r^^f*- ■':% :"■ ■•rj ' ] LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS (1856-igoo) A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS BY ^^MRS. HUMPHRY WARD' Ward* Ma,r(j /4u^usfa_ CA^hold) LONDON : 48 PALL MALL W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD. GLASGOW IMELBOURNE AUCKLAND COPYRIGHT 1918 TO T. H. W. (IN MEMORY OF APRIL 6th, 1872) i CONTENTS CHAPTER YAGK I. Eakly Days 1 Tasmania. Arnold of Rugby and his Children. My Father and New Zealand. II. Fox How 23 My Grandmother. Charlotte Bronte and Matthew Arnold. III. The Family of Fox How 34 Mrs. Forster. Matthew Arnold. A Letter from Lansdowne House. An Oxford Election. IV. Other Children of Fox How 58 William Delafield Arnold. ' Oakfield.' ' A Summer Night.' 'Aunt Mary.' V. The Friends of Fox How 75 Wordsworth. An Unpublished Letter. A Vision of the Poet. Arthur Hugh Clough. Dean Stanley. VI. Young Days at Oxford 96 Balliol and the Master. The Pattisons. George Eliot. M. Taine. Swinburne. The Paters. VII. Balliol and Lincoln 126 The Master Again. Thomas Hill Green. Cardinal Newman. Dr. Pusey. Canon Liddon. VIII. Early Married Life 141 First Attempts at Writing. Mandell Creighton. John Richard Green. Mr. Freeman. Bishop Stubbs. A First Talk with M. Renan. Sarah Bernhardt. Mme. Mohl. Dr. Lushingtoii. IX. The History of ' Eobekt Elsmere ' 162 Spanish History. Work on the West Goths. Meaning and Weight of Testimony. The Bampton Lectures, 1881. ' Unbelief and Sin.' A First Sketch of ' Rober. Elsmere.' M. Renan at Oxford. Work on the Ti7nes. London. Dublin, 1880. Mr. Forster's Chief Secre- taryship. The Education Bill of 1870. CONTENTS CHAPTEK X. LOXDOX IN THK EIGHTIES ....... John Morley. His Editorship of Macmillan. My Work for Him. His ' Life of Gladstone.' Russell Square and Borough Farm. ' Miss Bretlierton.' Henry James. Laura Lyttelton. PAOB 182 XI. London and Other Friends Edniond Scherer. Amiel's Journal. Mr. Balfour at Whittinghame. Mr. Goscheii. Lord Acton. M. Glemenceau. Mr. Chamberlain. Robert Browning. James Russell Lowell. 206 XII. Publication of ' Robert Elsmere ' 228 How the Book was Written. My Mother's Death. Conversations with Mr. Gladstone. Death of Matthew Arnold. The Rush for ' Robert Elsmere.' Mr. Pater's Review. Henry James's Letters and many others. Appearance of the Book in America. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Goldwin Smith. M. Brunetiere and ' Robert Elsmere.' XIII. First Visits to Italy 255 The Story of a First Folio. Mr. Gladstone at Hawarden. ' The New Reformation.' First Sketch of 'David Grieve.' Emily Lawless. Contessa Pasolini. A Summer at Hampden. Visitors to Hampden. The Husleys. Sir Alfred Lyall. M. .Jusserand. M. Andre Chevrillon. XIV. Amalfi and Rome 276 Lord Dufferin. Publication of ' David Grieve.' Lord Derby. We Settle at Stocks. Beginnings of ' Marcella.' Foundation of the Passmore Edwards Settlement. The Jowett Lectureship. Lord Carlisle. Stopford Brooke. James Martiueaii. The Death of the Master. XV. ' Helbeck of Bannisdale ' Publication of ' Marcella.' Letters from Mr. Gladstone. His Death and Funeral. Huxley on the ' Sentimental Deists.' Lady Wemyss. The Origins of ' Helbeck.' Spring at Levens. Publi- cation of ' Helbeck.' An Hour with the Empress Frederick. 301 XVI. The Villa Barberini. A Spring at Castel Gandolfo. James's Art. Henry James . Henry James at Nemi. Henry 323 XVII. Roman Friends. ' Eleanor ' Sir William Harcourt at Rome. Commendatore Boni. Mon- seigneur Duchesne. Cardinal Vaughan. Appearance of ' Eleanor.' Modern Italy. 337 Epilogue Some Thoughts on Literature and Religion. Tennyson and Meredith. Stevenson. Thomas Hardy. Rudyard Kipling. Mr. Wells. Mr. Arnold Bennett. Mr. Conrad. Mr. Galsworthy. Father Tyrrell. The Effects of the War on the Country Districts. A Visit to the United States. A Journey through Canada. 352 A WPtlTER'S RECOLLECTIONS CHAPTER I Early Days Do we all become garrulous and coDfidential as we approach the gates of old age ? Is it that we instinc- tively feel, and cannot help asserting our one advantage over the younger generation, which has so many over us ? — the one advantage of time ! After all, it is not disputable that we have lived longer than they. When they talk of past poets, or politicians, or novelists, whom the young still deign to remember, of whom for once their estimate agrees with ours, we can sometimes put in a quiet — ' I saw him ' — or * I talked with him ' — which for the moment wins the conversational race. And as we elders fall back before the brilliance and glitter of the New Age, advancing 'hke an army with banners,' tliis mere prerogative of years becomes in itself a precious possession. After all, we cannot divest ourselves of it, if we would. It is better to make friends with it — ^to turn it into a kind of panache — to wear it with an air, since wear it we must. So as the years draw on towards the Biblical limit, the inclination to look back, and to tell some sort of 2 A WEITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS story of what one has seen, grows upon most of us. I cannot hope that what I have to say will be very interesting to many. A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject matter, when one comes to write about it. I can only attempt it with any success, if my readers will allow me a large psychological element. The thoughts and opinions of one human being, if they are sincere, must always have an interest for some other human beings. The world is there to think about ; and if we have lived, or are living, with any sort of energy, we must have thought about it, and about ourselves in relation to it — ^thought ' furiously ' often. And it is out of the many ' thinkings ' of many folk, strong or weak, dull or far-ranging, that thought itself grows. For progress surely, whether in men or nations, means only a richer knowledge ; the more impressions therefore on the human intelligence that we can seize and record, the more sensitive be- comes that intelligence itself. But of course the difficulty lies in the seizing and recording — in the choice, that is, of what to say, and how to say it. In this choice, as I look back over more than half a century, I can only follow — and trust — the same sort of instinct that "one follows in the art of fiction. I shall be telling what is primarily true, or as true as I can make it ; as distinguished from what is primarily imagination, built on truth. But the truth one uses in fiction must be interesting ! Milton expresses that in the words ' sensuous ' and ' passionate,' which he applies to poetry in the Areopagitica. And the same thing applies to autobiography, where selection is even more necessary than in fiction. Nothing ought to be EAELY DAYS 3 told, I think, that does not interest or kindle one's own mind in looking back ; it is the only condition on which one can hope to interest or kindle other minds. And this means that one ought to handle things broadly, taking only the salient points in the landscape of the past, and of course with as much detachment as possible. Though probably in the end one will have to admit — egotists that we all are ! — that not much detachment is possible. For me, the first point that stands out is the arrival of a little girl of five, in the year 1856, at a grey stone house in a Westmorland valley, where fourteen years earlier, the children of Arnold of Rugby, the ' Doctor ' of ' Tom Brown's Schooldays,' had waited on a June day, to greet their father expected from the South, only to hear, as the summer day died away, that two hours' sharp illness, that very morning, had taken him from them. Of what preceded my arrival as a black- haired, dark-eyed child, with my father, mother, and two brothers, at Fox How, the holiday house among the mountains which the famous headmaster had built for himself in 1834, I have but little recollection. I see dimly another house in wide fields, where dwarf lilies grew, and I know that it was a house in Tasmania, where at the time of my birth my father, Thomas Arnold, the Doctor's second son, was organising education in the young colony. I can just recall too, the deck of a ship which to my childish feet seemed vast — but the William Brown was a sailing ship of only 400 tons ! — in which we made the voyage home in 1856. Three months and a half we took about it, going round the Horn in bitter weatlier, much run over by rats'at night, and'expected to take our baths by day in two huge barrels full of 4 A WEITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS sea water on the deck, into wliicli we children were phrnged shivering by our nurse, two or three times a week. My father and mother, their three children, and some small cousins, who were going to England under my mother's care, were the only passengers. I can remember too being lifted — ^weak and miserable with toothache — in my father's arms to catch the first sight of English shores as we neared the mouth of the Thames ; and then the dismal inn by the docks where we first took shelter. The dreary room where we children slept the first night, its dingy ugliness and its barred windows, still come back to me as a vision of horror. Next day, like angels of rescue, came an aunt and uncle, who took us away to other and cheerful quarters, and presently saw us off to Westmorland. The aunt was my godmother, Dr. Arnold's eldest daughter — then the young wife of William Edward Forster, a Quaker manufacturer, who afterwards became the well-known Education Minister of 1870, and was Chief Secretary for Ireland in the terrible years 1880-82. To my mother and her children. Fox How and its inmates represented much that was new and strange. My mother was the grand-daughter of one of the first Governors of Tasmania, Governor Sorell, and had been brought up in the colony, except for a brief schooling at Brussels. Of her personal beauty in youth we children heard much, as we grew up, from her old Tasmanian friends and kinsfolk who would occasionally drift across us ; and I see as though I had been there, a scene often described to me — ^my mother playing Hermione in the ' Winter's Tale,' at Government House when Sir William Denison was Governor — a. vision. EARLY DAYS 5 lovely and motionless, on lier pedestal, till at tlie words * Music ! awake her ! Strike ! ' she kindled into life. Her family were probably French in origin. Governor Sorell had been a man of promise in his youth. His father, General William Alexander Sorell, of the Cold- stream Guards, was a soldier of some eminence, whose two sons William and Thomas both served under Sir John Moore, and at the Cape. But my great- grandfather ruined his mihtary career, while he was Deputy Adjutant General at the Cape, by a love- afiair with a brother officer's wife, and was banished or promoted — whichever one pleases to call it — to the new colony of Tasmania, of which he became Governor in 1816. His eldest son, by the wife he had left behind him in England, went out as a youth of twenty-one or so, to join his father the Governor, in Tasmania, and I possess a little calf- bomid diary of my grandfather written in a very delicate and refined hand, about the year 1823. The faint entries in it show him to have been a devoted son. But when in 1830 or so, the Governor left the colony, and retired to Brussels, my grand- father remained in Van Diemen's Land, as it was then generally called, became very much attached to the colony, and filled the post of Eegistrar of Deeds for many years under its successive Governors. I just remember him, as a gentle, affectionate, upright being, a gentleman of an old punctilious school, strictly honourable and exact, content with a small sphere, and much loved within it. He would sometimes talk to his children of early days in Bath, of his father's young successes and promotions, and of his grandfather. General Sorell, who as Adjutant of the Coldstream 6 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS Guards, from 1744 to 1758, and associated with all the home and foreign service of that famous regiment during those years, through the Seven Years' War, and up to the opening of the American War of Independence, played a vaguely brilliant part in his grandson's recollec- tions. But he himself was quite content with the modest affairs of an infant colony, which even in its earliest days achieved, whether in its landscape or its life, a curiously EngUsh effect ; as though an English midland county had somehow got loose, and drifting to the Southern seas, had there set up — ^barring a few black aborigines, a few convicts, its mimosas, and its tree-ferns — another quiet version of the quiet English life it had left behind. But the Sorells all the same had some foreign and excitable blood in them. Their story of themselves was that they were French Huguenots, expelled in 1685, who had settled in England, and coming of a military stock, had naturally sought careers in the English army. There are points in this story which are puzzling ; but the foreign touch in my mother, and in the Governor — ^to judge from the only picture of him which remains — was unmistakable. Delicate features, small, beautifully shaped hands and feet, were accompanied in my mother by a French vivacity and quickness, an overflowing energy, which never forsook her through all her trials and misfortunes. In the Governor, the same physical characteristics make a rather decadent and foppish impression — as of an old stock run to seed. The stock had been re-invigorated in my mother, and one of its original elements which certainly survived in her temperament and tradition was of great importance both for her own life and for EARLY DAYS 7 her children's. This was the Protestant — the French Protestant element ; which no doubt represented in the family from which she came, a history of long suffering at the hands of Catholicism. Looking back upon her Protestantism, I see that it was not the least like English Evangelicalism, whether of the Anglican or dissenting type. There was nothing emotional or ' enthusiastic ' in it — ^no breath of Wesley or Wilberforce ; but rather something drawn from deep wells of history, instinctive and invincibb. Had some direct Calvinist ancestor of hers, with a soul on fire, fought the tyranny of Bossuet and Madame de Maintenon, before — eternally hating and resenting ' Papistry ' — ^he abandoned his country and kinsfolk, in the search for religious liberty ? That is the impression which — ^looking back upon her life — it often makes upon me. All the more strange that to her it fell, unwittingly, imagining, indeed, that by her marriage with a son of Arnold of Rugby, she was taking a step precisely in the opposite direction, to be, by a kind of tragic surprise, which yet was no one's fault, the wife of a Catholic. And that brings me to my father, whose character and story were so important to all his children that I must try and draw them, though I cannot pretend to any impartiality in doing so — only to the insight that affection gives ; its one abiding advantage over the critic and the stranger. He was the second son of Dr. Arnold of Rugby, and the younger brother — by only eleven months — of Matthew Arnold. On that morning of June 12, 1842, when the Headmaster who in fourteen years' rule at Rugby had made himself so conspicuous a place, not 8 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS merely in the public school world, but in English life generally,^ arose, in the words of his poet son — to tread — In the summer morning, the road — Of death, at a call unforeseen — Sudden — — my father, a boy of eighteen, was in the house, and witnessed the fatal attack of angina pectoris which, in two hours, cut short a memorable career, and left those who till then, under a great man's shelter and keeping, had— Eested as under the boughs Of a mighty oak. . . . Bare, unshaded, alone. He had been his father's special favourite among the elder children, as shown by some verses in my keeping addressed to him as a small boy, at different times, by ' the Doctor.' Those who know their ' Tom Brown's Schooldays ' will perhaps remember the various passages in the book where the softer qualities of the man whom ' three hundred reckless childish boys ' feared with all their hearts, ' and very little besides in heaven or earth,' are made plain in the language of that date. Arthur's illness, for instance, when the little fellow, who has been at death's door, tells Tom ^ At the moment of correcting these proofs, my attention has been called to a foolish essay on my grandfather by I\Ir. Lytton Strachey, none the less foolish because it is the work of an extremely clever man. If Mr. Strachey imagines that the effect of my grandfather's life and character upon men like Stanley and Clough, or a score of others who could be named, can be accoimted for by the eidolon he presents to his readers in place of the real human being, one can only regard it as one proof the more of the ease with which a certain kind of ability outwits itself. EARLY DAYS 9 Brown, who is at last allowed to see him — ' You can't think what the Doctor's like when one's ill. He said such brave and tender and gentle things to me — I felt quite light and strong after it, and never had any more fear.' Or East's talk with the Doctor, when the lively boy of many scrapes has a moral return upon him- self — and says to his best friend — ' You can't think how kind and gentle he was, the great grim man, whom I've feared more than anybody on earth. When I stuck, he lifted me, just as if I'd been a little child. And he seemed to know all I'd felt, and to have gone through it all.' This tenderness and charm of a strong man, which in Stanley's biography is specially mentioned as growing more and more visible in the last months of his life, was always there for his children. In a letter written in 1828 to his sister, when my father as a small child not yet five was supposed to be dying, Arnold says, trying to steel himself against the bitter- ness of coming loss — ' I might have loved him, had he lived, too dearly — ^you know how deeply I do love him now.' And three years later, when ' little Tom,' on his eighth birthday, had just said wistfully — with a curious foreboding instinct — ' I think that the eight years I have now lived will be the happiest of my life ' — ^Arnold, painfuUy struck by the words, wrote some verses upon them which I still possess. ' The Doctor ' was no poet, though the best of his historical prose — ^the well-known passage in the Roman History, for instance, on the death of Marcellus — has some of the essential notes of poetry — passion, strength, music. But the gentle Wordsworthian quality of his few essays in verse will be perhaps interesting to those who are aware of him chiefly as the great Liberal 10 A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS fighter of eighty years ago. He replies to his little son : — Is it that aught prophetic stirred Thy spirit to that ominous word, Foredating in thy childish mind The fortune of thy Life's career — That nought of brighter bliss shall cheer What stiU remains behind ? Or is thy Life so full of bliss That come what may, more blessed than this Thou canst not be again ? And fear'st thou, standing on the shore, What storms disturb with wild uproar The years of older men ? • ••••• At once to enjoy, at once to hope — That iiUs indeed the largest scope Of good our thoughts can reach. Where can we learn so blest a rule, What wisest sage, what happiest school. Art so divine can teach ? The answer, of course, in the mouth of a Christian teacher is that in Christianity alone is there both present joy and future hope. The passages in Arnold's most intimate diary, discovered after his death, and published by Dean Stanley, show what the Christian faith was to my grandfather, how closely bound up with every action and feeling of his life. The impression made by his conception of that faith, as interpreted by his own daily life, upon a great school, and, through the many strong and able men who went out from it, upon English thought and feehng, is a part of English religious history. But curiously enough the impression upon his own EARLY DAYS 11 sons appeared, at any rate, to be less strong and lasting than in the case of others. I mean, of course, in the matter of opinion. The famous father died, and his children had to face the \Yorld without his guiding hand. Matthew and Tom, William and Edward, the four eldest sons, went in due time to Oxford, and the youngest boy into the Navy. My grandmother made her home at Fox How under the shelter of the fells, with her four daughters, the youngest of whom was only eight when their father died. The devotion of all the nine children to their mother, to each other, and to the common home was never weakened for a moment by the varieties of opinion that life was sure to bring out in the strong brood of strong parents. But the development of the two elder sons at the University was probably very different from what it would have been had their father lived. Neither of them, indeed, ever showed, while there, the smallest tendency to the ' Newmanism ' which Arnold of Rugby had fought with all his powers ; which he had denounced with such vehemence in the Edinburgh article on 'The Oxford Malignants.' My father was at Oxford all through the agitated years which preceded Newman's secession from the Anglican communion. He had rooms in University College in the High Street, nearly opposite St. Mary's, in which John Henry Newman, then its Vicar, delivered Sunday after Sunday those sermons which will never be for- gotten by the Anglican church. But my father only once crossed the street to hear him, and was then repelled by the mannerism of the preacher. Matthew Arnold occasionally went, out of admiration, my father used to say, for that strange Newmanic power of words, which in itself fascinated the young Balliol poet, who 12 A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS was to produce his first volume of poems two years after Newman's secession to the Church of Kome. But he was never touched in the smallest degree by Newman's opinions. He and my father and Arthur Clough, and a few other kindred spirits, lived indeed in quite another world of thought. They discovered George Sand, Emerson and Carlyle, and orthodox Christianity no longer seemed to them the sure refuge that it had always been to the strong teacher who trained them as boys. There are many allusions of many dates in the letters of my father and uncle to each other, as to their common Oxford passion for George Sand. Consudo, in particular, was a revelation to the two young men brought up under the ' earnest ' influence of Rugby. It seemed to open to them a world of artistic beauty and joy of which they had never dreamed ; and to loosen the bands of an austere conception of life, which began to appear to them too narrow for the facts of life. Wilhdm Meister, read in Carlyle's translation at the same time, exercised a similar liber- ating and enchanting power upon my father. The social enthusiasms of George Sand also affected him greatly, strengthening whatever he had inherited of his father's discontent with an iron world, where the poor suffer too much and work too hard. And this discontent, when the time came for him to leave Oxford, assumed a form which startled his friends. He had done very well at Oxford, taking his two Firsts with ease, and was offered a post in the Colonial Office immediately on leaving the University. But the time was full of schemes for a new heaven and a new earth, wherein should dwell equality and righteousness. The storm of '48 was preparing in Europe ; the Corn EARLY DAYS 13 Laws had fallen ; the Chartists were gathering in England. To settle down to the old humdrum round of Civil Service promotion seemed to my father impossible. This revolt of his, and its efiect upon his friends, of whom the most intimate was Arthur Clough, has left its mark on Clough's poem, the 'Vacation Pastoral,' which he called ' The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich,' or, as it runs in my father's old battered copy which lies before me — ' Tober-na-Fuosich.' The Philip of the poem, the dreamer and democrat, who says to Adam the Tutor — • Alas, the noted phrase of the prayer-book Doing our duty in that state of life to which God has called us, Seems to me always to mean, when the little rich boys say it, Standing in velvet frock by Mama's brocaded flounces, Eying her gold-fastened book, and the chain and watch at her bosom, Seems to me always to mean, Eat, drink, and never mind others, — ^was in broad outline drawn from my father, and the impression made by his idealist, enthusiastic youth upon his comrades. And Philip's migration to the Antipodes at the end — when he rounded the sphere to New Zealand, There he hewed and dug ; subdued the earth and his spirit — — ^was certainly suggested by my father's similar step in 1847, the year before the poem appeared. Only in my father's life there had been as yet no parallel to the charming love-story of 'The Bothie.' His love-story awaited him on the other side of the world. At that moment. New Zealand, the land of beautiful mountain and sea, with its even temperate climate, and its natives whom English enthusiasm hoped not only to govern but to civilise and assimilate, was in the 14 A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS minds of all to wliom the colonies seemed to offer chances of social reconstruction beyond any that were possible in a crowded and decadent Europe. ' Land of Hope,' I find it often called in these old letters. ' The gleam ' was on it, and my father, like Browning's Waring, heard the call. After it ; follow it. Follow the gleam ! He writes to his mother in August 1847 from the Colonial Office : Everyone whom I meet pities me for having to retmn to London at this dull season, but to my o^^ti feelings, it is not worse than at other times. The things which would make me loathe the thought of passing my life or even several years in London, do not depend on summer or winter. It is the chronic, not the acute ills of London life which are real ills to me. I meant to have talked to you again before I left home about Kew Zealand, but I could not find a good opportunity. I do not think you will be surprised to hear that I cannot give up my intention — though you may think me wrong, you ■^-ill believe that no cold-heartedness towards home has assisted me in framing my resolution. Where or how we shall meet on this side the grave will be arranged for us by a wiser wiU than our own. To me, however strange and paradoxical it may sound, this going to New Zealand is become a work of faith, and I cannot but go through with it. And later on when his plans are settled, he writes in exultation to his eldest sister : The weather is gusty and rainy, but no cheerlessness without can repress a sort of exuberant buoyancy of spirit which is supplied to me from within. There is such an in- describable blessedness in looking forward to a manner of hfe which the heart and conscience approve, and which at the same time satisfies the instinct for the heroic and beautiful. Yet there seems little enough in a homely life in a New Zealand EARLY DAYS - 15 forest ; and indeed there is nothing in the thing itself, except in BO far as it flows from a principle, a faith. And he goes on to speak in vague exalted words of the ' equality ' and ' brotherhood ' to which he looks forward in the new land ; winding up with an account of his life in London, its daily work at the Colonial Office, his walks, the occasional evenings at the Opera where he worships Jenny Lind, his readings and practisings in his lodgings. My poor father ! He little knew what he was giving up, or the real conditions of the life to which he was going. For though the Philip of *The Bothie' may have ' hewed and dug ' to good purpose in New Zealand, success in colonial farming was a wild and fleeting dream in my father's case. He was born for Academic life and a scholar's pursuits. He had no practical gifts, and knew nothing whatever of land or farming. He had only courage, youth, sincerity, and a charming presence which made him friends at sight. His mother, indeed, with her gentle wisdom, put no obstacles in his way. On the contrary, she remembered that her husband had felt a keen imaginative interest in the colonies, and had bought small sections of land near Wellington, which his second son now proposed to take up and farm. But some of the old friends of the family felt and expressed consternation. In particular Baron Bunsen, then Prussian Ambassador to England, Arnold of Eugby's dear and faithful friend, wrote a letter of earnest and afiectionate remonstrance to the would-be colonist. Let me quote it, if only that it may remind me of days long ago, when it was still possible for a strong and tender friendship to exist between a Prussian and an Englishman ! 16 A WEITER'S EECOLLECTIONS Biinsen points out to ' young Tom ' that he has only been eight or nine months in the Colonial Office, not long enough to give it a fair trial, that the drudgery of his clerkship will soon lead to more interesting things, that his superiors speak well of him ; above all that he has no money, and no practical experience of farming, and that if he is going to New Zealand in the hope of building up a purer society, he will soon find himself bitterly disillusioned. Pray, my dear young friend, do not reject the voice of a man of nearly sixty years, who has made his way through life under much greater difficulties perhaps than you imagine — who was your father's dear friend — who feels deeply attached to all that bears the honoured and blessed name of Arnold — • who in particular had your father's 'promise that he would allow me to offer to you, after I had seen you in 1839, some- thing of that care and friendship he had bestowed upon Henry — (Bunsen's own son) — do not reject the warning voice of that man, if he entreats you solemnly not to take a 'precipitate step. Give yourself time. Try a change of scene. Go for a month or two to France or Germany. I am sure you wish to satisfy your friends that you are acting wisely, considerately, in giving up what you have. Spartam quam nactus es, orna — was Niebuhr's word to me when once, about 1825, wearied with diplomatic life, I resolved to throw up my place, and go — not to New Zealand, but to a German University. Let me say that concluding word to you and believe me, my dear young friend Your sincere and affectionate friend BUNSEN. P.S. If you feel disposed to have half an hour's quiet conversation with me alone, pray come to-day at six o'clock, and then dine with us quietly at half-past six. I go to-morrow to Windsor Castle for four days. Nothing could have been kinder, nothing more truly felt and meant. But the young make their own EAELY DAYS 17 experience, and my father, with the smiling open look which disarmed opposition, and disguised all the time a certain stubborn independence of will, characteristic of him through life, took his own way. He went to New Zealand, and now that it was done, the interest and sympathy of all his family and friends followed him. Let me give here the touching letter, which Arthur Stanley, his father's biographer, wrote to him the night before he left England. Univ. Coll., Oxford, Nov. 4, 1847. Farewell ! — (if you will let me once again recur to a relation so. long since past away) farewell — my dearest, earliest, best of pupils. I cannot let you go without asking you to forgive those many annoyances which I fear I must have unconsciously inflicted upon you in the last year of your Oxford life — nor without expressing the interest which I feel and shall I trust ever feel, beyond all that I can say, in your future course. You know — or perhaps you hardly can know — how when I came back to Oxford after the summer of 1842, youj? presence here was to me the stay and charm of my life — how the walks — the lectures — the Sunday eyenings with you, filled up the void which had been left in my interests,^ and endeared to mo all the beginnings of my College labours. That particular feehng, as is natural, has passed away — but it may still bo a pleasure to you to feel in your distant home that whatever may be my occupations, nothing will more cheer and support me through them than the belief that in that new world your dear father's name is in you still loved and bonoured, and bringing forth the fruits which he would have delighted to see. Farewell, my dear friend. May God in whom you trust bo with you. Do not trouble yourself to answer this — only take it as the true expression of one who often thinks how little he has done for you in comparison with what ho would. Ever yours, A. P. Stanley. ^ By the buddcu death of Dr. *\iuold. 18 A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS ' But, of course, the inevitable happened. After a few valiant but quite futile attempts to clear his land with his own hands, or with the random labour he could find to help him, the young colonist fell back on the education he had held so cheap in England, and bravely took school-work wherever in the rising townships of the infant colony he could find it. Meanwhile his youth, his pluck, and his Oxford distinctions had attracted the kindly notice of the Governor, Sir George Grey, who ofltered him his private secretaryship — one can imagine the twinl^le in the Governor's eye, when he first came across my father building his own hut on his section outside Wellington ! The offer was gratefully refused. But another year of New Zealand life brought re -consideration. The exile begins to speak of ' loneliness ' in his letters home, to realise that it is * collision ' with other kindred minds that ' kindles the spark of thought,' and presently, after a strildng account of a solitary walk across unexplored country in New Zealand, he confesses that he is not sufficient for himself, and that the growth and vigour of the intellect were, for him at least, ' not compatible with loneliness.' A few months later, Sir William Denison, the newly appointed Governor of Van Diemen's Land, hearing that a son of Arnold of Kugby, an Oxford First Class man, was in New Zealand, wrote to offer my father the task of organising primary education in Van Diemen's Land. He accepted — ^yet not I think without a sharp sense of defeat at the hands of Mother Earth ! — set sail for Hobart, and took possession of a post that might easily have led to great things. His father's fame EAELY DAYS 19 preceded him, and he was warmly welcomed. The salary was good and the field free. Within a few months of his landing he was engaged to my mother. They were married in 1850, and I. their eldest child, was born in June 1851. And then the unexpected, the amazing thing hap- pened. At the time of their marriage, and for some time after, my mother, who had been brought up in a Protestant ' scriptural ' atmosphere, and had been originally drawn to the younger ' Tom Arnold,' partly because he was the son of his father, as Stanley's ' Life ' had now made the headmaster Imown to the world, was a good deal troubled by the heretical views of her young husband. She had some difficulty in getting him to consent to the baptism of his elder children. He was still in many respects the ' Philip ' of the ' Bothie,' influenced by Goethe, and the French romantics, by Emerson, Kingsley and Carlyle, and in touch still with all that Liberalism of the later forties in Oxford, of which his most intimate friend, Arthur Clough, and his elder brother, Matthew Arnold, were to become the foremost representatives. But all the while, under the surface, an extraordinary transformation was going on. He was never able to explain it afterwards, even to me, who knew him best of all his children. I doubt whether he ever understood it himself. But he who had only once crossed the High Street to hear Newman preach, and felt no interest in the sermon, now, on the other side of the world, surrendered to Newman's influence. It is uncertain if they had ever spoken to each other at Oxford ; yet that subtle pervasive intellect which captured for years the critical and sceptical mind of Mark Pattison, and indirectly transformed the Church 20 A WEITER'S RECOLLECTIONS of England after Newman himself had left it, now, reaching across the world, laid hold on Arnold's son, when Ai'nold himself was no longer there to fight it. A general reaction against the negations and philosophies of his youth set in for ' Philip,' as inevitable in his case as the revolt against St. Sulpice was for Ernest Renan. For my father was in truth born for religion, as his whole later life showed. In that he was the true son of Arnold of Rugby. But his speculative Liberalism had carried him so much further than his father's had ever gone, that the recoil was correspondingly great. The steps of it are dim. He was ' struck ' one Sunday with the ' authoritative ' tone of the First Epistle of Peter. Who and what was Peter ? What justified such a tone ? At another tim.e he found a Life of St. Brigit of Sweden at a country inn, when he was on one of his school -inspecting journeys across the island . And he records a mysterious influence or ' voice ' from it, as he rode in meditative solitude through the sunny spaces of the Tasmanian bush. Last of all, he ' obtained ' — from England no doubt — the ' Tracts for the Times.' And as he went through them, the same documents, and the same arguments, which had taken Newman to Rome, nine years before, worked upon his late and distant disciple. But who can explain ' conversion ' ? Is it not enough to say, as was said of old — * The Holy Ghost fell on them that believed ' ? The great ' Malignant ' had indeed triumphed. In October, 1854, my father was received at Hobart, Tasmania, into the Church of Rome ; and two years later, after he had reached England, and written to Newman asking the new Father of the Oratory to receive him, Newman replied — EAELY DAYS 21 Hqw strange it seems ! What a world this is ! I knew your fathei) a little, and I really think I never had any unkind feeling towards him. I saw him at Oriel on the Purification before (I think) his death (January 1842). I was glad to meet him. If I said ever a harsh thing against him I am very sorry for it. In seeing you, I should have a sort of pledge that he at the moment of his death made it all up with me. Excuse this. I came here last night, and it is so marvellous to have your letter this morning. So, for the moment, ended one incident in the long bout between two noble fighters, Arnold and Newman, each worthy of the other's steel. For my father, indeed, this act of surrender was but the beginning of a long and troubled history. My poor mother felt as though the earth had crumbled under her. Her passionate affec- tion for my father endured till her latest hour, but she never reconciled herself to what he had done. There was in her an instinctive dread of Catholicism, of which I have suggested some of the origins — ancestral and historical. It never abated. Many years afterwards, in writing ' Helbeck of Bannisdale,' I drew upon what I remembered of it in describing some traits in Laura Fountain's inbred, and finally indomitable resistance, to the Catholic claim upon the will and intellect of men. And to this trial in the realm of religious feeling there were added all the practical difficulties into which my father's action plunged her, and his children. The Tasmanian appointment had to be given up, for the feeling in the colony was strongly anti-Catholic ; and we came home, as I have described, to a life of struggle, privation, and constant anxiety, in which my mother suffered not only for herself, but for her children. 22 A WRITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS But after all there were bright spots. My father and mother were young ; niy mother's eager sym.pathetic temper brought her niany friends ; and for us children, Fox How and its dear inmates opened a second home, and new joys, which upon myself in particular left impressions never to be effaced or undone. Let me try and describe that house and garden and those who lived in it, as they were in 1856. CHAPTER II Fox How The grey stone house stands now, as it stood then, on a * how ' or rising ground in the beautiful Westmor- land valley leading from Ambleside to Eydal. The ' Doctor ' built it as a holiday paradise for himself and his children, in the year 1833. It is a modest building, with ten bedrooms and three sitting-rooms. Its windows look straight into the heart of Fairfield, the beautiful semi-circular mountain which rears its hollowed front and buttressing scaurs against the north, far above the green floor of the valley. That the house looked north never troubled my grandfather or his children. AVliat they cared for was the perfect outHne of the mountain wall, the ' pensive glooms,' hovering in that deep breast of Fairfield, the magic never-ending chase of sunlight and cloud across it on fine days, and the beauty of the soft woodland clothing its base. The garden was his children's joy as it became mine. Its little beck with its mimic bridges, its encircling river, its rocky knolls, its wild strawberries and wild rasp- berries, its queen of birch-trees rearing a stately head against the distant mountain, its rhododendrons growing like weeds on its mossy banks, its velvet turf, and long 23 24 A WEITER'S EECOLLECTIONS silky grass in the parts left wild — all these things have made the joy of three generations. Inside, Fox How was comfortably spacious, and I remember what a palace it appeared to my childish eyes, fresh from the tiny cabin of a 400-ton sailing-ship, and the rough life of a colony. My grandmother, its mistress, was then sixty-one. Her beautiful hair was scarcely touched with grey, her complexion was still delicately clear, and her soft brown eyes had the eager sympathetic look of her Cornish race. Charlotte Bronte, who saw her a few years earlier, while on a visit to Miss Martineau, speaks of her as having been a ' very pretty woman,' and credits her and her daughters with ' the possession of qualities the most estimable and endearing.'' In another letter, however, written to a less famihar correspondent, to whom Miss Bronte, as the literary lady, with a critical reputation to keep up, expresses herself in a different and more artificial tone, she again describes my grandmother as good and charm- ing, but doubts her claim to ' power and completeness of character.' The phrase occurs in a letter describing a call at Fox How, and its slight pomposity makes the contrast with the passage in which Matthew Arnold describes the same visit the more amusing. At seven came Miss Martineau, and Miss Bronte (Jane Eyre) ; talked to Miss Martineau (who blasphemes frightfully) about, the prospects of the Church of England, and, wretched man that I am, promised to go and see her cow-keeping miracles to-morrow, I who hardly know a cow from a sheep. I talked to Miss Bronte (past thirty and plain, with expressive grey eyes though) of her curates, of French novels, and her education in a school at Brussels, and sent the Hons roaring to their dens at half-past nine. FOX HOW 25 No one irdced would have applied the word ' power ' to my grandmother, unless they had known her very well. The general impression was always one of gentle sweet- ness and soft dignity. But the phrase ' completeness of character,' happens to sum up very well the impression loft by her life both on kindred and friends. What Miss Bronte exactly meant by it, it is difficult to say. But the widowed mother of nine children, five of them sons, and all of them possessed of strong will and quick intelligence, who was able so to guide their young lives, that to her last hour, thirty years after her husband's death had left her alone with her task, she possessed their passionate reverence and afiection, and that each and all of them would have acknowledged her as among the dearest and noblest influences in their lives, can hardly be denied ' completeness of character.' Many of her letters lie before me. Each son and daughter, as he or she went out into the world, received them with the utmost regularity. They knew that every incident in their lives interested their mother ; and thev in their turn were eager to report to her everything that came to them, happy or unhappy, serious or amusing. And this relation of the family to their mother only grew and strengthened with years. As the daughters married, their husbands became so jnany new and devoted sons to this gentle, sympathetic, and yet firm-natured woman. Nor were the daughters-in-law less attached to her, and the grandchildren who in due time began to haunt Fox How. In my own life I trace her letters from my earliest childhood, through my life at school, to my engagement and marriage ; and I have never ceased to feel a pang of disappointment that she died before my children were born. i\ratthew Arnold adored 26 A WEITER'S RECOLLECTIONS her, and wrote to her every week of his life. So did her other children. William Forster, throughout his busy life in Parliament, vied with her sons in tender consider- ation and unfailing loyalty. And every grandchild thought of a visit to Fox How as not only a joy but an honour. Indeed nothing could have been more ' complete,' more rounded, than my grandmother's character and life as they developed through her eighty- three years. She made no conspicuous intellectual claim, though her quick intelhgence, her wide sympathies and clear judgment, combined with something ardent and responsive in her temperament, attracted and held able men ; but her personality was none the less strong because it was so gently, delicately served bv looks and manner. Perhaps the ' completeness ' of my grandmother's character will be best illustrated by one of her family letters, a letter which may recall to some readers Stevenson's delightful poem on the mother who sits at home watching the fledglings depart from the nest. So from the hearth the children flee, By that almighty hand Austerely led ; so one by sea Goes forth, and one by land ; Nor aught of all man's sons escapes from that command. And as the fervent smith of yore Beat out the glowing blade, Nor wielded in the front of war The weapons that he made, But in the tower at home still pHed his ringing trade ; FOX HOW 27 So like a sword the son shall roam On nobler missions sent ; And as the smith remained at home In peaceful turret pent, So sits the while at home the mother well content. The letter was written to my father in New Zealand in the year 1848, as a family chronicle. The brothers and sisters named in it are Walter, the youngest of the family, a middy of fourteen, on board ship, and not very happy in the Navy, which he was ultimately to leave for Durham University and business ; Willy, in the Indian Army, afterwards the author of ' Oak field,' a novel attacking the abuses of Anglo-Indian life, and the first Director of Public Instruction in the Punjab — commemorated by his poet brother in ' A Southern Night ' ; Edward, at Oxford ; Mary, the second daugh- ter, who at the age of twenty-two had been left a widow after a year of married life ; and Fan, the youngest daughter of the flock, who now, in 1917, alone represents them in the grey house under the fells. The little Westmorland farm described is still exactly as it was ; and has still a Richardson for master, though of a younger generation. And Rydal Chapel, freed now from the pink cement which clothed it in those days, and from the high pews famiUar to the children of Fox How, still sends the cheerful voice of its bells through the valley on Sunday mornings. The reader will remember, as he reads it, that he is in the troubled year of '48, with Chartism at home and revolution abroad. The ' painful interest ' with which the writer has read Clough's ' Bothie,' refers, I think, to the fact that she has recognised her second 28 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS son, my father, as to some extent the hero of the poem. Fox How, Nov, 19, 1848, My Dearest Tom, — , . . I am always intending to send you something Hke a regular journal, but twenty days of the month have now passed away, and it is not done. Dear Matt, who was with us at the beginning, and who I think bore a part in our last letters to you, has returned to his post in London, and I am not without hope of hearing by to-morrow's post that he has run down to Portsmouth to see Walter before he sails on a cruise with the Squadron which I believe he was to do to-day. But I should think they would hardly leave Port in such dirty weather, when the wind howls and the rain pours, and the whole atmosphere is thick and lowering as I suppose you rarely or never see it in New Zealand, I wish the more that Matt may get down to Spithead, because the poor little man has been in a great ferment about leaving his Ship and going into a smaller one. By the same post I had a letter from him, and from Captain Daws, who had been astonished and grieved by Walter's coming to him and telling him he wished to leave the ship. It was evident that Captain D. was quite distressed about it. She then discusses, very shrewdly and quietly, the reasons for her boy's restlessness, and how best to meet it. The letter goes on : — Certainly there is great comfort in having him with so true and good a friend as Captain D. and I could not feel justified in acting against his counsel. But as he gets to know Walter better, I think it very likely that he will himself think it better for him to be in some ship not so likely to stay about in harbour as the St. Vincent ; and will judge that with a character like his it might be better for him to be on some more distant stations, I write about all this as coolly as if he were not my own dear youngest born, the little dear son whom I have so cherished , and who was almost a nursling still, when the bond which kept us all together was broken. But I believe I do FOX HOW 29 truly feel that if my beloved sons are good and worthy of the name they bear, are in fact true, earnest. Christian men, I have no wish left for them — no selfish longings after their companionship, which can for a moment be put in comparison with such joy. Thus it almost seemed strange to me when in a letter the other day from Willy to Edward, in reference to his — E's — futm-e destination — Willy rather urged upon him a home, domestic life, on 7ny account, as my sons were already so scattered. As I say, those loving words seemed strange to me ; because I have such an overpowering feeling that the all-in-all to me is that my sons should be in just that vocation in life most suited to them, and most bringing out what is highest and best in them ; whether it might be in England, or at the furthest extremity of the world. November 24, 1848. — I have been unwell for some days, dearest Tom, and this makes me less active in all my usual employments, but it shall not if I can help it, prevent my making some progress in this letter, which in less than a week may perhaps be on its way to New Zealand. I have just sent Fan downstairs, for she nm*ses her Mother till I begin to think some change good for her. She has been reading aloud to me, and now, as the evening advances I have asked some of them to read to me a long poem by Clough — (the ' Bothie ') which I have no doubt will reach you. It does not look attractive to me, for it is in English Hexameters, which are to me very cumbrous and uninviting ; but probably that may be for some want of knowledge in my own ear and taste. The poem is addressed to his pupils of last summer, and in scenery etc. will have, I suppose, many touches from his Highland residence ; but, in a brief Preface, he says that the tale itself is altogether fiction. To turn from things domestic to things at large, what a state of things is this at Berlin ! a state of siege declared, and the King at open issue with his representatives ! — from the country districts, people ilocking to give him aid, while the 30 A WEITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS great towns are almost in revolt. ' Always too late * miglit, I suppose, have been his motto ; and when things have been given with one hand, he has seemed too ready to withdraw them with the other. But, after all, I must and do believe that he has noble qualities, so to have won Bunsen's love and respect. November 25. — Mary is preparing a long letter, and it will therefore matter the less if mine is not so long as I intended. I have not yet quite made up the way I have lost in my late indisposition, and we have such volumes of letters from dear Willy to answer, that I believe this folio will be all I can send to you, my own darling ; but you do not dw'ell in my heart or my thoughts less fondly. I long inexpressibly to have some definite ideas of what you are now — after some eight months of residence — doing, thinking, feeling ; what are yom- occupa- tions in the present, what your aims and designs for the future. The assurance that it is your first and heartfelt desire to please God, my dear son ; that you have struggled to do this and not allowed yourself to shrink from whatever you felt to be in- volved in it, this is, and will be my deepest and dearest comfort; and I pray to Him to guide you into all truth. But though supported by this assurance, I do not pretend to say that often and often I do not yearn over you in my thoughts, tind long to bestow upon you in act and word as well as in thought, some of that overflowing love which is cherished for you in your home. And here follows a tender mother-word in reference to an early and unrequited attachment of my father's, the fate of which may possibly have contributed to the restlessness which sent him beyond the seas. But, dear Tom, I believe that though the hoped for flower and fruit have faded, yet that the plant has been strengthened and purified. ... It would be a grief to me not to beheve that you will yet be most happy in married life FOX HOW 31 and when you can make to yourself a homo I shall perhaps lose some of my restless longing to bo near you and ministering to your comfort, and sharing in your life — if I can think of you as cheered and helped by one who loved you as I did your own beloved father. Sunday, November 26. — Just a year, my son, since you left England ! But I really must not allow myself to dwell on this, and all the thoughts it brings with it ; for I found last night that the contrast between the fulness of thought and feeling, and my own powerlessness to express it weighed on me heavily ; and not having yet quite recovered my usual tone I could not well bear it. So I will just try to collect for you a few more home Memoranda, and then have done. . . . Our new tenant, James Eichardson, is now fairly estabhshed at his farm, and when I w^ent up there and saw the cradle and the happy childish faces around the table, and the rows of oatmeal cake hanging up, and the cheerful, active Mother going hither and thither — now to her Dairy — now guiding the steps of the little one that followed her about — and all the time preparing things for her husband's return from his work at night, I could not but feel that it was a very happy pictm'e of Enghsh hfe. Alas ! that there are not larger districts where it exists ! But I hope there is still much of it ; and I feel that while there is an awful under -current of misery and sin — the latter both caused by the first and causing it — and while, on the surface, there is carelessness, and often recklessness and hardness and trifling, yet that still, in our English society, th^re is, between these two extremes, a strength of good mixed with baser elements, which must and will, I fully believe, support us nationally in the troublous times which are at hand — on which we are actually entered. But again I am wandering, and now the others have gone off to Bydal Chapel without me this lovely Sunday morning. There are the bells sounding invitingly across the valley, and the evergreens are white and sparkling in the sun. I have a note from Clough. . . . His poem is as remarkable, 32 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS I think, as you would expect, coming from him. Its fower quite overcame my dishke to the measure — so far at least as to make me read it with great interest — often, though, a painful one. And now I must end. As to Miss Bronte's impressions of Matthew Arnold in that same afternoon call of 1850, they were by no means flattering. She understands that he was akeady the author of ' a volume of poems ' (The Poems by A, 1849), and remarks that his manner ' displeases from its seeming foppery," but she recognises, nevertheless, in conversation with him, ' some genuine intellectual aspir- ations ! ' It was but a few years later that my uncle paid his poet's homage to the genius of the two sisters — to Charlotte of the ' expressive grey eyes ' — ^to Emily of tlie ' chainless soul.' I often try to picture their meeting in the Fox How drawing-room : Matthew Arnold, tall, handsome, in the rich opening of his life, his first poetic honours thick upon him, looking with a half- critical, half-humorous eye at the famous little lady whom Miss Martineau had brought to call upon bis mother ; and beside him that small intrepid figure, on which the worst storms of life had ali'eady beaten, which was but five short years from its own last rest. I doubt whether, face to face, they would ever have made much of each other. But the sister who could write of a sister's death as Charlotte wrote, in the letter that every lover of great prose ought to have by heart : — Emily suffers no more from pain or weakness now, she never will suffer more in this world. She is gone, after a hard, short confhct. . . . We are very calm at present, why should we be otherwise ? The anguish of seeing her suffer is over ; the spectacle of the pains of death is gone ; the funeral day is past. FOX HOW 33 We feel she is at peace. No need now to tremble fur the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not feci iliem. — — ^must have stretched out spiritual hands to Matthew Arnold, had she lived to read 'A Southern Night' — that loveliest, surely, of all laments of brother for brother. CHAPTER III The Family of Fox How Dr. Arnold's eldest daughter, Jane Arnold, after- wards Mrs. W. E. Forster, my godmother, stands out for me on the tapestry of the past, as one of the noblest personalities I have ever known. She was twenty- one when her father died, and she had been his chief companion among his children for years before death took him from her. He taught her Latin and Greek, he imbued her with his own political and historical interests, and her ardent Christian faith answered to his own. After his death she was her mother's right hand at Fox How ; and her letters to her brothers — to my father especially, since he was longest and farthest away — show her quick and cultivated mind, and all the sweetness of her nature. We hear of her teaching a younger brother Latin and Greek ; she goes over to Miss Martineau on the other side of the valley to trans- late some German for that busy woman ; she reads Dante beside her mother, when the rest of the family have gone to bed ; she sympathises passionately with Mazzini and Garibaldi ; and every week, she walks over Loughrigg through fair weather and foul, summer and winter, to teach in a night school at Skelwith. Then the 34 THE FA]\riLY OF FOX HOW 85 young Quaker manufacturer William Forster appears on the scene, and she falls happily and completely in love. Her letters to the brother in New Zealand become, in a moment, all joy and ardour, and nothing could be prettier than the account, given by one of the sisters, of the quiet wedding in Rydal Chapel, the family breakfast, the bride's simple dress and radiant look, Matthew Arnold giving his sister away, — with the great fells standing sentinel. And there exists a delightful unpublished letter by Harriet Martineau which gives some idea of the excitement roused in the quiet Amble- side valley by Jane Arnold's engagement to the tall Yorkshireman who came from surroundings so different from the academic and scholarly world in which the Arnolds had been brought up. Then followed married life at Eawdon near Brad- ford, with supreme happiness at home, and many and growing interests in the manufacturing, religious and social life around the young wife. In 1861 WilHam Forster became member for Bradford, and in 1869 Gladstone included him in that Ministry of all the talents, which foundered under the onslaughts of Disraeli in 1874. Forster became Vice-President of the Council, which meant Minister for Education, with a few other trifles like the cattle-plague thrown in. The Education Bill, which AVilliam Forster brought in in 1870 — (as a girl of eighteen, I was in the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Commons on the great day to hear his speech) — ^has been the foundation stone ever since of English popular education . It has always been clear to me that the scheme of the Bill was largely influenced by William Forster' s wife, and through her, bv the convictions and beliefs of her father. The 36 A WEITER'S RECOLLECTIONS compromise by wliich the Cliurcli schools, with the creeds and tlie Church catechism, were preserved, under a conscience clause, while the dissenters got their way as to the banishment of creeds and catechisms, and the substitution for them of ' simple Bible teaching,' in the schools founded under the new School Boards, which the Bill set up all over England, has practically — with of course modifications — ^held its ground for nearly half a century. It w^as illogical; and the dissenters have never ceased to resent the perpetuation of the Church school which it achieved. But English life is illogical. It met the real situation ; and it would never have taken the shape it did — in my opinion — but for the ardent beliefs of the young and remarkable woman, at once a strong Liberal, and a devoted daughter of the English Church, as Arnold, Kingsley and Maurice understood it, who had married her Quaker husband in 1850, and had thereby been the innocent cause of his automatic severance from the Quaker body. His respect for her judgement and intellectual power was only equalled by his devotion to her. And when the last great test of his own life came, how she stood by him ! — through those terrible days of the Land League struggle, when, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, Forster carried his life in his hand month after month, to be worn out finally by the double toil of Parliament and Ireland, and to die just before Mr. Gladstone split the Liberal party in 1886, by the introduction of the Home Rule Bill, in which Forster would not have followed him. I shall, however, have something to say later on in these Eeminiscences about those tragic days. To those who watched IMrs. Forster through them, and who knew THE FAMILY OF FOX HOW 37 her intimately, she was one of the most interesting figures of that crowded time. Few people, however, outside the circle of her kindred, knew her intimately. She was of course in the ordinary social and political world, both before and after her husband's entrance upon office, and admission to the Cabinet ; dining out and receiving at home ; attending Drawing-rooms and pubHc functions ; staying at country houses, and invited to Windsor, like other Ministers' wives, and keenly interested in all the varying fortunes of Forster's party. But though she was in that world, she was never truly of it. She moved through it, yet veiled from it, by that pure, unconscious selflessness, which is the saint's gift. Those who ask nothing for them- selves, whose whole strength is spent on affections that are their life, and ou ideals at one with their affections, are not easily popular, like the self-seeking, parti-coloured folk who make up the rest of us ; who flatter, caress, and court, that we in our turn may be flattered and courted. Their gentleness masks the indomitable soul within ; and so their fellows are often unaware of their true spiritual rank. It is interesting to recall the instinctive sympathy with which a nature so different from Charlotte Bronte's as that of Arnold's eldest daughter, met the challenge of the Bronte genius. It would not have been wonder- ful — in those days — ^if the quiet Fox How household, with its strong religious atmosphere, its daily psalmy and lessons, its love for ' The Christian Year,' its belief in ' discipline ' (how that comes out in all the letters !) had been repelled by the blunt strength of ' Jane Eyre' ;" just as it would not have been wonderful if they had held aloof from Miss Martineau, in the days 38 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS wlieii it pleased that remarkable woman to preach mesmeric atheism, or atheistic mesmerism, as we choose to put it. But there was a lifelong friendship between them and Harriet Martineau ; and they recognised at once the sincerity and truth — the literary rank in fact — of ' Jane E}Te.' Not long after her marriage, Jane Forster with her husband went over to Haworth to see Charlotte Bronte. My aunt's letter, describing the visit to the dismal parsonage and church, is given without her name in Mrs. Gaskell's ' Life,' and Mr. Shorter in reprinting it in the second of his large volumes, does not seem to be aware of the identity of the writer. Miss Bronte put me so in mind of her own * Jane Eyre ' [wrote my godmother]. She looked smaller than ever, and moved about so quietly and noiselessly, just like a little bird, as Bochester called her ; except that all birds are joyous, and that joy can never have entered that house since it was built. And yet, perhaps, when that old man (Mr. Bronte) married and took home his bride, and children's voices and feet were heard about the house, even that desolate graveyard and biting blast could not quench cheerfulness and hope. Now (i.e. since the deaths of Emily and Anne) there is something touching in the sight of that little creature entombed in such a place, and moving about herself there like a spirit ; especially when you think that the slight still frame encloses a force of strong, fiery life, which nothing has been able to freeze or extinguish. This letter was written before my birth, and about six years before the writer of it appeared, as an angel of hel^J, in the dingy dockside inn, where we tired ti'avellers had taken shelter on our arrival from the other side of the world, and where I was first kissed by my godmother. As I grew up into girlhood, ' Aunt K.' THE FAMILY OP FOX HOW 39 (K. was the pet name by which Matthew Arnold always wrote to her) became for me part of the magic of Fox How, though I saw her of course often in her own home also. I felt towards her a passionate and troubled affection. She was to me 'a thing enskied ' and heavenly — for all her quick human interests, and her sweet ways with those she loved. How could anyone be so good ! — was often the despairing reflection of the child who adored her, caught herself in the toils of a hot temper and a stubborn will ; but all the same to see her enter a room was joy, and to sit by her the highest privilege. I don't know whether she could be strictly called beautiful. But to me everything about her was beautiful — her broad brow, her clear brown eyes, and wavy brown hair, the touch of stately grace with which she moved, the mouth so responsive and soft, yet, at need, so determined, the hand so delicate, yet so characteristic. She was the eldest of the nine. Of her relation to the next of them — her brother Matthew — there are many indications in the collection of my uncle's letters, edited by Mr. George Russell. It was to her that ' Eesigna- tion ' was addressed, in recollection of their mountain walks and talks together ; and in a letter to her, the sonnet to Shakespeare — ' Others abide our question — thou art free ' — was first written out. Their affection for each other, in spite of profound differences of opinion, only quickened and deepened with time. Between my father and his elder brother Matthew Arnold there was barely a year's difference of age. The elder was born in December 1822, and the younger in November 1823. Tliey were always warmly attached 40 A WEITER'S EECOLLECTIONS to each other, and in spite of much that was outwardly divergent — sharply divergent — they were more alike fundamentally than was often suspected. Both had derived from some remoter ancestry — ^possibly through their Cornish mother, herself the daughter of a Penrose and a Trevenen — elements and qualities which were lacking in the strong personality of their father. Imagination, ' rebellion against fact,' spirituality, a tendency to dream, unworldliness, the passionate love of beauty and charm, ' ineffectualness ' in the practical competitive life — these, according to Matthew Arnold, when he came to lecture at Oxford on ' The Study of Celtic Literature,' were and are the characteristic marks of the Celt. They were unequally distributed between the two brothers. ' Unworldliness,' ' rebellion against fact,' ' ineffectualness ' in common life, fell rather to my father's share than my uncle's ; though my uncle's ' worldliness,' of which he was sometimes accused, if it ever existed, was never more than skin-deep. Imagination in my father led to a life-long and mysti- cal preoccupation with religion ; it made Matthew Arnold one of the great poets of the nineteenth century. There is a sketch of my father made in 1847, which preserves the dreamy, sensitive look of early youth, when he was the centre of a band of remarkable friends — Clough, Stanley, F. T. Palgrave, Alfred Domett (Browning's Waring) and others. It is the face — nobly and delicately cut — of one to whom the successes of the practical, competitive life could never be of the same importance as those events which take place in thought, and for certain minds are the only real events. THE FAMILY OF FOX HOW 41 * For ages and ages the world has been constantly slipping ever more and more out of the Celt's grasp,' wrote Matthew Arnold. But all the while the Celt has great compensations. To him belongs another world than the visible ; the world of phantasmagoria, of emotion, the world of passionate beginnings, rather than of things achieved. After the romantic and defiant days of his youth, my father, still pursuing the same natural tendency, found all that he needed in Catholic- ism, and specially, I think, in that endless poetry and mystery of the Mass, which keeps Catholicism alive. Matthew Arnold was very different in outward aspect. The face, strong and rugged, the large mouth, the broad lined brow, and vigorous coal-black hair, bore no resemblance, except for that fugitive yet vigorous something which w^e call ' family likeness,' to either his father or mother — still less to the brother so near to him in age. But the Celtic trace is there, though derived, I have sometimes thought, rather from an Irish than a Cornish source. Dr. Arnold's mother, Martha Delafield, according to a genealogy I see no reason to doubt, was partly of Irish blood ; one finds, at any rate, Fitzgeralds and Dillons among the names of her forebears. And I have seen in Ireland faces belonging to the ' black Celt ' type — faces full of power, and humour, and softness, visibly moulded out of the good common earth by the nimble spirit within, which have reminded me of my uncle. Nothing indeed at first sight could have been less romantic or dreamy than his outer aspect. ' Ineffectualness ' was not to be thought of in connection with him. He stood four-square — a 42 A WEITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS courteous, competent man of affairs, an admirable inspector of schools, a delightful companion, a guest whom everybody wanted, and no one could bind for long ; one of the sanest, most independent, most cheerful and loveable of mortals. Yet his poems show what was the real inner life and genius of the man ; how rich in that very ' emotion,' ' love of beauty and charm,' ' rebellion against fact,' ' spirituality,' ' melancholy ' which he himself catalogued as the cradle gifts of the Celt. Crossed indeed, always, with the Rugby ' earnest- ness,' with that in him which came to him from his father. It is curious to watch the growing perception of ' Matt's ' powers among the circle of his nearest kin, as it is reflected in these family letters to the emigrant brother, which reached him across the seas from 1847 to 1856, and now lie under my hand. The ' Poems by A.' came out, as all lovers of English poetry know, in 1849. My grandmother writes to my father in March of that year, after protesting that she has not much news to give him : — But the little volume of Poems ! — that is indeed a subject of new and very great interest. By degrees we hear more of public opinion concerning them, and I am very much mistaken if their power both in thought and execution is not more and more felt and acknowledged. I had a letter from dear Miss Fenwick to-day, whose first impressions were that they were by you, for it seems she had heard of the volume as much admired, and as by one of the family, and she had hardly thought it could be by one so moving in the busy haunts of men as dear Matt. . . . Matt himself says ' I have learned a good deal as to what is 'practicable from the objections of people, even when I thought them not reasonable, and in some degree THE FAMILY OF FOX HOW 43 they may determine my course as to publisliing ; e.g. I had thoughts of pubhshing another volume of short poems next spring, and a tragedy I have long had in my head, the spring after : at present I shall leave the short poems to take their chance, only writing them when I cannot help it, and try to get on with my Tragedy (Merope), which however will not be a very quick affair. But as that must be in a regular and usual form, it may perhaps, if it succeeds, enable me to use metres in short poems which seem proper to myself ; whether they suit the habits of readers at first sight or not. But all this is rather vague at present. ... I think I am getting quite indiilerent about the book. I have given away the only copy I had, and now never look at them. The most enthusiastic people about them are young men of course ; but I have heard of one or two people who found pleasure in " Eesignation " and poems of that stamp, wliich is what I like.' ' The most enthusiastic people about them are young men, of course.' The sentence might stand as the motto of all poetic beginnings. The young poet writes first of all for the young of his own day. They make his bodyguard. They open to him the gates of the House of Fame. But if the divine power is really his, it soon frees itself from the shackles of Time and Circumstance. The true poet becomes, in the language of the Greek epigram on Homer, ' the ageless mouth of all the world.' And if ' The Strayed Reveller,' and the Sonnet ' To Shakespeare,' and ' Resignation,' delighted those who were young m 1849, that same generation, as the years passed over it, instead of outgrowing their poet, took him all the more closely to their hearts. Only so can we explain the steady spread and deepening of his poetic reputation which befel my uncle up to the very end of his life, and had assured him by then — leaving out of count the later development of his influence both 44 A WEITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS in the field of poetry and elsewhere — his place in the history of English literature. But his entry as a poet was gradual, and but little heralded, compared to the debuts of our own time. Here is an interesting appreciation from his sister Mary, about whom I shall have more to say presently. At the time this letter was written, in 1849, she was twenty- three, and already a widow, after a tragic year of married life during which her young husband had developed paralysis of the brain. She was living in London, attending Bedford College, and F. D. Maurice's sermons, much influenced, like her brothers, by Emerson and Carlyle, and at this moment, a fine, restless, immature creature, much younger than her years in some respects, and much older in others — with eyes fast opening on worlds hitherto unsuspected in the quiet home life. She writes : — I have been in London for several months this year, and I have seen a good deal of ]\Iatt, considering the very different lives we lead. I used to breakfast with him sometimes, and then his Poems seemed to make me know Matt so much better than I had ever done before. Indeed it was almost like a new Introduction to him. I do not think those Poems could be read — quite independently of their poetical power — ^without leading one to expect a great deal from ]\Iatt ; without raising I mean the kind of expectation one has from and for those who have, in some way or other, come face to face with hfe and asked it, in real earnest, what it means. I felt there was so much more of tliis practical questioning in Matt's book than I was at all prepared for ; in fact that it showed a know- ledge of life and conflict which was strangelij like experience if it was not the thing itself ; and this with all Matt's great power I should not have looked for. I do not yet know the book well, but I think that ' Mycerinus ' struck me most perhaps, as illustrating what I have been speaking of. THE FA]\riLY OF FOX HOW 45 And again, to another member of tlie family : — It is the moral strength, or, at any rate, the moral consciousness which struck and surprised me so much in the poems. I could have been prepared for any degree of poetical power, for there being a great deal more than I could at all appreciate ; but there is something altogether different from this, something which such a man as Clough has, for instance, which I did not expect to find in Matt ; but it is there. Of course when I speak of his Poems I only speak of the impression received from those I understand. Some are perfect riddles to me, such as that to the Child at Douglas, which is surely more poetical than true. Strangely like experience! The words are an interesting proof of the difficulty we all have in seeing with accuracy the persons and things which are nearest to us. The astonishment of the sisters — for the same feeling is expressed by ]\Irs. Forster — ^was very natural. In these early days, ' Matt ' often figiu-es in the family letters as the worldling of the group — the dear one who is making way in surroundings quite unknown to the Fox How circle, where under the shadow of the mountains, the sisters, idealists all of them, looking out a little austerely, for all their tenderness, on the human scene, are watching with a certain anxiety lest Matt should be ' spoiled.' As Lord Lansdowne's private secretary, very much liked by his chief, he goes among rich and important people, and finds himself as a rule much cleverer than they ; above all, able to amuse them, so often the surest road to social and other success. Already at Oxford ' Matt ' had been something of an exquisite — or as Miss Bronte puts it, a trifle ' foppish ' ; and in the (manuscript) ' Fox How Magazine,' to which all the nine contributed, and in which Matthew Arnold's boyish poems may still be read, there are many family 46 A WEITER'S RECOLLECTIONS jests levelled at Matt's high standard in dress and deportment. But how soon the nascent dread lest their poet should be somehow separated from them by the ' great world ' passes away from mother and sisters — for ever ! With every year of his life Matthew Arnold, beside making the sunshine of his own married home, became a more attached, a more devoted son and brother. The two volumes of his published letters are there to show it. I will only quote here a sentence from a letter of Mrs. Arnold's, written in 1850, a year after the publication of the ' Poems by A.' She and her eldest daughter, then shortly to become William Forster's wife, were at the time in London. ' K.' had been seriously ill, and the marriage had been postponed for a short time. Matt [says Mrs. Arnold] has been with us almost every day since we came up — ^now so long ago ! — and it is pleasant indeed to see his dear face, and to find him always so affectionate, and so unspoiled by his being so much sought after in a kind of society entirely different from anything we can enter into. But, indeed, the time saved, day after day, for an invalid sister, by a run-after young man of twenty-seven, who might so easily have made one or other of the trifling or selfish excuses we are all so ready to make, was only a prophecy of those many ' nameless unremembered acts ' of simple kindness, which filled the background of Matthew Arnold's middle and later life, and were not revealed, many of them, even to his own people, till after his death — kindness to a pupil-teacher, an un- successful writer, a hard-worked schoolmaster or schoolmistress, a budding poet, a school-boy. It was not possible to ' spoil ' Matthew Arnold. Meredith's ' Comic Spirit ' in him, his irrepressible humour, would THE FAMILY OF FOX HOW 47 alone have saved him from it. Aiid as to his relation to ' society,' and the great ones in it, no one more frankly amused himself — within certain very definite limits — with the ' cakes and ale ' of life, and no one held more lightly to them. He never denied — none but the foolish ever do deny — the immense personal oppor- tunities and advantages of an aristocratic class, wherever it exists. He was quite conscious— none but those without imagination can fail to be conscious — of the glamour of long descent and great affairs. But he laughed at the ' Barbarians,' the materialised or stupid holders of power and place, and their ' fortified posts,' i.e. the country houses, just as he laughed at the Philistines and Mr. Bottles ; when he preached a sermon in later life, it was on Menander's motto — ' Choose Equality ' ; and he and Clough — the Republican — were not really far apart. He mocked even at Clough indeed, addressing his letters to him — ' Citizen Clough, Oriel Lyceum, Oxford ' ; but in the midst of the revolutionary hubbub of '48 he pours himself out to Clough only — he and ' Thyrsis,' to use his own expression in a letter, ' agreeing like two lambs in a world of wolves,' and in his early sonnet (1848) ' To a Republican Friend ' (who was certainly Clough), he says : — If sadness at tho long heart-wasting show Wherein earth's great ones are disquieted ; If thoughts, not idle, while before me flow The armies of the homeless and unfed — If these are yours, if this is what you are. Then I am yours, and what you feel, I share. Yet, as he adds, in the succeeding sonnet, he has no 48 A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS belief in sudden radical change, nor in any earthly millennium — Seeing this vale, this earth, whereon we dream. Is on all sides o'ershadowed by the high Uno'erleaped mountains of necessity, Sparing us narrower margin than we dream. On the eagerness with which Matthew Arnold fol- lowed the revolutionary spectacle of ' 48, an unpublished letter written — piquantly enough ! — from Lansdowne House itself, on February 28, in that famous year, to my father in New Zealand, throws a vivid light. One feels the artist in the writer. First, the quiet of the great house and courtyard, the flower-pricked grass, the ' still-faced babies ' : then the sudden clash of the street-cries ! ' Your uncle's description of this house,' writes the present Lord Lansdowne, in 1910, 'might almost have been written yesterday, instead of in 1848. Little is changed, Romulus and Remus and the she-wolf are still on the top of the book-case, and the clock is still hard by ; but the picture of the Jewish Exiles . . . has been given to a local School of Art in Wiltshire ! The green lawn remains, but I am afraid the crocuses, which I can remember as a child, no longer come up through the turf. And lastly one of the "still-faced babies" (i.e. Lord Lans- downe himself) is still often to be seen in the gravel court ! He was three years old when the letter was written.' Here then is the letter : — Lansdowne House, Feb 8, 1848. My Dearest Tom, — . . . Here I sit, opposite a marble group of Romulus and Remus and the wolf ; the two children fighting like mad, and the limp-uddered she-wolf affectionately TPIE FAMILY OF FOX PlOW 49 snarling at tbo little demons struggling on her back. Above it is a great picture, Eembrandt's Jewish Exiles, which would do for Consuelo and Albert resting in one of their wanderings, worn out upon a wild stony heath sloping to the Baltic — she leaning over her two children who sleep in their torn rags at her feet. Behind me a most musical clock, marking now 24 Minutes past 1 p.m. On my left two great windows looking out on the court in front of the house, through one of which, slightly opened, comes in gushes the soft damp breath, with a tone of spring-life in it, which the close of an English February some- times brings — so different from a November mildness. The gi'een lawn which occupies nearly half the court is studded over with crocuses of all colours — growing out of the grass, for there are no flower beds ; delightful for the largo still-faced white-robed babies whom their nurses carry up and down on the gravel court where it skirts the green. And from the square and the neighbouring streets, tlirough the open door whereat the civil porter moves to and fro, come the sounds of vehicles and men, in all gradations, some from near and some from far, but mellowed by the time they reach this backstanding lordly mansion. But above all cries comes one whereat every stone in this and other lordly mansions may totter and quake for fear : ' Se . . . c . . . ond Edition of the Morning Herald — L . . . a . . . test news from Paris : — arrival of the King of the French.' I have gone out and bought the said portentous Herald, and send it herewith, that you may read and know. As the human race for ever stumbles up its great steps, so it is now. You remember the Reform Banquets (in Paris) last summer ? — well ! — the diners omitted the king's health, and abused Guizot's majority as corrupt and servile : the majority and the king grew excited ; the Government forbade the Banquets to continue. The king met the Chamber with the words ' passions aveugles ' to characterise the dispositions of the Banqueters : and Guizot grandly declared against the spirit of Bevolution all over the world. His practice suited his 50 A WKITER'S RECOLLECTION^ words, or seemed to suit it, for both in Switzerland and Italy, the French Government incurred the charge of siding against the Liberals. Add to this the corruption cases you remember, the Prashn murder, and later events, which powerfully stimu- lated the disgust (moral indignation that People does not feel !) entertained by the lower against the governing class. Then Thiers, seeing the breeze rising, and hoping to use it, made most telling speeches in the debate on the Address, clearly defining the crisis as a question between revolution and counter-revolution, and declaring enthusiastically for the former. Lamartine and others, the sentimental and the plain honest, were very damaging on the same side. The Govern- ment were harsh — abrupt — almost scornful. They would not yield — ^would not permit banquets : would give no Eeform tin they chose. Guizot spoke (alone in the Chamber I think) to this effect. With decreasing Majorities the Government carried the different clauses of the address, amidst furious scenes ; opposition members crying that they were worse than Polignac. It was resolved to hold an Opposition banquet in Paris in spite of the Government, last Tuesday, the 22nd. In the week between the close of the debate and this day there was a profound uneasy excitement, but nothing I think to appal the rulers. They had the fortifications : all kinds of stores ; and 100,000 troops of the line. To be quite secure however, they determined to take a formal legal objection to the banquet at the doors ; but not to prevent the procession thereto. On that the Opposition published a proclamation inviting the National Guard, who sympathised, to form part of the procession in uniform. Then the Government for- bade the meeting altogether — absolutely — and the Opposition resigned themselves to try the case in a Court of Law. So did not Uie 'peo'ple ! They gathered all over Paris : the National Guard, whom Ministers did not trust, were not called out : the Line checked and dispersed the mob on all points. But next day the mob were there again : the Ministers in a constitutional fright called out the National Guard : a body of these hard by the Opera refused to clear the street : they joined the people. Troops THE FAMILY OF FOX HOW 61 were brought up : the Mob and the National Guard refused to give them passage do^vn the Eue Le Pelletier which they occupied : after a moment's hesitation, they were marched on along the Boulevard. This settled the matter ! Everywhere the National Guard fraternised with the people : the troops stood indifferent. The King dismissed the Ministers : he sent for Mole ; a shade better : not enough : ho sent for Thiers — a pause ; this was several shades better — still not enough : meanwhile the crowd continued, and attacks on different posts, with shght bloodshed, increased the excitement : finally the King abdicated in favour of the Count of Paris, and fled. The Count of Paris was taken by his mother to the Chamber — the people broke in ; too late — not enough : — a republic — an appeal to the people. The royal family escaped to all parts, Belgium, Eu, England ; a Provisional Government narned. You will see how they stand : they have adopted the last measures of Eevolution. — News has just come that the National Guard have declared against a Republic, and that a colHsion is inevitable. If possible I will write by the next mail, and send you a later paper than the Herald by this mail. Your truly affectionate, dearest Tom, M. Arnold. To this, let me add here two or three other letters or fragments, all unpublished, which I find among the papers from which I have been drawing, ending, for the present, vdth the jubilant letter describing his election to the Poetry Professorship at Oxford, in 1857. Here, first of all, is an amusing reference, dated 1849, to Keble, then the idol of every well-disposed Anglican household : — > I dined last night with a Mr. Grove,^ a celebrated man of ^ Afterwards Sir William Grove, F.R.S., author of the famous essay ou • The Correlatiou of Thysical Eorce.' 52 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS science : his wife is pretty and agreeable, but not on a first interview. The husband and I agree wonderfully in some points. He is a bad sleeper, and hardly ever free from headache ; he equally dislikes and disapproves of modern existence and the state of excitement in which everybody lives : and he sighs after a paternal despotism and the calm existence of a Eussian or Asiatic. He showed me a picture of Faraday, which is wonderfully fine : I am almost inclined to get it : it has a curious likeness to Keble, only with a calm, earnest look unhke the latter's Flibbertigibbet, fanatical, twinkling expression. Did ever anybody apply such adjectives to John Keble before ! Yet if anyone will look carefully at the engraving of Keble so often seen in quiet parsonages, they will understand, I think, exactly, what Matthew Arnold meant. In 1850 great changes came upon the Arnold family. The ' Doctor's ' three elder children — Jane, Matthew, and my father — married in that year, and a host of new interests sprang up for every member of the Fox How circle. I find in a letter to my father from Arthur Stanley, his father's biographer, and his own Oxford Tutor, the following reference to ' Matt's ' marriage, and to the second series of Poems — containing ' Sohrab and Rustum ' — which were published in 1854. 'You will have heard ' — ^writes Stanley — ' of the great success of Matt's poems. He is in good heart about them. He is also — I must say so, though perhaps I have no right to say so — greatly improved by his marriage — retaining all the genius and nobleness of mind which you remember, with all the lesser faults pruned and softened down.' Matt himself wrote to give news of his wedding, to describe the bride — Judge Wightman's daughter, the dear and gracious little lady whom we THE FAMILY OF FOX HOW 58 grandcliildren knew and loved as ' Aunt Fanny Lucy ' — and to wish my father joy of his own. And then there is nothing among the waifs and strays that have come to me worth printing, till 1855, when my uncle writes to New Zealand : — I hope you have got my book by this time. What 3'ou will like best, I think, will be the ' Scholar Gipsy.' I am sure that old Cumner and Oxford country ^^^ll stir a chord in you. For the preface I doubt if you will care, not having much before your eyes the sins and offences at which it is directed : the first being that we have numbers of young gentlemen with really wonderful powers of perception and expression, but to whom there is wholly wanting a ' bedeutendes Individuum ' — so that their productions are most unedifying and unsatis- factory. But this is a long story. As to Church matters. I think people in general concern themselves less with them than they did when you left England. Certainly rehgion is not, to all appearance at least, losing gi'ound here : but since the great people of Newman's party went over, the disputes among the comparatively unimportant remains of them do not excite much interest. I am going to hear Manning at the Spanish Chapel next Sunday. Newman gives himself up almost entirely to organising and educating the Eoman Cathohcs, and is gone off greatly, they say, as a preacher. God bless you, my dearest Tom : I cannot tell you the almost painful longing I sometimes have to see you once more. The following year the brothers met again; and there followed, almost immediately, my uncle's election to the Poetry Professorship at Oxford. He writes, in answer to my father's congratulations : — ITampton, May 15, 1S57. My dear Tom, — My thoughts have often turned to you dm-ing my canvass for the Professorship — and they 54 A WRITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS have turned to you more than ever during the last few days which I have been spending at Oxford. You alone of my brothers are associated with that life at Oxford, the freest and most delightful part, perhaps, of my life, when with you and Clough and Walrond I shook off all the bonds and for- malities of the place, and enjoyed the spring of life and that unforgotten Oxfordshire and Berkshire country. Do you remember a poem of mine called ' The Scholar Gipsy ' ? It was meant to fix the remembrance of those delightful wander- ings of ours in the Cumner hills before they were quite effaced — and as such, Clough and Walrond accepted it, and it has had much success at Oxford, I am told, as was perhaps Hkely from its couleur locale. I am hardly ever at Oxford now, but the sentiment of the place is overpowering to me when I have leisure to feel it, and can shake off the interruptions which it is not so easy to shake off now as it was when we were young. But on Tuesday afternoon I smuggled myself awa3^ and got up into one of our old coombs among the Cumner hills, and into a field waving deep with cowslips and grasses, and gathered such a bunch as you and I used to gather in the cowslip field on Lutterworth road long years ago. You dear old boy, I love your congratulations although I see and hear so little of you, and, alas ! can see and hear but so little of you. I was supported by people of all opinions, the great bond of union being, I believe, the affectionate interest felt in papa's memory. I think it probable that I shall lecture in English : there is no direction whatever in the Statute as to the language in v/hich the lectures shall be : and the Latin has so died out, even among scholars, that it seems idle to entomb a lecture which, in English, might be stimulating and interesting. On the same occasion, writing to his mother, the new Professor gives an amusing account of the election day, when my uncle and aunt came up to town from Hampton, where they were living, in order to get telegraphic news of the polling from friends at Oxford. ' Christ Church ' — i.e. the High Church party in Oxford THE FA]\nLY OF FOX HOW 55 — ^had put up an opposition candidate, and the excite- ment was great. My nncle was by this time the father of three small boys, Tom, Trevenen — alias Budge — and Richard — ' Diddy.* We went first to the telegraph station at Charing Cross. Then, about 4, we got a message from Walrond — ' nothing certain is known, but it is rumoured that you are ahead.' Then we went to get some toys for the children in the Lowther Arcade, and could scarcely have found a more genuine distraction than in selecting waggons for Tom and Trev, with horses of precisely the same colour, not one of which should have a hair more in his tail than the other — and a musical cart for Diddy. A little after five we went back to the telegraph ofiice, and got the following message — * Nothing declared, but you are said to be quite safe. Go to Eaton Place.' (' Eaton Place ' was then the house of Judge Wightman, Mrs. Matthew Arnold's father.) * To Eaton Place we went, and then a httle after 6 o'clock we were joined by the Judge in the highest state of joyful excite- ment with the news of my majority of 85, which had been telegraphed to him from Oxford after he had started and had been given to him at Paddington Station. . . . The income is £130 a year or thereabouts : the duties consist as far as I can learn in assisting to look over the prize compositions, in delivering a Latin oration in praise of founders at every alternate commemoration, and in preparing and giving three Latin lectures on ancient poetry in the course of the year. These lectures I Iwpe io give in English. The italics are mine. The intention expressed here and in the letter to my father was, as is well known, carried out, and Matthew Arnold's Lectures at Oxford, together with the other poetic and critical work produced by him during the years of his professorship, became so great a force in the development of English criticism and English taste, that the life-like detail of this letter acq^uires a kind of historical value. As a 56 A WEITER'S RECOLLECTIONS child of fourteen I first made acquaintance with Oxford, while my uncle was still Professor. I remember well some of his lectures, the crowded lecture-hall, the manner and personality of the speaker, and my own shy pride in him — from a great distance. For I was a self-conscious, bookish child, and my days of real friendship with him were still far ahead. But during the years that followed, the ten years that he held his professorship, what a spell he wielded over Oxford, and literary England in general ! Looking back one sees how the first series of ' Essays in Criticism,' the ' Lectures on Celtic Literature,' or ' On translating Homer,' ' Culture and Anarchy ' and the rest, were all the time working on English taste and feeling, whether through sympathy or antagonism ; so that after those ten years, 1857-1867, the intellectual life of the country had ab- sorbed, for good and all, an influence, and a stimulus, which had set it moving on new paths to new ends. With these thoughts in mind, supplying a comment on the letter which few people could have foreseen in 1857, let me quote a few more sentences : — Keble voted for me after all. He told the Coleridges he was so much pleased with my letter (to the electors) that he could not refrain. ... I had support from all sides. Arch- deacon Denison voted for me, also Sir John Yarde Buller, and Henley, of the high Tory party. It was an immense victory — some 200 more voted than have ever, it is said, voted in a Professorship election before. It is a great lesson to Christ- church, which was rather disposed to imagine it could carry everything by its great numbers. Goodbye my dearest mother. ... I have just been up to see the three dear little brown heads on their pillows, all asleep. . . . My affectionate thanks to Mrs. Wordsworth and Mrs. Fletcher for their kind interest in my success. THE FAMILY OF FOX HOW 57 It is pleasant to think of Wordsworth's widow, in her ' old age serene and bright,' and of the poet's old friend, Mrs. Fletcher, watching and rejoicing in the first triumphs of the younger singer. So the ten years of approach and attack — in the intellectual sense — came to an end, and the ten central years of mastery and success began. Towards the end of that time, as a girl of sixteen I became a resident in Oxford. Up to then Euskin — ^the ' Stones of Venice,' and certain chapters in ' Modern Painters ' — had been my chief intellectual passion in a childhood and first youth that cut but a very poor figure, as I look back upon them, beside the ' wonderful children ' of this generation ! But it must have been about 1868 that I first read ' Essays in Criticism.' It is not too much to say that the book set for me the currents of life ; its effect heightened, no doubt, by the sense of kinship. Above all it determined in me as in many others, an enduring love of France and of French literature, which played the part of schoolmaster to a crude youth. I owe this to my uncle, and it was a priceless boon. If he had only lived a little longer — if he had not died so soon after I had really begun to know him — how many debts to him would have been confessed, how many things said, which, after all, were never said ! CHAPTER IV Other Children of Fox How I HAVE now to sketch some other figures in the Fox-How circle, together with a few of the intimate friends who mingled with it frequently, and very soon became names of power to the Tasmanian child also. Let me take first Dr. Arnold's third son, ' Uncle Willy ' — my father's junior by some four years. William Delafield Arnold is secure of long remembrance, one would fain think, if only as the subject of Matthew Arnold's two memorial poems — ' A Southern Night ' and ' Stanzas from Carnac' But in truth he had many and strong claims of his own. His youth was marked by that ' restlessness,' which is so often spoken of in the family letters as a family quality and failing. My father's ' restlessness ' made him throw up a secure niche in English life, for the New Zealand adventure. The same temperament in Mary Twining, the young widow of twenty-two, took her to London, away from the quiet of the Ambleside valley, and made her an ardent follower of Maurice, Kingsley and Carlyle. And in Willy, the third son, it showed itself first in a revolt against Oxford, while he was still at Christchurch, leading to his going out to India, and joining the Indian Army, at the age of twenty, only to find the life of 68 OTHER CHILDREN OF FOX HOW 59 an Indian subaltern all but intolerable, and to plunge for a time at least into fresh schemes of change. Among the early photographs at Fox How, there is a particularly fine daguerreotype of a young officer in uniform, almost a boy, slim and well proportioned, with piled curly hair, and blue eyes, which in the late fifties I knew as ' Uncle Willy ' ; and there were other photographs on glass of the same young man, where this handsome face appeared again, grown older, — much older — the boyish look replaced by an aspect of rather grave dignity. In the later pictures he was grouped with children, whom I knew as my Indian cousins. But him, in the flesh, I had never seen. He was dead . His wife was dead . On the landing bookcase of Fox How, there was however a book in two blue volumes, which I soon reahsed as a ' novel,' called ' Oakfield,' which had been written by the handsome young soldier in the daguerreotype. I tried to read it, but found it was about things and persons in which I could then take no interest. But its author remained to me a mysteriously attractive figure : and when the time came for me to read my Uncle Matthew's poems, ' A Southern Night,' describing the death at Gibraltar of this soldier uncle, became a great favourite with me, I could see it all as Matthew Arnold de- scribed it--the steamer approaching Gibraltar, the landing, and the pale invalid with the signs on him of that strange thing called ' death,' which to a child that ' feels its life in every limb,' has no real meaning, though the talk of it may lead vaguely to tears, as that poem often did with me. Later on, of course, I read ' Oakfield,' and learnt to take a more informed pride in the writer of it. But it 60 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS was not until a number of letters written from India by AVilliam Arnold to my father in New Zealand between 1848 and 1855, with a few later ones, came into my possession, at my father's death, that I really seemed to know this dear vanished Idnsman, though his orphaned children had always been my friends. The letters of 1848 and '49 read like notes for ' Oak- field.' They were written in bitterness of soul by a very young man, with high hopes and ideals, fresh from the surroundings of Oxford and Rugby, from the training of the Schoolhouse and Fox How, and plunged suddenly into a society of boys, — the subalterns of the Bengal Native Infantry — living for the most part in idleness, often a vicious idleness, without any restrain- ing public opinion, and practically unshepherded, amid the temptations of the Indian climate and life. They show that the novel is indeed, as was always supposed, largely autobiographical, and the references in them to the struggle with the Indian climate point sadly forward to the writer's own fate, ten years later, when like the hero of his novel, Edward Oakfield, he fell a victim to Indian heat and Indian work. The novel was published in 1853, while its author was at home on a long sick leave, and is still remembered for the anger and scandal it provoked in India, and the reforms to which, no doubt, after the Mutiny, it was one of the contributing impulses. It is indeed full of interest for any student of the development of Anglo-Indian life and society; even when one remembers how, soon after it was pub- lished, the great storm of the Mutiny came rushing over the society it describes, changing and uprooting every- where. As fiction, it suffers from the Rugby ' earnest- ness * which overmasters in it any purely artistic impulse, OTHER CHILDREN OF FOX HOW Gl while infusing a certain fire and unity of its own. But various incidents in the story — the quarrel at the mess-table, the horse-whipping, the court-martial, the death of Vernon, and the meeting between Oakfield and Stafford, the villain of the piece, after Chilianwallah — are told with force, and might have led on, had the writer lived, to something more detached and mature in the way of novel- writing. But there were few years left to him, ' poor gallant boy ! ' — ^to quote the phrase of his poet-brother ; and within them he was to find his happiness and his oppor- tunity in love and in pubhc service, not in Kterature. Nothing could be more pathetic than the isolation and revolt of the early letters. The boy Ensign is desperately home-sick, pining for Fox How, for his mother and sisters, for the Oxford he had so easily renounced, for the brothers parted from him by such leagues of land and sea. The fact that one learns first in India [he says, bitterly] is the profound ignorance which exists in England about it. You know how one hears it spoken of always as a magnificent field for exertion, and this is true enough in one way, for if a man does emerge at all, he emerges the more by contrast — he is a triton among minnows. But I think the responsibihty of those who keep sending out here young fellows of sixteen and seventeen fresh from a private school or Addiscombe is quite awful. The stream is so strong, the society is so utterly worldly and mercenary in its bes.t phase, so utterly and inconceivably low and profligate in its worst, that it is not strange that at so early an age, eight out of ten sink beneath it. . . . One soon observes here how seldom one meets a happij man. I came out here with tliree great advantages [he adds]. First, being twenty instead of seventeen ; secondly, not having been at Addiscombe ; third, having been at Rugby and Christ- chmch. This gives me a sort of position — but still I know 62 A WKITER'S RECOLLECTIONS the danger is awful — for constitutionally I believe I am as little able to stand the peculiar trials of Indian life as anybody. And he goes on to say, that if ever he feels himself in peril of sinking to the level of what he loathes — ' I will go at once.' By coming out to India he had bound himself to one thing only — ' to earn my own bread.' But he is not bound to earn it ' as a gentleman.' The day may come — When I shall ask for a place on your farm, and if you ask how I am to get there, you, Tom, are not the person to deny that a man who is in earnest and capable of forming a resolution can do more difficult things than getting from India to New Zealand ! And he winds up with yearning affection towards the elder brother so far away. I think of you very often — our excursion to Keswick and Greta Hall, our walk over Hardknot and Wrynose, our bathes in the old Allen Bank bathing-place (Grasmere), our parting in the cab at the corner of Mount St. One of my pleasantest but most difficult problems is when and where we shall meet again. In another letter written a year later, the tone is still despondent. ' It is no affectation to say that I feel my life, in one way, cannot now be a happy one.' He feels it his duty for the present to ' lie still,' as Keble says, to think, it may be to suffer. ' But in my castle- buildings I often dream of coming to you.' He appre- ciates, more fully than ever before, Tom's motives in going to New Zealand,— the desire that may move a man to live his own life in a new and freer world. ' But when I am asked, as I often am, why you went, I always grin and let people answer themselves ; for OTHER CHILDREN OF FOX HOW 68 I could not hope to explain without preaching a sermon. An act of faith and conviction cannot be understood by the light of worldly motives and interests ; and to blow out this light, and bring the true one, is not the work of a young man with his own darkness to struggle through ; so I grin as aforesaid.' ' God is teaching us,' — he adds, i.e. the different members of the family 'by separation, absence, and suffering.' And he winds up — ' Goodbye. I never like finishing a letter to you — it seems like letting you fall back again to such infinite distance. And you are often very near me, and the thought of you is often cheery and helpful to me in my own conflict.' Even up to January, 1850, he is still tliinking of New Zealand, and signing himself, ' ever, dear Tom, whether I am destined to see you soon, or never again in this world — ^Your most truly affectionate brother.' Alack, the brothers never did meet again, in this world which both took so hardly. But for Willy a transformation scene was near. After two years in India, his gift and his character had made their mark. He had not only been dreaming of New Zealand ; besides his daily routine, he had been working hard at Indian languages and history. The Lawrences, both John and Henry, had found him out, and realised his quality. It was at Sir Henry Lawrence's house in the spring of 1850, that he met Miss Fanny Hodgson, daughter of the distinguished soldier and explorer, General Hodgson, discoverer of the sources of the Ganges, and at that time the Indian Surveyor-General. The soldier of twenty-three fell instantly in love, and tumult and despondency melted away. The next letter to New Zealand is pitched in quite another key. 64 A WEITEE^S EECOLLECTIONS He still judges Indian life and Indian government witti a very critical eye. ' The Alpha and Omega of the whole evil in Indian Society ' is ' the regarding India as a rupee-mine, instead of a Colony, and ourselves as Fortune-himters and Pension- earners rather than as emigrants and missionaries.' And outside his domestic life his prospects are still uncertain. But with every mail one can see the strained spirit relaxing, yielding to the spell of love and to the honourable interests of an opening life. ' To-day, my Thomas (October 2, 1850) I sit, a married man in the Bengal army writing to a brother, it may be a married man, in Van Diemen's Land.' (Eumours of Tom's courtship of Julia Sorell had evidently just reached him) . He goes on to describe his married home at Hoshyarpore, and his work at Indian languages. He has been reading Carlyle's ' Cromwell,' and mar- veUing at the ' rapid rush of thought which seems more and more to be engrossing people in England ! ' ' In India you will easily beheve that the torpor is still unbroken.' (The Mutiny was only seven short years ahead !) And he is still conscious of the * many weights which do beset and embitter a man's life in India.' But a new stay within, the reconciliation that love brings about between a man and the world, upholds him. ' " To draw homewards to the general life," which you, and dear Matt himself, and I, and all of us, are — or at least may be — living, independent of all the accidents of time and circumstance — this is a great alleviation.' The ^fundamentals ' are safe. He dwells happily on the word — ' a good word, in which you and I, so separated, as far as accidents go, it may be for all time, can find OTHER CHILDREN OF FOX HOW 65 great comfort, speaking as it does of Eternity.' One sees what is in his mind — the brother's ' little book of poems ' published a year before : — - Yet they, believe me, who await No gifts from chance, have conquered fate. They, winning room to see and hear. And to men's business not too near Though clouds of individual strife Draw homeward to the general life. To the wise, foolish ; to the world Weak ; — ^yet not weak, I might reply. Not foohsh, Fausta, in His eye. To whom each moment in its race, Crowd as we will its neutral space. Is but a quiet watershed Whence, equally, the seas of life and death are fed. Six months later the younger brother has heard ' as a positive fact ' of Tom's marriage, and writes, with affectionate ' chaff ' : — I wonder whether it has changed you much ? — ^not made a Tory of you, I'll undertake to say ! But it is wonderfully sobering. After all, Master Tom, it is not the very exact finale which we should have expected to your Repubhcanism of the last three or four years, to find you a respectable married man, holding a permanent appointment ! Matt's marriage, too, stands pre-eminent among the items of family new^s. What blind judges sometimes, the most attached brothers are of each other! I hear too by this mail of Matt's engagement, which suggests many thoughts. I ovni that Matt is one of the very last men in the world whom I can fancy happily married — or rather happy in matrimony. But I daresay I reckon without my GG A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS host, for there was such a ' longum intervallum ' between dear old Matt and me, that even that last month in town, when I saw so much of him, though there was the most entire absence of eld r-brotherism on his part, and 011I3' the most kind and thoughtful affection, for which I shall always feel grateful, yet om- intercourse was that of man and boy ; and though the difference of years was not so formidable as between ' Matthew ' and Wordsworth, yet we were less than they a * pair of Friends,' though a pair of very loving brothers. But even in this gay and charming letter, one begins to see the shadows cast by the doom to come. The young wife has gone to Simla, having been ' delicate ' for some time. The young husband stays behind, fighting the heat. The hot weather, old boy, is coming on hke a tiger. It is getting on for ten at night ; but we sit with windows all wide open, the Punkah going, the thinnest conceivable garments, and yet we sweat, my brother, very profusely. . . . To-morrow I shall be up at gun-fire, about half-past four a.m. and drive down to the civil station, about three miles off, to see a friend, an officer of our own corps. . . who is sick, return, take my Bearer's daily account, write a letter or so, and he down with Don Quixote under a punkah, go to sleep the first Chapter that Sancho lets me, and sleep till ten, get up, bathe, re-dress and breakfast ; do my daily business, such as it is — hard work, beheve me, in a hot sleep-inducing, intestine-withering climate, till sunset, when doors and windows are thrown open . . . and mortals go out to ' eat the air ' as the natives say. The climate indeed had already begun its deadly attack upon an organism as fine and sensitive as any of the myriad victims which the secret forces of India's sun and soil have exacted from her European invaders. In 1853, William Delafield Arnold came home invalided, with his wife and his two elder children. The third, OTHER CHILDREN OF FOX HOW G7 Oakeley (the future War Minister in Mr. Balfour's Government), was born in England in 1855. There were projects of giving up India and settling at home. The young soldier whose Hterary gift, always conspicuous among the nine in the old childish Fox How days, and already shown in ' Oakfield,' was becoming more and more marked, was at this time a frequent contributor to the Times, the Economist and Fraser, and was presently offered the Editorship of the Economist. But just as he was about to accept it, came a flattering offer from India, no doubt through the influence of Sir John Lawrence, of the Directorship of Public Instruction in the Punjaub. He thought himself bound to accept it, and mth his wife and two children went out again at the end of 1855. His business was to organise the whole of native education in the Punjaub, and he did it so well during the short time that remained to him before the Mutiny broke out, that during all that time of terror, education in the Punjaub was never interrupted, the attendances at the schools never dropped, and the young Director went about his work, not knowing often, indeed, whether the whole province might not be aflame within twenty-four hours, and its Anglo-Indian administration wiped out, but none the less undaunted and serene. To this day, three portrait medals in gold and silver are given every year to the best pupils in the schools of the Punjaub, the product of a fund raised immediately after his death by William Arnold's fellow-workers there, in order to commemorate his short heroic course in that far land, and to preserve if they could some record of that ' sweet stateliness ' of aspect, to use the expression of one who loved him, which 'had so fascinated his friends.' 68 A WEITER'S EECOLLECTIONS The Mutiny passed . Sir John Lawrence paid public and flattering tribute to the young official who had so amply justified a great man's choice. And before the storm had actually died away, within a fortnight of the fall of Delhi, while it was not yet certain that the troops on their way would arrive in time to prevent further mischief, my uncle, writing to my father of the awful days of suspense from the 14th to the 30th of September, says : — ■ A more afflicted country than this has been since I returned to it in November 1855 — afflicted by Dearth — Deluge — Pestilence — far worse than war, if would be hard to imagine. In the midst of it all, the happiness of our domestic life has heen almost perfect. With that touching sentence the letters to my father, so far at least as I possess them, come to an end. Alas ! In the following year the gentle wife and mother, worn out by India, died at a hill-station in the Himalayas, and a few months later, her husband, ill and heart-broken, sent his motherless children home by long sea, and followed himself by the overland route. Too late ! He was taken ill in Egypt, struggled on to Malta, and was put ashore at Gibraltar to die. From Cairo he had written to the beloved mother who was waiting for him in that mountain home he so longed to reach, that he hopes to be able to travel in a fortnight. But do not trust to this. ... Do not in fact expect me till you hear that I am in London. I much fear that it may be long before I see dear, dear Fox How. In London I must have advice, and I feel sure I shall be ordered to the South of England till the hot weather is well advanced. I must wait too in London for the darling children. But once in London, I cannot but think my dearest mother will manage to see me, and I have even had visions of your making one of your spring OTHEE CHILDREN OF FOX HOW 09 tours, and going with me to Torquay or wherever I may go. . . . Plans — plans — plans ! They will keep. And a few days later : — As I said before, do not expect me in England till you hear I am there. Perhaps I was too eager to get home. Assuredly I have been checked, and I feel as if there were much trouble between mo and home yet. ... I see in the papers the death of dear Mrs. AYordsworth. . . Ever my beloved mother . . . Your very loving son, W. D. Arnold. He started for England, but at Gibraltar, a dying man was carried ashore. His younger brother, sent out from England in post haste, missed him by ill chance at Alexandria and Malta, and arrived too late. He was buried under the shelter of the Kock of Spain and the British flag. His intimate friend, Meredith Townsend, the joint editor and creator of the Spectator, wrote to the Times shortly after his death : — William Arnold did not live long enough (he was thirty-one) to gain his true place in the world, but he had time enough given him to make himself of importance to a Government like that of Lord Dalhousie, to mould the education of a great province, and to win the enduring love of all with •whom he ever came in contact. It was left, however, for his poet-brother to build upon his early grave ' the living record of his memory.' A month after ' Willy's ' death, ' Matt ' was wandering where — beneath me, bright and wide Lay the low coast of Brittany. — with the thought of ' Willy ' in his mind, as he turns to the sea that will never now bring the wanderer home. 70 A WRITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS 0, could he once have reached the air Freshened by phmging tides, by showers ! Have felt this breath he loved, of fair Cool northern fields, and grain, and flowers. He longed for it — pressed on ! — In vain ! At the Straits failed that spirit brave, The south was parent of his pain, The south is mistress of his grave. Or again, in 'A Southern Night ' — where he muses on the ' two jaded English,' man and wife, who lie, one under the Himalayas, the other beside *the soft Mediterranean.' And his first thought is that for the * spent ones of a work-day age,' such graves are out of keeping. In cities should we English lie Where cries are rising ever new. And men's incessant stream goes by ! — • • • • • Not by those hoary Indian hills. Not by this gracious Midland sea Whose floor to-night sweet moonshine fills Should our graves be ! Some Eastern sage pursuing ' the pure goal of being ' — ' He by those Indian mountains old, might well repose.' Crusader, troubadour, or maiden dying for love — Such by these waters of romance 'Twas meet to lay ! Ajid then he turns upon himself. For what is beauty, what wisdom, what romance, if not the tender goodness of women, if not the high soul of youth ? Mild o'er her grave, ye mountains, shine ! Gently by his, ye waters, glide ! To that in you which is divine They were allied. OTHEE CHILDREN OF FOX HOW 71 Only a few days after their father's death, the four orphan children of the William Arnolds arrived at Fox How. They were immediately adopted as their own by William and Jane Forster, who had no children ; and later they added the name of Forster to that of Arnold. At that moment I was at school at Ambleside, and I remember well my first meeting with the Indian children, and how I wondered at their fair skins and golden hair and frail ethereal looks. By this time. Fox How was in truth a second home to me. But I have still to complete the tale of those who made it so. Edward Penrose, the Doctor's fourth son, who died in 1878, on the threshold of fifty, was a handsome bearded man of winning presence, and of many friends. He was at Balliol, then a Fellow of AU Souls, and in Orders. But he first found his real voca- tion as an Inspector of Schools in Devon and Cornwall, and for eighteen years, from 1860 to 1878, through the great changes in elementary education produced by his brother-in-law's Education Act, he was the ever- welcome friend of teachers and cliildrcn all over the wide and often remote districts of the West country which his work covered. He had not the gifts of his elder brothers, — neither the genius of Matthew nor the restless energy and initiative of Wilham Delafield, nor the scholarly and researching tastes of my father ; and his later fife was always a struggle against ill-health. But he had Matthew's kindness, and Matthew's humour — the ' chaff ' between the two brothers was endless ! — and a large allowance of Wilham's charm. His un- conscious talk in his last iUness was often of childi'en. He seemed to see them before him in the countiy schoolrooms, where his coming — the coming of * the tall gentleman with the kind blue eyes,' as an eye- n A WEITER'S EECOLLECTIONS witness describes him — was a festa, excellent official though he was. He carried enthusiasm into the cause of popular education, and that is not a very common enthusiasm in this country of ours. Yet the cause is nothing more nor less than the cause of the national intelligence, and its sharpening for the national tasks. But education has always been the Cinderella of poHtics ; this nation apparently does not love to be taught ! Those who grapple with its stubbornness in this field can never expect the ready palm that falls to the workers in a dozen other fields. But in the seed sown, and the human duty done, they find their reward. ' Aunt Mary,^ Arnold's second daughter, I have already spoken of. When my father and mother reached England from Tasmania, she had just married again, a Leicestershire clergyman, with a house and small estate near Loughborough. Her home — Woodhouse — on the borders of Charnwood Forest, and the beautiful Beaumanoir Park, was another fairy-land to me and to my cousins. Its ponds and woods and reed-beds ; its distant summer house between two waters, where one might live and read and dream through long summer hours, undisturbed ; its pleasant rooms, above all the ' tapestry room ' where I generally slept, and which I always connected with the description of the huntsman on the ' arras,' in ' Tristram and Iseult '; the Scott novels I devoured there ; and the ' Court ' nights at Beaumanoir, where some feudal customs were still kept up, and its beautiful mistress, Mrs. Herrick, the young wife of an old man, queened it very graciously over neighbours and tenants : — all these are among the lasting memories of fife. Mrs. Herrick became identified in my imagination with each successive Scott heroine, — OTHER CHILDREN OF FOX HOW 73 Rowena, Isabella, Rose Bradwardine, the Wliite Lady of Avenel, and the rest. But it was Aunt Mary herself, after all, who held the scene. In that Leicestershire world of High Toryism, she raised the Liberal flag — her father's flag — with indomitable courage, but also with a humour, which after the tragic hours of her youth, flowered out in her like something new and unexpectedly delightful. It must have been always there, but not till marriage and motherhood, and F. D. Maurice's influence, had given her peace of soul does it seem to have shown itself as I remember it, — a golden and pervading quality, which made life unfailingly pleasant beside her. Her clear dark eyes, with their sweet sincerity, and the touch in them of a quiet laughter, of which the causes were not always clear to the bystanders, her strong face with its points of likeness to her father's, and all her warm and most human personality — they are still vividly present to me, though it is nearly thirty years, since, after an hour or two's pain, she died suddenly and unexpectedly, of the same malady that killed her father. Consumed in her youth by a passionate idealism, she had accepted at the hands of life, and by the age of four and twenty, a lot by no means ideal : — a home in the depths of the country, among neighboiu's often uncon- genial, and far from the intellectual pleasures she had tasted during her young widowhood in London. But out of this lot she made something beautiful, and all her own — by sheer goodness, conscience, intelligence. She had her angles and inconsistencies ; she often puzzled those who loved her ; but she had a large brain and a large heart ; and for us colonial children, conscious of many disadvantages beside our English-born cousins. 74 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS she had a peculiar tenderness, a peculiar laughing sympathy, that led us to feel in ' Aunt Maria,' one of our best friends. Susan Arnold, the Doctor's fourth daughter, married Mr. John Cropper in 1858, and here too, in her house beside the Mersey, among fields and trees that still maintain a green though be-smutted oasis in the busy heart of Liverpool, that girdles them now on all sides, and will soon engulf them, there was kindness and welcome for the little Tasmanians. She died a few years ago, mourned and missed by her own people — those life-long neighbours who know truly what we are. Of the fifth daughter, Frances, 'Aunt Fan,^ I may not speak, because she is still with us in the old house — alive to every political and intellectual interest of these dark- ened days, beloved by innumerable friends in many worlds, and making sunshine still for Arnold's grand- children, and their children's children. But it was to her that my own stormy childhood was chiefly confided, at Fox How ; it was she who taught the Tasmanian child to read, and grappled with her tempers ; and while she is there, the same magic as of old clings about Fox How for those of us who have loved it and all it stands for, so long. CHAPTER V The Friends of Fox How It remains for nie now to say something of those friends of Fox How and my father, whose influence, or whose living presence, made the atmosphere in which the second generation of children who loved Fox How grew up. Wordsworth died in 1850, the year before I was born. He and my grandfather were much attached to each other — ' old Coleridge,' says my grandfather, * inoculated a little knot of us with the love of Words- worth ' — though their politics were widely different, and the poet sometimes found it hard to put up with the reforming views of the younger man. In a letter printed in Stanley's ' Life ' my grandfather mentions ' a good fight ' with Wordsworth over the Reform Bill of '32, on a walk to Greenhead Ghyll. And there is a story told of a girl-friend of the family who, once when Wordsworth had been paying a visit at Fox How, accom- panied him and the Doctor part of the way home to Rydal Mount. Something was inadvertently said to stir the old man's Toryism, and he broke out in indignant denunciation of some views expressed by Arnold. The storm lasted all the way to Pelter Bridge, and the girl on Arnold's left stole various alarmed glances at him to 75 76 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS see how lie was taking it. He said little or nothing, and at Pelter Bridge they all parted, Wordsworth going on to Rydal Mount, and the other two turning back towards Fox How. Arnold paced along, his hands behind his back, his eyes on the ground, and his companion watched him, till he suddenly threw back his head with a laugh of enjoyment. — ' What beautiful English the old man talks ! ' The poet complained sometimes — as I find from an amusing passage in the letter to Mr.Howson quoted below, that he could not see enough of his neighbour, the Doctor, on a mountain walk, because Arnold was always so surroimded with children and pupils, ' like little dogs ' running round and after him. But no differences, great or small, interfered with his constant friendship to Fox How. The garden there was largely planned by him during the family absences at Eugby : the round chimneys of the house are said to be of his design ; and it was for Fox How, which still possesses the MS., that the fine sonnet was written, beginning — Wansfell, this household has a favoured lot Living with liberty on thee to gaze. — a sonnet which contains, surely, two or three of the most magical lines that Wordsworth ever wrote. It is of course no purpose of these notes to give any fresh account of Wordsworth at Rydal, or any exhaustive record of the relations between the Wordsworths and Fox How, especially after the recent pubhcation of Professor Harper's fresh, interesting, though debatable biography. But from the letters in my hands I glean a few things worth recording. Here for instance is a pass- ing picture of Matthew Arnold and Wordsworth in the THE FRIENDS OF FOX HOW 77 Fox How di'awing-room together, in January 1848, which I find in a letter from my grandmother to my father : — Matt has been very much pleased I think by what he has seen of dear old Wordsworth since he has been at home, and certainly he manages to draw him out very well. The old man was here yesterday, and as he sat on the stool in the corner beside the fire which you knew so well, ho talked of various subjects of interest, of Italian poetry, of Coleridge, etc. etc. ; and he looked and spoke with more vigour than he has often done lately. But the poet's health was failing. His daughter Dora's death in 1847 had hit him terribly hard, and his sister's state— the helpless though gentle insanity of the imique, the beloved Dorothy — weighed heavily on his weakening strength. I find a touching picture of him in the unpublished letter referred to on a previous page, ^v^itten in this very year — 1848 — to Dean Howson, as a young man, by his former pupil the late Duke of Argyll, the distinguished author of ' The Reign of Law ' — which Dean Howson' s son and the Duke's grandson allow me to print. The Rev. J. S. Howson, afterwards Dean of Chester, married a sister of the John Cropper who married Susan Arnold, and was thus a few years later brought into connection vnth. the Arnolds and Fox How. The Duke and Duchess had set out to visit both the Lakes and the Lakes ' celebrities,' advised evidently as to their tour by the Duke's old tutor, who was already familiar with the valleys and some of their inmates. Their visit to Fox How is only briefly men- tioned, but of Wordsworth and Rydal Mount the Duke gives a long account. The picture, first, of drooping health and spirits, and then of the flaming out of the 78 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS old poetic fire, will I think interest any true Words- worthian. On Saturday [writes the Duke] we reached Ambleside and soon after drove to Eydal Mount. We found the Poet seated at his fireside, and a little languid in maimer. He became less so as he talked. ... He talked incessantly, but not generally interestingly. ... I looked at him often and asked myself if that was the man who had stamped the impress of his own mind so decidedly on a great part of the literatm'e of his age ! He took us to see a waterfall near his house, and talked and chattered, but said nothing remarkable or even thoughtful. . . . Yet I could see that all this was only that we were on the surface, and did not indicate any decay of mental powers. Still — we went away with no other impres- sion than the vaguest of having seen the man, whose writings we knew so well — and with no feeling that we had seen anything of the mind which spoke through them. On the following day, Sunday, the Duke with a friend walked over to Rydal, but found no one at the Mount, but an invalid lady, very old, and apparently paralysed, ' drawn in a bath chair by a servant.' They did not realise that the poor sufferer, with her wandering speech and looks, was Dorothy Wordsworth, whose share in her great brother's fame will never be forgotten while literature lasts. In the evening, however — — after visiting Mrs. Arnold we drove together to bid Wordsworth goodbye, as we were to go next morning. We found the old man as before, seated by the fire-side and languid and sleepy in manner. Again he awakened as conversation went on, and, a stranger coming in, we rose to go away. He seemed unwilling that we should go so soon, and said he would walk out with us. We went to the mound in front and the Duchess then asked if he would repeat some of his own lines to us. He said he hardly thought he could do that, but that THE FEIENDS OF FOX HOW 79 he would have been glad to read some to us. We stood looking at the view for some time, when Mrs. Wordsworth came out and asked us back to the house to take some tea. This was just what we wanted. Wo sat for about half an hour at tea, during which I tried to direct the conversation to interesting subjects — Coleridge, Southey, etc. He gave a very different impression from the preceding evening. His memory seemed clear and unclouded — his remarks forcible and decided — ^with some tendency to run off to irrelevant anecdote. When tea was over, we renewed our request that he should read to us. He said — ' Oh dear, that is terrible ! ' — but con- sented, asking what we chose. He jumped at ' Tintem Abbey ' in preference to any part of the Excursion. He told us he had written ' Tintern Abbey ' in 1798, taking four days to compose it ; the last twenty lines or so being composed as he walked down the hill from Chfton to Bristol. It was curious to feel that we were to hear a Poet read his own verses composed fifty years before. He read the introductory lines descriptive of the scenery in a low clear voice. But when he came to the thoughtful and reflective lines, his tones deepened and he poured them forth with a fervour and almost passion of dehvery, which was very striking and beautiful. I observed that Mrs. Words- worth was strongly affected during the reading. The strong emphasis that he put on the words addressed to the person to whom the poem is written struck me as almost unnatural at the time. ' My deab, dear friend ! ' — and on the words, ' In thy wild eyes.' It was not till after the reading was over that we found out that the poor paralytic invahd we had seen in the morning was the sister to whom ' Tintern Abbey ' was addressed, and her condition, now, accounted for the fervour with which the old Poet read lines which reminded him of their better days. But it was melancholy to think that the vacant gaze we had seen in the morning was from the ' wild eyes ' of 1798. . . . We could not have had a better opportunity of bringing out in his reading the source of the inspiration of liis poetry, which it was impossible not to feel was the poetry of 80 A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS the heart. Mrs. Wordsworth told me it was the first time he had read since his daughter's death, and that she was thankful to us for having made him do it, as he was apt to fall into a listless, languid state. We asked him to come to Inverary. He said he had not com'age ; as he had last gone through that country with his daughter, and he feared it would be too much for him. Less than two years after this visit, on April 23, 1850, the death day of Shakespeare and Cervantes, Arnold's youngest daughter, now Miss Arnold of Fox How, was walking with her sister Susan on the side of Loughirigg which overlooks Eydal Mount. They knew that the last hour of a great poet was near, — ^to my aunts, not only a great poet, but the familiar friend of their dead father and all their kindred. They moved through the April day, along the mountain- side, under the shadow of death ; and, suddenly, as they looked at the old house opposite, unseen hands drew down the blinds ; and by the darkened windows, they knew that the life of Wordsworth had gone out. Henceforward, in the family letters to my father, it is Mrs. Wordsworth who comes into the foreground. The old age prophesied for her by her poet bridegroom in the early Grasmere days was about her for the nine years of her widowhood, ' lovely as a Lapland night ' ; or rather like one of her own Eydal evenings when the sky is clear over the perfect httle lake, and the reflections of island and wood and fell, go down and down, unearthly far into the quiet depths, and Wansfell still ' parleys with the setting sun.' My grandmother writes of her — of ' her sweet grace and dignity,' and the little friendly acts she is always doing for this person and that, gentle or simple, in the valley — THE FKIENDS OF FOX HOW 81 with a tender enthusiasm. She is ' dear JVIrs. Words- worth ' always, for them all. And it is my joy that in the year '56 or '57 my grandmother took me to Rydal Mount, and that I can vividly recollect sitting on a foot-stool at Mrs. Wordsworth's feet. I see still the little room, with its plain furniture, the chair beside the fire, and the old lady in it. I can still re- call the childish feeling that this was no common visit, and the house no common house — that a presence still haimted it. Instinctively the childish mind said to itself ' Remember ! ' — and I have always remembered. A few years later, I was again, as a child of eight, in Rydal Mount. Mrs. Wordsworth was dead, and there was a sale in the house. From far and near the neigh- bours came, very curious, very full of real regret, and a little awe-stricken. They streamed through the rooms where the furniture was arranged in lots. I wandered about by myself, and presently came upon something which absorbed me so that I forgot everything else — a store of Easter eggs, with wonderful drawings and devices, made by ' James,' the Rydal Mount factotum, in the poet's day. I recollect sitting down with them in a nearly empty room, dreaming over them in a kind of ecstasy, because of their pretty, strange colours and pictures. Fifty-two years passed, and I found myself, in September 1911, the tenant of a renovated and rebuilt Rydal Mount, for a few autumn weeks. The house was occupied then, and is still occupied by Wordsworth's great-granddaughter and her husband — Mr. and IVIrs. Fisher Wordsworth. My eldest daughter was with me, and a strange thing happened to us. I arrived at the Moimt before my husband and daughter. She joined 82 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS me there on September 13. I remember how eagerly I showed her the many Wordsworthiana in the house, collected by the piety of its mistress — the Haydon portrait on the stairs, and the books, in the small low- ceiled room to the right of the hall, which is still just as it was in Wordsworth's day ; the garden too, and the poet's walk. All my own early recollections were ahve ; we chattered long and late. And now let the accomit of what happened afterwards be given in my daughter's words as she v,T:ote it down for me the following morning. Rydal Mount, September 14, 1911. Last night, my first at Eydal Mount, I slept in the corner room, over the small sitting-room. I had drawn up the blind about half-way up the window before going to bed, and had drawn the curtain aside, over the back of a wooden armchair that stood against the window. The window, a casement, was wide open. I slept soundly, but woke quite suddenly, at what hour I do not know, and found myself sitting bolt upright in bed looking towards the window. Very bright moonlight was shining into the room and I could just see the corner of Loughrigg out in the distance. My first impression was of bright moonhght, but then I became strongly conscious of the moonlight striking on something, and I saw perfectly clearly the figure of an old man sitting in the arm-chair by the window. I said to myself — ' That's Wordsworth ! ' He was sitting with either hand resting on the arms of the chair, leaning back, his head rather bent and he seemed to be looking down, straight in front of him with a rapt expression. He was not looking at me, nor out of the window. The moonlight lit up the top of his head and the silvery hair and I noticed that the hair was very thin. The whole impression was of something solemn and beautiful, and I was not in the very least frightened. As I looked — I cannot say, when I looked again, for I have no recollection of ceasing to look, or looking away — the figure disappeared, and I became aware of the empty chair. — I lay THE FRIENDS OF FOX HOW 88 back again, and thought for a moment in a pleased and con- tented way — ' That was Wordsworth.' And almost imme- diately I must have fallen asleep again. I had not, to my knowledge, been dreaming about Wordsworth before I awoke ; but I had been reading Hutton's essay on ' Wordsworth's Two Styles ' out of Knight's ' Words wort hiana,' before I fell asleep. I should add that I had a distinct impression of the high collar and stock, the same as in the picture on the stairs in this house. Neither the seer of this striking vision — unique in her experience — nor I, to whom she told it within eight hours, make any claim for it to a supernatural origin. It seemed to us an interesting example of the influence of mind and association on the visualising power of the brain. A member of the Psychical Society, to whom I sent the contemporary record, classified it as ' a visual hallucination,' and I don't know that there is anything more to be said about it. But the pathetic coincidence remains still to be noted — we did not know it till after- wards — that the seer of the vision was sleeping in Dorothy Wordsworth's room, where Dorothy spent so many sad years of death-in-life ; and that in that very corner by the window, Wordsworth must have sat, day after day, when he came to visit what remained to him of that creature of fire and dew, that child of genius, who had been the inspiration and support of his poetic youth. In these rapid sketches of the surroundings and personal influences amid which my own childhood was passed, I have already said something of my father's intimate friend, Arthur Hugh Clough. Clough was of course a Rugbeian, and one of Arnold's ablest and most devoted pupils. He was about three years older than my father, and was already a Fellow of Oriel 84 A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS when Thomas Arnold, the younger, was reading for his First. But the difference of age made no difference to the friendship which grew up between them in Oxford, a friendship only less enduring and close than that between Clough and Matthew Arnold, which has been ' eternised,' to use a word of Fulke Greville's, by the noble dirge of ' Thyrsis/ Not many years before his own death, in 1895 my father wrote of the friend of his youth : — I loved him, oh so well : and also respected him more profoundly than any man, anywhere near my own age, whom I ever met. His pure soul was without stain : he seemed incapable of being inflamed by wrath, or tempted to vice, or enslaved by any unworthy passion of any sort. As to ' Philip ' something that he saw in me helped to suggest the character — that was all. There is much in Philip that is Clough himself, and there is a dialectic force in him that certainly was never in me. A great yearning for possessing one's soul in freedom — for trampling on ceremony and palaver, for trying experi- ments in equality, being common to me and Philip, sent me out to New Zealand ; and in the two years before I sailed (Dec. 1847) Clough and I were a great deal together. It was partly also the visit paid by my father and his friend John Campbell Shairp, afterwards Principal Shairp of St. Ajidrew's, to Clough's reading party at Drumnadrochit in 1845, and their report of incidents which had happened to them on their way along the shores of Loch Ericht, which suggested the scheme of the * Bothie.' One of the half-dozen short poems of Clough which have entered per- manently into Hterature — Qui laborat oral — was found by my father one morning on the table of his bachelor rooms in Mount St., after Clough had spent the night on a shake-up in his sitting-room, and on his early THE FRIENDS OF FOX HOW 85 departure had left the poem behind him as payment for his night's lodging. In one of Clongh's letters to New Zealand I find — ' Say not the struggle nought availeth ' — another of the half-dozen — wTitten out by him ; and the original copy — * tibi primo confisum/ of the pretty though unequal verses, ' A London Idyll' The httle volume of miscellaneous poems, called ' Ambarvaha,' and the ' Bothie of Tober- na-Vuolich ' were sent out to New Zealand by Clough, at the same moment that Matt was sending his brother the ' Poems by A/ Clough writes from Liverpool in February 1849, — having just received Matt's volume — At last our own Matt's book ! Read mine first, my child, if our volumes go forth together. Otherwise you won't read mine — Ambarvalia — at any rate, at all. Froude also has pubhshed a new book of rehgious biography, auto or otherwise, (The Nemesis of Faith) and therewithal resigns his Fellowship. But the Rector (of Exeter) talks of not accepting the resigna- tion, but having an expulsion — fire and fagot fashion. Quo usqae ? But when the books arrive, my father writes to his sister with affectionate welcome indeed of the ' Poems by A.' but with enthusiasm of the ' Bothie.' It greatly surpasses my expectations ! It is on the whole a noble poem, well held together, clear, full of purpose, and full of promise. With joy I see the old fellow bestiring himself, ' awakening hke a strong man out of sleep and shaking his mvincible locks'; and if he remains true and works, I think there is nothing too high or too great to be expected from him. ' True,' and a worker, Clough remained to the lust hours of his short hfe. But in spite of a happy marriage. 86 A WEITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS tlie burden and perplexity of philosophic thought, together with the strain of failing health, checked, before long, the strong poetic impulse shown in the ' Bothie,' its buoyant delight in natural beauty, and in the simplicities of human feeling and passion. The ' music ' of his ' rustic ' flute ' Kept not for long its happy, country tone ; Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note Of men contenfcion-tost, of men who groan. The poet of the ' Bothie ' becomes the poet of ' Dipsychus,' ' Easter Day,' and the ' Amours de Voyage ' ; and the young repubhcan who writes in triumph — all humorous joy and animation — ^to my father, from the Paris of '48, which has just seen the overthrow of Louis Philippe, says, a year later — February 24, 1849— To-day, my dear brother republican, is the glorious anniversary of '48, whereof what shall I now say ? Put not your trust in repubhcs, nor in any constitution of man ! God be praised for the downfall of Louis Philippe. This with a faint feeble echo of that loud last year's scream of * A bas Guizot ! ' seems to be the sum total. Or are we to salute the rising sun, with ' Vive I'Empereur ! ' and the green liveries ? President for hfe I think they'll make him, and then begin to tire of him. Meanwhile the Great Powers are to restore the Pope, and crush the renascent Eoman Eepublic, of which Joseph Mazzini has just been declared a citizen ! A few months later, the writer — at Eome — ' was in at the death ' of this same Roman Republic, listening to the French bombardment in bitterness of soul. I saw the French enter [he writes to my father]. Unto this has come our grand Lib. Eq. and Frat. revolution ! And then I went to Naples — and home. I am full of admiration THE FEIENDS OF FOX HOW 87 for i\Iazzini. . . . But on the whole — ' Farewell Politics ! ' utterly ! — What can I do ? Study is much more to the purpose. So in disillusion and disappointment, ' Citizen Cloiigh ' leaving Oxford and politics behind him, settled down to educational work in London, married, and became the happy father of children, wrote much that was remarkable, and will be long read — whether it be poetry or no — ^by those who find perennial attraction in the lesser-known ways of literature and thought, and at last closed his short life at Florence in 1862, at the age of forty-one, leaving an indelible memory in the hearts of those who had talked and lived with him. To a boon southern country he is fled, And now in happier air, Wandering with the Great Mother's train divine (And purer or more subtle soul than thee, I trow the mighty Mother doth not see) Within a folding of the Apennine, Tliou hearest the immortal chants of old ! — But I remember him, in an English setting, and on the slopes of English hills. In the year 1858, as a child of seven, I was an inmate of a little school kept at Ambleside, by Miss Anne Clough, the poet's sister, afterwards the well-known head of Newnham College, Cambridge, and wisest leader in the cause of women. It was a small day-school for Ambleside children of all ranks, and I was one of two boarders, spending my Sundays often at Fox How. I can recall one or two golden days, at long intervals, when my father came for me, with ' Mr. Clough,' and the two old friends, who. 88 A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS after nine years' separation, had recently met again, walked up tlie Sweden Bridge lane into tlie heart of Scandale Fell, while I, paying no more attention to them, than they — after a first ten minutes— did to me, went wandering, and skipping, and dreaming by myself. In those days every rock along the mountain lane, every boggy patch, every stretch of silken, flower-sown grass, every bend of the wild stream, and all its sounds, whether it chattered gently over stony shallows, or leapt full-throated into deep pools, swimming with foam — were to me the never-ending joys of a ' land of pure delight.' Should I find a ripe wild strawberry in a patch under a particular rock I knew by heart ? — or the first Grass of Parnassus, or the bog auricula, or streaming cotton-plant, amid a stretch of wet moss ahead ? I might quite safely explore these enchanted spots under male eyes, since they took no account, merci- fully, of a child's boots and stockings — male tongues besides being safely busy with books and politics. Was that a dipper, rising and falling along the stream, or — positively — a fat brown trout in hiding under that shady bank ? — or that a buzzard, hovering overhead. Such hopes and doubts kept a child's heart and eyes as quick and busy as the ' beck ' itself. It was a point of honour with me to get to Sweden Bridge — a rough crossing for the shepherds and sheep, near the head of the valley — ^before my companions; and I would sit dangling my feet over the unprotected edge of its grass-grown arch, blissfully conscious on a summer day of the warm stretches of golden fell folding in the stream, the sheep, the hovering hawks, the stony path that wound up and up to regions beyond the ken of thought ; and of myself, queening it there on the THE FEIENDS OF FOX HOW 89 weather-worn key-stone of the bridge, dissolved in the mere physical joy of each contented sense : — the sun on my cotton dress, the scents from grass and moss, the marvellous rush of cloud-shadow along the hills, the brilliant browns and blues in the water, the little white stones on its tiny beaches, or the purples of the bigger rocks, whether in the stream or on the mountain- side. How did they come there — those big rocks ? I puzzled my head about them a good deal, especially as my father, in the walks we had to ourselves, would some- times try and teach me a little geology. I have used the \vords ' physical joy,' because, although such passionate pleasure in natural things as has been my constant Helper (in the sense of the Greek eViAroupo?) through life, has connected itself no doubt, in process of time, with various intimate beliefs, philosophic or rehgious, as to the Beauty which is Truth, and therewith the only conceivable key to man's experience, yet I could not myself endorse the famous contrast in Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey,' between the ' haunting passion ' of youth's delight in Nature, and the more complex feeling of later years, when Nature takes an aspect coloured by our o^vn moods and memories, when our sorrows and reflections enter so much into what we feel about the ' bright and intricate device' of earth and her seasons, that 'in our life alone doth Nature live.' No one can answer for the changing moods that the future, long or short, may bring with it. But so far, I am incUned to think of this quick, intense pleasure in natural things, which I notice in myself and others, as something involuntary and inbred ; independent — often selfishly independent — of the real human experience. I have been sometimes 90 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS ashamed — pricked even with self -contempt — to remem- ber how in the course of some tragic or sorrowful hours, concerning myself, or others of great account to me, I could not help observing some change in the clouds, some effect of colour in the garden, some picture on the wall, which pleased me even — for the moment — intensely. The impression would be gone, perhaps, as soon as felt, rebuked by something like a flash of remorse. But it was not in my power to prevent its recurrence. And the delight in natural things— colours, forms, scents — when there was nothing to restrain or hamper it, has often been a kind of intoxication, in which thought and consciousness seemed suspended — ' as though of hemlock one had drunk.' Wordsworth has of course expressed it constantly, though increasingly, as life went on, in combination with his pantheistic philo- sophy. But it is my belief that it survived in him in its primitive form, almost to the end. The best and noblest people I have known have been, on the whole — except in first youth — without this correspondence between some constant pleasure- sense in the mind, and natural beauty. It cannot therefore be anything to be proud of. But it is cer- tainly something to be glad of — 'amid the chances and changes of this mortal life' ; it is one of the joys ' in widest commonalty spread ' — and that may last longest. It is therefore surely to be encouraged both in oneself, and in children ; and that, although I have often felt that there is something inhuman, or infra- human in it, as though the earth-gods in us all — Pan, or Demeter — ^laid ghostly hands again, for a space, upon the soul and sense that nobler or sadder faiths have ravished from them. THE FEIENDS OF FOX HOW 91 In these Westmorland walks, however, my father had sometimes another companion — a frequent visitor at Fox How, where he was almost another son to my grandmother, and an elder brother to her children- How shall one ever make the later generation understand the charm of Arthur Stanley ? There are many — very many — still living, in whom the sense of it leaps up, at the very mention of his name. But for those who never saw him, who are still in their twenties and thirties, what shall I say ? That he was the son of a Bishop of Norwich, and a member of the old Cheshire family of the Stanleys of Alderley, that he was a Eugby boy and a devoted pupil of Arnold, whose 'Life' he wrote, so that it stands out among the biographies of the century, not only for its literary merit, but for its mde and varied influence on feeling and opinion ; that he was an Oxford tutor and Professor all through the great struggle of Liberal thought against the reactionary influences let loose by Newman and the Tractarian movement ; that, as Kegius Professor at Oxford, and Canon of Canterbury, if he added little to learning, or research, he at least kept alive— by his power of turning all he knew into image and colour — that great ' art ' of history which the Dryas- dusts so willingly let die ; that as Dean of Westminster, he was still the life and soul of all the Liberalism in the church, still the same generous friend and champion of all the spiritually oppressed that he had ever been ? None of the old ' causes ' beloved of his youth could ever have said of him as of so many others : — Just for a handful of silver he loft us, Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat — He was no doubt the friend of kings and princes, and 92 A WEITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS keenly conscious, always, of things long- descended, with picturesque or heroic associations. But it was he who invited Colenso to preach in the Abbey, after his excom- munication by the fanatical and now forgotten Bishop of Cape Town ; it was he who brought about that famous Communion of the Revisers in the Abbey, where the Unitarian received the Sacrament of Christ's death beside the Wesleyan and the Anglican, and who bore with unflinching courage the idle tumult which followed ; it was he too who first took special pains to open the historical Abbey to working-men, and to give them an insight into the meaning of its treasures. He was not a social reformer in the modern sense ; that was not his business. But his unfailing power of seeing and pouncing upon the interesting — the dramatic — in any human lot, soon brought him into relation with men of callings and types the most different from his own ; and for the rest he fulfilled to perfection that hard duty — ' the duty to our equals,' on which Mr. Jowett once preached a caustic and suggestive sermon. But for him John Richard Green would have abandoned history, and student after student, heretic after heretic, found in him the man who eagerly understood them, and chivalrously fought for them. And then, what a joy he was to the eye ! His small spare figure, miraculously light, his delicate face of tinted ivory — only that ivory is not sensitive and subtle, and incredibly expressive, as were the features of the little Dean ; the eager thin-lipped mouth, varying with every shade of feeling in the innocent great soul behind it ; the clear eyes of china-blue ; the glistening white hair, still with the wave and spring of youth in it ; the slender legs, and Dean's dress, which becomes THE FKIENDS OF FOX HOW 93 all but the portly, with, on festal occasions, the red ribbon of the Bath crossing the mercurial frame :— there are still a few pictures and photographs by which these characteristics are dimly recalled to those at least who knew the living man. To my father, who called him ' Arthur,' and to all the Fox How circle he was the most faithful of friends, though no doubt my father's conversion to Catholicism to some extent, in later years, separated him from Stanley. In the letter I have printed on a former page, \\Titten on the night before my father left England for New Zealand in 1847, and cherished by its recipient all his life, there is a yearning, personal note, which was, perhaps, some- times lacking in the much-surrounded, much-courted Dean of later life. It was not that Arthur Stanley, any more than Matthew Arnold, ever became a world- ling in the ordinary sense. But ' the world ' asks too much of such men as Stanley. It heaps all its honours and all its tasks upon them, and without some slight stiffening of its substance the exquisite instrument cannot meet the strain. Mr. Hughes always strongly denied that the ' George Arthur ' of ' Tom Brown's Schooldays ' had anything whatever to do with Arthur Stanley. But I should like to believe that at least some anecdote of Stanley's schooldays had entered into the well-known scene where Arthur, in class, breaks down in construing the last address of Helen to the dead Hector. Stanley's memory, indeed, was alive with the great things or the picturesque detail of literature and history, no less than with the humorous or striking things of con- temporary life. I remember an amusing instance of it at my own wedding breakfast. Stanley married us, 94 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS and a few days before, he had buried Frederick Denison Maurice. His historical sense was pleased by the juxtaposition of the two names Maurice and Arnold, suggested by the funeral of Maurice and the marriage of Arnold's granddaughter. The consequence was that his speech at the wedding breakfast was quite as much concerned with * graves and worms and epitaphs ' as with things hymeneal. But from 'the Httle Dean' all things were welcome. My personal memory of him goes back to much earUer days. As a child at Fox How, he roused in me a mingled fascination and terror. To listen to him quoting Shakspeare or Scott or Macaulay was fascina- tion ; to find his eye fixed on one, and his slender finger darting towards one, as he asked a sudden historical question — ' Where did Edward the First die ? ' — ' Where was the Black Prince buried ? ' — was terror — lest, at seven years old, one should not be able to play up. I remember a particular visit of his to Fox How> when the dates and places of these royal deaths and burials kept us — myself in particular — in a perpetual ferment. It must, I think, have been when he was still at Canterbury, investigating, almost with the zest and passion of the explorer of Troy or Mycenae, what bones he hid, and where, under the Cathedral floor, what sands — ' fallen from the ruined sides of Kings ' — that this passion of deaths and dates was upon him. I can see myself as a child of seven or eight, standing outside the drawing-room door at Fox How, bracing myself in a mixture of dehght and fear, as to what ' Dr. Stanley ' might ask me when the door was opened ; then the opening, and the sudden sharp turn of the THE FRIENDS OF FOX HOW 95 slight figure, writing letters at the middle table, at the sight of ' little Mary ' — and the expected thunderbolt ' Where did Henry the Fourth die ? ' Confusion — and blank ignorance ! But memory leaps forward to a day four or five years later, when my father and I invaded the dark high room in the old Deanery, and the Dean standing at his reading-desk. He looks round — sees * Tom,' and the child with him. His charming face breaks into a broad smile ; he remembers instantly, though it is some years since he and ' Httle Mary ' met. He holds out both his hands to me — ' Come and see the place where Henry the Fourth died ! ' And off we ran together to the Jerusalem Chamber. CHAPTER VI Young Days at Oxfoed How little those who are schoolgirls of to-day can reahse what it was to be a schoolgirl in the fifties or the early sixties of the last century ! A modern girls' school, equipped as scores are now equipped through- out the country, was of course not to be found in 1858, when I first became a school boarder, or in 1867 when I ceased to be one. The games, the gymnastic, the sohd grounding in drawing and music, together with the enormously improved teaching in elementary science, or literature and language, which are at the service of the schoolgirl of to-day, had not begun to be when 1 was at school. As far as intellectual training was con- cerned, my nine years from seven to sixteen were practically wasted. I learnt nothing thoroughly or accurately, and the German, French, and Latin, which I soon discovered after my marriage to be essential to the kind of literary work I wanted to do, had aU to be re-learnt before they could be of any real use to me ; nor was it ever possible for me — who married at twenty — ^to get that firm hold on the structure and literary history of any language, ancient or modern, which my brother WilHam, only fifteen months my junior, got 96 YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD 97 from his six years at Rugby, and his training there in Latin and Greek. AVhat I learnt during those years was learnt from personalities ; from contact with a nature so simple, sincere and strong as that of Miss Clough ; from the kindly old German governess, whose affection for me helped me through some rather hard and lonely school years spent at a school in Shropshire ; and from a gentle and high-minded woman, an ardent Evangelical, with whom a little later, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, I fell headlong in love, as was the manner of schoolgirls then, and is I understand frequently the case with schoolgirls now, in spite of the greatly increased variety of subjects on which they may spend their minds. Enghsh girls' schools to-day providing the higher education are, so far as my knowledge goes, worthily representative of that astonishing rise in the intellectual standards of women, which has taken place in the last half century. They are almost entirely taught by women, and women with whom, in many cases, leducation — the shaping of the immature human creature to noble ends — is the sincerest of passions ; who find, indeed, in the task that same creative joy which belongs to Hterature or art, or philanthropic experiment. The school-mistress to whom money is the sole or even the chief motive of her work, is, in my experience, rare to-day, though we have all in our time heard tales of modern ' academies ' of the Miss Pinkerton type, brought up to date — fashionable, exclusive, and luxurious — where, as in some boys' preparatory schools (before the war !) the more the parents paid, the better they were pleased. But I have not come across them. The leading boarding-schools in England and America, 98 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS at present, no less than the excellent day-schools for girls of the middle class, with which this country has been covered since 1870, are genuine products of that AVomen's Movement, as we vaguely call it, in the early educational phases of which I myself was much engaged ; whereof the results are now widely apparent, though as yet only half-grown. If one tracks it back to some- where near its origins, its superficial origins at any rate, one is brought up, I think, as in the case of so much else, against one leading cause — railways ! With railways and a cheap press, in the second third of the nineteenth century, there came in, as we all know, the break-up of a thousand mental stagnations, answering to the old physical disabihties and inconveniences. And the break-up has nowhere had more startling results than in the world of women, and the training of women for life. We have only to ask ourselves what the women of Benjamin Constant, or of Beyle, or Balzac, would have made of the keen schoolgirl and college girl of the present day, to feel how vast is the change through which some of us have Hved. Exceptional women, of course, have led much the same kind of lives in all generations. Mrs. Sidney Webb has gone through a very different sort of self-education from that of Harriet Martineau ; but she has not thought more widely, and she will hardly influence her world so much as that staunch fighter of the past. It is the rank and file — the average woman — for whom the world has opened up so astonishingly. The revelation of her wide-spread and various capacity that the present war has brought about, is only the suddenly conspicuous result of the liberating forces set in action by the scientific and mechanical development of the nineteenth century. YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD 99 It rests still with that world * after the war/ to which we are all looking forward with mingled hope and fear, to determine the new forms, sociological and political, through which this capacity, this heightened faculty, must some day organically express itself. In the years when I was at school, however, — 1858 to 1867 — these good days were only beginning to dawn. Poor teaching, poor school-books, and, in many cases, indifferent food and much ignorance as to the physical care of girls — these things were common in my school-time. I loved nearly all my teachers ; but it was not till I went home to Hve at Oxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests and influences that begin much earher nowadays to affect any clever child. I had few tools and Httle grounding ; and I was much more childish than I need have been. A few vivid impressions stand out from these years : the great and to me mysterious figure of Newman haunting the streets of Edgbaston, where, in 1861, my father became head classical master of the Oratory School ; the news of the murder of Lincoln, coming suddenly into a quiet garden in a suburb of Birmingham, and an ineffaceable memory of the pale faces and horror-stricken looks of those discussing it ; the haunting beauty of certain passages of Ruskin which I copied out and carried about with me, without in the least caring to read as a whole the books from which they came ; my first visit to the House of Commons in 1863 ; the recurrent visits to Fox How, and the winter and summer beauty of the fells ; together with an endless story-telhng phase in which I told stories to my school-fellows, on condition they told stories to me ; coupled with many attempts 100 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS on my part at poetry and fiction, which make me laugh and bhish when I compare them to-day with similar efforts of my own grand-children. But on the whole they were starved and rather unhappy years ; through no one's fault. My parents were very poor and perpetually in movement. Everybody did the best they could. With Oxford, however, and my seventeenth year, came a radical change. It was in July 1865, while I was still a schoolgirl, that in the very middle of the Long Vacation, I first saw Oxford. My father, after some five years as Dr. Newman's colleague at the Oratory School, had then become the subject of a strong temporary reaction against Cathohcism. He left the Roman church in '65, to return to it again, for good, eleven years later. During the interval he took pupils at Oxford, produced a very successful * Manual of Enghsh Literature,' edited the works of Wychffe for the Claren- don Press, made himself an Anglo-Saxon scholar, and became one of the most learned editors of the great Rolls Series. To look at the endless piles of his note- books is to reahse how hard, how incessantly he worked. Historical scholarship was his destined field ; he found his happiness in it through all the troubles of Hfe. And the return to Oxford, to its memories, its hbraries, its stately, imperishable beauty, was dehghtful to him. So also, I think, for some years, was the sense of intellectual freedom. Then began a kind of nostalgia, which grew and grew till it took him back to the Cathohc haven in 1876, never to wander more. YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD 101 But when lie first showed me Oxford he was in the ardour of what seemed a permanent severance from an admitted mistake. I see a deserted Oxford street, and a hansom coming up it — myself and my father inside it. I was returning from school, for the holidays. When I had last seen my people, they were hving near Birmingham. I now found them at Oxford, and I remember the thrill of excitement with which I looked from side to side as we neared the colleges. For I knew well, even at fourteen, that this was *no mean city.' As we drove up Beaumont Street we saw what was then * new Balliol ' in front of us, and a jutting window. ' There hves the arch-heretic ! ' said m.y father. It was a window in Mr. Jowett's rooms. He was not yet Master of the famous College, but his name was a rallying-cry, and his personal influence almost at its zenith. At the same time, he was then rigorously excluded from the University pulpit ; it was not till a year later that even his close friend Dean Stanley ventured to ask him to preach in Westminster Abbey ; and his salary as Greek Professor, due to him from the revenues of Christ ( hurch, and withheld from him on theological gromids for years, had only just been wrung — at last — from the reluctant hands of a governing body which contained Canon Liddon and Dr. Pusey. To my father, on his settlement in Oxford, Jowett had been a kind and helpfid friend ; he had a very quick sympathy with my mother ; and as I grew up he became my friend too, so that as I look back upon my Oxford years both before and after my marriage, the dear Master — he became Master in 1870 — plays a very marked part in the Oxford scene as I shall ever remember it. 102 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS It was not however till two years later that I left school, and slipped into the Oxford life as a fish into water. I was sixteen, beginning to be conscious of all sorts of rising needs and ambitions, keenly alive to the spell of Oxford, and to the good fortune which had brought me to live in her streets. There was in me, I think, a real hunger to learn, and a very quick sense of romance in things or people. But after sixteen, except in music, I had no definite teaching, and every- thing I learnt came to me from persons — and books — sporadically, ^vithout any general guidance or plan. It was all a great voyage of discovery, organised mainly by myself, on the advice of a few men and women very much older, who took an interest in me, and were endlessly kind to the shy and shapeless creature I must have been. It was in '68 or '69 — I think I was seventeen — ^that I remember my first sight of a college garden lying cool and shaded between grey college walls, and on the grass a figure that held me fascinated — a lady in a green brocade dress, with a belt and chatelaine of Russian silver, who was playing croquet, then a novelty in Oxford, and seemed to me, as I watched her, a perfect model of grace and vivacity. A man nearly thirty years older than herself whom I knew to be her husband was standing near her, and a handful of undergraduates made an amused and admiring court round the lady. The elderly man — he was then fifty-three — ^was Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, and the croquet-player had been his wife about seven years. After the Rector's death in 1884, Mrs. Pattison married Sir Charles Dilke in the very midst YOUNG DAYS AT OXFOED 103 of the divorce proceedings which were to wreck in full stream a brilliant political career ; and she showed him a proud devotion till her death in 1904. None of her early friends who remember her later history can ever think of the ' Frances Pattison ' of Oxford days without a strange stirring of heart. I was much at Lincoln in the years before I married, and derived an impression from the Hfe hved there that has never left me. Afterwards I saw much less of Mrs. Pattison,. who was generally on the Riviera in the winter ; but from 1868 to 1872, the Rector, learned, critical, bitter, fastidious, and ' Mrs. Pat,' with her gaiety, her picturesqueness, her impatience of the Oxford solemnities and decorums, her sharp restless wit, her determination not to be academic, to hold on to the greater world of affairs outside — mattered more to me perhaps than anybody else. They were very good to me, and I was never tired of going there : though I was much puzzled by their ways, and — while my Evangelical phase lasted — much scandaHsed often by the speculative freedom of the talk I heard. Some- times my rather uneasy conscience protested in ways which I think must have amused my hosts, though they never said a word. They were fond of asking me to come to supper at Lincoln on Sundays. It was a gay, imceremonious meal, at which Mrs. Pattison appeared in the kind of gown which at a much later date began to be called a tea-gown. It was generally white or grey, with various ornaments and accessories which always seemed to me, accustomed for so long to the rough-and-tumble of school hfe, marvels of dehcacy and prettiness ; so that I was sharply conscious, on 104 A WEITER'S BECOLLECTIONS these occasions, of the graceful figure made by the young mistress of the old house. But some last stubborn trace in me of the Evangehcal \dew of Sunday declared that while one might talk — and one must eat ! — on Sunday, one mustn't put on evening dress, or behave as though it were just hke a week-day. So while everyone else was in evening dress, I more than once — at seventeen — came to these Sunday gatherings on a winter evening, purposely, in a high woollen frock, sternly but uncomfortably conscious of being sublime — if only one were not ridiculous ! The Rector, ' ]\Irs. Pat,' JVIr. Bywater, myself, and perhaps a couple of undergraduates — often a bewildered and silent couple — I see that httle vanished company in the far past, so plainly I Three of them are dead — and for me, the grey walls of Lincoln must always be haunted by their ghosts. The historian of French painting and French decorative art was already in those days unfolding in Mrs. Pattison. Her drawing-room was French, sparely furnished with a few old girandoles and mirrors on its white panelled walls, and a Persian carpet with a black centre, on which both the French furniture and the hving inmates of the room looked their best. And upstairs, in * Mrs. Pat's ' own working-room, there were innumerable things that stirred my curiosity — old French drawings and engravings, masses of foreign books that showed the young and brilhant owner of the room to be already a scholar, even as her husband counted scholarship ; together with the tools and materials for etching, a mysterious process in which I was occasionally allowed to lend a hand, and which, as often as not, during the apphcation of the acid to YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD 106 the plate, ended iu dire misfortune to the etcher's fingers or dress, and in the helpless laughter of both artist and assistant. The Rector himself was an endless study to me — he and his frequent companion, Ingram By\vater, after- wards the distinguished Greek Professor. To hsten to these two friends as they talked of foreign scholars in Paris, or Germany, of Renan, or Ranke, or Curtius ; as they poured scorn on Oxford scholarship, or the lack of it, and on the ideals of BalUol, which aimed at turning out pubhc officials, as compared with the researching ideals of the German universities, which seemed to the Rector the only ideals worth calhng academic ; or as they flmig gibes at Christ C hurch whence Pusey and Liddon still directed the powerful Church party of the University : — was to watch the doors of new worlds gradually opening before a girl's questioning intelhgence. The Rector would walk up and do\vTi, occasionally taking a book from his crowded shelves, while Mr. Bywater and Mrs. Pattison smoked, with the after-luncheon coffee, — and in those days a woman with a cigarette was a rarity in England — and sometimes, at a caustic mot of the former's there would break out the Rector's cackhng laugh, which was ugly no doubt, but when he was amused and at ease, extraordinarily full of mirth. To me he was from the beginning the kindest friend. He saw that I came of a hterary stock and had hterary ambitions ; and he tried to direct me. * Get to the bottom of something ' — he would say — * Choose a subject, and know everything about it ! ' I eagerly followed his advice, and began to work at early Spanish in the Bodleian. But I think he was 106.. A WEITER'S EECOLLECTIONS wrong — I venture to think so ! — ^though as his half melancholy, half satirical look comes back to me, I reahse how easily he would defend himself, if one could tell him so now. I think I ought to have been told to take a history examination and learn Latin properly. But if I had, half the exploring joy of those early years would no doubt have been cut away. Later on, in the winters when Mrs. Pattison, threatened with rheumatic gout, disappeared to the Riviera, I came to know a sadder and loneher Eector. I used to go to tea with him then in his own book- lined sanctum, and we mended the blazing fire between us and talked endlessly. Presently I married, and his interest in me changed ; though our friendship never lessened, and I shall always remember with emotion my last sight of him lying a white and dying man on his sofa in London — the clasp of the wasted hand, the sad haunting eyes. When his * Memoirs ' appeared, after his death, a book of which Mr. Gladstone once said to me that he reckoned it as among the most tragic and the most memorable books of the nineteenth century, I understood him more clearly, and more tenderly, than I could have done as a girl. Particularly, I understood why in that sceptical and agnostic talk which never spared the Anghcan ecclesiastics of the moment, or such a later Cathohc convert as Manning, I cannot remember that I ever heard him mention the great name of John Henry Newman with the shghtest touch of disrespect. On the other hand, I once saw him receive a message that some friend brought him from Newman with an eager look and a start of pleasure. He had been a follower of Newman's in the Tractarian ^marA. ^aJU lo/z- YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD 107 days, and no one who ever came near to Newman could afterwards lightly speak ill of him. It was Stanley and not the Rector, indeed, who said of the famous Oratorian that the whole course of English religious history might have been different if Newman had known German. But Pattison might have said it, and if he had, it would have been without the smallest bitterness as the mere expression of a sober and indis- putable truth. Alas ! — merely to quote it, nowadays, carries one back to a Germany before the Flood — a Germany of small States, a land of scholars and thinkers ; a Germany that would surely have recoiled in horror from any prevision of that deep and hideous abyss which her descendants, maddened by wealth and success, were one day to dig between themselves and the rest of Europe. One of my clearest memories connected with the Pattisons and Lincoln is that of meeting George EHot and Mr. Lewes there, in the spring of 1870, when I was eighteen. It was at one of the Sunday suppers. George EUot sat at the Rector's right hand. I was opposite her ; on my left was George Henry Lewes, to whom I took a prompt and active dishke. He and ]\Irs. Pattison kept up a lively conversation in which Mr. By water, on the other side of the table, played full part. George Eliot talked very little, and I not at all. The Rector was shy or tired, and George Ehot was in truth entirely occupied in watching or hstening to Mr. Lewes. I was disappointed that she was so silent, and perhaps her quick eye may have divined it, for after supper, as we were going up the interesting old staircase, made in the thickness of the wall, which 108 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS led direct from the dining-room to the drawing-room above, she said to me : ' The Rector tells me that you have been reading a good deal about Spain. Would you care to hear something of our Spanish journey ? ' — ^the journey which had preceded the appearance of * The Spanish Gypsy,' then newly pubHshed. My reply is easily imagined. The rest of the party passed through the dimly ht drawing-room to talk and smoke in the gallery beyond. George EHot sat down in the darkness and I beside her. Then she talked for about twenty minutes, with perfect ease and finish, without mis- placing a word or dropping a sentence, and I realised at last that I was in the presence of a great writer. Not a great talker. It is clear that George Eliot never was that. Impossible for her to * talk ' her books, or evolve her books from conversation, like Madame de Stael. She was too self-conscious, too desperately reflective, too rich in second-thoughts for that. But in tete-a-tete, and with time to choose her words, she could — ^in monologue, with just enough stimulus from a companion to keep it going — produce on a Hstener exactly the impression of some of her best work. As the low clear voice flowed on, in Mrs . Pattison's drawing room, I saw Saragossa, Granada, the Escorial, and that survival of the old Europe in the new, which one must go to Spain to find. Not that the description was particularly vivid — in talldng of famous places John Richard Green could make words tell and paint with far greater success ; but it was singularly complete and accomphshed. When it was done the effect was there — the effect she had meant to produce. I shut my eyes, and it aU comes back : — ^the darkened room, YOUNG DAYS AT OXFOED 109 the long, pallid face, set iu black lace, the evident wish to be kind to a young girl. Two more impressions of her let me record. The following day, the Pattisons took their guests to see the * eights ' races from Christ Church meadow. A young Fellow of Merton, Mandell Creighton, afterwards the beloved and famous Bishop of London, was among those entertaining her on the barge, and on the way home he took her and Mr. Lewes through Merton garden. I was of the party, and I remember what a carnival of early summer it was in that enchanting place. The chestnuts were all out, one splendour from top to toe ; the laburnums, the lilacs, the hawthorns red and white, the new-mown grass spreading its smooth and silky carpet round the college walls, a May sky overhead, and through the trees ghmpses of towers and spires, silver grey, in the sparkhng summer air : — the picture was one of those that Oxford throws before the spectator, at every turn, like the careless beauty that knows she has only to show herself, to move, to breathe, to give delight. George EHot stood on the grass, in the bright sun, looking at the flower- laden chesnuts, at the distant glimpses on all sides, of the surrounding city, saying little — that she left to Mr. Lewes ! — but drinldng it in, storing it in that rich, absorbent mind of hers. And afterwards when Mr. Lewes, Mr. Creighton, she and I walked back to Lincoln, I remember another httle incident throwing light on the ever-ready instinct of the novelist. As we turned into the quadrangle of Lincoln — suddenly, at one of the upper windows of the Rector's lodgings, which occupied the far right-hand corner of the quad, there no A WRITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS appeared the head and shoulders of Mrs. Pattison, as she looked out and beckoned smiHng to Mrs. Lewes. It was a briUiant apparition, as though a French portrait by Greuze or Perronneau had suddenly slipped into a vacant space in the old college wall. The pale, pretty head, hlo'tid-cendree ; the delicate smiling features and white throat ; a touch of black, a touch of blue ; a white dress ; a general eighteenth-century impression as though of powder and patches : — ^Mrs. Lewes perceived it in a flash, and I saw her run eagerly to Mr. Lewes and draw his attention to the window and its occupant. She took his arm, while she looked and waved. If she had lived longer, some day, and somewhere in her books, that vision at the window, and that flower-laden garden would have reappeared. I seemed to see her consciously and deliberately committing them both to memory. But I do not beUeve that she ever meant to describe the Rector in * Mr. Casaubon. * She was far too good a scholar herself to have perpetrated a caricature so flagrantly untrue. She knew Mark Pattison's quality, and could never have meant to draw the writer of some of the most fruitful and illuminating of Enghsh essays, and one of the most brilhant pieces of European biography, in the dreary and foohsh pedant who over- shadows 'Middlemarch.' But the fact that Mark Pattison was an elderly scholar with a young wife, and that George Eliot knew him, led later on to a legend which was, I am sure, unwelcome to the writer of ' Middlemarch,' while her supposed victim passed it by with amused indifference. As to the relation between the Rector and the YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD 111 Squire of ' Robert Elsmorc ' which has been often assumed, it was confined, as I have already said (in the introduc- tion to the Hbrary edition of ' Robert Elsmere ' pubhshed in 1909) to a Ukeness in outward aspect — * a few personal traits, and the two main facts of great learning and a general impatience of fools.' If one could imagine Mark Pattison a landowner, he would certainly never have neglected his estates, or tolerated an inefficient agent. Only three years intervened between my leaving school and my engagement to Mr. T. Humphry Ward, Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose College, Oxford. But those three years seem to me now to have been extra- ordinarily full. Lincoln and the Pattisons, Balliol and Mr. Jowett, and the Bodleian Library, outside the influences and affections of my own home, stand in the forefront of what memory looks back on as a broad and animated scene. The great Library, in particular, became to me a living and inspiring presence. \Vhen I think of it, as it then was, I am aware of a medley of beautiful things — pale sunlight on book-lined walls, or streaming through old armorial bearings on Tudor windows ; spaces and distances, all books, beneath a painted roof from which gleamed the motto of the University — ' Dominus illuminatio mea ' ; gowned figures moving silently about the spaces ; the faint scents of old leather and polished wood ; and fusing it all, a stately dignity and benignant charm, through which the voices of the bells outside, as they struck each successive quarter from Oxford's many towers, seemed to breathe a certain eternal reminder of the past and the dead. 112 A WRITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS But regions of the Bodleian were open to me then that no ordinary reader sees now Mr. Coxe — the well- known, much-loved Bodley's Librarian of those days — took kindly notice of the girl-reader, and very soon, probably on the recommendation of Mark Pattison, who was a Curator, made me free of the lower floors, where was the * Spanish room,* with its shelves of seventeenth and eighteenth century volumes in sheepskin or vellum, with their turned-in edges and leathern strings. Here I might wander at will, absolutely alone, save for the visit of an occasional librarian from the upper floor, seeking a book. To get to the Spanish Koom one had to pass through the Douce Library, the home of treasures beyond price ; on one side half the precious things of Eenaissance printing, French or Italian or Elizabethan, on the other, stands of illuminated Missals and Hour Books, many of them rich in pictures and flower- work, that shone like jewels in the golden light of the room. That light was to me something tangible and friendly. It seemed to be the mingled product of all the dehcate browns and yellows and golds in the bindings of the books, of the brass lattice work that covered them, and of reflections from the beautiful stone-work of the Schools Quadrangle outside. It was in these noble surroundings that, with far too little, I fear, of positive reading, and with much undisciphned wandering from shelf to shelf and subject to subject, there yet sank deep into me the sense of history, and of that vast ocean of the recorded past, from which the generations rise, and into which they fall back. And that in itself was a great boon — almost, one might say, a training, of a kind. YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD 113 But a girl of seventeen is not always thinking of books, especially in the Oxford summer term. In * Miss Bretherton/ my earhest novel, and in * Lady Coimie,' so far my latest,^ will be found by those who care to look for it, the reflection of that other life of Oxford, the life which takes its shape not from age, but from youth, not from the past which created Oxford, but from the hvely laughing present which every day renews it. For six months of the year Oxford is a city of young men, for the most part between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. In my maiden days it was not also a city of young women, as it is to-day. Women — girls especially — were comparatively on sufferance. The Heads of Houses were married ; the Professors were mostly married ; but married tutors had scarcely begun to be. Only at two seasons of the year was Oxford invaded by women — by bevies of maidens who came, in early May and middle June, to be made much of by their brothers and their brothers' friends, to be danced with and flirted with, to know the joys of coming back on a summer night from Nuneham up the long fragrant reaches of the lower river, or of * sitting out ' in historic gardens where Phihp Sidney or Charles I. had passed. At the Eights and * Commem." the old, old place became a mere background for pretty dresses, and college luncheons, and river picnics. The seniors groaned often, as well they might ; for there was Uttle work done in my day in the summer term. But it is perhaps worth while for any nation to possess * These chapters were written before the appearance of Alissirig in the autumn of 1917. 114 A WEITER'S RECOLLECTIONS such harmless festivals in so beautiful a setting as these Oxford gatherings. How many of our national festivals are spoilt by ugly and sordid things — betting and drink, greed and display ! Here, all there is to see is a competition of boats, manned by England's best youth, upon a noble river, flowing, in Virgihan phrase, ' imder ancient walls ' ; a city of romance, given up for a few days to the pleasure of the young, and breath- ing into that pleasure her own refining, exalting note ; a stately ceremony — the Encsenia — going back to the infancy of Enghsh learning ; and the dancing of young men and maidens in Gothic or classical halls built long ago by the * fathers who begat us/ My own recollection of the Oxford summer, the Oxford river and hayfields, the dawn on Oxford streets, as one came out from a Commemoration ball, or the evening under Nuneham woods where the swans on that still water, now, as always, * float double, swan and shadow ' — these things I hope will be with me to the end. To have Hved through them is to have tasted youth and pleasure from a cup as pure, as Httle alloyed with baser things, as the high gods allow to mortals. Let me recall one more experience before I come to the married hfe which began in 1872 ; — my first sight of Taine, the great French historian, in the spring of 1871. He had come over at the invitation of the Curators of the Taylorian Institution to give a series of lectures on Corneille and Racine. The lectures were arranged immediately after the surrender of Paris to the German troops, when it might have been hoped that the worst calamities of France were over. But before M. Taine crossed to England the insurrection YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD 115 of the Coimnuiie had broken out, and while he was actually in Oxford dchvering his six lectui'es, the terrible news of the last daj's of May, the burning of the Tuileries, the Hotel de Ville and the Cour des Comptes, all the savagery of the beaten revolution let loose on Paris itself, came crashing, day by day and hour by hour, hke so many horrible explosions in the heavy air of Europe, still tremulous with the memories and agonies of recent war. How well I remember the effect in Oxford 1 — the newspaper cries in the streets, the fear each morning as to what new calamities might have fallen on civihsation, the intense fellow-feeling in a community of students and scholars for the students and scholars of France ! When M. Taine arrived, he himself bears witness (see his pubhshed Correspondence, vol. II) that Oxford could not do enough to show her sympathy with a distinguished Frenchman. He writes from Oxford on May 25 :— I have no courage for a letter to-day. I have just heard of the horrors of Paris, the burning of the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Hotel de ViUe, etc. My heart is wrung. I have energy for nothing. I cannot go out and see people. I was in the Bodleian when the Librarian told me this and showed me the newspapers. In presence of such madness and such disasters, they treat a Frenchman here with a kind of pitying sympathy. Oxford residents indeed, inside and outside the colleges, crowded the first lecture to show our feehng not only for M. Taine, but for a France wounded and trampled on by her own childi-en. The few digmfied and touching words with which he opened his course. 116 A WEITER'S RECOLLECTIONS his fine dark head, the attractiveness of his subject, the lucidity of his handhng of it, made the lecture a great success ; and a few nights afterwards at dinner at Balliol, I found myself sitting next the great man. In his pubhshed correspondence there is a letter describing this dinner which shows that I must have confided in him not a Uttle — as to my Bodleian reading, and the article on the Poema del Gid that I was writing. He confesses, however, that he did his best to draw me — examining the Enghsh girl as a new specimen for his psychological collection. As for me, I can only perversely remember a passing phrase of his to the efiect that there was too much magenta in the dress of English women, and too much pepper in the Enghsh cuisine. From English cooking — which showed ill in the Oxford of those days — ^he suffered indeed a good deal. Nor, in spite of his great literary knowledge of England and English, was his spoken English clear enough to enable him to grapple with the lodging-house cook. Professor Max Miiller, w^ho had induced him to give the lectures, and watched over him during his stay, tqld me that on his first visit to the historian in his Beaumont Street rooms, he found him sitting bewildered before the strangest of meals. It consisted entirely of a huge beef-steak, served in the un-appetising, slovenly English way, and — a large plate of buttered toast. Nothing else. ' But I ordered bif-tek and pott-a-toes ! ' cried the puzzled historian, to his visitor ! Another guest of the Master's on that night was Mr. Swinburne, and of him too I have a vivid recollection as he sat opposite to me on the side next the fire, his small lower features and slender neck over- weighted YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD 117 by his thick reddish hair and capacious brow. I could not think why he seemed so cross and uncomfortable. He was perpetually beckoning to the waiters, then, when they came, holding peremptory conversation with them ; while I from my side of the table could see them going away, with a whisper or a shrug to each other, like men asked for the impossible. At last with a kind of bound, Swinburne leapt from his chair and seized a copy of the Times, which he seemed to have persuaded one of the men to bring him. As he got up I saw that the fire behind him, and very close to him, must indeed have been burning the very marrow out of a long-suffering poet. And alack, in that house without a mistress, the small conveniences of Hfe, such as fire-screens, were often overlooked. The Master did not possess any. In a pale exasperation Swinburne folded the Times over the back of his chair, and sat down again. Vain was the effort ! The room was narrow, the party large, and the servants pushing by, had soon dislodged the Times. Again and again did Swinbiu-ne in a fmy replace it ; and was soon reduced to sitting silent and wild-eyed, his back firmly pressed against the chair and the newspaper, in a concentrated struggle with fate. Matthew Arnold was another of the party, and I have a vision of my uncle standing talking with jM. Taine, with whom he then and there made a lasting friendship. The Frenchman was not, I trust, aware at that moment of the heresies of the Enghsh critic who had ventured only a few years before to speak of ' the exaggerated French estimate of Racine,' and even to endorse the judgment of Joubert — 'Racine est le Virgile des 118 A WEITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS ignorants * ! Otherwise M. Taine might have given an even sharper edge than he actually did to his remarks, in his letters home, on the critical faculty of the English. * In all that I read and hear * — ^he says to Madame Taine — * I see nowhere the fine literary sense which means the gift — or the art — of understanding the souls and passions of the past. ' And again, ' I have had infinite trouble to-day to make my audience appreciate some finesses of Racine/ There is a note of resigned exasperation in these comments which reminds me of the passionate feeling of another French critic — Edmond Scherer, Sainte-Beuve^s best successor — ^ten years later. A 'pro'pos of some judgment of Matthew Arnold — ^whom Scherer delighted in — on Racine, of the same kind as those I have already quoted, the French man of letters once broke out to me, almost with fury, as we walked together at Versailles. But, after all, was the Oxford which contained Pater, Pattison, and Bjrwater, which had nurtured ^Matthew Arnold and Swinbm^ne — Swinburne with his wonderful knowledge of the intricacies and subtleties of the French tongue, and the French Hterature — merely * solide and positif/ as Taine declares ? The judgment is, I think, a characteristic judgment of that man of formulas — often so brilliant, and often so mistaken — who in the famous * History of English Literature,* taught his English readers as much by his blunders as by his merits. He provoked us into thinking. And what critic does more ? Is not the whole fraternity like so many successive Penelopes, each unraveUing the web of the one before ? The point is that the web should be eternally re-made and eternally unravelled. YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD il9 II I married Mr. Thomas Humphry Ward, Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose College, on April 6, 1872, the knot being tied by my father's friend, my grandfather's pupil and biographer. Dean Stanley. For nine years, till the spring of 1881, we lived in Oxford, in a Httle house, north of the Parks, in what was then the newest quarter of the University town. They were years, for both of us, of great happiness and incessant activity. Our children, two daughters and a son, were born in 1874, 1876 and 1879. We had many friends, all pur- suing the same kind of life as ourselves, and interested in the same kind of things. Nobody under the rank of a Head of a College, except a very few privileged Professors, possessed as much as a thousand a year. The average income of the new race of married tutors was not much more than half that sum. Yet we all gave dinner-parties and furnished our houses with Morris papers, old chests and cabinets, and blue pots. The dinner-parties were simple and short. At our own early efforts of the kind, there certainly was not enough to eat. But we all improved with time ; and on the whole I think we were very fair housekeepers and competent mothers. Most of us were very anxious to be up-to-date, and in the fashion, whether in aesthetics, in house-keeping, or education. But our fashion was not that of Belgravia or Mayfair, which indeed we scorned ! It was the fashion of the movement which sprang from IMorris and Burne-Jones. Liberty stuffs very plain in line, but elaborately * smocked/ were greatly in vogue, and evening dresses, 120 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS * cut square/ or with ' Watteau pleats/ were generally worn, and often in conscious protest against the London ' low dress/ which Oxford — ^young married Oxford — thought both ugly and ' fast/ And when we had donned our Liberty gowns we went out to dinner, the husband walking, the wife in a bath chair, drawn by an ancient member of an ancient and close fraternity — the * chairmen ' of old Oxford. Almost immediately opposite to us in the Bradmore Road, hved Walter Pater and his sisters. The exquisite- ness of their small house, and the charm of the three people who hved in it will never be forgotten by those who knew them well in those days when by the pubhca- tion of the ' Studies in the Renaissance ' (1873) their author had just become famous. I recall very clearly the efiect of that book, and of the strange and poignant sense of beauty expressed in it ; of its entire aloofness also from the Christian tradition of Oxford, its glorification of the higher and intenser forms of aesthetic pleasure, of * passion ' in the intellectual sense — as against the Christian doctrine '" of self-denial and renunciation. It was a gospel that both stirred and scandahsed Oxford. The bishop of the diocese thought it worth while to protest. There was a cry of ' Neo-paganism,* and various attempts at persecution. The author of the book was quite unmoved. Li those days Walter Pater's mind was still full of revolutionary ferments which were just as sincere, just as much himself as that later hesitating and wistful return towards Christianity, and Christianity of the Cathohc type, which is embodied in ' Marius the Epicurean,' the most beautiful of the spiritual romances of Europe since YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD 121 the 'Confessions.' I can remember a dinner-party at his house, where a great tumult arose over some abrupt statement of his made to the High Church wife of a well-known professor. Pater had been in some way pressed controversially beyond the point of wisdom, and had said suddenly that no reasonable person could govern their hves by the opinions or actions of a man who died eighteen centuries ago. The Professor and his wife — I look back to them both with the warmest affection — departed hurriedly, in agitation ; and the rest of us only gradually found out what had happened. But before we left Oxford in 1881, this attitude of mind had, I think, greatly changed. Mr. Gosse in the memoir of Walter Pater contributed to the Dictionary of National Biography says that before 1870, he had gradually rehnquished all belief in the Christian rehgion — and leaves it there. But the interesting and touching thing to watch was the gentle and almost imperceptible flowing back of the tide over the sands it had left bare. It may be said, I think, that he never returned to Christianity in the orthodox, or intellectual sense. But his heart returned to it. He became once more endlessly interested in it, and haunted by the ' something ' in it, which he thought inexphcable. A remembrance of my own shows this. In my ardent years of exploration and revolt, conditioned by the historical work that occupied me during the later seventies, I once said to him in tete-a-tete, reckoning confidently on his sympathy, and with the intolerance and certainty of youth, that orthodoxy could not possibly maintain itself long against its assailants, especially from the historical and hterary 122 A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS camps, and that we should live to see it break down. He shook his head and looked rather troubled. * I don't think so — ' he said. Then, with hesitation — * And we don't altogether agree. You think it's- all plain. But I can't. There are such mysterious things. Take that saying " Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden." How can you explain that ? There is a mystery in it — something supernatural.' A few years later, I should very likely have replied that the answer of the modern critic would be : * The words you quote are in all probability from a lost Wisdom book ; there are very close analogies in Proverbs and in the Apocrypha. They are a fragment without a context, and may represent on the Lord's lips, either a quotation, or the text of a discourse. Wisdom is speaking — the Wisdom " which is justified of her children. " ' But if anyone had made such a reply, it would not have affected the mood in Pater of which this conversation gave me my first glimpse, and which is expressed again and again in the most exquisite passages of *Marius.' Turn to the first time when Marius — under Marcus AureHus — is present at a Christ- ian ceremony, and sees, for the first time, the * wonderful spectacle of those who believed.' The people here collected might have figured as the earliest handsel or pattern of a new world, from the very face of which discontent had passed away .... They had faced life and were glad, by some science or light of knowledge they had, to which there was certainly no parallel in the older world. Was some credible message from beyond * the flaming rampart of the'^'world ' — a message of^hope . . . already moulding their very bodies and looks and voices, now and here? YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD 123 Or again, to the thoughts of Marius at the approach of death : — At this moment, his unclouded receptivity of soul, grown so steadily through all those years, from experience to e'xper- ience, was at its height ; the house was ready for the possible guest, the tablet of the mind white and smooth, for whatever divine fingers might choose to write there. ' Marius ' was pubhshed twelve years after the * Studies in the Renaissance/ and there is a world between the two books. Some further light will be thrown on this later phase of IVIr. Pater's thought by a letter he wrote to me in 1885 on my translation of AmieFs * from Journal Intime.' Here it is rather the middle days of his hfe that concern me, and the years of happy friendship with him and his sisters, when we were all young together. Mr. Pater and my husband were both fellows and tutors of Brasenose, though my husband was much the younger ; a fact which naturally brought us into frequent contact. And the beautiful httle house across the road, with its two dear mistresses drew me perpetually, both before and after my marriage. The dramng-room which runs the whole breadth of the house from the road to the garden behind was * Paterian ' in every line and ornament. There was a Morris paper ; spindle-legged tables and chairs ; a sparing allowance of blue plates and pots, bought, I think, in Holland, where Oxford residents in my day were always foraging, to return, often, wdth treasures of which the very memory now stirs a half-amused envy of one's own past self, that had such chancer and lost thcni ; framed embroidery of the most dehcate design and colour, the work of I\Ir. 124 A WEITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS Pater^s elder sister ; engravings, if I remember right, from Botticelli or Luini, or Mantegna ; a few mirrors, and a very few flowers, chosen and arranged with a simple yet conscious art. I see that room always with the smi in it, touching the pohshed surfaces of wood and brass and china, and bringing out its pure, bright colour. I see it too pervaded by the presence of the younger sister Clara, — a personahty never to be for- gotten by those who loved her. Clara Pater, whose grave and noble beauty in youth has been preserved in a drawing by Mr. Wirgman, was indeed a 'rare and dedicated spirit. ' When I first Imew her, she was four or five and twenty, intelligent, alive, sympathetic, with a delightful humour, and a strong judgment, but without much positive acquirement. Then after some years, she began to learn Latin and Greek with a view to teaching ; and after we left Oxford she became Vice- President of the new Somerville College for Women. Several generations of girl-students must still preserve the tenderest and most grateful memories of all that she was there, as woman, teacher, and friend. Her point of view, her opinion had always the crispness, the savour that goes with perfect sincerity. She feared no one, and she loved many, as they loved her. She loved animals too, as all the household did. How well I remember the devoted nursing given by the brother and sisters to a poor little paralytic cat, whose life they tried to save — ^in vain ! When, later, I came across in * Marius * the account of Marcus Aurelius carrying away the dead child Annius Verus, — 'pressed closely to his bosom, as if yearning just then for one thing only, to be united, to be absolutely one with it, in its obscure YOUNG DAYS AT OXFOED 125 distress' — I remembered the absorption of the writer of those hnes, and of his sisters, in the suffering of that poor httle creature, long years before. I feel tolerably certain that in writing the words Walter Pater had that past experience in mind. After Walter Pater's death, Clara, with her elder sister, became the vigilant and joint guardians of their brother's books and fame, till, four years ago, a terrible illness cut short her life, and set free, in her brother's words, the ' unclouded and receptive soul. ' CHAPTEK VII Balliol and Lincoln When the Oxford historian of the future comes across the name and influence of Benjamin Jowett, the famous Master of BalHol, and Greek professor, in the mid-current of the nineteenth century, he will not be without full means of finding out what made that sHght figure (whereof he will be able to study the outward and visible presence in some excellent portraits, and in many caricatures) so significant and so representative. The * Life ' of the Master, by Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell, is to me one of the most interesting biogra- phies of our generation. It is long — for those who have no Oxford ties, no doubt, too long ; and it is cumbered with the echoes of old controversies, theological and academic, which have mostly, though by no means wholly, passed into a dusty hmbo. But it is one of the rare attempts that EngHsh biography has seen to paint a man as he really was ; and to paint him not with the sub-mahcious strokes of a Purcell, but in love, although in truth. The Master, as he fought his many fights, with his abnormally strong will, and his dominating personaHty ; the Master, as he appeared, on the one hand, to the 126 BALLIOL AND LINCOLN 127 upholders of * research/ of learniug that is, as^an end m itself apart from teaching, and, on the other, to the High Churchmen encamped in Christ Church, to Pusey, Liddon, and all their clan — pugnacious, formidable, and generally successful — here he is to the hfe. This is the Master whose personahty could never be forgotten in any room he chose to enter ; who brought restraint rather than ease to the gatherings of his friends, mainly because, according to his own account, of a shyness he could never overcome ; whose company on a walk was too often more of a torture than an honour to the under- graduate selected for it, whose hghtest words were feared, quoted, chuckled over, or resented, hke those of no one else. Of this Master, I have many remembrances. I see, for instance, a drawing-room full of rather tongue-tied embarrassed guests, some Oxford residents, some Londoners ; and the Master among them, as a stimu- lating — but disintegrating ! — force, of whom every one was uneasily conscious. The circle was wide, the room bare, and the BaUiol arm chairs were not placed for conversation. On a high chair against the wall, sat a small boy of ten — we will call him Arthur — oppressed by his surroundings. The talk languished and dropped, i'rom one side of the large room, the Master, raising his voice, addressed the small boy on the other side. ' Well, Arthur, so I hear youVe begun Greek. How are you getting on ? ' To the small boy looking round the room it seemed as though twenty awful grown-ups were waiting in a dead silence to eat him up. He rushed upon his answer. ' 1 — I'm reading the Anabasis,' he said desperately. 128 A WEITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS The false quantity sent a shock through the room. Nobody laughed, out of sympathy with the boy, who already knew that something dreadful had happened. The boy's miserable parents, Londoners, who were among the twenty, wished themselves under the floor. The Master smiled. * Anabasis, Arthur," he said cheerfully. * You'll get it right next time." And he went across to the boy, evidently feehng for him, and wishing to put him at ease. But after thirty years, the boy and his parents still remember the incident \\dth a shiver. It could not have produced such an efiect, except in an atmosphere of tension ; and that, alas ! too often, was the atmosphere which surrounded the Master. I can remember, too, many proud yet anxious half- hours in the Master's study — such a privilege, yet such an ordeal ! — when, after our migration to London, we became, at regular intervals, the Master's week-end visitors. ' Come and talk to me a Httle in my study,' the Master would say pleasantly. And there in the room where he worked for so many years, as the inter- preter of Greek thought to the Enghsh world, one would take a chair beside the fire, with the Master opposite. I have described my fireside tetes-a-tete, as a girl, with another head of a College — the Rector of Lincoln, Mark Pattison. But the Master was a far more strenuous companion. With him, there were no diversions, none ! — no rehef from the breathless adventure of trying to please him, and doing one's best. The Rector once, being a httle invahdish, allowed me to make up the fire, and after watching the process sharply, said — * Good ! does it drive you distracted, too, when people BALLIOL AND LINCOLN 129 put on coals the wrong way ? ' An interruption, which made for human sympathy ! The Master, as far as I can remember, had no ' nerves ' ; and ' nerves ' are a bond between many. But he occasionally had sudden returns upon himself. I remember once after we had been discussing a religious book which had interested us both, he abruptly drew himself up, in the full tide of talk, and said with a curious impatience — * But one can't be always thinking of these things ! ' — and changed the subject. So much for the Master, the stimulus of whose mere presence was, according to his biographers, ' often painful.' But there were at least two other Masters in the ' Mr. Jowett ' we reverenced. And they too are fully shown in this biography. The Master who loved his friends and thought no pains too great to take for them ; including the very rare pains of trying to mend their characters by faithfulness and plain speaking, whenever he thought they wanted it. The Master, again, whose sympathies were always with social re- form, and with the poor, whose hidden life was full of deeds of kindness and charity, who, in spite of his difficulties of manner, was loved by all sorts and condi- tions of men — and women — in all circles of life ; by pohticians and great ladies ; by diplomats and scholars and poets ; by his secretary and his servants : — there are many traits of this good man and useful citizen, recorded by his biographers. And, finally, there was the Master who reminded his most intimate friends of a sentence of his about Greek literature, which occurs in the Litroduction to the ' Phaedrus.' ' Under the marble exterior of Greek litera- ture was concealed a soul thrilhng with spiritual emotion,' 130 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS says the Master. His own was not exactly a marble exterior ; but the placid and yet shrewd cheerfulness of his deHcately rounded face, with its small mouth and chin, its great brow, and frame of snowy hair, gave but little clue to the sensitive and mystical soul within. If ever a man was Gottbetrunhen, it was the Master, many of whose meditations and passing thoughts, with- drawn, while he lived, from all human ken, yet written down — in thirty or forty volumes ! — for his own dis- ciphne and remembrance, can now be read, thanks to his biographers, in the pages of the Life. They are extraordinarily frank and simple ; starthng often, in their bareness and truth. But they are, above all, the thoughts of a mystic, moving in a divine presence. An old and intimate friend of the Master's once said to me that he believed ' Jowett's inner mind, especially to- wards the end of his life, was always in an attitude of Prayer. One would go and talk to him on University or College business in his study, and suddenly see his lips moving, shghtly and silently, and know what it meant.' The records of him which his death revealed — and his closest friends reahsed it in Hfe — show a man perpetually conscious of a mysterious and blessed companionship ; which is the mark of the rehgious man, in all faiths and all churches. Yet this was the man who, for the High Church party at Oxford, with its headquarters at Christ Church, under the flag of Dr. Pusey and Canon Liddon, was the symbol and embodiment of all heresy ; whose University salary as Greek professor, which depended on a Christ Church subsidy, was withheld for years by the same High- churchmen, because of their inextinguishable wrath BALLIOL AND LINCOLN 13] against the Liberal leader who had contributed so largely to the test-abolishing legislation of 1870 — legis- lation by which Oxford, in Liddon's words, was * logically lost to the Church of England/ Yet no doubt they had their excuses ! For this, too, was the man who, in a city haunted by Tractarian shades, once said to his chief biographer that ' Voltaire had done more good than all the Fathers of the Church put together ! * — who scornfully asks himself in his diary, d pro'pos of the Bishops' condenmation of ' Essays and Reviews,' ' ^Vliat is Truth against an esprit de corps ? * — and drops out the quiet dictum : ' Half the books that are pubhshed are rehgious books, and what trash this rehgious literature is ! ' Nor did the Evangehcals escape. The Master's dishke for many well-known hymns specially dear to that persuasion was never concealed. ' How cocky they are ! ' he would say con- temptuously. *"Wlien upwards I fly — Quite justified I " — who can repeat a thing like that ? ' How the old war-cries ring again in one's ears as one looks back ! Those who have only known the Oxford of the last twenty years can never, I think, feel towards that * august place ' as we did, in the seventies of the last century ; we who were still within sight and hearing of the great fighting years of an earlier generation, and still scorched by tlieir dying fires. BalHol, Christ Church, Lincoln : — the Liberal and utilitarian camp, the Church camp, the researching and pure scholarship camp — with Science and the Museum hovering in the background, as the growing aggressive powers of the future seeking whom they might devour : — they were the signs and symbols of mighty hosts, of great forces 182 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS still visibly incarnate, and in marching array. Balliol versus Christ Church — Jowett versus Pusey and Liddon — while Lincoln despised both, and the new scientific forces watched and waited : — that was how we saw the field of battle, and the various alarms and excursions it was always providing. But BalHol meant more to me than the Master. Professor Thomas Hill Green — ' Green of Balhol * — was no less representative in our days of the spiritual and Hberating forces of the great college ; and the time which has now elapsed since his death has clearly shown that his philosophic work and influence hold a lasting and conspicuous place in the history of nine- teenth-century thought. He and his wife became our intimate friends, and in the * Grey ' of ' Robert Elsmere ' I tried to reproduce a few of those traits — traits of a great thinker and teacher, who was also one of the simplest, sincerest, and most practical of men — which Oxford will never forget, so long as high culture and noble character are dear to her. His wife — so his friend and biographer, Lewis Nettleship, tells us — once com- pared him to Sir Bors in ' The Holy Grail * : A square-set man and honest ; and his eyes, An out-door sign of all^the wealth within, Smiled with his lips — a smile beneath a' cloud, But Heaven had meant it for a sunny one ! A quotation in which the minghng of a cheerful, practical, humorous temper, the temper of the active citizen and politician, with the heavy tasks of philosophic thought, is very happily suggested. As we knew him, indeed, before his growing reputation, confirmed by the Litroduction to the Clarendon Press edition of Hume, had led to his appointment as Whyte's > I. BALLIOL AND LINCOLN 183 Professor of Moral PLilosophy, ]\Lr. Green was not only a leading Balliol tutor, but an energetic Liberal, a member both of the Oxford Town Council and of various University bodies ; a helper in all the great steps taken for the higher education of women at Oxford, and keenly attracted by the project of a High School for the town boys of Oxford — a man, in other words, pre- occupied, just as the Master was, and for all his philo- sophic genius, with the need of leading ' a useful life/ Let me pause to think how much that phrase meant in the mouths of the best men whom Balhol produced, in the days when I knew Oxford. The Master, Green, Toynbee — their minds were full, half a century ago, of the * condition of the people ' question, of temperance, housing, wages, electoral reform ; and within the University, and by the help of the weapons of thought and teaching, they regarded themselves as the natural alhes of the Liberal party which was striving for these things through politics and Parliament. ' Usefulness,' * social reform," the bettering of daily life for the many — these ideas are stamped on all their work and on all the biographies of them that remain to us. And the significance of it is only to be realised when we turn to the rival group, to Christ Church, and the rehgi- ous party which that name stood for. Read the lives of Liddon, of Pusey, or — to go further back — of the great Newman himself. Nobody will question the personal goodness and charity of any of the three. But how httle the leading ideas of that seething time of social and industrial reform, from the appearance of Sybil in 1843 to the Education Bill of 1870, mattered either to Pusey or to Liddon, compared with the date of the book of Daniel, or the retention of the Athanasian 134 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS Creed ! Newman, at a time when national drunkenness was an overshadowing terror in the minds of all reformers, confesses with a pathetic frankness that he had never considered ' whether there were too many pubhc-houses in England or no ; ' and in all his religious controversies of the thirties and the forties, you will look in vain for any word of industrial or political reform. So also in the * Life ' of that great rhetorician and beautiful personahty, Canon Liddon, you will scarcely find a single letter that touches on any question of social betterment. How to safeguard the ' principle of authority,^ how to uphold the traditional authorship of the Pentateuch, and of the Book of Daniel, against ' infidel ' criticism ; how to stifle among the younger High Churchmen like Mr. (now Bishop) Gore, then head of the Pusey House, the first advances towards a reasonable freedom of thought ; how to maintain the doctrine of Eternal Punishment against the protest of the religious consciousness itself — it is on these matters that Canon Liddon's corre- spondence turns, it was to them his life was devoted. How vainly ! Who can doubt now which type of life and thought had in it the seeds of growth and per- manence — the BalHol type, or the Christ Church type ? There are many High Churchmen, it is true, at the present day, and many Eitualist Churches. But they are ahve to-day, just in so far as they have learnt the lesson of social pity, and the lesson of a reasonable criticism, from the men whom Pusey and Liddon and half the bishops condemned and persecuted in the middle years of the nineteenth century. When we were Hving in Oxford, however, this was not exactly the point of view from which the great BALLIOL AND LINCOLN 135 figure of Liddon presented itself, to us of the Liberal camp. We were constantly aware of him, no doubt, as the rival figure to the Master of Balliol, as the arch ^vi^e-pulle^ and ecclesiastical intriguer in University affairs, leading the Church forces with a more than Koman astuteness. But his great mark was made, of course, by his preaching, and that not so much by the things said as by the man saying them. Who now would go to Liddon's famous Bamptons, for all their learning, for a still vahd defence of the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation ? Those w^onderful paragraphs of subtle argumentation from w^hich the great preacher emerged, as triumphantly as Mr. Gladstone from a Gladstonian sentence in a House of Commons debate— what re- mains of them ? Liddon wrote of Stanley that he — Stanley — was * more entirely destitute of the logical faculty ' than any educated man he knew. In a sense it was true. But Stanley, if he had been aware of the criticism, might have rephed that, if he lacked logic, Liddon lacked something much more vital — i.e. the sense of history — and of the relative value of testimony ! Newman, Pusey, Liddon — all three, great school- men, arguing from an accepted brief ; the man of genius, the man of a vast industry, intense but futile, the man of captivating presence and a perfect rhetoric : — history, with its patient burrowings, has surely under- mined the work of all three ; sparing only that element in the work of one of them — Newman— which is the preserving salt of all literature — i.e. the magic of per- sonahty. And some of the most efficacious burrowers have been their own spiritual children. As was fitting ! For the Tractarian movement, with its appeal to the 136 A WEITER'S EECOLLECTIONS primitive cluirch, was in truth, and quite unconsciously, one of the agencies in a great process of historical enquiry, which is still going on, and of which the end is not yet. But to me, in my twenties, these great names were not merely names or symbols, as they are to the men and women of the present generation. Newman I had seen in my childhood, walking about the streets of Edgbaston, and had shrunk from him in a dumb childish resentment as from someone whom I understood to be the author of our family misfortunes. In those days, as I have already recalled in an earher chapter, the daughters of a ' mixed marriage ' were brought up in the mother's faith and the sons in the father's. I, therefore, as a schoolgirl under EvangeHcal influence, was not allowed to make friends with any of my father's CathoHc colleagues. Then, in 1880, twenty years later, Newman came to Oxford, and on Trinity Monday there was a great gathering at Trinity College, where the Cardinal in his red, a blanched and spiritual presence, received the homage of a new generation who saw in him a great soul and a great master of English, and cared little or nothing for the controversies in which he had spent his prime. As my turn came to shake hands, I recalled my father to him and the Edgbaston days. His face ht up — almost mischievously. * Are you the Httle girl I remember seeing sometimes — in the dis- tance ? ' he said to me, with a smile and a look that only he and I imderstood. On the Sunday preceding that gathering I went to hear his last sermon in the city he had loved so well, preached at the new Jesuit church in the suburbs ; while little more than a mile away. Bidding Prayer BALLIOL AND LINCOLN 137 and sermon were going on as usual in the University Church where in his youth, week by week, he had so deeply stirred the hearts and consciences of men. The sermon in St. Aloysius was preached with great difficulty, and was almost incoherent from the physical wealoiess of the speaker. Yet who that was present on that Sunday will ever forget the great ghost that fronted them, the faltering accents, the words from which the life blood had departed yet not the charm ? Then — Pusey! There comes back to me a bowed and uncouth figure, whom one used to see both in the Cathedral procession on a Sunday, and — rarely — in the University pulpit. One sermon on Darwinism, which was preached, if I remember right, in the early seventies, remains with me, as the appearance of some modem EHjah, returning after long silence and exile to protest against an unbeUeving world. Sara Coleridge had years before described Pusey in the pulpit with a few vivid strokes. He has not ono of the graces of oratory [she says]. His discourse is generally a rhapsody describing with infinite repetition the wickedness of sin, the worthlessness of earth, and the blessedness of heaven. He is as still as a statue all the time he is uttering it, looks as white as a sheet, and is a3 monotonous in delivery as possible. Nevertheless Pusey wielded a spell which is worth much oratory — the spell of a soul dwelling spiritually on the heights ; and a prophet moreover may be as monotonous or as incoherent as he pleases, while the world is still in tune with his message. But in the seventies, Oxford, at least, was no longer in tune with Pusey's message, and the effect of the veteran leader, trying to come to terms with Darwinism, struggling 138 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS that is with new and stubborn forces he had no further power to bind, was tragic, or pathetic, as such things must always be. New Puseys arise in every century. The ' sons of authority ' will never perish out of the earth. But the language changes, and the argument changes ; and perhaps there are none more secretly impatient with the old prophet than those younger spirits of his own kind who are aheady stepping into his shoes. Far difierent was the efiect of Liddon, in those days, upon us younger folk ! The grace and charm of Liddon's personal presence were as valuable to his party in the seventies as that of Dean Stanley had been to Liberahsm at an earher stage. There was indeed much in common between the aspect and manner of the two men, though no hkeness, in the strict sense, whatever. But the exquisite dehcacy of feature, the brightness of eye, the sensitive play of expression, were alike in both. Saint Simon says of Fenelon : — He was well made, pale, with eyes that showered intelligence and fire, — and with a physiognomy that no one who had seen it once could forget. It had both gravity and polish, serious- ness and gaiety ; it spoke equally of the scholar, the bishop and the grand seigneur, and the final impression was one of intelligence, subtlety, grace, charm ; above all, of dignity. One had to tear oneself from looking at him. Many of those who knew Liddon best could, I think, have adapted this language to him ; and there is much in it that fitted Ai-thur Stanley. But the love and gift for managing men was of course a secondary thing in the case of our great preacher. The University pohtics of Liddon and his followers are BALLIOL AND LINCOLN 139 dead and gone ; and as I have ventured to think, the intellectual force of Liddon's thoughts and arguments, as they are presented to us now on the printed page, is also a thing of the past. But the vision of the preacher, in those who saw it, is imperishable. The scene in St. Paul's has been often described, by none better than by Dr. Liddon's colleague. Canon Scott Holland. But the Oxford scene, with all its old-world setting, was more touching, more interesting. As I think of it, I seem to be looking out from those dark seats under the under- graduates' gallery — where sat the wives of the Masters of Arts — at the crowded church, as it waited for the preacher. First, came the stir of the procession ; the long line of Heads of Houses, in their scarlet robes as Doctors of Divinity, all but the two heretics, Pattison and Jowett, who walked in their plain black, and warmed my heart always thereby ! And then, the Vice- Chan- cellor, with the * pokers,' and the preacher. All eyes were fixed on the slender willowy figure, and the dark head touched with silver. The bow to the Vice-Chan- cellor as they parted at the foot of the pulpit stairs, the mounting of the pulpit, the quiet look out over the Church, the Bidding Prayer, the voice — it was all part of an incomparable performance, which cannot be paralleled to-day. The voice was high and penetrating, without much variety as I remember it ; but of beautiful quality, and at times wonderfully moving. And what was still more appealing was the evident strain upon the speaker of his message. It wore him out visibly as he deUvered it. He came do-^m from the pulpit white and shaken, dripping with perspiration. Virtue had gone out of 140 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS him. Yet his effort had never for a moment weakened his perfect self-control, the flow and finish of the long sentences, or the subtle inter-connection of the whole ! One Sunday I remember in particular. Oxford had been saddened the day before by the somewhat sudden death of a woman whom everybody loved and respected • — Mrs. Acland, the wife of the well-known doctor and professor. And Liddon with a wonderfully happy instinct, had added to his sermon a paragraph deahng with Mrs. Acland's death, which held us all spell-bound till the beautiful words died into silence. It was done with a fastidious hterary taste that is rather French than Enghsh ; and yet it came from the very heart of the speaker. Looking back through my many memories of Dr. Liddon as a preacher, that tribute to a noble woman in death remains with me as the finest and most lasting of them all. CHAPTER VIII Early Married Life How many other figures in that vanished Oxford world I should like to draw ! — Mandell or ' Max ' Creighton, our Hfe-long friend, then just married to the wife who was his best comrade while he lived, and since his death has made herself an independent force in EngHsh hfe. I first remember the future Bishop of London when I was fifteen, and he was readmg history with my father on a Devonshire reading party. The tall, slight figure in blue serge, the red-gold hair, the spectacles, the keen features, and quiet commanding eye — I see them first against a background of rocks on the Lynton shore. Then again a few years later, in his beautiful Merton rooms, with the vine-tendrils curhng round the windows, the Morris paper, and the blue willow-pattern plates upon it, that he was surely the first to collect in Oxford. A luncheon party returns upon me — in Brasenose — where the brilHant Merton fellow and tutor, already a power in Oxford, first met his future wife ; afterwards, their earhest married home in Oxford so near to ours, in the new region of the Parks ; then the Vicarage on the Northumberland coast where Creighton wrestled with the north-comitry folk, with their \artues and their 141 142 A WEITER'S EECOLLECTIONS vices, drinking deep draughts thereby from the sources of human nature ; where he read and wrote history, preparing for his magnum opus, the history of the Renaissance Popes ; where he entertained his friends, brought up his children, and took mighty walks — always the same restless, energetic, practical, pondering spirit, his mind set upon the Kingdom of God, and convinced that in and through the English Church a man might strive for the Kingdom as faithfully and honestly as anywhere else. The intellectual doubts and misgivings on the subject of taking orders, so common in the Oxford of his day, Creighton had never felt. His Hfe had ripened to a rich maturity without — apparently — any of those fundamental conflicts which had scarred the lives of other men. The fact set him in strong contrast with another historian who was also our intimate friend — John Richard Green. "When I first knew him, during my engagement to my husband, and seven years before the ' Short History ' was published, he had just prac- tically — though not formally — given up his orders. He had been originally curate to my husband's father, who held a London Hving, and the bond between him and his Vicar's family was singularly close and affectionate. After the death of the dear mother of the flock, a saintly and tender spirit, to whom Mr. Green was much attached, he remained the faithful friend of all her children. How much I had heard of him before I saw him ! The expectation of our first meeting filled with trepidation. Should I be admitted too into that large and generous heart ?— would he * pass ' the girl who had dared to be his ' boy's ' fiancee ? But after ten minutes all was well, and he was my friend no less than my EARLY MARRIED LIFE 143 husband's, to the last hour of his fruitful, suffering life. And how much it meant, his friendship ! It became plain very soon after our marriage that ours was to be a hterary partnership. My first published story, wTitten when I was eighteen, had appeared in the Churchman s Magazine in 1870, and an article on the ' Poema del Cid,' the fijstfruits of my Spanish browsings in the Bodleian, appeared in Macmillan early in 1872. My husband was already writing in the Saturday Review and other quarters, and had won his hterary spurs as one of the three authors of that jeu d'es'prit of no small fame in its day, the Oxford Spectator. Our three children arrived in 1874, 1876, and 1879, and all the time I was reading, hstening, talking, and beginning to write in earnest — mostly for the Saturday Review. * J. R. G.,' as we loved to call him, took up my efforts with the warmest encouragement, tempered indeed by constant fears that I should become a hopeless book- worm and Dryasdust, yielding day after day to the mere luxury of reading, and puttmg nothing into shape ! (Against this supposed tendency in me he railed perpetually. * Anyone can read ! ' he would say ; — ' anybody of decent wits can accumulate notes and references — the difficulty is to ivrite — to make some- thing ! ' And later on, when I was deep in Spanish chronicles, and thinking vaguely of a History of Spain, early Spain at any rate, he wrote almost impatiently — ' Begin — and begin your hook. Don't do " studies " and that sort of thing — one's book teaches one every- thing as one writes it.' I was reminded of that letter years later when I came across in Amiel's journal a 144 A WEITER'S RECOLLECTIONS passage almost to the same effect. ' It is by writing that one learns — it is by pumping that one draws water into one's well/ But in J. R. G/s case the advice he gave his friend was'carried out by himself through every hour of his short, concentrated life. * He died learning/ as the inscription on his grave testifies ; but he also died maJcing. In other words, the shaping, creative instinct wrestled in him with the powers of death through long years, and never deserted him to the very end. Who that has ever known the passion of the writer and the student can read without tears the record of his last months ? He was already doomed when I first saw him in 1871, for signs of tuberculosis had been discovered in 1869, and all through the seven- ties and till he died, in 1883, while he was writing the ' Short History,* the expanded Library Edition in four volumes, and the two brilhant monographs on 'The Making of England ' and * The Conquest of England,' the last of which was put together from his notes, and finished by his devoted wife and secretary after his death, he was fighting for his hfe, in order that he might finish his work. He was a dying man from January 1881, but he finished and pubHshed * The Making of England ' in 1882, and began ' The Conquest of Eng- land.' On February 25, ten days before his death, his wife told him that the end was near. He thought a httle, and said that he had still something to say in his book ' which is worth saying. I will make a fight for it. I will do what I can, and I must have sleeping draughts for a week. After that it will not matter if they lose their efiect.' He worked on a httle longer — but on March 7 all was over. My husband had gone f% .'Jay my visit at the Grange in 1908, walking thither from the house of one of the staunchest Imperialists in Canada, where I had been lunching. ' You are going to see Mi\ 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 after- noon, 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, with- out disrespect — his nmmmy. Shrivelled and spare, yet erect as ever, the iron-grey 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 252 A WEITEK'S RECOLLECTIONS 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. 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, then 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 for ever sealed in blood the union of the elder and the younger nations. ./ As to the circulation of * Eobert Elsmere,' 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 5000 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. Brunetiere, the well-known editor of the Revue des deux Mondes, and leader — ^il'iarn (/. li'arJ ''// ISSS THE PUBLICATION OF ' ROBERT ELSMERE ' 253 in some sort— of the Catholic reaction in France, began a negotiation with nie for the appearance of a French translation of the whole or part of the book in his Revue. ' But how ' — I asked hhn (we were sitting' in his editor's sanctum, in the old house of the Rue de rUniversite) — * could it possibly suit you, or the Revite, to do anything of the kind ? And 7iow — after fifteen years ? ' But according to him, the case was simple. A\^en the book fii'st appeared, the public of the Revue could not have felt any interest in it. France is a logical coimtry — 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 Cliui'ch — say, the date of the book of Daniel, as well as every- thmg else. Kenan indeed left the Church thii-ty 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 a23plauded, the literary argument against dogma made very little impression on the general Catholic world for many years. 'But now,' said M. Bruuetiere, 'everything is different. Modernism has arisen. It is penL'trating the Seminaries. People begin to talk of it in the streets. And ' Robert Elsraere ' is a study in Modernism — or at any rate it has so many affini- ties with Modernism, that now — the French public \\t'uld be interested,' 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 stii'ied. For it 254 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS 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. CHAPTER XIII First Visits to Italy I HAVE already mentioned in these pages that I was one of the examiners for the Spanish Taylorian scholar- ship at Oxford in 1883, and again in 1888. But perhaps before I go further in these Recollections, 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 * History of Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain," for his edition of the Correspond- ence of Cardinal Cisneros, and other historical work. A propos 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. Senor Gayangos was born in 1809, so that in 1883 he was already an old man, though full of vigour and work. He told me the fol- lowing story. Unfortunately I took no contemporary note. I give it now, as I remember it, and if anyone who knew Don Pascual, or any student of Shakespearean lore, can correct and ampHfy 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 travelling through Spain to England, 255 256 A WEITEE'S BECOLLECTIONS where, if I remember right, he had relations with Sir Thomas PhilHpps, the ardent book and MSS. collector, so many of whose treasures are now in the great libraries of Eui'ope. 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 Eng- lish 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 ValladoHd. He found his friend in the old library of the old house, engaged in a work of de- struction. On the floor of the long room was a large hrasero in which the new librarian was burning up a quantity of what he described as useless and miscel- laneous 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 burn- ing 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 Shake- speare, 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 bibUography. He was struck how- ever 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 Hbrarian attached no importance to the FIRST VISITS TO ITALY 257 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. He continued his journey to England, and presently mentioned the incident to Sir Thomas Pliillipps, and Sir Thomas's future son-in-law, Mr. Halliwell — after- wards Halliwell-Phillipps. The excitement of both knew no bounds. A First FoHo — 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 hbrary in London. The very thought of such a treasure perishmg barbarously in a bonfire of waste- paper was enough to drive a bibliophile out of his wits. Gayangos was sent back to Spain post haste. 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. But just dream a little ! Who sent the volume ? Who wrote the thick marginal notes ? An Enghsh 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 ? In the few years which intervened between his with- drawal from England, and his own death (1626) did he annotate the copy, storing there what he could remem- ber of the English stage, and of ' pleasant Willy ' himself 258 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS perhaps, during his two sojourns in London ? And was the book overlooked as EngHsh 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 ? Above all, did those marginal notes which Gayangos had once idly looked through contain, perhaps, though the First FoHo, of course, does not include the Poems, some faint key to the perennial Shakespeare mysteries — to ]\Ir. W. H., and the ' dark lady,' and all the impenetrable story of the Sonnets ? If so, the gods themselves took care that the veil should not be rent. The secret remains. Others abide our question — Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou standest and art still, Out-topping knowledge. • •••••« One other recollection of the ' Eobert Elsmere ' 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 neighbours 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 '86, and it was the first time they had called at Hawarden since the spHt. 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 FIRST VISITS TO ITALY 259 poetry, allowing us tlie 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 vigour, and the alertness with which, lead- ing 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 ofi. Especially do I remember the animation with which he dwelt on the horrible story of Damiens, executed with every conceivable torture for the attempted assas- sination 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.' I was already thinking of some reply both to Mr. Gladstone's article, and to the attack on ' Kobert Elsmere ' in the Quarterhj ; but it took me longer than I expected ; and it was not till March in the following year (1889) that I pubHshed ' The New Eeformation,' a Dia- logue, in the Nineteenth Century. Lito that dialogue I was able to tlirow 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 defence 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 particu- lar form, I was able to give the traditional as well as the 260 A WEITER'S RECOLLECTIONS critical case witli some fulness, and I took great pains with both. From a recently published letter, I see that Lord Acton %vrote to Mr. Gladstone that the role 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 litera- ture 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 sup- plied ' 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 worshipped, 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 sous-entendu of the story, and really gave the story all its force. But, in the dialogue, I could put the underlying con- flict of thought into articulate and logical form, and build up, in outline at least, the history of ' a new learn- ing.' W^ien it was published, the dear Master, with a sigh of relief, confessed that it had ' done no harm,* and ' shewed a considerable knowledge of critical theo- logy.' 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 FIRST VISITS TO ITALY 261 Lectures, Canon Liddou 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 right. 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 not the final judge — is indeed, in the last resort, the enemy, and must at some point go down, defeated and trampled on. ' Ideal Ward,' or Archdeacon Denison, or Mr. Spurgeon — and not Dr. Figgis, or Dr. Creighton — are the apologists who in the end hold the fort. But with this analysis of what may be called the intellectual presuppositions of * Robert Elsmere,' my mind began to turn to what I believed to be the other side of the Greenian or Modernist message — i.e. 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 * David Grieve,' which was already in my niind within a few months of the publi- cation of * Robert Elsmere.' We were at Borough Farm when the vision of it fii'st 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 262 A WEITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS 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 farmhouse, 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 farmyard, 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. A visit to Derbj^shire 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 at them in that fragrant, sunny spot, making acquaintance the while with a new and delightful friend, Emily Law- less, the author of ' Hurrish ' and ' Grania,' 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 Clone urry, 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 Ha-^kett, 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, FIRST VISITS TO ITALY 263 they loved both, with a strong preference for Ireland. All that EngUsh people instinctively resent in Irish character, — its dreamy or laughing indifference towards the ordinary business virtues — thrift, prudence, tidiness, accuracy — they had been accustomed to, even where they had not been infected with it, from their child- hood. 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 ' Grania ' is there to show how deUcate and profound might be their sympathy with the lovely things in Irish Cathohcism, and her best poems — * The Dirge of the Munster Forest,' or * 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 pecuUar pathos often into their lives. 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 grande dame, 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 disUke for grande ienue. "When she arrived at an Irish country-house, of which the hostess told me the story, she said to the mistress of 264 A WEITER'S EECOLLECTIONS 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 IVe brought some smart gowns. They (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 through- out her visit. 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 see- ing 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 meagre holiday from the Times — ' Go to Rome ! Never mind the journeys. Go ! You will have three days there, you say v Well, to have walked through Eome, 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 afterwards. If you only had an afternoon in Rome, it would be well worth while. But three days ! ' 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 over- FIRST VISITS TO ITALY 265 whelming impression — as of something infinitely old and facjan, through which Christianity moved about like a parvenu amid an elder generation of phantom presences, akeady grey 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. 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 busi- ness 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 Pasolhii, the head of an old aristocratic family with large estates in the Romagna, whose father was President of the fii^st Senate of United Italy. It was in the neighbourhood of the Pasolini estates that Garibaldi took refuge after '48 ; and one may pass through them to reach the lonely hut in which Anita Garibaldi died. Count Pasolini's father was also one of Pio Nono's Liberal IVlinisters, and the family, at the time at any rate of which I am speaking, combined Liberalism and sympathies for England wnth an enlightened and ardent Catholicism. I first made friends with Con- tessa Maria when we found her, on a cold Febru- ary day, receiving in an apartment in the Piazza del 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 fii'st came to know, with some intimacy, a cultivated Italian woman, 266 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS and to realise what a strong kindred exists between tlie English and the Italian educated mind. Especially, I think, in the case of the educated women 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 under- standing than the greater matters of the law. How an Italian lady manages her servants, and brings up her children, her general attitude towards 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 Kome, who still hold aloof from the Italian kingdom and its institutions. But the Liberal CathoUc, man or woman, who is both patriotically ItaHan and sincerely religious, will dis- cuss anything or anybody in heaven or earth, and just as tolerantly as would Lord Acton himself. They are cosmopoHtans, 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 salon in Rome. Every- body met there : grandees of all nations, ambassadors, ecclesiastics, men of literature, science, archaeology, 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 FIRST VISITS TO ITALY 267 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 realised the same ease, the same sympathy, the same instinctive and unerring success, 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 * Magna parens,' the Saturnian land ; but some- thing too that our English women, who live in the country and care for their own people, also possess. 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 ' Eleanor ' 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 afterwards came to do ; but she was learning EngUsh, with her two boys, from a delightful English tutor, and evidently pondering Enghsh character and ways — ' Ah, you Enghsh ! ' — I can see the white arm and hand, with its cigarette, waving in the darkness of the old Roman apartment — the broad brow, the smilmg eyes, and glint of white teeth — •' You English ! \\Tiy don't you talk ? — why wont 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 well ! But you Enghsh ! — you begin— and then you stop — one must always start you agahi — always wmd you up ! ' Terribly true ! But in her company, even we halting 268 A WEITER'S EECOLLECTIONS English learnt to talk, in our bad French, or what- ever came along. The summer of '89 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 ' Marcella/ 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 ad- vertisement. 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 laiew, 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 Times work. Hampden is enchanting ! — more delightful than even I thought it would be, and quite comfortable enough. Of course we want a^'multitude of things — (baths, wine-glasses, tumblers, cans, etc. !) but those I can hire from Wycombe. Our great FIRST VISITS TO ITALY 269 deficiency is lamps ! Last night wo crept about in this vast house, with hardly any light. ... As to the ghost, Mrs. Duval (the housekeeper) scoffs at it ! The ghost room is the tapestry room, from which there is a staircase down to the breakfast room. A good deal of the tapestry is loose, and when there is any wind it flaps and flaps. Hence all the tales. . . . The servants are rather bewildered by the size of everything, and — like me — were almost too excited to sleep. . . . The children are wandering bhssfully about, exploring everything. And what a place to wander in ! After we left it, Hampden was restored, beautified and re-furnished. 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- furnished and tatterdemalion con- dition — it was Romance pure and simple. The old galleried hall, the bare rooms, the neglected pictures — among them the * Queen Elizabeth," presented to the o^vner of Hampden by the Queen herself after a visit — the grey 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, \^^lth the births of John Hampden and his cousin, Oliver Cromwell, recorded on the same flyleaf ; the black cedars outside, and the 270 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS great glade in front of the house, stretching downwards for half a niile towards 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. Whoever cares to turn to the first chapters of ' Marcella ' will find as much of Hampden as could be transferred to paper — Hampden as it was then — in the description of Mellor. 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 ' David Grieve ' : she, if I remember right, at the brilliant book on ' English Town Life ' 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 ' Conseiller d'Ambassade ' under M. Waddington, now the French Ambassador to Washington, Mr. and Mrs. Lyulph Stanley (now Lord and Lady Shefiield), my first cousin H. 0. Arnold- Forster, afterwards 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 FIRST VISITS TO ITALY 271 stretched beecliwoods and commons and lanes, mi- touched since the days of Koundhead and Cavaher, where the occasional sound of wood-cutters in the beech solitudes, was often, through a long walk, the only hint of human life. Wliat 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 Nineteenth Century with Dr. Wace, now Dean of Canterbury, who had also — about a year before — belaboured the author of * Robert Elsmere ' in the Quarterly Review. 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 colour. 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 : Catch me going out of reach of letters again. I have been horridly anxious. Nobody — children or anyone else — can be to me what you are. Ulysses preferred his old woman to immortality, and this absence has led me to see that he was as wise in that as in other things. They were indeed lovers to the end. He had waited and served for her eight years in his youth, and her 272 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS sunny, affectionate nature, with its veins botli of humour and stoicism, gave her man of genius exactly what he wanted. She survived him for many years, living her own life at Eastbomiie, climbmg Beachy Head in all weathers, interested in everything, and writing poems of httle 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 verses from a privately-printed volume she gave me ; If you were here, — and I were where you lie, Would you, beloved, give your little span Of life remaining unto tear and sigh ? No ! — setting every tender memory Within your breast, as faded roses kept For giver's sake, of giver when bereft, Still to the last the lamp of work you'd burn For purpose high, nor any moment spurn. So, as you would have done, I fain would do In poorer fashion. Ah, how oft I try, Try to fulfil your wishes, till at length The scent of those dead roses steals my strength. 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, Uke 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 someone, a man he liked — but still oftener a woman — would approach him, and the whole figure would wake to life — a gentle, whimsical, melan- choly fife ; yet possessed of a strange spell and pungency. Brooding, sad and deep, seemed to me to hold his FIKST VISITS TO ITALY 273 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 sombre verse, and his volumes of * Asiatic Studies ' contain the intellectual analysis of that background of thought from which the poems spring. 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 honoiu' ; 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 grey-blue eyes of Sir Alfred's answering inexorably to any public or patriotic call. He was a disillusioned spectator of the ' great mimdane 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. When I thuik of M. Jusserand playing tennis on the big lawn at Hampden, and determined to master it, hke all else that was English, memory leads one back behind that pleasant scene to earlier days still. We fii'st knew the future Ambassador as an official of the French Foreign Office, who spent much of his scanty 274 A WRITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS Iiolidays 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 Lon- don as ' Conseiller d'Ambassade ' 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* It has always been a question with me, which of two French friends is the more wonderful English scholar — M. Jusserand, or M. Andre 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 extra- ordinarily stimulating to our English wits. The slight differences both in accent and phrase keep the ear attentive and alive. New shades emerge ; old cliches are broken up. M. Chevrillon has much less accent, FIEST VISITS TO ITALY 275 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 httle or nothing to choose. 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 our national behaviour. 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 amusinjr and caustic sally of his at the expense of our ^politicians and our foreign policy. M. Chevrillon took the Boer side in the South African war, and took it with passion. All the same, the friend- ship of both the diplomat and the man of letters for this country, based upon their knowledge of her, and warmly retiu-ned 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. Chevril- lon's knowledge of us is really micanny. He knows more than we know ourselves. And his last book about us — ' L'Angleterre et la Guerre ' — is not only photo- graphically close to the fact*-", 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 Eui'ope, 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 futm'e be. CHAPTER XIV Amalfi and Rome. Hampden and ' Marcella ' It was in November 1891 that I fiDislied ' David Grieve/ 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 m.e as places of pure delight, shone on even in winter by a more than earthly sun. 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 moun- tains rose an unclouded sun, shining on the purple coast, mth its innumerable rock-towns — ' Tot congesta manu frcbfwptis ofpida saxis '■ — and sending broad paths over the ' wine-dark ' sea. Never, I think, have I felt the glory and beauty of the world more rapturously, 276 * MAECELLA ' '277 more painfully — 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 clash- ing of great world policies, represented by the diplo- mats, 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 onmipresent 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 Duiferiu, then our Ambassador in Rome. Was there ever a greater charmer than Lord Dufferin ? In the sketch of the ' Ambassador ' in ' Eleanor, ' 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 suc- cesses of Lord Dufierin are told in many official docu- ments, and in the biography of him by Sir Alfred Lyall ; 278 A WRITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS but the key to it all lay in cradle gifts that are hard to put into print. In the first place he was — even at sixty-five— wonder- fully handsome. He had inherited the beauty, and also the humour 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, afterwards 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 Clande- boye, and let me show you Helen's Tower,' he would say eagerly, and one would answer with hopeful vague- ness. 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. 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 simpHcity, and Lord ' MARCELLA ' 279 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 grey 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. There is a passage in * Eleanor,' which commemor- ates first this playful sympathy and tact which made Lord Dufierin 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 : — ' Ah ! my dear lady ! ' said the Ambassador, * how few things in this world one does to please one's self ! This is one of them.' Lucy flushed with a young and natural pleasure. She was on the Ambassador's left, and ho had just laid his wrinkled hand for an instant on hers — with a charming and paternal freedom. * Have you enjoyed yourself ? — have you lost your heart to Italy ? ' said her host stooping to her. . . . ' I have been in fairyland,' said she shyly, opening her blue eyes upon him. ' Nothing can ever bo like it again.' ' No — because one can never be twenty again,' said the old man, sighing. ' Twenty years hence, you will wonder where the magic came from. Never mind — ^just now, anyway, the world's your oyster.' 280 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS Then he looked at her a little more closely. ... He missed some of that quiver of youth and enjoyment he had felt in her before ; and there were some very dark lines under the beautiful eyes. What was wrong ? Had she met the man — the appointed one ? He began to talk to her with a kindness that was at once simple and stately. *We must all have our ups and downs,' he said to her presently. ' Let me just give you a word of advice. It'll carry you through most of them. Eemember you are very young, and I shall soon be very old.' He stopped and surveyed her. His eyes blinked through their blanched lashes. Lucy dropped her fork and looked back at him with smiling expectancy. ' Learn Persian ! ' said the old man, in an urgent whisper — ' and get the dictionary by heart ! ' Lucy still looked — wondering. ' I finished it this morning,' said the ambassador, in her ear. ' To-morrow I shall begin it again. My daughter hates the sight of the thing. She says I overtire myself, and that when old people have done their work they should take a nap. But I know that if it weren't for my dictionary, I should have given up long ago. When too many tiresome people dine here in the evening — or when they worry me from home — I take a column. But generally half a column's enough — good tough Persian roots, and no nonsense. Oh ! of course I can read Hafiz and Omar Khayyam, and all that kind of thing. But that's the whipped cream. That don't count. What one wants is something to set one's teeth in. Latin verse will do. Last year I put half Tommy Moore into hendeca- syllables. But my youngest boy, who's at Oxford, said he wouldn't be responsible for them — so I had to desist. And I suppose the mathematicians have always something handy. But, one way or another, one must learn one's dictionary. It comes next to cultivating one's garden.' The pretty bit of kindness to a very young girl, in 1892, which I have described, suggested part of • MAECELLA ' 281 this conversation ; and I find the foundation of the rest in a letter written to my father from Paris in 1896. Wo had a very pleasant three days in Paris . . . including a most agreeable couple of hours with the Dufferins. Lord Dufferin shewed mo a number of relics of his Sheridan ancestry, and wound up by taking me into his special little den and telling me Persian stories with excellent grace and point ! He is wild about Persian just now, and has just finished learning the whole dictionary by heart. He looks upon this as his chief delassement from oflicial work. Lady Dufferin, however, does not approve of it at all ! His remarks to Humphry as to the ignorance and inexperience of the innumerable French Foreign Ministers with whom ho has to do, were amusing. An interview with Berthelot (the famous French chemist and friend of Eenan) was really, he said, a deplorable business. Berthelot (Foreign Minister 1891-92) knew everything but what he should have known as French Foreign Mmister. And Jusserand's testi- mony was practically the same ! He is now acting head of the French Foreign Office, and has had three Ministers in bewildering succession to instruct in their duties, they being absolutely new to everything. Now however in Hanotaux ho has got a strong chief at last. 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 be- fore 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 ! ' 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. 282 A WKITER'S RECOLLECTIONS But before I leave this second Roman visit of ours, let me recall one more figure in the entourage of the Ambassador — a young attache, 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 E,odd 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 afterwards 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. The appearance of ' David Grieve ' in February 1892, four years after ' Robert Elsmere,' was to me the occasion of very mixed feehngs. The pubHc took warmly to the novel from the beginning ; in its Enghsh circulation and its length of life it has, I think, very nearly equalled ' Robert Elsmere ' ; 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 Scots Observer, 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 Black- wood. The two Quarterlies opened fire upon it, and many lesser guns. A letter from Mr. Meredith • MARCELLA ' 283 Townsend, tlie very able, outspoken and wholly inde- pendent colleague of Mr. Hutton in the editorship of the Spectator, gave me some comfort under these on- slaughts ! I have read every word of * David Grieve.' Owing to the unusual and unaccountable imbecility of the reviewing — (the AtheJiaium man, for example, does not even comprehend that he is reading a biography !) — it may be three months or so before the public fully takes hold, but I have no doubt of the ultimate verdict. . . . The consistency of the leading characters is wonderful, and there is not one of the twenty-five, except possibly Dora — who is not human enough — that is not the perfection of lifelikeness. . . . Louie is a vivisection. I have the misfortune to know her well . . . and I am startled page after page by the accuracy of the drawing. 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 English Illustrated. Stopford Brooke, and Bishop Creighton, wrote to me with a warmth and emphasis that soon healed the wounds of the Scots Observer ; and that the public was with them, and not wath my castigators, was quickly visible from the wide success of the book. Some of the most interesting letters tnat 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 —afterwards Lord — Hannen, one of the Judges of the Parnell Commission ; and Lord Derby, the Minister who seceded, with Lord Carnarvon, from Disraeli's Govern- ment in 1878. We had made acquaintance not long before with Lord Derby, 'through his niece Lady Winifred 284 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS Byng (now Lady Burgliclere), 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 Hnk to begin with ; though he afterwards 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 Hfe 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 Stan- ley, 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 ' Life.' But the ultimate parting between himself and Dizzy was probably always inevitable. For his loathing of adventurous poHcies 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 * MAECELLA ' 285 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. * If he accepts the charge,' wrote Dizzy to Mrs. Bridges Wilharos, *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.' 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 ]\Ir. Gladstone, but only to separate from him on Home Kule in 1886 ; and when I first knew him, in 1891, he was leader of the Liberal Unionist peers in the House of Lords. A httle later he became President of the great Labour Com- mission of 1892, and before he could see Gladstone's fresh defeat in 1893, he died. Speculatively he was as open-minded as a reader and follower of Mill might be expected to be. He had been interested in ' Robert Elsmere,' 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 hterature and history. Especially interested, too, as to what Labour was going to make of Christianity,— 286 A WEITER'S EECOLLECTIONS and well aware — ^how could lie fail to be, as Chairman of that great, that epoch-making Commission of 1892 ? — of the advancing strength of organised labour 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 reahsed that he had thought much — in his balanced, reticent way — on matters in which I was then groping : how to humanise the relations between employer and emjDloyed, how to enrich and soften the life of the workman, how, in short, to break down the barrier between modern industriahsm and the stored-up treasures — art, science, thought — of man's long history. So that when ' David Grieve ' 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 person- ahty. 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 foot 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 • MARCELLA ' 287 of tlic 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 ! 1892, it will be remembered, was the first year of American coj^yright ; and the great success of * David Grieve ' in America, following on the extraordinary vogue there of ' Kobcrt Elsmere,' 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 ' Robert Elsmere ' ; but that mth regular work, I might look forward to a fairly steady income. AVe therefore felt justified in seizing an opportunity brought to our notice by an old friend who lived in the neighbourhood, 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 pm'ple Weald; but two years' residence had convinced me that Surrey was almost as populous as London, and that real sohtude for literary work was not to be fomid 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 288 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS 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 re-built 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 ' Marcella.' 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 socio- ' MARCELLA ' 269 political — when we went down from London to stay at one of the neighbouring country-houses, in February, and found the Hojne Secretary, Mr. Matthews, afterwards 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 favour of a reprieve ; and what made the discussion of it, in this country-house party, particularly piquant w^as 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' 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. With these things in my mind, as soon as we had settled into Stocks, I began to think of * Marcella.' I wrote the sketch of the book in September '92, and finished it in February '94. Many things went to the making of it : — not only the murdered keepers, and the village talk, not only the remembered beauty of Hamp- den 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. For the New Brotherhood of ' Robert ElsDiere ' had become in some sort a realised dream; so far as any dream can ever take to itself the practical gar- ments of this puzzhng world. To show that the faith of Green and Martin eau and Stopford Brooke was a faith that would wear and work — to provide a home for 290 A WEITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS 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 Dr. Martineau, Mr. Stopford Brooke, my old friend. Lord Carlisle, and a group of other religious Liberals, to take part in its realisation. We held a crowded meeting in London, and an adequate subscrip- tion 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 fraternisation 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 centre of comradeship, and the residents at the Hall in Gordon ' MARCELLA ' 291 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. 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 neighbourhood, 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. And there the Settlement now stands, the most beautiful and commodious Settlement building in Lon- don, with a large garden behind it, made by the Duke out of various old private gardens, and lent to the Settle- ment 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 centre of social work and endeavour 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 to^\^ls. The first school 292 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS 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 £rst Play Centre in England began there in 1898 ; and the first Vacation School was held there in 1902. During those twenty years the Settlement has played a large part in my life. We have had our fail- ures 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 rehgious lecturing of the past ; but otherwise the Settlement, like the Master him- self, stands for the liberal and spiritual life, without definitions or exclusions. Up to 1915, it was, like Toyn- bee 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 popu- lar lectures have been steadily held even during this devastating war ; the Workers' Educational Association carry on their work under our roof ; mothers bring their ' .MARCELLA ' 293 babies to the Infant Welfare Centre 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 Honour is a long one. Twenty years ! How clearly one sees the mis- takes, 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 learnt from it and in it have gone their way, still serving * the future hour ' of an England re-born. 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 westwards, regretting the ' interesting old house,' ' with which I associate you in my mind. ' He 294 A WEITEK'S EECOLLECTIONS was not an easy talker, but his listening had the quality that makes others talk their best ; while the sudden play of humour or sarcasm through the features that were no less strong than refined, and the impression throughout of a singularly upright and humane person- ality, 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-ovv^ning 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 liberalising of rehgion, and by a common love of Italy and Italian art. I remember him once in the incomparable setting • MAECELLA ' 295 of Naworth ; but more often in London, and in Stopford Brooke's company. 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 svmbol of so much else that is too late in life, and of our human helplessness and futility in the face of sorrow. Aiter our move to London, my children and I went 296 A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS 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 colour and range, for modermiess, 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 ardour, a tenderness one can only think of with emotion, was an example of what could be done with our religious traditions, for those who want new bottles for new wine, if only the courage and the imagination were there. 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 le papier est bete ! — 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 fulness and freedom. They have his faults, naturally. They are often ex- uberant or hasty — not, by any means, always fair to men and women of a different temperament from his « MAHCELLA ' 297 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 j)assion 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 Wordsw^orth 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 Eoad, his grey 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 towards the evening glow over Helm Crag and the- Easedale fells. 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 Comicil, 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. AVell I remember going to tea with that tremendous woman when I w^as eight years old ; sitting through a silent 298 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS meal, in much awe of her cap, her strong face, her ear trumpet ; and then being taken away to a neighbouring 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 dis- approved 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 hstening ! 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 ' History of the Peace,' ' Feats on the Fiord,' the * Settlers at Home,' and those excellent biographical sketches of the pohticians of the Reform and Corn Law days in the Daily News, which are still well worth reading. 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 were 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 formidable. The prophet and the Puritan ' MARCELLA ' 290 lay deep in liim. 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 liow his beauti- ful 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. The year after * David Grieve ' appeared, Mr. Jowett died. His long letter to me on the book contained some characteristic passages, of which I quote the following : I should like to have a good talk with you. I seldom get anyone to talk on rehgious subjects. It seems to me that the world is growing rather tired of German criticism, having got out of it nearly all that it is capable of giving. To me it appears one of the most hopeful signs of the present day that we are coming back to the old, old doctrine, ' he can't be wrong whose life is in the right.' Yet this has to be taught in a new way, adapted to the wants of the age. We must give up doctrine and teach by the lives of men, beginning with the life of Christ, instead. And the best words of men, beginning with the Gospels and the prophets, will be our Bible. At the end of the year we spent a week-end with him at Balliol, and that was my last sight of my dear old friend. 1893 was for me a year of ilhiess, and of hard work both in the organisation of the new Settle- ment and in the writing of * Marcella.' 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. * Everyone who waited on him in his illness loved him,' wrote an old friend of his and mine who was with him to the end. What were almost his last words — 800 A WEITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS * I bless God for my life ! — I bless God for my life ! ' — seemed to bring the noble story of it to a triumphant close ; and after death he lay ' with the look of a little child on his face. . . . He will live in the hearts of those who loved him, as well as in his work/ He lives indeed ; and as we recede further 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 everj^where, 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 Eobert Morier, Matthew Arnold, Huxley, Tennyson, Lord Goschen, Miss Nightingale, and a hundred others of the nation's leaders : — amid profoundest difierence, 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. Li 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. Moan- while, 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. CHAPTER XV ' Helbeck of Bannisdale ' The coming out of ' Marcella/ 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 " Marcella,"' ' the name appearing on the notice-boards of most of the evening papers — a thmg which never happened to me before or shice ; 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. I am greatly interested in the book and pine for the denouement. So far Marcella, though I know her quite well, does not in the least awaken my sympathy. She is an intolerable girl — but there are many of them. . . . ^ 301 302 A WRITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS I only hope that she may be made to pay for it. Mr. and Mrs. Boyce are good and original, so is Wharton. I hope that condign vengeance awaits him. He is the modern politician enthely. ... I really hope Marcella may be con- verted. It would serve her right to marry her to Wharton ; he would beat her. Another old friend, one of the industrial leaders of the north, carried off half the proofs to read on his journey to Yorkshire. I so ravened on them that I sat still at Ellsworth instead of getting out ! The consequence is that all my plans are disarranged. I shall not get to M in time for my meeting, and for all this Marcella is to blame. . . . The station-master assured me he called out * Change for Northampton,' but I was much too deep in the scene between Marcella, Lord Maxwell and Raeburn, to heed anything belonging to the outer world. Mr. Goschen wrote : I don't know how long it is since I have enjoyed reading anything so much. I can't satisfy myself as to the physical appearance of Wharton. ... I do know some men of a character not quite unlike him, but they haven't the boyish face with curls. Marcella I see before me. ]\Irs. Boyce and Lord Maxwell both interested me very much. . . . Alack, I must turn from Marcella's enthusiasm and aspirations to Sir W. Harcourt's speech — a great transition. And dear Alfred Lyttelton wrote : I feel a ridiculous pride in her triumphs which I have had the joy of witnessing on every side. ... At least permit an expert to tell you that his heart beat over the ferrets (in the poaching scene) and at the intense vividness and truth of the legal episodes. But there is one letter in this old packet which moves me specially. It was on the 1st of March, ' HELBECK OF BANNISDALE ' 303 1894, that Mr. Gladstone said ' Goodbye ' 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. While Lord Kimberley and Sir William Harcourt, on behalf of the rest of their colleagues, were bidding their great chief farewell, ' ]\Ir. Gladstone sat composed and still as marble, and the emotion of the Cabinet did not gain him for an instant.' When the spokes- men 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 col- leagues with minds oppressed filed out by the other.' 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 ' dm*ing 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 27. When ' Marcella ' arrived my thankfulness was alloyed with a feeling that the state of my eyesight made your kindness for the time a waste. But Mr. Nettleship has since then by 304 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS an infusion supplied a temporary stimulus to the organ, such that I have been enabled to begin, and am reading the work with great pleasure and an agi-eeable sense of congeniality which I do not doubt I shall retain to the close. Then he describes a book — a novel — dealing with religious controversy, which he had lately been read- ing, 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 ' David Grieve,' and then continues : Well, I have by my resignation passed into a new state of existence. And in that state I shall be very glad when our respective stars may cause our paths to meet. I am full of prospective work ; but for the present a tenacious influenza greatly cripples me and prevents my making any definitive arrangement for an expected operation on my eye. Eighty-five ! — greatly crippled by influenza and blindness — yet * full of prospective work * ! The follow- ing year, remembering ' Robert Elsmere ' days, and apropos 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 * New Testament Times.' 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. It is one of the most legitimate interests of the old to watch with hope and joy these opening lives, and it has the secondary effect of whispering to them that they are not yet wholly frozen up. ... I am busy as far as my limited powers of exertion allow upon a new edition of Bishop Butler's Works, which costs me a good deal of labour, and leaves me after ' HELBECK OF BANNISDxVLE ' 305 a few hours upon it, good for very little else. And my per- spective, dubious as it is, is filled with other work, in the Homeric region lying beyond. I hope it will bo very long before you know anything of compulsory limitations on the exercise of your powers. Believe me always Sincerely yours, W. E. Gladstone. But it was not till 1897, as he himself records, that the iudomitable spirit so far yielded to these limita- tions 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 — " The Olympian Religion." ' It was I think in the winter of 1895 that I saw him for the last time at our neighbours, the Roth- schilds, at Tring Park. He was then full of anima- tion 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 ' George Tressady ' appeared he sent me a message through ]\lrs. Drew that he feared Cjeorge Tressady 's Parliamentary conduct ' was inconceivable in a man of honour ' ; and I was only comforted by the emphatic and laughmg dissent of Lord Peel, to whom I repeated the verdict. * Nothing of the khid ! But of course he was thinkhig of us — the Liberal Unionists.' Then came the last months when, amid a world's sympathy and reverence, the great Ufe, in weariness and pain wore to its end. The ' lying in state ' in Westminster Hall seemed to me ill-arranged. But the 306 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS burying remains with me as one of those perfect things, which only the AngUcan Church at its best in com- bination with the immemorial associations of English history can achieve. After it, I wrote to my son : I have now seen four great funerals in the Abbey — Darwin, Browning, Tennyson, and the funeral service for Uncle Forster which was very striking too. But no one above forty of those in the Abbey yesterday will ever see the like again. It was as beautiful and noble as the 'lying-in-state ' was disappoint- ing and ugly. The music was exquisite, and fitting in every respect ; and when the high sentence rang out — ' and their name liveth for evermore,' the effect was marvellous. One seemed to hear the voice of the future already pealing through the Abbey — as though the verdict were secured, the judgement given. We saw it all, admirably, from the Muniment Eoom which is a sort of lower Triforium above the south Transept. To me perhaps the most thi'illing moment was when, bending forward, one saw the white covered coffin disappear amid the black crowd round it, and knew that it had sunk for ever into its deep grave, amid that same primaeval clay of Thorny Island on which Edward's Minster was first reared and the Bed King built his hall of judgement and Council. The statue of Bizzy looked down on him — ' So you have come at last ! ' — and all the other statues on either side seemed to welcome and receive him. . . . The sloping seats for Bords and Commons filled the transepts, a great black mass against the jewelled windows, the Bords on one side, the Commons on the other ; in front of each black multitude was the glitter of a mace, and in the hollow between, the whiteness of the pall — perhaps you can fancy it so. But the impetus of memory has carried me on too fast. There are some other figures and scenes to be gathered from these years — '93-'98 — that may still interest this present day. Of the most varied kind ! For as I turn over letters and memoranda a jumble • HELBECK OF BANNISDALE ' 807 of recollections passes through my mind. Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild on the one hand, a melan- choly kindly man, amid the splendours of Waddesden ; a meeting of the Social Democratic Federation in a cellar in Lisson Grove ; days of absorbing interest in the Je^\ish East End, and in sweaters' workshops, while * George Tressady ' was in writing ; a first visit to Mentmore while Lady Rosebery was aUve ; a talk with Lord Rosebery some time after her death, in a comer of a local ball-room, while ' Helbeck ' was shaping itself, about the old Catholic families of England, which re- vealed to me yet another and unsuspected vein of know- ledge in one of the best furnished of minds ; the xAsquith marriage in 1894 ; new acquaintances and experiences in Lancashire towais, again connected with * George Tressady,' 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 even- ings 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 con- tinual strain of hard literary work, mingled with the new social and religious interests which the foundation of the Passmore Edwards Settlement had brought me. We have been at Margot Tennant's wedding to-day (I wrote to my son — on May 10, 1894) — a great function, very tii'ing, but very brilliant and amusmg — occasionally dramatic too, a3 when after the service had begun, the sound of cheering in the 808 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS street outside dro"\vned the voice of the Bishop of Eochester, and warned us that Mr. Gladstone was arriving. Afterwards at the house, we shook hands with three Cabinet Ministers on the doorstep, and there were all the rest of them inside ! The bride carried herself beautifully and was as composed and fresh as though it were any ordinary party. From our seat in the church one saw the interior of the vestry and Mr. Gladstone's white head against the window as he sat to sign the register ; and the greeting between him and IVIr. Balfour when he had done. 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 ' Foundations of Belief," 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 wilHng to give them — in defence also of our English idealists, such as Green and Caird, in theii* 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 Professer Huxley and Dr. 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 cob- webs,' gave me a fearful joy! I well remember a thriUing moment in the Russell Square drawing- room in '89, when ' Pater ' and I were in full talk, he in his raciest and most amusing form, and suddenly ' HELBECK OF BANNISDALE ' 809 the door opened, and * Dr. Wace * was announced — the opponent with whom at that moment he was grap- pling his hardest in the Nmeteenth Century. 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 ' Dictionary of Christian Biography ' took his departure, Huxley found all kinds of pleasant personal things to say about him. 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 ' sacra ' than to other people's. Once I dared a mild remonstrance — in 1892 — only to provoke one of his most vigorous replies : My dear M. — ThanlvS for your very pleasant letter. I do not know whether 1 like the praise or the scolding better. They, like pastry, need to be done with a light hand — especially praise — and I have swallowed all yours, and feel it thoroughly agrees with me. As to the scolding I am going to defend myself tooth and nail. In the first place, by all my Gods and No Gods, neitlier Green, nor Martineau, nor the Cairds were in my mind when I talked of * Sentimental Deism,' but the ' Vicaire Savoyard, ' and Channing, and such as Voysey. There are two chapters of 'Eousseauism.' I have not touched yet — Eousseauism in Theology, and Eousseauism in Education. When I \\Tite the former I shall try to shew that the people of whom I speak as 'sentimental deists' are the lineal descendents of the Vicahe Savoyard. I was a great reader of Channing in my boyhood, and was much taken in by his theosophic confectionery. At present I have as much] (intellectual) antipathy to him as St. John had to the Nicolaitans, 310 A WEITEE'S BECOLLECTIONS . . . Green I know only from his Introduction to Hume — which reminds me of nothing so much as a man with a hammer and chisel knocking out bits of bad stone in the Great Pyramid, with the view of bringing it down. ... As to Caird's ' Introduc- tion to the Philosophy of Eeligion,' I will get it and study it. But as a rule 'Philosophies of Eeligion' in my experience, turn out to be only ' Eeligions of Philosophers '—quite another business, as you will admit. And if you please, Ma'am, I wish to add that I think I am not without sympathy for Christian feeling— or rather for what you mean by it. Beneath the cooled logical upper strata of my microcosm, there is a fused mass of prophetism and mysticism, and the Lord knows what might happen to me, in case a moral earthquake cracked the superincumbent deposit, and permitted an eruption of the demonic element below. . . . Luckily I am near 70, and not a G.O.M. — so the danger is slight. One must stick to one's trade. It is my business to the best of my ability to fight for scientific clearness — that is what the world lacks. Feeling, Christian or other, is super- abundant. . . . Ever yours affectionately, T. H. Huxley. A few more letters from him — racy, and living as himself— and then in '95, 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. 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 * HELBECK OF BANNISDALE ' 811 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 cliild at home, with a high temperature, and was fidgeting to get back to him. ' ^Y[mt is the matter ? — Fever ? — throat ? Aconite, of course ! You're a homoeopath, 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 ? AJl right. Give me your address.' 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 tem- perature 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 enquire for him. So began a friendship which for just twenty years, especially from about '85 to '96, meant a great deal to me. How shall I describe Lady Wemyss ? An un- friendly 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 fii'st 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 312 A WRITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS reserved and often harsh manner, Hke the charm ol mountain places in spring. She was a Conservative, and I suppose an aristocrat, whatever that word may mean. She thought the Harcourt death-duties * ter- rible,' because they broke up old famiUes 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 ail 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 humour, silent, self - restrained, yet most infectious to the by- stander, that would lighten through them ; her stately ways ; and yet withal, her child-like 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. 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 further end — with a wonderful frizzled head, an infinitesimal waist sheathed in white mushn and blue ribbons, rouged cheeks, a marvellous 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 * HELBECK OF BANNISDALE ' 313 pointed ; and suddenly I heard Lady Wemyss's deep voice, meditatively amused, beside me — * Her fingers will be in Frank's eyes soon 1 ' Or again, I see her, stalled beneath the drawing- room table, on all fours, by her imperious grand-children, patiently playing ' horse ' or * cow, ' till her scand- aHsed 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. 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 ' Commonplace Book,' 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. It was in 1896, not long after the appearance of ' George Tressady,' that a conversation in a house on the outskirts of the Lakes suggested to me the main plot of * Helbeck of Bannisdale.' The talk turned on the fortunes of that interesting old place, Sizergh Castle, near Kendal, and of the CathoHc family to whom it then still belonged, though mortgages and lack of pence were threatening imminently to 814 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS submerge an ancient stock that had held it iinbrokenly, from father to son, through many generations. 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 per- secuted 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 ' Helbeck of Bannisdale ' was more or less clear to me. I confided it to Lord Acton a little while afterwards. 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 diffi- culty. So I only had to begin. 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. Bannisdale in the novel is a combination, I sup- pose, 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 'HELBECK OF BANNISDALE 315 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, melloAved by time into a per- fect 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. 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. At last we arrived — saw the wonderful grey house rising above the river in the evening light, found G — — waiting at the open door for us, and plunged into the hall, the sitting- rooms, and all the intricacies of the upper passages and turrets with the delight and curiosity of a pack of children. Wood and peat fires were burning everywhere ; the great chimney, pieces in the drawing-room, the arms of Elizabeth over the hall fire, the stucco birds and beasts running round the Hall shewed dimlj'' in the scanty lamp-light (we shall want about six more lamps !) — and the beauty of the marvellous old place took us all by storm, llien through endless passages and kitchens, bright with long rows of copper pans and moulds, we made our way out into the gardens among the clipped yews and cedars, and had just light enough to see that Levens apparently is like nothing else but itself. . . . The drawback of the house at present is certainly the cold ! 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 316 A WEITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS 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 '93 our summer neighbours at Stocks ; Lord Lytton, then at Cambridge ; the Sydney Buxtons ; old Ox- ford friends, and many kinsfolk. The damson blossom along the hedge-rows that makes of these northern vales in April a ghstening network of white and green, the daffodils and violets, the Hhes of the valley in the Brigsteer woods came and went, and ' Helbeck ' made steady progress. But we left Levens in May, and it took me another eight months to finish the book. Except perhaps in the case of ' Bessie Costrell,' 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. 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 Dr. Friedland, who, it will perhaps be remembered, is made the spokesman in the book of certain points in the intellectual 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 pubhcation in June. The joy and emotion of it were great. George • HELBECK OF BANNISDALE ' 317 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 : Your Helbeck of Bannisdale held me fu-mly in Ihe reading and remains wilh me. ... If I felt a monotony during the struggle, it came of your being faithful to your theme — rapt — or you would not have had such power over your reader. I know not another book that shews the classic fate so distinctly to view. . . . Yet a word of thanks for Dr. Friedland. He is the voice of spring in the book. J. M. Barriers 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, -^^th 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 kno^^^l so much sorrow. Sir Alfred Lyall thought — ' the story reaches a higher pitch of vigour 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 their way, and how true to the ideal on both sides ! ' — and others, fi'om Mr. Godkin, of the American Nation, from Frederic Harrison, Lord Goschen, Lord Dufterin, and many, many more, pro- duced 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 Wyndhani to Mr. Wilfred Ward, I have asked leave to print as a piece of independent criticism : 318 A WEITER'S EECOLLECTIONS On Sunday I read Helbeck of Bannisdale, and I confess that the book moved me a great deal. It is her best book. It is a true tragedy, because the crash is inevitable. This is not so easy to effect in Art as many suppose. There are very few characters and situations which lead to inevitable crashes. It is a thousand to one that a woman who thinks she ought not to marry a man but who loves him passionately, will, in fact, marry him. She will either discover an ingenious way out of her wood, or else, just shut her eyes and 'go it blind ' relying on his strength and feeling that it is really right to relinquish to him her sense of responsibility. In choosing a girl with nothing left her in the world but loyalty to a dead father and memory of his attitude towards religion, without knowledge of his arguments for that attitude, I think that ]\Ii-s. Ward has hit on the only possible ' persona.' Had Laura, herself, been a convinced rationalist, or had her Father been still alive, she would have merged herself and her attitude in Helbeck's strength of character. Being a work of art, self- consistent and inevitable, the book becomes symbolic. It is a pictui'e of incompatibility, but, being a true pictm-e, it is a symbolic index to the incompatible which plays so large a part in the experience of man. For the rest, I remember vividly the happy hoKday of that summer at Stocks ; the sense of having come through a great WTestle, 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 that * wind-warm space,' and look into the faces that earth knows no more — my father, Leslie Stephen, Alfred Lyall, ]\Ir. Goschen, Alfred Lyttelton, H. 0. 'HELBECK OF BANNISDALE ' 319 Arnold-Forster, my sister, Julia Huxley, my eldest brother — a vanished company ! And in the following year, to complete the story, I owed to * Helbeck ' 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. 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 tor- tured 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 interest- ing. She had, of course, the reputation of being the ablest of her family, and the bitterness of her sudden and ii'reparable 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 fi'om an eye- witness of the scene, before 1898. It was as follows : The Empress Frederick in the midst of the Bismarck crisis of March 1890, when it was evident that the young Emperor William 11. was bent on getting rid of his Chancellor, and so * dropping the pilot ' of his House, was sitting at home one afternoon, with the companion from whom I heard the story, when a servant, looking a good deal scared, announced that Prince Bismarck 320 A WEITER'S RECOLLECTIONS had called, and wished to know whether her Majesty- would receive him. * Prince Bismarck ! ' said the Empress in amazement. She had probably not seen him since the death of her husband, and relations between herself and him had been no more than official for years. Turning to her companion, she said, * What can he possibly want with me ! ' She consented however to receive him, and the old Prince, agitated and hollow-eyed, made his appearance. He had come, as a last hope of placating the new Kaiser, to ask the Empress to use what influence she could on his behalf with her son. The Empress listened in growing astonishment. At the end, there was a short silence. Then she said, with emotion — * I am sorry ! You, yourself, Prince Bismarck, have destroyed all my influence with my son. I can do nothing.' In a sense, it must have been a moment of triumph. But how tragic are all the impHcations of the story ! It was in my mind as I travelled to Windsor on November 18th, 1898. The following letter was written next day to one of my children : D and I met at Windsor, and we mounted into the quad- rangle, stopped at the third door on the right as Mis. M had directed us, interviewed various gorgeous footmen, and were soon in Mrs. M 's little sitting-room. Then we found we should have some little time to wait, as the Empress was just going out with the Queen and would see me at a quarter to 1. So we waited, much amused by the talk around us. (It turned, if I remember right, on a certain German Princess, who had arrived a day^or two before as the old Queen's guest, and had been taken since her arrival on such a strenuous round of tombs and mausoleums that, hearing on this particular morning that the Queen proposed to take • HELBECK OF BANNISDALE ' 321 her in the afternoon to see yet another mausoleum, she had stubbornly refused to get up. She had a headache, she said, and would stay in bed. But the ladies in waiting, with fits of laughter, described how the Queen had at once ordered her phenacetin, and how there was really no chance at all for the poor lady. The Queen would get her way, and the departed . would be duly honoured — headache or no headache. As indeed it turned out.) Presently we saw the Queen's little pony-carriage pass along beyond (he windows with the Empress Frederick, and the Grand Duke and Duchess Serge walking beside it, and the Indians behind. Tlien in a little while the Empress Frederick came hurrying back alone, and almost directly came my summons. Countess Perponcher, her lady in waiting, took me up through the Long Corridor, past the entrance to the Queen's rooms on one side, and Gordon's Bible, in its glass case, on the other, till we turned to the left, and I was in a small sitting-room, where a lady, gi-ey-haued and in black, came forward to meet me. . . . We talked for about 50 minutes : — of German books and Universities — Harnack — Eenan, for whom she had the greatest admiration — Strauss, of whom she told me various interesting things — German colonies, that she thought were ' all nonsense ' — Dreyfus, who in her eyes is certainly innocent — reaction in France — the difference between the Greek Chm-ch in Russia, and the Greek Church in Greece, the hopes of Greece, and the freeing of Crete. It is evident that her whole heart is with Greece and her daughter there [the young Queen Sophia, on whose character recently deciphered documents have thrown so strong a light] and she spoke bitterl}^ as she always does, about the English hanging-back, and the dawdling of the European Concert. Then she described how she read ' George Tressady ' aloud to her invalid daughter till the daughter begged her to stop, lest she should cry over it all night — she said charming things of ' Helbeck,' talked of Italy, D'Anmmzio, quoted 'my dear old friend Miughetti,' as to the fundamental paganism in the Italian mind, asked me to WTite my name in her book, and to come and see her in Berlin — and it was time to go. . . . She is a very attractive, sensitive, Y 322 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS impulsive woman, more charming than I had imagined, and, perhaps, less intellectual — altogether the very woman to set up the backs of Bismarck and his like. Never was there a more thorough Englishwoman ! I found myself constantly getting her out of focus, by that confusion of mind which made one think of her as German, And to my father I wrote : The Empress began by asking after Uncle Matt, and nothing could have been kinder and more sympathetic than her whole manner. But of com'se Bismarck hated her. She is absolutely English, parliamentary, and anti-despotic. . . . When I ventured to say in bidding her Good-bye, that I had often felt great admiration and deep sympathy for her, which is true— she thi'ew up her hands with a little sad or bitter gesture • — 'Oh ! — admiration ! — for me ! ' — as if she knew very well what it was to be conscious of the reverse. A touching, intelligent, impulsive woman, she seemed to me — ^no doubt often not a wise one — but very attractive. Nineteen years ago ! And two years later, after long sufiering, like her husband, the last silence fell on this brave and stormy natm:e. Let us thank God for it, as we look out upon Europe, and see what her son has made of it. CHAPTER XVI The Villa Barberini. Henry James It was in the summer of 1898, tliat some suggestions gathered from the love-story of Chateaubriand and Madame de Beaumont, and jotted down on a sheet of notepaper led to the writing of * Eleanor. ' 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 politi- cal, historical or artistic, seem to be running at double tides, would be, I knew, impossible, and we began to make enquiries 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 323 324 A WEITER'S EECOLLECTIONS to be spent in rooms meant only for viUegiatura in the summer. We were to go early in March, and fires or stoves must be obtainable, if the weather pinched. 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 ohves, and all the furies were waihng 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 Eome 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 grey storm-swept Campagna, to distant line of surf-beaten coast ; the kitchen was fifty-two steps below the dining- room ; the Neapolitan cook seemed to us a most for- midable gentleman, suggesting stilettos, and we sat down to our first meal, wondering whether we could possibly stay it out. But with the night (as I wrote some years ago) the snow vanished, and the sun emerged. We ran east to one balcony, and saw the light blazing on the Alban Lake, and had but to cross the apartment to find ourselves, on the other side, with all the Campagna at our feet, sparkling in a thousand colours to the sea. And outside was the garden, with its lemon trees growing in vast jars — like the jars of Knossos — but marked with Barberini bees ; its white and red camellias be-carpeting the soft grass with their fallen petals ; its dark and tragic recesses where melancholy trees hung above piled fragments of the great Domitian villa whose ruins lay everywhere beneath our feet ; its olive gardens sloping to the west, and open to the sun, open too to white, nibbling goals, and wandering bambini; THE VILLA BARBERINL HENRY JAMES 325 its magical glimpse of St. Peter's to the north, through a notch in a group of stone-pines ; and, last and best, its marvellous terrace that roofed a crypto-porticus of the old villa, whence the whole ' vast landscape, from Ostia and the mountains of Yiterbo to the Circaean promontory, might be discerned, where one might sit and w^atch the sunsets burn in scarlet and purple down through the wide west into the shining bosom of the Tyrrhenian sea. 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 began to realise 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, antic[uity, and romance, as any covetous soul could hope for — with Rome at our gates, and leisurely time for quiet work. Our earliest guest was Henry James, and never did I see Hem:y James in a happier light. A new light too. For here, in this Itahan country, and in the Eternal City, the man whom I had so far mainly kno^\Ti as a Londoner was far more at home than I ; and I realised perhaps more fully than ever before the extraordinary range of his knowledge and sym- pathies. Roman history and antiquities, Italian art, Re- naissance sculpture, the personalities and events of the Risorgimento, all these solid connaissances and many more were to be recognised perpetually as rich elements in the general wealth of ]Mr. James's mind. Tliat he had read immensely, observed immensely, talked 326 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS immensely, became once more gradually and delight- fully clear on this new field. That he spoke French to perfection was of course quickly evident to anyone who had even a slight acquaintance wdth 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 tune read and spoke English fluently, complained of Mr. Kipling's technicalities, and declared that he could not make head or tail of Mc Andrew'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, off-hand, 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 tour de force was the more difficult. 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 sure- ness 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 THE VILLA BARBEEINL HENRY JAMES 327 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 with you 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 towards a point which in the end was generally triumphantly rushed, always seemed to me more effective as ]\Ir. 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. 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 satis- factory, 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 short-comings. D , whose Italian was then rudimentary, brought the letter to Mr. James, and he walked up and down the vast salone of the Villa, striking his forehead, correcting and improvising. * A 328 A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS really nice pudding ' was what we justly desired, since the Neapolitan genius for sweets is well known. ]\Ir. James threw out half phrases — pursued them — improved upon them — withdrew them— till finally he rushed upon the magnificent bathos — ' un dolce come si deve ! ' — which has ever since been the word with us for the tip -top thing. With the country people he was simplicity and friendship itself. I recollect him in close talk with a brown-frocked bare-footed monk, coming from the monastery of Palazzuola on the farther side of the Alban lake, and how the super-subtle, super-sensitive cosmopolitan f omid 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 descend- ing 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 fattoria, 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, ' hke to a god in forDi 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 plough had just passed, bits of the innumerable small figurines that used to crowd the temple walls as ex-votos, and are now mingled mth the fragole 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, THE VILLA BARBERINL HENRY JAMES 329 wreckage from Caligula's galleys, which still lie buried in the deepest depth of the water ; on the rock of Nemi, and the fortress-hke 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 hght. Oi.e almost looked for the winged feet and helmet of the messenger god ! ]\Ir. James paused— his eyes first on the boy, then on the surrounding scene. ' Aristodemo ! ' he murmured smihng, and more to himself than me, his voice caressing the word — * what a name ! what a place ! ' ■. On another occasion I recall him in company with the well-known antiquary, Signor Lanciani, who came over to lunch ; amusing us all by the combination of learning with ' le sport ' which he affected. Let me quote the account of it given by a girl of the party : Signor Lanciani is a great man ^Yho combines being the top authority in his profession, with a kindness and bonhomie which makes even an ignoramus feel happy with him — and with the frankest love for fldnerie and 'sport.' We all fell in love with him. To hear him after lunch in his fluent but lisping English holding forth about the ruins of Domitian's villa — 'what treasures are still to be found in ziz garden if somebody would only dig ! ' — and saying with excitement — *ziz town, ziz Castello Gandolfo was built upon the site of Alba Longa, not Palazzuola at all. Here, Madame, beneath our feet, is Alba Longa' — i\jid then suddenly — a pause, a deep sigh from his ami)le breast, and a whisper on the summer air — ' I vender — vet her — von could make a golf-links around ziz garden ! ' And I see still Mr. James's figure strolhug along the terrace which roofed the crypto-porticus of the Eoman villa, beside the professor — the short coat, the summer 830 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS hat, the smooth-shaven, finely-cut face, now ahve with talk and laughter, now shrewdly, one might say coldly observant ; the face of a satirist — but so human ! — so alive to all that under-world 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 hterary hfe and in our friendship. Later on I shall quote from his ' Eleanor ' letter, the best perhaps of all his critical letters to me, though the ' Eobert Elsmere ' 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 outUne 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 sym- pathy for England and France, his English naturalisa- tion — a heau geste 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. 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 THE VILLA BARBERINL HENRY JAMES 331 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 fii'st 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 Jcnoiv they can't win ! It is only a question of how long, and how much damage they can do.' The American fm-ther 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 w^ell ! 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 bluS him — ' And then — springing up in his seat — ' And, by Heaven, if you want war with America, you can have it to-morrow ! ' Mr. James's dramatic repetition of this story, his eyes on fii*e, his hand striking the arm of his chair, remains with me as my last sight of him in a t}^ical representative moment. 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 impres- sions and information that were afterwards embodied in ' England's Effort.' We came down ready to start 332 A WKITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS 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 Hemy James ; and all through that wonderful day, when we watched a German counter-attack in the Ypres salient from one of the hills south-east 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. ' A mortal, a mortal is dead ! ' I was looking over ground where every inch was consecrate 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. One year and a month before the American declara- tion of war. What he would have given to see it — my dear old friend — whose life and genius will enter for ever into the bonds uniting England and Amercia ! • ••••• • Yes! — ... He was a priest to us all Of the wonder and bloom of the world, Which we saw with his eyes and were glad. For that was indeed true of Henry James, as of Wordsworth. The ' wonder and bloom,' no less than the ugly or heart-breaking things, which like the dis- figuring rags of old Laertes, hide them from us — he could weave them all, with an untiring hand, into the many-coloured web of his art. Olive Chancellor, Madame Mauve, Milly, in ' The Wings of a Dove ' — the THE VILLA BAEBEEINL HENRY JAMES 333 most exquisite in some ways of all his women — Roderick Hudson, St. George, the woman doctor in the * Bostonians/ the French family in the * Reverberation/ 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 * Bostonians,' 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 essen- tial poverty of creation. ' Ann Veronica ' and the ' New Machiavelli,* 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, Henrv 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 moulds. As to method, natm*ally I often discussed with him some of the difiicult problems of presentation. The posthumous sketches of work in progress, pub- lished 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 re-writing 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, some- times, I venture to think, too much. In ' The "Wings 334 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS of a Dove/ for instance, a subject full of beauty and tragedy is almost spoilt by an artificial tech- nique, 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 -fiances — one of whom at least, the man, is commicnded 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 tour de force 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 virtuoso, and not as the great artist we know him to be. And the same, I think, is true of * The Golden Bowl.' 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 ' The Ambassador.' There, the skill with which a deeply interesting subject is focussed 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 ' Am- bassador ' 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 rive gauche, for example ; or the summer THE VILLA BARBERINL HENRY JAMES 835 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 centre. * The Ambassador ' is the master-piece of Mr. James's later work and manner, just as * The Portrait of a Lady ' is the masterpiece of the earlier. 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 hterature. Personally, I regret that, from * What Maisie Knew ' onwards, 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 fros and cons of dictation, on the fell above Cartmel Chapel, when he was ^vith us at Levens in 1887. He was then enchanted by the endless vistas of work and achievement wliich'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 dehght. Still, the diffuseness and over-elabora- tion which were the natural snares of his astonishins: 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. But when these small cavils are done, one returns 336 A WEITEE'S KECOLLECTIONS in delight and wonder to the accomphshed work. To the weaWi 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 feehng, normal or strange, that he cannot describe or suggest. If he is without passion, as some are ready to declare, so are Stendhal and Turgueniev, 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. And all through, the dominating fact is that it is * Henry James ' speaking — Hemy James, with whose delicate, ironic mind and most human heart we are in contact. There is much that can be learnt 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. CHAPTER XVII Roman Friends. ' Eleanor ' 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 WiUiam 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 custode assured us firmly it was not 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 w^as per- fectly 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 leg)io. 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 337 Z 338 A WRITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS 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 ! " ' The following year I sent him * Eleanor,' as a reminder of our meeting in Rome, and he wrote : To me the revisiting of Rome is the brightest of the day- dreams of life, and I treasure all its recollections. After the disappointment of the day when we were to have seen Albano and Nemi under your guidance, we managed the expedition, and were entranced with the scene even beyond our hopes, and since that time I have lived through it again in the pages of ' Eleanor,' which I read with greediness, waiting each number as it appeared. Now about Manisty. What a fortunate beggar, to have two such charming w'omen in love with him ! It is always so. The less a man deserves it the more they adore him. That is the advantage you women-writers have. You always figure men as they are and women as they ought to be. If I had the composition of the history I should never represent two women behaving so well to one another under the circum- stances. Even American girls, according to my observation, ROMAN FRIENDS. ' ELEANOR ' 339 do not shew so much toleration to their rivals, even though in the end they carry off their man. . . . Your sincerely attached W. V. Harcourt. II 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 archaeologist 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 defence 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, honliomie he showed with those who knew him well : all these are vividly present to me. So too are the very different characteristics of Mon- seigneur 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. 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 ecclesi- astic of the old school, ixnahhe of the eisrhteenth century, •fin, shrewd, well versed in men and affaii's, and capable 840 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS 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 someone who knew the Cardinal well and the relation between him and Duchesne, said with malice frefense, ' Was his Eminence moved, Monsignore ? ' Dachesne looked up, and shook off the end of his cigarette — 'Non, Monsieur,' he said drily, * 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 centre 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 reahsed 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 afterwards, a Roman friend of ours, an English- man who knew Monseigneur Duchesne well, described to me the impressions of an English Cathohc 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 rehgious passion in his companion, the EOMAN FRIENDS. ' ELEANOR ' 341 devotion of his daily mass, the rigour 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 Hfe of Cathohcism, the Roman Church was not hkely to perish out of Europe. 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 w^ho 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 reehng off his task, gave us in extenso 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 842 A WEITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS that sent a thrill through one's historical sense — * If only J. R. Green were here ! — how these dead bones would Hve ! ' But the agnostic historian was in his grave, and the Prince of the Roman Church passed ignorantly and heedlessly by. A httle while before, I had sat beside the Cardinal at a luncheon party, where the case of Dr. Schell, the Rector of the Catholic University of Wurzburg, who had pubHshed a book condemned by the Congregation of the Index, came up for discussion. Dr. SchelFs book, ' Catholicismus und Fortschritt," was a plea on behalf of the Cathohc 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 Cathohc educa- tion had had on the Cathohc culture of Bavaria. The Jesuit influence at Rome had procured the condemnation of the book. Dr. Schell at first submitted ; then, just before the luncheon party at which I was present, withdrew his submission. 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. Echoes and reflections from these incidents will be found in * Eleanor,' and it was the case of Dr. Schell that suggested Father Benecke. EOMAN FRIENDS. ' ELEANOR ' 343 III So the full weeks passed on. Half ' Eleanor ' had been written, and in June we turned homewards. 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 civilisation 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 Castel Gandolfo, he vanished from the Villa, and presently after some hours reappeared with shining eyes. ' I have been on the Appian Way — I have walked where Horace walked ! ' In his own autobiography he whites : ' In proportion to a man's good sense and soundness of feeling are the love and admiration, increasing with his years, which he bears towards 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 gliostly 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 344 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS strange to our ears. But when the tumult and the shouting die, and ' peace has cahned the world/ what- ever 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. 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 ^schylus. 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 in- tellect had been suddenly related, much more clearly than ever before, to an absolute, ineffable source, * not itself.* So that, in realising the greatness of the mind of iEschylus, the creative Mind from which it sprang had in some new and powerful way touched my ROMAN FRIENDS. ' ELEANOR ' 345 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. 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. At any rate, as I look back upon my father's life of constant labour 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 — Eternal as the recurrent cloud, as air Imperative, refi-eshful as dawn-dew — 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, 346 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS they — the preacher and his convert — are together. ' Domine, Deus mens, in Te speravi.' So, on my father's tablet, runs the text below the quiet, sculptured face. It expresses the root fact of his life. IV A few weeks before my father's death ' Eleanor ' appeared. It had taken me a year and a quarter to WTite, and I had given it full measure of work. Henry James wrote to me, on receipt of it, that it gave him — the chance to overflow into my favourite occupation of re- writing as I read, such fiction as — I can read. I took this Hberty in an inordinate degree with Eleanor — and I always feel it the highest tribute I can pay. I recomposed and re-constructed her from head to foot — ^which I give you for the real measure of what I think of her. I think her, less obscurely — a thing of rare beauty, a large and noble performance, rich, complex, comprehensive, deeply interesting and highly distinguished. I congratulate you heartily on having meni a honne fin so intricate and diflScult a problem, and on having seen your sub- ject so wrapped in its air and so bristling with its relations. I should say that you had done nothing more homogeneous, nor more hanging and moving together. It has Beauty — the book, the theme, and treatment alike, is magnificently mature, and is really a delightful thing to have been able to do — to have laid at the old golden door of the beloved Italy. You deserve well of her. I can't ' criticise ' — though I could (that is I did — but can't do it again) — re-write. The thing's infinitely delightful and distinguished and that's enough. The success of it, specifically, to my sense is Eleanor, admirably sustained in the ' high-note ' way, without a break or a drop . She is a very exquisite and very rendered conception. I won't grossly pretend to you that I think the book hasn't a weakness and rather a grave one, or you will doubt of my intelligence. It has one, and in this way, to my troubled sense ; that the anti- ROMAN FRIENDS. ' ELEANOR ' 347 thesis on which your subject rests isn't a real, valid anti-thesis. It was utterly built, your subject, by your intention, of course, on one ; but the one you chose seems to me not efficiently to have operated, so that if the book is so charming and touching even so, that is a proof of your affluence. Lucy has in respect to Eleanor — that is the image of Lucy that you have tried to teach yourself to see — has no true, no adequate, no logical antithetic force — and this is not only, I think, because the girl is done a little more de chic than you would really have liked to do her, but because the nearer you had got to her type the less she would have served that particular condition of your subject. You went too far for her, or going so far, should have brought her back — roughly speaking — stronger. (Irony (and various things !) should at its hour have presided.) But I throw out that more imperfectly, I recognise, than I should wish. It doesn't matter, and not a solitary reader in your millions, cr critic in your hundreds, will either have missed, or have made it ! And when a book's beautiful, nothing does matter ! I hope greatly to see you after the New Year. Goodnight. It's my usual 1.30 a.m. Yours, dear Mrs. Ward, always, Henry James. I could not but feel indeed that the book had given great pleasure to those I might well wish to j^lease. 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 agaiii. . . . 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 : — ' It would be easier to ™te about the book to anyone else but you. . . . You have added to the treasures 348 A WKITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS of English imaginative literature, and no higher reward than this can any WTiter hope to gain/ The well-known and much loved editor of the Century, Eichard Watson Gilder, ' on this the last Simday of the nineteenth century ' — so he headed his letter — sat down to give a long hour of precious time to ' Eleanor's ' distant author. How can you reconcile it to your conscience to write a book like ' Eleanor ' that keeps a poor fellow reading it to a finish till after three in the morning ? Not only that — but that keeps him sobbing and sighing ' like a furnace,' that charms him and makes him angry — that hurts and delights him, and will not let him go till all is done ! Yes, there are some things I might quarrel with — but ah, how much you give of Italy — of the English, of the American — three nations so well-beloved ; and how much of things deeper than peoples or countries. Imagine me at our New England farm — with the younger part of the family — in my annual ' retreat.' Last year at this time I was here, with the thermometer a dozen degrees below zero ; now it is milder but cold, bleak, snowy. Yesterday we were fishing for pickerel through the ice at Hayes's Pond — in a wilderness where fox abound — and where bear and deer make rare appearances — all within a few miles of Lenox and Stockbridge. The farmer's family is at one end of the long farm house — I am at the other. It is a great place to read — one reads here with a sort of lonely passion. You know the landscape — it is in ' Eleanor.' Last night (or this morning) I wanted to talk with you about your book — or telegraph — but here I am calmly trying to thank you both for sending us the copy — and, too, for writing it. Of the ' deeper things ' I can really say nothing — except that I feel their truth, and am grateful for them. But may I not applaud (even the Pope is ' applauded,' you know) such a perfect touch as — for instance — in Chapter XVI — ' the final softening of that sweet austerity which hid Lucy's heart of gold' ; and again 'Italy without the forestkri' 'like surprising a bird on its nest ' ; and the scene beheld of Eleanor — Lucy EOMAN FRIENDS. ' ELEANOK ' 849 pressing the terra-cotta to her lips ; — and Italy ' having not enough faith to make a heresy ' — (true, too, of France, is it not?) and Chapter XXIII — ' a base and plundering happiness ' ; then the scene of the confessional ; and that sudden phrase of Eleanor's in her talk with Manisty that makes the whole world — and the whole book — right ; ' She loves you I ' That is art. . . . But above all, my dear lady, acknowledgements and praise for the hand that created * Lucy ' — that recreated rather — my dear country-woman ! Truly, that is an accom- plishment and one that will endear its author to the whole new world. And again one asks whether the readers that now are A\Tite 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. • ■••••• 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 traveller 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 CathoHc 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 towards the struggling Italian State, on the part of those who 350 A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS 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. This vein of feeling finds expression in 'Eleanor.' 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 regime. 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. ' What rivers — what fertility — what a climate ! And the industry of the people ! Catch a few English farmers and set them to do what the Italian peasant does, year in and year out, without a murmur ! Look at all the coast south of Naples. There is not a yard of it, scarcely, that hasn't been made by human hands. Look at the hill -towns ; and think of the human toil that has gone to the making and maintaining of them since the world began. . . . Ecco I — there they are ' — and he pointed down the river to the three or four distant towns, each on its mountain spur, that held the valley between them and Orvieto, pale jewels on the purple robe of rock and wood — ' So Virgil saw them. So the latest sons of time shall see them — the homes of a race that we chatter about without understanding — the most laborious race in the wide world. . . . Anyway, as I have been going up and down their country, . . . prating about their poverty, and their taxes, their EOMxVN FEIENDS. ' ELEANOR ' 851 corruption, the incompetence of their leaders, the mischief of theii' quarrel with the Church ; I have been finding myself caught in the grip of things older and deeper— incredibly, primevally old ! — that still dominate everything, shape every- thing here. There are forces in Italy, forces of land and soil and race — only now fully let loose— that will remake Church no less than State, as the generations go by. Sometimes I have felt as though this country were the youngest in Europe ; with a future as fresh and teeming as the future of America. And yet one thinks of it at other times as one vast graveyard ; so thick it is with the ashes and the bones of men ! The Pope — and Crispi ! — waves, both of them, on a sea of life that gave them birth " with equal mind " ; and that " with equal mind " will sweep them both to its own goal — not theirs ! . . . No — there are plenty of dangers ahead. . . . Socialism is serious ; Sicily is serious ; the economic difficulties are serious ; the House of Savoy will have a rough task, perhaps, to ride the seas that may come. — But Italy is safe. You can no more undo what has been done than you can replace the child in the W'Omb. The birth is over. The organism is still weak, but it hves. And the forces behind it are, indefinitely, mysteriously stronger than its adversaries think.' In this mood it was that, when the book came out in the autumn of 1900, 1 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." ' Comrade of our future.' As one looks out to-day upon the Italian fighting line, where English troops are interwoven with those of Italy and France for the defence 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-ofE day suggested these words written eighteen years ago ? EPILOGUE And here, for a time at least, I bring these ' Eecollec- tions ' to an end mth the century in which I was born, and my own fiftieth year. Since ' Eleanor ' 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 pre-occupation mth 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 rm:al scene, with its coimtry 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 ' Lady Rose's Daughter,' ' The Marriage of William Ashe,' and ' Fenwick's Career ' ; in ' Richard Meynell ' I attempted the vision of a Church of England recreated from within, with a rebel, and not — as in ' Robert Elsmere '—an exile, for a hero ; ' Lady Connie ' is a picture of Oxford, as I saw her in my youth, as faithful as I can now make it ; ' Eltham House ' is a return to the method of ' William Ashe,' and both ' Lady Connie ' and ' Missing ' have been written since the war. ' Missing ' 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 352 EPILOGUE 353 first two years of the war, the cry both of writers and puljlic — so far as the literature of imagination was con- cerned — 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 iEneas 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 is, had still to taste reality and pain. We were thankful for a time to go back to that kind, unconscious, unfore- seeing world. But it is no longer possible. The war has become our life, and ^vill be so for years after the signing of peace. As to the three main interests, outside my home Ufe, which, as I look back upon half a century, seem to have held sway over my thoughts — contemporary hterature^ religious development, and social experiment — one is tempted to say a few last summarising things, though, amid the noise of war, it is hard to say them with any real detachment of mind. 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 ; Teimyson in 1892. I saw the Temiyson funeral in the Abbey, and remember it vividly. The burying of Mr. Glad- stone was more stately, this of Temiyson, as befitted a poet, had a more intimate beauty. A great midtitude 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 2 A 354 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS 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 answ^er to the needs of a generation that has learnt from younger singers and thinkers a more restless method, a more poignant and discon- tented thought. A Hterary world fed on Meredith and Henry James, on Ibsen or Bernard Shaw or Anatole France, on Synge or Yeats, rebels against the versified argument, however musical or skUf ul, 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 volunae will ultimately contain aU that is really immortal in Tennyson's work. But that volume, it seems to me, wiU be safe among the golden books of our Hterature, cherished ahke by young lovers and the ' drooping old.^ 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 EPILOGUE 355 the wide-awake, the energy of undefeated age that breathed from the figure, remains with me, stamped on my memory, hke the gentle face of Mrs. "W'ords- worth, or a passing glimpse — a gesture— of George IMeredith as we met on the thresliold of i\Ir. Cotter Morison's house at Hampstead, one day perhaps in '86 or '87, and he turned his handsome curly head with a smile and a word when iMr. i\Iorison introduced us. He was then not yet sixty, already a little lame, but the radiant physical presence scarcely marred. We had some passing tallv 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 Fortnightly in 1874. I had heard him and his work discussed in the Lincoln circle, where both the Pattisons were quite alive to IMeredith's quahty ; but I was at the time and for long afterwards 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 Cam- bridge, 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, IMr. 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 darbig and freedom than at Oxford. ]\Ien were not so afraid of each other ; the sharp religious divisions of Oxford were absent ; ideas were throwTi up like 856 A WEITER'S RECOLLECTIONS 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 gonius in George Meredith. The place in literatm-e that some of these brilliant men were already giving to * Richard Feverel/ which had been published some fifteen years earlier, struck me greatly ; but if I was honest with myself, my enthusiasm wa« much more qualified than theirs. It was not till ' Diana of the Crossways ' came out, after we had moved to London, that the Meredithian power began to grip me ; and to this day the satm^ation with French books and French ideals that I owed to my uncle's influence during om' 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 great enough, 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 effoii} is worth while ; we are admitted by it to a world of beauty or romance or humour that without it we should not know ; and with the thing gained, goes, as in Alpine climbing, the pleasure of the effort itself. 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 clielp,|in regard to it, from others — the EPILOGUE 857 young and ardent— who are the natural initiates, the ' Mystae ' of the poetic world. But once let tlie strange and poignant magic of it, its music in discord, its sharp sweetness, touch the inward ear :— thenceforward we shall follow its piping. Let me record another regret for another losfc 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 feehng and won the affection of his time. And that by a double spell^ of the Hfe Hved and the books \\Titten. 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 Brontes on their day and om's. 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 Brontes did not possess — the element of charm, the jjetit carillon, to which Renan attributed his own success in literature : undefinable, always, this last ! — but supreme. 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 enchant- ing fairy-tale, ' Prince Otto,' but in his most tragic, ^ Ti yaf) ^apiTOiv liyaTraTov ^Avdpunoisjairdvfvdfi' ', 858 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS or his most intellectual work — in the fragment ' Weir of Hermiston/ or in that fine piece of penetrating psychology and admirable narrative, ' The Master of Ballantrae/ 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 hterature— more as a letter -writer, or more as a writer of fiction. Whether, in other words, his own character and personaHty will not prove the enduring thing, rather than the characters he created. The volumes of letters, with their wonderful range and variety, their humour, their bravery, their vision — whether of persons or scenes — abeady mean to some of us more than his stories, dear to us as these are. 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 dehghtful 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 raine 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 R A. S. ' — surely immortal, so lozig as mother-hearts endure. 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 EriLOGUE 859 nineties. The first of the Hardy novels that strongly affected me was the * Return of the Native/ 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 ' Tess of the Durbervilles/ my own re- collection 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. ' 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 realise their truth, sincerity and humanity, in spite of the pessimism with which so many of them are thiged ; their beauty also, not- withstanding 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 ' Jude the Obscure ' ! On the other hand, in the three volumes of ' The Dynasts,' he has given us one of the noblest, and possibly one of the most fruitful experiments in recent English letters. 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, wiitten 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 360 A WEITER'S EECOLLECTIONS 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 Eomance.' It contains to my thinking the very essence and spirit of his work. Through all reahsm, through all technical accomplish- ment, through all the marvellous and detailed know- ledge 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 McAiidrew, or the Centurion of the Eoman Wall, or the trawlers and sub- marines 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 Eomance.' 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 undis- puted 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 Budyard Kipling's work may be counted among those gifts of the gods which bring no nemesis with them. Another star — w^as it the one that danced when Beatrice was born ? — was rising about the same time as Budyard Kipling's. ' The Window in Thrums ' appeared in 1889 — b> master-piece to set beside the French masterpiece, drawn likewise from peasant life, of almost the same date, ' Pecheur d'Islande.' Barrie's gift, also, has been a gift making for the joy of his genera- tion ; he too has carried the flag of the True Bomance — slight, twinkling, fantastic thing, compared to that of Kipling, but consecrate to the same great service. El'ILOGUE 861 And then beside this group of men, who, deuhng 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 ' sentiment- ahsm ' 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 genera- tion, 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 Enghsh novel-wTiting. 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 Xovel — of that fiction which at any given moment is chiefly attracting and stimuhiting the men and w^omen 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 Eomantic, or Eealist, or Ai-gumentative. In our day it appears to b3 a compound of the last two — at any rate in the novels of ^Ir. A\'clls. Mr. Wells seems to me a jour}ialist of very great powers, of unequal education, and much crudity of mind, who has inadvertently strayed into the literature of imagination. The earlier becks were excellent story-telling, though without any Stevensonian dis- tinction ; ' Kipps ' was almost a masterpiece ; ' Tono- Bungay ' a piece of admirable fooliiig, enriched with some real character-creation, a thing extremely rare in Mr. Wells's books ; while ' Mr. Britlijig sees it 2 A5 362 A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS through ' 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 WeUs novels, whose names one can never recollect, is Mr. WeUs 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 declara- tion of war. They compare with the description of the Thames in ' Tono-Bmigay. ' These, and a few others like them, wall no doubt appear among the morceaux cJioisis of a coming day. But who, after a few years more, will ever want to turn the resfcless, ill-written, undigested pages of ' The New Machiavelli ' 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 journahsm aUve — ^journahsm, which is born of the moment, serves the moment, and, as a rule, dies with the moment — is — again the Stevensonian secret ! — charm. Diderot, the prince of journahsts, is the great instance of it in literature ; the phrase ' sous le charme ' i? 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 — ' C'est pour moi et pour mes amis que je lis, que je reflechis, que j'ecris ' — Mr. Wells for a world of enemies or fools, whom he wishes to instruct or show up. ' Le Neveu de Rameau ' is a masterpiece of satire ; yet there is EPILOGUE 863 no ill-nature in it. But the snarl is never very long absent from Mi: Wells's work ; the background of it is disagreeable. Hence its complete lack of magic, of charm. And without some touch of these quaUties, the a peu prh of journalism, of that necessarily hrn'ried and improvised work which is the spendthrift of talent, can never become litera- ture, as it once did — under the golden pen of Denis Diderot. Sainte Beuve said of Stendhal that he was an excitateur d'idees. 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 Hkely to live than Mr. Wells, is Mr. Arnold Bennett. i\Ir. Beimett's achievement in his three principal books — the ' Old Wives' Tale,' ' Clayhanger,' and ' Hilda Lessways,' 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 * Comedie Humaine ' has a breadth and magnificence of general conception which governs all its details, and Stendhal's work is linked to one of the most significant periods of European history, and reflects its teeming ideas. j\Ir. Bennett's work seems to many readers to be choked by detail. But a ^^Titer 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 364 A WEITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS exquisite as the detail which paints the household of Lissy-Gory in ' War and Peace,' or the visit of Dolly to Anna and "\^l■onsky in ' Anna Karenin/ or the nursing of the dying Nicolas by Kitty and Levin, he will have justified his method — with all its longueurs. Has he justified it yet ? One great -wTriter, however, we possess who can give us any detail he Hkes 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 mth any personal knowledge. And yet we in- stinctively 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 un\ATitten, which are the fruit of our special history, and our long-descended life. It is this which gives value often to ]\Ir. Conrad's shghtest 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 accessorv that he needs. EPILOGUE 365 Mr. Galsworthy, I hope, when this war is over, on which he has AVTitten such vivid, sucli 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 ' The Country House ' 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 observa- tion ; above all, an individuality it is abmidantly worth while to know. Of 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 showTi 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 indi- vidual 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 366 A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS again. The 'Life and Liberty' movement in the Anglican Church, which has sprung up since the war, is endeavouring 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 com- manding message, though all the time it may be silently providing the ' pile of grey heather ' from which, when the moment comes, the beacon-light may spring. 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. ' A Much-abused Letter,' ' Lex Orandi,' ' Scylla and Charybdis,' and ' Christianity at the Cross- Roads ' have settled nothing. What book of real influ- ence 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 TyrrelFs 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— Dr. 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. EPILOGUE 367 Green and George Tyrrell, through whose work there flashes at intervals the ' gleam ' that hghts human thought a little fiu'ther on its way. Meanwhile, it must often seem to anyone 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 to claim theni ! — 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 rally- ing 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 miiverse ; — it is mider 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 conmion 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. 368 A WRITEE'S RECOLLECTIONS But if religious ideals liave not greatly profited by the war, it is plain that in the field of social change we are on the eve of transformation^ — throughout Europe which may well rank in history with the establishment of the Pax Romana, or the incm'sion 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 w^omen have been forcibly shaken out of all their former ways of life, and submitted to a sterner discipline than any- thing they have yet known, while, at the same time, they have been roused by mere change of circumstance and scene to a strange new consciousness both of them- selves and the world, cannot pass away without per- manently 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 labourer 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 EPILOGUE 309 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 anyone in the old days. He has learnt 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 learnt that a ' swell ' can reckon his life — his humble, insignificant life as it used to be — as worth more than his own. And there are thousands on whom the mere excite- ment of the new scenes, the new countries, cities, and men, has acted like flame on invisible ink, bringing out a hmidred 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 at the front are worth twice the others. I don't think they hnow 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.' And in the towns, in London, where, through the Play Centres, 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 harden- ing the race ! In the noble and Pauline sense, I mean. Tliese lanky, restless lads have indeed ' endured hardness ' Ah, let us take what comfort we can from these facts : — for they are facts — in face of these crowded 870 A WEITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS 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 m^ging 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. Let me recall a few more personal landmarks in the eighteen years that have passed since ' Eleanor ' appeared, before I close. 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. Eoosevelt, then at the White House, and with American men of politics and affairs, like Mr. Root, Mr. Garfield and Mr. Bacon— EPILOGUE 871 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 unspoilt, such as one's fairy godmother seldom provides without some medi- cinal 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 fi'iends 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. Then Philadelphia, where I lectured on behalf of the London Play Centres ; 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 them- selves day by day ; kind faces and welcoming voices were always round us, and it was indeed hard to tear ourselves away. 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 Home, 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 railwav, which took us first from Toronto to Vancouver, and then from Vancouver to 372 A WKITEE'S EECOLLECTIONS Quebec. So in a swallow's flight from sea to" sea I saw the marvellous land, wherein perhaps, in a far|hidden future, lies the destiny of our race. Of all this— of the historic figures of Sir William van Home, of beloved Lord Grey, of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and Sir Kobert Borden, as they were ten years ago, there would be much to say. But my present task is done. 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 ' England's Effort ' and * Towards the Goal' Some day, perhaps, if these * EecoUections ' find an audience, and when peace has loosened our tongues, and aboHshed that very necessary person the Censor, there will be something more to be written. But now, at any rate, I lay do^vn my pen. For a while these Recollections, 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. 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.' And meanwhile, across the Western ocean, America through these winter days, sends uicessantly the long procession of her men and ships to the help of the old EPILOGUE 373 world, and of an iindyijig 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 oa that, it is the Army of Freedom, aiid of Judgement. Mary A. Ward. Chriatmoi Eve, 1917. AT THE nAI.t.ANTYNn PRESS PRINTED BY SPO 1 TISWOODE, BAI.LANTYNE AND CO LTD COLCHESTER, LONDON AND tTON COLLINS' :: NEW :: BOOKS Extra Crown 8vo. 6s. net. FOE-FARRELL [Second Impression) By "Q" (Sir ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH) *A most enthralling story of aJvcntures.' — Pall Mall Gazette. 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