Jacks, has +just brought out, will, I think, reveal to many what made the spell of +Stopford Brooke, to a degree which is not common in biography. For <i>le +papier est bête</i>!--and the charm of a man who was both poet and artist, +without writing poems or painting pictures, is very hard to hand on to +those who never knew him. But, luckily, Stopford Brooke's diaries and +letters reflect him with great fullness and freedom. They have his +faults, naturally. They are often exuberant or hasty--not, by any means, +always fair to men and women of a different temperament from his own. +Yet, on the whole, there is the same practical, warm-hearted wisdom in +them that many a friend found in the man himself when they went to +consult him in his little study at the back of Bedford Chapel, where he +wrote his sermons and books, and found quiet, without, however, barring +out the world, if it wanted him. And there breathes from them also the +enduring, eager passion for natural and artistic beauty which made the +joy of his own life, and which his letters and journals may well kindle +in others. His old age was a triumph in the most difficult of arts. He +was young to the end, and every day of the last waiting years was happy +for himself, and precious to those about him. He knew what to give up +and what to keep, and his freshness of feeling never failed. Perhaps his +best and most enduring memorial will be the Wordsworth Cottage at +Grasmere, which he planned and carried out. And I like to remember that +my last sight of him was at a spot only a stone's-throw from that +cottage on the Keswick Road, his gray hair beaten back by the light +breeze coming from the pass, and his cheerful eyes, full often, as it +seemed to me, of a mystical content, raised toward the evening glow over +Helm Crag and the Easedale fells.</p> + +<p>On the threshold also of the Settlement's early history there stands the +venerable figure of James Martineau--thinker and saint. For he was a +member of the original Council, and his lectures on the Gospel of St. +Luke, in the old "Elsmerian" hall, marked the best of what we tried to +give in those first days. I knew Harriet Martineau in my childhood at +Fox How. Well I remember going to tea with that tremendous woman when I +was eight years old; sitting through a silent meal, in much awe of her +cap, her strong face, her ear-trumpet; and then being taken away to a +neighboring room by a kind niece, that I might not disturb her further. +Once or twice, during my growing up, I saw her. She lived only a mile +from Fox How, and was always on friendly terms with my people. Matthew +Arnold had a true admiration for her--sturdy fighter that she was in +Liberal causes. So had W.E. Forster; only he suffered a good deal at her +hands, as she disapproved of the Education Bill, and contrived so to +manage her trumpet when he came to see her as to take all the argument +and give him all the listening! When my eldest child was born, a +cot-blanket arrived, knitted by Miss Martineau's own hands--the busy +hands (soon then to be at rest) that wrote the <i>History of the Peace</i>, +<i>Feats on the Fiord</i>, the <i>Settlers at Home</i>, and those excellent +biographical sketches of the politicians of the Reform and Corn Law days +in the <i>Daily News</i>, which are still well worth reading.</p> + +<p>Between Harriet Martineau and her brother James, as many people will +remember, there arose an unhappy difference in middle life which was +never mended or healed. I never heard him speak of her. His standards +were high and severe, for all the sensitive delicacy of his long, +distinguished face and visionary eyes; and neither he nor she was of the +stuff that allows kinship to supersede conscience. He published a +somewhat vehement criticism of a book in which she was part author, and +she never forgave it. And although to me, in the University Hall +venture, he was gentleness and courtesy itself, and though his presence +seemed to hallow a room directly he entered it, one felt always that he +was <i>formidable</i>. The prophet and the Puritan lay deep in him. Yet in +his two famous volumes of Sermons there are tones of an exquisite +tenderness and sweetness, together with harmonies of prose style, that +remind me often how he loved music and how his beautiful white head +might be seen at the Monday Popular Concerts, week after week, his +thinker's brow thrown back to catch the finest shades of +Joachim's playing.</p> + +<p>The year after <i>David Grieve</i> appeared, Mr. Jowett died. His long letter +to me on the book contained some characteristic passages, of which I +quote the following:</p> + + I should like to have a good talk with you. I seldom get any one to<br> + talk on religious subjects. It seems to me that the world is growing<br> + rather tired of German criticism, having got out of it nearly all<br> + that it is capable of giving. To me it appears one of the most<br> + hopeful signs of the present day that we are coming back to the old,<br> + old doctrine, "he can't be wrong whose life is in the right." Yet<br> + this has to be taught in a new way, adapted to the wants of the<br> + age. We must give up doctrine and teach by the lives of men,<br> + beginning with the life of Christ, instead. And the best words of<br> + men, beginning with the Gospels and the prophets, will be our Bible.<br> + +<p>At the end of the year we spent a weekend with him at Balliol, and that +was my last sight of my dear old friend. The year 1893 was for me one of +illness, and of hard work both in the organization of the new Settlement +and in the writing of <i>Marcella</i>. But that doesn't reconcile me to the +recollection of how little I knew of his failing health till, suddenly, +in September the news reached me that he was lying dangerously ill in +the house of Sir Robert Wright, in Surrey.</p> + + "Every one who waited on him in his illness loved him," wrote an old<br> + friend of his and mine who was with him to the end. What were almost<br> + his last words--"I bless God for my life!--I bless God for my<br> + life!"--seemed to bring the noble story of it to a triumphant close;<br> + and after death he lay "with the look of a little child on his<br> + face.... He will live in the hearts of those who loved him, as well<br> + as in his work."<br> + +<p>He lives indeed; and as we recede farther from him the originality and +greatness of his character will become more and more clear to Oxford and +to England. The men whom he trained are now in the full stream of +politics and life. His pupils and friends are or have been everywhere, +and they have borne, in whatever vocation, the influence of his mind or +the mark of his friendship. Lord Lansdowne, Mr. Asquith, Lord Justice +Bowen, Lord Coleridge, Lord Milner, Sir Robert Morier, Matthew Arnold, +Tennyson, Lord Goschen, Miss Nightingale, and a hundred others of the +nation's leaders--amid profoundest difference, the memory of "the +Master" has been for them a common and a felt bond. No other religious +personality of the nineteenth century--unless it be that of Newman--has +stood for so much. In his very contradictions and inconsistencies of +thought he was the typical man of a time beset on all sides by new +problems to which Jowett knew very well there was no intellectual +answer; while through the passion of his faith in a Divine Life, which +makes itself known to man, not in miracle or mystery, but through the +channels of a common experience, he has been a kindling force in many +hearts and minds, and those among the most important to England. +Meanwhile, to these great matters the Jowettan oddities and +idiosyncrasies added just that touch of laughter and surprise that makes +a man loved by his own time and arrests the eye and ear of posterity.</p> + + +<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br> +<h2><a name="146"></a><a href="#151">CHAPTER VI</a></h2> +<br> + +<p class="c"><i>HELBECK OF BANNISDALE</i></p> + +<p>The coming out of <i>Marcella</i>, in April, 1894, will always mark for me +perhaps the happiest date in my literary life. The book, for all the +hard work that had gone to it, had none the less been a pleasure to +write; and the good-will that greeted it made the holiday I had +earned--which again was largely spent in Rome--a golden time. Not long +after we left England, "Piccadilly," my sister wrote me, was "placarded +with <i>Marcella</i>," the name appearing on the notice-boards of most of the +evening papers--a thing which never happened to me before or since; and +when we arrived in Rome, the content-bills of the London newspapers, +displayed in the Piazza di Spagna, announced her no less flamingly. The +proof-sheets of the book had been tried on various friends, as usual, +with some amusing results. Bishop Creighton, with only the first +two-thirds of the book before him, wrote me denunciations of Marcella.</p> + + I am greatly interested in the book and pine for the <i>dénoûment</i>. So<br> + far Marcella, though I know her quite well, does not in the least<br> + awaken my sympathy. She is an intolerable girl--but there are many<br> + of them.... I only hope that she may be made to pay for it. Mr. and<br> + Mrs. Boyce are good and original, so is Wharton. I hope that condign<br> + vengeance awaits him. He is the modern politician entirely.... I<br> + really hope Marcella may be converted. It would serve her right to<br> + marry her to Wharton; he would beat her.<br> + +<p>Another old friend, one of the industrial leaders of the north, carried +off half the proofs to read on his journey to Yorkshire.</p> + + I so ravened on them that I sat still at Blosworth instead of<br> + getting out! The consequence is that all my plans are disarranged. I<br> + shall not get to M---- in time for my meeting, and for all this<br> + Marcella is to blame.... The station-master assured me he called out<br> + "Change for Northampton," but I was much too deep in the scene<br> + between Marcella, Lord Maxwell, and Raeburn to heed anything<br> + belonging to the outer world.<br> + +<p>Mr. Goschen wrote:</p> + + I don't know how long it is since I have enjoyed reading anything so<br> + much. I can't satisfy myself as to the physical appearance of<br> + Wharton.... I do know some men of a <i>character</i> not quite unlike<br> + him, but they haven't the boyish face with curls. Marcella I see<br> + before me. Mrs. Boyce and Lord Maxwell both interested me very<br> + much....Alack! I must turn from Marcella's enthusiasm and<br> + aspirations to Sir W. Harcourt's speech--a great transition.<br> + +<p>And dear Alfred Lyttelton wrote:</p> + + I feel a ridiculous pride in her triumphs which I have had the joy<br> + of witnessing on every side.... At least permit an expert to tell<br> + you that his heart beat over the ferrets (in the poaching scene) and<br> + at the intense vividness and truth of the legal episodes.<br> + +<p>But there is no one letter in this old packet which moves me specially. +It was on the 1st of March, 1894, that Mr. Gladstone said "Good-by" to +his Cabinet in the Cabinet room at Downing Street, and a little later in +the afternoon walked away for the last time from the House of Commons. +No one who has read it will forget the telling of that episode, in Mr. +Morley's biography, with what concentration, what dignity!--worthy alike +of the subject and of the admirable man of letters--himself an +eye-witness--who records it.</p> + +<p>While Lord Kimberley and Sir William Harcourt, on behalf of the rest of +their colleagues, were bidding their great chief farewell, "Mr. +Gladstone sat composed and still as marble, and the emotion of the +Cabinet did not gain him for an instant." When the spokesmen ceased, he +made his own little speech of four or five minutes in reply: "then +hardly above a breath, but every accent heard, he said, 'God bless you +all.' He rose slowly and went out of one door, while his colleagues with +minds oppressed filed out by the other."</p> + +<p>On this moving scene there followed what Mr. Gladstone himself described +as the first period of comparative leisure he had ever known, extending +to four and a half months. They were marked first by increasing +blindness, then by an operation for cataract, and finally by a moderate +return of sight. In July he notes that "during the last months of +partial incapacity I have not written with my own hand probably so much +as one letter a day." In this faded packet of mine lies one of these +rare letters, written with his own hand--a full sheet--from Dollis Hill, +on April 27th.</p> + + When <i>Marcella</i> arrived my thankfulness was alloyed with a feeling<br> + that the state of my eyesight made your kindness for the time a<br> + waste. But Mr. Nettleship has since then by an infusion supplied a<br> + temporary stimulus to the organ, such that I have been enabled to<br> + begin, and am reading the work with great pleasure and an agreeable<br> + sense of congeniality which I do not doubt I shall retain to<br> + the close.<br> +<br> + +<p>Then he describes a book--a novel--dealing with religious controversy, +which he had lately been reading, in which every character embodying +views opposed to those of the author "is exhibited as odious." With this +he warmly contrasts the method and spirit of <i>David Grieve</i>, and then +continues:</p> + + Well, I have by my resignation passed into a new state of existence.<br> + And in that state I shall be very glad when our respective stars may<br> + cause our paths to meet. I am full of prospective work; but for the<br> + present a tenacious influenza greatly cripples me and prevents my<br> + making any definite arrangement for an expected operation on my eye.<br> + +<p>Eighty-five!--greatly crippled by influenza and blindness--yet "full of +prospective work"! The following year, remembering <i>Robert Elsmere</i> +days, and <i>à propos</i> of certain passages in his review of that book, I +ventured to send him an Introduction I had contributed to my +brother-in-law Leonard Huxley's translation of Hausrath's <i>New Testament +Times.</i> This time the well-known handwriting is feebler and the old +"fighter" is not roused. He puts discussion by, and turns instead to +kind words about a near relative of my own who had been winning +distinctions at Oxford.</p> + + It is one of the most legitimate interests of the old to watch with<br> + hope and joy these opening lives, and it has the secondary effect of<br> + whispering to them that they are not yet wholly frozen up.... I am<br> + busy as far as my limited powers of exertion allow upon a new<br> + edition of Bishop Butler's Works, which costs me a good deal of<br> + labor and leaves me, after a few hours upon it, good for very little<br> + else. And my perspective, dubious as it is, is filled with other<br> + work, in the Homeric region lying beyond. I hope it will be very<br> + long before you know anything of compulsory limitations on the<br> + exercise of your powers. Believe me always,<br> + + Sincerely yours,<br> + + W. E. GLADSTONE.<br> + +<p>But it was not till 1897, as he himself records, that the indomitable +spirit so far yielded to these limitations as to resign--or rather +contemplate resigning--the second great task of which he had spoken to +me at Oxford, nine years before. "I have begun seriously to ask myself +whether I shall ever be able to face--<i>The Olympian Religion</i>."</p> + +<p>It was, I think, in the winter of 1895 that I saw him for the last time +at our neighbors', the Rothschilds, at Tring Park. He was then full of +animation and talk, mainly of things political, and, indeed, not long +before he had addressed a meeting at Chester on the Turkish massacres in +Armenia, and was still to address a large audience at Liverpool on the +same subject--his last public appearance--a year later. When <i>George +Tressady</i> appeared he sent me a message through Mrs. Drew that he feared +George Tressady's Parliamentary conduct "was inconceivable in a man of +honor"; and I was only comforted by the emphatic and laughing dissent of +Lord Peel, to whom I repeated the verdict. "Nothing of the kind! But of +course he was thinking of <i>us</i>--the Liberal Unionists."</p> + +<p>Then came the last months when, amid a world's sympathy and reverence, +the great life, in weariness and pain, wore to its end. The "lying in +state" in Westminster Hall seemed to me ill arranged. But the burying +remains with me as one of those perfect things, which only the Anglican +Church at its best, in combination with the immemorial associations of +English history, can achieve. After it, I wrote to my son:</p> + + I have now seen four great funerals in the Abbey--Darwin, Browning,<br> + Tennyson, and the funeral service for Uncle Forster, which was very<br> + striking, too. But no one above forty of those in the Abbey<br> + yesterday will ever see the like again. It was as beautiful and<br> + noble as the "lying in state" was disappointing and ugly. The music<br> + was exquisite, and fitting in every respect; and when the high<br> + sentence rang out, "and their name liveth for evermore," the effect<br> + was marvelous. One seemed to hear the voice of the future already<br> + pealing through the Abbey--as though the verdict were secured, the<br> + judgment given.<br> + + We saw it all, admirably, from the Muniment Room, which is a sort of<br> + lower Triforium above the south Transept. To me, perhaps, the most<br> + thrilling moment was when, bending forward, one saw the<br> + white-covered coffin disappear amid the black crowd round it, and<br> + knew that it had sunk forever into its deep grave, amid that same<br> + primeval clay of Thorny Island on which Edward's Minister was first<br> + reared and the Red King built his hall of judgment and Council. The<br> + statue of Dizzy looked down on him--"So you have come at last!"--and<br> + all the other statues on either side seemed to welcome and receive<br> + him.... The sloping seats for Lords and Commons filled the<br> + transepts, a great black mass against the jeweled windows, the Lords<br> + on one side, the Commons on the other; in front of each black<br> + multitude was the glitter of a mace, and in the hollow between, the<br> + whiteness of the pall--perhaps you can fancy it so.<br> + +<p>But the impetus of memory has carried me on too fast. There are some +other figures and scenes to be gathered from these years--1893-98--that +may still interest this present day. Of the most varied kind! For, as I +turn over letters and memoranda, a jumble of recollections passes +through my mind. Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, on the one hand, a +melancholy, kindly man, amid the splendors of Waddesden; a meeting of +the Social Democratic Federation in a cellar in Lisson Grove; days of +absorbing interest in the Jewish East End, and in sweaters' workshops, +while <i>George Tressady</i> was in writing; a first visit to Mentmore while +Lady Rosebery was alive; a talk with Lord Rosebery some time after her +death, in a corner of a local ball-room, while <i>Helbeck</i> was shaping +itself about the old Catholic families of England, which revealed to me +yet another and unsuspected vein of knowledge in one of the best +furnished of minds; the Asquith marriage in 1894; new acquaintances and +experiences in Lancashire towns, again connected with <i>George Tressady</i>, +and in which I was helped by that brilliant writer, worker, and fighter, +Mrs. Sidney Webb; a nascent friendship with Sir William Harcourt, one of +the most racy of all possible companions; happy evenings in the Tadema +and Richmond studios with music and good talk; occasional meetings with +and letters from "Pater," the dear and famous Professor, who, like my +uncle, fought half the world and scarcely made an enemy; visits to +Oxford and old friends--such are the scenes and persons that come back +to me as I read old letters, while all through it ran the continual +strain of hard literary work mingled with the new social and religious +interests which the foundation of the Passmore Edwards Settlement had +brought me.</p> + + We have been at Margot Tennant's wedding to-day [I wrote to my son<br> + on May 10, 1894]--a great function, very tiring, but very brilliant<br> + and amusing--occasionally dramatic, too, as, when after the service<br> + had begun, the sound of cheering in the street outside drowned the<br> + voice of the Bishop of Rochester, and warned us that Mr. Gladstone<br> + was arriving. Afterward at the house we shook hands with three<br> + Cabinet Ministers on the door-step, and there were all the rest of<br> + them inside! The bride carried herself beautifully and was as<br> + composed and fresh as though it were any ordinary party. From our<br> + seat in the church one saw the interior of the vestry and Mr.<br> + Gladstone's white head against the window as he sat to sign the<br> + register; and the greeting between him and Mr. Balfour when he<br> + had done.<br> +<br> + +<p>This was written while Lord Rosebery was Prime Minister and Mr. Balfour, +still free, until the following year, from the trammels of office, was +finishing his brilliant <i>Foundations of Belief</i>, which came out in 1895. +In acknowledging the copy which he sent me, I ventured to write some +pages on behalf of certain arguments of the Higher Criticism which +seemed to me to deserve a fuller treatment than Mr. Balfour had been +willing to give them--in defense also of our English idealists, such as +Green and Caird, in their relation to orthodoxy. A year or two earlier I +find I had been breaking a lance on behalf of the same school of writers +with a very different opponent. In the controversy between Professor +Huxley and Doctor Wace, in 1889, which opened with the famous article on +"The Gadarene Swine," the Professor had welcomed me as an ally, because +of "The New Reformation," which appeared much about the same time; and +the word of praise in which he compared my reply to Mr. Gladstone, to +the work "of a strong housemaid brushing away cobwebs," gave me a +fearful joy! I well remember a thrilling moment in the Russell Square +drawing-room in 1889, when "Pater" and I were in full talk, he in his +raciest and most amusing form, and suddenly the door opened, and "Doctor +Wace" was announced--the opponent with whom at that moment he was +grappling his hardest in the <i>Nineteenth Century</i>. Huxley gave me a +merry look--and then how perfectly they both behaved! I really think the +meeting was a pleasure to both of them, and when my old chief in the +<i>Dictionary of Christian Biography</i> took his departure, Huxley found all +kinds of pleasant personal things to say about him.</p> + +<p>But the Professor and I were not always at one. Caird and Green--and, +for other reasons, Martineau--were to me names "of great pith and +moment," and Christian Theism was a reasonable faith. And Huxley, in +controversy, was no more kind to my <i>sacra</i> than to other people's. Once +I dared a mild remonstrance--in 1892--only to provoke one of his most +vigorous replies:</p> + + MY DEAR M.--Thanks for your pleasant letter. I do not know whether I<br> + like the praise or the scolding better. They, like pastry, need to<br> + be done with a light hand--especially praise--and I have swallowed<br> + all yours, and feel it thoroughly agrees with me.<br> + + As to the scolding I am going to defend myself tooth and nail. In<br> + the first place, by all my Gods and No Gods, neither Green, nor<br> + Martineau, nor the Cairds were in my mind when I talked of<br> + "Sentimental Deism," but the "Vicaire Savoyard," and Charming, and<br> + such as Voysey. There are two chapters of "Rousseauism," I have not<br> + touched yet--Rousseauism in Theology, and Rousseauism in Education.<br> + When I write the former I shall try to show that the people of whom<br> + I speak as "sentimental deists" are the lineal descendants of the<br> + Vicaire Savoyard. I was a great reader of Channing in my boyhood,<br> + and was much taken in by his theosophic confectionery. At present I<br> + have as much (intellectual) antipathy to him as St. John had to the<br> + Nicolaitans.<br> + + ... Green I know only from his Introduction to Hume--which reminds<br> + me of nothing so much as a man with a hammer and chisel knocking out<br> + bits of bad stone in the Great Pyramid, with the view of bringing it<br> + down.... As to Caird's <i>Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion</i>,<br> + I will get it and study it. But as a rule "Philosophies of Religion"<br> + in my experience turn out to be only "Religions of<br> + Philosophers"--quite another business, as you will admit.<br> + + And if you please, Ma'am, I wish to add that I think I am <i>not</i><br> + without sympathy for Christian feeling--or rather for what you mean<br> + by it. Beneath the cooled logical upper strata of my microcosm there<br> + is a fused mass of prophetism and mysticism, and the Lord knows what<br> + might happen to me, in case a moral earthquake cracked the<br> + superincumbent deposit, and permitted an eruption of the demonic<br> + element below.... Luckily I am near 70, and not a G.O.M.--so the<br> + danger is slight.<br> + + One must stick to one's trade. It is my business to the best of my<br> + ability to fight for scientific clearness--that is what the world<br> + lacks. Feeling Christian or other, is superabundant....<br> + + Ever yours affectionately,<br> + + T. H. HUXLEY.<br> + +<p>A few more letters from him--racy, and living as himself--and then in +1895, just after his first article on the "Foundations of Belief," we +heard with dismay of the illness which killed him. There was never a man +more beloved--more deeply mourned.</p> + +<p>The autumn of 1896 brought me a great loss in the death of an intimate +friend, Lady Wemyss--as marked a personality in her own circle as was +her indomitable husband, the famous Lord Elcho, of the Volunteer +movement, on the bigger stage. It was at Balliol, at the Master's table, +and in the early Oxford days, that we first made friends with Lord and +Lady Wemyss, who were staying with the Master for the Sunday. I was +sitting next to Lord Wemyss, and he presently discovered that I was +absent-minded. And I found him so attractive and so human that I soon +told him why. I had left a sick child at home, with a high temperature, +and was fidgeting to get back to him.</p> + +<p>"What is the matter?--Fever?--throat? Aconite, of course! You're a +homeopath, aren't you? All sensible people are. Look here--I've got a +servant with me. I'll send him with some aconite at once. Where do you +live?--in the Parks? All right. Give me your address."</p> + +<p>Out came an envelope and a pencil. A message was sent round the +dinner-table to Lady Wemyss, whose powerful dreaming face beside the +Master lit up at once. The aconite was sent; the child's temperature +went down; and, if I remember right, either one or both of his new +medical advisers walked up to the Parks the next day to inquire for him. +So began a friendship which for just twenty years, especially from about +1885 to 1896, meant a great deal to me.</p> + +<p>How shall I describe Lady Wemyss? An unfriendly critic has recently +allowed me the power of "interesting fashionable ladies in things of the +mind." Was Lady Wemyss a "fashionable lady"? She was the wife, +certainly, of a man of high rank and great possessions; but I met her +first as a friend--a dear and intimate friend, as may be seen from his +correspondence--of Mr. Jowett's; and Mr. Jowett was not very tolerant of +"fashionable ladies." She was in reality a strong and very simple +person, with a natural charm working through a very reserved and often +harsh manner, like the charm of mountain places in spring. She was a +Conservative, and I suppose an aristocrat, whatever that word may mean. +She thought the Harcourt death-duties "terrible" because they broke up +old families and old estates, and she had been brought up to think that +both were useful. Yet I never knew anybody with a more instinctive +passion for equality. This means that she was simply and deeply +interested in all sorts of human beings and all sorts of human lots; +also that, although she was often self-conscious, it was the +self-consciousness one sees in the thoughtful and richly natured young, +whose growth in thought or character has outrun their means of +expression, and never mean or egotistical. Her deep voice; her fine, +marked features; and the sudden play of humor, silent, self-restrained, +yet most infectious to the bystander, that would lighten through them; +her stately ways; and yet, withal, her childlike love of loving and +being loved by the few to whom she gave her deepest affection--in some +such phrases one tries to describe her; but they go a very little way.</p> + +<p>I can see her now at the dinner-table at Gosford, sardonically watching +a real "fashionable lady" who had arrived in the afternoon and was +sitting next Lord Wemyss at the farther end--with a wonderful frizzled +head, an infinitesimal waist sheathed in white muslin and blue ribbons, +rouged cheeks, a marvelous concatenation of jewels, and a caressing, +gesticulating manner meant, at fifty, to suggest the ways of "sweet and +twenty." The frizzled head drew nearer and nearer to Lord Wemyss, the +fingers flourished and pointed; and suddenly I heard Lady Wemyss's deep +voice, meditatively amused, beside me:</p> + +<p>"Her fingers will be in Frank's eyes soon!" Or again, I see her, stalled +beneath the drawing-room table, on all-fours, by her imperious +grandchildren, patiently playing "horse" or "cow," till her scandalized +daughter-in-law discovered her and ran to her release. Or in her last +illness, turning her noble head and faint, welcoming smile to the few +friends that were admitted; and finally, in the splendid rest after +death, when those of us who had not known her in youth could guess what +the beauty of her youth had been.</p> + +<p>She was an omnivorous and most intelligent reader, and a friend that +never failed. Matthew Arnold was very fond of her, and she of him; Laura +Lyttelton, who was nearly forty years her junior, loved her dearly and +never felt the bar of years; the Master owed much to her affection, and +gratefully acknowledged it. The <i>Commonplace Book</i>, privately printed +after her death, showed the range of interests which had played upon her +fresh and energetic mind. It was untrained, I suppose, compared to the +woman graduate of to-day. But it was far less tired; and all its +adventures were of its own seeking.</p> + +<p>It was in 1896, not long after the appearance of <i>George Tressady</i>, that +a conversation in a house on the outskirts of the Lakes suggested to me +the main plot of <i>Helbeck of Bannisdale.</i> The talk turned on the +fortunes of that interesting old place, Sizergh Castle, near Kendal, and +of the Catholic family to whom it then still belonged, though mortgages +and lack of pence were threatening imminently to submerge an ancient +stock that had held it unbrokenly, from father to son, through many +generations.</p> + +<p>The relation between such a family--pinched and obscure, yet with its +own proud record, and inherited consciousness of an unbroken loyalty to +a once persecuted faith--and this modern world of ours struck me as an +admirable subject for a novel. I thought about it next day, all through +a long railway journey from Kendal to London, and by the time I reached +Euston the plot of <i>Helbeck of Bannisdale</i> was more or less clear to me.</p> + +<p>I confided it to Lord Acton a little while afterward. We discussed it, +and he cordially encouraged me to work it out. Then I consulted my +father, my Catholic father, without whose assent I should never have +written the book at all; and he raised no difficulty. So I only had +to begin.</p> + +<p>But I wanted a setting--somewhere in the border country between the +Lakes mountains and Morecambe Bay. And here another piece of good luck +befell, almost equal to that which had carried us to Hampden for the +summer of 1889. Levens Hall, it appeared, was to be let for the +spring--the famous Elizabethan house, five miles from Kendal, and about +a mile from Sizergh. I had already seen Levens; and we took the +chance at once.</p> + +<p>Bannisdale in the novel is a combination, I suppose, of Sizergh and +Levens. The two houses, though of much the same date, are really very +different, and suggest phases of life quite distinct from each other. +Levens compared to Sizergh is--or was then, before the modern +restoration of Sizergh--the spoiled beauty beside the shabby ascetic. +Levens has always been cared for and lived in by people who had money to +spend upon the house and garden they loved, and the result is a +wonderful example of Elizabethan and Jacobean decoration, mellowed by +time into a perfect whole. Yet, for my purposes, there was always +Sizergh, close by, with its austere suggestions of sacrifice and +suffering under the penal laws, borne without flinching by a long +succession of quiet, simple, undistinguished people.</p> + +<p>We arrived there in March, 1897. The house greeted us on a clear and +chilly evening under the mingled light of a frosty sunset, and the blaze +of wood fires which had been lit everywhere to warm its new guests.</p> + + At last we arrived--saw the wonderful gray house rising above the<br> + river in the evening light, found G---- waiting at the open door for<br> + us, and plunged into the hall, the sitting-rooms, and all the<br> + intricacies of the upper passages and turrets with the delight and<br> + curiosity of a pack of children. Wood and peat fires were burning<br> + everywhere; the great chimneypieces in the drawing-room, the arms of<br> + Elizabeth over the hall fire, the stucco birds and beasts running<br> + round the Hall, showed dimly in the scanty lamplight (we shall want<br> + about six more lamps!)--and the beauty of the marvelous old place<br> + took us all by storm. Then through endless passages and kitchens,<br> + bright with long rows of copper pans and molds, we made our way out<br> + into the gardens among the clipped yews and cedars, and had just<br> + light enough to see that Levens apparently is like nothing else<br> + but itself.<br> + ... The drawback of the house at present is certainly <i>the cold</i>!<br> + +<p>Thus began a happy and fruitful time. We managed to get warm in spite of +a treacherous and tardy spring. Guests came to stay with us--Henry +James, above all; the Creightons, he then in the first months of that +remarkable London episcopate, which in four short years did so much to +raise the name and fame of the Anglican Church in London, at least for +the lay mind; the Neville Lytteltons, who had been since 1893 our summer +neighbors at Stocks; Lord Lytton, then at Cambridge; the Sydney Buxtons; +old Oxford friends, and many kinsfolk. The damson blossom along the +hedgerows that makes of these northern vales in April a glistening +network of white and green, the daffodils and violets, the +lilies-of-the-valley in the Brigsteer woods came and went, the <i>Helbeck</i> +made steady progress.</p> + +<p>But we left Levens in May, and it took me another eight months to finish +the book. Except perhaps in the case of <i>Bessie Costrell</i>, I was never +more possessed by a subject, more shut in by it from the outer world. +And, though its contemporary success was nothing like so great as that +of most of my other books, the response it evoked, as my letters show, +in those to whom the book appealed, was deep and passionate.</p> + +<p>My first anxiety was as to my father, and after we had left England for +abroad I was seized with misgivings lest certain passages in the talk of +Doctor Friedland, who, it will perhaps be remembered, is made the +spokesman in the book of certain points in the <i>intellectual</i> case +against Catholicism, should wound or distress him. I, therefore, no +sooner reached Italy than I sent for the proofs again, and worked at +them as much as fatigue would let me, softening them, and, I think, +improving them, too. Then we went on to Florence, and rest, coming home +for the book's publication in June.</p> + +<p>The joy and emotion of it were great. George Meredith, J. M. Barrie, +Paul Bourget, and Henry James--the men who at that time stood at the +head of my own art--gave the book a welcome that I can never forget. +George Meredith wrote:</p> + + Your <i>Helbeck of Bannisdale</i> held me firmly in the reading and<br> + remains with me.... If I felt a monotony during the struggle, it<br> + came of your being faithful to your theme--rapt--or you would not<br> + have had such power over your reader. I know not another book that<br> + shows the classic so distinctly to view.... Yet a word of thanks for<br> + Doctor Friedland. He is the voice of spring in the book.<br> +<br> + +<p>J.M. Barrie's generous, enthusiastic note delights and inspires me again +as I read it over. Mr. Morley, my old editor and critic, wrote: "I find +it intensely interesting and with all the elements of beauty, power, and +pathos." For Leslie Stephen, with whom I had only lately made warm and +close friends, I had a copy bound, without the final chapter, that the +book might not, by its tragic close, depress one who had known so much +sorrow. Sir Alfred Lyall thought--"the story reaches a higher pitch of +vigor and dramatic presentation than is to be found even in your later +books"; while Lord Halifax's letter--"how lovable they both are, each in +his way, and how true to the ideal on both sides!"--and others, from Mr. +Godkin, of the American <i>Nation</i>, from Frederic Harrison, Lord Goschen, +Lord Dufferin, and many, many more, produced in me that curious mood +which for the artist is much nearer dread than boasting--dread that the +best is over and that one will never earn such sympathy again. One +letter not written to myself, from Mr. George Wyndham to Mr. Wilfred +Ward, I have asked leave to print as a piece of independent criticism:</p> + + On Sunday I read <i>Helbeck of Bannisdale</i>, and I confess that the<br> + book moved me a great deal. It is her best book. It is a true<br> + tragedy, because the crash is inevitable. This is not so easy to<br> + effect in Art as many suppose. There are very few characters and<br> + situations which lead to inevitable crashes. It is a thousand to one<br> + that a woman who thinks she ought not to marry a man, but loves him<br> + passionately, will, in fact, marry him. She will either discover an<br> + ingenious way out of her woods or else just shut her eyes and "go it<br> + blind," relying on his strength and feeling that it is really right<br> + to relinquish to him her sense of responsibility. In choosing a girl<br> + with nothing left her in the world but loyalty to a dead father and<br> + memory of his attitude toward religion, without knowledge of his<br> + arguments for that attitude, I think that Mrs. Ward has hit on the<br> + only possible <i>persona</i>. Had Laura, herself, been a convinced<br> + rationalist, or had her father been still alive, she would have<br> + merged herself and her attitude in Helbeck's strength of character.<br> + Being a work of art, self-consistent and inevitable, the book<br> + becomes symbolic. It is a picture of incompatibility, but, being a<br> + true picture, it is a symbolic index to the incompatible which plays<br> + so large a part in the experience of man.<br> + +<p>For the rest, I remember vividly the happy holiday of that summer at +Stocks; the sense of having come through a great wrestle, and finding +everything--my children, the garden, my little Huxley nephews, books and +talk, the Settlement where we were just about to open our Cripple +School, and all else in life, steeped in a special glamour. It faded +soon, no doubt, "into the light of common day"; but if I shut my +thoughts and eyes against the troubles of these dark hours of war, I can +feel my way back into the "wind-warm space" and look into the faces that +earth knows no more--my father, Leslie Stephen, Alfred Lyall, Mr. +Goschen, Alfred Lyttelton, H. O. Arnold-Forster, my sister, Julia +Huxley, my eldest brother--a vanished company!</p> + +<p>And in the following year, to complete the story, I owed to <i>Helbeck</i> a +striking and unexpected hour. A message reached me in November, 1898, to +the effect that the Empress Frederick, who had just arrived at Windsor, +admired the book and would like to see the writer of it.</p> + +<p>A tragic figure at that moment--the Empress Frederick! That splendid +Crown Prince, in his white uniform, whom we had seen at Schwalbach in +1872, had finished early in 1890 with his phantom reign and tortured +life, and his son reigned in his stead. Bismarck, "the Englishwoman's" +implacable enemy, had died some four months before I saw the Empress, +after eight years' exclusion from power. The Empress herself was on the +verge of the terrible illness which killed her two years later. To me +her life and personality--or, rather, the little I knew of them--had +always been very interesting. She had, of course, the reputation of +being the ablest of her family, and the bitterness of her sudden and +irreparable defeat at the hands of Fate and her son, in 1889-90, had +often struck me as one of the grimmest stories in history. One incident +in it, not, I think, very generally known, I happened to hear from an +eye-witness of the scene, before 1898. It was as follows:</p> + + The Empress Frederick in the midst of the Bismarck crisis of March,<br> + 1890, when it was evident that the young Emperor William II was bent<br> + on getting rid of his Chancellor, and so "dropping the pilot" of his<br> + House, was sitting at home one afternoon, with the companion from<br> + whom I heard the story, when a servant, looking a good deal scared,<br> + announced that Prince Bismarck had called and wished to know whether<br> + her Majesty would receive him.<br> + + "Prince Bismarck!" said the Empress, in amazement. She had probably<br> + not seen him since the death of her husband, and relations between<br> + herself and him had been no more than official for years. Turning to<br> + her companion, she said, "What can he possibly want with me!"<br> + + She consented, however, to receive him, and the old Prince, agitated<br> + and hollow-eyed, made his appearance. He had come, as a last hope of<br> + placating the new Kaiser, to ask the Empress to use what influence<br> + she could on his behalf with her son. The Empress listened in<br> + growing astonishment. At the end there was a short silence. Then she<br> + said, with emotion: "I am sorry! You, yourself, Prince Bismarck,<br> + have destroyed all my influence with my son. I can do nothing."<br> + +<p>In a sense, it must have been a moment of triumph. But how tragic are +all the implications of the story! It was in my mind as I traveled to +Windsor on November 18, 1898. The following letter was written next day +to one of my children:</p> + + + D---- and I met at Windsor, and we mounted into the quadrangle,<br> + stopped at the third door on the right as Mrs. M---- had directed<br> + us, interviewed various gorgeous footmen, and were soon in Mrs.<br> + M---- 's little sitting-room. Then we found we should have some<br> + little time to wait, as the Empress was just going out with the<br> + Queen and would see me at a quarter to 1. So we waited, much amused<br> + by the talk around us. (It turned, if I remember right, on a certain<br> + German Princess, who had arrived a day or two before as the old<br> + Queen's guest, and had been taken since her arrival on such a<br> + strenuous round of tombs and mausoleums that, hearing on this<br> + particular morning that the Queen proposed to take her in the<br> + afternoon to see yet another mausoleum, she had stubbornly refused<br> + to get up. She had a headache, she said, and would stay in bed. But<br> + the ladies in waiting, with fits of laughter, described how the<br> + Queen had at once ordered her phenacetin, and how there was really<br> + no chance at all for the poor lady. The Queen would get her way, and<br> + the departed would be duly honored--headache or no headache. As<br> + indeed it turned out.)<br> + + Presently we saw the Queen's little pony-carriage pass along beyond<br> + the windows with the Empress Frederick, and the Grand Duke and<br> + Duchess Serge walking beside it, and the Indians behind. Then in a<br> + little while the Empress Frederick came hurrying back alone, and<br> + almost directly came my summons. Countess Perponcher, her lady in<br> + waiting, took me up through the Long Corridor, past the entrance to<br> + the Queen's rooms on one side, and Gordon's Bible, in its glass<br> + case, on the other, till we turned to the left, and I was in a small<br> + sitting-room, where a lady, gray-haired and in black, came forward<br> + to meet me.... We talked for about 50 minutes:--of German books and<br> + Universities--Harnack--Renan, for whom she had the greatest<br> + admiration--Strauss, of whom she told me various interesting<br> + things--German colonies, that she thought were "all<br> + nonsense"--Dreyfus, who in her eyes is certainly innocent--reaction<br> + in France--the difference between the Greek Church in Russia and the<br> + Greek Church in Greece, the hopes of Greece, and the freeing of<br> + Crete. It is evident that her whole heart is with Greece and her<br> + daughter there [the young Queen Sophia, on whose character recently<br> + deciphered documents have thrown so strong a light], and she spoke<br> + bitterly, as she always does, about the English hanging-back, and<br> + the dawdling of the European Concert. Then she described how she<br> + read <i>George Tressady</i> aloud to her invalid daughter till the<br> + daughter begged her to stop, lest she should cry over it all<br> + night--she said charming things of <i>Helbeck</i>, talked of Italy,<br> + D'Annunzio, quoted "my dear old friend Minghetti" as to the<br> + fundamental paganism in the Italian mind, asked me to write my name<br> + in her book, and to come and see her in Berlin--and it was time to<br> + go.... She is a very attractive, sensitive, impulsive woman, more<br> + charming than I had imagined, and, perhaps, less<br> + intellectual--altogether the very woman to set up the backs of<br> + Bismarck and his like. Never was there a more thorough Englishwoman!<br> + I found myself constantly getting her out of focus, by that<br> + confusion of mind which made one think of her as German.<br> + +<p>And to my father I wrote:</p> + + The Empress began by asking after Uncle Matt, and nothing could have<br> + been kinder and more sympathetic than her whole manner. But of<br> + course Bismarck hated her. She is absolutely English, parliamentary,<br> + and anti-despotic.... When I ventured to say in bidding her Good-by,<br> + that I had often felt great admiration and deep sympathy for her,<br> + which is true--she threw up her hands with a little sad or bitter<br> + gesture--"Oh!--admiration!--for <i>me</i>!"--as if she knew very well<br> + what it was to be conscious of the reverse. A touching, intelligent,<br> + impulsive woman, she seemed to me--no doubt often not a wise<br> + one--but very attractive.<br> + +<p>Nineteen years ago! And two years later, after long suffering, like her +husband, the last silence fell on this brave and stormy nature. Let us +thank God for it as we look out upon Europe and see what her son has +made of it.</p> + + +<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br> +<h2><a name="147"></a><a href="#151">CHAPTER VII</a></h2> +<br> + +<p class="c">THE VILLA BARBERINI. HENRY JAMES</p> + +<p>It was in the summer of 1898 that some suggestions gathered from the +love-story of Châteaubriand and Madame de Beaumont, and jotted down on a +sheet of note-paper, led to the writing of <i>Eleanor</i>. Madame de +Beaumont's melancholy life came to an end in Rome, and the Roman setting +imposed itself, so to speak, at once. But to write in Rome itself, +played upon by all the influences of a place where the currents of life +and thought, so far as those currents are political, historical, or +artistic, seem to be running at double tides, would be, I knew, +impossible, and we began to make inquiries for a place outside Rome, yet +not too far away, where we might spend the spring. We tried to get an +apartment at Frascati, but in vain. Then some friend suggested an +apartment in the old Villa Barberini at Castel Gandolfo, well known to +many an English and French diplomat, especially to the diplomat's wife +and children, flying to the hills to escape the summer heat of Rome. We +found by correspondence two kind little ladies living in Rome, who +agreed to make all the preparations for us, find servants, and provide +against a possibly cold spring to be spent in rooms meant only for +<i>villegiatura</i> in the summer. We were to go early in March, and fires or +stoves must be obtainable, if the weather pinched.</p> + +<p>The little ladies did everything--engaged servants, and bargained with +the Barberini Steward, but they could not bargain with the weather! On a +certain March day when the snow lay thick on the olives, and all the +furies were wailing round the Alban hills--we arrived. My husband, who +had journeyed out with us to settle us in, and was then returning to his +London work, was inclined to mocking prophecies that I should soon be +back in Rome at a comfortable hotel. Oh, how cold it was that first +night!--how dreary on the great stone staircase, and in the bare, +comfortless rooms! We looked out over a gray storm-swept Campagna, to a +distant line of surf-beaten coast; the kitchen was fifty-two steps below +the dining-room; the Neapolitan cook seemed to us a most formidable +gentleman, suggesting stilettos, and we sat down to our first meal +wondering whether we could possibly stay it out.</p> + + + But with the night (as I wrote some years ago) the snow vanished and<br> + the sun emerged. We ran east to one balcony, and saw the light<br> + blazing on the Alban lake, and had but to cross the apartment to<br> + find ourselves, on the other side, with all the Campagna at our<br> + feet, sparkling in a thousand colors to the sea. And outside was the<br> + garden, with its lemon-trees growing in vast jars--like the jars of<br> + Knossos--but marked with Barberini bees; its white and red camellias<br> + be-carpeting the soft grass with their fallen petals; its dark and<br> + tragic recesses where melancholy trees hung above piled fragments of<br> + the great Domitian villa whose ruins lay everywhere beneath our<br> + feet; its olive gardens sloping to the west, and open to the sun,<br> + open, too, to white, nibbling goats, and wandering <i>bambini</i>; its<br> + magical glimpse of St. Peter's to the north, through a notch in a<br> + group of stone-pines; and, last and best, its marvelous terrace that<br> + roofed a crypto-porticus of the old villa, whence the whole vast<br> + landscape, from Ostia and the mountains of Viterbo to the Circæan<br> + promontory, might be discerned, where one might sit and watch the<br> + sunsets burn in scarlet and purple down through the wide west into<br> + the shining bosom of the Tyrrhenian sea.<br> + + +<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br> +<p>And in one day we had made a home out of what seemed a desert. Books had +been unpacked, flowers had been brought in, the stoves were made to +burn, the hard chairs and sofas had been twisted and turned into +something more human and sociable, and we had begun to realize that we +were, after all, singularly fortunate mortals, put in possession for +three months--at the most moderate of rents!--of as much Italian beauty, +antiquity, and romance as any covetous soul could hope for--with Rome at +our gates, and leisurely time for quiet work.</p> + +<p>Our earliest guest was Henry James, and never did I see Henry James in a +happier light. A new light, too. For here, in this Italian country, and +in the Eternal City, the man whom I had so far mainly known as a +Londoner was far more at home than I; and I realized, perhaps more fully +than ever before, the extraordinary range of his knowledge and +sympathies.</p> + +<p>Roman history and antiquities, Italian art, Renaissance sculpture, the +personalities and events of the Risorgimento, all these solid +<i>connaissances</i> and many more, were to be recognized perpetually as rich +elements in the general wealth of Mr. James's mind. That he had read +immensely, observed immensely, talked immensely, became once more +gradually and delightfully clear on this new field. That he spoke French +to perfection was of course quickly evident to any one who had even a +slight acquaintance with him. M. Bourget once gave me a wonderful +illustration of it. He said that Mr. James was staying with himself and +Madame Bourget at their villa at Hyeres, not long after the appearance +of Kipling's "Seven Seas." M. Bourget, who by that time read and spoke +English fluently, complained of Mr. Kipling's technicalities, and +declared that he could not make head or tail of McAndrew's Hymn. +Whereupon Mr. James took up the book and, standing by the fire, fronting +his hosts, there and then put McAndrew's Hymn into vigorous idiomatic +French--an extraordinary feat, as it seemed to M. Bourget. Something +similar, it will be remembered, is told of Tennyson. "One evening," says +F. T. Palgrave of the poet, "he read out, offhand, Pindar's great +picture of the life of Heaven, in the Second Olympian, into pure modern +prose splendidly lucid and musical." Let who will decide which <i>tour de +force</i> was the more difficult.</p> + +<p>But Mr. James was also very much at home in Italian, while in the +literature, history, and art of both countries he moved with the +well-earned sureness of foot of the student. Yet how little one ever +thought of him as a student! That was the spell. He wore his +learning--and in certain directions he was learned--"lightly, like a +flower." It was to him not a burden to be carried, not a possession to +be proud of, but merely something that made life more thrilling, more +full of emotions and sensations--emotions and sensations which he was +always eager, without a touch of pedantry, to share with other people. +His knowledge was conveyed by suggestion, by the adroitest of hints and +indirect approaches. He was politely certain, to begin with, that you +knew it all; then to walk <i>with you</i> round and round the subject, +turning it inside out, playing with it, making mock of it, and catching +it again with a sudden grip, or a momentary flash of eloquence, seemed +to be for the moment his business in life. How the thing emerged, after +a few minutes, from the long involved sentences!--only involved because +the impressions of a man of genius are so many, and the resources of +speech so limited. This involution, this deliberation in attack, this +slowness of approach toward a point which in the end was generally +triumphantly rushed, always seemed to me more effective as Mr. James +used it in speech than as he employed it--some of us would say, to +excess--in a few of his latest books. For, in talk, his own living +personality--his flashes of fun--of courtesy--of "chaff"--were always +there, to do away with what, in the written word, became a difficult +strain on attention.</p> + +<p>I remember an amusing instance of it, when my daughter D----, who was +housekeeping for us at Castel Gandolfo, asked his opinion as to how to +deal with the Neapolitan cook, who had been anything but satisfactory, +in the case of a luncheon-party of friends from Rome. It was decided to +write a letter to the ex-bandit in the kitchen, at the bottom of the +fifty-two steps, requesting him to do his best, and pointing out recent +shortcomings. D----, whose Italian was then rudimentary, brought the +letter to Mr. James, and he walked up and down the vast <i>salone</i> of the +villa, striking his forehead, correcting and improvising. "A really nice +pudding" was what we justly desired, since the Neapolitan genius for +sweets is well known. Mr. James threw out half phrases--pursued +them--improved upon them--withdrew them--till finally he rushed upon the +magnificent bathos--"<i>un dolce come si deve</i>!"--which has ever since +been the word with us for the tiptop thing.</p> + +<p>With the country people he was simplicity and friendship itself. I +recollect him in close talk with a brown-frocked, barefooted monk, +coming from the monastery of Palazzuola on the farther side of the Alban +lake, and how the super-subtle, supersensitive cosmopolitan found not +the smallest difficulty in drawing out the peasant and getting at +something real and vital in the ruder, simpler mind. And again, on a +never-to-be-forgotten evening on the Nemi lake, when, on descending from +Genzano to the strawberry-farm that now holds the site of the famous +temple of Diana Nemorensis, we found a beautiful youth at the +<i>fattoria</i>, who for a few pence undertook to show us the fragments that +remain. Mr. James asked his name. "Aristodemo," said the boy, looking, +as he spoke the Greek name, "like to a god in form and stature." Mr. +James's face lit up, and he walked over the historic ground beside the +lad, Aristodemo picking up for him fragments of terra-cotta from the +furrows through which the plow had just passed, bits of the innumerable +small figurines that used to crowd the temple walls as ex-votos, and are +now mingled with the <i>fragole</i> in the rich alluvial earth. It was a +wonderful evening; with a golden sun on the lake, on the wide stretches +where the temple stood, and the niched wall where Lord Savile dug for +treasure and found it; on the great ship timbers also, beside the lake, +wreckage from Caligula's galleys, which still lie buried in the deepest +depth of the water; on the rock of Nemi, and the fortress-like Orsini +villa; on the Alban Mount itself, where it cut the clear sky. I +presently came up with Mr. James and Aristodemo, who led us on serenely, +a young Hermes in the transfiguring light. One almost looked for the +winged feet and helmet of the messenger god! Mr. James paused--his eyes +first on the boy, then on the surrounding scene. "Aristodemo!" he +murmured, smiling, and more to himself than me, his voice caressing the +word. "What a name! What a place!"</p> + +<p>On another occasion I recall him in company with the well-known +antiquary, Signer Lanciani, who came over to lunch, amusing us all by +the combination of learning with <i>le sport</i> which he affected. Let me +quote the account of it given by a girl of the party:</p> + + + Signor Lanciani is a great man who combines being <i>the</i> top<br> + authority in his profession with a kindness and <i>bonhomie</i> which<br> + make even an ignoramus feel happy with him--and with the frankest<br> + love for <i>flânerie</i> and "sport." We all fell in love with him. To<br> + hear him after lunch, in his fluent, but lisping English, holding<br> + forth about the ruins of Domitian's villa--"what treasures are still<br> + to be found in ziz garden if somebody would only <i>dig</i>!"--and saying<br> + with excitement--"ziz town, ziz Castello Gandolfo was built upon the<br> + site of Alba Longa, not Palazzuola at all. <i>Here</i>, Madame, beneath<br> + our feet, is Alba Longa"--And then suddenly--a pause, a deep sigh<br> + from his ample breast, and a whisper on the summer air--"I<br> + vonder--vether--von could make a golf-links around ziz garden!"<br> + + +<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br> +<p>And I see still Mr. James's figure strolling along the terrace which +roofed the crypto-porticus of the Roman villa, beside the professor--the +short coat, the summer hat, the smooth-shaven, finely cut face, now +alive with talk and laughter, now shrewdly, one might say coldly, +observant; the face of a satirist--but so human!--so alive to all that +underworld of destiny through which move the weaknesses of men and +women. We were sorry indeed when he left us. But there were many other +happy meetings to come through the sixteen years that remained--meetings +at Stocks and in London; letters and talks that were landmarks in my +literary life and in our friendship. Later on I shall quote from his +<i>Eleanor</i> letter, the best, perhaps, of all his critical letters to me, +though the <i>Robert Elsmere</i> letters, already published, run it hard. +That, too, was followed by many more. But as I do not intend to give +more than a general outline of the years that followed on 1900, I will +record here the last time but one that I ever saw Henry James--a vision, +an impression, which the retina of memory will surely keep to the end. +It was at Grosvenor Place in the autumn of 1915, the second year of the +war. How doubly close by then he had grown to all our hearts! His +passionate sympathy for England and France, his English +naturalization--a <i>beau geste</i> indeed, but so sincere, so moving--the +pity and wrath that carried him to sit by wounded soldiers and made him +put all literary work aside as something not worth doing, so that he +might spend time and thought on helping the American ambulance in +France--one must supply all this as the background of the scene.</p> + +<p>It was a Sunday afternoon. Our London house had been let for a time, but +we were in it again for a few weeks, drawn into the rushing tide of +war-talk and war anxieties. The room was full when Henry James came in. +I saw that he was in a stirred, excited mood, and the key to it was soon +found. He began to repeat the conversation of an American envoy to +Berlin--a well-known man--to whom he had just been listening. He +described first the envoy's impression of the German leaders, political +and military, of Berlin. "They seemed to him like men waiting in a room +from which the air is being slowly exhausted. They <i>know</i> they can't +win! It is only a question of how long, and how much damage they can +do." The American further reported that after his formal business had +been done with the Prussian Foreign Minister, the Prussian, relaxing his +whole attitude and offering a cigarette, said, "Now then, let me talk to +you frankly, as man to man!"--and began a bitter attack on the attitude +of President Wilson. Colonel---- listened, and when the outburst was +done, said: "Very well! Then I, too, will speak frankly. I have known +President Wilson for many years. He is a very strong man, physically and +morally. You can neither frighten him nor bluff him--"</p> + +<p>And then, springing up in his seat, "And, by Heaven! if you want war +with America, you can have it to-morrow!"</p> + +<p>Mr. James's dramatic repetition of this story, his eyes on fire, his +hand striking the arm of his chair, remains with me as my last sight of +him in a typical representative moment.</p> + +<p>Six months later, on March 6, 1916, my daughter and I were guests at the +British Headquarters in France. I was there at the suggestion of Mr. +Roosevelt and by the wish of our Foreign Office, in order to collect the +impressions and information that were afterward embodied in <i>England's +Effort</i>. We came down ready to start for the front, in a military motor, +when our kind officer escort handed us some English telegrams which had +just come in. One of them announced the death of Henry James; and all +through that wonderful day, when we watched a German counter-attack in +the Ypres salient from one of the hills southeast of Poperinghe, the +ruined tower of Ypres rising from the mists of the horizon, the news was +intermittently with me as a dull pain, breaking in upon the excitement +and novelty of the great spectacle around us.</p> + + "<i>A mortal, a mortal is dead</i>!"<br> +<br> + +<p>I was looking over ground where every inch was consecrated to the dead +sons of England, dead for her; but even through their ghostly voices +came the voice of Henry James, who, spiritually, had fought in their +fight and suffered in their pain.</p> + +<p>One year and a month before the American declaration of war. What he +would have given to see it--my dear old friend--whose life and genius +will enter forever into the bonds uniting England and America!</p> + +<hr style="width: 25%;"> + + + Yes!--<br> + ... He was a priest to us all<br> + Of the wonder and bloom of the world,<br> + Which we saw with his eyes and were glad.<br> +<br> + +<p>For that was indeed true of Henry James as of Wordsworth. The "wonder +and bloom," no less than the ugly or heartbreaking things, which, like +the disfiguring rags of old Laertes, hide them from us--he could weave +them all, with an untiring hand, into the many-colored web of his art. +Olive Chancellor, Madame Mauve, Milly, in <i>The Wings of a Dove</i>--the +most exquisite, in some ways, of all his women--Roderick Hudson, St. +George, the woman doctor in the <i>Bostonians,</i> the French family in the +<i>Reverberation</i>, Brooksmith--and innumerable others--it was the wealth +and facility of it all that was so amazing! There is enough observation +of character in a chapter of the <i>Bostonians,</i> a story he thought little +of, and did not include in his collected edition, to shame a Wells novel +of the newer sort, with its floods of clever, half-considered journalism +in the guise of conversation, hiding an essential poverty of creation. +<i>Ann Veronica</i> and the <i>New Machiavelli</i>, and several other tales by the +same writer, set practically the same scene, and handle the same +characters under different names. Of an art so false and confused Henry +James could never have been capable. His people, his situations, have +the sharp separateness--and something of the inexhaustibleness--of +nature, which does not mix her molds.</p> + +<p>As to method, naturally I often discussed with him some of the difficult +problems of presentation. The posthumous sketches of work in progress, +published since his death, show how he delighted in these problems, in +their very difficulties, in their endless opportunities. As he often +said to me, he could never read a novel that interested him without +taking it mentally to pieces and rewriting it in his own way. Some of +his letters to me are brilliant examples of this habit of his. +Technique, presentation, were then immensely important to him; important +as they never could have been to Tolstoy, who probably thought very +little consciously about them. Mr. James, as we all know, thought a +great deal about them--sometimes, I venture to think, too much. In <i>The +Wings of a Dove</i>, for instance, a subject full of beauty and tragedy is +almost spoiled by an artificial technique, which is responsible for a +scene on which, as it seems to me, the whole illusion of the book is +shattered. The conversation in the Venice apartment where the two +fiancé's--one of whom, at least, the man, is commended to our sympathy +as a decent and probable human being--make their cynical bargain in the +very presence of the dying Milly, for whose money they are plotting, is +in some ways a <i>tour de force</i> of construction. It is the central point +on which many threads converge and from which many depart. But to my +mind, as I have said, it invalidates the story. Mr. James is here +writing as a <i>virtuoso</i>, and not as the great artist we know him to be. +And the same, I think, is true of <i>The Golden Bowl.</i> That again is a +wonderful exercise in virtuosity; but a score of his slighter sketches +seem to me infinitely nearer to the truth and vitality of great art. The +book in which perhaps technique and life are most perfectly blended--at +any rate, among the later novels--is <i>The Ambassador</i>. There, the skill +with which a deeply interesting subject is focused from many points of +view, but always with the fascinating unity given to it, both by the +personality of the "Ambassador" and by the mystery to which every +character in the book is related, is kept in its place, the servant, not +the master, of the theme. And the climax--which is the river scene, when +the "Ambassador" penetrates at last the long-kept secret of the +lovers--is as right as it is surprising, and sinks away through +admirable modulations to the necessary close. And what beautiful things +in the course of the handling!--the old French Academician and his +garden, on the <i>rive gauche</i>, for example; or the summer afternoon on +the upper Seine, with its pleasure-boats, and the red parasol which +finally tells all--a picture drawn with the sparkle and truth of a +Daubigny, only the better to bring out the unwelcome fact which is its +center. <i>The Ambassador</i> is the masterpiece of Mr. James's later work +and manner, just as <i>The Portrait of a Lady</i> is the masterpiece of +the earlier.</p> + +<p>And the whole?--his final place?--when the stars of his generation rise +into their place above the spent field? I, at least, have no doubt +whatever about his security of fame; though very possibly he may be no +more generally read in the time to come than are most of the other great +masters of literature. Personally, I regret that, from <i>What Maisie +Knew</i> onward, he adopted the method of dictation. A mind so teeming, and +an art so flexible, were surely the better for the slight curb imposed +by the physical toil of writing. I remember how and when we first +discussed the <i>pros</i> and <i>cons</i> of dictation, on the fell above Cartmel +Chapel, when he was with us at Levens in 1887. He was then enchanted by +the endless vistas of work and achievement which the new method seemed +to open out. And indeed it is plain that he produced more with it than +he could have produced without it. Also, that in the use of dictation, +as in everything else, he showed himself the extraordinary craftsman +that he was, to whom all difficulty was a challenge, and the conquest of +it a delight. Still, the diffuseness and over-elaboration which were the +natural snares of his astonishing gifts were encouraged rather than +checked by the new method; and one is jealous of anything whatever that +may tend to stand between him and the unstinted pleasure of those to +come after.</p> + +<p>But when these small cavils are done, one returns in delight and wonder +to the accomplished work. To the <i>wealth</i> of it, above all--the deep +draughts from human life that it represents. It is true indeed that +there are large tracts of modern existence which Mr. James scarcely +touches, the peasant life, the industrial life, the small-trading life, +the political life; though it is clear that he divined them all, enough, +at least, for his purposes. But in his vast, indeterminate range of busy +or leisured folk, men and women with breeding and without it, backed +with ancestors or merely the active "sons of their works," young girls +and youths and children, he is a master indeed, and there is scarcely +anything in human feeling, normal or strange, that he cannot describe or +suggest. If he is without passion, as some are ready to declare, so are +Stendhal and Turguénieff, and half the great masters of the novel; and +if he seems sometimes to evade the tragic or rapturous moments, it is +perhaps only that he may make his reader his co-partner, that he may +evoke from us that heat of sympathy and intelligence which supplies the +necessary atmosphere for the subtler and greater kinds of art.</p> + +<p>And all through, the dominating fact is that it is "Henry James" +speaking--Henry James, with whose delicate, ironic mind and most human +heart we are in contact. There is much that can be <i>learned</i> in fiction; +the resources of mere imitation, which we are pleased to call realism, +are endless; we see them in scores of modern books. But at the root of +every book is the personality of the man who wrote it. And in the end, +that decides.</p> + + +<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br> +<h2><a name="148"></a><a href="#151">CHAPTER VIII</a></h2> +<br> + +<p class="c">ROMAN FRIENDS. <i>ELEANOR</i></p> + +<p>The spring of the following year (1900) saw us again in Rome. We spent +our April fortnight there, of which I specially remember some amusing +hours with Sir William Harcourt. I see myself, for instance, as a rather +nervous tourist in his wake and that of the very determined wife of a +young diplomat, storming the Vatican library at an hour when a bland +<i>custode</i> assured us firmly it was <i>not</i> open to visitors. But Sir +William's great height and bulk, aided by his pretty companion's +self-will, simply carried us through the gates by their natural +momentum. Father Ehrle was sent for and came, and we spent a triumphant +and delightful hour. After all, one is not an ex-British Cabinet +Minister for nothing. Sir William was perfectly civil to everybody, with +a blinking smile like that of the Cheshire cat; but nothing stopped him. +I laugh still at the remembrance. On the way home it was wet, and he and +I shared a <i>legno</i>. I remember we talked of Mr. Chamberlain, with whom +at that moment--May, 1899--Sir William was not in love; and of Lord +Hartington. "Hartington came to me one day when we were both serving +under Mr. G., and said to me in a temper, 'I wish I could get Gladstone +to answer letters.' 'My dear fellow, he always answers letters.' 'Well, +I have been trying to do something and I can't get a word out of him.' +'What have you been trying to do?' 'Well, to tell the truth, I've been +trying to make a bishop.' 'Have you? Not much in your line, I should +think. Now if it had been something about a horse--' 'Don't be absurd. +He would have made a very good bishop. C---- and S---- [naming two +well-known Liberals] told me I must--so I wrote--- and not a word! Very +uncivil, I call it.' 'Who was it?' 'Oh, I can't remember. Let me think. +Oh yes, it was a man with a double name--Llewellyn-Davies.' Sir William, +with a shout of laughter, 'Why, it took me five years to get him made +a Canon!'"</p> + +<p>The following year I sent him <i>Eleanor</i>, as a reminder of our meeting in +Rome, and he wrote:</p> + + To me the revisiting of Rome is the brightest spot of the day-dreams<br> + of life, and I treasure all its recollections. After the<br> + disappointment of the day when we were to have seen Albano and Nemi<br> + under your guidance, we managed the expedition, and were entranced<br> + with the scene even beyond our hopes, and since that time I have<br> + lived through it again in the pages of <i>Eleanor</i>, which I read with<br> + greediness, waiting each number as it appeared.<br> + + Now about Manisty. What a fortunate beggar, to have two such<br> + charming women in love with him! It is always so. The less a man<br> + deserves it the more they adore him. That is the advantage you women<br> + writers have. You always figure men as they are and women as they<br> + ought to be. If I had the composition of the history I should never<br> + represent two women behaving so well to one another under the<br> + circumstances. Even American girls, according to my observation, do<br> + not show so much toleration to their rivals, even though in the end<br> + they carry off their man....<br> + + Your sincerely attached<br> + + W. V. HARCOURT.<br> + +<p>Let me detach a few other figures from a gay and crowded time, the +ever-delightful and indefatigable Boni--Commendatore Boni--for instance. +To hear him talk in the Forum or hold forth at a small gathering of +friends on the problems of the earliest Italian races, and the causes +that met in the founding and growth of Rome, was to understand how no +scholar or archeologist can be quite first-rate who is not also +something of a poet. The sleepy blue eyes, so suddenly alive; the +apparently languid manner which was the natural defense against the +outer world of a man all compact of imagination and sleepless energy; +the touch in him of "the imperishable child," combined with the brooding +intensity of the explorer who is always guessing at the next riddle; the +fun, simplicity, <i>bonhomie</i> he showed with those who knew him well--all +these are vividly present to me.</p> + +<p>So, too, are the very different characteristics of Monseigneur Duchesne, +the French Lord Acton; like him, a Liberal, and a man of vast learning, +tarred with the Modernist brush in the eyes of the Vatican, but at heart +also like Lord Acton, by the testimony of all who know, a simple and +convinced believer.</p> + +<p>When we met Monseigneur Duchesne at the house of Count Ugo Balzani, or +in the drawing-room of the French Embassy, all that showed, at first, +was the witty ecclesiastic of the old school, an abbe of the eighteenth +century, <i>fin</i>, shrewd, well versed in men and affairs, and capable of +throwing an infinity of meaning into the inflection of a word or the +lift of an eyebrow. I remember listening to an account by him of certain +ceremonies in the catacombs in which he had taken part, in the train of +an Ultramontane Cardinal whom he particularly disliked. He himself had +preached the sermon. A member of the party said, "I hear your audience +were greatly moved, Monsignore." Duchesne bowed, with just a touch of +irony. Then some one who knew the Cardinal well and the relation between +him and Duchesne, said, with <i>malice prepense</i>, "Was his Eminence moved, +Monsignore?" Duchesne looked up and shook off the end of his cigarette. +"<i>Non, Monsieur</i>," he said, dryly, "his Eminence was not moved--oh, not +at all!" A ripple of laughter went round the group which had heard the +question. For a second, Duchesne's eyes laughed, too, and were then as +impenetrable as before. My last remembrance of him is as the center of a +small party in one of the famous rooms of the Palazzo Borghese which +were painted by the Caracci, this time in a more serious and +communicative mood, so that one realized in him more clearly the +cosmopolitan and liberal scholar, whose work on the early Papacy, and +the origins of Christianity in Rome, is admired and used by men of all +faiths and none. Shortly afterward, a Roman friend of ours, an +Englishman who knew Monseigneur Duchesne well, described to me the +impressions of an English Catholic who had gone with him to Egypt on +some learned mission, and had been thrown for a time into relations of +intimacy with him. My friend reported the touch of astonishment in the +Englishman's mind, as he became aware of the religious passion in his +companion, the devotion of his daily mass, the rigor and simplicity of +his personal life; and we both agreed that as long as Catholicism could +produce such types, men at once so daring and so devout, so free, and +yet so penetrated with--so steeped in--the immemorial life of +Catholicism, the Roman Church was not likely to perish out of Europe.</p> + +<p>Let me, however, contrast with Monseigneur Duchesne another Catholic +personality--that of Cardinal Vaughan. I remember being asked to join a +small group of people who were to meet Cardinal Vaughan on the steps of +St. Peter's, and to go with him, and Canon Oakley, an English convert to +Catholicism, through the famous crypt and its monuments. We stood for +some twenty minutes outside St. Peter's, while Cardinal Vaughan, in the +manner of a cicerone reeling off his task, gave us <i>in extenso</i> the +legendary stories of St. Peter's and St. Paul's martyrdoms. Not a touch +of criticism, of knowledge, of insight--a childish tale, told by a man +who had never asked himself for a moment whether he really believed it. +I stood silently by him, inwardly comparing the performance with certain +pages by the Abbe Duchesne, which I had just been reading. Then we +descended to the crypt, the Cardinal first kneeling at the statue of St. +Peter. The crypt, as every one knows, is full of fragments from +Christian antiquity, sarcophagi of early Popes, indications of the +structures that preceded the present building, fragments from papal +tombs, and so on. But it was quite useless to ask the Cardinal for an +explanation or a date. He knew nothing, and he had never cared to know. +Again and again, I thought, as we passed some shrine or sarcophagus +bearing a name or names that sent a thrill through one's historical +sense--"If only J.R. Green were here!--how these dead bones would live!" +But the agnostic historian was in his grave, and the Prince of the Roman +Church passed ignorantly and heedlessly by.</p> + +<p>A little while before, I had sat beside the Cardinal at a +luncheon-party, where the case of Doctor Schell, the Rector of the +Catholic University of Würzburg, who had published a book condemned by +the Congregation of the Index, came up for discussion. Doctor Schell's +book, <i>Catholicismus und Fortschritt</i>, was a plea on behalf of the +Catholic Universities of Bavaria against the Jesuit seminaries which +threatened to supplant them; and he had shown with striking clearness +the disastrous results which the gradual narrowing of Catholic education +had had on the Catholic culture of Bavaria. The Jesuit influence at Rome +had procured the condemnation of the book. Doctor Schell at first +submitted; then, just before the luncheon-party at which I was present, +withdrew his submission.</p> + +<p>I saw the news given to the Cardinal. He shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, +poor fellow!" he said. "Poor fellow!" It was not said unkindly, rather +with a kind of easy pity; but the recollection came back to me in the +crypt of St. Peter's, and I seemed to see the man who could not shut his +ear to knowledge and history struggling in the grip of men like the +Cardinal, who knew no history.</p> + +<p>Echoes and reflections from these incidents will be found in <i>Eleanor</i>, +and it was the case of Doctor Schell that suggested Father Benecke.</p> + +<p>So the full weeks passed on. Half <i>Eleanor</i> had been written, and in +June we turned homeward. But before then, one visitor came to the Villa +Barberini in our last weeks there, who brought with him, for myself, a +special and peculiar joy. My dear father, with his second wife, arrived +to spend a week with us. Never before, throughout all his ardent +Catholic life, had it been possible for him to tread the streets of Rome +or kneel in St. Peter's. At last, the year before his death, he was to +climb the Janiculum, and to look out over the city and the plain whence +Europe received her civilization and the vast system of the Catholic +Church. He felt as a Catholic; but hardly less as a scholar, one to whom +Horace and Virgil had been familiar from his boyhood, the greater +portion of them known by heart, to a degree which is not common now. I +remember well that one bright May morning at Castle Gandolfo, he +vanished from the villa, and presently, after some hours, reappeared +with shining eyes.</p> + +<p>"I have been on the Appian Way--I have walked where Horace walked!"</p> + +<p>In his own autobiography he writes: "In proportion to a man's good sense +and soundness of feeling are the love and admiration, increasing with +his years, which he bears toward Horace." An old-world judgment, some +will say, which to us, immersed in this deluge of war which is changing +the face of all things, may sound, perhaps, as a thin and ghostly voice +from far away. It comes from the Oxford of Newman and Matthew Arnold, of +Jowett and Clough; and for the moment, amid the thunder and anguish of +our time, it is almost strange to our ears. But when the tumult and the +shouting die, and "peace has calmed the world," whatever else may have +passed, the poets and the thinkers will be still there, safe in their +old shrines, for they are the "ageless mouths" of all mankind, when men +are truly men. The supposed reformers, who thirst for the death of +classical education, will not succeed, because man doth not live by +bread alone, and certain imperishable needs in him have never been so +fully met as by some Greeks and some Latins, writing in a vanished +society, which yet, by reason of their thought and genius, is still in +some real sense ours. More science? More foreign languages? More +technical arts? Yes! All these. But if democracy is to mean the +disappearance of the Greek and Latin poets from the minds of the future +leaders of our race, the history of three thousand years is there to +show what the impoverishment will be.</p> + +<p>As to this, a personal experience, even from one who in Greek literature +is only a "proselyte of the gate," may not be without interest. I shall +never forget the first time, when, in middle life, I read in the Greek, +so as to understand and enjoy, the "Agamemnon" of Æschylus. The feeling +of sheer amazement at the range and power of human thought--and at such +a date in history--which a leisurely and careful reading of that play +awakened in me, left deep marks behind. It was as though for me, +thenceforward, the human intellect had been suddenly related, much more +clearly than ever before, to an absolute, ineffable source, "not +itself." So that, in realizing the greatness of the mind of Æschylus, +the creative Mind from which it sprang had in some new and powerful way +touched my own; with both new light on the human Past, and mysterious +promise for the Future. Now, for many years, the daily reading of Greek +and Latin has been not only a pleasure, but the only continuous bit of +mental discipline I have been able to keep up.</p> + +<p>I do not believe this will seem exaggerated to those on whom Greek +poetry and life have really worked. My father, or the Master, or Matthew +Arnold, had any amateur spoken in similar fashion to them, would have +smiled, but only as those do who are in secure possession of some +precious thing, on the eagerness of the novice who has just laid a +precarious hold upon it.</p> + +<p>At any rate, as I look back upon my father's life of constant labor and +many baffled hopes, there are at least two bright lights upon the scene. +He had the comfort of religious faith, and the double joy of the scholar +and of the enthusiast for letters. He would not have bartered these +great things, these seeming phantoms--</p> + + Eternal as the recurrent cloud, as air<br> + Imperative, refreshful as dawn-dew--<br> + +<p>for any of the baser goods that we call real. A year and a half after +his visit to Rome, he died in Dublin, where he had been for years a +Fellow and Professor of the Irish University, occupied in lecturing on +English literature, and in editing some of the most important English +Chronicles for the Rolls Series. His monument, a beautiful medallion by +Mr. Derwent Wood, which recalls him to the life, hangs on the wall of +the University Church, in Stephen's Green, which was built in Newman's +time and under his superintendence. The only other monument in the +church is that to the great Cardinal himself. So once more, as in 1886, +they--the preacher and his convert--are together. "<i>Domine, Deus meus, +in Te speravi</i>." So, on my father's tablet, runs the text below the +quiet, sculptured face. It expresses the root fact of his life.</p> + +<p>A few weeks before my father's death <i>Eleanor</i> appeared. It had taken me +a year and a quarter to write, and I had given it full measure of work. +Henry James wrote to me, on receipt of it, that it gave him</p> + + . . . the chance to overflow into my favorite occupation of rewriting as<br> + I read, such fiction as--I can read. I took this liberty in an<br> + inordinate degree with Eleanor--and I always feel it the highest<br> + tribute I can pay. I recomposed and reconstructed her from head to<br> + foot--which I give you for the real measure of what I think of her.<br> + I think her, less obscurely--a thing of rare beauty, a large and<br> + noble performance, rich, complex, comprehensive, deeply interesting<br> + and highly distinguished. I congratulate you heartily on having<br> + <i>mené à bonne fin</i> so intricate and difficult a problem, and on<br> + having seen your subject so wrapped in its air and so bristling with<br> + its relations. I should say that you had done nothing more<br> + homogeneous, nor more hanging and moving together. It has<br> + Beauty--the book, the theme and treatment alike, is magnificently<br> + mature, and is really a delightful thing to have been able to do--to<br> + have laid at the old golden door of the beloved Italy. You deserve<br> + well of her. I can't "criticize"--though I <i>could</i> (that is, I<br> + <i>did</i>--but can't do it again)--rewrite. The thing's infinitely<br> + delightful and distinguished, and that's enough. The success of it,<br> + specifically, to my sense is Eleanor, admirably sustained in the<br> + "high-note" way, without a break or a drop. She is a very exquisite<br> + and very rendered conception. I won't grossly pretend to you that I<br> + think the book hasn't a weakness and rather a grave one, or you will<br> + doubt of my intelligence. It <i>has</i> one, and in this way, to my<br> + troubled sense: that the anti-thesis on which your subject rests<br> + isn't a real, valid anti-thesis. It was utterly built, your subject,<br> + by your intention, of course, on one; but the one you chose seems to<br> + me not efficiently to have operated, so that if the book is so<br> + charming and touching even so, that is a proof of your affluence.<br> + Lucy has in respect to Eleanor--that is, the image of Lucy that you<br> + have tried to teach yourself to see--has no true, no adequate, no<br> + logical antithetic force--and this is not only, I think, because the<br> + girl is done a little more <i>de chic</i> than you would really have<br> + liked to do her, but because the <i>nearer</i> you had got to her type<br> + the less she would have served that particular condition of your<br> + subject. You went too far for her, or, going so far, should have<br> + brought her back--roughly speaking--stronger. (Irony--and various<br> + things!--should at its hour have presided.) But I throw out that<br> + more imperfectly, I recognize, than I should wish. It doesn't<br> + matter, and not a solitary reader in your millions, or critic in<br> + your hundreds, will either have missed, or have made it! And when a<br> + book's beautiful, nothing <i>does</i> matter! I hope greatly to see you<br> + after the New Year. Good night. It's my usual 1.30 A.M.<br> + + Yours, dear Mrs. Ward, always,<br> + + HENRY JAMES.<br> +<br> + +<p>I could not but feel, indeed, that the book had given great pleasure to +those I might well wish to please. My old friend, Mr. Frederic Harrison, +wrote to me:--"I have read it all through with great attention and +delight, and have returned to it again and again.... I am quite sure +that it is the most finished and artistic of all your books and one of +the most subtle and graceful things in all our modern fiction." And +Charles Eliot Norton's letter from Shady Hill, the letter of one who +never praised perfunctorily or insincerely, made me glad:</p> + + + "It would be easier to write about the book to any one else but<br> + you.... You have added to the treasures of English imaginative<br> + literature, and no higher reward than this can any writer hope to<br> + gain." The well-known and much-loved editor of the <i>Century</i>,<br> + Richard Watson Gilder, "on this the last Sunday of the nineteenth<br> + century"--so he headed his letter--sat down to give a long hour of<br> + precious time to <i>Eleanor's</i> distant author.<br> + + How can you reconcile it to your conscience to write a book like<br> + <i>Eleanor</i> that keeps a poor fellow reading it to a finish till after<br> + three in the morning? Not only that--but that keeps him sobbing and<br> + sighing "like a furnace," that charms him and makes him angry--that<br> + hurts and delights him, and will not let him go till all is done!<br> + Yes, there are some things I might quarrel with--but, ah, how much<br> + you give of Italy--of the English, of the American--three nations so<br> + well-beloved; and how much of things deeper than peoples or<br> + countries.<br> + + Imagine me at our New England farm--with the younger part of the<br> + family--in my annual "retreat." Last year at this time I was here,<br> + with the thermometer a dozen degrees below zero; now it is milder,<br> + but cold, bleak, snowy. Yesterday we were fishing for pickerel<br> + through the ice at Hayes's Pond--in a wilderness where fox<br> + abound--and where bear and deer make rare appearances--all within a<br> + few miles of Lenox and Stockbridge. The farmer's family is at one<br> + end of the long farm-house--I am at the other. It is a great place<br> + to read--one reads here with a sort of lonely passion. You know the<br> + landscape--it is in <i>Eleanor</i>. Last night (or this morning) I wanted<br> + to talk with you about your book--or telegraph--but here I am calmly<br> + trying to thank you both for sending us the copy--and, too, for<br> + writing it.<br> + + Of the "deeper things" I can really say nothing--except that I feel<br> + their truth, and am grateful for them. But may I not applaud (even<br> + the Pope is "applauded," you know) such a perfect touch as--for<br> + instance--in Chapter XVI--"the final softening of that sweet<br> + austerity which hid Lucy's heart of gold"; and again "Italy without<br> + the <i>forestieri</i>" "like surprising a bird on its nest"; and the<br> + scene beheld of Eleanor--Lucy pressing the terra-cotta to her<br> + lips;--and Italy "having not enough faith to make a heresy"--(true,<br> + too, of France, is it not?) and Chapter XXIII--"a base and<br> + plundering happiness"; and the scene of the confessional; and that<br> + sudden phrase of Eleanor's in her talk with Manisty that makes the<br> + whole world--and the whole book--right, "<i>She loves you!"</i> That is<br> + art.... But, above all, my dear lady, acknowledgments and praise for<br> + the hand that created "Lucy"--that recreated, rather--my dear<br> + countrywoman! Truly, that is an accomplishment and one that will<br> + endear its author to the whole new world.<br> + +<p>And again one asks whether the readers that now are write such generous, +such encouraging things to the makers of tales, as the readers of twenty +years ago! If not, I cannot but think it is a loss. For praise is a +great tonic, and helps most people to do their best.</p> + +<hr style="width: 25%;"> + +<p>It was during our stay on the Alban hills that I first became conscious +in myself, after a good many springs spent in Italy, of a deep and +passionate sympathy for the modern Italian State and people; a sympathy +widely different from that common temper in the European traveler which +regards Italy as the European playground, picture-gallery, and +curiosity-shop, and grudges the smallest encroachment by the needs of +the new nation on the picturesque ruin of the past. Italy in 1899 was +passing through a period of humiliation and unrest. The defeats of the +luckless Erythrean expedition were still hot in Italian memory. The +extreme Catholic party at home, the sentimental Catholic tourist from +abroad, were equally contemptuous and critical; and I was often +indignantly aware of a tone which seemed to me ungenerous and unjust +toward the struggling Italian State, on the part of those who had really +most cause to be grateful for all that the youngest--and oldest--of +European Powers had done in the forty years since 1860 to furnish itself +with the necessary equipment, moral, legal, and material, of a modern +democracy.</p> + +<p>This vein of feeling finds expression in <i>Eleanor</i>. Manisty represents +the scornful dilettante, the impatient accuser of an Italy he does not +attempt to understand; while the American Lucy, on the other side draws +from her New England tradition a glowing sympathy for the Risorgimento +and its fruits, for the efforts and sacrifices from which modern Italy +arose, that refuses to be chilled by the passing corruptions and +scandals of the new <i>régime</i>. Her influence prevails and Manisty +recants. He spends six solitary weeks wandering through middle Italy, in +search of the fugitives--Eleanor and Lucy--who have escaped him--and at +the end of it he sees the old, old country and her people with new +eyes--which are Lucy's eyes.</p> + + "What rivers--what fertility--what a climate! And the industry of<br> + the people! Catch a few English farmers and set them to do what the<br> + Italian peasant does, year in and year out, without a murmur! Look<br> + at all the coast south of Naples. There is not a yard of it,<br> + scarcely, that hasn't been made by human hands. Look at the hill<br> + towns; and think of the human toil that has gone to the making and<br> + maintaining of them since the world began.... <i>Ecco!</i>--there they<br> + are"--and he pointed down the river to the three or four distant<br> + towns, each on its mountain spur, that held the valley between them<br> + and Orvieto, pale jewels on the purple robe of rock and wood--"So<br> + Virgil saw them. So the latest sons of time shall see them--the<br> + homes of a race that we chatter about without understanding--the<br> + most laborious race in the wide world.... Anyway, as I have been<br> + going up and down their country, ... prating about their poverty,<br> + and their taxes, their corruption, the incompetence of their<br> + leaders, the mischief of their quarrel with the Church; I have been<br> + finding myself caught in the grip of things older and<br> + deeper--incredibly, primevally old!--that still dominate everything,<br> + shape everything here. There are forces in Italy, forces of land and<br> + soil and race--only now fully let loose--that will remake Church no<br> + less than State, as the generations go by. Sometimes I have felt as<br> + though this country were the youngest in Europe; with a future as<br> + fresh and teeming as the future of America. And yet one thinks of it<br> + at other times as one vast graveyard; so thick it is with the ashes<br> + and the bones of men! The Pope--and Crispi!--waves, both of them, on<br> + a sea of life that gave them birth 'with equal mind'; and that 'with<br> + equal mind' will sweep them both to its own goal--not theirs! ...<br> + No--there are plenty of dangers ahead.... Socialism is serious;<br> + Sicily is serious; the economic difficulties are serious; the House<br> + of Savoy will have a rough task, perhaps, to ride the seas that may<br> + come.--But <i>Italy</i> is safe. You can no more undo what has been done<br> + than you can replace the child in the womb. The birth is over. The<br> + organism is still weak, but it lives. And the forces behind it are,<br> + indefinitely, mysteriously stronger than its adversaries think."<br> +<br> + +<p>In this mood it was that, when the book came out in the autumn of 1900, +I prefixed to it the dedication--"To Italy, the beloved and beautiful, +Instructress of our past, Delight of our present, Comrade of our future, +the heart of an Englishwoman offers this book."</p> + +<p>"<i>Comrade of our future</i>." As one looks out to-day upon the Italian +fighting-line, where English troops are interwoven with those of Italy +and France for the defense of the Lombard and Venetian plain against the +attack of Italy's old and bitter enemy, an attack in which are concerned +not only the fortunes of Italy, but those also of the British Empire, I +wonder what touch of prophecy, what whisper from a far-off day, +suggested these words written eighteen years ago?</p> + + +<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br> +<h2><a name="149"></a><a href="#151">EPILOGUE</a></h2> +<br> + +<p>And here, for a time at least, I bring these <i>Recollections</i> to an +end with the century in which I was born, and my own fiftieth year. +Since <i>Eleanor</i> appeared, and my father died, eighteen years have +gone--years for me of constant work, literary and other. On the one +hand, increasing interest in and preoccupation with politics, owing to +personal links and friendships, and a life spent, as to half the year, +in London, have been reflected in my books; and on the other, the +English rural scene, with its country houses and villages, its religion, +and its elements of change and revolution, has been always at my home +gates, as a perpetually interesting subject. Old historic situations, +also, have come to life for me again in new surroundings, as in <i>Lady +Rose's Daughter</i>, <i>The Marriage of William Ashe</i>, and +<i>Fenwick's Career;</i> in <i>Richard Meynell</i> I attempted the +vision of a Church of England recreated from within, with a rebel, and +not--as in <i>Robert Elsmere</i>--an exile, for a hero; <i>Lady +Connie</i> is a picture of Oxford as I saw her in my youth, as faithful +as I can now make it; <i>Eltham House</i> is a return to the method of +<i>William Ashe</i>, and both <i>Lady Connie</i> and <i>Missing</i> have +been written since the war. <i>Missing</i> takes for its subject a +fragment from the edge of that vast upheaval which no novel of real life +in future will be able to leave out of its ken. In the first two years +of the war, the cry both of writers and public--so far as the literature +of imagination was concerned--tended to be--"anything but the war"! +There was an eager wish in both, for a time, in the first onrush of the +great catastrophe, to escape from it and the newspapers, into the world +behind it. That world looks to us now as the Elysian fields looked to +Æneas as he approached them from the heights--full not only of souls in +a blessed calm, but of those also who had yet to make their way into +existence as it terribly <i>is</i>, had still to taste reality and pain. +We were thankful, for a time, to go back to that kind, unconscious, +unforeseeing world. But it is no longer possible. The war has become our +life, and will be so for years after the signing of peace.</p> + +<p>As to the three main interests, outside my home life, which, as I look +back upon half a century, seem to have held sway over my +thoughts--contemporary literature, religious development, and social +experiment--one is tempted to say a few last summarizing things, though, +amid the noise of war, it is hard to say them with any real detachment +of mind.</p> + +<p>When we came up to London in 1881, George Eliot was just dead (December, +1880); Browning and Carlyle passed away in the course of the 'eighties; +Tennyson in 1892. I saw the Tennyson funeral in the Abbey, and remember +it vividly. The burying of Mr. Gladstone was more stately; this of +Tennyson, as befitted a poet, had a more intimate beauty. A great +multitude filled the Abbey, and the rendering, in Sir Frederick Bridge's +setting, of "Crossing the Bar" by the Abbey Choir sent the "wild echoes" +of the dead man's verse flying up and on through the great arches +overhead with a dramatic effect not to be forgotten. Yet the fame of the +poet was waning when he died, and has been hotly disputed since; though, +as it seems to me, these later years have seen the partial return of an +ebbing tide. What was merely didactic in Tennyson is dead years ago; the +difficulties of faith and philosophy, with which his own mind had +wrestled, were, long before his death, swallowed up in others far more +vital, to which his various optimisms, for all the grace in which he +clothed them, had no key, or suggestion of a key, to offer. The +"Idylls," so popular in their day, and almost all, indeed, of the +narrative and dramatic work, no longer answer to the needs of a +generation that has learned from younger singers and thinkers a more +restless method, a more poignant and discontented thought. A literary +world fed on Meredith and Henry James, on Ibsen or Bernard Shaw or +Anatole France, or Synge or Yeats, rebels against the versified +argument, however musical or skilful, built up in "In Memoriam," and +makes mock of what it conceives to be the false history and weak +sentiment of the "Idylls." All this, of course, is true, and has been +said a thousand times, but--and here again the broad verdict is +emerging--it does not touch the lyrical fame of a supreme lyrical poet. +It may be that one small volume will ultimately contain all that is +really immortal in Tennyson's work. But that volume, it seems to me, +will be safe among the golden books of our literature, cherished alike +by young lovers and the "drooping old."</p> + +<p>I only remember seeing Tennyson twice--once in a crowded drawing-room, +and once on the slopes of Blackdown, in his big cloak. The strong set +face under the wide-awake, the energy of undefeated age that breathed +from the figure, remains with me, stamped on my memory, like the gentle +face of Mrs. Wordsworth, or a passing glimpse--a gesture--of George +Meredith as we met on the threshold of Mr. Cotter Morison's house at +Hampstead, one day perhaps in 1886 or 1887, and he turned his handsome +curly head with a smile and a word when Mr. Morison introduced us. He +was then not yet sixty, already a little lame, but the radiant physical +presence scarcely marred. We had some passing talk that day, but--to my +infinite regret--that was the only time I ever saw him. Of his work and +his genius I began to be aware when "Beauchamp's Career"--a much +truncated version--was coming out in the <i>Fortnightly</i> in 1874. I +had heard him and his work discussed in the Lincoln circle, where both +the Pattisons were quite alive to Meredith's quality; but I was at the +time and for long afterward under the spell of the French limpidity and +clarity, and the Meredithian manner repelled me. About the same time, +when I was no more than three or four and twenty, I remember a visit to +Cambridge, when we spent a week-end at the Bull Inn, and were the guests +by day of Frederic Myers, and some of his Trinity and King's friends. +Those two days of endless talk in beautiful College rooms with men like +Frederic Myers, Edmund Gurney, Mr. Gerald Balfour, Mr. George Prothero, +and others, left a deep mark on me. Cambridge seemed to me then a hearth +whereon the flame of thought burnt with far greater daring and freedom +than at Oxford. Men were not so afraid of one another; the sharp +religious divisions of Oxford were absent; ideas were thrown up like +balls in air, sure that some light hand would catch and pass them on. +And among the subjects which rose and fell in that warm electric +atmosphere, was the emergence of a new and commanding genius in George +Meredith. The place in literature that some of these brilliant men were +already giving to <i>Richard Feverel</i>, which had been published some +fifteen years earlier, struck me greatly; but if I was honest with +myself, my enthusiasm was much more qualified than theirs. It was not +till <i>Diana of the Crossways</i> came out, after we had moved to +London, that the Meredithian power began to grip me; and to this day the +saturation with French books and French ideals that I owed to my uncle's +influence during our years at Oxford, stands somewhat between me and a +great master. And yet, in this case, as in that of Mr. James, there is +no doubt that difficulty--even obscurity!--are part of the spell. The +man behind is <i>great enough</i>, and rewards the reader's effort to +understand him with a sense of heightened power, just as a muscle is +strengthened by exercise. In other words, the effort is worth while; we +are admitted by it to a world of beauty or romance or humor that without +it we should not know; and with the thing gained goes, as in +Alpine-climbing, the pleasure of the effort itself.</p> + +<p>Especially is this the case in poetry, where the artist's thought +fashions for itself a manner more intimate and personal than in prose. +George Meredith's poetry is still only the possession of a minority, +even among those who form the poetic audience of a generation. There are +many of us who have wanted much help, in regard to it, from others--the +young and ardent--who are the natural initiates, the "Mystae" of the +poetic world. But once let the strange and poignant magic of it, its +music in discord, its sharp sweetness, touch the inward +ear--thenceforward we shall follow its piping.</p> + +<p>Let me record another regret for another lost opportunity. In spite of +common friends, and worlds that might have met, I never saw Robert Louis +Stevenson--the writer who more, perhaps, than any other of his +generation touched the feeling and won the affection of his time. And +that by a double spell--of the life lived and the books written. +Stevenson's hold both upon his contemporaries, and those who since his +death have had only the printed word of his letters and tales whereby to +approach him, has not been without some points of likeness--amid great +difference--to the hold of the Brontës on their day and ours. The sense +of an unsurpassable courage--against great odds--has been the same in +both cases; and a great tenderness in the public mind for work so +gallant, so defiant of ill fortune, so loyal to its own aims. In +Stevenson's case, quite apart from the claims of his work as literature, +there was also an added element which, with all their genius, the +Brontës did not possess--the element of charm, the <i>petit +carillon,</i> to which Renan attributed his own success in literature: +undefinable, always, this last!--but supreme.<a name="FNanchor2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2"><sup>[2]</sup></a> There is scarcely a +letter of Stevenson's that is without it, it plays about the slender +volumes of essays or of travel that we know so well; but it is present +not only in the lighter books and tales, not only in the enchanting +fairy-tale, "Prince Otto," but in his most tragic, or his most +intellectual work--in the fragment "Weir of Hermiston," or in that fine +piece of penetrating psychology and admirable narrative, <i>The Master +of Ballantrae</i>. It may, I think, be argued whether in the far future +Stevenson will be more widely and actively remembered--whether he will +enter into the daily pleasure of those who love literature--more as a +letter-writer, or more as a writer of fiction. Whether, in other words, +his own character and personality will not prove the enduring thing, +rather than the characters he created. The volumes of letters, with +their wonderful range and variety, their humor, their bravery, their +<i>vision</i>--whether of persons or scenes--already mean to some of us +more than his stories, dear to us as these are.</p> + +<p>He died in his forty-fifth year, at the height of his power. If he had +lived ten--twenty--years longer, he might well have done work that would +have set him with Scott in the history of letters. As it is, he remains +the most graceful and appealing, the most animated and delightful, +figure in the literary history of the late nineteenth century. He is +sure of his place. "Myriad-footed Time will discover many other +inventions; but mine are mine!" And to that final award his poems no +less than his letters will richly contribute--the haunting beauty of the +"Requiem," the noble lines "To my Father," the lovely verses "In memory +of F.A.S."--surely immortal, so long as mother-hearts endure.<br> +</p> +<p><a name="Footnote_2"></a></p> +<p><a href="#FNanchor2">[2]</a>Greek: Ti gar chariton agapaton Anthropois apaneuthen;</p> +<p><img src="Greek.gif" alt=""></p> + +<p>Another great name was steadily finding its place during our first +London years. Thomas Hardy had already published some of his best novels +in the 'seventies, and was in full production all through the 'eighties +and 'nineties. The first of the Hardy novels that strongly affected me +was the <i>Return of the Native</i>, and I did not read it till some +time after its publication. Although there had been a devoted and +constantly growing audience for Mr. Hardy's books for twenty years +before the publication of <i>Tess of the Durbervilles,</i> my own +recollection is that Tess marked the conversion of the larger public, +who then began to read all the earlier books, in that curiously changed +mood which sets in when a writer is no longer on trial, but has, so to +speak, "made good."</p> + +<p>And since that date how intimately have the scenes and characters of Mr. +Hardy's books entered into the mind and memory of his country, +compelling many persons, slowly and by degrees--I count myself among +this tardy company--to realize their truth, sincerity, and humanity, in +spite of the pessimism with which so many of them are tinged; their +beauty also, notwithstanding the clashing discords that a poet, who is +also a realist, cannot fail to strike; their permanence in English +literature; and the greatness of Mr. Hardy's genius! Personally, I would +make only one exception. I wish Mr. Hardy had not written <i>Jude the +Obscure!</i> On the other hand, in the three volumes of <i>The +Dynasts</i> he has given us one of the noblest, and possibly one of the +most fruitful, experiments in recent English letters.</p> + +<p>Far more rapid was the success of Mr. Kipling, which came a decade later +than Mr. Hardy's earlier novels. It thrills one's literary pulse now to +look back to those early paper-covered treasures, written by a youth, a +boy of genius; which for the first time made India interesting to +hundreds of thousands in the Western world; which were the heralds also +of a life's work of thirty years, unfailingly rich, and still unspent! +The debt that two generations owe to Mr. Kipling is, I think, past +calculating. There is a poem of his specially dear to me--"To the True +Romance." It contains, to my thinking, the very essence and spirit of +his work. Through all realism, through all technical accomplishment, +through all the marvelous and detailed knowledge he has accumulated on +this wonderful earth, there rings the lovely Linos-song of the higher +imagination, which is the enduring salt of art. Whether it is Mowgli, or +Kim, or the Brushwood Boy, or McAndrew, or the Centurion of the Roman +Wall, or the trawlers and submarines and patrol-boats to which he lends +actual life and speech, he carries through all the great company the +flag of his lady--the flag of the "True Romance." It was Meredith's +flag, and Stevenson's and Scott's--it comes handed down in an endless +chain from the story-tellers of old Greece. For a man to have taken +undisputed place in that succession is, I think, the best and most that +literary man can do. And that it has fallen to our generation to watch +and rejoice in Rudyard Kipling's work may be counted among those gifts +of the gods which bring no Nemesis with them.</p> + +<p>Another star--was it the one that danced when Beatrice was born?--was +rising about the same time as Rudyard Kipling's. <i>The Window in +Thrums</i> appeared in 1889--a masterpiece to set beside the French +masterpiece, drawn likewise from peasant life, of almost the same date, +<i>Pêcheur d'Islande.</i> Barrie's gift, also, has been a gift making +for the joy of his generation; he too has carried the flag of the True +Romance--slight, twinkling, fantastic thing, compared to that of +Kipling, but consecrate to the same great service.</p> + +<p>And then beside this group of men, who, dealing as they constantly are +with the most prosaic and intractable material, are yet poets at heart, +there appears that other group who, headed perhaps by Mr. Shaw, and +kindred in method with Thomas Hardy, are the chief gods of a younger +race, as hostile to "sentimentalism" as George Meredith, but without +either the power--or the wish--to replace it by the forces of the +poetic imagination. Mr. Shaw, whose dramatic work has been the goad, the +gadfly of a whole generation, stirring it into thought by the help of a +fascinating art, will not, I think, elect to stand upon his novels; +though his whole work has deeply affected English novel-writing. But Mr. +Wells and Mr. Arnold Bennett have been during the last ten or fifteen +years--vitally different as they are--the leaders of the New Novel--of +that fiction which at any given moment is chiefly attracting and +stimulating the men and women under forty. There is always a New Novel, +and a New Poetry, as there was once, and many times, a New Learning. The +New Novel may be Romantic, or Realist, or Argumentative. In our day it +appears to be a compound of the last two--at any rate, in the novels of +Mr. Wells.</p> + +<p>Mr. Wells seems to me a journalist of very great powers, of unequal +education, and much crudity of mind, who has inadvertently strayed into +the literature of imagination. The earlier books were excellent +story-telling, though without any Stevensonian distinction; <i>Kipps</i> +was almost a masterpiece; <i>Tono-Bungay</i> a piece of admirable +fooling, enriched with some real character-creation, a thing extremely +rare in Mr. Wells's books; while <i>Mr. Britling Sees It Through</i> is +perhaps more likely to live than any other of his novels, because the +subject with which it deals comes home so closely to so vast an +audience. Mr. Britling, considered as a character, has neither life nor +joints. He, like the many other heroes from other Wells novels, whose +names one can never recollect, is Mr. Wells himself, talking this time +on a supremely interesting topic, and often talking extraordinarily +well. There are no more brilliant pages, of their kind, in modern +literature than the pages describing Mr. Britling's motor-drive on the +night of the declaration of war. They compare with the description of +the Thames in <i>Tono-Bungay</i>. These, and a few others like them, +will no doubt appear among the <i>morceaux choisis</i> of a coming day.</p> + +<p>But who, after a few years more, will ever want to turn the restless, +ill-written, undigested pages of <i>The New Machiavelli</i> again--or +of half a dozen other volumes, marked often by a curious monotony both +of plot and character, and a fatal fluency of clever talk? The only +thing which can keep journalism alive--journalism, which is born of the +moment, serves the moment, and, as a rule, dies with the +moment--is--again the Stevensonian secret!--<i>charm</i>. Diderot, the +prince of journalists, is the great instance of it in literature; the +phrase "<i>sous le charme</i>" is of his own invention. But Mr. Wells +has not a particle of charm, and the reason of the difference is not far +to seek. Diderot wrote for a world of friends--"<i>C'est pour moi et +pour mes amis que je lis, que je réfléchis, que j'écris</i>"--Mr. Wells +for a world of enemies or fools, whom he wishes to instruct or show up. +<i>Le Neveu de Rameau</i> is a masterpiece of satire; yet there is no +ill-nature in it. But the snarl is never very long absent from Mr. +Wells's work; the background of it is disagreeable. Hence its complete +lack of magic, of charm. And without some touch of these qualities, the +<i>à peu près</i> of journalism, of that necessarily hurried and +improvised work which is the spendthrift of talent, can never become +literature, as it once did--under the golden pen of Denis Diderot.</p> + +<p>Sainte Beuve said of Stendhal that he was an <i>excitateur d'idées</i>. +Mr. Wells no doubt deserves the phrase. As an able journalist, a +preacher of method, of foresight, and of science, he has much to say +that his own time will do well to heed. But the writer among us who has +most general affinity with Stendhal, and seems to me more likely to live +than Mr. Wells, is Mr. Arnold Bennett. Mr. Bennett's achievement in his +three principal books, the <i>Old Wives' Tale</i>, <i>Clayhanger</i>, +and <i>Hilda Lessways</i>, has the solidity and relief--the ugliness +also!--of Balzac, or of Stendhal; a detachment, moreover, and a +coolness, which Mr. Wells lacks. These qualities may well preserve them, +if "those to come" find their subject-matter sufficiently interesting. +But the <i>Comédie Humaine</i> has a breadth and magnificence of general +conception which govern all its details, and Stendhal's work is linked +to one of the most significant periods of European history, and reflects +its teeming ideas. Mr. Bennett's work seems to many readers to be choked +by detail. But a writer of a certain quality may give us as much detail +as he pleases--witness the great Russians. Whenever Mr. Bennett +succeeds in offering us detail at once so true and so exquisite as the +detail which paints the household of Lissy-Gory in <i>War and Peace</i>, +or the visit of Dolly to Anna and Wronsky in <i>Anna Karénin</i>, or the +nursing of the dying Nicolas by Kitty and Levin, he will have justified +his method--with all its <i>longueurs</i>. Has he justified it yet?</p> + +<p>One great writer, however, we possess who can give us any detail he +likes without tedium, because of the quality of the intelligence which +presents it. Mr. Conrad is not an Englishman by race, and he is the +master, moreover, of a vast exotic experience of strange lands and +foreign seas, where very few of his readers can follow him with any +personal knowledge. And yet we instinctively feel that in all his best +work he is none the less richly representative of what goes to make the +English mind, as compared with the French, or the German, or the Italian +mind--a mind, that is, shaped by sea-power and far-flung +responsibilities, by all the customs and traditions, written and +unwritten, which are the fruit of our special history, and our +long-descended life. It is this which gives value often to Mr. Conrad's +slightest tales, or intense significance to detail, which, without this +background, would be lifeless or dull. In it, of course, he is at one +with Mr. Kipling. Only the tone and accent are wholly different. Mr. +Conrad's extraordinary intelligence seems to stand outside his subject, +describing what he sees, as though he were crystal-gazing at figures and +scenes, at gestures and movements, magically clear and sharp. Mr. +Kipling, on the other hand, is part of--intimately one with--what he +tells us; never for a moment really outside it; though he has at command +every detail and every accessory that he needs.</p> + +<p>Mr. Galsworthy, I hope, when this war is over, on which he has written +such vivid, such moving pages (I know! for in some of its scenes--on the +Somme battle-fields, for instance--I have stood where he has stood), has +still the harvest of his literary life before him. Since <i>The Country +House</i> it does not seem to me that he has ever found a subject that +really suits him--and "subject is everything." But he has passion and +style, and varied equipment, whether of training or observation; above +all, an individuality it is abundantly worth while to know.</p> + +<hr style="width: 25%;"> + +<p>On the religious development of the last thirty years I can find but +little that is gladdening, to myself, at any rate, to say. There are +ferments going on in the Church of England which have shown themselves +in a series of books produced by Oxford and Cambridge men, each of them +representing some greater concession to modern critical and historical +knowledge than the one before it. The war, no doubt, has gripped the +hearts and stirred the minds of men, in relation to the fundamental +problems of life and destiny, as nothing else in living experience has +ever done. The religious minds among the men who are perpetually +fronting death in the battle-line seem to develop, on the one hand, a +new and individual faith of their own, and, on the other, an instinctive +criticism of the faiths hitherto offered them, which in time may lead us +far. The complaints, meanwhile, of "empty churches" and the failing hold +of the Church of England, are perhaps more persistent and more +melancholy than of old; and there is a general anxiety as to how the +loosening and vivifying action of the war will express itself +religiously when normal life begins again. The "Life and Liberty" +movement in the Anglican Church, which has sprung up since the war, is +endeavoring to rouse a new Christian enthusiasm, especially among the +young; and with the young lies the future. But the war itself has +brought us no commanding message, though all the time it may be silently +providing the "pile of gray heather" from which, when the moment comes, +the beacon-light may spring.</p> + +<p>The greatest figure in the twenty years before the war seems to me to +have been George Tyrrell. The two volumes of his biography, with all +their absorbing interest, have not, I think, added much to the effect of +his books. <i>A Much-abused Letter, Lex Orandi, Scylla and +Charybdis</i>, and <i>Christianity at the Cross-Roads</i> have settled +nothing. What book of real influence does? They present many +contradictions; but are thereby, perhaps, only the more living. For one +leading school of thought they go not nearly far enough; for another a +good deal too far. But they contain passages drawn straight from a +burning spiritual experience, passages also of a compelling beauty, +which can hardly fall to the ground unfruitful. Whether as Father +Tyrrell's own, or as assimilated by other minds, they belong, at least, +to the free movement of experimental and inductive thought, which, in +religion as in science, is ever the victorious movement, however +fragmentary and inconclusive it may seem at any given moment to be. +Other men--Doctor Figgis, for instance--build up shapely and plausible +systems, on given material, which, just because they are plausible and +shapely, can have very little to do with truth. It is the seekers, the +men of difficult, half-inspired speech, like T. H. Green and George +Tyrrell, through whose work there flashes at intervals the "gleam" that +lights human thought a little farther on its way.</p> + +<p>Meanwhile, it must often seem to any one who ponders these past years, +as if what is above all wanting to our religious moment is courage and +imagination. If only Bishop Henson had stood his trial for +heresy!--there would have been a seed of new life in this lifeless day. +If only, instead of deserting the churches, the Modernists of to-day +would have the courage <i>to claim them!</i>--there again would be a +stirring of the waters. Is it not possible that Christianity, which we +have thought of as an old faith, is only now, with the falling away of +its original sheath-buds, at the beginning of its true and mightier +development? A religion of love, rooted in and verified by the simplest +experiences of each common day, possessing in the Life of Christ a +symbol and rallying cry of inexhaustible power, and drawing from its own +corporate life of service and aspiration, developed through millions of +separate lives, the only reasonable hope of immortality, and the only +convincing witness to a Divine and Righteous Will at work in the +universe;--it is under some such form that one tries to dream the +future. The chaos into which religious observance has fallen at the +present day is, surely, a real disaster. Religious services in which men +and women cannot take part, either honestly or with any spiritual gain, +are better let alone. Yet the ideal of a common worship is an infinitely +noble one. Year after year the simplest and most crying reforms in the +liturgy of the Church of England are postponed, because nobody can agree +upon them. And all the time the starving of "the hungry sheep" goes on.</p> + +<p>But if religious ideals have not greatly profited by the war, it is +plain that in the field of social change we are on the eve of +transformations--throughout Europe--which may well rank in history with +the establishment of the Pax Romana, or the incursion of the northern +races upon the Empire; with the Renaissance, or the French Revolution. +In our case, the vast struggle, in the course of which millions of +British men and women have been forcibly shaken out of all their former +ways of life and submitted to a sterner discipline than anything they +have ever known, while, at the same time, they have been roused by mere +change of circumstance and scene to a strange new consciousness both of +themselves and the world, cannot pass away without permanently affecting +the life of the State and the relation of all its citizens to each +other. In the country districts, especially, no one of my years can +watch what is going on without a thrilling sense, as though, for us who +are nearing the last stage of life, the closed door of the future had +fallen mysteriously ajar and one caught a glimpse through it of a coming +world which no one could have dreamt of before 1914. Here, for instance, +is a clumsy, speechless laborer of thirty-five, called up under the +Derby scheme two years ago. He was first in France and is now in +Mesopotamia. On his first leave he reappears in his native village. His +family and friends scarcely know him. Always a good fellow, he has risen +immeasurably in mental and spiritual stature. For him, as for Cortez, on +the "peak in Darien," the veil has been drawn aside from wonders and +secrets of the world that, but for the war, he would have died without +even guessing at. He stands erect; his eyes are brighter and larger; his +speech is different. Here is another--a boy--a careless and troublesome +boy he used to be--who has been wounded, and has had a company officer +of whom he speaks, quietly indeed, but as he could never have spoken of +any one in the old days. He has learned to love a man of another social +world, with whom he has gone, unflinching, into a hell of fire and +torment. He has seen that other dare and die, leading his men, and has +learned that a "swell" can reckon <i>his</i> life--his humble, +insignificant life as it used to be--as worth more than his own.</p> + +<p>And there are thousands on whom the mere excitement of the new scenes, +the new countries, cities, and men, has acted like flame on invisible +ink, bringing out a hundred unexpected aptitudes, developing a mental +energy that surprises themselves. "On my farm," says a farmer I know, "I +have both men that have been at the front, and are allowed to come back +for agricultural purposes, and others that have never left me. They were +all much the same kind of men before the war; but now the men who have +been to the front are worth twice the others. I don't think they +<i>know</i> that they are doing more work, and doing it better than they +used to do. It is unconscious. Simply, they are twice the men they +were."</p> + +<p>And in the towns, in London, where, through the Play Centers, I know +something of the London boy, how the discipline, the food, the open air, +the straining and stimulating of every power and sense that the war has +brought about, seems to be transforming and hardening the race! In the +noble and Pauline sense, I mean. These lanky, restless lads have indeed +"endured hardness."</p> + +<p>Ah, let us take what comfort we can from these facts, for they are +facts--in face of these crowded graveyards in the battle zone, and all +the hideous wastage of war. They mean, surely, that a new heat of +intelligence, a new passion of sympathy and justice, has been roused in +our midst by this vast and terrible effort, which, when the war is over, +will burn out of itself the rotten things in our social structure, and +make reforms easy which, but for the war, might have rent us in sunder. +Employers and employed, townsman and peasant, rich and poor--in the ears +of all, the same still small voice, in the lulls of the war tempest, +seems to have been urging the same message. More life--more +opportunity--more leisure--more joy--more beauty!--for the masses of +plain men and women, who have gone so bare in the past and are now +putting forth their just and ardent claim on the future.</p> + +<hr style="width: 25%;"> + +<p>Let me recall a few more personal landmarks in the eighteen years that +have passed since <i>Eleanor</i> appeared, before I close.</p> + +<p>Midway in the course of them, 1908 was marked out for me, for whom a +yearly visit to Italy or France, and occasionally to Germany, made the +limits of possible travel, by the great event of a spring spent in the +United States and Canada. We saw nothing more in the States than every +tourist sees--New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and a few +other towns; but the interest of every hour seemed to renew in me a +nervous energy and a capacity for enjoyment that had been flagging +before. Our week at Washington at the British Embassy with Mr. and Mrs. +Bryce, as they then were, our first acquaintance with Mr. Roosevelt, +then at the White House, and with American men of politics and affairs, +like Mr. Root, Mr. Garfield, and Mr. Bacon--set all of it in spring +sunshine, amid a sheen of white magnolias and May leaf--will always stay +with me as a time of pleasure, unmixed and unspoiled, such as one's +fairy godmother seldom provides without some medicinal drawback! And to +find the Jusserands there so entirely in their right place--he so +unchanged from the old British Museum days when we knew him first--was +one of the chief items in the delightful whole. So, too, was the +discussion of the President, first with one Ambassador and then with +another. For who could help discussing him! And what true and admiring +friends he had in both these able men who knew him through and through, +and were daily in contact with him, both as diplomats and in social +life.</p> + +<p>Then Philadelphia, where I lectured on behalf of the London Play +Centers; Boston, with Mrs. Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett--a pair of +friends, gentle, eager, distinguished, whom none who loved them will +forget; Cambridge, and our last sight of Charles Eliot Norton, standing +to bid us farewell on the steps of Shady Hill; Hawthorne's house at +Concord; and the lovely shore of Newport. The wonderful new scenes +unrolled themselves day by day; kind faces and welcoming voices were +always round us, and it was indeed hard to tear ourselves away.</p> + +<p>But at the end of April we went north to Canada for yet another chapter +of quickened life. A week at Montreal, first with Sir William van Horne, +then Ottawa, and a week with Lord and Lady Grey; and finally the +never-to-be-forgotten experience of three weeks in the "Saskatchewan," +Sir William's car on the Canadian Pacific Railway, which took us first +from Toronto to Vancouver, and then from Vancouver to Quebec. So in a +swallow's flight from sea to sea I saw the marvelous land wherein, +perhaps, in a far hidden future, lies the destiny of our race.</p> + +<p>Of all this--of the historic figures of Sir William van Home, of beloved +Lord Grey, of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and Sir Robert Borden, as they were +ten years ago, there would be much to say. But my present task is done.</p> + +<p>Nor is there any room here for those experiences of the war, and of the +actual fighting front, to which I have already given utterance in +<i>England's Effort</i> and <i>Towards the Goal.</i> Some day, perhaps, +if these <i>Recollections</i> find an audience, and when peace has +loosened our tongues and abolished that very necessary person, the +Censor, there will be something more to be written. But now, at any +rate, I lay down my pen. For a while these <i>Recollections</i>, during +the hours I have been at work on them, have swept me out of the shadow +of the vast and tragic struggle in which we live, into days long past on +which there is still sunlight--though it be a ghostly sunlight; and +above them the sky of normal life. But the dream and the illusion are +done. The shadow descends again, and the evening paper comes in, +bringing yet another mad speech of a guilty Emperor to desecrate yet +another Christmas Eve.</p> + +<p>The heart of the world is set on peace. But for us, the Allies, in whose +hands lies the infant hope of the future, it must be a peace worthy of +our dead and of their sacrifice. "Let us gird up the loins of our minds. +In due time we shall reap, if we faint not."</p> + +<p>And meanwhile across the western ocean America, through these winter +days, sends incessantly the long procession of her men and ships to the +help of the Old World and an undying cause. Silently they come, for +there are powers of evil lying in wait for them. But "still they come." +The air thickens, as it were with the sense of an ever-gathering host. +On this side, and on that, it is the Army of Freedom, and of Judgment.</p> + +<p><i>Christmas Eve, 1917</i></p> + +<p>THE END</p> + + + +<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br> +</td> +</tr> +</table> +<br> +<pre> +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS +(IN TWO VOLUMES), VOLUME II *** + +This file should be named 8wrr210h.htm or 8wrr210h.zip +Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, 8wrr211h.htm +VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, 8wrr210ah.htm + + +Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed +editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US +unless a copyright notice is included. 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