A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS (IN TWO VOLUMES), VOLUME II

BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

Published November, 1918

[Illustration: HENRY JAMES]

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

 I. LONDON IN THE 'EIGHTIES

 II. LONDON FRIENDS

 III. THE PUBLICATION OF "ROBERT ELSMERE"

 IV. FIRST VISITS TO ITALY

 V. AMALFI AND ROME. HAMPDEN AND "MARCELLA"

 VI. "HELBECK OF BANNISDALE"

 VII. THE VILLA BARBERINI. HENRY JAMES

VIII. ROMAN FRIENDS. "ELEANOR"

EPILOGUE

ILLUSTRATIONS

HENRY JAMES

ARTHUR BALFOUR

GOLDWIN SMITH

M. JUSSERAND

CHAPTER I

LONDON IN THE 'EIGHTIES

The few recollections of William Forster that I have put together in thepreceding volume lead naturally, perhaps, to some account of myfriendship and working relations at this time with Forster's mostformidable critic in the political press--Mr. John Morley, now LordMorley. It was in the late 'seventies, I think, that I first saw Mr. Morley. I sat next him at the Master's dinner-table, and the impressionhe made upon me was immediate and lasting. I trust that a great man, towhom I owed much, will forgive me for dwelling on some of the incidentsof literary comradeship which followed!

My husband and I, on the way home, compared notes. We felt that we hadjust been in contact with a singular personal power combined with amoral atmosphere which had in it both the bracing and the charm that, physically, are the gift of the heights. The "austere" Radical, indeed, was there. With regard to certain vices and corruptions of our life andpolitics, my uncle might as well have used Mr. Morley's name as that ofMr. Frederick Harrison, when he presented us, in "Friendship's Garland, "with Mr. Harrison setting up a guillotine in his back garden. There wassomething--there always has been something--of the somber intensity ofthe prophet in Mr. Morley. Burke drew, as we all remember, anineffaceable picture of Marie Antoinette's young beauty as he saw it in1774, contrasting it with the "abominable scenes" amid which sheperished. Mr. Morley's comment is:

 But did not the protracted agonies of a nation deserve the tribute of a tear? As Paine asked, were men to weep over the plumage and forget the dying bird? ... It was no idle abstraction, no metaphysical right of man for which the French cried, but only the practical right of being permitted, by their own toil, to save themselves and the little ones about their knees from hunger and cruel death. 

The cry of the poor, indeed, against the rich and tyrannous, the cry ofthe persecuted Liberal, whether in politics or religion, against hisoppressors--it used to seem to me, in the 'eighties, when, to mypleasure and profit, I was often associated with Mr. Morley, that in hispassionate response to this double appeal lay the driving impulse of hislife and the secret of his power over others. While we were still atOxford he had brought out most of his books: _On Compromise_--the fierceand famous manifesto of 1874--and the well-known volumes on theEncyclopedists, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot. It was not for nothing thathe had been a member of Pattison's college; and a follower of JohnStuart Mill. The will to look the grimmest facts of life and destiny inthe face, without flinching, and the resolve to accept no "anodyne" fromreligion or philosophy, combined with a ceaseless interest in the humanfate and the human story, and a natural, inbred sympathy for the manyagainst the few, for the unfortunate against the prosperous; it wasthese ardors and the burning sincerity with which he felt them, thatmade him so great a power among us, his juniors by half a generation. Ishall never lose the impression that _Compromise_, with its almostsavage appeal for sincerity in word and deed, made upon me--animpression which had its share in _Robert Elsmere_. 

But together with this tragic strenuousness there was always thepersonal magic which winged it and gave it power. Mr. Morley has knownall through his life what it was to be courted, by men and women alike, for the mere pleasure of his company; in which he resembled another manwhom both he and I knew well--Sir Alfred Lyall. It is well known thatMr. Gladstone was fascinated by the combination in his future biographerof the Puritan, the man of iron conviction, and the delightful man ofletters. And in my own small sphere I realized both aspects of Mr. Morley during the 'eighties. Just before we left Oxford I had begun towrite reviews and occasional notes for the _Pall Mall_, which he wasthen editing; after we settled in London, and he had become also editorof _Macmillan_, he asked me, to my no little conceit, to write a monthly_causerie_ on a book or books for that magazine. I never succeeded inwriting nearly so many; but in two years I contributed perhaps eight orten papers--until I became absorbed in _Robert Elsmere_ and Mr. Morleygave up journalism for politics. During that time my pleasant taskbrought me into frequent contact with my editor. Nothing could have beenkinder than his letters; at the same time there was scarcely one of themthat did not convey some hint, some touch of the critical goad, invaluable to the recipient. I wrote him a letter of wailing when hegave up the editorship and literature and became Member for Newcastle. Such a fall it seemed to me then! But Mr. Morley took it patiently. "Donot lament over your friend, but pray for him!" As, indeed, one mightwell do, in the case of one who for a few brief months--in 1886--was tobe Chief Secretary for Ireland, and again in 1892-95. 

It was, indeed, in connection with Ireland that I became keenly andpersonally aware of that other side of Mr. Morley's character--the sidewhich showed him the intransigent supporter of liberty at all costs andall hazards. It was, I suppose, the brilliant and pitiless attacks inthe _Pall Mall_ on Mr. Forster's Chief-Secretaryship, which, as much asanything else, and together with what they reflected in the Cabinet, weakened my uncle's position and ultimately led to his resignation inthe spring of 1882. Many of Mr. Forster's friends and kinsfolk resentedthem bitterly; and among the kinsfolk, one of them, I have reason toknow, made a strong private protest. Mr. Morley's attitude in replycould only have been that which is well expressed by a sentence ofDarmesteter's about Renan: "So pliant in appearance, so courteous inmanner, he became a bar of iron as soon as one sought to wrest from himan act or word contrary to the intimate sense of his conscience. "

But no man has a monopoly of conscience. The tragedy was that here weretwo men, both democrats, both humanitarians, but that an executiveoffice, in a time of hideous difficulty, had been imposed upon the one, from which the other--his critic--was free. Ten years later, when Mr. Morley was Chief Secretary, it was pointed out that the same statesmanwho had so sincerely and vehemently protested in the case of WilliamForster and Mr. Balfour against the revival of "obsolete" statutes, andthe suppression of public meetings, had himself been obliged to putobsolete statutes in operation sixteen times, and to prohibit twenty-sixpublic meetings. These, however, are the whirligigs of politics, and nopolitician escapes them. 

In my eyes Lord Morley's crowning achievement in literature is hisbiography of Mr. Gladstone. How easy it would have been to smother Mr. Gladstone in stale politics!--and how stale politics may become in thatintermediate stage before they pass finally into history! Englishpolitical literature is full of biography of this kind. The threenotable exceptions of recent years which occur to me are Mr. Churchill's_Life_ of his father, the Disraeli biography still in progress, and the_Gladstone_. But it would be difficult indeed to "stale" the story ofeither Lord Randolph or Dizzy. A biographer would have to set about itof malice prepense. In the case, however, of Mr. Gladstone, the dangerwas more real. Anglican orthodoxy, eminent virtue, unfailing decorum; acomparatively weak sense of humor, and a literary gift much inferior tohis oratorical gift, so that the most famous of his speeches are butcold reading now; interminable sentences, and an unfailing relish fordetail all important in its day, but long since dead and buried; thekind of biography that, with this material, half a dozen of Mr. Gladstone's colleagues might have written of him, for all his greatness, rises formidably on the inward eye. The younger generation waiting forthe historian to come--except in the case of those whose professionalduty as politicians it would have been to read it--might quite well haveyawned and passed by. 

But Mr. Morley's literary instinct, which is the artistic instinct, solved the problem. The most interesting half of the book will always, Ithink, be the later half. In the great matters of his hero's earliercareer--Free Trade, the Crimean War, the early budgets, the slowdevelopment of the Liberal leader from the Church and State Conservativeof 1832, down to the franchise battle of the 'sixties and the "greatMinistry, " as Mr. Morley calls it, of 1868, the story is told, indeed, perhaps here and there at too great length, yet with unfailing ease andlucidity. The teller, however, is one who, till the late 'seventies, wasonly a spectator, and, on the whole, from a distance, of what he isdescribing, who was indeed most of the time pursuing his own specialaims--i. E. , the hewing down of orthodoxy and tradition, together withthe preaching of a frank and uncompromising agnosticism, in the_Fortnightly Review_; aims which were, of all others, most opposed toMr. Gladstone's. But with the 'eighties everything changes. Mr. Morleybecomes a great part of what he tells. During the intermediatestage--marked by his editorship of the _Pall Mall Gazette_--the tone ofthe biography grows sensibly warmer and more vivid, as the writer drawsnearer and nearer to the central scene; and with Mr. Morley's electionto Newcastle and his acceptance of the Chief-Secretaryship in 1885, thebook becomes the fascinating record of not one man, but two, and thatwithout any intrusion whatever on the rights of the main figure. Thedreariness of the Irish struggle is lightened by touch after touch thatonly Mr. Morley could have given. Take that picture of the somber, discontented Parnell, coming, late in the evening, to Mr. Morley's roomin the House of Commons, to complain of the finance of the Home RuleBill--Mr. Gladstone's entrance at 10. 30 P. M. , after an exhaustingday--and he, the man of seventy-seven, sitting down to work between theChief Secretary and the Irish leader, till at last, with a sigh ofweariness at nearly 1 A. M. , the tired Prime Minister pleads to go tobed. Or that most dramatic story, later on, of Committee Room No. 15, where Mr. Morley becomes the reporter to Mr. Gladstone of that moral andpolitical tragedy, the fall of Parnell; or a hundred other sharp lightsupon the inner and human truth of things, as it lay behind the politicalspectacle. All through the later chapters, too, the happy use ofconversations between the two men on literary and philosophical mattersrelieves what might have been the tedium of the end. For these vividnotes of free talk not only bring the living Gladstone before you in themost varied relation to his time; they keep up a perpetually interestingcomparison in the reader's mind between the hero and his biographer. Oneis as eager to know what Mr. Morley is going to say as one is to listento Mr. Gladstone. The two men, with their radical differences and theirpassionate sympathies, throw light on each other, and the agreeablepages achieve a double end, without ever affecting the real unity of thebook. Thus handled, biography, so often the drudge of literature, risesinto its high places and becomes a delight instead of an edifying orinforming necessity. 

I will add one other recollection of this early time--i. E. , that in1881 the reviewing of Mr. Morley's _Cobden_ in the _Times_ fell to myhusband, and as those were the days of many-column reviews, and as thetime given for the review was _exceedingly_ short, it could only be doneat all by a division of labor. We divided the sheets of the book, and wejust finished in time to let my husband rush off to Printing HouseSquare and correct the proofs as they went through the press for themorning's issue. In those days, as is well known, the _Times_ went topress much later than now, and a leader-writer rarely got home before 4, and sometimes 5, A. M. 

 * * * * *

I find it extremely difficult, as I look back, to put any order into thecrowding memories of those early years in London. They wereextraordinarily stimulating to us both, and years of great happiness. Athome our children were growing up; our own lives were branching out intonew activities and bringing us always new friends, and a moreinteresting share in that "great mundane movement" which Mr. Bottlesbelieved would perish without him. Our connection with the _Times_ andwith the Forsters, and the many new acquaintances and friends we made atthis time in that happy meeting-ground of men and causes--Mrs. Jeune'sdrawing-room--opened to us the world of politicians; while my husband'sfour volumes on _The English Poets_, published just as we left Oxford, volumes to which all the most prominent writers of the day hadcontributed, together with the ever-delightful fact that Matthew Arnoldwas my uncle, brought us the welcome of those of our own _métier_ andway of life; and when in 1884 my husband became art critic of the paper, a function which he filled for more than five and twenty years, freshdoors opened on the already crowded scene, and fresh figures stepped in. 

The setting of it all was twofold--in the first place, our dear oldhouse in Russell Square, and, in the next, the farm on RodboroughCommon, four miles from Godalming, where, amid a beauty of gorse andheather that filled every sense on a summer day with the mere joy ofbreathing and looking, our children and we spent the holiday hours ofseven goodly years. The Russell Square house has been, so to speak, twice demolished and twice buried, since we lived in it. Some of itsstones must still lie deep under the big hotel which now towers on itssite. That it does not still exist somewhere, I can hardly believe. Thewesterly sun seems to me still to be pouring into the beautiful littlehall, built and decorated about 1750, with its panels of free scrollworkin blue and white, and to be still glancing through the drawing-rooms tothe little powder-closet at the end, my tiny workroom, where I firstsketched the plan of _Robert Elsmere_ for my sister Julia Huxley, andwhere, after three years, I wrote the last words. If I open the door ofthe back drawing-room, there, to the right, is the children'sschool-room. I see them at their lessons, and the fine plane-trees thatlook in at the window. And up-stairs there are the pleasant bedrooms andthe nurseries. It was born, the old house, in the year of the YoungPretender, and, after serving six generations, perhaps as faithfully asit served us, it "fell on sleep. " There should be a special Elysium, surely, for the houses where the fates have been kind and where peoplehave been happy; and a special Tartarus for those--of Oedipus orAtreus--in which "old, unhappy, far-off things" seem to be alwayspoisoning the present. 

As to Borough Farm--now the head-quarters of the vast camp whichstretches to Hindhead--it stood then in an unspoiled wilderness ofcommon and wood, approached only by what we called "the sandy track"from the main Portsmouth Road, with no neighbors for miles but a fewscattered cottages. Its fate had been harder than that of 61 RussellSquare. The old London house has gone clean out of sight, translated, whole and fair, into a world of memory. But Borough and the common arestill here--as war has made them. Only--may I never see them again!

It was in 1882, the year of Tel-el-Kebir, when we took PeperharrowRectory (the Murewell Vicarage of _Robert Elsmere_) for the summer, thatwe first came across Borough Farm. We left it in 1889. I did a greatdeal of work, there and in London, in those seven years. The _Macmillan_papers I have already spoken of. They were on many subjects--Tennyson's"Becket, " Mr. Pater's "Marius, " "The Literature of Introspection, " JaneAusten, Keats, Gustavo Becquer, and various others. I still kept up mySpanish to some extent, and I twice examined--in 1882 and 1888--for theTaylorian scholarship in Spanish at Oxford, our old friend, DoctorKitchin, afterward Dean of Durham, writing to me with glee that I shouldbe "making history" as "the first woman examiner of men at eitherUniversity. " My colleague on the first occasion was the old Spanishscholar, Don Pascual de Gayangos, to whom the calendaring of the SpanishMSS. In the British Museum had been largely intrusted; and the secondtime, Mr. York Powell of Christ Church--I suppose one of the mostadmirable Romance scholars of the time--was associated with me. But if Iremember right, I set the papers almost entirely, and wrote the reporton both occasions. It gave me a feeling of safety in 1888, when myknowledge, such as it was, had grown very rusty, that Mr. York Powelloverlooked the papers, seeing that to set Scholarship questions forpostgraduate candidates is not easy for one who has never been throughany proper "mill"! But they passed his scrutiny satisfactorily, and in1888 we appointed as Taylorian Scholar a man to whom for years Iconfidently looked for _the_ history of Spain--combining both theSpanish and Arabic sources--so admirable had his work been in theexamination. But, alack! that great book has still to be written. ForMr. Butler Clarke died prematurely in 1904, and the hope died with him. 

For the _Times_ I wrote a good many long, separate articles before 1884, on "Spanish Novels, " "American Novels, " and so forth; the "leader" onthe death of Anthony Trollope; and various elaborate reviews of books onChristian origins, a subject on which I was perpetually reading, alwayswith the same vision before me, growing in clearness as theyears passed. 

But my first steps toward its realization were to begin with the shortstory of _Miss Bretherton_, published in 1884, and then the translationof Amiel's _Journal Intime_, which appeared in 1885. _Miss Bretherton_was suggested to me by the brilliant success in 1883 of Mary Anderson, and by the controversy with regard to her acting--as distinct from herdelightful beauty and her attractive personality--which arose betweenthe fastidious few and the enchanted many. I maintained then, and amquite sure now, that Isabel Bretherton was in no sense a portrait ofMiss Anderson. She was to me a being so distinct from the living actressthat I offered her to the world with an entire good faith, which seemsto myself now, perhaps thirty years later, hardly less surprising thanit did to the readers of the time. For undoubtedly the situation in thenovel was developed out of the current dramatic debate. But it became tome just _a_ situation--_a_ problem. It was really not far removed fromDiderot's problem in the _Paradoxe sur le Comédien_. What is therelation of the actor to the part represented? One actress isplain--Rachel; another actress is beautiful, and more than beautiful, delightful--Miss Anderson. But all the time, is there or is there not aregion in which all these considerations count for nothing in comparisonwith certain others? Is there a dramatic _art_--exacting, difficult, supreme--or is there not? The choice of the subject, at that time, was, it may be confessed, a piece of naïveté, and the book itself was youngand naïve throughout. But something in it has kept it in circulation allthis while; and for me it marks with a white stone the year in which itappeared. For it brought me my first critical letter from Henry James;it was the first landmark in our long friendship. 

Beloved Henry James! It seems to me that my original meeting with himwas at the Andrew Langs' in 1882. He was then forty-two, in the prime ofhis working life, and young enough to be still "Henry James, Junior, " tomany. I cannot remember anything else of the Langs' dinner-party exceptthat we were also invited to meet the author of _Vice Versa_, "which Mr. Lang thinks"--as I wrote to my mother--"the best thing of its kind sinceDickens. " But shortly after that, Mr. James came to see us in RussellSquare and a little incident happened which stamped itself for good on astill plastic memory. It was a very hot day; the western sun was beatingon the drawing-room windows, though the room within was comparativelydark and cool. The children were languid with the heat, and theyoungest, Janet, then five, stole into the drawing-room and stoodlooking at Mr. James. He put out a half-conscious hand to her; she camenearer, while we talked on. Presently she climbed on his knee. I supposeI made a maternal protest. He took no notice, and folded his arm roundher. We talked on; and presently the abnormal stillness of Janetrecalled her to me and made me look closely through the dark of theroom. She was fast asleep, her pale little face on the young man'sshoulder, her long hair streaming over his arm. Now Janet was a mostindependent and critical mortal, no indiscriminate "climber up ofknees"; far from it. Nor was Mr. James an indiscriminate lover ofchildren; he was not normally much at home with them, though _always_good to them. But the childish instinct had in fact divined the profoundtenderness and chivalry which were the very root of his nature; and hewas touched and pleased, as one is pleased when a robin perches onone's hand. 

From that time, as the precious bundle of his letters shows, he becamethe friend of all of us--myself, my husband, and the children; thoughwith an increased intimacy from the 'nineties onward. In a subsequentchapter I will try and summarize the general mark left on me by hisfruitful and stainless life. His letter to me about _Miss Bretherton_ isdated December 9, 1884. He had already come to see me about it, andthere was never any critical discussion like his, for its suggestion ofa hundred points of view, its flashing of unexpected lights, its witnessto the depth and richness of his own artistic knowledge. 

 The whole thing is delicate and distinguished [he wrote me] and the reader has the pleasure and security of feeling that he is with a woman (distinctly a woman!) who knows how (rare bird!) to write. I think your idea, your situation, interesting in a high degree--But [and then come a series of most convincing "buts"! He objects strongly to the happy ending]. I wish that your actress had been carried away from Kendal [her critical lover, who worships herself, but despises her art] altogether, carried away by the current of her artistic life, the sudden growth of her power, and the excitement, the ferocity and egotism (those of the artist realizing success, I mean; I allude merely to the normal dose of those elements) which the effort to create, to "arrive" (once she had had a glimpse of her possible successes) would have brought with it. (Excuse that abominable sentence. ) Isabel, the Isabel you describe, has too much to spare for Kendal--Kendal being what he is; and one doesn't feel her, see her, enough, as the pushing actress, the _cabotine_! She lapses toward him as if she were a failure, whereas you make her out a great success. No!--she wouldn't have thought so much of him at such a time as that--though very possibly she would have come back to him later. 

The whole letter, indeed, is full of admirable criticism, sprung from aknowledge of life, which seemed to me, his junior by twelve years, unapproachably rich and full. But how grateful I was to him for thecriticism!--how gracious and chivalrous was his whole attitude towardthe writer and the book! Indeed, as I look over the bundle of letterswhich concern this first novel of mine, I am struck by the good fortunewhich brought me such mingled chastening and praise, in such longletters, from judges so generous and competent. Henry James, WalterPater, John Morley, "Mr. Creighton" (then Emmanuel Professor atCambridge), Cotter Morrison, Sir Henry Taylor, Edmond Scherer--they areall there. Besides the renewal of the old throb of pleasure as one readsthem, one feels a sort of belated remorse that so much trouble was takenfor so slight a cause! Are there similar friends nowadays to help thefirst steps of a writer? Or is there no leisure left in this chokedlife of ours?

The decisive criticism, perhaps, of all, is that of Mr. Creighton: "Ifind myself carried away by the delicate feeling with which thedevelopment of character is traced. " But--"You wrote this book as acritic not as a creator. It is a sketch of the possible worth ofcriticism in an unregenerate world. This was worth doing once; but ifyou are going on with novels you must throw criticism overboard and letyourself go, as a partner of common joys, common sorrows, and commonperplexities. There--I have told you what I think, just as I think it. "

 * * * * *

_Miss Bretherton_ was a trial trip, and it taught me a good deal. Whenit came out I had nearly finished the translation of Amiel, whichappeared in 1885, and in March of that year some old friends drove me upthe remote Westmorland valley of Long Sleddale, at a moment when theblackthorn made lines of white along the lanes; and from that day onwardthe early chapters of _Robert Elsmere_ began to shape themselves in mymind. All the main ideas of the novel were already there. Elsmere was tobe the exponent of a freer faith; Catharine had been suggested by an oldfriend of my youth; while Langham was the fruit of my long communingwith the philosophic charm and the tragic impotence of Amiel. I beganthe book in the early summer of 1885, and thenceforward it absorbed meuntil its appearance in 1888. 

The year 1885, indeed, was one of expanding horizons, of many newfriends, of quickened pulses generally. The vastness of London and itsmyriad interests seemed to be invading our life more and more. I canrecall one summer afternoon, in particular, when, as I was in a hansomdriving idly westward toward Hyde Park Gate, thinking of a hundredthings at once, this consciousness of _intensification_, of a heightenedmeaning in everything--the broad street, the crowd of moving figures andcarriages, the houses looking down upon it--seized upon me with a rush. "Yes, it is good--the mere living!" Joy in the infinite variety of thegreat city as compared with the "cloistered virtue" of Oxford; the sheerpleasure of novelty, of the kind new faces, and the social discoveriesone felt opening on many sides; the delight of new perceptions, newpowers in oneself--all this seemed to flower for me in those few minutesof reverie--if one can apply such a word to an experience so vivid. Andmeanwhile the same intensity of pleasure from nature that I had alwaysbeen capable of flowed in upon me from new scenes; above all, fromsolitary moments at Borough Farm, in the heart of the Surrey commons, when the September heather blazed about me; or the first signs of springwere on the gorse and the budding trees; or beside some lonely pool; andalways heightened now by the company of my children. It was a stage--anormal stage, in normal life. But I might have missed it so easily! TheFates were kind to us in those days. 

As to the social scene, let me gather from it first a recollection ofpure romance. One night at a London dinner-party I found myself sentdown with a very stout gentleman, an American Colonel, who proclaimedhimself an "esoteric Buddhist, " and provoked in me a rapid and vehementdislike. I turned my back upon him and examined the table. Suddenly Ibecame aware of a figure opposite to me, the figure of a young girl whoseemed to me one of the most ravishing creatures I had ever seen. Shewas very small, and exquisitely made. Her beautiful head, with its massof light-brown hair; the small features and delicate neck; the clear, pale skin, the lovely eyes with rather heavy lids, which gave a slightlook of melancholy to the face; the grace and fire of every movementwhen she talked; the dreamy silence into which she sometimes fell, without a trace of awkwardness or shyness. But how vain is any merecatalogue to convey the charm of Laura Tennant--the first Mrs. AlfredLyttelton--to those who never saw her!

I asked to be introduced to her as soon as we left the dining-room, andwe spent the evening in a corner together. 

I fell in love with her there and then. The rare glimpses of her thather busy life and mine allowed made one of my chief joys thenceforward, and her early death was to me--as to so many, many others!--a griefnever forgotten. 

The recent biography of Alfred Lyttelton--War Minister in Mr. Balfour'slatest Cabinet--skilfully and beautifully done by his second wife, hasconveyed to the public of thirty years later some idea of Laura'simperishable charm. And I greatly hope that it may be followed some dayby a collection of her letters, for there are many in existence, and, young as she was, they would, I believe, throw much light upon a crowdedmoment in our national life. Laura was the fourth daughter of SirCharles Tennant, a rich Glasgow manufacturer, and the elder sister ofMrs. Asquith. She and her sisters came upon the scene in the early'eighties; and without any other extrinsic advantage but that of wealth, which in this particular case would not have taken them very far, theymade a conquest--the younger two, Laura and Margot, in particular--of agroup of men and women who formed a kind of intellectual and social_élite_; who were all of them accomplished; possessed, almost all ofthem, of conspicuous good looks, or of the charm that counts as much;and among whom there happened to be a remarkable proportion of men whohave since made their mark on English history. My generation knew themas "The Souls. " "The Souls" were envied, mocked at, caricatured, bythose who were not of them. They had their follies--why not? They wereyoung, and it was their golden day. Their dislike of convention androutine had the effect on many--and those not fools--of makingconvention and routine seem particularly desirable. But there was not, Ithink, a young man or woman admitted to their inner ranks who did notpossess in some measure a certain quality very difficult to isolate anddefine. Perhaps, to call it "disinterestedness" comes nearest. For theywere certainly no seekers after wealth, or courters of the great. Itmight be said, of course, that they had no occasion; they had as muchbirth and wealth as any one need want, among themselves. But that doesnot explain it. For push and greed are among the commonest faults of anaristocracy. The immortal pages of Saint Simon are there to show it. "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also, " says theGospel. Now the "treasure" among The Souls was, ultimately--or at leasttended to be--something spiritual. The typical expression of it, at itsbest, is to be found in those exquisite last words left by LauraLyttelton for her husband, which the second Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton has, as I think, so rightly published. That unique "will, " which for thirtyyears before it appeared in print was known to a wide circle of persons, many of whom had never seen the living Laura, was the supreme expressionof a quality which, in greater or lesser degree, The Souls seemed todemand of one another, and of those who wished to join their band. Yet, combined with this passion, this poetry, this religious feeling, wasfirst the maddest delight in simple things--in open air and physicalexercise; then, a headlong joy in literature, art, music, acting; aperpetual spring of fun; and a hatred of all the solemn pretenses thattoo often make English society a weariness. 

No doubt there is something--perhaps much--to be said on the other side. But I do not intend to say it. I was never a Soul, nor could have been. I came from too different a world. But there were a certain number ofpersons--of whom I was one--who were their "harborers" and spectators. Ifound delight in watching them. They were quite a new experience to me;and I saw them dramatically, like a scene in a play, full of freshimplications and suggestions. I find in an old letter to my mother anaccount of an evening at 40 Grosvenor Square, where the Tennants lived. 

 It was not an evening party--we joined a dinner party there, after dining somewhere else. So that the rooms were empty enough to let one see the pretty creatures gathered in it, to perfection. In the large drawing-room, which is really a ball-room with a polished floor, people were dancing, or thought-reading, or making music, as it pleased them. 

Mr. Balfour was there, with whom we had made friends, as fellow-guests, on a week-end visit to Oxford, not long before; Alfred Lyttelton, thenin the zenith of his magnificent youth; Lord Curzon, then plain Mr. Curzon, and in the Foreign Office; Mr. Harry Gust; Mr. Rennell Rodd, nowthe British Ambassador in Rome, and many others--a goodly company ofyoung men in their prime. And among the women there was a very highproportion of beauty, but especially of grace. "The half-lit room, thedresses and the beauty, " says my letter, "reminded one of some _festa_painted by Watteau or Lancret. " But with what a difference! For, afterall, it was English, through and through. 

A little after this evening, Laura Tennant came down to spend a day atBorough Farm with the children and me. Another setting! Our principaldrawing-room there in summer was a sand-pit, shaded by an old ash-treeand haunted by innumerable sand-martins. It was Ascension Day, and thecommons were a dream of beauty. Our guest, I find, was to have come down"with Mr. Balfour and Mr. Burne-Jones. " But in the end she came downalone; and we talked all day, sitting under hawthorns white with bloom, wandering through rushy fields ablaze with marsh marigold and orchis. She wrote to me the same evening after her return to London:

 I sit with my eyes resting on the medieval purple of the sweet-breathing orchis you gave me, and my thoughts feasting on the wonderful beauty of the snowy blossom against the blue.... This has been a real Ascension Day. 

Later in the year--in November--she wrote to me from Scotland--she wasthen twenty-one:

 I am still in Scotland, but don't pity me, for I love it more than anything else in the wide world. If you could only hear the wind throwing his arm against my window, and sobbing down the glen. I think I shall never have a Lover I am so fond of as the wind. None ever serenaded me so divinely. And when I open my window wide and ask him what he wants, and tell him I am quite ready to elope with him now--this moment--he only moans and sighs thro' my outblown hair--and gives me neuralgia.... I read all day, except when I am out with my Lover, or playing with my little nephew and niece, both of whom I adore--for they are little poets. We have had a houseful ever since August, so I am delighted to get a little calm. It is so dreadful never, never to be alone--and really the housemaid would do just as well! and yet, whenever I go to my sanctum I am routed out as if I was of as much use as plums to plum pudding, and either made to play lawn-tennis or hide-and-seek, or to talk to a young man whose only idea of the Infinite is the Looking-glass. All these are the trials that attend the "young lady" of the house. Poor devil! Forgive strong language--but really my sympathy is deep. 

 I have, however, some really nice friends here, and am not entirely discontented. Mr. Gerald Balfour left the other day. He is very clever--and quite beautiful--like a young god. I wonder if you know him. I know you know Arthur.... Lionel Tennyson, who was also here with Gerald Balfour, has a splendid humor--witty and "fin, " which is rare in England. Lord Houghton, Alfred Lyttelton, Godfrey Webb, George Curzon, the Chesterfields, the Hayters, Mary Gladstone, and a lot more have been here. I went north, too, to the land of Thule and was savagely happy. I wore no hat--no gloves--I bathed, fished, boated, climbed, and kissed the earth, and danced round a cairn. It was opposite Skye at a Heaven called Loch Ailsa.... Such beauty--such weather--such a fortnight will not come again. Perhaps it would be unjust to the crying world for one human being to have more of the Spirit of Delight; but one is glad to have tasted of the cup, and while it was in my hands I drank deeply. 

 I have read very little. I am hungering for a month or two's silence. 

But there was another lover than the west wind waiting for this mostlovable of mortals. A few days afterward she wrote to me from a house inHampshire, where many of her particular friends were gathered, amongthem Alfred Lyttelton. 

 The conversation is pyrotechnic--and it is all quite delightful. A beautiful place--paradoxical arguments--ideals raised and shattered--temples torn and battered--temptations given way to--newspapers unread--acting--rhyming--laughing--_ad infinitum_. I wish you were here!

Six weeks afterward she was engaged to Mr. Lyttelton. She was to bemarried in May, and in Easter week of that year we met her in Paris, where she was buying her trousseau, enjoying it like a child, makingfriends with all her dressmakers, and bubbling over with fun about it. "It isn't 'dressing, '" she said, "unless you apply main force to them. What they _want_ is always--_presque pas de corsage, et pas dutout de manches!_"

One day she and Mr. Lyttelton and Mr. Balfour and one or two others cameto tea with us at the Hotel Chatham to meet Victor Cherbuliez. Theveteran French novelist fell in love with her, of course, and theirtalk--Laura's French was as spontaneous and apparently as facile as herEnglish--kept the rest of us happy. Then she married in May, with halfLondon to see, and Mr. Gladstone--then Prime Minister--mounted on thechair to make the wedding-speech. For by her marriage Laura became thegreat man's niece, since Alfred Lyttelton's mother was a sister of Mrs. Gladstone. 

Then in the autumn came the hope of a child--to her who loved childrenso passionately. But all through the waiting time she was overshadowedby a strangely strong presentiment of death. I went to see her sometimestoward the end of it, when she was resting on her sofa in the lateevening, and used to leave her listening for her husband's step, on hisreturn from his work, her little weary face already lit up withexpectation. The weeks passed, and those who loved her began to beanxious. I went down to Borough Farm in May, and there, just two yearsafter she had sat with us under the hawthorn, I heard the news of herlittle son's birth, and then ten days later the news of her death. 

With that death a ray of pure joy was quenched on earth. But LauraLyttelton was not only youth and delight--she was also embodied love. Ihave watched her in a crowded room where everybody wanted her, quietlyseek out the neglected person there, the stranger, the shy secretary orgoverness, and make her happy--bring her in--with an art that fewnoticed, because in her it was nature. When she died she left anenduring mark in the minds of many who have since governed or guidedEngland; but she was mourned also by scores of humble folk, and bydisagreeable folk whom only she befriended. Mrs. Lyttelton quotes aletter written by the young wife to her husband:

 Tell me you love me and always will. Tell me, so that when I dream I may dream of Love, and when I sleep dreamless Love may be holding me in his wings, and when I wake Love may be the spirit in my feet, and when I die Love may be the Angel that takes me home. 

And in the room of death, when the last silence fell on those gatheredthere, her sister Margot--by Laura's wish, expressed some timebefore--read aloud the "will, " in which she spoke her inmost heart. Since its publication it belongs to those records of life and feelingwhich are part of our common inheritance. 

"She was a flame, beautiful, dancing, ardent, " writes the second Mrs. Lyttelton. "The wind of life was too fierce for such a spirit; she couldnot live in it. "

I make no apology for dwelling on the life and earthly death of thisyoung creature who was only known to a band--though a large band--offriends during her short years. Throughout social and literary historythere have been a few apparitions like hers, which touch with peculiarforce, in the hearts of men and women, the old, deep, human notes which"make us men. " Youth, beauty, charm, death--they are the great themeswith which all art, plastic or literary, tries to conjure. It is givento very few to handle them simply, yet sufficiently; with power, yetwithout sentimentality. Breathed into Laura's short life, they affectedwhose who knew her like the finest things in poetry. 

CHAPTER II

LONDON FRIENDS

It was in 1874, as I have already mentioned, that on an introductionfrom Matthew Arnold we first made friends with M. Edmond Scherer, theFrench writer and Senator, who more than any other person--unless, perhaps, one divides the claim between him and M. Faguet--stepped intothe critical chair of Sainte Beuve, after that great man's death. For M. Scherer's weekly reviews in the _Temps_ (1863-78) were looked for bymany people over about fifteen years, as persons of similar tastes hadlooked for the famous "Lundis, " in the _Constitutionnel_ of an earliergeneration. 

We went out to call upon the Scherers at Versailles, coupling with it, if I remember right, a visit to the French National Assembly thensitting in the Chateau. The road from the station to the palace was deepin snow, and we walked up behind two men in ardent conversation, one ofthem gesticulating freely. My husband asked a man beside us, bound also, it seemed, for the Assembly, who they were. "M. Gambetta and M. JulesFavre, " was the answer. So there we had in front of us the intrepidorganizer of the Government of National Defense, whose services toFrance France will never forget, and the unfortunate statesman to whomit fell, under the tyrannic and triumphant force of Germany (which wasto prove, as we now know, in the womb and process of time, more fatal toherself than to France!), to sign away Alsace-Lorraine. And we had onlyjust settled ourselves in our seats when Gambetta was in the tribune, making a short but impassioned speech. I but vaguely remember what thespeech was about, but the attitude of the lion head thrown back, and thetones of the famous voice, remain with me--as it rang out in therecurrent phrase: _"Je proteste!--Messieurs, je proteste!"_ It was theattitude of the statue in the Place du Carrousel, and of the_meridional_, Numa Roumestan, in Daudet's well-known novel. Every wordsaid by the speaker seemed to enrage the benches of the Right, and thetumult was so great at times that we were still a little dazed by itwhen we reached the quiet of the Scherers' drawing-room. 

M. Scherer rose to greet us, and to introduce us to his wife anddaughters. A tall, thin man, already white-haired, with something in hisaspect which suggested his Genevese origin--something at once asceticand delicately sensitive. He was then in his sixtieth year, deputy forthe Seine-et-Oise, and an important member of the Left Center. The yearafter we saw him he became a Senator, and remained so through his life, becoming more Conservative as the years went on. But his real importancewas as a man of letters--one of the recognized chiefs of Frenchliterature and thought, equally at war with the forces of Catholicreaction, then just beginning to find a leader in M. Bourget, and withthe scientific materialism of M. Taine. He was--when we first knewhim--a Protestant who had ceased to believe in any historical religion;a Liberal who, like another friend of ours, Mr. Goschen, about the sametime was drifting into Conservatism; and also a man of strong and subtlecharacter to whom questions of ethics were at all times as important asquestions of pure literature. Above all, he was a scholar, speciallyconversant with England and English letters. He was, for instance, the"French critic on Milton, " on whom Matthew Arnold wrote one of his mostattractive essays; and he was fond of maintaining--and proving--thatwhen French people _did_ make a serious study of England, and Englishbooks, which he admitted was rare, they were apt to make fewer mistakesabout us than English writers make about France. 

Dear M. Scherer!--I see him first in the little suite of carpetlessrooms, empty save for books and the most necessary tables and chairs, where he lived and worked at Versailles; amid a library "read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested, " like that of Lord Acton, his Englishjunior. And then, in a winter walk along the Champs-Élysées, a year ortwo later, discussing the prospects of Catholicism in France: "Theyhaven't a man--a speaker--a book! It is a real drawback to us Liberalsthat they are so weak, so negligible. We have nothing to hold ustogether!" At the moment Scherer was perfectly right. But the followingyears were to see the flowing back of Catholicism into literature, theUniversities, the École Normale. Twenty years later I quoted this remarkof Scherer's to a young French philosopher. "True, for its date, " hesaid. "There was then scarcely a single Catholic in the École Normale[i. E. , at the headwaters of French education]. There are now a greatmany. _But they are all Modernists!_" Since then, again, we have seenthe growing strength of Catholicism in the French literature ofimagination, in French poetry and fiction. Whether in the end it willemerge the stronger for the vast stirring of the waters caused by thepresent war is one of the most interesting questions of the present day. 

But I was soon to know Edmond Scherer more intimately. I imagine that itwas he who in 1884 sent me a copy of the _Journal Intime_ of HenriFrédéric Amiel, edited by himself. The book laid its spell upon me atonce; and I felt a strong wish to translate it. M. Scherer consented andI plunged into it. It was a delightful but exacting task. At the end ofit I knew a good deal more French than I did at the beginning! For thebook abounded in passages that put one on one's mettle and seemed tochallenge every faculty one possessed. M. Scherer came over with hisdaughter Jeanne--a _schöne Seele_, if ever there was one--and we spenthours in the Russell Square drawing-room, turning and twisting the mostcrucial sentences this way and that. 

But at last the translation and my Introduction were finished and theEnglish book appeared. It certainly obtained a warm welcome both hereand in America. There is something in Amiel's mystical and melancholycharm which is really more attractive to the Anglo-Saxon than the Frenchtemper. At any rate, in the English-speaking countries the book spreadwidely, and has maintained its place till now. 

 The _Journal_ is very interesting to me [wrote the Master of Balliol]. It catches and detains many thoughts that have passed over the minds of others, which they rarely express, because they must take a sentimental form, from which most thinkers recoil. It is all about "self, " yet it never leaves an egotistical or affected impression. It is a curious combination of skepticism and religious feeling, like Pascal, but its elements are compounded in different proportions and the range of thought is far wider and more comprehensive. On the other hand, Pascal is more forcible, and looks down upon human things from a higher point of view. 

 Why was he unhappy? ... But, after all, commentaries on the lives of distinguished men are of very doubtful value. There is the life--take it and read it who can. 

 Amiel was a great genius, as is shown by his power of style.... His _Journal_ is a book in which the thoughts of many hearts are revealed.... There are strange forms of mysticism, which the poetical intellect takes. I suppose we must not try to explain them. Amiel was a Neo-Platonist and a skeptic in one. 

 For myself [wrote Walter Pater], I shall probably think, on finishing the book, that there was still something Amiel might have added to those elements of natural religion which he was able to accept at times with full belief and always with the sort of hope which is a great factor in life. To my mind, the beliefs and the function in the world of the historic Church form just one of those obscure but all-important possibilities which the human mind is powerless effectively to dismiss from itself, and might wisely accept, in the first place, as a workable hypothesis. The supposed facts on which Christianity rests, utterly incapable as they have become of any ordinary test, seem to me matters of very much the same sort of assent we give to any assumptions, in the strict and ultimate sense, moral. The question whether those facts are real will, I think, always continue to be what I should call one of the _natural_ questions of the human mind. 

A passage, it seems to me, of considerable interest as throwing lightupon the inner mind of one of the most perfect writers, and mostimportant influences of the nineteenth century. Certainly there is nosign in it, on Mr. Pater's part, of "dropping Christianity"; very muchthe contrary. 

 * * * * *

But all this time, while literary and meditative folk went on writingand thinking, how fast the political world was rushing!

Those were the years, after the defeat of the first Home Rule Bill, andthe dismissal of Mr. Gladstone, of Lord Salisbury's Government and Mr. Balfour's Chief-Secretaryship. As I look back upon them--those fivedramatic years culminating first in the Parnell Commission, and then inParnell's tragic downfall and death, I see everything grouped round Mr. Balfour. From the moment when, in succession to Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Mr. Balfour took over the Chief-Secretaryship, his sudden and swiftdevelopment seemed to me the most interesting thing in politics. We hadfirst met him, as I have said, on a week-end visit to the Talbots atOxford. It was then a question whether his health would stand the roughand tumble of politics. I recollect he came down late and looked farfrom robust. We traveled up to London with him, and he was reading Mr. Green's _Prolegomena to Ethics_, which, if I remember right, he was toreview for _Mind_. 

He was then a member of the Fourth Party, and engaged--though in arather detached fashion--in those endless raids and excursions against the"Goats"--i. E. , the bearded veterans of his own party, Sir StaffordNorthcote in particular, of which Lord Randolph was the leader. Butcompared to Lord Randolph he had made no Parliamentary mark. One thoughtof him as the metaphysician, the lover of music, the delightfulcompanion, always, I feel now, in looking back, with a prevailingconsciousness of something reserved and potential in him, which gave apeculiar importance and value to his judgments of men and things. He wasa leading figure among "The Souls, " and I remember some delightfulevenings in his company before 1886, when the conversation was entirelyliterary or musical. 

Then, with the Chief-Secretaryship there appeared a new Arthur Balfour. The courage, the resource, the never-failing wit and mastery with whichhe fought the Irish members in Parliament, put down outrage in Ireland, and at the same time laid the foundation in a hundred directions of thatsocial and agrarian redemption of Ireland on which a new politicalstructure will some day be reared--is perhaps even now about torise--these things make one of the most brilliant, one of the mostdramatic, chapters in our modern history. 

[Illustration: ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR]

It was in 1888, two years after Mr. Forster's death, that we foundourselves for a Sunday at Whittinghame. It was, I think, not long beforethe opening of the Special Commission which was to inquire into thecharges brought by the _Times_ against the Parnellites and the LandLeague. Nothing struck me more in Mr. Balfour than the absence in him ofany sort of excitement or agitation, in dealing with the current chargesagainst the Irishmen. It seemed to me that he had quietly accepted thefact that he was fighting a revolution, and, while perfectly clear as tohis own course of action, wasted no nervous force on moral reprobationof the persons concerned. His business was to protect the helpless, topunish crime, and to expose the authors of it, whether high or low. Buthe took it as a job to be done--difficult--unpleasant--but all in theway of business. The tragic or pathetic emotion that so many people wereready to spend upon it he steadily kept at a distance. His nerve struckme as astonishing, and the absence of any disabling worry about thingspast. "One can only do one's best at the moment, " he said to me once, _àpropos_ of some action of the Irish government which had turned outbadly--"if it doesn't succeed, better luck next time! Nothing to begained by going back upon things. " After this visit to Whittinghame, Iwrote to my father:

 I came away more impressed and attracted by Arthur Balfour than ever. If intelligence and heart and pure intentions can do anything for Ireland, he at least has got them all. Physically he seems to have broadened and heightened since he took office, and his manner, which was always full of charm, is even brighter and kindlier than it was--or I fancied it. He spoke most warmly of Uncle Forster. 

And the interesting and remarkable thing was the contrast between anattitude so composed and stoical, and his delicate physique, hissensitive, sympathetic character. All the time, of course, he was inconstant personal danger. Detectives, much to his annoyance, lay in waitfor us as we walked through his own park, and went with him in Londonwherever he dined. Like my uncle, he was impatient of being followed andguarded, and only submitted to it for the sake of other people. Once, ata dinner-party at our house, he met an old friend of ours, one of themost original thinkers of our day, Mr. Philip Wicksteed, economistsDante scholar, and Unitarian minister. Ha and Mr. Balfour were evidentlyattracted to each other, and when the time for departure came, the two, deep in conversation, instead of taking cabs, walked off together in thedirection of Mr. Balfour's house in Carlton Gardens. The detectivesbelow-stairs remained for some time blissfully unconscious of what hadhappened. Then word reached them; and my husband, standing at the doorto see a guest off, was the amused spectator of the rush in pursuit oftwo splendid long-legged fellows, who had, however, no chance whateverof catching up the Chief Secretary. 

Thirty years ago, almost! And during that time the name and fame ofArthur Balfour have become an abiding part of English history. Nor isthere any British statesman of our day who has been so much loved by hisfriends, so little hated by his opponents, so widely trusted bythe nation. 

 * * * * *

As to the Special Commission and the excitement produced by the _Times_attack on the Irish Members, including the publication of the forgedParnell letter in 1887, our connection with the _Times_ brought us, ofcourse, into the full blast of it. Night after night I would sit up, half asleep, to listen to the different phases of the story when in theearly hours of the morning my husband came back from the _Times_, brimful of news, which he was as eager to tell as I to hear. My husband, however, was only occasionally asked to write upon Ireland, and was notin the inner counsels of the paper on that subject. We were both veryanxious about the facsimiled letter, and when, after long preliminaries, the Commission came to the _Times_ witnesses, I well remember the dismaywith which I heard the first day of Mr. Macdonald's examination. Wasthat _all_? I came out of the Court behind Mr. Labouchere and Sir GeorgeLewis, and in Mr. Labouchere's exultation one read the comingcatastrophe. I was on the Riviera when Pigott's confession, flight, andsuicide held the stage; yet even at that distance the shock was great. The _Times_ attack was fatally discredited, and the influence of thegreat paper temporarily crippled. Yet how much of that attack was sound, how much of it was abundantly justified! After all, the report of theCommission--apart altogether from the forged letter or letters--certainly gave Mr. Balfour in Ireland later on the reasoned support ofEnglish opinion in his hand-to-hand struggle with the Land Leaguemethods, as the Commission had both revealed and judged them. Afterthirty years one may well admit that the Irish land system had to go, and that the Land League was "a sordid revolution, " with both the crimesand the excuses of a revolution. But at the time, British statesmen hadto organize reform with one hand, and stop boycotting and murder withthe other; and the light thrown by the Commission on the methods ofIrish disaffection was invaluable to those who were actually grapplingday by day with the problems of Irish government. 

It was probably at Mrs. Jeune's that I first saw Mr. Goschen, and werapidly made friends. His was a great position at that time. Independentof both parties, yet trusted by both; at once disinterested andsympathetic; a strong Liberal in some respects, an equally strongConservative in others--he never spoke without being listened to, andhis support was eagerly courted both by Mr. Gladstone, from whom he hadrefused office in 1880, without, however, breaking with the Liberalparty, and by the Conservatives, who instinctively felt him theirproperty, but were not yet quite clear as to how they were to finallycapture him. That was decided in 1886, when Mr. Goschen voted in themajority that killed the Home Rule Bill, and more definitely in thefollowing year when Randolph Churchill resigned the Exchequer in a fitof pique, thinking himself indispensable, and not at all expecting LordSalisbury to accept his resignation. But, in his own historic phrase, he"forgot Goschen, " and Mr. Goschen stepped easily into his shoes andremained there. 

I find from an old diary that the Goschens dined with us in RussellSquare two nights before the historic division on the Home Rule Bill, and I remember how the talk raged and ranged. Mr. Goschen was anextremely agreeable talker, and I seem still to hear his husky voice, with the curious deep notes in it, and to be looking into the large butshort-sighted and spectacled eyes--he refused the Speakership mainly onthe grounds of his sight--of which the veiled look often made what hesaid the more racy and unexpected. A letter he wrote me in 1886, afterhis defeat at Liverpool, I kept for many years as the best shortanalysis I had ever read of the Liberal Unionist position, and theprobable future of the Liberal party. 

Mrs. Goschen was as devoted a wife as Mrs. Gladstone or Mrs. Disraeli, and the story of the marriage was a romance enormously to Mr. Goschen'scredit. Mr. Goschen must have been a most faithful lover, and hecertainly was a delightful friend. We stayed with them at Seacox, theirhome in Kent, and I remember one rainy afternoon there, the greater partof which I spent listening to his talk with John Morley, and--Ithink--Sir Alfred Lyall. It would have been difficult to find a trio ofmen better worth an audience. 

Mrs. Goschen, though full of kindness and goodness, was not literary, and the house was somewhat devoid of books, except in Mr. Goschen'sstudy. I remember J. R. G. 's laughing fling when Mrs. Goschen complainedthat she could not get _Pride and Prejudice_, which he had recommendedto her, "from the library. " "But you could have bought it for sixpenceat the railway bookstall, " said J. R. G. Mr. Goschen himself, however, wasa man of wide cultivation, as befitted the grandson of the intelligentGerman bourgeois who had been the publisher of both Schiller and Goethe. His biography of his grandfather in those happy days before the presentlife-and-death struggle between England and Germany has now a kind ofsymbolic value. It is a study by a man of German descent who had becomeone of the most trusted of English statesmen, of that earlier Germanlife--with its measure, its kindness, its idealism--on which Germany hasturned its back. The writing of this book was the pleasure of his lateryears, amid the heavy work which was imposed upon him as a Free-Trader, in spite of his personal friendship for Mr. Chamberlain, by the TariffReform campaign of 1903 onward; and the copy which he gave me reminds meof many happy talks with him, and of my own true affection for him. I amthankful that he did not live to see 1914. 

Lord Goschen reminds me of Lord Acton, another new friend of the'eighties. Yet Lord Acton had been my father's friend and editor, in the_Home and Foreign Review_, long before he and I knew each other. Wasthere ever a more interesting or a more enigmatic personality than LordActon's? His letters to Mrs. Drew, addressed, evidently, in many cases, to Mr. Gladstone, through his daughter, have always seemed to me one ofthe most interesting documents of our time. Yet I felt sharply, inreading them, that the real man was only partially there; and in the newseries of letters just published (October, 1917) much and welcome lightis shed upon the problem of Lord Acton's mind and character. Theperpetual attraction for me, as for many others, lay in the contrastbetween Lord Acton's Catholicism and the universalism of his learning;and, again, between what his death revealed of the fervor and simplicityof his Catholic faith, and the passion of his Liberal creed. Oppression--tyranny--persecution--those were the things that stirredhis blood. He was a Catholic, yet he fought Ultramontanism and thePapal, Curia to the end; he never lost his full communion with theChurch of Rome, yet he could never forgive the Papacy for the things ithad done, and suffered to be done; and he would have nothing to do withthe excuse that the moral standards of one age are different from thoseof another, and therefore the crimes of a Borgia weigh more lightly andclaim more indulgence than similar acts done in the nineteenth century. 

 There is one moral standard for all Christians--there has never been more than one [he would say, inexorably]. The Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount have been always there. It was the wickedness of men that ignored them in the fifteenth century--it is the wickedness of men that ignores them now. Tolerate them in the past, and you will come to tolerate them in the present and future. 

It was in 1885 that Mr. --then recently made Professor--Creighton, showedme at Cambridge an extraordinarily interesting summary, in Lord Acton'shandwriting, of what should be the principles--the ethicalprinciples--of the modern historian in dealing with the past. They were, I think, afterward embodied in an introduction to a new edition of_Machiavelli_. The gist of them, however, is given in a letter writtento Bishop Creighton in 1887, and printed in the biography of the Bishop. Here we find a devout Catholic attacking an Anglican writer for applyingthe epithets "tolerant and enlightened" to the later medieval Papacy. 

 These men [i. E. , the Popes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries] [he says] instituted a system of persecution.... The person who authorizes the act shares the guilt of the person who commits it.... Now the Liberals think persecution a crime of a worse order than adultery, and the acts done by Ximenes [through the agency of the Spanish Inquisition] considerably worse than the entertainment of Roman courtesans by Alexander VIth. 

These lines, of course, point to the Acton who was the lifelong friendof Dollinger and fought, side by side with the Bavarian scholar, thepromulgation of the dogma of Papal Infallibility, at the Vatican Councilof 1870. But while Dollinger broke with the Church, Lord Acton neverdid. That was what made the extraordinary interest of conversation withhim. Here was a man whose denunciation of the crimes and corruption ofPapal Rome--of the historic Church, indeed, and the clergy ingeneral--was far more unsparing than that of the average educatedAnglican. Yet he died a devout member of the Roman Church in which hewas born; after his death it was revealed that he had never felt aserious doubt either of Catholic doctrine or of the supernatural missionof the Catholic Church; and it was to a dearly loved daughter on herdeath-bed that he said, with calm and tender faith, "My child, you willsoon be with Jesus Christ. " All his friends, except the very few whoknew him most intimately, must, I think, have been perpetually puzzledby this apparent paradox in his life and thought. Take the subject ofBiblical criticism. I had many talks with him while I was writing_Robert Elsmere_, and was always amazed at his knowledge of what Liddonwould have called "German infidel" books. He had read them all, hepossessed them all, he knew a great deal about the lives of the men whohad written them, and he never spoke of them, both the books and thewriters, without complete and, as it seemed to me, sympathetictolerance. I remember, after the publication of the dialogue on "The NewReformation, " in which I tried to answer Mr. Gladstone's review of_Robert Elsmere_ by giving an outline of the history of religiousinquiry and Biblical criticism from Lessing to Harnack, that I met LordActon one evening on the platform of Bletchley station, while we wereboth waiting for a train. He came up to me with a word of congratulationon the article. "I only wish, " I said, "I had been able to consult youmore about it. " "No, no, " he said. "_Votre siège est faite_! But I thinkyou should have given more weight to so-and-so, and you have omittedso-and-so. " Whereupon we walked up and down in the dusk, and he pouredout that learning of his, in that way he had--so courteous, modest, thought-provoking--which made one both wonder at and love him. 

As to his generosity and kindness toward younger students, it wasendless. I asked him once, when I was writing for _Macmillan_, to giveme some suggestions for an article on Chateaubriand. The letter Ireceived from him the following morning is a marvel of knowledge, bibliography, and kindness. And not only did he give me such a "scheme"of reading as would have taken any ordinary person months to getthrough, but he arrived the following day in a hansom, with a number ofthe books he had named, and for a long time they lived on my shelves. Alack! I never wrote the article, but when I came to the writing of_Eleanor_, for which certain material was drawn from the life ofChateaubriand, his advice helped me. And I don't think he would havethought it thrown away. He never despised novels!

Once on a visit to us at Stocks, there were nine books of differentsorts in his room which I had chosen and placed there. By Monday morninghe had read them all. His library, when he died, contained about 60, 000volumes--all read; and it will be remembered that Lord Morley, to whomMr. Carnegie gave it, has handed it on to the University of Cambridge. 

In 1884, when I first knew him, however, Lord Acton was every bit askeen a politician as he was a scholar. As is well known, he was a poorspeaker, and never made any success in Parliament; and this was always, it seemed to me, the drop of gall in his otherwise happy anddistinguished lot. But if he was never in an English Cabinet, hisinfluence over Mr. Gladstone through the whole of the Home Rule strugglegave him very real political power. He and Mr. Morley were the constantfriends and associates to whom Mr. Gladstone turned through all thatcritical time. But the great split was rushing on, and it was also in1884 that, at Admiral Maxse's one night at dinner, I first saw Mr. Chamberlain, who was to play so great a part in the following years. Itwas a memorable evening to me, for the other guest in a small party wasM. Clémenceau. 

M. Clémenceau was then at the height of his power as the maker andunmaker of French Ministries. It was he more than any other single manwho had checkmated the Royalist reaction of 1877 and driven MacMahonfrom power; and in the year after we first met him he was to bring JulesFerry to grief over _L'affaire de Tongkin_. He was then in the prime oflife, and he is still (1917), thirty-three years later, [1] one of themost vigorous of French political influences. Mr. Chamberlain, in 1884, was forty-eight, five years older than the French politician, and was atthat time, of course, the leader of the Radicals, as distinguished fromthe old Liberals, both in the House of Commons and Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet. 

How many great events, in which those two men were to be concerned, werestill in the "abysm of time, " as we sat listening to them at AdmiralMaxse's dinner-table!--Clémenceau, the younger, and the more fiery andfluent; Chamberlain, with no graces of conversation, and much less readythan the man he was talking with, but producing already the impressionof a power, certain to leave its mark, if the man lived, on Englishhistory. In a letter to my father after the dinner-party, I describedthe interest we had both felt in M. Clémenceau. "Yet he seems to me alight weight to ride such a horse as the French democracy!"

[Footnote 1: These lines were written shortly before, on the overthrowof M. Panlevé. M. Clémenceau, at the age of seventy-seven, became PrimeMinister of France, at what may well be the deciding moment of Frenchdestiny (January, 1918). ]

In the following year, 1885, I remember a long conversation on theGordon catastrophe with Mr. Chamberlain at Lady Jeune's. It was evident, I thought, that his mind was greatly exercised by the whole story ofthat disastrous event. He went through it from step to step, ending updeliberately, but with a sigh, "I have never been able to see, from dayto day, and I do not see now, how the Ministry could have taken anyother course than that they did take. "

Yet the recently published biography of Sir Charles Dilke shows clearlyhow very critical Mr. Chamberlain had already become of his greatleader, Mr. Gladstone, and how many causes were already preparing therupture of 1886. 

 * * * * *

I first met Mr. Browning in 1884 or 1885, if I remember right, at aKensington dinner-party, where he took me down. A man who talked loud andmuch was discoursing on the other side of the table; and a spirit ofopposition had clearly entered into Mr. Browning. 

_À propos_ of some recent acting in London we began to talk of Molière, and presently, as though to shut out the stream of words opposite, whichwas damping conversation, the old poet--how the splendid brow and thewhite hair come back to me!--fell to quoting from the famous sonnetscene in "Le Misanthrope": first of all, Alceste's rage with Phillinte'sflattery of the wretched verses declaimed by Oronte--"_Morbleu! vilcomplaisant, vous louez des sottises_"; then the admirable fencingbetween Oronte and Alceste, where Alceste at first tries to convey hiscontempt for Oronte's sonnet indirectly, and then bursts out:

 "_Ce n'est que jeu de mots, qu'affectation pure, Et ce n'est point ainsi que parle la nature_!"

breaking immediately into the _vieille chanson_, one line of which isworth all the affected stuff that Célimène and her circle admire. 

Browning repeated the French in an undertone, kindling as he went, Iurging him on, our two heads close together. Every now and then he wouldlook up to see if the plague outside was done, and, finding it stillwent on, would plunge again into the seclusion of our tête-à-tête; tillthe _chanson_ itself--"_Si le roi m'avoit donné--Paris, sa grand'ville"_--had been said, to his delight and mine. 

The recitation lasted through several courses, and our hostess once ortwice threw uneasy glances toward us, for Browning was the "lion" of theevening. But, once launched, he was not to be stopped; and as for me, Ishall always remember that I heard Browning--spontaneously, without amoment's pause to remember or prepare--recite the whole, or almost thewhole, of one of the immortal things in literature. 

He was then seventy-two or seventy-three. He came to see us once ortwice in Russell Square, but, alack! we arrived too late in the Londonworld to know him well. His health began to fail just about the timewhen we first met, and early in 1889 he died in the Palazzo Rezzonico. 

He did not like _Robert Elsmere_, which appeared the year before hisdeath; and I was told a striking story by a common friend of his andmine, who was present at a discussion of the book at a literary house. Browning, said my friend, was of the party. The discussion turned on thedivinity of Christ. After listening awhile, Browning repeated, with somepassion, the anecdote of Charles Lamb in conversation with Leigh Hunt, on the subject of "Persons one would wish to have seen"; when, afterranging through literature and philosophy, Lamb added:

 "But without mentioning a name that once put on a semblance of mortality ... There is only one other Person. If Shakespeare was to come into the room, we should rise up to meet him; but if that Person was to come into it, we should fall down and try to kiss the hem of His garment. "

Some fourteen years after his death I seemed to be brought very near inspirit to this great man, and--so far as a large portion of his work isconcerned--great poet. We were in Venice. I was writing the _Marriage ofWilliam Ashe_, and, being in want of a Venetian setting for some of thescenes, I asked Mr. Pen Browning, who was, I think, at Asolo, if hewould allow me access to the Palazzo Rezzonico, which was thenuninhabited. He kindly gave me free leave to wander about it as I liked;and I went most days to sit and write in one of the rooms of the_mezzanin_. But when all chance of a tourist had gone, and the palacewas shut, I used to walk all about it in the rich May light, finding ita little creepy! but endlessly attractive and interesting. There was abust of Mr. Browning, with an inscription, in one of the rooms, and theplace was haunted for me by his great ghost. It was there he had come todie, in the palace which he had given to his only son, whom he adored. The _concierge_ pointed out to me what he believed to be the room inwhich he passed away. There was very little furniture in it. Everythingwas chill and deserted. I did not want to think of him there. I liked toimagine him strolling in the stately hall of the palace with its vastchandelier, its pillared sides and Tiepolo ceiling, breathing in theItalian spirit which through such long years had passed into his, anddelighting, as a poet delights--not vulgarly, but with something of achild's adventurous pleasure--in the mellow magnificence of thebeautiful old place. 

 * * * * *

Mr. Lowell is another memory of these early London days. My first sightof him was at Mr. And Mrs. Westlake's house--in a temper! For some onehad imprudently talked of "Yankeeisms, " perhaps with some "superior"intonation. And Mr. Lowell--the Lowell of _A Certain Condescension inForeigners_--had flashed out: "It's you English who don't know your ownlanguage and your own literary history. Otherwise you would realize thatmost of what you call 'Yankeeisms' are merely good old English which youhave thrown away. "

Afterward, I find records of talks with him at Russell Square, then ofMrs. Lowell's death in 1885, and finally of dining with him in thespring of 1887, just before his return to America. At that dinner wasalso the German Ambassador, Count Hatzfeldt, a handsome man, with apowerful, rather somber face. I remember some talk with him after dinneron current books and politics. Just thirty years ago! Mr. Lowell hadthen only four years to live. He and all other diplomats had just passedthrough an anxious spring. The scare of another Franco-German war hadbeen playing on the nerves of Europe, started by the military party inGermany, merely to insure the passing of the famous Army law of thatyear--the first landmark in that huge military expansion of which we seethe natural fruit in the present Armageddon. 

A week or two before this dinner the German elections had given theConservatives an enormous victory. Germany, indeed, was in the fullpassion of economic and military development--all her people growingrich--intoxicated, besides, with vague dreams of coming power. Yet Ihave still before me the absent, indecipherable look of herAmbassador--a man clearly of high intelligence--at Mr. Lowell's table. Thirty years--and at the end of them America was to be at grips withGermany, sending armies across the Atlantic to fight in Europe. It wouldhave been as impossible for any of us, on that May evening in LowndesSquare, even to imagine such a future, as it was for Macbeth to creditthe absurdity that Birnam wood would ever come to Dunsinane!

A year later Mr. Lowell came back to London for a time in a privatecapacity, and I got to know him better and to like him much.... Here isa characteristic touch in a note I find among the old letters:

 I am glad you found something to like in my book and much obliged to you for saying so. Nobody but Wordsworth ever got beyond need of sympathy, and he started there!

CHAPTER III

THE PUBLICATION OF _ROBERT ELSMERE_

It was in 1885, after the completion of the Amiel translation, that Ibegan _Robert Elsmere_, drawing the opening scenes from that expeditionto Long Sleddale in the spring of that year which I have alreadymentioned. The book took me three years, nearly, to write. Again andagain I found myself dreaming that the end was near and publication onlya month or two away, only to sink back on the dismal conviction that thesecond, or the first, or the third volume--or some portion of each--mustbe rewritten, if I was to satisfy myself at all. I actually wrote thelast words of the last chapter in March, 1887, and came out afterward, from my tiny writing-room at the end of the drawing-room, shaken withtears, and wondering, as I sat alone on the floor, by the fire, in thefront room, what life would be like, now that the book was done! But itwas nearly a year after that before it came out, a year of incessanthard work, of endless rewriting, and much nervous exhaustion. For allthe work was saddened and made difficult by the fact that my mother'slong illness was nearing its end and that I was torn incessantly betweenthe claim of the book and the desire to be with her whenever I couldpossibly be spared from my home and children. Whenever there was atemporary improvement in her state, I would go down to Borough alone towork feverishly at revision, only to be drawn back to her side beforelong by worse news. And all the time London life went on as usual, andthe strain at times was great. 

The difficulty of finishing the book arose first of all from its length. I well remember the depressed countenance of Mr. George Smith--who wasto be to me through fourteen years afterward the kindest of publishersand friends--when I called one day in Waterloo Place, bearing abasketful of typewritten sheets. "I am afraid you have brought us aperfectly unmanageable book!" he said; and I could only mournfully agreethat so it was. It was far too long, and my heart sank at the thought ofall there was still to do. But how patient Mr. Smith was over it! andhow generous in the matter of unlimited fresh proofs and endlesscorrections. I am certain that he had no belief in the book's success;and yet, on the ground of his interest in _Miss Bretherton_ he had madeliberal terms with me, and all through the long incubation he was alwaysindulgent and sympathetic. 

The root difficulty was of course the dealing with such a subject in anovel at all. Yet I was determined to deal with it so, in order to reachthe public. There were great precedents--Froude's _Nemesis of Faith_, Newman's _Loss and Gain_, Kingsley's _Alton Locke_--for the novel ofreligious or social propaganda. And it seemed to me that the novel wascapable of holding and shaping real experience of any kind, as itaffects the lives of men and women. It is the most elastic, the mostadaptable of forms. No one has a right to set limits to its range. Thereis only one final test. Does it interest?--does it appeal? Personally, Ishould add another. Does it make in the long run for _beauty_? Beautytaken in the largest and most generous sense, and especially asincluding discord, the harsh and jangled notes which enrich therest--but still Beauty--as Tolstoy was a master of it?

But at any rate, no one will deny that _interest_ is the crucial matter. 

 There are five and twenty ways Of constructing tribal lays-- And every single one of them is right!

always supposing that the way chosen quickens the breath and stirs theheart of those who listen. But when the subject chosen has two aspects, the one intellectual and logical, the other poetic and emotional, thedifficulty of holding the balance between them, so that neitheroverpowers the other, and interest is maintained, is admittedly great. 

I wanted to show how a man of sensitive and noble character, born forreligion, comes to throw off the orthodoxies of his day and moment, andto go out into the wilderness where all is experiment, and spirituallife begins again. And with him I wished to contrast a type no less fineof the traditional and guided mind, and to imagine the clash of two suchtendencies of thought as it might affect all practical life, andespecially the life of two people who loved each other. 

Here then, to begin with, were Robert and Catharine. Yes, but Robertmust be made intellectually intelligible. Closely looked at, allnovel-writing is a sort of shorthand. Even the most simple and broadlyhuman situation cannot really be told in full. Each reader in followingit unconsciously supplies a vast amount himself. A great deal of theeffect is owing to things quite out of the picture given--things in thereader's own mind, first and foremost. The writer is playing on commonexperience; and mere suggestion is often far more effective thananalysis. Take the paragraph in Turguénieff's _Lisa_--it was pointed outto me by Henry James--where Lavretsky on the point of marriage, aftermuch suffering, with the innocent and noble girl whom he adores, suddenly hears that his intolerable first wife, whom he had longbelieved dead, is alive. Turguénieff, instead of setting out thesituation in detail, throws himself on the reader: "It was dark. Lavretsky went into the garden, and walked up and down there till dawn. "

That is all. And it is enough. The reader who is not capable of sharingthat night walk with Lavretsky, and entering into his thoughts, has readthe novel to no purpose. He would not understand, though Lavretsky orhis creator were to spend pages on explaining. 

But in my case, what provoked the human and emotional crisis--whatproduced the _story_--was an intellectual process. Now the difficultyhere in using suggestion--which is the master tool of the novelist--ismuch greater than in the case of ordinary experience. For the conscioususe of the intellect on the accumulated data of life, through historyand philosophy, is not ordinary experience. In its more advanced forms, it only applies to a small minority of the human race. 

Still, in every generation, while a minority is making or taking part inthe intellectual process itself, there is an atmosphere, a diffusion, produced around them, which affects many thousands who have but littleshare--but little _conscious_ share, at any rate--in the actual process. 

Here, then, is the opening for suggestion--in connection with thevarious forms of imagination which enter into Literature; with poetry, and fiction, which, as Goethe saw, is really a form of poetry. And aquite legitimate opening. For to use it is to quicken the intellectualprocess itself, and to induce a larger number of minds to take partin it. 

The problem, then, in intellectual poetry or fiction, is so to suggestthe argument, that both the expert and the popular consciousness mayfeel its force, and to do this without overstepping the bounds of poetryor fiction; without turning either into mere ratiocination, and solosing the "simple, sensuous, passionate" element which is theirtrue life. 

It was this problem which made _Robert Elsmere_ take three years towrite, instead of one. Mr. Gladstone complained, in his famous review ofit, that a majestic system which had taken centuries to elaborate, andgathered into itself the wisest brains of the ages, had gone down in afew weeks or months before the onslaught of the Squire's arguments; andthat if the Squire's arguments were few, the orthodox arguments werefewer! The answer to the first part of the charge is that thewell-taught schoolboy of to-day is necessarily wiser in a hundredrespects than Sophocles or Plato, since he represents not himself, butthe brainwork of a hundred generations since those great men lived. Andas to the second, if Mr. Gladstone had seen the first redactions of thebook--only if he had, I fear he would never have read it!--he wouldhardly have complained of lack of argument on either side, whatever hemight have thought of its quality. Again and again I went on writing forhours, satisfying the logical sense in oneself, trying to put thearguments on both sides as fairly as possible, only to feel despairinglyat the end that it must all come out. It might be decent controversy;but life, feeling, charm, _humanity_, had gone out of it; it had ceased, therefore, to be "making, " to be literature. 

So that in the long run there was no other method possible thansuggestion--and, of course, _selection_!--as with all the rest of one'smaterial. That being understood, what one had to aim at was so to usesuggestion as to touch the two zones of thought--that of the scholar andthat of what one may call the educated populace; who, without beingscholars, were yet aware, more or less clearly, of what the scholarswere doing. It is from these last that "atmosphere" and "diffusion"come; the atmosphere and diffusion which alone make wide penetration fora book illustrating an intellectual motive possible. I had to learnthat, having read a great deal, I must as far as possible wipe out thetraces of reading. All that could be done was to leave a few sign-postsas firmly planted as one could, so as to recall the real journey tothose who already knew it, and, for the rest, to trust to the floatinginterest and passion surrounding a great controversy--the _second_religious battle of the nineteenth century--with which it had seemed tome, both in Oxford and in London, that the intellectual air was charged. 

I grew very weary in the course of the long effort, and often verydespairing. But there were omens of hope now and then; first, a letterfrom my dear eldest brother, the late W. T. Arnold, who died in 1904, leaving a record as journalist and scholar which has been admirably toldby his intimate friend and colleague, Mr. (now Captain) C. E. Montague. He and I had shared many intellectual interests connected with thehistory of the Empire. His monograph on _Roman ProvincialAdministration_, first written as an Arnold Essay, still holds thefield; and in the realm of pure literature his one-volume edition ofKeats is there to show his eagerness for beauty and his love of Englishverse. I sent him the first volume in proof, about a year before thebook came out, and awaited his verdict with much anxiety. It came oneMay day in 1889. I happened to be very tired and depressed at themoment, and I remember sitting alone for a little while with the letterin my hand, without courage to open it. Then at last I opened it. 

 Warm congratulation--Admirable!--Full of character and color.... _Miss Bretherton_ was an intellectual exercise. This is quite a different affair, and has interested and touched me deeply, as I feel sure it will all the world. The biggest thing that--with a few other things of the same kind--has been done for years. 

Well!--that was enough to go on with, to carry me through the lastwrestle with proofs and revision. But by the following November nervousfatigue made me put work aside for a few weeks, and we went abroad forrest, only to be abruptly summoned home by my mother's state. Thenceforward I lived a double life--the one overshadowed by my mother'sapproaching death, the other amid the agitation of the book's appearanceand all the incidents of its rapid success. 

I have already told the story in the Introduction to the Library Editionof _Robert Elsmere_, and I will only run through it here as rapidly aspossible, with a few fresh incidents and quotations. There was never anydoubt at all of the book's fate, and I may repeat again that, before Mr. Gladstone's review of it, the three volumes were already in a thirdedition, the rush at all the libraries was in full course, and MatthewArnold--so gay and kind, in those March weeks before his own suddendeath!--had clearly foreseen the rising boom. "I shall take it with meto Bristol next week and get through it there, I hope [but he didn'tachieve it!]. It is one of my regrets not to have known the Green ofyour dedication. " And a week or two later he wrote an amusing letter tohis sister, describing a country-house party at beautiful Wilton, LordPembroke's home near Salisbury, and the various stages in the bookreached by the members of the party, including Mr. Goschen, who were allreading it, and all talking of it. I never, however, had any criticismof it from him, except of the first volume, which he liked. I doubt verymuch whether the second and third volumes would have appealed to him. Myuncle was a Modernist long before the time. In _Literature and Dogma_ hethrew out in detail much of the argument suggested in _Robert Elsmere_, but to the end of his life he was a contented member of the AnglicanChurch, so far as attendance at her services was concerned, and beliefin her mission of "edification" to the English people. He had littlesympathy with people who "went out. " Like Mr. Jowett, he would haveliked to see the Church slowly reformed and "modernized" from within. Sothat with the main theme of my book--that a priest who doubts mustdepart--he could never have had full sympathy. And in the course ofyears--as I showed in a later novel written twenty-four years after_Robert Elsmere_--I feel that I have very much come to agree with him!These great national structures that we call churches are too preciousfor iconoclast handling, if any other method is possible. The strongassertion of individual liberty within them, as opposed to the attemptto break them down from without; that seems to me now the hopefulcourse. A few more heresy trials like those which sprang out of _Essaysand Reviews_, or the persecution of Bishop Colenso, would let in freshlife and healing nowadays, as did those old stirrings of the waters. Thefirst Modernist bishop who stays in his place forms a Modernist chapterand diocese around him, and fights the fight where he stands, will domore for liberty and faith in the Church, I now sadly believe, thanthose scores of brave "forgotten dead" who have gone out of her forconscience' sake, all these years. 

But to return to the book. All through March the tide of success wasrapidly rising; and when I was able to think of it I was naturallycarried away by the excitement and astonishment of it. But with thelater days of March a veil dropped between me and the book. My mother'ssuffering and storm-beaten life was coming rapidly to its close, and Icould think of nothing else. In an interval of slight improvement, indeed, when it seemed as though she might rally for a time, I heard Mr. Gladstone's name quoted for the first time in connection with the book. It will be remembered that he was then out of office, having beenoverthrown on the Home Rule Question in 1886, and he happened to bestaying for an Easter visit with the Warden of Keble, and Mrs. Talbot, who was his niece by marriage. I was with my mother, about a mile away, and Mrs. Talbot, who came to ask for news of her, reported to me thatMr. Gladstone was deep in the book. He was reading it, pencil in hand, marking all the passages he disliked or quarreled with, with the Italian"_Ma_!"--and those he approved of with mysterious signs which she whofollowed him through the volumes could not always decipher. Mr. Knowles, she reported, the busy editor of the _Nineteenth Century_, was trying topersuade the great man to review it. But "Mr. G. " had not made uphis mind. 

Then all was shut out again. Through many days my mother askedconstantly for news of the book, and smiled with a flicker of her oldbrightness when anything pleased her in a letter or review. But finallythere came long hours when to think or speak of it seemed sacrilege. Andon April 7th she died. 

 * * * * *

The day after her death I saw Mr. Gladstone at Keble. We talked for acouple of hours, and then when I rose to go he asked if I would comeagain on the following morning before he went back to town. I had beendeeply interested and touched, and I went again for another long visit. My account, written down at the time, of the first day's talk, has beenprinted as an appendix to the Library Edition of the book. Of the secondconversation, which was the more interesting of the two since we came tomuch closer quarters in it, my only record is the following letter tomy husband:

 I have certainly had a wonderful experience last night and this morning! Last night two hours' talk with Gladstone, this morning, again an hour and a half's strenuous argument, during which the great man got quite white sometimes and tremulous with interest and excitement.... The talk this morning was a battle royal over the book and Christian evidences. He was _very_ charming personally, though at times he looked stern and angry and white to a degree, so that I wondered sometimes how I had the courage to go on--the drawn brows were so formidable! There was one moment when he talked of "trumpery objections, " in his most House of Commons manner. It was as I thought. The new lines of criticism are not familiar to him, and they really press him hard. He meets them out of Bishop Butler, and things analogous. But there is a sense, I think, that question and answer don't fit, and with it ever-increasing interest and--sometimes--irritation. His own autobiographical reminiscences were wonderfully interesting, and his repetition of the 42d psalm--"Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks"--_grand_!

 He said that he had never read any book on the hostile side written in such a spirit of, "generous appreciation" of the Christian side. 

Yes, those were hours to which I shall always look back with gratitudeand emotion. Wonderful old man! I see him still standing, as I tookleave of him, one hand leaning on the table beside him, his lined, pallid face and eagle eyes framed in his noble white hair, shining amidthe dusk of the room. "There are still two things left for me to do!" hesaid, finally, in answer to some remark of mine. "One is to carry HomeRule; the other is to prove the intimate connection between the Hebrewand Olympian revelations!"

Could any remark have been more characteristic of that double life ofhis--the life of the politician and the life of the student--which kepthim fresh and eager to the end of his days? Characteristic, too, of theamateurish element in all his historical and literary thinking. Indealing "with early Greek mythology, genealogy, and religion, " says hisold friend, Lord Bryce, Mr. Gladstone's theories "have been condemned bythe unanimous voice of scholars as fantastic. " Like his greatcontemporary, Newman--on whom a good deal of our conversation turned--hehad no critical sense of evidence; and when he was writing on _TheImpregnable Rock of Scripture_ Lord Acton, who was staying at Hawardenat the time, ran after him in vain, with Welhausen or Kuenen under hisarm, if haply he might persuade his host to read them. 

But it was not for that he was born; and those who look back to themighty work he did for his country in the forty years preceding the HomeRule split can only thank the Powers "that hold the broad Heaven" forthe part which the passion of his Christian faith, the eagerness of hislove for letters--for the Homer and the Dante he knew by heart--playedin refreshing and sustaining so great a soul. I remember returning, shaken and uplifted, through the April air, to the house where my motherlay in death; and among my old papers lies a torn fragment of a letterthirty years old, which I began to write to Mr. Gladstone a few dayslater, and was too shy to send. 

 This morning [says the letter, written from Fox How, on the day of my mother's funeral] we laid my dear Mother to rest in her grave among the mountains, and this afternoon I am free to think a little over what has befallen me personally and separately during this past week. It is not that I wish to continue our argument--quite the contrary. As I walked home from Keble on Monday morning, I felt it a hard fate that I should have been arguing, rather than listening.... Argument, perhaps, was inevitable, but none the less I felt afterward as though there were something incongruous and unfitting in it. In a serious discussion it seemed to me right to say plainly what I felt and believed; but if in doing so I have given pain, or expressed myself on any point with a too great trenchancy and confidence, please believe that I regret it very sincerely. I shall always remember our talks. If consciousness lasts "beyond these voices"--my inmost hope as well as yours--we shall know of all these things. Till then I cherish the belief that we are not so far apart as we seem. 

But there the letter abruptly ended, and was never sent. I probablyshrank from the added emotion of sending it, and I found it again theother day in a packet that had not been looked at for many years. Iprint it now as evidence of the effect that Mr. Gladstone's personalitycould produce on one forty years younger than himself, and in sharprebellion at that time against his opinions and influence in two mainfields--religion and politics. 

 * * * * *

Four days later, Monday, April 16th, my husband came into my room withthe face of one bringing ill tidings. "Matthew Arnold is dead!" Myuncle, as many will remember, had fallen suddenly in a Liverpool streetwhile walking with his wife to meet his daughter, expected that day fromAmerica, and without a sound or movement had passed away. The heartdisease which killed so many of his family was his fate also. A mercifulone it always seemed to me, which took him thus suddenly and withoutpain from the life in which he had played so fruitful and blameless apart. That word "blameless" has always seemed to me particularly to fithim. And the quality to which it points was what made his humor sosharp-tipped and so harmless. He had no hidden interest to serve--nomalice--not a touch, not a trace of cruelty--so that men allowed him tojest about their most sacred idols and superstitions and bore himno grudge. 

To me his death at that moment was an irreparable personal loss. For itwas only since our migration to London that we had been near enough tohim to see much of him. My husband and he had become fast friends, andhis visits to Russell Square, and our expeditions to Cobham, where helived, in the pretty cottage beside the Mole, are marked in memory witha very white stone. The only drawback to the Cobham visits were the"dear, dear boys!"--i. E. , the dachshunds, Max and Geist, who, howeveradorable in themselves, had no taste for visitors and no intention ofletting such intruding creatures interfere with their possession oftheir master. One would go down to Cobham, eager to talk to "Uncle Matt"about a book or an article--covetous, at any rate, of _some_ talk withhim undisturbed. And it would all end in a breathless chase after Max, through field after field where the little wretch was harrying eithersheep or cows, with the dear poet, hoarse with shouting, at his heels. The dogs were always _in the party_, talked to, caressed, or scoldedexactly like spoiled children; and the cat of the house was almostequally dear. Once, at Harrow, the then ruling cat--a tom--broke hisleg, and the house was in lamentation. The vet was called in, and hurthim horribly. Then Uncle Matt ran up to town, met Professor Huxley atthe Athenaeum, and anxiously consulted him. "I'll go down with you, "said Huxley. The two traveled back instanter to Harrow, and, while UncleMatt held the cat, Huxley--who had begun life, let it be remembered, assurgeon to the _Rattlesnake_!--examined him, the two black headstogether. There is a rumor that Charles Kingsley was included in theconsultation. Finally the limb was put in splints and left to nature. All went well. 

Nobody who knew the modest Cobham cottage while its master lived willever forget it; the garden beside the Mole, where every bush andflower-bed had its history; and that little study-dressing-room wheresome of the best work in nineteenth-century letters was done. Not agreat multitude of books, but all cherished, all read, each one thefriend of its owner. No untidiness anywhere; the ordinary litter of anauthor's room was quite absent. For long after his death the roomremained just as he had left it, his coat hanging behind the door, hisslippers beside his chair, the last letters he had received, and all thesmall and simple equipment of his writing-table ready to his hand, waiting for the master who would never know "a day of return. " In thatroom--during fifteen years, he wrote _God and the Bible_, the manysuggestive and fruitful Essays, including the American addresses, of hislater years--seeds, almost all of them, dropped into the mind of hisgeneration for a future harvesting; a certain number of poems, includingthe noble elegiac poem on Arthur Stanley's death, "Geist's Grave" and"Poor Matthias"; a mass of writing on education which is only now, helped by the war, beginning to tell on the English mind; and theendlessly kind and gracious letters to all sorts and conditions ofmen--and women--the literary beginner, the young teacher wanting advice, even the stranger greedy for an autograph. Every little playful note tofriends or kinsfolk he ever wrote was dear to those who received it; buthe--the most fastidious of men--would have much disliked to see them allprinted at length in Mr. Russell's indiscriminate volumes. He talked tome once of his wish to make a small volume--"such a little one!"--ofGeorge Sand's best letters. And that is just what he would have wishedfor himself. 

Among the letters that reached me on my uncle's death was one from Mr. Andrew Lang denouncing almost all the obituary notices of him. "Nobodyseems to know that he _was a poet_!" cries Mr. Lang. But his poeticblossoming was really over with the 'sixties, and in the hubbub thatarose round his critical and religious work--his attempts to drive"ideas" into the English mind, in the 'sixties and 'seventies--the mainfact that he, with Browning and Tennyson, _stood for English poetry_, inthe mid-nineteenth century, was often obscured and only slowlyrecognized. But it was recognized, and he himself had never any realdoubt of it, from the moment when he sent the "Strayed Reveller" to myfather in New Zealand in 1849, to those later times when his growingfame was in all men's ears. He writes to his sister in 1878:

 It is curious how the public is beginning to take my poems to its bosom after long years of comparative neglect. The wave of thought and change has rolled on until people begin to find a significance and an attraction in what had none for them formerly. 

But he had put it himself in poetry long before--this slow emergenceabove the tumult and the shouting of the stars that are to shine uponthe next generation. Mr. Garnett, in the careful and learned notice ofmy uncle's life and work in the _Dictionary of National Biography_, saysof his poetry that "most of it" is "immortal. " This, indeed, is thegreat, the mystic word that rings in every poet's ear from thebeginning. And there is scarcely any true poet who is not certain thatsooner or later his work will "put on immortality. " Matthew Arnoldexpressed, I think, his own secret faith, in the beautiful lines of hisearly poem, "The Bacchanalia--or the New Age":

 The epoch ends, the world is still. The age has talk'd and work'd its fill--

 * * * * *

 And in the after-silence sweet, Now strife is hush'd, our ears doth meet, Ascending pure, the bell-like fame Of this or that down-trodden name, Delicate spirits, push'd away In the hot press of the noonday. And o'er the plain, where the dead age Did its now silent warfare wage-- O'er that wide plain, now wrapt in gloom, Where many a splendor finds its tomb, Many spent fames and fallen nights-- The one or two immortal lights Rise slowly up into the sky To shine there everlastingly, Like stars over the bounding hill. The epoch ends, the world is still. 

 * * * * *

It was on the way home from Laleham, after my uncle's burial there, thatMr. George Smith gave me fresh and astonishing news of _RobertElsmere's_ success. The circulating libraries were being fretted todeath for copies, and the whirlwind of talk was constantly rising. Alittle later in the same month of April, if I remember right, I wasgoing from Waterloo to Godalming and Borough Farm, when, just as thetrain was starting, a lady rushed along the platform, waving a bookaloft and signaling to another lady who was evidently waiting to see heroff. "I've got it--I've got it!" she said, triumphantly. "Get in, ma-am--get in!" said the porter, bundling her into the compartment whereI sat alone. Then she hung out of the window, breathlessly talking. "They told me no chance for weeks--not the slightest! Then--just as Iwas standing at the counter, who should come up but somebody bringingback the first volume. Of course it was promised to somebody else; butas I was _there_, I laid hands on it, and here it is!" The train wentoff, my companion plunged into her book, and I watched her as she turnedthe pages of the familiar green volume. We were quite alone. I had halfa mind to say something revealing; but on the whole it was more amusingto sit still!

And meanwhile letters poured in. 

"I try to write upon you, " wrote Mr. Gladstone; "wholly despair ofsatisfying myself--cannot quite tell whether to persevere or desist. "Mr. Pater let me know that he was writing on it for the _Guardian_. "Itis a _chef d'oeuvre_ after its kind, and justifies the care you havedevoted to it. " "I see, " said Andrew Lang, on April 30th, "that _R. E. _is running into as many editions as _The Rights of Man_ by Tom Paine.... You know he is not _my_ sort (at least unless you have a ghost, amurder, a duel, and some savages). " Burne-Jones wrote, with the fun andsweetness that made his letters a delight:

 Not one least bitter word in it!--threading your way through intricacies of parsons so finely and justly.... As each new one came on the scene, I wondered if you would fall upon him and rend him--but you never do.... Certainly I never thought I should devour a book about parsons--my desires lying toward--"time upon once there was a dreadful pirate"--but I am back again five and thirty years and feeling softened and subdued with memories you have wakened up so piercingly--and I wanted to tell you this. 

And in the same packet lie letters from the honored and beloved EdwardTalbot, now Bishop of Winchester, Stopford Brooke--the Master ofBalliol--Lord Justice Bowen--Professor Huxley--and so many, many more. Best of all, Henry James! His two long letters I have already printed, naturally with his full leave and blessing, in the Library Edition ofthe novel. Not his the grudging and faultfinding temper that besets thelesser man when he comes to write of his contemporaries! Full ofgenerous honor for what he thought good and honest work, however faulty, his praise kindled--and his blame no less. He appreciated so fully_your_ way of doing it; and his suggestion, alongside, of what wouldhave been _his_ way of doing it, was so stimulating--touched one with solight a Socratean sting, and set a hundred thoughts on the alert. Ofthis delightful critical art of his his letters to myself over manyyears are one long illustration. 

And now--"There is none like him--none!" The honeyed lips are silent andthe helping hand at rest. 

With May appeared Mr. Gladstone's review--"the refined criticism of_Robert Elsmere_"--"typical of his strong points, " as Lord Brycedescribes it--certainly one of the best things he ever wrote. I had nosooner read it than, after admiring it, I felt it must be answered. Butit was desirable to take time to think how best to do it. At the momentmy one desire was for rest and escape. At the beginning of June we tookour eldest two children, aged eleven and thirteen, to Switzerland forthe first time. Oh! the delight of Glion! with its hay-fields thick withmiraculous spring flowers, the "peak of Jaman delicately tall, " and thatgorgeous pile of the Dent du Midi, bearing up the June heaven, to theeast!--the joy of seeing the children's pleasure, and the relief of themere physical rebound in the Swiss air, after the long months of strainand sorrow! My son, a slip of a person in knickerbockers, walked overthe Simplon as though Alps were only made to be climbed by boys ofeleven; and the Defile of Gondo, Domo d'Ossola, and beautifulMaggiore--they were all new and heavenly to each member of the party. Every year now there was growing on me the spell of Italy, the historic, the Saturnian land; and short as this wandering was, I remember, afterit was over, and we turned homeward across the St. Gothard, leavingItaly behind us, a new sense as of a hidden treasure in life--ofsomething sweet and inexhaustible always waiting for one's return; likea child's cake in a cupboard, or the gold and silver hoard of Odysseusthat Athene helped him to hide in the Ithacan cave. 

Then one day toward the end of June or the beginning of July my husbandput down beside me a great brown paper package which the post had justbrought. "There's America beginning!" he said, and we turned over thecontents of the parcel in bewilderment. A kind American friend had madea collection for me of the reviews, sermons, and pamphlets that had beenpublished so far about the book in the States, the correspondences, theodds and ends of all kinds, grave and gay. Every mail, moreover, beganto bring me American letters from all parts of the States. "No booksince _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ has had so sudden and wide a diffusion amongall classes of readers, " wrote an American man of letters, "and Ibelieve that no other book of equal seriousness ever had so quick ahearing. I have seen it in the hands of nursery-maids and of shopgirlsbehind the counters; of frivolous young women who read every novel thatis talked about; of business men, professors, and students.... Theproprietors of those large shops where anything--from a pin to apiano--can be bought, vie with each other in selling the cheapestedition. One pirate put his price even so low as four cents--two pence!"(Those, it will be remembered, were the days before Anglo-Americancopyright. )

Oliver Wendell Holmes, to whom I was personally a stranger, wrote to mejust such a letter as one might have dreamed of from the "Autocrat":"One of my elderly friends of long ago called a story of mine you maypossibly have heard of--_Elsie Venner_--'a medicated novel, ' and suchshe said she was not in the habit of reading. I liked her expression; ittitillated more than it tingled. _Robert Elsmere_ I suppose we shouldall agree is 'a medicated novel'--but it is, I think, beyond question, the most effective and popular novel we have had since _UncleTom's Cabin_. "

A man of science, apparently an agnostic, wrote, severely: "I regret thepopularity of _Robert Elsmere_ in this country. Our Western people arelike sheep in such matters. They will not see that the book was writtenfor a people with a State Church on its hands, so that a grossexaggeration of the importance of religion was necessary. It will reviveinterest in theology and retard the progress of rationalism. "

Another student and thinker from one of the universities of the West, after a brilliant criticism of the novel, written about a year after itspublication, winds up, "The book, here, has entered into the evolutionof a nation. "

Goldwin Smith--my father's and uncle's early friend--wrote me fromCanada:

 The Grange, Toronto, _Oct. 31, 1888. _

 My dear Mrs. Ward, --You may be amused by seeing what a stir you are making even in this sequestered nook of the theological world, and by learning that the antidote to you is _Ben-Hur_. I am afraid, if it were so, I should prefer the poison to the antidote. 

 The state of opinion on this Continent is, I fancy, pretty much that to which Robert Elsmere would bring us--Theism, with Christ as a model of character, but without real belief in the miraculous part of Christianity. Churches are still being everywhere built, money is freely subscribed, young men are pressing into the clerical profession, and religion shows every sign of vitality. I cannot help suspecting, however, that a change is not far off. If it comes, it will come with a vengeance; for over the intellectual dead level of this democracy opinion courses like the tide running in over a flat. 

 As the end of life draws near I feel like the Scotchman who, being on his death-bed when the trial of O'Connell was going on, desired his Minister to pray for him that he might just live to see what came of O'Connell. A wonderful period of transition in all things, however, has begun, and I should like very much to see the result. However, it is too likely that very rough times may be coming and that one will be just as well out of the way. 

 * * * * *

 Yours most truly, GOLDWIN SMITH. 

Exactly twenty years from the date of this letter I was in Toronto forthe first time, and paid my homage to the veteran fighter who, living ashe did amid a younger generation, hotly resenting his separatist andanti-Imperial views and his contempt for their own ideal of an equal andpermanent union of free states under the British flag, was yetgenerously honored throughout the Dominion for his services toliterature and education. He had been my father's friend atOxford--where he succeeded to Arthur Stanley's tutorship at UniversityCollege--and in Dublin. And when I first began to live in Oxford he wasstill Regius Professor, inhabiting a house very near that of my parents, which was well known to me afterward through many years as the house ofthe Max Müllers. I can remember the catastrophe it seemed to all hisOxford friends when he deserted England for America, despairing of therepublic, as my father for a while in his youth had despaired, and sickof what seemed to him the forces of reaction in English life. I waseighteen when _Endymion_ came out, with Dizzy's absurd attack on the"sedentary" professor who was also a "social parasite. " It would bedifficult to find two words in the English language more wholly andludicrously inappropriate to Goldwin Smith; and the furious letter tothe _Times_ in which he denounced "the stingless insults of a coward"might well have been left unwritten. But I was living then among OxfordLiberals, and under the shadow of Goldwin Smith's great reputation ashistorian and pamphleteer, and I can see myself listening with an angryand sympathetic thrill to my father as he read the letter aloud. Thencame the intervening years, in which one learned to look on GoldwinSmith as _par excellence_ the great man "gone wrong, " on that vitalquestion, above all, of a sane Imperialism. It was difficult, after atime, to keep patience with the Englishman whose most passionate desireseemed to be to break up the Empire, to incorporate Canada in the UnitedStates, to relieve us of India, that "splendid curse, " to detach from usAustralia and South Africa, and thereby to wreck forever that vision ofa banded commonwealth of free nations which for innumerable minds athome was fast becoming the romance of English politics. 

So it was that I went with some shrinking, yet still under the glamourof the old Oxford loyalty, to pay my visit at the Grange in 1908, walking thither from the house of one of the stanchest Imperialists inCanada, where I had been lunching. "You are going to see Mr. GoldwinSmith?" my host had said. "I have not crossed his threshold for twentyyears. I abhor his political views. All the same, we are proud of him inCanada!" When I entered the drawing-room, which was rather dark, thoughit was a late May afternoon, there rose slowly from its chair beside abright fire a figure I shall never forget. I had a fairly clearremembrance of Goldwin Smith in his earlier says. This was like hisphantom, or, if one may say so, without disrespect--his mummy. Shriveledand spare, yet erect as ever, the iron-gray hair, closely shaven beard, dark complexion, and black eyes still formidably alive, made on me animpression at once of extreme age and unabated will. A prophet!--stilldelivering his message--but well aware that it found but few listenersin a degenerate world. He began immediately to talk politics, denouncingEnglish Imperialism, whether of the Tory or the Liberal type. Canadianloyalty to the Empire was a mere delusion. A few years, he said, wouldsee the Dominion merged in the United States; and it was far best itshould be so. He spoke with a bitter, almost a fierce energy, as thoughperfectly conscious that, although I did not contradict him, I did notagree with him; and presently, to my great relief, he allowed the talkto slip back to old Oxford days. 

[Illustration: GOLDWIN SMITH]

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 yearsafter this conversation, on the Scherpenberg Hill, held by a Canadiandivision, the approach to its summit guarded by Canadian sentries, andhave looked out over that plain, where Canadian and British graves, lying in their thousands side by side, have forever sealed in blood theunion of the elder and the younger nations. 

As to the circulation of _Robert Elsmere_, I have never been able toascertain the exact figures in America, but it is probable, from thedata I have, that about half a million copies were sold in the Stateswithin a year of the book's publication. In England, an edition of 5, 000copies a fortnight was the rule for many months after the one-volumeedition appeared; hundreds of thousands have been circulated in thesixpenny and sevenpenny editions; it has been translated into mostforeign tongues; and it is still, after thirty years, a living book. Fifteen years after its publication, M. Brunetière, the well-knowneditor of the _Revue des deux Mondes_ and leader--in some sort--of theCatholic reaction in France, began a negotiation with me for theappearance of a French translation of the whole or part of the book inhis _Revue_. "But how, " I asked him (we were sitting in his editor'ssanctum, in the old house of the Rue de l'Université), "could itpossibly suit you, or the _Revue_, to do anything of the kind? And_now_--after fifteen years?"

But, according to him, the case was simple. When the book firstappeared, the public of the _Revue_ could not have felt any interest init. France is a logical country--a country of clear-cut solutions. Andat that time either one was a Catholic or a free thinker. And if one wasa Catholic, one accepted from the Church, say, the date of the Book ofDaniel, as well as everything else. Renan, indeed, left the Churchthirty years earlier because he came to see with certainty that the Bookof Daniel was written under Antiochus Epiphanes, and not when histeachers at St. Sulpice said it was written. But while the secular worldlistened and applauded, the literary argument against dogma made verylittle impression on the general Catholic world for many years. 

But now [said M. Brunetière] everything is different. Modernism hasarisen. It is penetrating the Seminaries. People begin to talk of it inthe streets. And _Robert Elsmere_ is a study in Modernism--or at anyrate it has so many affinities with Modernism, that _now_--the Frenchpublic would be interested. 

The length of the book, however, could not be got over, and the planfell through. But I came away from my talk with a remarkable man, not alittle stirred. For it had seemed to show that with all its manyfaults--and who knew them better than I?--my book had yet possessed acertain representative and pioneering force; and that, to some extent, at least, the generation in which it appeared had spoken through it. 

CHAPTER IV

FIRST VISITS TO ITALY

I have already mentioned in these papers that I was one of the examinersfor the Spanish Taylorian scholarship at Oxford in 1883, and again in1888. But perhaps before I go farther in these _Recollections_ I may putdown here--somewhat out of its place--a reminiscence connected with thefirst of these examinations, which seems to me worth recording. MySpanish colleague in 1883 was, as I have said, Don Pascual Gayangos, well known among students for his _History of Mohammedan Dynasties inSpain_, for his edition of the Correspondence of Cardinal Cisneros, andother historical work. _À propos_ of the examination, he came to see mein Russell Square, and his talk about Spain revived in me, for the time, a fading passion. Señor Gayangos was born in 1809, so that in 1883 hewas already an old man, though full of vigor and work. He told me thefollowing story. Unfortunately, I took no contemporary note. I give itnow as I remember it, and if any one who knew Don Pascual, or anystudent of Shakespearian lore, can correct and amplify it, no one willbe better pleased than I. He said that as quite a young man, somewherein the thirties of the last century, he was traveling through Spain toEngland, where, if I remember right, he had relations with Sir ThomasPhillipps, the ardent book and MSS. Collector, so many of whosetreasures are now in the great libraries of Europe. Sir Thomas employedhim in the search for Spanish MSS. And rare Spanish books. I gatheredthat at the time to which the story refers Gayangos himself was not muchacquainted with English or English literature. On his journey north fromMadrid to Burgos, which was, of course, in the days before railways, hestopped at Valladolid for the night, and went to see an acquaintance ofhis, the newly appointed librarian of an aristocratic family having a"palace" in Valladolid. He found his friend in the old library of theold house, engaged in a work of destruction. On the floor of the longroom was a large _brasero_ in which the new librarian was burning up aquantity of what he described as useless and miscellaneous books, with aview to the rearrangement of the library. The old sheepskin or vellumbindings had been stripped off, while the printed matter was burningsteadily and the room was full of smoke. There was a pile of old bookswhose turn had not yet come lying on the floor. Gayangos picked one up. It was a volume containing the plays of Mr. William Shakespeare, andpublished 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 heknew nothing about Shakespeare bibliography. He was struck, however, bythe name of Shakespeare, and also by the fact that, according to aninscription inside it, the book had belonged to Count Gondomar, who hadhimself lived in Valladolid and collected a large library there. But hisfriend the librarian attached no importance to the book, and it was togo into the common holocaust with the rest. Gayangos noticedparticularly, as he turned it over, that its margins were covered withnotes in a seventeenth-century hand. 

He continued his journey to England, and presently mentioned theincident to Sir Thomas Phillipps, and Sir Thomas's future son-in-law, Mr. Halliwell--afterward Halliwell-Phillipps. The excitement of bothknew no bounds. A First Folio--which had belonged to Count Gondomar, Spanish Ambassador to England up to 1622--and covered with contemporarymarginal notes! No doubt a copy which had been sent out to Gondomar fromEngland; for he was well acquainted with English life and letters andhad collected much of his library in London. The very thought of such atreasure perishing barbarously in a bonfire of waste paper was enough todrive a bibliophile out of his wits. Gayangos was sent back to Spainposthaste. But, alack! he found a library swept and garnished; no traceof the volume he had once held there in his hand, and on the face of hisfriend the librarian only a frank and peevish wonder that anybody shouldtease him with questions about such a trifle. 

But just dream a little! Who sent the volume? Who wrote the thickmarginal notes? An English correspondent of Gondomar's? Or Gondomarhimself, 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 withdrawal from Englandand his own death (1626), did he annotate the copy, storing there whathe could remember of the English stage, and of "pleasant Willy" himself, perhaps, during his two sojourns in London? And was the book overlookedas English and of no importance in the transfer of Gondomar's ownlibrary, a hundred and sixty years after his death, to Charles III ofSpain? And had it been sold, perhaps, for an old song, and with otherremnants of Gondomar's books, just for their local interest, to someValladolid grandee?

Above all, did those marginal notes which Gayangos had once idly lookedthrough contain, perhaps--though the First Folio does not, of course, include the Poems--some faint key to the perennial Shakespearemysteries--to Mr. W. H. , and the "dark lady, " and all the impenetrablestory 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, Outtopping knowledge. 

 * * * * *

One other recollection of the _Robert Elsmere_ year may fitly end mystory of it. In September we spent an interesting afternoon atHawarden--the only time I ever saw "Mr. G. " at leisure, amid his ownbooks and trees. We drove over with Sir Robert and Lady Cunliffe, Mr. Gladstone's neighbors on the Welsh border, with whom we were staying. Sir Robert, formerly an ardent Liberal, had parted from Mr. Gladstone inthe Home Rule crisis of 1886, and it was the first time they had calledat Hawarden since the split. But nothing could have been kinder than theGladstones' reception of them and of us. "Mr. G. " and I let theologyalone!--and he was at his best and brightest, talking books and poetry, showing us the octagonal room he had built out for his 60, 000 selectedletters--among them "hundreds from the Queen"--his library, the park, and the old keep. As I wrote to my father, his amazing intellectual andphysical vigor, and the alertness with which, leading the way, he"skipped up the ruins of the keep, " were enough "to make a LiberalUnionist thoughtful. " Ulysses was for the time in exile, but the "day ofreturn" was not far off. 

Especially do I remember the animation with which he dwelt on thehorrible story of Damiens, executed with every conceivable torture forthe attempted assassination of Louis Quinze. He ran through thecatalogue of torments so that we all shivered, winding up with acontemptuous, "And all that for just pricking the skin of that scoundrelLouis XV. "

I was already thinking of some reply both to Mr. Gladstone's article andto the attack on _Robert Elsmere_ in the _Quarterly_; but it took melonger than I expected, and it was not till March in the following year(1889) that I published "The New Reformation, " a Dialogue, in the_Nineteenth Century_. Into that dialogue I was able to throw the readingand the argument which had been of necessity excluded from the novel. Mr. Jowett was nervous about it, and came up on purpose from Oxford topersuade 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, andhistorical or critical controversy on another, and that a novel cannotbe justified by an essay. But my defense was not an essay; I put it inthe form of a conversation, and made it as living and varied as I could. By using this particular form, I was able to give the traditional aswell as the critical case with some fullness, and I took great painswith both. From a recently published letter, I see that Lord Acton wroteto Mr. Gladstone that the rôle played by the orthodox anti-rational andwholly 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 thetheological literature of the last century. To have provided a morerational and plausible representative of orthodoxy would, I think, haveslackened the pace and chilled the atmosphere of the novel. After all, what really supplied "the other side" was the whole system of things inwhich the readers of the book lived and moved--the ideas in which theyhad been brought up, the books they read, the churches in which theyworshiped, the sermons to which they listened every week. The novelchallenged this system of things; but it was always there to make reply. It was the eternal _sous-entendu_ of the story, and really gave thestory all its force. 

But in the dialogue I could put the underlying conflict of thought intoarticulate and logical form, and build up, in outline at least, thehistory of "a new learning. " When it was published, the dear Master, with a sigh of relief, confessed that it had "done no harm, " and "showeda considerable knowledge of critical theology. " I, too, felt that it haddone no harm--rather that it had vindicated my right to speak, not as anexpert and scholar--to that I never pretended for a moment--but as theinterpreter of experts and scholars who had something to say to theEnglish world, and of whom the English world was far too little aware. In the preface to one of the latest editions of his Bampton Lectures, Canon Liddon wrote an elaborate answer to it, which, I think, impliesthat it was felt to have weight; and if Lord Acton had waited for itsappearance he might not, perhaps, have been so ready to condemn thecharacter of Newcome as belonging "to the infancy of art. " ThatNewcome's type might have been infinitely better presented is indeedmost true. But in the scheme of the book, it is _right_. For theultimate answer to the critical intellect, or, as Newman called it, the"wild living intellect of man, " when it is dealing with Christianity andmiracle, is that reason is _not_ the final judge--is, indeed, in thelast resort, the enemy, and must at some point go down, defeated andtrampled on. "Ideal Ward, " and Archdeacon Denison, and Mr. Spurgeon--andnot Doctor Figgis or Doctor Creighton--are the apologists who in the endhold the fort. 

But with this analysis of what may be called the intellectualpresuppositions of _Robert Elsmere_, my mind began to turn to what Ibelieved to be the other side of the Greenian or Modernistmessage--i. E. , that life itself, the ordinary human life andexperience 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 inhis own soul, to the voice of the Eternal Friend, speaking throughConscience, through Society, through Nature. Hence _David Grieve_, whichwas already in my mind within a few months of the publication of _RobertElsmere_. We were at Borough Farm when the vision of it first came uponme. It was a summer evening of extraordinary beauty, and I had beenwandering through the heather and the pine woods. "The country"--toquote an account written some years ago--"was drenched in sunset; whitetowering thunder-clouds descending upon and mingling with the crimson ofthe heath, the green stretches of bracken, the brown pools upon thecommon, everywhere a rosy suffusion, a majesty of light interweavingheaven and earth and transfiguring all dear familiar things--the oldfarm-house, the sand-pit where the children played and the sand-martinsnested, the wood-pile by the farm door, the phloxes in the tumble-downfarm-yard, the cottage down the lane. " After months of rest, the fountof mental energy which had been exhausted in me the year before hadfilled again. I was eager to be at work, and this time on something"more hopeful, positive, and consoling" than the subject of theearlier book. 

A visit to Derbyshire in the autumn gave me some of the setting for thestory. Then I took the first chapters abroad during the winter toValescure, and worked them in that fragrant, sunny spot, makingacquaintance the while with a new and delightful friend, Emily Lawless, the author of _Hurrish_ and _Grania_, and of some few poems thatdeserve, I think, a long life in English anthologies. She and her mostracy, most entertaining mother, old Lady Cloncurry, were spending thewinter at Valescure, and my young daughter and I found them a greatresource. Lady Cloncurry, who was a member of an old Galway family, theKirwans of Castle Hackett, seemed to me a typical specimen of thoseAnglo-Irish gentry who have been harshly called the "English garrison"in Ireland, but who were really in the last century the most natural andkindly link between the two countries. So far as I knew them, they lovedboth, with a strong preference for Ireland. All that English peopleinstinctively resent in Irish character--its dreamy or laughingindifference toward the ordinary business virtues, thrift, prudence, tidiness, accuracy--they had been accustomed to, even where they had notbeen infected with it, from their childhood. They were not Catholics, most of them, and, so far as they were landlords, the part played by thepriests in the Land League agitation tried them sore. But Miss Lawless's_Grania_ is there to show how delicate and profound might be theirsympathy with the lovely things in Irish Catholicism, and her bestpoems--"The Dirge of the Munster Forest" and "After Aughrim"--give avoice to Irish suffering and Irish patriotism which it would be hard toparallel in the Nationalist or rebel literature of recent years. Thefact that they had both nations in their blood, both patriotisms intheir hearts, infused a peculiar pathos often into their lives. 

Pathos, however, was not a word that seemed--at first sight, at anyrate--to have much to do with Lady Cloncurry. She was the most energeticand sprightly _grande dame_ as I remember her, small, with vivid blackeyes and hair, her head always swathed in a becoming black lace coif, her hands in black mittens. She and her daughter Emily amused each otherperennially, and were endless good company, besides, for other people. Lady Cloncurry's clothes varied very little. She had an Irish contemptfor too much pains about your appearance, and a great dislike for_grande tenue_. When she arrived at an Irish country-house, of which thehostess told me the story, she said to the mistress of the house, onbeing taken to her room: "My dear, you don't want me to come down smart?I'm sure you don't! Of course I've brought some smart gowns. _They_[meaning her daughters] make me buy them. But they'll just do for mymaid to show your maid!" And there on the wardrobe shelves they laythroughout her visit. 

At Valescure we were within easy reach of Cannes, where the Actons weresettled at the Villa Madeleine. The awkwardness of the trains preventedus from seeing as much of them as we had hoped; but I remember somepleasant walks and talks with Lord Acton, and especially the vehementadvice he gave us, when my husband joined us and we started on a short, a very short, flight to Italy--for my husband had only a meager holidayfrom the _Times: "Go to Rome_! Never mind the journeys. Go! You willhave three days there, you say? Well, to have walked through Rome, tohave spent an hour in the Forum, another on the Palatine; to have seenthe Vatican, the Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter's; to have climbed theJaniculum and looked out over the Alban hills and the Campagna--and youcan do all that in three days--well!--life is not the same afterward. Ifyou 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 waywe saw Perugia and Assisi for the first time, dipping into spring assoon as we got south of the Apennines, and tasting that intoxication ofItalian sun in winter which turns northern heads. Of our week in Rome Iremember only the first overwhelming impression--as of somethinginfinitely old and _pagan_, through which Christianity moved about likea _parvenu_ amid an elder generation of phantom presences, already graywith time long before Calvary--that, and the making of a few newfriends. Of these friends, one, who was to hold a lasting place in myadmiration and love through after-years, shall be mentionedhere--Contessa Maria Pasolini. 

Contessa Maria for some thirty years has played a great role in thesocial and intellectual history of Italy. She is the daughter of one ofthe leading business families of Milan, sister to the Marchese Ponti, who was for long Sindaco of that great city, and intimately concerned inits stormy industrial history. She married Count Pasolini, the head ofan old aristocratic family with large estates in the Romagna, whosefather was President of the first Senate of United Italy. It was in theneighborhood of the Pasolini estates that Garibaldi took refuge after1848; and one may pass through them to reach the lonely hut in whichAnita Garibaldi died. 

Count Pasolini's father was also one of Pio Nono's Liberal Ministers, and the family, at the time, at any rate, of which I am speaking, combined Liberalism and sympathies for England with an enlightened andardent Catholicism. I first made friends with Contessa Maria when wefound her, on a cold February day, receiving in an apartment in thePiazza dei Santi Apostoli--rather gloomy rooms, to which her dark headand eyes, her extraordinary expressiveness and grace, and the vivacityof her talk, seemed to lend a positive brilliance and charm. In her Ifirst came to know, with some intimacy, a cultivated Italian woman, andto realize what a strong kindred exists between the English and theItalian educated mind. Especially, I think, in the case of the educated_women_ of both nations. I have often felt, in talking to an Italianwoman 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 callthe minor morals and judgments, which are often more important tofriendship and understanding than the greater matters of the law. How anItalian lady manages her servants and brings up her children; hergeneral attitude toward marriage, politics, books, social or economicquestions--in all these fields she is, in some mysterious way, muchnearer to the Englishwoman than the Frenchwoman is. Of course, theseremarks do not apply to the small circle of "black" families in Italy, particularly in Rome, who still hold aloof from the Italian kingdom andits institutions. But the Liberal Catholic, man or woman, who is bothpatriotically Italian and sincerely religious, will discuss anything oranybody in heaven or earth, and just as tolerantly as would Lord Actonhimself. They are cosmopolitans, and yet deep rooted in the Italiansoil. Contessa Maria, for instance, was in 1889 still near thebeginnings of what was to prove for twenty-five years the mostinteresting _salon_ in Rome. Everybody met there. Grandees of allnations, ambassadors, ecclesiastics, men of literature, science, archeology, art, politicians, and diplomats--Contessa Pasolini was equalto them all, and her talk, rapid, fearless, picturesque, full ofknowledge, yet without a hint of pedantry, gave a note of unity to ascene that could hardly have been more varied or, in less skilful hands, more full of jarring possibilities. But later on, when I knew herbetter, I saw her also with peasant folk, with the country people of theCampagna and the Alban hills. And here one realized the same ease, thesame sympathy, the same instinctive and unerring _success_, as one mightwatch with delight on one of her "evenings" in the Palazzo Sciarra. Whenshe was talking to a peasant woman on the Alban ridge, something broadand big and primitive seemed to come out in her, something of the _Magnaparens_, the Saturnian land; but something, too, that our Englishwomen, 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 lateryears, especially when we were at the Villa Barberini and I was writing_Eleanor_, in 1899. Now I will only recall a little saying of theContessa's at our first meeting, which lodged itself in memory. She didnot then talk English fluently, as she afterward came to do; but she waslearning English, with her two boys, from a delightful English tutor, and evidently pondering English character and ways--"Ah, youEnglish!"--I can see the white arm and hand, with its cigarette, wavingin the darkness of the old Roman apartment; the broad brow, the smilingeyes, and glint of white teeth. "You English! Why don't you _talk_?--why_won't_ you talk? If French people come here, there is no trouble. If Ijust tear up an envelope and throw down the pieces, they will talk aboutit a whole evening, and so _well_! But you English!--you begin, and thenyou stop; one must always start you again--always wind you up!"

Terribly true! But in her company, even we halting English learned totalk, in our bad French, or whatever came along. 

The summer of 1889 was filled with an adventure to which I still lookback with unalloyed delight, which provided me, moreover, with thesetting and one of the main themes of _Marcella_. We were at that timehalf-way through the building of a house at Haslemere, which was tosupersede Borough Farm. We had grown out of Borough and were for themoment houseless, so far as summer quarters were concerned. And for mywork's sake, I felt that eagerness for new scenes and suggestions whichis generally present, I think, in the story-teller of all shades. Suddenly, in a house-agent's catalogue, we came across an astonishingadvertisement. Hampden House, on the Chiltern Hills, the ancestral homeof John Hampden, of ship-money fame, was to let for the summer, and fora rent not beyond our powers. The new Lord Buckinghamshire, who hadinherited it, was not then able to live in it. It had, indeed, as weknew, been let for a while, some years earlier, to our old friends, SirMountstuart and Lady Grant Duff, before his departure for theGovernorship of Madras. The agents reported that it was scantilyfurnished, but quite habitable; and without more ado we took it! I havenow 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 deficiency is lamps! Last night we 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 blissfully about, exploring everything. 

And what a place to wander in! After we left it, Hampden was restored, beautified, and refurnished. It is now, I have no doubt, a charming andcomfortable country-house. But when we lived in it for three months--inits half-finished and tatterdemalion condition--it was Romance pure andsimple. The old galleried hall, the bare rooms, the neglectedpictures--among them the "Queen Elizabeth, " presented to the owner ofHampden by the Queen herself after a visit; the gray walls of KingJohn's garden, and just beyond it the little church where Hampden liesburied; the deserted library on the top floor, running along thebeautiful garden-front, with books in it that might have belonged to thepatriot himself, and a stately full-length portrait--painted about1600--which stood up, torn and frameless, among lumber of various kinds, the portrait of a beautiful lady in a flowered dress, walking in anElizabethan garden; the locked room, opened to us occasionally by theagent of the property, which contained some of the ancestral treasuresof the house--the family Bible among them, with the births of JohnHampden and his cousin, Oliver Cromwell, recorded on the same fly-leaf;the black cedars outside, and the great glade in front of the house, stretching downward for half a mile toward the ruined lodges, justvisible from the windows--all this mingling of nature and history withthe slightest, gentlest touch of pathos and decay, seen, too, under thegolden light of a perfect summer, sank deep into mind and sense. 

Whoever cares to turn to the first chapters of _Marcella_ will find asmuch of Hampden as could be transferred to paper--Hampden as it wasthen--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, joinedus in the venture. But she and I both went to Hampden to work. I set upin one half-dismantled room, and she in another, with theeighteenth-century drawing-room between us. Here our books and paperssoon made home. I was working at _David Grieve_; she, if I rememberright, at the brilliant book on _English Town Life_ she brought out in1891. My husband came down to us for long week-ends, and as soon as wehad provided ourselves with the absolute necessaries of life, visitorsbegan to arrive: Professor and Mrs. Huxley; Sir Alfred Lyall; M. Jusserand, then _Conseiller d'Ambassade_ under M. Waddington, now theFrench Ambassador to Washington; Mr. And Mrs. Lyulph Stanley, now Lordand Lady Sheffield; my first cousin, H. O. Arnold-Forster, afterward WarMinister in Mr. Balfour's Cabinet, and his wife; Mrs. Graham Smith, Laura Lyttelton's sister, and many kinsfolk. In those days Hampden wassix miles from the nearest railway station; the Great Central Railwaywhich now passes through the valley below it was not built, and allround us stretched beechwoods and commons and lanes, untouched since thedays of Roundhead and Cavalier, where the occasional sound ofwood-cutters in the beech solitudes was often, through a long walk, theonly hint of human life. What good walks and talks we had in thosesummer days! My sister had married Professor Huxley's eldest son, sothat with him and his wife we were on terms always of the closestintimacy and affection. "Pater" and "Moo, " as all their kith and kin andmany of their friends called them, were the most racy of guests. He hadbeen that year pursuing an animated controversy in the _NineteenthCentury_ with Doctor Wace, now Dean of Canterbury, who had also--about ayear before--belabored the author of _Robert Elsmere_ in the _QuarterlyReview_. The Professor and I naturally enjoyed dancing a little on ouropponents--when there was none to make reply!--as we strolled aboutHampden; 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 sointeresting, and its horizon so full of light and color! Of his wife, "Moo, " who outlived him many years, how much one might say! In this veryyear, 1889, Huxley wrote to her from the Canaries, whither he had gonealone for his health:

 Catch me going out of reach of letters again. I have been horridly anxious. Nobody--children or any one 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 hereight years in his youth, and her sunny, affectionate nature, with itsveins both of humor and of stoicism, gave her man of genius exactly whathe wanted. She survived him for many years, living her own life atEastbourne, climbing Beachy Head in all weathers, interested ineverything, and writing poems of little or no technical merit, butraised occasionally by sheer intensity of feeling--about herhusband--into something very near the real thing. I quote these linesfrom 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 haveadded that touch of something provocative and challenging which drawsmen and women after it, like an Orpheus-music? I can see him sittingsilent, his legs crossed, his white head bent, the corners of his mouthdrooping, his eyes downcast, like some one spent and wearied, from whomall virtue had gone out. Then some one, a man he liked--but stilloftener a woman--would approach him, and the whole figure would wake tolife--a gentle, whimsical, melancholy life, yet possessed of a strangespell and pungency. Brooding, sad and deep, seemed to me to hold hisinmost mind. The fatalism and dream of those Oriental religions to whichhe had given so much of his scholar's mind had touched him profoundly. His poems express it in mystical and somber verse, and his volumes of_Asiatic Studies_ contain the intellectual analysis of that backgroundof thought from which the poems spring. 

Yet no one was shrewder, more acute, than Sir Alfred in dealing with themen and politics of the moment. He swore to no man's words, and one feltin him not only the first-rate administrator, as shown by his Indiancareer, 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 thesoul of honor; and there was that in his fragile and delicatepersonality which earned the warm affection of many friends. So gentle, so absent-minded, so tired he often seemed; and yet I could imaginethose gray-blue eyes of Sir Alfred's answering inexorably to any publicor patriotic call. He was a disillusioned spectator of the "greatmundane movement, " yet eternally interested in it; and the man who lovesthis poor human life of ours, without ever being fooled by it, at leastafter 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 uswe know well that he has long since sharpened on himself. 

When I think of M. Jusserand playing tennis on the big lawn at Hampden, and determined to master it, like all else that was English, memoryleads one back behind that pleasant scene to earlier days still. Wefirst knew the future Ambassador as an official of the French ForeignOffice, who spent much of his scanty holidays in a scholarly pursuit ofEnglish literature. In Russell Square we were close to the BritishMuseum, where M. Jusserand, during his visits to London, was deep inChaucerian and other problems, gathering the learning which he presentlybegan to throw into a series of books on the English centuries fromChaucer to Shakespeare. Who introduced him to us I cannot remember, butduring his work at the Museum he would drop in sometimes for luncheon ortea; so that we soon began to know him well. Then, later, he came toLondon as _Conseiller d'Ambassade_ under M. Waddington, an office whichhe filled till he became French Minister to Denmark in 1900. Finally, in1904, he was sent as French Ambassador to the United States, and therewe found him in 1908, when we stayed for a delightful few days at theBritish Embassy with Mr. And Mrs. Bryce. 

It has always been a question with me, which of two French friends isthe more wonderful English scholar--M. Jusserand or André Chevrillon, Taine's nephew and literary executor, and himself one of the leaders ofFrench letters; with whom, as with M. Jusserand, I may reckon now somethirty years of friendship. No one could say that M. Jusserand speaksour tongue exactly like an Englishman. He does much better. He usesit--always, of course, with perfect correctness and fluency--to expressFrench ideas and French wits, in a way as nearly French as the foreignlanguage will permit. The result is extraordinarily stimulating to ourEnglish wits. The slight differences both in accent and in phrase keepthe ear attentive and alive. New shades emerge; old _clichés_ are brokenup. M. Chevrillon has much less accent, and his talk is more flowinglyand convincingly English; for which, no doubt, a boyhood partly spent inEngland accounts. While for vivacity and ease there is little or nothingto choose. 

But to these two distinguished and accomplished men England and Americaowe a real debt of gratitude. They have not by any means always approvedof _our_ national behavior. M. Jusserand during his official career inEgypt was, I believe, a very candid critic of British administration andBritish methods, and in the days of our early acquaintance with him Ican remember many an amusing and caustic sally of his at the expense ofour politicians and our foreign policy. 

[Illustration: JEAN JULES JUSSERAND]

M. Chevrillon took the Boer side in the South African war, and took itwith passion. All the same, the friendship of both the diplomat and theman of letters for this country, based upon their knowledge of her, andwarmly returned to them by many English friends, has been a real factorin the growth of that broad-based sympathy which we now call theEntente. M. Chevrillon's knowledge of us is really uncanny. He knowsmore than we know ourselves. And his last book about us--_L'Angleterreet la Guerre_--is not only photographically close to the facts, but fullof a spiritual sympathy which is very moving to an English reader. Menof such high gifts are not easily multiplied in any country. But, looking to the future of Europe, the more that France and England--andAmerica--can cultivate in their citizens some degree, at any rate, ofthat intimate understanding of a foreign nation which shines soconspicuously in the work of these two Frenchmen the safer will thatfuture be. 

CHAPTER V

AMALFI AND ROME. HAMPDEN AND _MARCELLA_

It was in November, 1891, that I finished _David Grieve_, after a longwrestle of more than three years. I was tired out, and we fled south forrest to Rome, Naples, Amalfi, and Ravello. The Cappucini Hotel atAmalfi, Madame Palumbo's inn at Ravello, remain with me as places ofpure delight, shone on even in winter by a more than earthly sun. 

Madame Palumbo was, as her many guests remember, an Englishwoman, andshowed a special zeal in making English folk comfortable. And can oneever forget the sunrise over the Gulf of Salerno from the Ravellowindows? It was December when we were there; yet nothing spoke ofwinter. From the inn, perched on a rocky point above the coast, onelooked straight down for hundreds of feet, through lemon-groves andolive-gardens, to the blue water. Flaming over the mountains rose anunclouded sun, shining on the purple coast, with its innumerablerock-towns--"_tot congesta manu praeruptis oppida saxis_"--and sendingbroad paths over the "wine-dark" sea. Never, I think, have I felt theglory and beauty of the world more rapturously, more _painfully_--forthere is pain in it!--than when one was standing alone on a Decembermorning, at a window which seemed to make part of the precipitous rockitself, looking over that fairest of scenes. From Ravello we went backto Rome, and a short spell of its joys. What is it makes the peculiarpleasure of society in Rome? A number of elements, of course, enter in. The setting is incomparable; while the clashing of great world policies, represented by the diplomats, and of the main religious and Liberalforces of Europe, as embodied in the Papacy and modern Italy, kindles awarmth and animation in the social air which matches the clearness ofthe Roman day, when the bright spells of the winter weather arrive, andthe omnipresent fountains of the Eternal City flash the January orFebruary sun through its streets and piazzas. Ours, however, on thisoccasion, was only a brief stay. Again we saw Contessa Maria, this timein the stately setting of the Palazzo Sciarra; and Count Ugo Balzani, anold friend of ours and of the Creightons since Oxford days, historianand thinker, and, besides, one of the kindest and truest of men. But thefigure, perhaps, which chiefly stands out in memory as connected withthis short visit is that of Lord Dufferin, then our Ambassador in Rome. Was there ever a greater charmer than Lord Dufferin? In the sketch ofthe "Ambassador" in _Eleanor_, there are some points caught from theliving Lord Dufferin, so closely, indeed, that before the book came outI sent him the proofs and asked his leave--which he gave at once, in oneof the graceful little notes of which he was always master. For thediplomatic life and successes of Lord Dufferin are told in many officialdocuments and in the biography of him by Sir Alfred Lyall; but the keyto it all lay in cradle gifts that are hard to put into print. 

In the first place, he was--even at sixty-five--wonderfully handsome. Hehad inherited the beauty, and also the humor and the grace, of hisSheridan ancestry. For his mother, as all the world knows, was HelenSheridan, one of the three famous daughters of Tom Sheridan, thedramatist's only son. Mrs. Norton, the innocent heroine of the Melbournedivorce suit, was one of his aunts, and the "Queen of Beauty" at theEglinton Tournament--then Lady Seymour, afterward Duchess ofSomerset--was the other. His mother's memory was a living thing to himall his life; he published her letters and poems; and at Clandeboye, hisUlster home, --in "Helen's Tower"--he had formed a collection ofmemorials of her which he liked to show to those of whom he madefriends. "You must come to Clandeboye and let me show you Helen'sTower, " he would say, eagerly, and one would answer with hopefulvagueness. But for me the time never came. My personal recollections ofhim, apart from letters, are all connected with Rome, or Paris, whitherhe was transferred the year after we saw him at the Roman Embassy, inDecember, 1891. 

It was, therefore, his last winter at Rome, and he had only beenAmbassador there a little more than two years--since he ceased to beViceroy of India in 1889. But he had already won everybody's affection. The social duties of the British Embassy in Rome--what with the Italianworld in all its shades, the more or less permanent English colony, andthe rush of English tourists through the winter and spring--seemed to meby no means easy. But Lady Dufferin's dignity and simplicity, and LordDufferin'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, whowas not really "out. " And no sooner was she in the room, shyly hidingbehind her elders, than he discovered her. I can see him still, as hemade her a smiling bow, his noble gray head and kind eyes, the blueribbon crossing his chest. "You promised me a dance!" And so for herfirst waltz, in her first grown-up dance, D. Was well provided, nervousas the moment was. 

There is a passage in _Eleanor_ which commemorates first this playfulsympathy and tact which made Lord Dufferin so delightful to all ages, and next, an amusing conversation with him that I remember a year or twolater 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 he 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 be 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. "

 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. Remember 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 hendecasyllables. 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 havedescribed, suggested part of this conversation; and I find thefoundation of the rest in a letter written to my father from Parisin 1896. 

 We had a very pleasant three days in Paris ... Including a most agreeable couple of hours with the Dufferins. Lord Dufferin showed me 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 _délassement_ from official 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 he has to do, were amusing. An interview with Berthelot (the famous French chemist and friend of Renan) was really, he said, a deplorable business. Berthelot (Foreign Minister 1891-92) knew _everything_ but what he should have known as French Foreign Minister. And Jusserand's testimony 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 he has got a strong chief at last. 

I recollect that in the course of our exploration of the Embassy, wepassed through a room with a large cheval-glass, of the Empire period. Lord Dufferin paused before it, reminding me that the house had oncebelonged to Pauline Borghese. "This was her room and this glass washers. I often stand before it and evoke her. She is there somewhere--ifone had eyes to see!"

And I thought, in the darkening room, as one looked into the shadows ofthe glass, of the beautiful, shameless creature as she appears in theCanova statue in the Villa Borghese, or as David has fixed her, immortally young, in the Louvre picture. 

But before I leave this second Roman visit of ours, let me recall onemore figure in the _entourage_ of the Ambassador--a young attaché, fair-haired, with all the good looks and good manners that belong to thepost, and how much else of solid wit and capacity the years were then tofind out. I had already seen Mr. Rennell Rodd in the Tennant circle, where he was everybody's friend. Soon we were to hear of him in Greece, whence he sent me various volumes of poems and an admirable study of theMorea, then in Egypt, and afterward in Sweden; while through all thesearduous years of war (I write in 1917) he has been Ambassador in thatsame 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 feelings. Thepublic took warmly to the novel from the beginning; in its Englishcirculation and its length of life it has, I think, very nearly equaled_Robert Elsmere_; only after twenty-five years has it now fallen behindits predecessor. It has brought me correspondence from all parts and allclasses, more intimate and striking, perhaps, than in the case of anyother of my books. But of hostile reviewing at the moment of itsappearance there was certainly no lack! It was violently attacked in the_Scots Observer_, then the organ of a group of Scotch Conservatives andliterary men, with W. E. Henley at their head, and received unfriendlynotice from Mrs. Oliphant in _Blackwood_. The two _Quarterlies_ openedfire upon it, and many lesser guns. A letter from Mr. Meredith Townsend, the very able, outspoken, and wholly independent colleague of Mr. Huttonin the editorship of the _Spectator_, gave me some comfort under theseonslaughts!

 I have read every word of _David Grieve_. Owing to the unusual and unaccountable imbecility of the reviewing--(the _Athenaeum_ 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 itspredecessor at work in it, with perhaps a mellower kind of art. " HenryJames reviewed it--so generously!--so subtly!--in the _EnglishIllustrated_. Stopford Brooke and Bishop Creighton wrote to me with awarmth and emphasis that soon healed the wounds of the _Scots Observer_;and that the public was with them, and not with my castigators, wasquickly visible from the wide success of the book. 

Some of the most interesting letters that reached me about it were frommen of affairs who were voracious readers, but not makers of books--suchas Mr. Goschen, who "could stand an examination on it"; Sir James, afterward Lord Hannen, one of the Judges of the Parnell Commission; andLord Derby, the Minister who seceded, with Lord Carnarvon, fromDisraeli's Government in 1878. We had made acquaintance not long beforewith Lord Derby, through his niece, Lady Winifred Byng (now LadyBurghclere), to whom we had all lost our hearts--children andparents--at Lucerne in 1888. There are few things I regret more inrelation to London social life than the short time allowed me by fatewherein to see something more of Lord Derby. If I remember right, wefirst met him at a small dinner-party at Lady Winifred's in 1891, and hedied early in 1893. But he made a very great impression upon me, and, though he was generally thought to be awkward and shy in generalsociety, in the conversations I remember with him nothing could havebeen more genial or more attractive than his manner. He had been atRugby under my grandfather, which was a link to begin with; though heafterward went to Cambridge, and never showed, that I know of, any signsof the special Rugby influence which stamped men like Dean Stanley andClough. And yet of the moral independence and activity which mygrandfather prized and cultivated in his boys, there was certainly nolack in Lord Derby's career. For the greater part of his political lifehe was nominally a Conservative, yet the rank and file of his party onlyhalf trusted a mind trained by John Stuart Mill and perpetually broodingon social reform. As Lord Stanley, his close association and personalfriendship with Disraeli during the Ministries and politics of themid-nineteenth century have been well brought out in Mr. Buckle's lastvolume of the Disraeli _Life_. But the ultimate parting between himselfand Dizzy was probably always inevitable. For his loathing ofadventurous policies of all kinds, and of any increase whatever in thevast commitments of England, was sure at some point to bring him intoconflict with the imagination or, as we may now call it, the prescience, of Disraeli. It was strange to remember, as one watched him at thedinner-table, that he had been offered the throne of Greece in 1862. 

If he accepts the charge [wrote Dizzy to Mrs. Bridges Williams] I shalllose a powerful friend and colleague. It is a dazzling adventure for theHouse of Stanley, but they are not an imaginative race, and I fancy theywill prefer Knowsley to the Parthenon, and Lancashire to the Atticplain. It is a privilege to live in this age of rapid and brilliantevents. What an error to consider it an utilitarian age! It is one ofinfinite romance. Thrones tumble down and crowns are offered like afairy-tale. 

Sixteen years later came his famous resignation, in 1878, when the Fleetwas ordered to the Dardanelles, and Lord Derby, as he had now become, then Foreign Secretary, refused to sanction a step that might lead towar. That, for him, was the end as far as Toryism was concerned. In 1880he joined Mr. Gladstone, but only to separate from him on Home Rule in1886; and when I first knew him, in 1891, he was leader of the LiberalUnionist peers in the House of Lords. A little later he became Presidentof the great Labor Commission in 1892, and before he could seeGladstone's fresh defeat in 1893, he died. 

Speculatively he was as open-minded as a reader and follower of Millmight be expected to be. He had been interested in _Robert Elsmere_, andthe discussion of books and persons, to which it led him in conversationwith me, showed him fully aware of the new forces abroad in literatureand history. Especially interested, too, as to what Labor was going tomake of Christianity, and well aware--how could he fail to be, asChairman of that great, that epoch-making Commission of 1892?--of theadvancing strength of organized labor on all horizons. He appeared tome, too, as a typical North-countryman--a son of Lancashire, proud ofthe great Lancashire towns, and thoroughly at home in the life of theLancashire countryside. He could tell a story in dialect admirably. AndI realized that he had thought much--in his balanced, reticent way--onmatters in which I was then groping: how to humanize the relationsbetween employer and employed, how to enrich and soften the life of theworkman, how, in short, to break down the barrier between modernindustrialism and the stored-up treasures--art, science, thought--ofman's long history. 

So that when _David Grieve_ was finished I sent it to Lord Derby, notlong after our first meeting, in no spirit of empty compliment, and Ihave always kept his letter in return as a memento of a remarkablepersonality. Some day I hope there may be a Memoir of him; for none hasyet appeared. He had not the charm, the versatility, the easy classicalculture, of his famous father--"the Rupert of debate. " But with hisgreat stature--he was six feet two--his square head, and strong, smooth-shaven face, he was noticeable everywhere. He was a childlesswidower 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 wasparticularly interesting to me as representing a type I have once ortwice tried to draw--of the aristocrat standing between the old world, before railways and the first Reform Bill, which saw his birth, and thenew world and new men of the later half of the century. He wastraditionally with the old world; by conviction and conscience, I think, with the new; yet not sorry, probably, that he was to see no more thanits threshold!

The year 1892, it will be remembered, was the first year of Americancopyright: and the great success of _David Grieve_ in America, followingon the extraordinary vogue there of _Robert Elsmere_, in its piratededitions, brought me largely increased literary receipts. It seemed thatI was not destined, after all, to "ruin my publishers, " as I haddespondently foretold in a letter to my husband before the appearance of_Robert Elsmere;_ but that, with regular work, I might look forward to afairly steady income. We therefore felt justified in seizing anopportunity brought to our notice by an old friend who lived in theneighborhood, and migrating to a house north of London, in the realheart of Middle England. After leaving Borough Farm, we had built ahouse on a hill near Haslemere, looking south over the blue and purpleWeald; but two years' residence had convinced me that Surrey was almostas populous as London, and that real solitude for literary work was notto be found there--at any rate, in that corner of it where we had chosento build, and, also, while we were nursing our newly planted shrubberiesof baby pines and rhododendrons, there was always in my mind, as I findfrom letters of the time, a discontented yearning for "an old house andold trees"! We found both at Stocks, whither we migrated in the summerof 1892. The little estate had then been recently inherited by Mrs. Grey, mother of Sir Edward Grey, now Lord Grey of Falloden. We were atfirst tenants of the house and grounds, but in 1896 we bought the smallproperty from the Greys, and have now been for more than twenty yearsits happy possessors. The house lies on a high upland, under one of thelast easterly spurs of the Chilterns. It was built in 1780 (we rebuiltit in 1908) in succession to a much older house of which a few fragmentsremain, and the village at its gates had changed hardly at all in thehundred years which preceded our arrival. A few new cottages had beenbuilt; more needed to be built; and two residents, intimately connectedwith the past of the village, had built houses just outside it. Butvilladom did not exist. The village was rich in old folk, in whom werestored the memories and traditions of its quiet past. The postmaster, "Johnny Dolt, " who was nearing his eighties, was the universal refereeon all local questions--rights of way, boundaries, village customs, andthe like; and of some of the old women of the village, as they weretwenty-five years ago, I have drawn as faithful a picture as I could inone or two chapters of _Marcella_. 

But the new novel owed not only much of its scenery and setting, butalso its main incident, to the new house. We first entered intonegotiation for Stocks in January, 1892. In the preceding December twogamekeepers had been murdered on the Stocks property, in a field under abig wood, not three hundred yards from the house; and naturally thelittle community, as it lay in its rural quiet beneath its wooded hills, was still, when we first entered it, under the shock and excitement ofthe tragedy. We heard all the story on the spot, and then viewed it fromanother point of view--the sociopolitical--when we went down from Londonto stay at one of the neighboring country-houses, in February, and foundthe Home Secretary, Mr. Matthews, afterward Lord Llandaff, among theguests. The trial was over, the verdict given, and the two murdererswere under sentence of death. But there was a strong agitation going onin favor of a reprieve; and what made the discussion of it, in thiscountry-house party, particularly piquant was that the case, at thatvery moment, was a matter of close consultation between the judge andthe Home Secretary. It was not easy, therefore, to talk of it in Mr. Matthews's presence. Voices dropped and groups dissolved when heappeared. Mr. Asquith, who succeeded Mr. Matthews that very year as HomeSecretary, was also, if I remember right, of the party; and there was agood deal of rather hot discussion of the game laws, and of Englishlandlordism in general. 

With these things in my mind, as soon as we had settled into Stocks, Ibegan to think of _Marcella_. I wrote the sketch of the book inSeptember, 1892, and finished it in February, 1894. Many things went tothe making of it--not only the murdered keepers and the village talk, not only the remembered beauty of Hampden which gave me the main settingof the story, but a general ferment of mind, connected with much elsethat had been happening to me. 

For the New Brotherhood of _Robert Elsmere_ had become in some sort arealized dream; so far as any dream can ever take to itself thepractical garments of this puzzling world. To show that the faith ofGreen and Martineau and Stopford Brooke was a faith that would wear andwork--to provide a home for the new learning of a New Reformation, and apractical outlet for its enthusiasm of humanity--were the chief aims inthe minds of those of us who in 1890 founded the University HallSettlement in London. I look back now with emotion on that astonishingexperiment. The scheme had taken shape in my mind during the summer of1889, and in the following year I was able to persuade Doctor Martineau, Mr. Stopford Brooke, my old friend Lord Carlisle, and a group of otherreligious Liberals, to take part in its realization. We held a crowdedmeeting in London, and an adequate subscription list was raised withoutdifficulty. University Hall in Gordon Square was taken as a residencefor young men, and was very soon filled. Continuous teaching by the bestmen available, from all the churches, on the history and philosophy ofreligion, was one half the scheme; the other half busied itself with anattempt to bring about some real contact between brain and manualworkers. We took a little dingy hall in Marchmont Street, where theresidents of the Hall started clubs and classes, Saturday mornings, forchildren and the like. The foundation of Toynbee Hall--the UniversitiesSettlement--in East London, in memory of Arnold Toynbee, was then afresh and striking fact in social history. A spirit of fraternizationwas in the air, an ardent wish to break down the local and geographicalbarriers that separated rich from poor, East End from West End. The newventure in which I was interested attached itself, therefore, to agrowing movement. The work in Marchmont Street grew and prospered. Menand women of the working class found in it a real center of comradeship, and the residents at the Hall in Gordon Square, led by a remarkable manof deeply religious temper and Quaker origin, the late Mr. AlfredRobinson, devoted themselves in the evenings to a work marked by a verygenuine and practical enthusiasm. 

Soon it was evident that larger premises were wanted. It was in the dayswhen Mr. Passmore Edwards was giving large sums to institutions ofdifferent kinds in London, but especially to the founding of publiclibraries. He began to haunt the shabby hall in Marchmont Street, andpresently offered to build us a new hall there for classes and socialgatherings. But the scheme grew and grew, in my mind as in his. And whenthe question of a site arose we were fortunate enough to interest thepractical and generous mind of the chief ground landlord of Bloomsbury, the Duke of Bedford. With him I explored various sites in theneighborhood, 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 commodiousSettlement building in London, with a large garden behind it, made bythe Duke out of various old private gardens, and lent to the Settlementfor its various purposes. Mr. Passmore Edwards contributed £14, 000 toits cost, and it bears his name. It was opened in 1898 by Lord Peel andMr. Morley, and for twenty years it has been a center of social work andendeavor in St. Pancras. From it have sprung the Physically DefectiveSchools under the Education Authority, now so plentiful in London, andso frequent in our other large towns. The first school of the kind wasopened at this Settlement in 1898; and the first school ambulance inLondon was given to us by Sir Thomas Barlow for our Cripple Children. The first Play Center in England began there in 1898; and the firstVacation School was held there in 1902. 

During those twenty years the Settlement has played a large part in mylife. We have had our failures and our successes; and the original ideahas been much transformed with time. The Jowett Lectureship, stilldevoted to a religious or philosophical subject, forms a link with thereligious lecturing of the past; but otherwise the Settlement, like theMaster himself, stands for the liberal and spiritual life, withoutdefinitions or exclusions. Up to 1915 it was, like Toynbee Hall, aSettlement for University and professional men who gave their eveningsto the work. Since 1915 it has been a Women's Settlement under adistinguished head--Miss Hilda Oakeley, M. A. , formerly Warden of King'sCollege for Women. It is now full of women residents and full of work. There is a Cripple School building belonging to the Settlement, to theEast; our cripples still fill the Duke's garden with the shouts of theirplay; and hundreds of other children crowd into the building everyevening in the winter, or sit under the plane-trees in summer. Thecharming hall of the Settlement is well attended every winter week bypeople to whom the beautiful music that the Settlement gives is aconstant joy; the Library, dedicated to the memory of T. H. Green, has400 members; the classes and popular lectures have been steadily heldeven during this devastating war; the Workers' Educational Associationcarry on their work under our roof; mothers bring their babies to theInfant Welfare Center in the afternoon; there are orchestral and choralclasses, boys' clubs and girls' clubs. Only one club has closeddown--the Men's Club, which occupied the top floor of the InvalidChildren's School before the war. Their members are scattered overFrance, Salonika, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, and the Roll of Honor isa long one. 

Twenty years! How clearly one sees the mistakes, the lost opportunities, of such an enterprise! But so much is certain--that the Settlement hasbeen an element of happiness in many, many lives. It has had scores ofdevoted workers, in the past--men and women to whom the heart of itsfounder goes out in gratitude. And I cannot imagine a time when thespacious and beautiful house and garden, with all the activities thathave a home there, will not be necessary and welcome to St. Pancras. Isee it, in my dreams, at least, half a century hence, when all those whofirst learned from it and in it have gone their way, still serving "thefuture hour" of an England reborn. To two especially among the earlyfriends of the Settlement let me turn back with gratefulremembrance--George Howard, Lord Carlisle, whom I have alreadymentioned, and Stopford Brooke. Lord Carlisle was one of the mostliberal and most modest of men, an artist himself, and the friend ofartists. On a Sunday in Russell Square, when the drawing-room dooropened to reveal his fine head and shy, kind eyes, one felt how wellworth while it was to stay at home on Sunday afternoons! I find a littlenote from him in 1891, the year in which we left Russell Square to movewestward, regretting the "interesting old house" "with which I associateyou in my mind. " He was not an easy talker, but his listening had thequality that makes others talk their best; while the sudden play ofhumor or sarcasm through the features that were no less strong thanrefined, and the impression throughout of a singularly upright andhumane personality, made him a delightful companion. There were thosewho would gladly have seen him take a more prominent part in publiclife. Perhaps a certain natural indolence held him back; perhaps awonderful fairness of mind which made him slow to judge, and abnormallysensitive to "the other side. " It is well known that as a landlord heleft the administration of his great estates in the north almost whollyto his wife, and that, except in the great matter of temperance, he andshe differed in politics, Lady Carlisle--who was a Stanley ofAlderley--going with Mr. Gladstone at the time of the Home Rule split, while Lord Carlisle joined the Liberal Unionists. Both took a publicpart, and the political differences of the parents were continued intheir children. Only a very rare and selfless nature could have carriedthrough so difficult a situation without lack of either dignity orsweetness. Lord Carlisle, in the late 'eighties and early 'nineties, when I knew him best, showed no want of either. The restrictions he laidupon his own life were perhaps made natural by the fact that he wasfirst and foremost an artist by training and temperament, and that theordinary occupations, rural, social, or political, of the greatland-owning noble, had little or no attraction for him. In the years, atany rate, when I saw him often, I was drawn to him by our commoninterest in the liberalizing of religion, and by a common love of Italyand Italian art. I remember him once in the incomparable setting ofNaworth; 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 camevery early under the spell of that same strong and magnetic personality. While we were still at Oxford, through J. R. G. We made acquaintance withMr. Brooke, and with the wife whose early death in 1879 left desolateone of the most affectionate of men. I remember well Mr. Brooke's lastsermon in the University pulpit, before his secession, on grounds ofwhat 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 deepimpression upon one who was then much more responsive and recipient thanindividual. The sermon was a great success; but it was almost Mr. Brooke's latest utterance within the Anglican Church. The following yearcame the news of Mrs. Brooke's mortal illness. During our short meetingin 1877 I had been greatly attracted by her, and the news filled me withunbearable pain. But I had not understood from it that the end itselfwas near, and I went out into our little garden, which was a mass ofsummer roses, and in a bewilderment of feeling gathered all I couldfind--a glorious medley of bloom--that they might surround her, if onlyfor a day, with the beauty she loved. Next day, or the day after, shedied; and that basket of roses, arriving in the house of death--belated, incongruous offering!--has stayed with me as the symbol of so much elsethat is too late in life, and of our human helplessness and futility inthe face of sorrow. 

After our move to London, my children and I went for a long timeregularly to hear Mr. Brooke at Bedford Chapel. At the time, I oftenfelt very critical of the sermons. Looking back, I cannot bring myselfto say a critical word. If only one could still go and hear him! Whereare the same gifts, the same magnetism, the same compelling personalityto be found to-day, among religious leaders? I remember a sermon onElijah and the priests of Baal, which for color and range, formodernness, combined with ethical force and power, remains with me asperhaps the best I ever heard. And then, the service. Prayerssimplified, repetitions omitted, the Beatitudes instead of theCommandments, a dozen jarring, intolerable things left out; but for therest, no needless break with association. And the relief and consolationof it! The simple Communion service, adapted very slightly from theAnglican rite, and administered by Mr. Brooke with a reverence, anardor, a tenderness one can only think of with emotion, was an exampleof what _could_ be done with our religious traditions, for those whowant new bottles for new wine, if only the courage and the imaginationwere there. 

The biography of Mr. Brooke, which his son-in-law, Principal Jacks, hasjust brought out, will, I think, reveal to many what made the spell ofStopford Brooke, to a degree which is not common in biography. For _lepapier est bête_!--and the charm of a man who was both poet and artist, without writing poems or painting pictures, is very hard to hand on tothose who never knew him. But, luckily, Stopford Brooke's diaries andletters reflect him with great fullness and freedom. They have hisfaults, naturally. They are often exuberant or hasty--not, by any means, always fair to men and women of a different temperament from his own. Yet, on the whole, there is the same practical, warm-hearted wisdom inthem that many a friend found in the man himself when they went toconsult him in his little study at the back of Bedford Chapel, where hewrote his sermons and books, and found quiet, without, however, barringout the world, if it wanted him. And there breathes from them also theenduring, eager passion for natural and artistic beauty which made thejoy of his own life, and which his letters and journals may well kindlein others. His old age was a triumph in the most difficult of arts. Hewas young to the end, and every day of the last waiting years was happyfor himself, and precious to those about him. He knew what to give upand what to keep, and his freshness of feeling never failed. Perhaps hisbest and most enduring memorial will be the Wordsworth Cottage atGrasmere, which he planned and carried out. And I like to remember thatmy last sight of him was at a spot only a stone's-throw from thatcottage on the Keswick Road, his gray hair beaten back by the lightbreeze coming from the pass, and his cheerful eyes, full often, as itseemed to me, of a mystical content, raised toward the evening glow overHelm Crag and the Easedale fells. 

On the threshold also of the Settlement's early history there stands thevenerable figure of James Martineau--thinker and saint. For he was amember of the original Council, and his lectures on the Gospel of St. Luke, in the old "Elsmerian" hall, marked the best of what we tried togive in those first days. I knew Harriet Martineau in my childhood atFox How. Well I remember going to tea with that tremendous woman when Iwas eight years old; sitting through a silent meal, in much awe of hercap, her strong face, her ear-trumpet; and then being taken away to aneighboring 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 milefrom Fox How, and was always on friendly terms with my people. MatthewArnold had a true admiration for her--sturdy fighter that she was inLiberal causes. So had W. E. Forster; only he suffered a good deal at herhands, as she disapproved of the Education Bill, and contrived so tomanage her trumpet when he came to see her as to take all the argumentand give him all the listening! When my eldest child was born, acot-blanket arrived, knitted by Miss Martineau's own hands--the busyhands (soon then to be at rest) that wrote the _History of the Peace_, _Feats on the Fiord_, the _Settlers at Home_, and those excellentbiographical sketches of the politicians of the Reform and Corn Law daysin the _Daily News_, which are still well worth reading. 

Between Harriet Martineau and her brother James, as many people willremember, there arose an unhappy difference in middle life which wasnever mended or healed. I never heard him speak of her. His standardswere high and severe, for all the sensitive delicacy of his long, distinguished face and visionary eyes; and neither he nor she was of thestuff that allows kinship to supersede conscience. He published asomewhat vehement criticism of a book in which she was part author, andshe never forgave it. And although to me, in the University Hallventure, he was gentleness and courtesy itself, and though his presenceseemed to hallow a room directly he entered it, one felt always that hewas _formidable_. The prophet and the Puritan lay deep in him. Yet inhis two famous volumes of Sermons there are tones of an exquisitetenderness and sweetness, together with harmonies of prose style, thatremind me often how he loved music and how his beautiful white headmight be seen at the Monday Popular Concerts, week after week, histhinker's brow thrown back to catch the finest shades ofJoachim's playing. 

The year after _David Grieve_ appeared, Mr. Jowett died. His long letterto me on the book contained some characteristic passages, of which Iquote the following:

 I should like to have a good talk with you. I seldom get any one to talk on religious 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 If 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 weekend with him at Balliol, and thatwas my last sight of my dear old friend. The year 1893 was for me one ofillness, and of hard work both in the organization of the new Settlementand in the writing of _Marcella_. But that doesn't reconcile me to therecollection of how little I knew of his failing health till, suddenly, in September the news reached me that he was lying dangerously ill inthe house of Sir Robert Wright, in Surrey. 

 "Every one 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--"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 farther from him the originality andgreatness of his character will become more and more clear to Oxford andto England. The men whom he trained are now in the full stream ofpolitics and life. His pupils and friends are or have been everywhere, and they have borne, in whatever vocation, the influence of his mind orthe mark of his friendship. Lord Lansdowne, Mr. Asquith, Lord JusticeBowen, Lord Coleridge, Lord Milner, Sir Robert Morier, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, Lord Goschen, Miss Nightingale, and a hundred others of thenation's leaders--amid profoundest difference, the memory of "theMaster" has been for them a common and a felt bond. No other religiouspersonality of the nineteenth century--unless it be that of Newman--hasstood for so much. In his very contradictions and inconsistencies ofthought he was the typical man of a time beset on all sides by newproblems to which Jowett knew very well there was no intellectualanswer; while through the passion of his faith in a Divine Life, whichmakes itself known to man, not in miracle or mystery, but through thechannels of a common experience, he has been a kindling force in manyhearts and minds, and those among the most important to England. Meanwhile, to these great matters the Jowettan oddities andidiosyncrasies added just that touch of laughter and surprise that makesa man loved by his own time and arrests the eye and ear of posterity. 

CHAPTER VI

_HELBECK OF BANNISDALE_

The coming out of _Marcella_, in April, 1894, will always mark for meperhaps the happiest date in my literary life. The book, for all thehard work that had gone to it, had none the less been a pleasure towrite; and the good-will that greeted it made the holiday I hadearned--which again was largely spent in Rome--a golden time. Not longafter we left England, "Piccadilly, " my sister wrote me, was "placardedwith _Marcella_, " the name appearing on the notice-boards of most of theevening papers--a thing which never happened to me before or since; andwhen we arrived in Rome, the content-bills of the London newspapers, displayed in the Piazza di Spagna, announced her no less flamingly. Theproof-sheets of the book had been tried on various friends, as usual, with some amusing results. Bishop Creighton, with only the firsttwo-thirds of the book before him, wrote me denunciations of Marcella. 

 I am greatly interested in the book and pine for the _dénoûment_. 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.... 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 entirely.... I really hope Marcella may be converted. 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, carriedoff half the proofs to read on his journey to Yorkshire. 

 I so ravened on them that I sat still at Blosworth 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. Mrs. 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 no one letter in this old packet which moves me specially. It was on the 1st of March, 1894, that Mr. Gladstone said "Good-by" tohis Cabinet in the Cabinet room at Downing Street, and a little later inthe 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 alikeof the subject and of the admirable man of letters--himself aneye-witness--who records it. 

While Lord Kimberley and Sir William Harcourt, on behalf of the rest oftheir colleagues, were bidding their great chief farewell, "Mr. Gladstone sat composed and still as marble, and the emotion of theCabinet did not gain him for an instant. " When the spokesmen ceased, hemade his own little speech of four or five minutes in reply: "thenhardly above a breath, but every accent heard, he said, 'God bless youall. ' He rose slowly and went out of one door, while his colleagues withminds oppressed filed out by the other. "

On this moving scene there followed what Mr. Gladstone himself describedas the first period of comparative leisure he had ever known, extendingto four and a half months. They were marked first by increasingblindness, then by an operation for cataract, and finally by a moderatereturn of sight. In July he notes that "during the last months ofpartial incapacity I have not written with my own hand probably so muchas one letter a day. " In this faded packet of mine lies one of theserare letters, written with his own hand--a full sheet--from Dollis Hill, on April 27th. 

 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 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 agreeable 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 reading, in which every character embodyingviews opposed to those of the author "is exhibited as odious. " With thishe warmly contrasts the method and spirit of _David Grieve_, and thencontinues:

 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 definite arrangement for an expected operation on my eye. 

Eighty-five!--greatly crippled by influenza and blindness--yet "full ofprospective work"! The following year, remembering _Robert Elsmere_days, and _à propos_ of certain passages in his review of that book, Iventured to send him an Introduction I had contributed to mybrother-in-law Leonard Huxley's translation of Hausrath's _New TestamentTimes. _ This time the well-known handwriting is feebler and the old"fighter" is not roused. He puts discussion by, and turns instead tokind words about a near relative of my own who had been winningdistinctions 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 labor and leaves me, after a few hours upon it, good for very little else. And my perspective, dubious as it is, is filled with other work, in the Homeric region lying beyond. I hope it will be 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 indomitablespirit so far yielded to these limitations as to resign--or rathercontemplate resigning--the second great task of which he had spoken tome at Oxford, nine years before. "I have begun seriously to ask myselfwhether 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 timeat our neighbors', the Rothschilds, at Tring Park. He was then full ofanimation and talk, mainly of things political, and, indeed, not longbefore he had addressed a meeting at Chester on the Turkish massacres inArmenia, and was still to address a large audience at Liverpool on thesame subject--his last public appearance--a year later. When _GeorgeTressady_ appeared he sent me a message through Mrs. Drew that he fearedGeorge Tressady's Parliamentary conduct "was inconceivable in a man ofhonor"; and I was only comforted by the emphatic and laughing dissent ofLord Peel, to whom I repeated the verdict. "Nothing of the kind! But ofcourse he was thinking of _us_--the Liberal Unionists. "

Then came the last months when, amid a world's sympathy and reverence, the great life, in weariness and pain, wore to its end. The "lying instate" in Westminster Hall seemed to me ill arranged. But the buryingremains with me as one of those perfect things, which only the AnglicanChurch at its best, in combination with the immemorial associations ofEnglish 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 disappointing 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 marvelous. One seemed to hear the voice of the future already pealing through the Abbey--as though the verdict were secured, the judgment given. 

 We saw it all, admirably, from the Muniment Room, which is a sort of lower Triforium above the south Transept. To me, perhaps, the most thrilling moment was when, bending forward, one saw the white-covered coffin disappear amid the black crowd round it, and knew that it had sunk forever into its deep grave, amid that same primeval clay of Thorny Island on which Edward's Minister was first reared and the Red King built his hall of judgment and Council. The statue of Dizzy 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 Lords and Commons filled the transepts, a great black mass against the jeweled windows, the Lords 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 someother figures and scenes to be gathered from these years--1893-98--thatmay still interest this present day. Of the most varied kind! For, as Iturn over letters and memoranda, a jumble of recollections passesthrough my mind. Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, on the one hand, amelancholy, kindly man, amid the splendors of Waddesden; a meeting ofthe Social Democratic Federation in a cellar in Lisson Grove; days ofabsorbing interest in the Jewish East End, and in sweaters' workshops, while _George Tressady_ was in writing; a first visit to Mentmore whileLady Rosebery was alive; a talk with Lord Rosebery some time after herdeath, in a corner of a local ball-room, while _Helbeck_ was shapingitself about the old Catholic families of England, which revealed to meyet another and unsuspected vein of knowledge in one of the bestfurnished of minds; the Asquith marriage in 1894; new acquaintances andexperiences in Lancashire towns, 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 ofthe most racy of all possible companions; happy evenings in the Tademaand Richmond studios with music and good talk; occasional meetings withand letters from "Pater, " the dear and famous Professor, who, like myuncle, fought half the world and scarcely made an enemy; visits toOxford and old friends--such are the scenes and persons that come backto me as I read old letters, while all through it ran the continualstrain of hard literary work mingled with the new social and religiousinterests which the foundation of the Passmore Edwards Settlement hadbrought me. 

 We have been at Margot Tennant's wedding to-day [I wrote to my son on May 10, 1894]--a great function, very tiring, but very brilliant and amusing--occasionally dramatic, too, as, when after the service had begun, the sound of cheering in the street outside drowned the voice of the Bishop of Rochester, and warned us that Mr. Gladstone was arriving. Afterward at the house we shook hands with three Cabinet Ministers on the door-step, 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 Mr. 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, wasfinishing his brilliant _Foundations of Belief_, which came out in 1895. In acknowledging the copy which he sent me, I ventured to write somepages on behalf of certain arguments of the Higher Criticism whichseemed to me to deserve a fuller treatment than Mr. Balfour had beenwilling to give them--in defense also of our English idealists, such asGreen and Caird, in their relation to orthodoxy. A year or two earlier Ifind I had been breaking a lance on behalf of the same school of writerswith a very different opponent. In the controversy between ProfessorHuxley and Doctor Wace, in 1889, which opened with the famous article on"The Gadarene Swine, " the Professor had welcomed me as an ally, becauseof "The New Reformation, " which appeared much about the same time; andthe word of praise in which he compared my reply to Mr. Gladstone, tothe work "of a strong housemaid brushing away cobwebs, " gave me afearful joy! I well remember a thrilling moment in the Russell Squaredrawing-room in 1889, when "Pater" and I were in full talk, he in hisraciest and most amusing form, and suddenly the door opened, and "DoctorWace" was announced--the opponent with whom at that moment he wasgrappling his hardest in the _Nineteenth Century_. Huxley gave me amerry look--and then how perfectly they both behaved! I really think themeeting was a pleasure to both of them, and when my old chief in the_Dictionary of Christian Biography_ took his departure, Huxley found allkinds 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 andmoment, " and Christian Theism was a reasonable faith. And Huxley, incontroversy, was no more kind to my _sacra_ than to other people's. OnceI dared a mild remonstrance--in 1892--only to provoke one of his mostvigorous replies:

 MY DEAR M. --Thanks for your pleasant letter. I do not know whether I 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, neither Green, nor Martineau, nor the Cairds were in my mind when I talked of "Sentimental Deism, " but the "Vicaire Savoyard, " and Charming, and such as Voysey. There are two chapters of "Rousseauism, " I have not touched yet--Rousseauism in Theology, and Rousseauism in Education. When I write the former I shall try to show that the people of whom I speak as "sentimental deists" are the lineal descendants of the Vicaire 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. 

 ... 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 _Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion_, I will get it and study it. But as a rule "Philosophies of Religion" in my experience turn out to be only "Religions 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 superabundant.... 

 Ever yours affectionately, T. H. HUXLEY. 

A few more letters from him--racy, and living as himself--and then in1895, just after his first article on the "Foundations of Belief, " weheard with dismay of the illness which killed him. There was never a manmore beloved--more deeply mourned. 

The autumn of 1896 brought me a great loss in the death of an intimatefriend, Lady Wemyss--as marked a personality in her own circle as washer indomitable husband, the famous Lord Elcho, of the Volunteermovement, 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 andLady Wemyss, who were staying with the Master for the Sunday. I wassitting next to Lord Wemyss, and he presently discovered that I wasabsent-minded. And I found him so attractive and so human that I soontold him why. I had left a sick child at home, with a high temperature, and was fidgeting to get back to him. 

"What is the matter?--Fever?--throat? Aconite, of course! You're ahomeopath, aren't you? All sensible people are. Look here--I've got aservant with me. I'll send him with some aconite at once. Where do youlive?--in the Parks? All right. Give me your address. "

Out came an envelope and a pencil. A message was sent round thedinner-table to Lady Wemyss, whose powerful dreaming face beside theMaster lit up at once. The aconite was sent; the child's temperaturewent down; and, if I remember right, either one or both of his newmedical advisers walked up to the Parks the next day to inquire for him. So began a friendship which for just twenty years, especially from about1885 to 1896, meant a great deal to me. 

How shall I describe Lady Wemyss? An unfriendly critic has recentlyallowed me the power of "interesting fashionable ladies in things of themind. " Was Lady Wemyss a "fashionable lady"? She was the wife, certainly, of a man of high rank and great possessions; but I met herfirst as a friend--a dear and intimate friend, as may be seen from hiscorrespondence--of Mr. Jowett's; and Mr. Jowett was not very tolerant of"fashionable ladies. " She was in reality a strong and very simpleperson, with a natural charm working through a very reserved and oftenharsh manner, like the charm of mountain places in spring. She was aConservative, and I suppose an aristocrat, whatever that word may mean. She thought the Harcourt death-duties "terrible" because they broke upold families and old estates, and she had been brought up to think thatboth were useful. Yet I never knew anybody with a more instinctivepassion for equality. This means that she was simply and deeplyinterested in all sorts of human beings and all sorts of human lots;also that, although she was often self-conscious, it was theself-consciousness one sees in the thoughtful and richly natured young, whose growth in thought or character has outrun their means ofexpression, and never mean or egotistical. Her deep voice; her fine, marked features; and the sudden play of humor, silent, self-restrained, yet most infectious to the bystander, that would lighten through them;her stately ways; and yet, withal, her childlike love of loving andbeing loved by the few to whom she gave her deepest affection--in somesuch 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 watchinga real "fashionable lady" who had arrived in the afternoon and wassitting next Lord Wemyss at the farther end--with a wonderful frizzledhead, an infinitesimal waist sheathed in white muslin and blue ribbons, rouged cheeks, a marvelous concatenation of jewels, and a caressing, gesticulating manner meant, at fifty, to suggest the ways of "sweet andtwenty. " The frizzled head drew nearer and nearer to Lord Wemyss, thefingers flourished and pointed; and suddenly I heard Lady Wemyss's deepvoice, meditatively amused, beside me:

"Her fingers will be in Frank's eyes soon!" Or again, I see her, stalledbeneath the drawing-room table, on all-fours, by her imperiousgrandchildren, patiently playing "horse" or "cow, " till her scandalizeddaughter-in-law discovered her and ran to her release. Or in her lastillness, turning her noble head and faint, welcoming smile to the fewfriends that were admitted; and finally, in the splendid rest afterdeath, when those of us who had not known her in youth could guess whatthe beauty of her youth had been. 

She was an omnivorous and most intelligent reader, and a friend thatnever failed. Matthew Arnold was very fond of her, and she of him; LauraLyttelton, who was nearly forty years her junior, loved her dearly andnever felt the bar of years; the Master owed much to her affection, andgratefully acknowledged it. The _Commonplace Book_, privately printedafter her death, showed the range of interests which had played upon herfresh and energetic mind. It was untrained, I suppose, compared to thewoman graduate of to-day. But it was far less tired; and all itsadventures were of its own seeking. 

It was in 1896, not long after the appearance of _George Tressady_, thata conversation in a house on the outskirts of the Lakes suggested to methe main plot of _Helbeck of Bannisdale. _ The talk turned on thefortunes of that interesting old place, Sizergh Castle, near Kendal, andof the Catholic family to whom it then still belonged, though mortgagesand lack of pence were threatening imminently to submerge an ancientstock that had held it unbrokenly, from father to son, through manygenerations. 

The relation between such a family--pinched and obscure, yet with itsown proud record, and inherited consciousness of an unbroken loyalty toa once persecuted faith--and this modern world of ours struck me as anadmirable subject for a novel. I thought about it next day, all througha long railway journey from Kendal to London, and by the time I reachedEuston the plot of _Helbeck of Bannisdale_ was more or less clear to me. 

I confided it to Lord Acton a little while afterward. We discussed it, and he cordially encouraged me to work it out. Then I consulted myfather, my Catholic father, without whose assent I should never havewritten the book at all; and he raised no difficulty. So I only hadto begin. 

But I wanted a setting--somewhere in the border country between theLakes mountains and Morecambe Bay. And here another piece of good luckbefell, almost equal to that which had carried us to Hampden for thesummer of 1889. Levens Hall, it appeared, was to be let for thespring--the famous Elizabethan house, five miles from Kendal, and abouta mile from Sizergh. I had already seen Levens; and we took thechance at once. 

Bannisdale in the novel is a combination, I suppose, of Sizergh andLevens. The two houses, though of much the same date, are really verydifferent, and suggest phases of life quite distinct from each other. Levens compared to Sizergh is--or was then, before the modernrestoration of Sizergh--the spoiled beauty beside the shabby ascetic. Levens has always been cared for and lived in by people who had money tospend upon the house and garden they loved, and the result is awonderful example of Elizabethan and Jacobean decoration, mellowed bytime into a perfect whole. Yet, for my purposes, there was alwaysSizergh, close by, with its austere suggestions of sacrifice andsuffering under the penal laws, borne without flinching by a longsuccession of quiet, simple, undistinguished people. 

We arrived there in March, 1897. The house greeted us on a clear andchilly evening under the mingled light of a frosty sunset, and the blazeof wood fires which had been lit everywhere to warm its new guests. 

 At last we arrived--saw the wonderful gray 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 chimneypieces in the drawing-room, the arms of Elizabeth over the hall fire, the stucco birds and beasts running round the Hall, showed dimly in the scanty lamplight (we shall want about six more lamps!)--and the beauty of the marvelous old place took us all by storm. Then through endless passages and kitchens, bright with long rows of copper pans and molds, 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 ofa treacherous and tardy spring. Guests came to stay with us--HenryJames, above all; the Creightons, he then in the first months of thatremarkable London episcopate, which in four short years did so much toraise the name and fame of the Anglican Church in London, at least forthe lay mind; the Neville Lytteltons, who had been since 1893 our summerneighbors at Stocks; Lord Lytton, then at Cambridge; the Sydney Buxtons;old Oxford friends, and many kinsfolk. The damson blossom along thehedgerows that makes of these northern vales in April a glisteningnetwork of white and green, the daffodils and violets, thelilies-of-the-valley in the Brigsteer woods came and went, the _Helbeck_made steady progress. 

But we left Levens in May, and it took me another eight months to finishthe book. Except perhaps in the case of _Bessie Costrell_, I was nevermore possessed by a subject, more shut in by it from the outer world. And, though its contemporary success was nothing like so great as thatof 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 forabroad I was seized with misgivings lest certain passages in the talk ofDoctor Friedland, who, it will perhaps be remembered, is made thespokesman in the book of certain points in the _intellectual_ caseagainst Catholicism, should wound or distress him. I, therefore, nosooner reached Italy than I sent for the proofs again, and worked atthem as much as fatigue would let me, softening them, and, I think, improving them, too. Then we went on to Florence, and rest, coming homefor the book's publication in June. 

The joy and emotion of it were great. George Meredith, J. M. Barrie, Paul Bourget, and Henry James--the men who at that time stood at thehead of my own art--gave the book a welcome that I can never forget. George Meredith wrote:

 Your _Helbeck of Bannisdale_ held me firmly in the reading and remains with 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 shows the classic so distinctly to view.... Yet a word of thanks for Doctor Friedland. He is the voice of spring in the book. 

J. M. Barrie's generous, enthusiastic note delights and inspires me againas I read it over. Mr. Morley, my old editor and critic, wrote: "I findit intensely interesting and with all the elements of beauty, power, andpathos. " For Leslie Stephen, with whom I had only lately made warm andclose friends, I had a copy bound, without the final chapter, that thebook might not, by its tragic close, depress one who had known so muchsorrow. Sir Alfred Lyall thought--"the story reaches a higher pitch ofvigor and dramatic presentation than is to be found even in your laterbooks"; while Lord Halifax's letter--"how lovable they both are, each inhis way, and how true to the ideal on both sides!"--and others, from Mr. Godkin, of the American _Nation_, from Frederic Harrison, Lord Goschen, Lord Dufferin, and many, many more, produced in me that curious moodwhich for the artist is much nearer dread than boasting--dread that thebest is over and that one will never earn such sympathy again. Oneletter not written to myself, from Mr. George Wyndham to Mr. WilfredWard, I have asked leave to print as a piece of independent criticism:

 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 loves him passionately, will, in fact, marry him. She will either discover an ingenious way out of her woods 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 toward religion, without knowledge of his arguments for that attitude, I think that Mrs. 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 picture of incompatibility, but, being a true picture, 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 holiday of that summer atStocks; the sense of having come through a great wrestle, and findingeverything--my children, the garden, my little Huxley nephews, books andtalk, the Settlement where we were just about to open our CrippleSchool, and all else in life, steeped in a special glamour. It fadedsoon, no doubt, "into the light of common day"; but if I shut mythoughts and eyes against the troubles of these dark hours of war, I canfeel my way back into the "wind-warm space" and look into the faces thatearth knows no more--my father, Leslie Stephen, Alfred Lyall, Mr. Goschen, Alfred Lyttelton, H. O. Arnold-Forster, my sister, JuliaHuxley, my eldest brother--a vanished company!

And in the following year, to complete the story, I owed to _Helbeck_ astriking and unexpected hour. A message reached me in November, 1898, tothe 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 splendidCrown Prince, in his white uniform, whom we had seen at Schwalbach in1872, had finished early in 1890 with his phantom reign and torturedlife, 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 theverge of the terrible illness which killed her two years later. To meher life and personality--or, rather, the little I knew of them--hadalways been very interesting. She had, of course, the reputation ofbeing the ablest of her family, and the bitterness of her sudden andirreparable defeat at the hands of Fate and her son, in 1889-90, hadoften struck me as one of the grimmest stories in history. One incidentin it, not, I think, very generally known, I happened to hear from aneye-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 II 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 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 areall the implications of the story! It was in my mind as I traveled toWindsor on November 18, 1898. The following letter was written next dayto one of my children:

 D---- and I met at Windsor, and we mounted into the quadrangle, stopped at the third door on the right as Mrs. 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 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 honored--headache or no headache. As indeed it turned out. )

 Presently we saw the Queen's little pony-carriage pass along beyond the windows with the Empress Frederick, and the Grand Duke and Duchess Serge walking beside it, and the Indians behind. Then 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, gray-haired and in black, came forward to meet me.... We talked for about 50 minutes:--of German books and Universities--Harnack--Renan, 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 Church 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 bitterly, 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'Annunzio, quoted "my dear old friend Minghetti" as to the fundamental paganism in the Italian mind, asked me to write 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, 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 course Bismarck hated her. She is absolutely English, parliamentary, and anti-despotic.... When I ventured to say in bidding her Good-by, that I had often felt great admiration and deep sympathy for her, which is true--she threw 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 suffering, like herhusband, the last silence fell on this brave and stormy nature. Let usthank God for it as we look out upon Europe and see what her son hasmade of it. 

CHAPTER VII

THE VILLA BARBERINI. HENRY JAMES

It was in the summer of 1898 that some suggestions gathered from thelove-story of Châteaubriand and Madame de Beaumont, and jotted down on asheet of note-paper, led to the writing of _Eleanor_. Madame deBeaumont's melancholy life came to an end in Rome, and the Roman settingimposed 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 lifeand thought, so far as those currents are political, historical, orartistic, seem to be running at double tides, would be, I knew, impossible, and we began to make inquiries for a place outside Rome, yetnot too far away, where we might spend the spring. We tried to get anapartment at Frascati, but in vain. Then some friend suggested anapartment in the old Villa Barberini at Castel Gandolfo, well known tomany an English and French diplomat, especially to the diplomat's wifeand children, flying to the hills to escape the summer heat of Rome. Wefound by correspondence two kind little ladies living in Rome, whoagreed to make all the preparations for us, find servants, and provideagainst a possibly cold spring to be spent in rooms meant only for_villegiatura_ in the summer. We were to go early in March, and fires orstoves must be obtainable, if the weather pinched. 

The little ladies did everything--engaged servants, and bargained withthe Barberini Steward, but they could not bargain with the weather! On acertain March day when the snow lay thick on the olives, and all thefuries were wailing round the Alban hills--we arrived. My husband, whohad journeyed out with us to settle us in, and was then returning to hisLondon work, was inclined to mocking prophecies that I should soon beback in Rome at a comfortable hotel. Oh, how cold it was that firstnight!--how dreary on the great stone staircase, and in the bare, comfortless rooms! We looked out over a gray storm-swept Campagna, to adistant line of surf-beaten coast; the kitchen was fifty-two steps belowthe dining-room; the Neapolitan cook seemed to us a most formidablegentleman, suggesting stilettos, and we sat down to our first mealwondering 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 colors 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 goats, and wandering _bambini_; its magical glimpse of St. Peter's to the north, through a notch in a group of stone-pines; and, last and best, its marvelous terrace that roofed a crypto-porticus of the old villa, whence the whole vast landscape, from Ostia and the mountains of Viterbo to the Circæan promontory, might be discerned, where one might sit and watch 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 hadbeen unpacked, flowers had been brought in, the stoves were made toburn, the hard chairs and sofas had been twisted and turned intosomething more human and sociable, and we had begun to realize that wewere, after all, singularly fortunate mortals, put in possession forthree months--at the most moderate of rents!--of as much Italian beauty, antiquity, and romance as any covetous soul could hope for--with Rome atour gates, and leisurely time for quiet work. 

Our earliest guest was Henry James, and never did I see Henry James in ahappier light. A new light, too. For here, in this Italian country, andin the Eternal City, the man whom I had so far mainly known as aLondoner was far more at home than I; and I realized, perhaps more fullythan ever before, the extraordinary range of his knowledge andsympathies. 

Roman history and antiquities, Italian art, Renaissance sculpture, thepersonalities and events of the Risorgimento, all these solid_connaissances_ and many more, were to be recognized perpetually as richelements in the general wealth of Mr. James's mind. That he had readimmensely, observed immensely, talked immensely, became once moregradually and delightfully clear on this new field. That he spoke Frenchto perfection was of course quickly evident to any one who had even aslight acquaintance with him. M. Bourget once gave me a wonderfulillustration of it. He said that Mr. James was staying with himself andMadame Bourget at their villa at Hyeres, not long after the appearanceof Kipling's "Seven Seas. " M. Bourget, who by that time read and spokeEnglish fluently, complained of Mr. Kipling's technicalities, anddeclared that he could not make head or tail of McAndrew's Hymn. Whereupon Mr. James took up the book and, standing by the fire, frontinghis hosts, there and then put McAndrew's Hymn into vigorous idiomaticFrench--an extraordinary feat, as it seemed to M. Bourget. Somethingsimilar, it will be remembered, is told of Tennyson. "One evening, " saysF. T. Palgrave of the poet, "he read out, offhand, Pindar's greatpicture of the life of Heaven, in the Second Olympian, into pure modernprose splendidly lucid and musical. " Let who will decide which _tour deforce_ was the more difficult. 

But Mr. James was also very much at home in Italian, while in theliterature, history, and art of both countries he moved with thewell-earned sureness of foot of the student. Yet how little one everthought of him as a student! That was the spell. He wore hislearning--and in certain directions he was learned--"lightly, like aflower. " It was to him not a burden to be carried, not a possession tobe proud of, but merely something that made life more thrilling, morefull of emotions and sensations--emotions and sensations which he wasalways eager, without a touch of pedantry, to share with other people. His knowledge was conveyed by suggestion, by the adroitest of hints andindirect approaches. He was politely certain, to begin with, that youknew it all; then to walk _with you_ round and round the subject, turning it inside out, playing with it, making mock of it, and catchingit again with a sudden grip, or a momentary flash of eloquence, seemedto be for the moment his business in life. How the thing emerged, aftera few minutes, from the long involved sentences!--only involved becausethe impressions of a man of genius are so many, and the resources ofspeech so limited. This involution, this deliberation in attack, thisslowness of approach toward a point which in the end was generallytriumphantly rushed, always seemed to me more effective as Mr. Jamesused it in speech than as he employed it--some of us would say, toexcess--in a few of his latest books. For, in talk, his own livingpersonality--his flashes of fun--of courtesy--of "chaff"--were alwaysthere, to do away with what, in the written word, became a difficultstrain on attention. 

I remember an amusing instance of it, when my daughter D----, who washousekeeping for us at Castel Gandolfo, asked his opinion as to how todeal with the Neapolitan cook, who had been anything but satisfactory, in the case of a luncheon-party of friends from Rome. It was decided towrite a letter to the ex-bandit in the kitchen, at the bottom of thefifty-two steps, requesting him to do his best, and pointing out recentshortcomings. D----, whose Italian was then rudimentary, brought theletter to Mr. James, and he walked up and down the vast _salone_ of thevilla, striking his forehead, correcting and improvising. "A really nicepudding" was what we justly desired, since the Neapolitan genius forsweets is well known. Mr. James threw out half phrases--pursuedthem--improved upon them--withdrew them--till finally he rushed upon themagnificent bathos--"_un dolce come si deve_!"--which has ever sincebeen the word with us for the tiptop thing. 

With the country people he was simplicity and friendship itself. Irecollect him in close talk with a brown-frocked, barefooted monk, coming from the monastery of Palazzuola on the farther side of the Albanlake, and how the super-subtle, supersensitive cosmopolitan found notthe smallest difficulty in drawing out the peasant and getting atsomething real and vital in the ruder, simpler mind. And again, on anever-to-be-forgotten evening on the Nemi lake, when, on descending fromGenzano to the strawberry-farm that now holds the site of the famoustemple of Diana Nemorensis, we found a beautiful youth at the_fattoria_, who for a few pence undertook to show us the fragments thatremain. Mr. James asked his name. "Aristodemo, " said the boy, looking, as he spoke the Greek name, "like to a god in form and stature. " Mr. James's face lit up, and he walked over the historic ground beside thelad, Aristodemo picking up for him fragments of terra-cotta from thefurrows through which the plow had just passed, bits of the innumerablesmall figurines that used to crowd the temple walls as ex-votos, and arenow mingled with the _fragole_ in the rich alluvial earth. It was awonderful evening; with a golden sun on the lake, on the wide stretcheswhere the temple stood, and the niched wall where Lord Savile dug fortreasure and found it; on the great ship timbers also, beside the lake, wreckage from Caligula's galleys, which still lie buried in the deepestdepth of the water; on the rock of Nemi, and the fortress-like Orsinivilla; on the Alban Mount itself, where it cut the clear sky. Ipresently came up with Mr. James and Aristodemo, who led us on serenely, a young Hermes in the transfiguring light. One almost looked for thewinged feet and helmet of the messenger god! Mr. James paused--his eyesfirst on the boy, then on the surrounding scene. "Aristodemo!" hemurmured, smiling, and more to himself than me, his voice caressing theword. "What a name! What a place!"

On another occasion I recall him in company with the well-knownantiquary, Signer Lanciani, who came over to lunch, amusing us all bythe combination of learning with _le sport_ which he affected. Let mequote the account of it given by a girl of the party:

 Signor Lanciani is a great man who combines being _the_ top authority in his profession with a kindness and _bonhomie_ which make even an ignoramus feel happy with him--and with the frankest love for _flânerie_ 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"--And then suddenly--a pause, a deep sigh from his ample breast, and a whisper on the summer air--"I vonder--vether--von could make a golf-links around ziz garden!"

And I see still Mr. James's figure strolling along the terrace whichroofed the crypto-porticus of the Roman villa, beside the professor--theshort coat, the summer hat, the smooth-shaven, finely cut face, nowalive with talk and laughter, now shrewdly, one might say coldly, observant; the face of a satirist--but so human!--so alive to all thatunderworld of destiny through which move the weaknesses of men andwomen. We were sorry indeed when he left us. But there were many otherhappy meetings to come through the sixteen years that remained--meetingsat Stocks and in London; letters and talks that were landmarks in myliterary life 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 _Robert Elsmere_ letters, already published, run it hard. That, too, was followed by many more. But as I do not intend to givemore than a general outline of the years that followed on 1900, I willrecord 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 thewar. How doubly close by then he had grown to all our hearts! Hispassionate sympathy for England and France, his Englishnaturalization--a _beau geste_ indeed, but so sincere, so moving--thepity and wrath that carried him to sit by wounded soldiers and made himput all literary work aside as something not worth doing, so that hemight spend time and thought on helping the American ambulance inFrance--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, butwe were in it again for a few weeks, drawn into the rushing tide ofwar-talk and war anxieties. The room was full when Henry James came in. I saw that he was in a stirred, excited mood, and the key to it was soonfound. He began to repeat the conversation of an American envoy toBerlin--a well-known man--to whom he had just been listening. Hedescribed first the envoy's impression of the German leaders, politicaland military, of Berlin. "They seemed to him like men waiting in a roomfrom which the air is being slowly exhausted. They _know_ they can'twin! It is only a question of how long, and how much damage they cando. " The American further reported that after his formal business hadbeen done with the Prussian Foreign Minister, the Prussian, relaxing hiswhole attitude and offering a cigarette, said, "Now then, let me talk toyou frankly, as man to man!"--and began a bitter attack on the attitudeof President Wilson. Colonel ---- listened, and when the outburst wasdone, said: "Very well! Then I, too, will speak frankly. I have knownPresident Wilson for many years. He is a very strong man, physically andmorally. You can neither frighten him nor bluff him--"

And then, springing up in his seat, "And, by Heaven! if you want warwith America, you can have it to-morrow!"

Mr. James's dramatic repetition of this story, his eyes on fire, hishand striking the arm of his chair, remains with me as my last sight ofhim in a typical representative moment. 

Six months later, on March 6, 1916, my daughter and I were guests at theBritish Headquarters in France. I was there at the suggestion of Mr. Roosevelt and by the wish of our Foreign Office, in order to collect theimpressions and information that were afterward embodied in _England'sEffort_. We came down ready to start for the front, in a military motor, when our kind officer escort handed us some English telegrams which hadjust come in. One of them announced the death of Henry James; and allthrough that wonderful day, when we watched a German counter-attack inthe Ypres salient from one of the hills southeast of Poperinghe, theruined tower of Ypres rising from the mists of the horizon, the news wasintermittently with me as a dull pain, breaking in upon the excitementand novelty of the great spectacle around us. 

 "_A mortal, a mortal is dead_!"

I was looking over ground where every inch was consecrated to the deadsons of England, dead for her; but even through their ghostly voicescame the voice of Henry James, who, spiritually, had fought in theirfight and suffered in their pain. 

One year and a month before the American declaration of war. What hewould have given to see it--my dear old friend--whose life and geniuswill enter forever into the bonds uniting England and America!

 * * * * *

 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 "wonderand bloom, " no less than the ugly or heartbreaking things, which, likethe disfiguring rags of old Laertes, hide them from us--he could weavethem all, with an untiring hand, into the many-colored web of his art. Olive Chancellor, Madame Mauve, Milly, in _The Wings of a Dove_--themost 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 wealthand facility of it all that was so amazing! There is enough observationof character in a chapter of the _Bostonians, _ a story he thought littleof, and did not include in his collected edition, to shame a Wells novelof the newer sort, with its floods of clever, half-considered journalismin the guise of conversation, hiding an essential poverty of creation. _Ann Veronica_ and the _New Machiavelli_, and several other tales by thesame writer, set practically the same scene, and handle the samecharacters under different names. Of an art so false and confused HenryJames could never have been capable. His people, his situations, havethe sharp separateness--and something of the inexhaustibleness--ofnature, which does not mix her molds. 

As to method, naturally I often discussed with him some of the difficultproblems of presentation. The posthumous sketches of work in progress, published since his death, show how he delighted in these problems, intheir very difficulties, in their endless opportunities. As he oftensaid to me, he could never read a novel that interested him withouttaking it mentally to pieces and rewriting it in his own way. Some ofhis letters to me are brilliant examples of this habit of his. Technique, presentation, were then immensely important to him; importantas they never could have been to Tolstoy, who probably thought verylittle consciously about them. Mr. James, as we all know, thought agreat deal about them--sometimes, I venture to think, too much. In _TheWings of a Dove_, for instance, a subject full of beauty and tragedy isalmost spoiled by an artificial technique, which is responsible for ascene on which, as it seems to me, the whole illusion of the book isshattered. The conversation in the Venice apartment where the twofiancé's--one of whom, at least, the man, is commended to our sympathyas a decent and probable human being--make their cynical bargain in thevery presence of the dying Milly, for whose money they are plotting, isin some ways a _tour de force_ of construction. It is the central pointon which many threads converge and from which many depart. But to mymind, as I have said, it invalidates the story. Mr. James is herewriting 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 awonderful exercise in virtuosity; but a score of his slighter sketchesseem to me infinitely nearer to the truth and vitality of great art. Thebook in which perhaps technique and life are most perfectly blended--atany rate, among the later novels--is _The Ambassador_. There, the skillwith which a deeply interesting subject is focused from many points ofview, but always with the fascinating unity given to it, both by thepersonality of the "Ambassador" and by the mystery to which everycharacter in the book is related, is kept in its place, the servant, notthe master, of the theme. And the climax--which is the river scene, whenthe "Ambassador" penetrates at last the long-kept secret of thelovers--is as right as it is surprising, and sinks away throughadmirable modulations to the necessary close. And what beautiful thingsin the course of the handling!--the old French Academician and hisgarden, on the _rive gauche_, for example; or the summer afternoon onthe upper Seine, with its pleasure-boats, and the red parasol whichfinally tells all--a picture drawn with the sparkle and truth of aDaubigny, only the better to bring out the unwelcome fact which is itscenter. _The Ambassador_ is the masterpiece of Mr. James's later workand manner, just as _The Portrait of a Lady_ is the masterpiece ofthe earlier. 

And the whole?--his final place?--when the stars of his generation riseinto their place above the spent field? I, at least, have no doubtwhatever about his security of fame; though very possibly he may be nomore generally read in the time to come than are most of the other greatmasters of literature. Personally, I regret that, from _What MaisieKnew_ onward, he adopted the method of dictation. A mind so teeming, andan art so flexible, were surely the better for the slight curb imposedby the physical toil of writing. I remember how and when we firstdiscussed the _pros_ and _cons_ of dictation, on the fell above CartmelChapel, when he was with us at Levens in 1887. He was then enchanted bythe endless vistas of work and achievement which the new method seemedto open out. And indeed it is plain that he produced more with it thanhe could have produced without it. Also, that in the use of dictation, as in everything else, he showed himself the extraordinary craftsmanthat he was, to whom all difficulty was a challenge, and the conquest ofit a delight. Still, the diffuseness and over-elaboration which were thenatural snares of his astonishing gifts were encouraged rather thanchecked by the new method; and one is jealous of anything whatever thatmay tend to stand between him and the unstinted pleasure of those tocome after. 

But when these small cavils are done, one returns in delight and wonderto the accomplished work. To the _wealth_ of it, above all--the deepdraughts from human life that it represents. It is true indeed thatthere are large tracts of modern existence which Mr. James scarcelytouches, 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 busyor leisured folk, men and women with breeding and without it, backedwith ancestors or merely the active "sons of their works, " young girlsand youths and children, he is a master indeed, and there is scarcelyanything in human feeling, normal or strange, that he cannot describe orsuggest. If he is without passion, as some are ready to declare, so areStendhal and Turguénieff, and half the great masters of the novel; andif he seems sometimes to evade the tragic or rapturous moments, it isperhaps only that he may make his reader his co-partner, that he mayevoke from us that heat of sympathy and intelligence which supplies thenecessary atmosphere for the subtler and greater kinds of art. 

And all through, the dominating fact is that it is "Henry James"speaking--Henry James, with whose delicate, ironic mind and most humanheart we are in contact. There is much that can be _learned_ 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 ofevery book is the personality of the man who wrote it. And in the end, that decides. 

CHAPTER VIII

ROMAN FRIENDS. _ELEANOR_

The spring of the following year (1900) saw us again in Rome. We spentour April fortnight there, of which I specially remember some amusinghours with Sir William Harcourt. I see myself, for instance, as a rathernervous tourist in his wake and that of the very determined wife of ayoung diplomat, storming the Vatican library at an hour when a bland_custode_ assured us firmly it was _not_ open to visitors. But SirWilliam's great height and bulk, aided by his pretty companion'sself-will, simply carried us through the gates by their naturalmomentum. Father Ehrle was sent for and came, and we spent a triumphantand delightful hour. After all, one is not an ex-British CabinetMinister for nothing. Sir William was perfectly civil to everybody, witha 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 andI shared a _legno_. I remember we talked of Mr. Chamberlain, with whomat that moment--May, 1899--Sir William was not in love; and of LordHartington. "Hartington came to me one day when we were both servingunder Mr. G. , and said to me in a temper, 'I wish I could get Gladstoneto 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 beentrying to make a bishop. ' 'Have you? Not much in your line, I shouldthink. 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 twowell-known Liberals] told me I must--so I wrote--- and not a word! Veryuncivil, 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 madea Canon!'"

The following year I sent him _Eleanor_, as a reminder of our meeting inRome, and he wrote:

 To me the revisiting of Rome is the brightest spot 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 women 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 circumstances. Even American girls, according to my observation, do not show so much toleration to their rivals, even though in the end they carry off their man.... 

 Your sincerely attached

 W. V. HARCOURT. 

Let me detach a few other figures from a gay and crowded time, theever-delightful and indefatigable Boni--Commendatore Boni--for instance. To hear him talk in the Forum or hold forth at a small gathering offriends on the problems of the earliest Italian races, and the causesthat met in the founding and growth of Rome, was to understand how noscholar or archeologist can be quite first-rate who is not alsosomething of a poet. The sleepy blue eyes, so suddenly alive; theapparently languid manner which was the natural defense against theouter world of a man all compact of imagination and sleepless energy;the touch in him of "the imperishable child, " combined with the broodingintensity of the explorer who is always guessing at the next riddle; thefun, simplicity, _bonhomie_ he showed with those who knew him well--allthese are vividly present to me. 

So, too, are the very different characteristics of Monseigneur Duchesne, the French Lord Acton; like him, a Liberal, and a man of vast learning, tarred with the Modernist brush in the eyes of the Vatican, but at heartalso like Lord Acton, by the testimony of all who know, a simple andconvinced believer. 

When we met Monseigneur Duchesne at the house of Count Ugo Balzani, orin the drawing-room of the French Embassy, all that showed, at first, was the witty ecclesiastic of the old school, an abbe of the eighteenthcentury, _fin_, shrewd, well versed in men and affairs, and capable ofthrowing an infinity of meaning into the inflection of a word or thelift of an eyebrow. I remember listening to an account by him of certainceremonies in the catacombs in which he had taken part, in the train ofan Ultramontane Cardinal whom he particularly disliked. He himself hadpreached the sermon. A member of the party said, "I hear your audiencewere greatly moved, Monsignore. " Duchesne bowed, with just a touch ofirony. Then some one who knew the Cardinal well and the relation betweenhim and Duchesne, said, with _malice prepense_, "Was his Eminence moved, Monsignore?" Duchesne looked up and shook off the end of his cigarette. "_Non, Monsieur_, " he said, dryly, "his Eminence was not moved--oh, notat all!" A ripple of laughter went round the group which had heard thequestion. For a second, Duchesne's eyes laughed, too, and were then asimpenetrable as before. My last remembrance of him is as the center of asmall party in one of the famous rooms of the Palazzo Borghese whichwere painted by the Caracci, this time in a more serious andcommunicative mood, so that one realized in him more clearly thecosmopolitan and liberal scholar, whose work on the early Papacy, andthe origins of Christianity in Rome, is admired and used by men of allfaiths and none. Shortly afterward, a Roman friend of ours, anEnglishman who knew Monseigneur Duchesne well, described to me theimpressions of an English Catholic who had gone with him to Egypt onsome learned mission, and had been thrown for a time into relations ofintimacy with him. My friend reported the touch of astonishment in theEnglishman's mind, as he became aware of the religious passion in hiscompanion, the devotion of his daily mass, the rigor and simplicity ofhis personal life; and we both agreed that as long as Catholicism couldproduce such types, men at once so daring and so devout, so free, andyet so penetrated with--so steeped in--the immemorial life ofCatholicism, the Roman Church was not likely to perish out of Europe. 

Let me, however, contrast with Monseigneur Duchesne another Catholicpersonality--that of Cardinal Vaughan. I remember being asked to join asmall group of people who were to meet Cardinal Vaughan on the steps ofSt. Peter's, and to go with him, and Canon Oakley, an English convert toCatholicism, through the famous crypt and its monuments. We stood forsome twenty minutes outside St. Peter's, while Cardinal Vaughan, in themanner of a cicerone reeling off his task, gave us _in extenso_ thelegendary stories of St. Peter's and St. Paul's martyrdoms. Not a touchof criticism, of knowledge, of insight--a childish tale, told by a manwho had never asked himself for a moment whether he really believed it. I stood silently by him, inwardly comparing the performance with certainpages by the Abbe Duchesne, which I had just been reading. Then wedescended to the crypt, the Cardinal first kneeling at the statue of St. Peter. The crypt, as every one knows, is full of fragments fromChristian antiquity, sarcophagi of early Popes, indications of thestructures that preceded the present building, fragments from papaltombs, and so on. But it was quite useless to ask the Cardinal for anexplanation or a date. He knew nothing, and he had never cared to know. Again and again, I thought, as we passed some shrine or sarcophagusbearing a name or names that sent a thrill through one's historicalsense--"If only J. R. Green were here!--how these dead bones would live!"But the agnostic historian was in his grave, and the Prince of the RomanChurch passed ignorantly and heedlessly by. 

A little while before, I had sat beside the Cardinal at aluncheon-party, where the case of Doctor Schell, the Rector of theCatholic University of Würzburg, who had published a book condemned bythe Congregation of the Index, came up for discussion. Doctor Schell'sbook, _Catholicismus und Fortschritt_, was a plea on behalf of theCatholic Universities of Bavaria against the Jesuit seminaries whichthreatened to supplant them; and he had shown with striking clearnessthe disastrous results which the gradual narrowing of Catholic educationhad had on the Catholic culture of Bavaria. The Jesuit influence at Romehad procured the condemnation of the book. Doctor Schell at firstsubmitted; 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, ratherwith a kind of easy pity; but the recollection came back to me in thecrypt of St. Peter's, and I seemed to see the man who could not shut hisear to knowledge and history struggling in the grip of men like theCardinal, who knew no history. 

Echoes and reflections from these incidents will be found in _Eleanor_, and it was the case of Doctor Schell that suggested Father Benecke. 

So the full weeks passed on. Half _Eleanor_ had been written, and inJune we turned homeward. But before then, one visitor came to the VillaBarberini in our last weeks there, who brought with him, for myself, aspecial and peculiar joy. My dear father, with his second wife, arrivedto spend a week with us. Never before, throughout all his ardentCatholic life, had it been possible for him to tread the streets of Romeor kneel in St. Peter's. At last, the year before his death, he was toclimb the Janiculum, and to look out over the city and the plain whenceEurope received her civilization and the vast system of the CatholicChurch. He felt as a Catholic; but hardly less as a scholar, one to whomHorace and Virgil had been familiar from his boyhood, the greaterportion of them known by heart, to a degree which is not common now. Iremember well that one bright May morning at Castle Gandolfo, hevanished from the villa, and presently, after some hours, reappearedwith shining eyes. 

"I have been on the Appian Way--I have walked where Horace walked!"

In his own autobiography he writes: "In proportion to a man's good senseand soundness of feeling are the love and admiration, increasing withhis years, which he bears toward Horace. " An old-world judgment, somewill say, which to us, immersed in this deluge of war which is changingthe face of all things, may sound, perhaps, as a thin and ghostly voicefrom far away. It comes from the Oxford of Newman and Matthew Arnold, ofJowett and Clough; and for the moment, amid the thunder and anguish ofour time, it is almost strange to our ears. But when the tumult and theshouting die, and "peace has calmed the world, " whatever else may havepassed, the poets and the thinkers will be still there, safe in theirold shrines, for they are the "ageless mouths" of all mankind, when menare truly men. The supposed reformers, who thirst for the death ofclassical education, will not succeed, because man doth not live bybread alone, and certain imperishable needs in him have never been sofully met as by some Greeks and some Latins, writing in a vanishedsociety, which yet, by reason of their thought and genius, is still insome real sense ours. More science? More foreign languages? Moretechnical arts? Yes! All these. But if democracy is to mean thedisappearance of the Greek and Latin poets from the minds of the futureleaders of our race, the history of three thousand years is there toshow what the impoverishment will be. 

As to this, a personal experience, even from one who in Greek literatureis only a "proselyte of the gate, " may not be without interest. I shallnever forget the first time, when, in middle life, I read in the Greek, so as to understand and enjoy, the "Agamemnon" of Æschylus. The feelingof sheer amazement at the range and power of human thought--and at sucha date in history--which a leisurely and careful reading of that playawakened in me, left deep marks behind. It was as though for me, thenceforward, the human intellect had been suddenly related, much moreclearly than ever before, to an absolute, ineffable source, "notitself. " So that, in realizing the greatness of the mind of Aeschylus, the creative Mind from which it sprang had in some new and powerful waytouched my own; with both new light on the human Past, and mysteriouspromise for the Future. Now, for many years, the daily reading of Greekand Latin has been not only a pleasure, but the only continuous bit ofmental discipline I have been able to keep up. 

I do not believe this will seem exaggerated to those on whom Greekpoetry and life have really worked. My father, or the Master, or MatthewArnold, had any amateur spoken in similar fashion to them, would havesmiled, but only as those do who are in secure possession of someprecious thing, on the eagerness of the novice who has just laid aprecarious hold upon it. 

At any rate, as I look back upon my father's life of constant labor andmany 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 scholarand of the enthusiast for letters. He would not have bartered thesegreat things, these seeming phantoms--

 Eternal as the recurrent cloud, as air Imperative, refreshful as dawn-dew--

for any of the baser goods that we call real. A year and a half afterhis visit to Rome, he died in Dublin, where he had been for years aFellow and Professor of the Irish University, occupied in lecturing onEnglish literature, and in editing some of the most important EnglishChronicles for the Rolls Series. His monument, a beautiful medallion byMr. Derwent Wood, which recalls him to the life, hangs on the wall ofthe University Church, in Stephen's Green, which was built in Newman'stime and under his superintendence. The only other monument in thechurch is that to the great Cardinal himself. So once more, as in 1886, they--the preacher and his convert--are together. "_Domine, Deus meus, in Te speravi_. " So, on my father's tablet, runs the text below thequiet, sculptured face. It expresses the root fact of his life. 

A few weeks before my father's death _Eleanor_ appeared. It had taken mea year and a quarter to write, and I had given it full measure of work. Henry James wrote to me, on receipt of it, that it gave him

 . . . The chance to overflow into my favorite occupation of rewriting as I read, such fiction as--I can read. I took this liberty in an inordinate degree with Eleanor--and I always feel it the highest tribute I can pay. I recomposed and reconstructed 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 _mené à bonne fin_ so intricate and difficult a problem, and on having seen your subject 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 "criticize"--though I _could_ (that is, I _did_--but can't do it again)--rewrite. 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-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 recognize, than I should wish. It doesn't matter, and not a solitary reader in your millions, or 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. Good night. 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 tothose I might well wish to please. My old friend, Mr. Frederic Harrison, wrote to me:--"I have read it all through with great attention anddelight, and have returned to it again and again.... I am quite surethat it is the most finished and artistic of all your books and one ofthe most subtle and graceful things in all our modern fiction. " AndCharles Eliot Norton's letter from Shady Hill, the letter of one whonever praised perfunctorily or insincerely, made me glad:

 "It would be easier to write about the book to any one else but you.... You have added to the treasures of English imaginative literature, and no higher reward than this can any writer hope to gain. " The well-known and much-loved editor of the _Century_, Richard Watson Gilder, "on this the last Sunday 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 _forestieri_" "like surprising a bird on its nest"; and the scene beheld of Eleanor--Lucy 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"; and 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!"_ That is art.... But, above all, my dear lady, acknowledgments and praise for the hand that created "Lucy"--that recreated, rather--my dear countrywoman! Truly, that is an accomplishment and one that will endear its author to the whole new world. 

And again one asks whether the readers that now are write such generous, such encouraging things to the makers of tales, as the readers of twentyyears ago! If not, I cannot but think it is a loss. For praise is agreat tonic, and helps most people to do their best. 

 * * * * *

It was during our stay on the Alban hills that I first became consciousin myself, after a good many springs spent in Italy, of a deep andpassionate sympathy for the modern Italian State and people; a sympathywidely different from that common temper in the European traveler whichregards Italy as the European playground, picture-gallery, andcuriosity-shop, and grudges the smallest encroachment by the needs ofthe new nation on the picturesque ruin of the past. Italy in 1899 waspassing through a period of humiliation and unrest. The defeats of theluckless Erythrean expedition were still hot in Italian memory. Theextreme Catholic party at home, the sentimental Catholic tourist fromabroad, were equally contemptuous and critical; and I was oftenindignantly aware of a tone which seemed to me ungenerous and unjusttoward the struggling Italian State, on the part of those who had reallymost cause to be grateful for all that the youngest--and oldest--ofEuropean Powers had done in the forty years since 1860 to furnish itselfwith the necessary equipment, moral, legal, and material, of a moderndemocracy. 

This vein of feeling finds expression in _Eleanor_. Manisty representsthe scornful dilettante, the impatient accuser of an Italy he does notattempt to understand; while the American Lucy, on the other side drawsfrom her New England tradition a glowing sympathy for the Risorgimentoand its fruits, for the efforts and sacrifices from which modern Italyarose, that refuses to be chilled by the passing corruptions andscandals of the new _régime_. Her influence prevails and Manistyrecants. He spends six solitary weeks wandering through middle Italy, insearch of the fugitives--Eleanor and Lucy--who have escaped him--and atthe end of it he sees the old, old country and her people with neweyes--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!_--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 corruption, the incompetence of their leaders, the mischief of their 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 everything 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 womb. The birth is over. The organism is still weak, but it lives. 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, I prefixed to it the dedication--"To Italy, the beloved and beautiful, Instructress of our past, Delight of our present, Comrade of our future, the heart of an Englishwoman offers this book. "

"_Comrade of our future_. " As one looks out to-day upon the Italianfighting-line, where English troops are interwoven with those of Italyand France for the defense of the Lombard and Venetian plain against theattack of Italy's old and bitter enemy, an attack in which are concernednot only the fortunes of Italy, but those also of the British Empire, Iwonder what touch of prophecy, what whisper from a far-off day, suggested these words written eighteen years ago?

EPILOGUE

And here, for a time at least, I bring these _Recollections_ to anend with the century in which I was born, and my own fiftieth year. Since _Eleanor_ appeared, and my father died, eighteen years havegone--years for me of constant work, literary and other. On the onehand, increasing interest in and preoccupation with politics, owing topersonal links and friendships, and a life spent, as to half the year, in London, have been reflected in my books; and on the other, theEnglish rural scene, with its country houses and villages, its religion, and its elements of change and revolution, has been always at my homegates, as a perpetually interesting subject. Old historic situations, also, have come to life for me again in new surroundings, as in _LadyRose's Daughter_, _The Marriage of William Ashe_, and _Fenwick'sCareer;_ in _Richard Meynell_ I attempted the vision of a Churchof England recreated from within, with a rebel, and not--as in_Robert Elsmere_--an exile, for a hero; _Lady Connie_ is a pictureof Oxford as I saw her in my youth, as faithful as I can nowmake it; _Eltham House_ is a return to the method of _WilliamAshe_, and both _Lady Connie_ and _Missing_ have been writtensince the war. _Missing_ takes for its subject a fragmentfrom the edge of that vast upheaval which no novel of real lifein future will be able to leave out of its ken. In the first two yearsof the war, the cry both of writers and public--so far as the literatureof imagination was concerned--tended to be--"anything but the war"!There was an eager wish in both, for a time, in the first onrush of thegreat catastrophe, to escape from it and the newspapers, into the worldbehind it. That world looks to us now as the Elysian fields looked toAeneas as he approached them from the heights--full not only of souls ina blessed calm, but of those also who had yet to make their way intoexistence as it terribly _is_, had still to taste reality and pain. We were thankful, for a time, to go back to that kind, unconscious, unforeseeing world. But it is no longer possible. The war has become ourlife, and will be so for years after the signing of peace. 

As to the three main interests, outside my home life, which, as I lookback upon half a century, seem to have held sway over mythoughts--contemporary literature, religious development, and socialexperiment--one is tempted to say a few last summarizing things, though, amid the noise of war, it is hard to say them with any real detachmentof 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;Tennyson in 1892. I saw the Tennyson funeral in the Abbey, and rememberit vividly. The burying of Mr. Gladstone was more stately; this ofTennyson, as befitted a poet, had a more intimate beauty. A greatmultitude filled the Abbey, and the rendering, in Sir Frederick Bridge'ssetting, 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 archesoverhead with a dramatic effect not to be forgotten. Yet the fame of thepoet 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 anebbing tide. What was merely didactic in Tennyson is dead years ago; thedifficulties of faith and philosophy, with which his own mind hadwrestled, were, long before his death, swallowed up in others far morevital, to which his various optimisms, for all the grace in which heclothed them, had no key, or suggestion of a key, to offer. The"Idylls, " so popular in their day, and almost all, indeed, of thenarrative and dramatic work, no longer answer to the needs of ageneration that has learned from younger singers and thinkers a morerestless method, a more poignant and discontented thought. A literaryworld fed on Meredith and Henry James, on Ibsen or Bernard Shaw orAnatole France, or Synge or Yeats, rebels against the versifiedargument, however musical or skilful, built up in "In Memoriam, " andmakes mock of what it conceives to be the false history and weaksentiment of the "Idylls. " All this, of course, is true, and has beensaid a thousand times, but--and here again the broad verdict isemerging--it does not touch the lyrical fame of a supreme lyrical poet. It may be that one small volume will ultimately contain all that isreally immortal in Tennyson's work. But that volume, it seems to me, will be safe among the golden books of our literature, cherished alikeby 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 setface under the wide-awake, the energy of undefeated age that breathedfrom the figure, remains with me, stamped on my memory, like the gentleface of Mrs. Wordsworth, or a passing glimpse--a gesture--of GeorgeMeredith as we met on the threshold of Mr. Cotter Morison's house atHampstead, one day perhaps in 1886 or 1887, and he turned his handsomecurly head with a smile and a word when Mr. Morison introduced us. Hewas then not yet sixty, already a little lame, but the radiant physicalpresence scarcely marred. We had some passing talk that day, but--to myinfinite regret--that was the only time I ever saw him. Of his work andhis genius I began to be aware when "Beauchamp's Career"--a muchtruncated version--was coming out in the _Fortnightly_ in 1874. Ihad heard him and his work discussed in the Lincoln circle, where boththe Pattisons were quite alive to Meredith's quality; but I was at thetime and for long afterward under the spell of the French limpidity andclarity, 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 toCambridge, when we spent a week-end at the Bull Inn, and were the guestsby 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 likeFrederic Myers, Edmund Gurney, Mr. Gerald Balfour, Mr. George Prothero, and others, left a deep mark on me. Cambridge seemed to me then a hearthwhereon the flame of thought burnt with far greater daring and freedomthan at Oxford. Men were not so afraid of one another; the sharpreligious divisions of Oxford were absent; ideas were thrown up likeballs in air, sure that some light hand would catch and pass them on. And among the subjects which rose and fell in that warm electricatmosphere, was the emergence of a new and commanding genius in GeorgeMeredith. The place in literature that some of these brilliant men werealready giving to _Richard Feverel_, which had been published somefifteen years earlier, struck me greatly; but if I was honest withmyself, my enthusiasm was much more qualified than theirs. It was nottill _Diana of the Crossways_ came out, after we had moved toLondon, that the Meredithian power began to grip me; and to this day thesaturation with French books and French ideals that I owed to my uncle'sinfluence during our years at Oxford, stands somewhat between me and agreat master. And yet, in this case, as in that of Mr. James, there isno doubt that difficulty--even obscurity!--are part of the spell. Theman behind is _great enough_, and rewards the reader's effort tounderstand him with a sense of heightened power, just as a muscle isstrengthened by exercise. In other words, the effort is worth while; weare admitted by it to a world of beauty or romance or humor that withoutit we should not know; and with the thing gained goes, as inAlpine-climbing, the pleasure of the effort itself. 

Especially is this the case in poetry, where the artist's thoughtfashions 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 aremany of us who have wanted much help, in regard to it, from others--theyoung and ardent--who are the natural initiates, the "Mystae" of thepoetic world. But once let the strange and poignant magic of it, itsmusic in discord, its sharp sweetness, touch the inwardear--thenceforward we shall follow its piping. 

Let me record another regret for another lost opportunity. In spite ofcommon friends, and worlds that might have met, I never saw Robert LouisStevenson--the writer who more, perhaps, than any other of hisgeneration touched the feeling and won the affection of his time. Andthat by a double spell--of the life lived and the books written. Stevenson's hold both upon his contemporaries, and those who since hisdeath have had only the printed word of his letters and tales whereby toapproach him, has not been without some points of likeness--amid greatdifference--to the hold of the Brontës on their day and ours. The senseof an unsurpassable courage--against great odds--has been the same inboth cases; and a great tenderness in the public mind for work sogallant, so defiant of ill fortune, so loyal to its own aims. InStevenson's case, quite apart from the claims of his work as literature, there was also an added element which, with all their genius, theBrontës did not possess--the element of charm, the _petitcarillon, _ to which Renan attributed his own success in literature:undefinable, always, this last!--but supreme. [1] There is scarcely aletter of Stevenson's that is without it, it plays about the slendervolumes of essays or of travel that we know so well; but it is presentnot only in the lighter books and tales, not only in the enchantingfairy-tale, "Prince Otto, " but in his most tragic, or his mostintellectual work--in the fragment "Weir of Hermiston, " or in that finepiece of penetrating psychology and admirable narrative, _The Masterof Ballantrae_. It may, I think, be argued whether in the far futureStevenson will be more widely and actively remembered--whether he willenter into the daily pleasure of those who love literature--more as aletter-writer, or more as a writer of fiction. Whether, in other words, his own character and personality will not prove the enduring thing, rather than the characters he created. The volumes of letters, withtheir wonderful range and variety, their humor, their bravery, their_vision_--whether of persons or scenes--already mean to some of usmore than his stories, dear to us as these are. 

He died in his forty-fifth year, at the height of his power. If he hadlived ten--twenty--years longer, he might well have done work that wouldhave set him with Scott in the history of letters. As it is, he remainsthe most graceful and appealing, the most animated and delightful, figure in the literary history of the late nineteenth century. He issure of his place. "Myriad-footed Time will discover many otherinventions; but mine are mine!" And to that final award his poems noless than his letters will richly contribute--the haunting beauty of the"Requiem, " the noble lines "To my Father, " the lovely verses "In memoryof F. A. S. "--surely immortal, so long as mother-hearts endure. 

[Footnote 1: Greek: Ti gar chariton agapaton Anthropois apaneuthen;]

Another great name was steadily finding its place during our firstLondon years. Thomas Hardy had already published some of his best novelsin the 'seventies, and was in full production all through the 'eightiesand 'nineties. The first of the Hardy novels that strongly affected mewas the _Return of the Native_, and I did not read it till sometime after its publication. Although there had been a devoted andconstantly growing audience for Mr. Hardy's books for twenty yearsbefore the publication of _Tess of the Durbervilles, _ my ownrecollection is that Tess marked the conversion of the larger public, who then began to read all the earlier books, in that curiously changedmood which sets in when a writer is no longer on trial, but has, so tospeak, "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 amongthis tardy company--to realize their truth, sincerity, and humanity, inspite of the pessimism with which so many of them are tinged; theirbeauty also, notwithstanding the clashing discords that a poet, who isalso a realist, cannot fail to strike; their permanence in Englishliterature; and the greatness of Mr. Hardy's genius! Personally, I wouldmake only one exception. I wish Mr. Hardy had not written _Jude theObscure!_ On the other hand, in the three volumes of _TheDynasts_ he has given us one of the noblest, and possibly one of themost fruitful, experiments in recent English letters. 

Far more rapid was the success of Mr. Kipling, which came a decade laterthan Mr. Hardy's earlier novels. It thrills one's literary pulse now tolook back to those early paper-covered treasures, written by a youth, aboy of genius; which for the first time made India interesting tohundreds of thousands in the Western world; which were the heralds alsoof a life's work of thirty years, unfailingly rich, and still unspent!The debt that two generations owe to Mr. Kipling is, I think, pastcalculating. There is a poem of his specially dear to me--"To the TrueRomance. " It contains, to my thinking, the very essence and spirit ofhis work. Through all realism, through all technical accomplishment, through all the marvelous and detailed knowledge he has accumulated onthis wonderful earth, there rings the lovely Linos-song of the higherimagination, which is the enduring salt of art. Whether it is Mowgli, orKim, or the Brushwood Boy, or McAndrew, or the Centurion of the RomanWall, or the trawlers and submarines and patrol-boats to which he lendsactual life and speech, he carries through all the great company theflag of his lady--the flag of the "True Romance. " It was Meredith'sflag, and Stevenson's and Scott's--it comes handed down in an endlesschain from the story-tellers of old Greece. For a man to have takenundisputed place in that succession is, I think, the best and most thatliterary man can do. And that it has fallen to our generation to watchand rejoice in Rudyard Kipling's work may be counted among those giftsof the gods which bring no Nemesis with them. 

Another star--was it the one that danced when Beatrice was born?--wasrising about the same time as Rudyard Kipling's. _The Window inThrums_ appeared in 1889--a masterpiece to set beside the Frenchmasterpiece, drawn likewise from peasant life, of almost the same date, _Pêcheur d'Islande. _ Barrie's gift, also, has been a gift makingfor the joy of his generation; he too has carried the flag of the TrueRomance--slight, twinkling, fantastic thing, compared to that ofKipling, but consecrate to the same great service. 

And then beside this group of men, who, dealing as they constantly arewith the most prosaic and intractable material, are yet poets at heart, there appears that other group who, headed perhaps by Mr. Shaw, andkindred in method with Thomas Hardy, are the chief gods of a youngerrace, as hostile to "sentimentalism" as George Meredith, but withouteither the power--or the wish--to replace it by the forces of thepoetic imagination. Mr. Shaw, whose dramatic work has been the goad, thegadfly of a whole generation, stirring it into thought by the help of afascinating art, will not, I think, elect to stand upon his novels;though his whole work has deeply affected English novel-writing. But Mr. Wells and Mr. Arnold Bennett have been during the last ten or fifteenyears--vitally different as they are--the leaders of the New Novel--ofthat fiction which at any given moment is chiefly attracting andstimulating the men and women under forty. There is always a New Novel, and a New Poetry, as there was once, and many times, a New Learning. TheNew Novel may be Romantic, or Realist, or Argumentative. In our day itappears to be a compound of the last two--at any rate, in the novels ofMr. Wells. 

Mr. Wells seems to me a journalist of very great powers, of unequaleducation, and much crudity of mind, who has inadvertently strayed intothe literature of imagination. The earlier books were excellentstory-telling, though without any Stevensonian distinction; _Kipps_was almost a masterpiece; _Tono-Bungay_ a piece of admirablefooling, enriched with some real character-creation, a thing extremelyrare in Mr. Wells's books; while _Mr. Britling Sees It Through_ isperhaps more likely to live than any other of his novels, because thesubject with which it deals comes home so closely to so vast anaudience. Mr. Britling, considered as a character, has neither life norjoints. He, like the many other heroes from other Wells novels, whosenames one can never recollect, is Mr. Wells himself, talking this timeon a supremely interesting topic, and often talking extraordinarilywell. There are no more brilliant pages, of their kind, in modernliterature than the pages describing Mr. Britling's motor-drive on thenight of the declaration of war. They compare with the description ofthe Thames in _Tono-Bungay_. These, and a few others like them, will no doubt appear among the _morceaux choisis_ of a coming day. 

But who, after a few years more, will ever want to turn the restless, ill-written, undigested pages of _The New Machiavelli_ again--orof half a dozen other volumes, marked often by a curious monotony bothof plot and character, and a fatal fluency of clever talk? The onlything which can keep journalism alive--journalism, which is born of themoment, serves the moment, and, as a rule, dies with themoment--is--again the Stevensonian secret!--_charm_. Diderot, theprince of journalists, is the great instance of it in literature; thephrase "_sous le charme_" is of his own invention. But Mr. Wellshas not a particle of charm, and the reason of the difference is not farto seek. Diderot wrote for a world of friends--"_C'est pour moi etpour mes amis que je lis, que je réfléchis, que j'écris_"--Mr. Wellsfor 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 noill-nature in it. But the snarl is never very long absent from Mr. Wells's work; the background of it is disagreeable. Hence its completelack of magic, of charm. And without some touch of these qualities, the_à peu près_ of journalism, of that necessarily hurried andimprovised work which is the spendthrift of talent, can never becomeliterature, as it once did--under the golden pen of Denis Diderot. 

Sainte Beuve said of Stendhal that he was an _excitateur d'idées_. Mr. Wells no doubt deserves the phrase. As an able journalist, apreacher of method, of foresight, and of science, he has much to saythat his own time will do well to heed. But the writer among us who hasmost general affinity with Stendhal, and seems to me more likely to livethan Mr. Wells, is Mr. Arnold Bennett. Mr. Bennett's achievement in histhree principal books, the _Old Wives' Tale_, _Clayhanger_, and _Hilda Lessways_, has the solidity and relief--the uglinessalso!--of Balzac, or of Stendhal; a detachment, moreover, and acoolness, which Mr. Wells lacks. These qualities may well preserve them, if "those to come" find their subject-matter sufficiently interesting. But the _Comédie Humaine_ has a breadth and magnificence of generalconception which govern all its details, and Stendhal's work is linkedto one of the most significant periods of European history, and reflectsits teeming ideas. Mr. Bennett's work seems to many readers to be chokedby detail. But a writer of a certain quality may give us as much detailas he pleases--witness the great Russians. Whenever Mr. Bennettsucceeds in offering us detail at once so true and so exquisite as thedetail which paints the household of Lissy-Gory in _War and Peace_, or the visit of Dolly to Anna and Wronsky in _Anna Karénin_, or thenursing of the dying Nicolas by Kitty and Levin, he will have justifiedhis method--with all its _longueurs_. Has he justified it yet?

One great writer, however, we possess who can give us any detail helikes without tedium, because of the quality of the intelligence whichpresents it. Mr. Conrad is not an Englishman by race, and he is themaster, moreover, of a vast exotic experience of strange lands andforeign seas, where very few of his readers can follow him with anypersonal knowledge. And yet we instinctively feel that in all his bestwork he is none the less richly representative of what goes to make theEnglish mind, as compared with the French, or the German, or the Italianmind--a mind, that is, shaped by sea-power and far-flungresponsibilities, by all the customs and traditions, written andunwritten, which are the fruit of our special history, and ourlong-descended life. It is this which gives value often to Mr. Conrad'sslightest tales, or intense significance to detail, which, without thisbackground, would be lifeless or dull. In it, of course, he is at onewith 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 andscenes, at gestures and movements, magically clear and sharp. Mr. Kipling, on the other hand, is part of--intimately one with--what hetells us; never for a moment really outside it; though he has at commandevery detail and every accessory that he needs. 

Mr. Galsworthy, I hope, when this war is over, on which he has writtensuch vivid, such moving pages (I know! for in some of its scenes--on theSomme battle-fields, for instance--I have stood where he has stood), hasstill the harvest of his literary life before him. Since _The CountryHouse_ it does not seem to me that he has ever found a subject thatreally suits him--and "subject is everything. " But he has passion andstyle, and varied equipment, whether of training or observation; aboveall, an individuality it is abundantly worth while to know. 

On the religious development of the last thirty years I can find butlittle that is gladdening, to myself, at any rate, to say. There areferments going on in the Church of England which have shown themselvesin a series of books produced by Oxford and Cambridge men, each of themrepresenting some greater concession to modern critical and historicalknowledge than the one before it. The war, no doubt, has gripped thehearts and stirred the minds of men, in relation to the fundamentalproblems of life and destiny, as nothing else in living experience hasever done. The religious minds among the men who are perpetuallyfronting death in the battle-line seem to develop, on the one hand, anew and individual faith of their own, and, on the other, an instinctivecriticism of the faiths hitherto offered them, which in time may lead usfar. The complaints, meanwhile, of "empty churches" and the failing holdof the Church of England, are perhaps more persistent and moremelancholy than of old; and there is a general anxiety as to how theloosening and vivifying action of the war will express itselfreligiously when normal life begins again. The "Life and Liberty"movement in the Anglican Church, which has sprung up since the war, isendeavoring to rouse a new Christian enthusiasm, especially among theyoung; and with the young lies the future. But the war itself hasbrought us no commanding message, though all the time it may be silentlyproviding the "pile of gray 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 tohave been George Tyrrell. The two volumes of his biography, with alltheir absorbing interest, have not, I think, added much to the effect ofhis books. _A Much-abused Letter, Lex Orandi, Scylla andCharybdis_, and _Christianity at the Cross-Roads_ have settlednothing. What book of real influence does? They present manycontradictions; but are thereby, perhaps, only the more living. For oneleading school of thought they go not nearly far enough; for another agood deal too far. But they contain passages drawn straight from aburning spiritual experience, passages also of a compelling beauty, which can hardly fall to the ground unfruitful. Whether as FatherTyrrell's own, or as assimilated by other minds, they belong, at least, to the free movement of experimental and inductive thought, which, inreligion as in science, is ever the victorious movement, howeverfragmentary and inconclusive it may seem at any given moment to be. Other men--Doctor Figgis, for instance--build up shapely and plausiblesystems, on given material, which, just because they are plausible andshapely, can have very little to do with truth. It is the seekers, themen of difficult, half-inspired speech, like T. H. Green and GeorgeTyrrell, through whose work there flashes at intervals the "gleam" thatlights human thought a little farther on its way. 

Meanwhile, it must often seem to any one who ponders these past years, as if what is above all wanting to our religious moment is courage andimagination. If only Bishop Henson had stood his trial forheresy!--there would have been a seed of new life in this lifeless day. If only, instead of deserting the churches, the Modernists of to-daywould have the courage _to claim them!_--there again would be astirring of the waters. Is it not possible that Christianity, which wehave thought of as an old faith, is only now, with the falling away ofits original sheath-buds, at the beginning of its true and mightierdevelopment? A religion of love, rooted in and verified by the simplestexperiences of each common day, possessing in the Life of Christ asymbol and rallying cry of inexhaustible power, and drawing from its owncorporate life of service and aspiration, developed through millions ofseparate lives, the only reasonable hope of immortality, and the onlyconvincing witness to a Divine and Righteous Will at work in theuniverse;--it is under some such form that one tries to dream thefuture. The chaos into which religious observance has fallen at thepresent day is, surely, a real disaster. Religious services in which menand women cannot take part, either honestly or with any spiritual gain, are better let alone. Yet the ideal of a common worship is an infinitelynoble one. Year after year the simplest and most crying reforms in theliturgy of the Church of England are postponed, because nobody can agreeupon them. And all the time the starving of "the hungry sheep" goes on. 

But if religious ideals have not greatly profited by the war, it isplain that in the field of social change we are on the eve oftransformations--throughout Europe--which may well rank in history withthe establishment of the Pax Romana, or the incursion of the northernraces upon the Empire; with the Renaissance, or the French Revolution. In our case, the vast struggle, in the course of which millions ofBritish men and women have been forcibly shaken out of all their formerways of life and submitted to a sterner discipline than anything theyhave ever known, while, at the same time, they have been roused by merechange of circumstance and scene to a strange new consciousness both ofthemselves and the world, cannot pass away without permanently affectingthe life of the State and the relation of all its citizens to eachother. In the country districts, especially, no one of my years canwatch what is going on without a thrilling sense, as though, for us whoare nearing the last stage of life, the closed door of the future hadfallen mysteriously ajar and one caught a glimpse through it of a comingworld which no one could have dreamt of before 1914. Here, for instance, is a clumsy, speechless laborer of thirty-five, called up under theDerby scheme two years ago. He was first in France and is now inMesopotamia. On his first leave he reappears in his native village. Hisfamily and friends scarcely know him. Always a good fellow, he has risenimmeasurably in mental and spiritual stature. For him, as for Cortez, onthe "peak in Darien, " the veil has been drawn aside from wonders andsecrets of the world that, but for the war, he would have died withouteven guessing at. He stands erect; his eyes are brighter and larger; hisspeech is different. Here is another--a boy--a careless and troublesomeboy he used to be--who has been wounded, and has had a company officerof whom he speaks, quietly indeed, but as he could never have spoken ofany one in the old days. He has learned to love a man of another socialworld, with whom he has gone, unflinching, into a hell of fire andtorment. He has seen that other dare and die, leading his men, and haslearned 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 excitement of the new scenes, the new countries, cities, and men, has acted like flame on invisibleink, bringing out a hundred unexpected aptitudes, developing a mentalenergy that surprises themselves. "On my farm, " says a farmer I know, "Ihave both men that have been at the front, and are allowed to come backfor agricultural purposes, and others that have never left me. They wereall much the same kind of men before the war; but now the men who havebeen to the front are worth twice the others. I don't think they_know_ that they are doing more work, and doing it better than theyused to do. It is unconscious. Simply, they are twice the men theywere. "

And in the towns, in London, where, through the Play Centers, I knowsomething of the London boy, how the discipline, the food, the open air, the straining and stimulating of every power and sense that the war hasbrought about, seems to be transforming and hardening the race! In thenoble and Pauline sense, I mean. These lanky, restless lads have indeed"endured hardness. "

Ah, let us take what comfort we can from these facts, for they arefacts--in face of these crowded graveyards in the battle zone, and allthe hideous wastage of war. They mean, surely, that a new heat ofintelligence, a new passion of sympathy and justice, has been roused inour 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, andmake reforms easy which, but for the war, might have rent us in sunder. Employers and employed, townsman and peasant, rich and poor--in the earsof all, the same still small voice, in the lulls of the war tempest, seems to have been urging the same message. More life--moreopportunity--more leisure--more joy--more beauty!--for the masses ofplain men and women, who have gone so bare in the past and are nowputting forth their just and ardent claim on the future. 

Let me recall a few more personal landmarks in the eighteen years thathave passed since _Eleanor_ appeared, before I close. 

Midway in the course of them, 1908 was marked out for me, for whom ayearly visit to Italy or France, and occasionally to Germany, made thelimits of possible travel, by the great event of a spring spent in theUnited States and Canada. We saw nothing more in the States than everytourist sees--New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and a fewother towns; but the interest of every hour seemed to renew in me anervous energy and a capacity for enjoyment that had been flaggingbefore. Our week at Washington at the British Embassy with Mr. And Mrs. Bryce, as they then were, our first acquaintance with Mr. Roosevelt, then at the White House, and with American men of politics and affairs, like Mr. Root, Mr. Garfield, and Mr. Bacon--set all of it in springsunshine, amid a sheen of white magnolias and May leaf--will always staywith me as a time of pleasure, unmixed and unspoiled, such as one'sfairy godmother seldom provides without some medicinal drawback! And tofind the Jusserands there so entirely in their right place--he sounchanged from the old British Museum days when we knew him first--wasone of the chief items in the delightful whole. So, too, was thediscussion of the President, first with one Ambassador and then withanother. For who could help discussing him! And what true and admiringfriends 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 sociallife. 

Then Philadelphia, where I lectured on behalf of the London PlayCenters; Boston, with Mrs. Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett--a pair offriends, gentle, eager, distinguished, whom none who loved them willforget; Cambridge, and our last sight of Charles Eliot Norton, standingto bid us farewell on the steps of Shady Hill; Hawthorne's house atConcord; and the lovely shore of Newport. The wonderful new scenesunrolled themselves day by day; kind faces and welcoming voices werealways 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 chapterof quickened life. A week at Montreal, first with Sir William van Horne, then Ottawa, and a week with Lord and Lady Grey; and finally thenever-to-be-forgotten experience of three weeks in the "Saskatchewan, "Sir William's car on the Canadian Pacific Railway, which took us firstfrom Toronto to Vancouver, and then from Vancouver to Quebec. So in aswallow's flight from sea to sea I saw the marvelous 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 belovedLord Grey, of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and Sir Robert Borden, as they wereten 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 theactual fighting front, to which I have already given utterance in_England's Effort_ and _Towards the Goal. _ Some day, perhaps, if these _Recollections_ find an audience, and when peace hasloosened our tongues and abolished that very necessary person, theCensor, there will be something more to be written. But now, at anyrate, I lay down my pen. For a while these _Recollections_, duringthe hours I have been at work on them, have swept me out of the shadowof the vast and tragic struggle in which we live, into days long past onwhich there is still sunlight--though it be a ghostly sunlight; andabove them the sky of normal life. But the dream and the illusion aredone. The shadow descends again, and the evening paper comes in, bringing yet another mad speech of a guilty Emperor to desecrate yetanother Christmas Eve. 

The heart of the world is set on peace. But for us, the Allies, in whosehands lies the infant hope of the future, it must be a peace worthy ofour 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 winterdays, sends incessantly the long procession of her men and ships to thehelp of the Old World and an undying cause. Silently they come, forthere are powers of evil lying in wait for them. But "still they come. "The air thickens, as it were with the sense of an ever-gathering host. On this side, and on that, it is the Army of Freedom, and of Judgment. 

_Christmas Eve, 1917. _

THE END OF VOLUME II