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

BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

Published November, 1918

[Illustration: DR. THOMAS ARNOLD OF RUGBY]

_To

T. H. W. 

(In memory of April 6, 1872)_

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

 I. EARLY DAYS

 II. FOX HOW

 III. THE FAMILY OF FOX HOW

 IV. OTHER CHILDREN OF FOX HOW

 V. THE FRIENDS OF FOX HOW

 VI. YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD

 VII. BALLIOL AND LINCOLN

VIII. EARLY MARRIED LIFE

 IX. THE BEGINNINGS OF "ROBERT ELSMERE"

ILLUSTRATIONS

DR. THOMAS ARNOLD OP RUGBY _Frontispiece_

MATTHEW ARNOLD

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN J

FOX HOW, THE WESTMORLAND HOME OF THE ARNOLDS

BENJAMIN JOWETT

A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS

CHAPTER I

EARLY DAYS

Do we all become garrulous and confidential as we approach the gates ofold age? Is it that we instinctively feel, and cannot help asserting, our one advantage over the younger generation, which has so many overus?--the one advantage of _time!_

After all, it is not disputable that we have lived longer than they. When they talk of past poets, or politicians, or novelists, whom theyoung still deign to remember, of whom for once their estimate agreeswith ours, we can sometimes put in a quiet, "I saw him"--or, "I talkedwith him"--which for the moment wins the conversational race. And as weelders fall back before the brilliance and glitter of the New Age, advancing "like an army with banners, " this mere prerogative of yearsbecomes in itself a precious possession. After all, we cannot divestourselves of it, if we would. It is better to make friends with it--toturn it into a kind of _panache_--to wear it with an air, since wear itwe must. 

So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination tolook back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, growsupon most of us. I cannot hope that what I have to say will be veryinteresting to many. A life spent largely among books, and in theexercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as asubject-matter, when one comes to write about it. I can only attempt itwith any success, if my readers will allow me a large psychologicalelement. The thoughts and opinions of one human being, if they aresincere, must always have an interest for some other human beings. Theworld is there to think about; and if we have lived, or are living, withany sort of energy, we _must_ have thought about it, and about ourselvesin relation to it--thought "furiously" often. And it is out of the many"thinkings" of many folk, strong or weak, dull or far-ranging, thatthought itself grows. For progress surely, whether in men or nations, means only a richer knowledge; the more impressions, therefore, on thehuman intelligence that we can seize and record, the more sensitivebecomes that intelligence itself. 

But of course the difficulty lies in the seizing and recording--in thechoice, that is, of what to say, and how to say it. In this choice, as Ilook back over more than half a century, I can only follow--andtrust--the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction. I shall be telling what is primarily true, or as true as I can make it, as distinguished from what is primarily imagination, built on truth. Butthe truth one uses in fiction must be interesting! Milton expresses thatin the words "sensuous" and "passionate, " which he applies to poetry inthe _Areopagitica_. And the same thing applies to autobiography, whereselection is even more necessary than in fiction. Nothing ought to betold, I think, that does not interest or kindle one's own mind inlooking back; it is the only condition on which one can hope to interestor kindle other minds. And this means that one ought to handle thingsbroadly, taking only the salient points in the landscape of the past, and of course with as much detachment as possible. Though probably inthe end one will have to admit--egotists that we all are!--that not muchdetachment _is_ possible. 

For me, the first point that stands out is the arrival of a little girlof five, in the year 1856, at a gray-stone house in a Westmorlandvalley, where, fourteen years earlier, the children of Arnold of Rugby, the "Doctor" of _Tom Brown's Schooldays_, had waited on a June day, togreet their father, expected from the South, only to hear, as the summerday died away, that two hours' sharp illness, that very morning, hadtaken him from them. Of what preceded my arrival as a black-haired, dark-eyed child, with my father, mother, and two brothers, at Fox How, the holiday house among the mountains which the famous headmaster hadbuilt for himself in 1834, I have but little recollection. I see dimlyanother house in wide fields, where dwarf lilies grew, and I know thatit was a house in Tasmania, where at the time of my birth my father, Thomas Arnold, the Doctor's second son, was organizing education in theyoung colony. I can just recall, too, the deck of a ship which to mychildish feet seemed vast--but the _William Brown_ was a sailing-ship ofonly 400 tons!--in which we made the voyage home in 1856. Three monthsand a half we took about it, going round the Horn in bitter weather, much run over by rats at night, and expected to take our baths by day intwo huge barrels full of sea water on the deck, into which we childrenwere plunged shivering by our nurse, two or three times a week. Myfather and mother, their three children, and some small cousins, whowere going to England under my mother's care, were the only passengers. 

I can remember, too, being lifted--weak and miserable with toothache--inmy father's arms to catch the first sight of English shores as we nearedthe mouth of the Thames; and then the dismal inn by the docks where wefirst took shelter. The dreary room where we children slept the firstnight, its dingy ugliness and its barred windows, still come back to meas a vision of horror. Next day, like angels of rescue, came an aunt anduncle, who took us away to other and cheerful quarters, and presentlysaw us off to Westmorland. The aunt was my godmother, Doctor Arnold'seldest daughter--then the young wife of William Edward Forster, a Quakermanufacturer, who afterward became the well-known Education Minister of1870, and was Chief Secretary for Ireland in the terrible years 1880-82. 

To my mother and her children, Fox How and its inmates represented muchthat was new and strange. My mother was the granddaughter of one of thefirst Governors of Tasmania, Governor Sorell, and had been brought up inthe colony, except for a brief schooling at Brussels. Of her personalbeauty in youth we children heard much, as we grew up, from her oldTasmanian friends and kinsfolk who would occasionally drift across us;and I see as though I had been there a scene often described to me--mymother playing Hermione in the "Winter's Tale, " at Government House whenSir William Denison was Governor--a vision, lovely and motionless, onher pedestal, till at the words, "Music! awake her! Strike!" she kindledinto life. Her family were probably French in origin. Governor Sorellhad been a man of promise in his youth. His father, General WilliamAlexander Sorell, of the Coldstream Guards, was a soldier of someeminence, whose two sons, William and Thomas, both served under Sir JohnMoore and at the Cape. But my great-grandfather ruined his militarycareer, while he was Deputy Adjutant-General at the Cape, by alove-affair with a brother officer's wife, and was banished orpromoted--whichever one pleases to call it--to the new colony ofTasmania, of which he became Governor in 1816. His eldest son, by thewife he had left behind him in England, went out as a youth oftwenty-one or so, to join his father, the Governor, in Tasmania, and Ipossess a little calf-bound diary of my grandfather written in a verydelicate and refined hand, about the year 1823. The faint entries in itshow him to have been a devoted son. But when, in 1830 or so, theGovernor left the colony, and retired to Brussels, my grandfatherremained in Van Diemen's Land, as it was then generally called, becamevery much attached to the colony, and filled the post of Registrar ofDeeds for many years under its successive Governors. I just rememberhim, as a gentle, affectionate, upright being, a gentleman of an old, punctilious school, strictly honorable and exact, content with a smallsphere, and much loved within it. He would sometimes talk to hischildren of early days in Bath, of his father's young successes andpromotions, and of his grandfather, General Sorell, who, as Adjutant ofthe Coldstream Guards from 1744 to 1758, and associated with all thehome and foreign service of that famous regiment during those years, through the Seven Years' War, and up to the opening of the American Warof Independence, played a vaguely brilliant part in his grandson'srecollections. But he himself was quite content with the modest affairsof an infant colony, which even in its earliest days achieved, whetherin its landscape or its life, a curiously English effect; as though anEnglish midland county had somehow got loose and, drifting to theSouthern seas, had there set up--barring a few black aborigines, a fewconvicts, its mimosas, and its tree-ferns--another quiet version of thequiet English life it had left behind. 

But the Sorells, all the same, had some foreign and excitable blood inthem. Their story of themselves was that they were French Huguenots, expelled in 1685, who had settled in England and, coming of a militarystock, had naturally sought careers in the English army. There arepoints in this story which are puzzling; but the foreign touch in mymother, and in the Governor--to judge from the only picture of him whichremains--was unmistakable. Delicate features, small, beautifully shapedhands and feet, were accompanied in my mother by a French vivacity andquickness, an overflowing energy, which never forsook her through allher trials and misfortunes. In the Governor, the same physicalcharacteristics make a rather decadent and foppish impression--as of anold stock run to seed. The stock had been reinvigorated in my mother, and one of its original elements which certainly survived in hertemperament and tradition was of great importance both for her own lifeand for her children's. This was the Protestant--the _French_Protestant--element; which no doubt represented in the family from whichshe came a history of long suffering at the hands of Catholicism. Looking back upon her Protestantism, I see that it was not the leastlike English Evangelicalism, whether of the Anglican or dissenting type. There was nothing emotional or "enthusiastic" in it--no breath of Wesleyor Wilberforce; but rather something drawn from deep wells of history, instinctive and invincible. Had some direct Calvinist ancestor of hers, with a soul on fire, fought the tyranny of Bossuet and Madame deMaintenon, before--eternally hating and resenting "Papistry"--heabandoned his country and kinsfolk, in the search for religious liberty?That is the impression which--looking back upon her life--it often makesupon me. All the more strange that to her it fell, unwittingly, imagining, indeed, that by her marriage with a son of Arnold of Rugbyshe was taking a step precisely in the opposite direction, to be, by akind of tragic surprise, which yet was no one's fault, the wife of aCatholic. 

And that brings me to my father, whose character and story were soimportant to all his children that I must try and draw them, though Icannot pretend to any impartiality in doing so--only to the insight thataffection gives; its one abiding advantage over the critic and thestranger. 

He was the second son of Doctor Arnold of Rugby, and the youngerbrother--by only eleven months--of Matthew Arnold. On that morning ofJune 12, 1842, when the headmaster who in fourteen years' rule at Rugbyhad made himself so conspicuous a place, not merely in the public-schoolworld, but in English life generally[1] arose, in the words ofhis poet son--to tread--

 In the summer morning, the road-- Of death, at a call unforeseen-- Sudden--

My father, a boy of eighteen, was in the house, and witnessed the fatalattack of _angina pectoris_ which, in two hours, cut short a memorablecareer, and left those who till then, under a great man's shelter andkeeping, had--

 Rested as under the boughs Of a mighty oak.... Bare, unshaded, alone. 

[Footnote 1: At the moment of correcting these proofs, my attention hasbeen called to a foolish essay on my grandfather by Mr. LyttonStrachey, none the less foolish because it is the work of an extremelyclever man. If Mr. Strachey imagines that the effect of mygrandfather's life and character upon men like Stanley and Clough, or ascore of others who could be named, can be accounted for by the eidolonhe presents to his readers in place of the real human being, one canonly regard it as one proof the more of the ease with which a certainkind of ability outwits itself. ]

He had been his father's special favorite among the elder children, asshown by some verses in my keeping addressed to him as a small boy, atdifferent times, by "the Doctor. " Those who know their _Tom Brown'sSchooldays_ will perhaps remember the various passages in the book wherethe softer qualities of the man whom "three hundred reckless childishboys" feared with all their hearts, "and very little besides in heavenor earth, " are made plain in the language of that date. Arthur'sillness, for instance, when the little fellow, who has been at death'sdoor, tells Tom Brown, who is at last allowed to see him: "You can'tthink what the Doctor's like when one's ill. He said such brave andtender and gentle things to me--I felt quite light and strong after it, and never had any more fear. " Or East's talk with the Doctor, when thelively boy of many scrapes has a moral return upon himself, and says tohis best friend: "You can't think how kind and gentle he was, the greatgrim man, whom I've feared more than anybody on earth. When I stuck, helifted me, just as if I'd been a little child. And he seemed to know allI'd felt, and to have gone through it all. " This tenderness and charm ofa strong man, which in Stanley's biography is specially mentioned asgrowing more and more visible in the last months of his life, was alwaysthere for his children. In a letter written in 1828 to his sister, whenmy father as a small child not yet five was supposed to be dying, Arnoldsays, trying to steel himself against the bitterness of coming loss, "Imight have loved him, had he lived, too dearly--you know how deeply I dolove him now. " And three years later, when "little Tom, " on his eighthbirthday, had just said, wistfully--with a curious foreboding instinct, "I think that the eight years I have now lived will be the happiest ofmy life, " Arnold, painfully struck by the words, wrote some verses uponthem which I still possess. "The Doctor" was no poet, though the best ofhis historical prose--the well-known passage in the Roman History, forinstance, on the death of Marcellus--has some of the essential notes ofpoetry--passion, strength, music. But the gentle Wordsworthian qualityof his few essays in verse will be perhaps interesting to those who areaware of him chiefly as the great Liberal fighter of eighty years ago. He replies to his little son:

 Is it that aught prophetic stirred Thy spirit to that ominous word, Foredating in thy childish mind The fortune of thy Life's career-- That naught of brighter bliss shall cheer What still remains behind?

 Or is thy Life so full of bliss That, come what may, more blessed than this Thou canst not be again? And fear'st thou, standing on the shore, What storms disturb with wild uproar The years of older men?

 * * * * *

 At once to enjoy, at once to hope-- That fills indeed the largest scope Of good our thoughts can reach. Where can we learn so blest a rule, What wisest sage, what happiest school, Art so divine can teach?

The answer, of course, in the mouth of a Christian teacher is that inChristianity alone is there both present joy and future hope. Thepassages in Arnold's most intimate diary, discovered after his death, and published by Dean Stanley, show what the Christian faith was to mygrandfather, how closely bound up with every action and feeling of hislife. The impression made by his conception of that faith, asinterpreted by his own daily life, upon a great school, and, through themany strong and able men who went out from it, upon English thought andfeeling, is a part of English religious history. 

[Illustration: MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. From a drawing in possessionof H. E. Wilberforce, Esq. ]

But curiously enough the impression upon his own sons _appeared_, at anyrate, to be less strong and lasting than in the case of others. I mean, of course, in the matter of opinion. The famous father died, and hischildren had to face the world without his guiding hand. Matthew andTom, William and Edward, the eldest four sons, went in due time toOxford, and the youngest boy into the Navy. My grandmother made her homeat Fox How under the shelter of the fells, with her four daughters, theyoungest of whom was only eight when their father died. The devotion ofall the nine children to their mother, to one another, and to the commonhome was never weakened for a moment by the varieties of opinion thatlife was sure to bring out in the strong brood of strong parents. Butthe development of the elder two sons at the University was probablyvery different from what it would have been had their father lived. Neither of them, indeed, ever showed, while there, the smallest tendencyto the "Newmanism" which Arnold of Rugby had fought with all his powers;which he had denounced with such vehemence in the Edinburgh article on"The Oxford Malignants. " My father was at Oxford all through the agitatedyears which preceded Newman's secession from the Anglican communion. Hehad rooms in University College in the High Street, nearly oppositeSt. Mary's, in which John Henry Newman, then its Vicar, delivered Sundayafter Sunday those sermons which will never be forgotten by the AnglicanChurch. But my father only once crossed the street to hear him, and wasthen repelled by the mannerism of the preacher. Matthew Arnoldoccasionally went, out of admiration, my father used to say, for thatstrange Newmanic power of words, which in itself fascinated the youngBalliol poet, who was to produce his first volume of poems two yearsafter Newman's secession to the Church of Rome. But he was never touchedin the smallest degree by Newman's opinions. He and my father and ArthurClough, and a few other kindred spirits, lived indeed in quite anotherworld of thought. They discovered George Sand, Emerson, and Carlyle, and orthodox Christianity no longer seemed to them the sure refugethat it had always been to the strong teacher who trained them as boys. There are many allusions of many dates in the letters of my fatherand uncle to each other, as to their common Oxford passion for GeorgeSand. _Consuelo_, in particular, was a revelation to the two youngmen brought up under the "earnest" influence of Rugby. It seemed toopen to them a world of artistic beauty and joy of which they hadnever dreamed; and to loosen the bands of an austere conception oflife, which began to appear to them too narrow for the facts of life. _Wilhelm Meister_, read in Carlyle's translation at the same time, exercised a similar liberating and enchanting power upon my father. The social enthusiasms of George Sand also affected him greatly, strengthening whatever he had inherited of his father's generousdiscontent with an iron world, where the poor suffer too much andwork too hard. And this discontent, when the time came for him toleave Oxford, assumed a form which startled his friends. 

He had done very well at Oxford, taking his two Firsts with ease, andwas offered a post in the Colonial Office immediately on leaving theUniversity. But the time was full of schemes for a new heaven and a newearth, wherein should dwell equality and righteousness. The storm of1848 was preparing in Europe; the Corn Laws had fallen; the Chartistswere gathering in England. To settle down to the old humdrum round ofCivil Service promotion seemed to my father impossible. This revolt ofhis, and its effect upon his friends, of whom the most intimate wasArthur Clough, has left its mark on Clough's poem, the "VacationPastoral, " which he called "The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, " or, as itruns in my father's old battered copy which lies before me, "Tober-na-Fuosich. " The Philip of the poem, the dreamer and democrat, who says to Adam the Tutor--

 Alas, the noted phrase of the prayer-book Doing our duty in that state of life to which God has called us, Seems to me always to mean, when the little rich boys say it, Standing in velvet frock by Mama's brocaded flounces, Eying her gold-fastened book, and the chain and watch at her bosom, Seems to me always to mean, Eat, drink, and never mind others--

was in broad outline drawn from my father, and the impression made byhis idealist, enthusiastic youth upon his comrades. And Philip'smigration to the Antipodes at the end--when he

 rounded the sphere to New Zealand, There he hewed and dug; subdued the earth and his spirit--

was certainly suggested by my father's similar step in 1847, the yearbefore the poem appeared. Only in my father's life there had been as yetno parallel to the charming love-story of "The Bothie. " His love-storyawaited him on the other side of the world. 

At that moment, New Zealand, the land of beautiful mountain and sea, with its even temperate climate, and its natives whom English enthusiasmhoped not only to govern, but to civilize and assimilate, was in theminds of all to whom the colonies seemed to offer chances of socialreconstruction beyond any that were possible in a crowded and decadentEurope. "Land of Hope, " I find it often called in these old letters. "The gleam" was on it, and my father, like Browning's Waring, heard thecall. 

 After it; follow it. Follow the gleam!

He writes to his mother in August, 1847, from the Colonial Office:

 Every one whom I meet pities me for having to return to London at this dull season, but to my own feelings, it is not worse than at other times. The things which would make me loathe the thought of passing my life or even several years in London, do not depend on summer or winter. It is the chronic, not the acute ills of London life which are real ills to me. I meant to have talked to you again before I left home about New Zealand, but I could not find a good opportunity. I do not think you will be surprised to hear that I cannot give up my intention--though you may think me wrong, you will believe that no cold-heartedness towards home has assisted me in framing my resolution. Where or how we shall meet on this side the grave will be arranged for us by a wiser will than our own. To me, however strange and paradoxical it may sound, this going to New Zealand is become a work of faith, and I cannot but go through with it. 

And later on when his plans are settled, he writes in exultation to hiseldest sister:

 The weather is gusty and rainy, but no cheerlessness without can repress a sort of exuberant buoyancy of spirit which is supplied to me from within. There is such an indescribable blessedness in looking forward to a manner of life which the heart and conscience approve, and which at the same time satisfies the instinct for the heroic and beautiful. Yet there seems little enough in a homely life in a New Zealand forest; and indeed there is nothing in the thing itself, except in so far as it flows from a principle, a faith. 

And he goes on to speak in vague exalted words of the "equality" and"brotherhood" to which he looks forward in the new land; winding up withan account of his life in London, its daily work at the Colonial Office, his walks, the occasional evenings at the opera where he worships JennyLind, his readings and practisings in his lodgings. My poor father! Helittle knew what he was giving up, or the real conditions of the life towhich he was going. 

For, though the Philip of "The Bothie" may have "hewed and dug" to goodpurpose in New Zealand, success in colonial farming was a wild andfleeting dream in my father's case. He was born for academic life and ascholar's pursuits. He had no practical gifts, and knew nothing whateverof land or farming. He had only courage, youth, sincerity, and acharming presence which made him friends at sight. His mother, indeed, with her gentle wisdom, put no obstacles in his way. On the contrary, she remembered that her husband had felt a keen imaginative interest inthe colonies, and had bought small sections of land near Wellington, which his second son now proposed to take up and farm. But some of theold friends of the family felt and expressed consternation. Inparticular, Baron Bunsen, then Prussian Ambassador to England, Arnold ofRugby's dear and faithful friend, wrote a letter of earnest andaffectionate remonstrance to the would-be colonist. Let me quote it, ifonly that it may remind me of days long ago, when it was still possiblefor a strong and tender friendship to exist between a Prussian and anEnglishman!

Bunsen points out to "young Tom" that he has only been eight or ninemonths in the Colonial Office, not long enough to give it a fair trial;that the drudgery of his clerkship will soon lead to more interestingthings; that his superiors speak well of him; above all, that he has nomoney and no practical experience of farming, and that if he is going toNew Zealand in the hope of building up a purer society, he will soonfind himself bitterly disillusioned. 

 Pray, my dear young friend, do not reject the voice of a man of nearly sixty years, who has made his way through life under much greater difficulties perhaps than you imagine--who was your father's dear friend--who feels deeply attached to all that bears the honored and blessed name of Arnold--who in particular had _your father's promise_ that he would allow me to offer to _you_, after I had seen you in 1839, something of that care and friendship he had bestowed upon Henry [Bunsen's own son]--do not reject the warning voice of that man, if he entreats you solemnly not to take a _precipitate_ step. Give yourself time. Try a change of scene. Go for a month or two to France or Germany. I am sure you wish to satisfy your friends that you are acting wisely, considerately, in giving up what you have. 

 _Spartam quam nactus es, orna_--was Niebuhr's word to me when once, about 1825, wearied with diplomatic life, I resolved to throw up my place and go--not to New Zealand, but to a German University. Let me say that concluding word to you and believe me, my dear young friend, Your sincere and affectionate friend

 BUNSEN. 

 P. S. --If you feel disposed to have half an hour's quiet conversation with me alone, pray come to-day at six o'clock, and then dine with us quietly at half-past six. I go to-morrow to Windsor Castle for four days. 

Nothing could have been kinder, nothing more truly felt and meant. Butthe young make their own experience, and my father, with the smilingopen look which disarmed opposition, and disguised all the time acertain stubborn independence of will, characteristic of him throughlife, took his own way. He went to New Zealand, and, now that it wasdone, the interest and sympathy of all his family and friends followedhim. Let me give here the touching letter which Arthur Stanley, hisfather's biographer, wrote to him the night before he left England. 

 UNIV. COLL. , OXFORD, _Nov. 4, 1847. _

 Farewell!--(if you will let me once again recur to a relation so long since past away) farewell--my dearest, earliest, best of pupils. I cannot let you go without asking you to forgive those many annoyances which I fear I must have unconsciously inflicted upon you in the last year of your Oxford life--nor without expressing the interest which I feel, and shall I trust ever feel, beyond all that I can say, in your future course. You know--or perhaps you hardly can know--how when I came back to Oxford after the summer of 1842, your presence here was to me the stay and charm of my life--how the walks--the lectures--the Sunday evenings with you, filled up the void which had been left in my interests[1], and endeared to me all the beginnings of my College labors. That particular feeling, as is natural, has passed away--but it may still be a pleasure to you to feel in your distant home that whatever may be my occupations, nothing will more cheer and support me through them than the belief that in that new world your dear father's name is in you still loved and honored, and bringing forth the fruits which he would have delighted to see. 

 Farewell, my dear friend. May God in whom you trust be with you. 

 Do not trouble yourself to answer this--only take it as the true expression of one who often thinks how little he has done for you in comparison with what he would. 

 Ever yours, A. P. STANLEY. 

[Footnote 1: By the sudden death of Doctor Arnold. ]

But, of course, the inevitable happened. After a few valiant but quitefutile attempts to clear his land with his own hands, or with the randomlabor he could find to help him, the young colonist fell back on theeducation he had held so cheap in England, and bravely took school-workwherever in the rising townships of the infant colony he could find it. Meanwhile his youth, his pluck, and his Oxford distinctions hadattracted the kindly notice of the Governor, Sir George Grey, whooffered him his private secretaryship--one can imagine the twinkle inthe Governor's eye, when he first came across my father building his ownhut on his section outside Wellington! The offer was gratefully refused. But another year of New Zealand life brought reconsideration. The exilebegins to speak of "loneliness" in his letters home, to realize that itis "collision" with other kindred minds that "kindles the spark ofthought, " and presently, after a striking account of a solitary walkacross unexplored country in New Zealand, he confesses that he is notsufficient for himself, and that the growth and vigor of the intellectwere, for him, at least, "not compatible with loneliness. "

A few months later, Sir William Denison, the newly appointed Governor ofVan Diemen's Land, hearing that a son of Arnold of Rugby, an OxfordFirst Class man, was in New Zealand, wrote to offer my father the taskof organizing primary education in Van Diemen's Land. 

He accepted--yet not, I think, without a sharp sense of defeat at thehands of Mother Earth!--set sail for Hobart, and took possession of apost that might easily have led to great things. His father's famepreceded him, and he was warmly welcomed. The salary was good and thefield free. Within a few months of his landing he was engaged to mymother. They were married in 1850, and I, their eldest child, was bornin June, 1851. 

And then the unexpected, the amazing thing happened. At the time oftheir marriage, and for some time after, my mother, who had been broughtup in a Protestant "scriptural" atmosphere, and had been originallydrawn to the younger "Tom Arnold, " partly because he was the son of hisfather, as Stanley's _Life_ had now made the headmaster known to theworld, was a good deal troubled by the heretical views of her younghusband. She had some difficulty in getting him to consent to thebaptism of his elder children. He was still in many respects the Philipof the "Bothie, " influenced by Goethe, and the French romantics, byEmerson, Kingsley, and Carlyle, and in touch still with all thatLiberalism of the later 'forties in Oxford, of which his most intimatefriend, Arthur Clough, and his elder brother, Matthew Arnold, were tobecome the foremost representatives. But all the while, under thesurface, an extraordinary transformation was going on. He was never ableto explain it afterward, even to me, who knew him best of all hischildren. I doubt whether he ever understood it himself. But he who hadonly once crossed the High Street to hear Newman preach, and felt nointerest in the sermon, now, on the other side of the world, surrenderedto Newman's influence. It is uncertain if they had ever spoken to eachother at Oxford; yet that subtle pervasive intellect which captured foryears the critical and skeptical mind of Mark Pattison, and indirectlytransformed the Church of England after Newman himself had left it, now, reaching across the world, laid hold on Arnold's son, when Arnoldhimself was no longer there to fight it. A general reaction against thenegations and philosophies of his youth set in for "Philip, " asinevitable in his case as the revolt against St. Sulpice was for ErnestRenan. For my father was in truth born for religion, as his whole laterlife showed. In that he was the true son of Arnold of Rugby. But hisspeculative Liberalism had carried him so much farther than his father'shad ever gone, that the recoil was correspondingly great. The steps ofit are dim. He was "struck" one Sunday with the "authoritative" tone ofthe First Epistle of Peter. Who and what was Peter? What justified sucha tone? At another time he found a _Life of St. Brigit of Sweden_ at acountry inn, when he was on one of his school-inspecting journeys acrossthe island. And he records a mysterious influence or "voice" from it, ashe rode in meditative solitude through the sunny spaces of the Tasmanianbush. Last of all, he "obtained"--from England, no doubt--the _Tractsfor the Times_. And as he went through them, the same documents, and thesame arguments, which had taken Newman to Rome, nine years before, worked upon his late and distant disciple. But who can explain"conversion"? Is it not enough to say, as was said of old, "The HolyGhost fell on them that believed"? The great "Malignant" had indeedtriumphed. In October, 1854, my father was received at Hobart, Tasmania, into the Church of Rome; and two years later, after he had reachedEngland, and written to Newman asking the new Father of the Oratory toreceive him, Newman replied:

 How strange it seems! What a world this is! I knew your father a little, and I really think I never had any unkind feeling toward him. I saw him at Oriel on the Purification before (I think) his death (January, 1842). I was glad to meet him. If I said ever a harsh thing against him I am very sorry for it. In seeing you, I should have a sort of pledge that he at the moment of his death made it all up with me. Excuse this. I came here last night, and it is so marvelous to have your letter this morning. 

So, for the moment, ended one incident in the long bout between twonoble fighters, Arnold and Newman, each worthy of the other's steel. Formy father, indeed, this act of surrender was but the beginning of a longand troubled history. My poor mother felt as though the earth hadcrumbled under her. Her passionate affection for my father endured tillher latest hour, but she never reconciled herself to what he had done. There was in her an instinctive dread of Catholicism, of which I havesuggested some of the origins--ancestral and historical. It neverabated. Many years afterward, in writing _Helbeck of Bannisdale_, I drewupon what I remembered of it in describing some traits in LauraFountain's inbred, and finally indomitable, resistance to the Catholicclaim upon the will and intellect of men. 

And to this trial in the realm of religious feeling there were added allthe practical difficulties into which my father's action plunged her andhis children. The Tasmanian appointment had to be given up, for thefeeling in the colony was strongly anti-Catholic; and we came home, as Ihave described, to a life of struggle, privation, and constant anxiety, in which my mother suffered not only for herself, but for her children. 

But, after all, there were bright spots. My father and mother wereyoung; my mother's eager, sympathetic temper brought her many friends;and for us children, Fox How and its dear inmates opened a second home, and new joys, which upon myself in particular left impressions never tobe effaced or undone. Let me try and describe that house and garden andthose who lived in it, as they were in 1856. 

CHAPTER II

FOX HOW

The gray-stone house stands now, as it stood then, on a "how" or risingground in the beautiful Westmorland valley leading from Ambleside toRydal. The "Doctor" built it as a holiday paradise for himself and hischildren, in the year 1833. It is a modest building, with ten bedroomsand three sitting-rooms. Its windows look straight into the heart ofFairfield, the beautiful semicircular mountain which rears its hollowedfront and buttressing scaurs against the north, far above the greenfloor of the valley. That the house looked north never troubled mygrandfather or his children. What they cared for was the perfect outlineof the mountain wall, the "pensive glooms, " hovering in that deep breastof Fairfield, the magic never-ending chase of sunlight and cloud acrossit on fine days, and the beauty of the soft woodland clothing its base. The garden was his children's joy as it became mine. Its little beckwith its mimic bridges, its encircling river, its rocky knolls, its wildstrawberries and wild raspberries, its queen of birch-trees rearing astately head against the distant mountain, its rhododendrons growinglike weeds on its mossy banks, its velvet turf, and long silky grass inthe parts left wild--all these things have made the joy of threegenerations. 

Inside, Fox How was comfortably spacious, and I remember what a palaceit appeared to my childish eyes, fresh from the tiny cabin of a 400-tonsailing-ship, and the rough life of a colony. My grandmother, itsmistress, was then sixty-one. Her beautiful hair was scarcely touchedwith gray, her complexion was still delicately clear, and her soft browneyes had the eager, sympathetic look of her Cornish race. CharlotteBrontë, who saw her a few years earlier, while on a visit to MissMartineau, speaks of her as having been a "very pretty woman, " andcredits her and her daughters with "the possession of qualities the mostestimable and endearing. " In another letter, however, written to a lessfamiliar correspondent, to whom Miss Brontë, as the literary lady with acritical reputation to keep up, expresses herself in a different andmore artificial tone, she again describes my grandmother as good andcharming, but doubts her claim to "power and completeness of character. "The phrase occurs in a letter describing a call at Fox How, and itsslight pomposity makes the contrast with the passage in which MatthewArnold describes the same visit the more amusing. 

 At seven came Miss Martineau, and Miss Brontë (Jane Eyre); talked to Miss Martineau (who blasphemes frightfully) about the prospects of the Church of England, and, wretched man that I am, promised to go and see her cow-keeping miracles to-morrow, I who hardly know a cow from a sheep. I talked to Miss Brontë (past thirty and plain, with expressive gray eyes, though) of her curates, of French novels, and her education in a school at Brussels, and sent the lions roaring to their dens at half-past nine. 

No one, indeed, would have applied the word "power" to my grandmother, unless he had known her very well. The general impression was always oneof gentle sweetness and soft dignity. But the phrase, "completeness ofcharacter, " happens to sum up very well the impression left by her lifeboth on kindred and friends. What Miss Brontë exactly meant by it it isdifficult to say. But the widowed mother of nine children, five of themsons, and all of them possessed of strong wills and quick intelligence, who was able so to guide their young lives that to her last hour, thirtyyears after her husband's death had left her alone with her task, shepossessed their passionate reverence and affection, and that each andall of them would have acknowledged her as among the dearest and noblestinfluences in their lives, can hardly be denied "completeness ofcharacter. " Many of her letters lie before me. Each son and daughter, ashe or she went out into the world, received them with the utmostregularity. They knew that every incident in their lives interestedtheir mother; and they in their turn were eager to report to hereverything that came to them, happy or unhappy, serious or amusing. Andthis relation of the family to their mother only grew and strengthenedwith years. As the daughters married, their husbands became so many newand devoted sons to this gentle, sympathetic, and yet firm-naturedwoman. Nor were the daughters-in-law less attached to her, and thegrandchildren who in due time began to haunt Fox How. In my own life Itrace her letters from my earliest childhood, through my life at school, to my engagement and marriage; and I have never ceased to feel a pang ofdisappointment that she died before my children were born. MatthewArnold adored her, and wrote to her every week of his life. So did herother children. William Forster, throughout his busy life in Parliament, vied with her sons in tender consideration and unfailing loyalty. Andevery grandchild thought of a visit to Fox How as not only a joy, but anhonor. Indeed, nothing could have been more "complete, " more rounded, than my grandmother's character and life as they developed through hereighty-three years. She made no conspicuous intellectual claim, thoughher quick intelligence, her wide sympathies, and clear judgment, combined with something ardent and responsive in her temperament, attracted and held able men; but her personality was none the lessstrong because it was so gently, delicately served by looks and manner. 

Perhaps the "completeness" of my grandmother's character will be bestillustrated by one of her family letters, a letter which may recall tosome readers Stevenson's delightful poem on the mother who sits at home, watching the fledglings depart from the nest. 

 So from the hearth the children flee, By that almighty hand Austerely led; so one by sea Goes forth, and one by land; Nor aught of all-man's sons escapes from that command. 

 * * * * *

 And as the fervent smith of yore Beat out the glowing blade, Nor wielded in the front of war The weapons that he made, But in the tower at home still plied his ringing trade;

 So like a sword the son shall roam On nobler missions sent; And as the smith remained at home In peaceful turret pent, So sits the while at home the mother well content. 

The letter was written to my father in New Zealand in the year 1848, asa family chronicle. The brothers and sisters named in it are Walter, theyoungest of the family, a middy of fourteen, on board ship, and not veryhappy in the Navy, which he was ultimately to leave for DurhamUniversity and business; Willy, in the Indian Army, afterward the authorof _Oakfield_, a novel attacking the abuses of Anglo-Indian life, andthe first Director of Public Instruction in the Punjab--commemorated byhis poet brother in "A Southern Night"; Edward, at Oxford; Mary, thesecond daughter, who at the age of twenty-two had been left a widowafter a year of married life; and Fan, the youngest daughter of theflock, who now, in 1917, alone represents them in the gray house underthe fells. The little Westmorland farm described is still exactly as itwas; and has still a Richardson for master, though of a youngergeneration. And Rydal Chapel, freed now from the pink cement whichclothed it in those days, and from the high pews familiar to thechildren of Fox How, still sends the cheerful voice of its bells throughthe valley on Sunday mornings. 

The reader will remember, as he reads it, that he is in the troubledyear of 1848, with Chartism at home and revolution abroad. The "painfulinterest" with which the writer has read Clough's "Bothie" refers, Ithink, to the fact that she has recognized her second son, my father, asto some extent the hero of the poem. 

 Fox How, _Nov. 19, 1848. _

 My Dearest Tom, --... I am always intending to send you something like a regular journal, but twenty days of the month have now passed away, and it is not done. Dear Matt, who was with us at the beginning, and who I think bore a part in our last letters to you, has returned to his post in London, and I am not without hope of hearing by to-morrow's post that he has run down to Portsmouth to see Walter before he sails on a cruise with the Squadron, which I believe he was to do to-day. But I should think they would hardly leave Port in such dirty weather, when the wind howls and the rain pours, and the whole atmosphere is thick and lowering as I suppose you rarely or never see it in New Zealand. I wish the more that Matt may get down to Spithead, because the poor little man has been in a great ferment about leaving his Ship and going into a smaller one. By the same post I had a letter from him, and from Captain Daws, who had been astonished and grieved by Walter's coming to him and telling him he wished to leave the ship. It was evident that Captain D. Was quite distressed about it. 

She then discusses, very shrewdly and quietly, the reasons for her boy'srestlessness, and how best to meet it. The letter goes on:

 Certainly there is great comfort in having him with so true and good a friend as Captain D. And I could not feel justified in acting against his counsel. But as he gets to know Walter better, I think it very likely that he will himself think it better for him to be in some ship not so likely to stay about in harbor as the _St. Vincent_; and will judge that with a character like his it might be better for him to be on some more distant stations. 

 I write about all this as coolly as if he were not my own dear youngest born, the little dear son whom I have so cherished, and who was almost a nursling still, when the bond which kept us all together was broken. But I believe I do truly feel that if my beloved sons are good and worthy of the name they bear, are in fact true, earnest, Christian men, I have no wish left for them--no selfish longings after their companionship, which can for a moment be put in comparison with such joy. Thus it almost seemed strange to me when, in a letter the other day from Willy to Edward, in reference to his--E's--future destination--Willy rather urged upon him a home, domestic life, on _my_ account, as my sons were already so scattered. As I say, those loving words seemed strange to me; because I have such an overpowering feeling that the all-in-all to me is that my sons should be in just that vocation in life most suited to them, and most bringing out what is highest and best in them; whether it might be in England, or at the furthest extremity of the world. 

 * * * * *

 _November 24, 1848. _--I have been unwell for some days, dearest Tom, and this makes me less active in all my usual employments, but it shall not, if I can help it, prevent my making some progress in this letter, which in less than a week may perhaps be on its way to New Zealand. I have just sent Fan down-stairs, for she nurses her Mother till I begin to think some change good for her. She has been reading aloud to me, and now, as the evening advances I have asked some of them to read to me a long poem by Clough--(the "Bothie") which I have no doubt will reach you. It does not _look_ attractive to me, for it is in English Hexameters, which are to me very cumbrous and uninviting; but probably that may be for some want of knowledge in my own ear and taste. The poem is addressed to his pupils of last summer, and in scenery, etc. , will have, I suppose, many touches from his Highland residence; but, in a brief Preface, he says that the tale itself is altogether fiction. 

 * * * * *

 To turn from things domestic to things at large, what a state of things is this at Berlin! a state of siege declared, and the King at open issue with his representatives!--from the country districts, people flocking to give him aid, while the great towns are almost in revolt. "Always too late" might, I suppose, have been his motto; and when things have been given with one hand, he has seemed too ready to withdraw them with the other. But, after all, I must and do believe that he has noble qualities, so to have won Bunsen's love and respect. 

 _November 25. _--Mary is preparing a long letter, and it will therefore matter the less if mine is not so long as I intended. I have not yet quite made up the way I have lost in my late indisposition, and we have such volumes of letters from dear Willy to answer, that I believe this folio will be all I can send to you, my own darling; but you do not dwell in my heart or my thoughts less fondly. I long inexpressibly to have some definite ideas of what you are now--after some eight months of residence--doing, thinking, feeling; what are your occupations in the present, what your aims and designs for the future. The assurance that it is your first and heartful desire to please God, my dear son; that you have struggled to do this and not allowed yourself to shrink from whatever you felt to be involved in it, this is, and will be my deepest and dearest comfort, and I pray to Him to guide you into all truth. But though supported by this assurance, I do not pretend to say that often and often I do not yearn over you in my thoughts, and long to bestow upon you in act and word, as well as in thought, some of that overflowing love which is cherished for you in your home. 

And here follows a tender mother-word in reference to an early andunrequited attachment of my father's, the fate of which may possiblyhave contributed to the restlessness which sent him beyond the seas. 

 But, dear Tom, I believe that though the hoped for flower and fruit have faded, yet that the plant has been strengthened and purified.... It would be a grief to me not to believe that you will yet be most happy in married life; and when you can make to yourself a home I shall perhaps lose some of my restless longing to be near you and ministering to your comfort, and sharing in your life--if I can think of you as cheered and helped by one who loved you as I did your own beloved father. 

 _Sunday, November 26. _--Just a year, my son, since you left England! But I really must not allow myself to dwell on this, and all the thoughts it brings with it; for I found last night that the contrast between the fulness of thought and feeling, and my own powerlessness to express it weighed on me heavily; and not having yet quite recovered my usual tone, I could not well bear it. So I will just try to collect for you a few more home Memoranda, and then have done.... Our new tenant, James Richardson, is now fairly established at his farm, and when I went up there and saw the cradle and the happy childish faces around the table, and the rows of oatmeal cake hanging up, and the cheerful, active Mother going hither and thither--now to her Dairy--now guiding the steps of the little one that followed her about--and all the time preparing things for her husband's return from his work at night, I could not but feel that it was a very happy picture of English life. Alas! that there are not larger districts where it exists! But I hope there is still much of it; and I feel that while there is an awful undercurrent of misery and sin--the latter both caused by the first and causing it--and while, on the surface, there is carelessness, and often recklessness and hardness and trifling, yet that still, in our English society, there is, between these two extremes, a strength of good mixed with baser elements, which must and will, I fully believe, support us nationally in the troublous times which are at hand--on which we are actually entered. 

 But again I am wandering, and now the others have gone off to the Rydal Chapel without me this lovely Sunday morning. There are the bells sounding invitingly across the valley, and the evergreens are white and sparkling in the sun. 

 I have a note from Clough.... His poem is as remarkable, I think, as you would expect, coming from him. Its _power_ quite overcame my dislike to the measure--so far at least as to make me read it with great interest--often, though, a painful one. And now I must end. 

As to Miss Brontë's impressions of Matthew Arnold in that same afternooncall of 1850, they were by no means flattering. She understands that hewas already the author of "a volume of poems" (_The Poems by A, _ 1849), remarks that his manner "displeases from its seeming foppery, " butrecognizes, nevertheless, in conversation with him, "some genuineintellectual aspirations"! It was but a few years later that my unclepaid his poet's homage to the genius of the two sisters--to Charlotte ofthe "expressive gray eyes"--to Emily of the "chainless soul. " I oftentry to picture their meeting in the Fox How drawing-room: MatthewArnold, tall, handsome, in the rich opening of his life, his firstpoetic honors thick upon him, looking with a half-critical, half-humorous eye at the famous little lady whom Miss Martineau hadbrought to call upon his mother; and beside him that small, intrepidfigure, on which the worst storms of life had already beaten, which wasbut five short years from its own last rest. I doubt whether, face toface, they would ever have made much of each other. But the sister whocould write of a sister's death as Charlotte wrote, in the letter thatevery lover of great prose ought to have by heart--

 Emily suffers no more from pain or weakness now, she never will suffer more in this world. She is gone, after a hard, short conflict.... We are very calm at present, why should we be otherwise? The anguish of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of death is gone; the funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. No need now to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. _Emily does not feel them_. --

must have stretched out spiritual hands to Matthew Arnold, had she livedto read "A Southern Night"--that loveliest, surely, of all laments ofbrother for brother. 

CHAPTER III

THE FAMILY OF FOX HOW

Doctor Arnold's eldest daughter, Jane Arnold, afterward Mrs. W. E. Forster, my godmother, stands out for me on the tapestry of the past, asone of the noblest personalities I have ever known. She was twenty-onewhen her father died, and she had been his chief companion among hischildren for years before death took him from her. He taught her Latinand Greek, he imbued her with his own political and historicalinterests, and her ardent Christian faith answered to his own. After hisdeath she was her mother's right hand at Fox How; and her letters to herbrothers--to my father, especially, since he was longest and farthestaway--show her quick and cultivated mind, and all the sweetness of hernature. We hear of her teaching a younger brother Latin and Greek; shegoes over to Miss Martineau on the other side of the valley to translatesome German for that busy woman; she reads Dante beside her mother, whenthe rest of the family have gone to bed; she sympathizes passionatelywith Mazzini and Garibaldi; and every week she walks over Loughriggthrough fair weather and foul, summer and winter, to teach in a nightschool at Skelwith. Then the young Quaker manufacturer, William Forster, appears on the scene, and she falls happily and completely in love. Herletters to the brother in New Zealand become, in a moment, all joy andardor, and nothing could be prettier than the account, given by one ofthe sisters, of the quiet wedding in Rydal Chapel, the family breakfast, the bride's simple dress and radiant look, Matthew Arnold giving hissister away--with the great fells standing sentinel. And there exists adelightful unpublished letter by Harriet Martineau which gives some ideaof the excitement roused in the quiet Ambleside valley by Jane Arnold'sengagement to the tall Yorkshireman who came from surroundings sodifferent from the academic and scholarly world in which the Arnolds hadbeen brought up. 

Then followed married life at Rawdon near Bradford, with supremehappiness at home, and many and growing interests in the manufacturing, religious, and social life around the young wife. In 1861 WilliamForster became member for Bradford, and in 1869 Gladstone included himin that Ministry of all the talents, which foundered under theonslaughts of Disraeli in 1874. Forster became Vice-President of theCouncil, which meant Minister for Education, with a few other trifleslike the cattle-plague thrown in. The Education Bill, which WilliamForster brought in in 1870 (as a girl of eighteen, I was in the Ladies'Gallery of the House of Commons on the great day to hear his speech), has been the foundation-stone ever since of English popular education. It has always been clear to me that the scheme of the bill was largelyinfluenced by William Forster's wife, and, through her, by theconvictions and beliefs of her father. The compromise by which theChurch schools, with the creeds and the Church catechism, werepreserved, under a conscience clause, while the dissenters got their wayas to the banishment of creeds and catechisms, and the substitution forthem of "simple Bible-teaching, " in the schools founded under the newSchool Boards, which the bill set up all over England, haspractically--with, of course, modifications--held its ground for nearlyhalf a century. It was illogical; and the dissenters have never ceasedto resent the perpetuation of the Church school which it achieved. ButEnglish life is illogical. It met the real situation; and it would neverhave taken the shape it did--in my opinion--but for the ardent beliefsof the young and remarkable woman, at once a strong Liberal and adevoted daughter of the English Church, as Arnold, Kingsley, and Mauriceunderstood it, who had married her Quaker husband in 1850, and hadthereby been the innocent cause of his automatic severance from theQuaker body. His respect for her judgment and intellectual power wasonly equaled by his devotion to her. And when the last great test of hisown life came, how she stood by him!--through those terrible days of theLand League struggle, when, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, Forstercarried his life in his hand month after month, to be worn out finallyby the double toil of Parliament and Ireland, and to die just before Mr. Gladstone split the Liberal party in 1886, by the introduction of theHome Rule Bill, in which Forster would not have followed him. 

I shall, however, have something to say later on in these Reminiscencesabout those tragic days. To those who watched Mrs. Forster through them, and who knew her intimately, she was one of the most interesting figuresof that crowded time. Few people, however, outside the circle of herkindred, knew her intimately. She was, of course, in the ordinary socialand political world, both before and after her husband's entrance uponoffice, and admission to the Cabinet; dining out and receiving at home;attending Drawing-rooms and public functions; staying at country houses, and invited to Windsor, like other Ministers' wives, and keenlyinterested in all the varying fortunes of Forster's party. But thoughshe was in that world, she was never truly of it. She moved through it, yet veiled from it, by that pure, unconscious selflessness which is thesaint's gift. Those who ask nothing for themselves, whose whole strengthis spent on affections that are their life, and on ideals at one withtheir affections, are not easily popular, like the self-seeking, parti-colored folk who make up the rest of us; who flatter, caress, andcourt, that we in our turn may be flattered and courted. Theirgentleness masks the indomitable soul within; and so their fellows areoften unaware of their true spiritual rank. 

It is interesting to recall the instinctive sympathy with which a natureso different from Charlotte Brontë's as that of Arnold's eldestdaughter, met the challenge of the Brontë genius. It would not have beenwonderful--in those days--if the quiet Fox How household, with itsstrong religious atmosphere, its daily psalms and lessons, its love for_The Christian Year_, its belief in "discipline" (how that comes out inall the letters!) had been repelled by the blunt strength of _JaneEyre_; just as it would not have been wonderful if they had held alooffrom Miss Martineau, in the days when it pleased that remarkable womanto preach mesmeric atheism, or atheistic mesmerism, as we choose to putit. But there was a lifelong friendship between them and HarrietMartineau; and they recognized at once the sincerity and truth--theliterary rank, in fact--of _Jane Eyre_. Not long after her marriage, Jane Forster with her husband went over to Haworth to see CharlotteBrontë. My aunt's letter, describing the visit to the dismal parsonageand church, is given without her name in Mrs. Gaskell's _Life_, and Mr. Shorter, in reprinting it in the second of his large volumes, does notseem to be aware of the identity of the writer. 

 Miss Brontë put me so in mind of her own Jane Eyre [wrote my godmother]. She looked smaller than ever, and moved about so quietly and noiselessly, just like a little bird, as Rochester called her; except that all birds are joyous, and that joy can never have entered that house since it was built. And yet, perhaps, when that old man (Mr. Brontë) married and took home his bride, and children's voices and feet were heard about the house, even that desolate graveyard and biting blast could not quench cheerfulness and hope. Now (i. E. Since the deaths of Emily and Anne) there is something touching in the sight of that little creature entombed in such a place, and moving about herself there like a spirit; especially when you think that the slight still frame incloses a force of strong, fiery life, which nothing has been able to freeze or extinguish. 

This letter was written before my birth and about six years before thewriter of it appeared, as an angel of help, in the dingy dock-side inn, where we tired travelers had taken shelter on our arrival from the otherside of the world, and where I was first kissed by my godmother. As Igrew up into girlhood, "Aunt K. " (K. Was the pet name by which MatthewArnold always wrote to her) became for me part of the magic of Fox How, though I saw her, of course, often in her own home also. I felt towardher a passionate and troubled affection. She was to me "a thing enskied"and heavenly--for all her quick human interests, and her sweet ways withthose she loved. How could any one be so good!--was often the despairingreflection of the child who adored her, caught herself in the toils of ahot temper and a stubborn will; but all the same, to see her enter aroom was joy, and to sit by her the highest privilege. I don't knowwhether she could be strictly called beautiful. But to me everythingabout her was beautiful--her broad brow, her clear brown eyes and wavybrown hair, the touch of stately grace with which she moved, the mouthso responsive and soft, yet, at need, so determined, the hand sodelicate, yet so characteristic. 

She was the eldest of nine. Of her relation to the next of them--herbrother Matthew--there are many indications in the collection of myuncle's letters, edited by Mr. George Russell. It was to her that"Resignation" was addressed, in recollection of their mountain walks andtalks together; and in a letter to her, the Sonnet "To Shakespeare, ""Others abide our question--thou art free, " was first written out. Theiraffection for each other, in spite of profound differences of opinion, only quickened and deepened with time. 

Between my father and his elder brother Matthew Arnold there was barelya year's difference of age. The elder was born in December, 1822, andthe younger in November, 1823. They were always warmly attached to eachother, and in spite of much that was outwardly divergent--sharplydivergent--they were more alike fundamentally than was often suspected. Both had derived from some remoter ancestry--possibly through theirCornish mother, herself the daughter of a Penrose and aTrevenen--elements and qualities which were lacking in the strongpersonality of their father. Imagination, "rebellion against fact, "spirituality, a tendency to dream, unworldliness, the passionate love ofbeauty and charm, "ineffectualness" in the practical competitivelife--these, according to Matthew Arnold, when he came to lecture atOxford on "The Study of Celtic Literature, " were and are thecharacteristic marks of the Celt. They were unequally distributedbetween the two brothers. "Unworldliness, " "rebellion against fact, ""ineffectualness" in common life, fell rather to my father's share thanmy uncle's; though my uncle's "worldliness, " of which he was sometimesaccused, if it ever existed, was never more than skin-deep. Imaginationin my father led to a lifelong and mystical preoccupation with religion;it made Matthew Arnold one of the great poets of the nineteenth century. 

There is a sketch of my father made in 1847, which preserves the dreamy, sensitive look of early youth, when he was the center of a band ofremarkable friends--Clough, Stanley, F. T. Palgrave, Alfred Domett(Browning's Waring), and others. It is the face--nobly and delicatelycut--of one to whom the successes of the practical, competitive lifecould never be of the same importance as those events which take placein thought, and for certain minds are the only real events. "For agesand ages the world has been constantly slipping ever more and more outof the Celt's grasp, " wrote Matthew Arnold. But all the while the Celthas great compensations. To him belongs another world than the visible;the world of phantasmagoria, of emotion, the world of passionatebeginnings, rather than of things achieved. After the romantic anddefiant days of his youth, my father, still pursuing the same naturaltendency, found all that he needed in Catholicism, and specially, Ithink, in that endless poetry and mystery of the Mass which keepsCatholicism alive. 

Matthew Arnold was very different in outward aspect. The face, strongand rugged, the large mouth, the broad lined brow, and vigorouscoal-black hair, bore no resemblance, except for that fugitive yetvigorous something which we call "family likeness, " to either his fatheror mother--still less to the brother so near to him in age. But theCeltic trace is there, though derived, I have sometimes thought, ratherfrom an Irish than a Cornish source. Doctor Arnold's mother, MarthaDelafield, according to a genealogy I see no reason to doubt, was partlyof Irish blood; one finds, at any rate, Fitzgeralds and Dillons amongthe names of her forebears. And I have seen in Ireland faces belongingto the "black Celt" type--faces full of power and humor, and softness, visibly molded out of the good common earth by the nimble spirit within, which have reminded me of my uncle. Nothing, indeed, at first sightcould have been less romantic or dreamy than his outer aspect. "Ineffectualness" was not to be thought of in connection with him. Hestood four-square--a courteous, competent man of affairs, an admirableinspector of schools, a delightful companion, a guest whom everybodywanted and no one could bind for long; one of the sanest, mostindependent, most cheerful and lovable of mortals. Yet his poems showwhat was the real inner life and genius of the man; how rich in thatvery "emotion, " "love of beauty and charm, " "rebellion against fact, ""spirituality, " "melancholy" which he himself catalogued as the cradlegifts of the Celt. Crossed, indeed, always, with the Rugby"earnestness, " with that in him which came to him from his father. 

It is curious to watch the growing perception of "Matt's" powers amongthe circle of his nearest kin, as it is reflected in these familyletters to the emigrant brother, which reached him across the seas from1847 to 1856, and now lie under my hand. The _Poems by A. _ came out, asall lovers of English poetry know, in 1849. My grandmother writes to myfather in March of that year, after protesting that she has not muchnews to give him:

 But the little volume of Poems!--that is indeed a subject of new and very great interest. By degrees we hear more of public opinion concerning them, and I am very much mistaken if their power both in thought and execution is not more and more felt and acknowledged. I had a letter from dear Miss Fenwick to-day, whose first impressions were that they were by _you_, for it seems she had heard of the volume as much admired, and as by one of the family, and she had hardly thought it could be by one so moving in the busy haunts of men as dear Matt.... Matt himself says: "I have learned a good deal as to what is _practicable_ from the objections of people, even when I thought them not reasonable, and in some degree they may determine my course as to publishing; e. G. , I had thoughts of publishing another volume of short poems next spring, and a tragedy I have long had in my head, the spring after: at present I shall leave the short poems to take their chance, only writing them when I cannot help it, and try to get on with my Tragedy ('Merope'), which however will not be a very quick affair. But as that must be in a regular and usual form, it may perhaps, if it succeeds, enable me to use meters in short poems which seem proper to myself; whether they suit the habits of readers at first sight or not. But all this is rather vague at present.... I think I am getting quite indifferent about the book. I have given away the only copy I had, and now never look at them. The most enthusiastic people about them are young men of course; but I have heard of one or two people who found pleasure in 'Resignation, ' and poems of that stamp, which is what I like. "

"The most enthusiastic people about them are young men, of course. " Thesentence might stand as the motto of all poetic beginnings. The youngpoet writes first of all for the young of his own day. They make hisbodyguard. They open to him the gates of the House of Fame. But if thedivine power is really his, it soon frees itself from the shackles ofTime and Circumstance. The true poet becomes, in the language of theGreek epigram on Homer, "the ageless mouth of all the world. " And if, "The Strayed Reveller, " and the Sonnet "To Shakespeare, " and"Resignation, " delighted those who were young in 1849, that samegeneration, as the years passed over it, instead of outgrowing theirpoet, took him all the more closely to their hearts. Only so can weexplain the steady spread and deepening of his poetic reputation whichbefell my uncle up to the very end of his life, and had assured him bythen--leaving out of count the later development of his influence bothin the field of poetry and elsewhere--his place in the history ofEnglish literature. 

But his entry as a poet was gradual, and but little heralded, comparedto the debuts of our own time. Here is an interesting appreciation fromhis sister Mary, about whom I shall have more to say presently. At thetime this letter was written, in 1849, she was twenty-three, and alreadya widow, after a tragic year of married life during which her younghusband had developed paralysis of the brain. She was living in London, attending Bedford College, and F. D. Maurice's sermons, much influenced, like her brothers, by Emerson and Carlyle, and at this moment a fine, restless, immature creature, much younger than her years in somerespects, and much older in others--with worlds hitherto unsuspected inthe quiet home life. She writes:

 I have been in London for several months this year, and I have seen a good deal of Matt, considering the very different lives we lead. I used to breakfast with him sometimes, and then his Poems seemed to make me know Matt so much better than I had ever done before. Indeed it was almost like a new Introduction to him. I do not think those Poems could be read--quite independently of their poetical power--without leading one to expect a great deal from Matt; without raising I mean the kind of expectation one has from and for those who have, in some way or other, come face to face with life and asked it, in real earnest, what it means. I felt there was so much more of this practical questioning in Matt's book than I was at all prepared for; in fact that it showed a knowledge of life and conflict which was _strangely like experience_ if it was not the thing itself; and this with all Matt's great power I should not have looked for. I do not yet know the book well, but I think that "Mycerinus" struck me most, perhaps, as illustrating what I have been speaking of. 

And again, to another member of the family:

 It is the moral strength, or, at any rate, the _moral consciousness_ which struck and surprised me so much in the poems. I could have been prepared for any degree of poetical power, for there being a great deal more than I could at all appreciate; but there is something altogether different from this, something which such a man as Clough has, for instance, which I did not expect to find in Matt; but it is there. Of course when I speak of his Poems I only speak of the impression received from those I understand. Some are perfect riddles to me, such as that to the Child at Douglas, which is surely more poetical than true. 

_Strangely like experience!_ The words are an interesting proof of thedifficulty we all have in seeing with accuracy the persons and thingswhich are nearest to us. The astonishment of the sisters--for the samefeeling is expressed by Mrs. Forster--was very natural. In these earlydays, "Matt" often figures in the family letters as the worldling of thegroup--the dear one who is making way in surroundings quite unknown tothe Fox How circle, where, under the shadow of the mountains, thesisters, idealists all of them, looking out a little austerely, for alltheir tenderness, on the human scene, are watching with a certainanxiety lest Matt should be "spoiled. " As Lord Lansdowne's privatesecretary, very much liked by his chief, he goes among rich andimportant people, and finds himself, as a rule, much cleverer than they;above all, able to amuse them, so often the surest road to social andother success. Already at Oxford "Matt" had been something of anexquisite--or, as Miss Brontë puts it, a trifle "foppish"; and (in themanuscript) _Fox How Magazine_, to which all the nine contributed, andin which Matthew Arnold's boyish poems may still be read, there are manyfamily jests leveled at Matt's high standard in dress and deportment. 

But how soon the nascent dread lest their poet should be somehowseparated from them by the "great world" passes away from mother andsisters--forever! With every year of his life Matthew Arnold, besidesmaking the sunshine of his own married home, became a more attached, amore devoted son and brother. The two volumes of his published lettersare there to show it. I will only quote here a sentence from a letter ofMrs. Arnold's, written in 1850, a year after the publication of the_Poems by A. _ She and her eldest daughter, then shortly to becomeWilliam Forster's wife, were at the time in London. "K" had beenseriously ill, and the marriage had been postponed for a short time. 

 Matt [says Mrs. Arnold] has been with us almost every day since we came up--now so long ago!--and it is pleasant indeed to see his dear face, and to find him always so affectionate, and so unspoiled by his being so much sought after in a kind of society entirely different from anything we can enter into. 

But, indeed, the time saved, day after day, for an invalid sister, by arun-after young man of twenty-seven, who might so easily have made oneor other of the trifling or selfish excuses we are all so ready to make, was only a prophecy of those many "nameless unremembered acts" of simplekindness which filled the background of Matthew Arnold's middle andlater life, and were not revealed, many of them, even to his own people, till after his death--kindness to a pupil-teacher, an unsuccessfulwriter, a hard-worked schoolmaster or schoolmistress, a budding poet, aschool-boy. It was not possible to "spoil" Matthew Arnold. Meredith's"Comic Spirit" in him, his irrepressible humor, would alone have savedhim from it. And as to his relation to "society, " and the great ones init, no one more frankly amused himself--within certain very definitelimits--with the "cakes and ale" of life, and no one held more lightlyto them. He never denied--none but the foolish ever do deny--the immensepersonal opportunities and advantages of an aristocratic class, whereverit exists. He was quite conscious--none but those without imaginationcan fail to be conscious--of the glamour of long descent and greataffairs. But he laughed at the "Barbarians, " the materialized or stupidholders of power and place, and their "fortified posts"--i. E. , thecountry houses--just as he laughed at the Philistines and Mr. Bottles;when he preached a sermon in later life, it was on Menander's motto, "Choose Equality"; and he and Clough--the Republican--were not reallyfar apart. He mocked even at Clough, indeed, addressing his letters tohim, "Citizen Clough, Oriel Lyceum, Oxford"; but in the midst of therevolutionary hubbub of 1848 he pours himself out to Clough only--he and"Thyrsis, " to use his own expression in a letter, "agreeing like twolambs in a world of wolves, " and in his early sonnet (1848) "To aRepublican Friend" (who was certainly Clough) he says:

 If sadness at the long heart-wasting show Wherein earth's great ones are disquieted; If thoughts, not idle, while before me flow

 The armies of the homeless and unfed-- If these are yours, if this is what you are, Then I am yours, and what you feel, I share. 

Yet, as he adds, in the succeeding sonnet, he has no belief in suddenradical change, nor in any earthly millennium--

 Seeing this vale, this earth, whereon we dream, Is on all sides o'ershadowed by the high Uno'erleaped mountains of necessity, Sparing us narrower margin than we dream. 

On the eagerness with which Matthew Arnold followed the revolutionaryspectacle of 1848, an unpublished letter written--piquantlyenough!--from Lansdowne House itself, on February 28th, in that famousyear, to my father in New Zealand, throws a vivid light. One feels theartist in the writer. First, the quiet of the great house and courtyard, the flower-pricked grass, the "still-faced babies"; then the suddenclash of the street-cries! "Your uncle's description of this house, "writes the present Lord Lansdowne, in 1910, "might almost have beenwritten yesterday, instead of in 1848. Little is changed, Romulus andRemus and the she-wolf are still on the top of the bookcase, and theclock is still hard by; but the picture of the Jewish Exiles... Has beengiven to a local School of Art in Wiltshire! The green lawn remains, butI am afraid the crocuses, which I can remember as a child, no longercome up through the turf. And lastly one of the 'still-faced babies'[i. E. , Lord Lansdowne himself] is still often to be seen in the gravelcourt! He was three years old when the letter was written. "

Here, then, is the letter:

 LANSDOWNE HOUSE, _Feb. 8, 1848. _

 MY DEAREST TOM, --... Here I sit, opposite a marble group of Romulus and Remus and the wolf; the two children fighting like mad, and the limp-uddered she-wolf affectionately snarling at the little demons struggling on her back. Above it is a great picture, Rembrandt's Jewish Exiles, which would do for Consuelo and Albert resting in one of their wanderings, worn out upon a wild stony heath sloping to the Baltic--she leaning over her two children who sleep in their torn rags at her feet. Behind me a most musical clock, marking now 24 Minutes past 1 P. M. On my left two great windows looking out on the court in front of the house, through one of which, slightly opened, comes in gushes the soft damp breath, with a tone of spring-life in it, which the close of an English February sometimes brings--so different from a November mildness. The green lawn which occupies nearly half the court is studded over with crocuses of all colors--growing out of the grass, for there are no flower-beds; delightful for the large still-faced white-robed babies whom their nurses carry up and down on the gravel court where it skirts the green. And from the square and the neighboring streets, through the open door whereat the civil porter moves to and fro, come the sounds of vehicles and men, in all gradations, some from near and some from far, but mellowed by the time they reach this backstanding lordly mansion. 

 But above all cries comes one whereat every stone in this and other lordly mansions may totter and quake for fear:

"Se... C... Ond Edition of the Morning _Herald_--L... A... Test news fromParis:--arrival of the King of the French. "

 I have gone out and bought the said portentous _Herald_, and send it herewith, that you may read and know. As the human race forever stumbles up its great steps, so it is now. You remember the Reform Banquets [in Paris] last summer?--well!--the diners omitted the king's health, and abused Guizot's majority as corrupt and servile: the majority and the king grew excited; the Government forbade the Banquets to continue. The king met the Chamber with the words "_passions aveugles_" to characterize the dispositions of the Banqueters: and Guizot grandly declared against the spirit of Revolution all over the world. His practice suited his words, or seemed to suit them, for both in Switzerland and Italy, the French Government incurred the charge of siding against the Liberals. Add to this the corruption cases you remember, the Praslin murder, and later events, which powerfully stimulated the disgust (moral indignation that People does not feel!) entertained by the lower against the governing class. 

 Then Thiers, seeing the breeze rising, and hoping to use it, made most telling speeches in the debate on the Address, clearly defining the crisis as a question between revolution and counter-revolution, and declaring enthusiastically for the former. Lamartine and others, the sentimental and the plain honest, were very damaging on the same side. The Government were harsh-- abrupt--almost scornful. They would not yield--would not permit banquets: would give no Reform till they chose. Guizot spoke (alone in the Chamber, I think) to this effect. With decreasing Majorities the Government carried the different clauses of the address, amidst furious scenes; opposition members crying that they were worse than Polignac. It was resolved to hold an Opposition banquet in Paris in spite of the Government, last Tuesday, the 22d. In the week between the close of the debate and this day there was a profound, uneasy excitement, but nothing I think to appall the rulers. They had the fortifications; all kinds of stores; and 100, 000 troops of the line. To be quite secure, however, they determined to take a formal legal objection to the banquet at the doors; but not to prevent the procession thereto. On that the Opposition published a proclamation inviting the National Guard, who sympathized, to form part of the procession in uniform. Then the Government forbade the meeting altogether--absolutely--and the Opposition resigned themselves to try the case in a Court of Law. 

 _So did not the people!_

 They gathered all over Paris: the National Guard, whom Ministers did not trust, were not called out: the Line checked and dispersed the mob on all points. But next day the mob were there again: the Ministers in a constitutional fright called out the National Guard: a body of these hard by the Opéra refused to clear the street, they joined the people. Troops were brought up: the Mob and the National Guard refused to give them passage down the Rue le Pelletier, which they occupied: after a moment's hesitation, they were marched on along the Boulevard. 

 This settled the matter! Everywhere the National Guard fraternized with the people: the troops stood indifferent. The King dismissed the Ministers: he sent for Molé; a shade better: not enough: he sent for Thiers--a pause; this was several shades better--still not enough: meanwhile the crowd continued, and attacks on different posts, with slight bloodshed, increased the excitement: finally _the King abdicated_ in favor of the Count of Paris, and fled. The Count of Paris was taken by his mother to the Chamber--the people broke in; too late--not enough:--a republic--an appeal to the people. The royal family escaped to all parts, Belgium, Eu, England: _a Provisional Government named_. 

 You will see how they stand: they have adopted the last measures of Revolution. --News has just come that the National Guard have declared against a Republic, and that a collision is inevitable. 

 If possible I will write by the next mail, and send you a later paper than the _Herald_ by this mail. 

 Your truly affectionate, dearest Tom, M. ARNOLD. 

To this let me add here two or three other letters or fragments, allunpublished, which I find among the papers from which I have beendrawing, ending, for the present, with the jubilant letter describinghis election to the Poetry Professorship at Oxford, in 1857. Here, firstof all, is an amusing reference, dated 1849, to Keble, then the idol ofevery well-disposed Anglican household:

 I dined last night with a Mr. Grove, [1] a celebrated man of science: his wife is pretty and agreeable, but not on a first interview. The husband and I agree wonderfully on some points. He is a bad sleeper, and hardly ever free from headache; he equally dislikes and disapproves of modern existence and the state of excitement in which everybody lives: and he sighs after a paternal despotism and the calm existence of a Russian or Asiatic. He showed me a picture of Faraday, which is wonderfully fine: I am almost inclined to get it: it has a curious likeness to Keble, only with a calm, earnest look unlike the latter's Flibbertigibbet, fanatical, twinkling expression. 

[Footnote 1: Afterward Sir William Grove, F. R. S. , author of the famousessay on "The Correlation of Physical Force. "]

Did ever anybody apply such adjectives to John Keble before! Yet if anyone will look carefully at the engraving of Keble so often seen in quietparsonages, they will understand, I think, exactly what Matthew Arnoldmeant. 

In 1850 great changes came upon the Arnold family. The "Doctor's" elderthree children--Jane, Matthew, and my father--married in that year, anda host of new interests sprang up for every member of the Fox Howcircle. I find in a letter to my father from Arthur Stanley, hisfather's biographer, and his own Oxford tutor, the following referenceto "Matt's" marriage, and to the second series of Poems--containing"Sohrab and Rustum"--which were published in 1854. "You will haveheard, " writes Stanley, "of the great success of Matt's poems. He is ingood heart about them. He is also--I must say so, though perhaps I haveno right to say so--greatly improved by his marriage--retaining all thegenius and nobleness of mind which you remember, with all the lesserfaults pruned and softened down. " Matt himself wrote to give news of hiswedding, to describe the bride--Judge Wightman's daughter, the dear andgracious little lady whom we grandchildren knew and loved as "Aunt FannyLucy"--and to wish my father joy of his own. And then there is nothingamong the waifs and strays that have come to me worth printing, till1855, when my uncle writes to New Zealand:

 I hope you have got my book by this time. What you will like best, I think, will be the "Scholar Gipsy. " I am sure that old Cumner and Oxford country will stir a chord in you. For the preface I doubt if you will care, not having much before your eyes the sins and offenses at which it is directed: the first being that we have numbers of young gentlemen with really wonderful powers of perception and expression, but to whom there is wholly wanting a "_bedeutendes Individuum"_--so that their productions are most unedifying and unsatisfactory. But this is a long story. 

 As to Church matters. I think people in general concern themselves less with them than they did when you left England. Certainly religion is not, to all appearance at least, losing ground here: but since the great people of Newman's party went over, the disputes among the comparatively unimportant remains of them do not excite much interest. I am going to hear Manning at the Spanish Chapel next Sunday. Newman gives himself up almost entirely to organizing and educating the Roman Catholics, and is gone off greatly, they say, as a preacher. 

 God bless you, my dearest Tom: I cannot tell you the almost painful longing I sometimes have to see you once more. 

The following year the brothers met again; and there followed, almostimmediately, my uncle's election to the Poetry Professorship at Oxford. He writes, in answer to my father's congratulations:

 HAMPTON, _May 16, 1857. _

 MY DEAR TOM, --My thoughts have often turned to you during my canvass for the Professorship--and they have turned to you more than ever during the last few days which I have been spending at Oxford. You alone of my brothers are associated with that life at Oxford, the _freest_ and most delightful part, perhaps, of my life, when with you and Clough and Walrond I shook off all the bonds and formalities of the place, and enjoyed the spring of life and that unforgotten Oxfordshire and Berkshire country. Do you remember a poem of mine called "The Scholar Gipsy"? It was meant to fix the remembrance of those delightful wanderings of ours in the Cumner hills before they were quite effaced--and as such Clough and Walrond accepted it, and it has had much success at Oxford, I am told, as was perhaps likely from its _couleur locale_. I am hardly ever at Oxford now, but the sentiment of the place is overpowering to me when I have leisure to feel it, and can shake off the interruptions which it is not so easy to shake off now as it was when we were young. But on Tuesday afternoon I smuggled myself away, and got up into one of our old coombs among the Cumner hills, and into a field waving deep with cowslips and grasses, and gathered such a bunch as you and I used to gather in the cowslip field on Lutterworth road long years ago. 

 You dear old boy, I love your congratulations although I see and hear so little of you, and, alas! _can_ see and hear but so little of you. I was supported by people of all opinions, the great bond of union being, I believe, the affectionate interest felt in papa's memory. I think it probable that I shall lecture in English: there is no direction whatever in the Statute as to the language in which the lectures shall be: and the Latin has so died out, even among scholars, that it seems idle to entomb a lecture which, in English, might be stimulating and interesting. 

On the same occasion, writing to his mother, the new Professor gives anamusing account of the election day, when my uncle and aunt came up totown from Hampton, where they were living, in order to get telegraphicnews of the polling from friends at Oxford. "Christ Church"--i. E. , theHigh Church party in Oxford--had put up an opposition candidate, and theexcitement was great. My uncle was by this time the father of threesmall boys, Tom, Trevenen--_alias_ Budge--and Richard--"Diddy. "

 We went first to the telegraph station at Charing Cross. Then, about 4, we got a message from Walrond--"nothing certain is known, but it is rumored that you are ahead. " Then we went to get some toys for the children in the Lowther Arcade, and could scarcely have found a more genuine distraction than in selecting wagons for Tom and Trev, with horses of precisely the same color, not one of which should have a hair more in his tail than the other--and a musical cart for Diddy. A little after five we went back to the telegraph office, and got the following message--"Nothing declared, but you are said to be quite safe. Go to Eaton Place. " ["Eaton Place" was then the house of Judge Wightman, Mrs. Matthew Arnold's father. ] To Eaton Place we went, and then a little after 6 o'clock we were joined by the Judge in the highest state of joyful excitement with the news of my majority of 85, which had been telegraphed to him from Oxford after he had started and had been given to him at Paddington Station.... The income is £130 a year or thereabouts: the duties consist as far as I can learn in assisting to look over the prize compositions, in delivering a Latin oration in praise of founders at every alternate commemoration, and in preparing and giving three Latin lectures on ancient poetry in the course of the year. _These lectures I hope to give in English_. 

The italics are mine. The intention expressed here and in the letter tomy father was, as is well known, carried out, and Matthew Arnold'sLectures at Oxford, together with the other poetic and critical workproduced by him during the years of his professorship, became so great aforce in the development of English criticism and English taste, thatthe lifelike detail of this letter acquires a kind of historical value. As a child of fourteen I first made acquaintance with Oxford while myuncle was still Professor. I remember well some of his lectures, thecrowded lecture-hall, the manner and personality of the speaker, and myown shy pride in him--from a great distance. For I was a self-conscious, bookish child, and my days of real friendship with him were still farahead. But during the years that followed, the ten years that he heldhis professorship, what a spell he wielded over Oxford, and literaryEngland in general! Looking back, one sees how the first series of_Essays in Criticism_, the _Lectures on Celtic Literature_, or _OnTranslating Homer, Culture, and Anarchy_ and the rest, were all the timeworking on English taste and feeling, whether through sympathy orantagonism; so that after those ten years, 1857-1867, the intellectuallife of the country had absorbed, for good and all, an influence, and astimulus, which had set it moving on new paths to new ends. With thesethoughts in mind, supplying a comment on the letter which few peoplecould have foreseen in 1857, let me quote a few more sentences:

 Keble voted for me after all. He told the Coleridges he was so much pleased with my letter (to the electors) that he could not refrain. ... I had support from all sides. Archdeacon Denison voted for me, also Sir John Yarde Buller, and Henley, of the high Tory party. It was an immense victory--some 200 more voted than have ever, it is said, voted in a Professorship election before. It is a great lesson to Christ Church, which was rather disposed to imagine it could carry everything by its great numbers. 

 Good-by, my dearest mother.... I have just been up to see the three dear little brown heads on their pillows, all asleep.... My affectionate thanks to Mrs. Wordsworth and Mrs. Fletcher for their kind interest in my success. 

It is pleasant to think of Wordsworth's widow, in her "old age sereneand bright, " and of the poet's old friend, Mrs. Fletcher, watching andrejoicing in the first triumphs of the younger singer. 

So the ten years of approach and attack--in the intellectualsense--came to an end, and the ten central years of mastery and successbegan. Toward the end of that time, as a girl of sixteen, I became aresident in Oxford. Up to then Ruskin--the _Stones of Venice_ andcertain chapters in _Modern Painters_--had been my chief intellectualpassion in a childhood and first youth that cut but a very poor figure, as I look back upon them, beside the "wonderful children" of thisgeneration! But it must have been about 1868 that I first read _Essaysin Criticism. _ It is not too much to say that the book set for me thecurrents of life; its effect heightened, no doubt, by the sense ofkinship. Above all it determined in me, as in many others, an enduringlove of France and of French literature, which played the part ofschoolmaster to a crude youth. I owe this to my uncle, and it was apriceless boon. If he had only lived a little longer--if he had not diedso soon after I had really begun to know him--how many debts to himwould have been confessed, how many things said, which, after all, werenever said!

CHAPTER IV

OTHER CHILDREN OF FOX HOW

I have now to sketch some other figures in the Fox How circle, togetherwith a few of the intimate friends who mingled with it frequently, andvery soon became names of power to the Tasmanian child also. 

Let me take first Doctor Arnold's third son, "Uncle Willy"--my father'sjunior by some four years. William Delafield Arnold is secure of longremembrance, one would fain think, if only as the subject of MatthewArnold's two memorial poems--"A Southern Night" and "Stanzas fromCarnac. " But in truth he had many and strong claims of his own. Hisyouth was marked by that "restlessness, " which is so often spoken of inthe family letters as a family quality and failing. My father's"restlessness" made him throw up a secure niche in English life, for theNew Zealand adventure. The same temperament in Mary Twining, the youngwidow of twenty-two, took her to London, away from the quiet of theAmbleside valley, and made her an ardent follower of Maurice, Kingsley, and Carlyle. And in Willy, the third son, it showed itself first in arevolt against Oxford, while he was still at Christ Church, leading tohis going out to India and joining the Indian Army, at the age oftwenty, only to find the life of an Indian subaltern all butintolerable, and to plunge for a time at least into fresh schemes ofchange. 

Among the early photographs at Fox How there is a particularly finedaguerreotype of a young officer in uniform, almost a boy, slim and wellproportioned, with piled curly hair, and blue eyes, which in the late'fifties I knew as "Uncle Willy"; and there were other photographs onglass of the same young man, where this handsome face appeared again, grown older--much older--the boyish look replaced by an aspect of rathergrave dignity. In the later pictures he was grouped with children, whomI knew as my Indian cousins. But him, in the flesh, I had never seen. Hewas dead. His wife was dead. On the landing bookcase of Fox How therewas, however, a book in two blue volumes, which I soon realized as a"novel, " called _Oakfield_, which had been written by the handsome youngsoldier in the daguerreotype. I tried to read it, but found it was aboutthings and persons in which I could then take no interest. But itsauthor remained to me a mysteriously attractive figure; and when thetime came for me to read my Uncle Matthew's poems, "A Southern Night, "describing the death at Gibraltar of this soldier uncle, became a greatfavorite with me. I could see it all as Matthew Arnold described it--thesteamer approaching Gibraltar, the landing, and the pale invalid withthe signs on him of that strange thing called "death, " which to a childthat "feels its life in every limb" has no real meaning, though the talkof it may lead vaguely to tears, as that poem often did with me. 

Later on, of course, I read _Oakfield_, and learned to take a moreinformed pride in the writer of it. But it was not until a number ofletters written from India by William Arnold to my father in New Zealandbetween 1848 and 1855, with a few later ones, came into my possession, at my father's death, that I really seemed to know this dear vanishedkinsman, though his orphaned children had always been my friends. 

[Illustration: FOX HOW, THE WESTMORELAND HOME OF THE ARNOLDS. ]

The letters of 1848 and 1849 read like notes for _Oakfield_. They werewritten in bitterness of soul by a very young man, with high hopes andideals, fresh from the surroundings of Oxford and Rugby, from thetraining of the Schoolhouse and Fox How, and plunged suddenly into asociety of boys--the subalterns of the Bengal Native Infantry--livingfor the most part in idleness, often a vicious idleness, without anyrestraining public opinion, and practically unshepherded, amid thetemptations of the Indian climate and life. They show that the novel is, indeed, as was always supposed, largely autobiographical, and thereferences in them to the struggle with the Indian climate point sadlyforward to the writer's own fate, ten years later, when, like the heroof his novel, Edward Oakfield, he fell a victim to Indian heat andIndian work. The novel was published in 1853, while its author was athome on a long sick leave, and is still remembered for the anger andscandal it provoked in India, and the reforms to which, no doubt, afterthe Mutiny, it was one of the contributing impulses. It is, indeed, fullof interest for any student of the development of Anglo-Indian life andsociety; even when one remembers how, soon after it was published, thegreat storm of the Mutiny came rushing over the society it describes, changing and uprooting everywhere. As fiction, it suffers from the Rugby"earnestness" which overmasters in it any purely artistic impulse, whileinfusing a certain fire and unity of its own. But various incidents inthe story--the quarrel at the mess-table, the horse-whipping, the courtmartial, the death of Vernon, and the meeting between Oakfield andStafford, the villain of the piece, after Chilianwallah--are told withforce, and might have led on, had the writer lived, to something moredetached and mature in the way of novel-writing. 

But there were few years left to him, "poor gallant boy!"--to quote thephrase of his poet brother; and within them he was to find his happinessand his opportunity in love and in public service, not in literature. 

Nothing could be more pathetic than the isolation and revolt of theearly letters. The boy Ensign is desperately homesick, pining for FoxHow, for his mother and sisters, for the Oxford he had so easilyrenounced, for the brothers parted from him by such leagues of land andsea. 

 The fact that one learns first in India [he says, bitterly] is the profound ignorance which exists in England about it. You know how one hears it spoken of always as a magnificent field for exertion, and this is true enough in one way, for if a man does emerge at all, he emerges the more by contrast--he is a triton among minnows. But I think the responsibility of those who keep sending out here young fellows of sixteen and seventeen fresh from a private school or Addiscombe is quite awful. The stream is so strong, the society is so utterly worldly and mercenary in its best phase, so utterly and inconceivably low and profligate in its worst, that it is not strange that at so early an age, eight out of ten sink beneath it. ... One soon observes here how seldom one meets _a happy man_. 

 I came out here with three great advantages [he adds]. First, being twenty instead of seventeen; secondly not having been at Addiscombe; third, having been at Rugby and Christ Church. This gives me a sort of position--but still I know the danger is awful--for constitutionally I believe I am as little able to stand the peculiar trials of Indian life as anybody. 

And he goes on to say that if ever he feels himself in peril of sinkingto the level of what he loathes--"I will go at once. " By coming out toIndia he had bound himself to one thing only--"to earn my own bread. "But he is not bound to earn it "as a gentleman. " The day may come--

 when I shall ask for a place on your farm, and if you ask how I am to get there, you, Tom, are not the person to deny that a man who is in earnest and capable of forming a resolution can do more difficult things than getting from India to New Zealand!

And he winds up with yearning affection toward the elder brother so faraway. 

 I think of you very often--our excursion to Keswick and Greta Hall, our walk over Hardknot and Wrynose, our bathes in the old Allen Bank bathing-place [Grasmere], our parting in the cab at the corner of Mount St. One of my pleasantest but most difficult problems is when and where we shall meet again. 

In another letter, written a year later, the tone is still despondent. "It is no affectation to say that I feel my life, in one way, cannot nowbe a happy one. " He feels it his duty for the present to "lie still, " asKeble says, to think, it may be to suffer. "But in my castle-buildings Ioften dream of coming to you. " He appreciates, more fully than everbefore, Tom's motives in going to New Zealand--the desire that may movea man to live his own life in a new and freer world. "But when I amasked, as I often am, why you went, I always grin and let people answerthemselves; for I could not hope to explain without preaching a sermon. An act of faith and conviction cannot be understood by the light ofworldly motives and interests; and to blow out this light, and bring thetrue one, is not the work of a young man with his own darkness tostruggle through; so I grin as aforesaid. " "God is teaching us, " headds--i. E. , the different members of the family--"by separation, absence, and suffering. " And he winds up--"Good-by. I never likefinishing a letter to you--it seems like letting you fall back again tosuch infinite distance. And you are often very near me, and the thoughtof you is often cheery and helpful to me in my own conflict. " Even up toJanuary, 1850, he is still thinking of New Zealand, and signing himself, "ever, dear Tom, whether I am destined to see you soon, or never againin this world--Your most truly affectionate brother. "

Alack! the brothers never did meet again, in this world which both tookso hardly. But for Willy a transformation scene was near. After twoyears in India, his gift and his character had made their mark. He hadnot only been dreaming of New Zealand; besides his daily routine, he hadbeen working hard at Indian languages and history. The Lawrences, bothJohn and Henry, had found him out, and realized his quality. It was atSir Henry Lawrence's house in the spring of 1850 that he met Miss FannyHodgson, daughter of the distinguished soldier and explorer, GeneralHodgson, discoverer of the sources of the Ganges, and at that time theIndian Surveyor-General. The soldier of twenty-three fell instantly inlove, and tumult and despondency melted away. The next letter to NewZealand is pitched in quite another key. He still judges Indian life andIndian government with a very critical eye. "The Alpha and Omega of thewhole evil in Indian Society" is "the regarding India as a rupee-mine, instead of a Colony, and ourselves as Fortune-hunters andPension-earners rather than as emigrants and missionaries. " And outsidehis domestic life his prospects are still uncertain. But with every mailone can see the strained spirit relaxing, yielding to the spell of loveand to the honorable interests of an opening life. 

"To-day, my Thomas [October 2, 1850], I sit, a married man in the Bengalarmy, writing to a brother, it may be a married man, in Van Diemen'sLand. " (Rumors of Tom's courtship of Julia Sorell had evidently justreached him. ) He goes on to describe his married home at Hoshyarpore, and his work at Indian languages. He has been reading Carlyle's_Cromwell_, and marveling at the "rapid rush of thought which seems moreand more to be engrossing people in England!" "In India you will easilybelieve that the torpor is still unbroken. " (The Mutiny was only sevenshort years ahead!) And he is still conscious of the "many weights whichdo beset and embitter a man's life in India. " But a new stay within, thereconciliation that love brings about between a man and the world, upholds him. 

"'To draw homeward to the general life, ' which you, and dear Matthimself, and I, and all of us, are--or at least may be--living, independent of all the accidents of time and circumstance--this is agreat alleviation. " The "_fundamentals"_ are safe. He dwells happily onthe word--"a good word, in which you and I, so separated, as far asaccidents go, it may be for all time, can find great comfort, speakingas it does of Eternity. " One sees what is in his mind--the brother's"little book of poems" published a year before:

 Yet they, believe me, who await No gifts from chance, have conquered fate, They, winning room to see and hear, And to men's business not too near Though clouds of individual strife Draw homeward to the general life. * * * * * To the wise, foolish; to the world Weak;--yet not weak, I might reply, Not foolish, Fausta, in His eye, To whom each moment in its race, Crowd as we will its neutral space, Is but a quiet watershed Whence, equally, the seas of life and death are fed. 

Six months later the younger brother has heard "as a positive fact" ofTom's marriage, and writes, with affectionate "chaff":

 I wonder whether it has changed you much?--not made a Tory of you, I'll undertake to say! But it is wonderfully sobering. After all, Master Tom, it is not the very exact _finale_ which we should have expected to your Republicanism of the last three or four years, to find you a respectable married man, holding a permanent appointment!

Matt's marriage, too, stands pre-eminent among the items of family news. What blind judges, sometimes, the most attached brothers are of eachother!

 I hear too by this mail of Matt's engagement, which suggests many thoughts. I own that Matt is one of the very last men in the world whom I can fancy happily married--or rather happy in matrimony. But I dare say I reckon without my host, for there was such a "_longum intervallum"_ between dear old Matt and me, that even that last month in town, when I saw so much of him, though there was the most entire absence of elder-brotherism on his part, and only the most kind and thoughtful affection, for which I shall always feel grateful, yet our intercourse was that of man and boy; and though the difference of years was not so formidable as between "Matthew" and Wordsworth, yet we were less than they a "pair of Friends, " though a pair of very loving brothers. 

But even in this gay and charming letter one begins to see the shadowscast by the doom to come. The young wife has gone to Simla, having been"delicate" for some time. The young husband stays behind, fighting theheat. 

 The hot weather, old boy, is coming on like a tiger. It is getting on for ten at night; but we sit with windows all wide open, the punkah going, the thinnest conceivable garments, and yet we sweat, my brother, very profusely.... To-morrow I shall be up at gun-fire, about half-past four A. M. And drive down to the civil station, about three miles off, to see a friend, an officer of our own corps ... Who is sick, return, take my Bearer's daily account, write a letter or so, and lie down with _Don Quixote_ under a punkah, go to sleep the first chapter that Sancho lets me, and sleep till ten, get up, bathe, re-dress and breakfast; do my daily business, such as it is--hard work, believe me, in a hot sleep- inducing, intestine-withering climate, till sunset, when doors and windows are thrown open ... And mortals go out to "eat the air, " as the natives say. 

The climate, indeed, had already begun its deadly attack upon anorganism as fine and sensitive as any of the myriad victims which thesecret forces of India's sun and soil have exacted from her Europeaninvaders. In 1853, William Delafield Arnold came home invalided, withhis wife and his elder two children. The third, Oakeley (the future WarMinister in Mr. Balfour's Government), was born in England in 1855. There were projects of giving up India and settling at home. The youngsoldier whose literary gift, always conspicuous among the nine in theold childish Fox How days, and already shown in _Oakfield_, was becomingmore and more marked, was at this time a frequent contributor to the_Times_, the _Economist_, and _Fraser_, and was presently offered theeditorship of the _Economist_. But just as he was about to accept it, came a flattering offer from India, no doubt through the influence ofSir John Lawrence, of the Directorship of Public Instruction in thePunjaub. He thought himself bound to accept it, and with his wife andtwo children went out again at the end of 1855. His business was toorganize the whole of native education in the Punjaub, and he did it sowell during the short time that remained to him before the Mutiny brokeout, that during all that time of terror, education in the Punjaub wasnever interrupted, the attendances at the schools never dropped, and theyoung Director went about his work, not knowing often, indeed, whetherthe whole province might not be aflame within twenty-four hours, and itsAnglo-Indian administration wiped out, but none the less undaunted andserene. 

To this day, three portrait medals in gold and silver are given everyyear to the best pupils in the schools of the Punjaub, the product of afund raised immediately after his death by William Arnold'sfellow-workers there, in order to commemorate his short heroic course inthat far land, and to preserve, if they could, some record of that"sweet stateliness" of aspect, to use the expression of one who lovedhim, which "had so fascinated his friends. "

The Mutiny passed. Sir John Lawrence paid public and flattering tributeto the young official who had so amply justified a great man's choice. And before the storm had actually died away, within a fortnight of thefall of Delhi, while it was not yet certain that the troops on their waywould arrive in time to prevent further mischief, my uncle, writing tomy father of the awful days of suspense from the 14th to the 30th ofSeptember, says:

 A more afflicted country than this has been since I returned to it in November. 1855--afflicted by Dearth--Deluge--Pestilence--far worse than war, it would be hard to imagine. _In the midst of it all, the happiness of our domestic life has been almost perfect_. 

With that touching sentence the letters to my father, so far, at least, as I possess them, come to an end. Alas! In the following year thegentle wife and mother, worn out by India, died at a hill-station in theHimalayas, and a few months later her husband, ill and heartbroken, senthis motherless children home by long sea, and followed himself by theoverland route. Too late! He was taken ill in Egypt, struggled on toMalta, and was put ashore at Gibraltar to die. From Cairo he had writtento the beloved mother who was waiting for him in that mountain home heso longed to reach, that he hoped to be able to travel in a fortnight. 

 But do not trust to this.... Do not in fact expect me till you hear that I am in London. I much fear that it may be long before I see dear, dear Fox How. In London I must have advice, and I feel sure I shall be ordered to the South of England till the hot weather is well advanced. I must wait too in London for the darling children. But once in London, I cannot but think my dearest mother will manage to see me, and I have even had visions of your making one of your spring tours, and going with me to Torquay or wherever I may go.... Plans--plans--plans! They will keep. 

And a few days later:

 As I said before, do not expect me in England till you hear I am there. Perhaps I was too eager to get home. Assuredly I have been checked, and I feel as if there were much trouble between me and home yet.... I see in the papers the death of dear Mrs. Wordsworth.... 

 Ever my beloved mother ... 

 Your very loving son, W. D. ARNOLD. 

He started for England, but at Gibraltar, a dying man, was carriedashore. His younger brother, sent out from England in post haste, missedhim by ill chance at Alexandria and Malta, and arrived too late. He wasburied under the shelter of the Rock of Spain and the British flag. Hisintimate friend, Meredith Townsend, the joint editor and creator of the_Spectator_, wrote to the _Times_ shortly after his death:

 William Arnold did not live long enough (he was thirty-one) to gain his true place in the world, but he had time enough given him to make himself of importance to a Government like that of Lord Dalhousie, to mold the education of a great province, and to win the enduring love of all with whom he ever came in contact. 

It was left, however, for his poet-brother to build upon his early grave"the living record of his memory. " A month after "Willy's" death, "Matt"was wandering where--

 beneath me, bright and wide Lay the low coast of Brittany--

with the thought of "Willy" in his mind, as he turns to the sea thatwill never now bring the wanderer home. 

 O, could he once have reached the air Freshened by plunging tides, by showers! Have felt this breath he loved, of fair Cool northern fields, and grain, and flowers. 

 He longed for it--pressed on!--In vain! At the Straits failed that spirit brave, The south was parent of his pain, The south is mistress of his grave. 

Or again, in "A Southern Night"--where he muses on the "two jadedEnglish, " man and wife, who lie, one under the Himalayas, the otherbeside "the soft Mediterranean. " And his first thought is that for the"spent ones of a work-day age, " such graves are out of keeping. 

 In cities should we English lie Where cries are rising ever new, And men's incessant stream goes by!-- * * * * * Not by those hoary Indian hills, Not by this gracious Midland sea Whose floor to-night sweet moonshine fills Should our graves be!

Some Eastern sage pursuing "the pure goal of being"--"He by those Indianmountains old, might well repose. " Crusader, troubadour, or maiden dyingfor love--

 Such by these waters of romance 'Twas meet to lay!

And then he turns upon himself. For what is beauty, what wisdom, whatromance if not the tender goodness of women, if not the high soul ofyouth?

 Mild o'er her grave, ye mountains, shine! Gently by his, ye waters, glide! To that in you which is divine They were allied. 

 * * * * *

Only a few days after their father's death, the four orphan children ofthe William Arnolds arrived at Fox How. They were immediately adopted astheir own by William and Jane Forster, who had no children; and laterthey added the name of Forster to that of Arnold. At that moment I wasat school at Ambleside, and I remember well my first meeting with theIndian children, and how I wondered at their fair skins and golden hairand frail, ethereal looks. 

By this time Fox How was in truth a second home to me. But I have stillto complete the tale of those who made it so. Edward Penrose, theDoctor's fourth son, who died in 1878, on the threshold of fifty, was ahandsome, bearded man of winning presence and of many friends. He was atBalliol, then a Fellow of All Souls, and in Orders. But he first foundhis real vocation as an Inspector of Schools in Devon and Cornwall, andfor eighteen years, from 1860 to 1878, through the great changes inelementary education produced by his brother-in-law's Education Act, hewas the ever-welcome friend of teachers and children all over the wideand often remote districts of the West country which his work covered. He had not the gifts of his elder brothers--neither the genius ofMatthew nor the restless energy and initiative of William Delafield, northe scholarly and researching tastes of my father; and his later lifewas always a struggle against ill-health. But he had Matthew's kindness, and Matthew's humor--the "chaff" between the two brothers wasendless!--and a large allowance of William's charm. His unconscious talkin his last illness was often of children. He seemed to see them beforehim in the country school-rooms, where his coming--the coming of "thetall gentleman with the kind blue eyes, " as an eye-witness describeshim--was a festa, excellent official though he was. He carriedenthusiasm into the cause of popular education, and that is not a verycommon enthusiasm in this country of ours. Yet the cause is nothing morenor less than the cause of _the international intelligence_, and itssharpening for the national tasks. But education has always been theCinderella of politics; this nation apparently does not love to betaught! Those who grapple with its stubbornness in this field can neverexpect the ready palm that falls to the workers in a dozen other fields. But in the seed sown, and the human duty done, they find their reward. 

"Aunt Mary, " Arnold's second daughter, I have already spoken of. When myfather and mother reached England from Tasmania, she had just marriedagain, a Leicestershire clergyman, with a house and small estate nearLoughborough. Her home--Woodhouse--on the borders of Charnwood Forest, and the beautiful Beaumanoir Park, was another fairyland to me and to mycousins. Its ponds and woods and reed-beds; its distant summer-housebetween two waters, where one might live and read and dream through longsummer hours, undisturbed; its pleasant rooms, above all the "tapestryroom" where I generally slept, and which I always connected with thedescription of the huntsman on the "arras, " in "Tristram and Iseult";the Scott novels I devoured there, and the "Court" nights at Beaumanoir, where some feudal customs were still kept up, and its beautifulmistress, Mrs. Herrick, the young wife of an old man, queened it verygraciously over neighbors and tenants--all these are among the lastingmemories of life. Mrs. Herrick became identified in my imagination witheach successive Scott heroine, --Rowena, Isabella, Rose Bradwardine, theWhite Lady of Avenel, and the rest. But it was Aunt Mary herself, afterall, who held the scene. In that Leicestershire world of High Toryism, she raised the Liberal flag--her father's flag--with indomitablecourage, but also with a humor which, after the tragic hours of heryouth, flowered out in her like something new and unexpectedlydelightful. It must have been always there, but not till marriage andmotherhood, and F. D. Maurice's influence, had given her peace of souldoes it seem to have shown itself as I remember it--a golden andpervading quality, which made life unfailingly pleasant beside her. Herclear, dark eyes, with their sweet sincerity, and the touch in them of aquiet laughter, of which the causes were not always clear to thebystanders, her strong face with its points of likeness to her father's, and all her warm and most human personality--they are still vividlypresent to me, though it is nearly thirty years since, after an hour ortwo's pain, she died suddenly and unexpectedly, of the same malady thatkilled her father. Consumed in her youth by a passionate idealism, shehad accepted at the hands of life, and by the age of four and twenty, alot by no means ideal--a home in the depths of the country, amongneighbors often uncongenial, and far from the intellectual pleasures shehad tasted during her young widowhood in London. But out of this lot shemade something beautiful, and all her own--by sheer goodness, conscience, intelligence. She had her angles and inconsistencies; sheoften puzzled those who loved her; but she had a large brain and a largeheart; and for us colonial children, conscious of many disadvantagesbeside our English-born cousins, she had a peculiar tenderness, apeculiar laughing sympathy, that led us to feel in "Aunt Maria" one ofour best friends. 

Susan Arnold, the Doctor's fourth daughter, married Mr. John Cropper in1858, and here, too, in her house beside the Mersey, among fields andtrees that still maintain a green though besmutted oasis in the busyheart of Liverpool, that girdles them now on all sides, and will soonengulf them, there were kindness and welcome for the little Tasmanians. She died a few years ago, mourned and missed by her own people--thoselifelong neighbors who know truly what we are. Of the fifth daughter, Frances, "Aunt Fan, " I may not speak, because she is still with us inthe old house--alive to every political and intellectual interest ofthese darkened days, beloved by innumerable friends in many worlds, andmaking sunshine still for Arnold's grandchildren and their children'schildren. But it was to her that my own stormy childhood was chieflyconfided, at Fox How; it was she who taught the Tasmanian child to read, and grappled with her tempers; and while she is there the same magic asof old clings about Fox How for those of us who have loved it, and allit stands for, so long. 

CHAPTER V

THE FRIENDS OF FOX HOW

It remains for me now to say something of those friends of Fox How andmy father whose influence, or whose living presence, made the atmospherein which the second generation of children who loved Fox How grew up. 

Wordsworth died in 1850, the year before I was born. He and mygrandfather were much attached to each other--"old Coleridge, " says mygrandfather, "inoculated a little knot of us with the love ofWordsworth"--though their politics were widely different, and the poetsometimes found it hard to put up with the reforming views of theyounger man. In a letter printed in Stanley's _Life_ my grandfathermentions "a good fight" with Wordsworth over the Reform Bill of 1832, ona walk to Greenhead Ghyll. And there is a story told of a girl friend ofthe family who, once when Wordsworth had been paying a visit at Fox How, accompanied him and the Doctor part of the way home to Rydal Mount. Something was inadvertently said to stir the old man's Toryism, and hebroke out in indignant denunciation of some views expressed by Arnold. The storm lasted all the way to Pelter Bridge, and the girl on Arnold'sleft stole various alarmed glances at him to see how he was taking it. He said little or nothing, and at Pelter Bridge they all parted, Wordsworth going on to Rydal Mount, and the other two turning backtoward Fox How. Arnold paced along, his hands behind his back, his eyeson the ground, and his companion watched him, till he suddenly threwback his head with a laugh of enjoyment. --"What _beautiful_ English theold man talks!"

The poet complained sometimes--as I find from an amusing passage in theletter to Mr. Howson quoted below, that he could not see enough of hisneighbor, the Doctor, on a mountain walk, because Arnold was always sosurrounded with children and pupils, "like little dogs" running roundand after him. But no differences, great or small, interfered with hisconstant friendship to Fox How. The garden there was largely planned byhim during the family absences at Rugby; the round chimneys of the houseare said to be of his design; and it was for Fox How, which stillpossesses the MS. , that the fine sonnet was written, beginning--

 Wansfell, this household has a favored lot Living with liberty on thee to gaze--

a sonnet which contains, surely, two or three of the most magical linesthat Wordsworth ever wrote. 

It is of course no purpose of these notes to give any fresh account ofWordsworth at Rydal, or any exhaustive record of the relations betweenthe Wordsworths and Fox How, especially after the recent publication ofProfessor Harper's fresh, interesting, though debatable biography. Butfrom the letters in my hands I glean a few things worth recording. Here, for instance, is a passing picture of Matthew Arnold and Wordsworth inthe Fox How drawing-room together, in January, 1848, which I find in aletter from my grandmother to my father:

 Matt has been very much pleased, I think, by what he has seen of dear old Wordsworth since he has been at home, and certainly he manages to draw him out very well. The old man was here yesterday, and as he sat on the stool in the corner beside the fire which you knew so well, he talked of various subjects of interest, of Italian poetry, of Coleridge, etc. , etc. ; and he looked and spoke with more vigor than he has often done lately. 

But the poet's health was failing. His daughter Dora's death in 1847 hadhit him terribly hard, and his sister's state--the helpless thoughgentle insanity of the unique, the beloved Dorothy--weighed heavily onhis weakening strength. I find a touching picture of him in theunpublished letter referred to on a previous page, written in this veryyear--1848--to Dean Howson, as a young man, by his former pupil, thelate Duke of Argyll, the distinguished author of _The Reign ofLaw_--which Dean Howson's son and the Duke's grandson allow me to print. The Rev. J. S. Howson, afterward Dean of Chester, married a sister of theJohn Cropper who married Susan Arnold, and was thus a few years laterbrought into connection with the Arnolds and Fox How. The Duke andDuchess had set out to visit both the Lakes and the Lakes"celebrities, " advised, evidently, as to their tour, by the Duke's oldtutor, who was already familiar with the valleys and some of theirinmates. Their visit to Fox How is only briefly mentioned, but ofWordsworth and Rydal Mount the Duke gives a long account. The picture, first, of drooping health and spirits, and then of the flaming out ofthe old poetic fire, will, I think, interest any true Wordsworthian. 

 On Saturday [writes the Duke] we reached Ambleside and soon after drove to Rydal Mount. We found the Poet seated at his fireside, and a little languid in manner. He became less so as he talked. ... He talked incessantly, but not generally interestingly.... I looked at him often and asked myself if that was the man who had stamped the impress of his own mind so decidedly on a great part of the literature of his age! He took us to see a waterfall near his house, and talked and chattered, but said nothing remarkable or even thoughtful. Yet I could see that all this was only that we were on the surface, and did not indicate any decay of mental powers. [Still] we went away with no other impression than the vaguest of having seen the man, whose writings we knew so well-- and with no feeling that we had seen anything of the mind which spoke through them. 

On the following day, Sunday, the Duke with a friend walked over toRydal, but found no one at the Mount but an invalid lady, very old, andapparently paralyzed, "drawn in a bath chair by a servant. " They did notrealize that the poor sufferer, with her wandering speech and looks, wasDorothy Wordsworth, whose share in her great brother's fame will neverbe forgotten while literature lasts. 

In the evening, however--

 ... After visiting Mrs. Arnold we drove together to bid Wordsworth good-by, as we were to go next morning. We found the old man as before, seated by the fireside and languid and sleepy in manner. Again he awakened as conversation went on, and, a stranger coming in, we rose to go away. He seemed unwilling that we should go so soon, and said he would walk out with us. We went to the mound in front, and the Duchess then asked if he would repeat some of his own lines to us. He said he hardly thought he could do that, but that he would have been glad to read some to us. We stood looking at the view for some time, when Mrs. Wordsworth came out and asked us back to the house to take some tea. This was just what we wanted. We sat for about half an hour at tea, during which I tried to direct the conversation to interesting subjects--Coleridge, Southey, etc. He gave a very different impression from the preceding evening. His memory seemed clear and unclouded--his remarks forcible and decided--with some tendency to run off to irrelevant anecdote. 

 When tea was over, we renewed our request that he should read to us. He said, "Oh dear, that is terrible!" but consented, asking what we chose. He jumped at "Tintern Abbey" in preference to any part of the "Excursion. "

 He told us he had written "Tintern Abbey" in 1798, taking four days to compose it; the last twenty lines or so being composed as he walked down the hill from Clifton to Bristol. It was curious to feel that we were to hear a Poet read his own verses composed fifty years before. 

 He read the introductory lines descriptive of the scenery in a low, clear voice. But when he came to the thoughtful and reflective lines, his tones deepened and he poured them forth with a fervor and almost passion of delivery which was very striking and beautiful. I observed that Mrs. Wordsworth was strongly affected during the reading. The strong emphasis that he put on the words addressed to the person to whom the poem is written struck me as almost unnatural at the time. "My DEAR, DEAR friend!"--and on the words, "In thy wild eyes. " It was not till after the reading was over that we found out that the poor paralytic invalid we had seen in the morning was the _sister_ to whom "Tintern Abbey" was addressed, and her condition, now, accounted for the fervor with which the old Poet read lines which reminded him of their better days. But it was melancholy to think that the vacant gaze we had seen in the morning was from the "wild eyes" of 1798. 

 ... We could not have had a better opportunity of bringing out in his reading the source of the inspiration of his poetry, which it was impossible not to feel was the poetry of the heart. Mrs. Wordsworth told me it was the first time he had read since his daughter's death, and that she was thankful to us for having made him do it, as he was apt to fall into a listless, languid state. We asked him to come to Inverary. He said he had not courage; as he had last gone through that country with his daughter, and he feared it would be too much for him. 

Less than two years after this visit, on April 23, 1850, the deathday ofShakespeare and Cervantes, Arnold's youngest daughter, now Miss Arnoldof Fox How, was walking with her sister Susan on the side of Loughriggwhich overlooks Rydal Mount. They knew that the last hour of a greatpoet was near--to my aunts, not only a great poet, but the familiarfriend of their dead father and all their kindred. They moved throughthe April day, along the mountainside, under the shadow of death; and, suddenly, as they looked at the old house opposite, unseen hands drewdown the blinds; and by the darkened windows they knew that the life ofWordsworth had gone out. 

Henceforward, in the family letters to my father, it is Mrs. Wordsworthwho comes into the foreground. The old age prophesied for her by herpoet bridegroom in the early Grasmere days was about her for the nineyears of her widowhood, "lovely as a Lapland night"; or rather like oneof her own Rydal evenings when the sky is clear over the perfect littlelake, and the reflections of island and wood and fell go down and down, unearthly far into the quiet depths, and Wansfell still "parleys withthe setting sun. " My grandmother writes of her--of "her sweet grace anddignity, " and the little friendly acts she is always doing for thisperson and that, gentle or simple, in the valley--with a tenderenthusiasm. She is "dear Mrs. Wordsworth" always, for them all. And itis my joy that in the year 1856 or 1857 my grandmother took me to RydalMount, and that I can vividly recollect sitting on a footstool at Mrs. Wordsworth's feet. I see still the little room, with its plainfurniture, the chair beside the fire, and the old lady in it. I canstill recall the childish feeling that this was no common visit, and thehouse no common house--that a presence still haunted it. Instinctivelythe childish mind said to itself, "Remember!"--and I have alwaysremembered. 

A few years later I was again, as a child of eight, in Rydal Mount. Mrs. Wordsworth was dead, and there was a sale in the house. From far andnear the neighbors came, very curious, very full of real regret, and alittle awe-stricken. They streamed through the rooms where the furniturewas arranged in lots. I wandered about by myself, and presently cameupon something which absorbed me so that I forgot everything else--astore of Easter eggs, with wonderful drawings and devices, made by"James, " the Rydal Mount factotum, in the poet's day. I recollectsitting down with them in a nearly empty room, dreaming over them in akind of ecstasy, because of their pretty, strange colors and pictures. 

Fifty-two years passed, and I found myself, in September, 1911, thetenant of a renovated and rebuilt Rydal Mount, for a few autumn weeks. The house was occupied then, and is still occupied by Wordsworth'sgreat-granddaughter and her husband--Mr. And Mrs. Fisher Wordsworth. Myeldest daughter was with me, and a strange thing happened to us. Iarrived at the Mount before my husband and daughter. She joined me thereon September 13th. I remember how eagerly I showed her the manyWordsworthiana in the house, collected by the piety of its mistress--theHaydon portrait on the stairs, and the books, in the small low-ceiledroom to the right of the hall, which is still just as it was inWordsworth's day; the garden, too, and the poet's walk. All my own earlyrecollections were alive; we chattered long and late. And now let theaccount of what happened afterward be given in my daughter's words asshe wrote it down for me the following morning. 

 RYDAL MOUNT, _September 14, 1911. _

 Last night, my first at Rydal Mount, I slept in the corner room, over the small sitting-room. I had drawn up the blind about half-way up the window before going to bed, and had drawn the curtain aside, over the back of a wooden arm-chair that stood against the window. The window, a casement, was wide open. I slept soundly, but woke quite suddenly, at what hour I do not know, and found myself sitting bolt upright in bed, looking toward the window. Very bright moonlight was shining into the room and I could just see the corner of Loughrigg out in the distance. My first impression was of bright moonlight, but then I became strongly conscious of the moonlight striking on something, and I saw perfectly clearly the figure of an old man sitting in the arm-chair by the window. I said to myself, "That's Wordsworth!" He was sitting with either hand resting on the arms of the chair, leaning back, his head rather bent, and he seemed to be looking down straight in front of him with a rapt expression. He was not looking at me, nor out of the window. The moonlight lit up the top of his head and the silvery hair and I noticed that the hair was very thin. The whole impression was of something solemn and beautiful, and I was not in the very least frightened. As I looked-- I cannot say, when I looked again, for I have no recollection of ceasing to look, or looking away--the figure disappeared and I became aware of the empty chair. --I lay back again, and thought for a moment in a pleased and contented way, "That was Wordsworth. " And almost immediately I must have fallen asleep again. I had not, to my knowledge, been dreaming about Wordsworth before I awoke; but I had been reading Hutton's essay on "Wordsworth's Two Styles" out of Knight's _Wordsworthiana_, before I fell asleep. 

 I should add that I had a distinct impression of the high collar and stock, the same as in the picture on the stairs in this house. 

Neither the seer of this striking vision--unique in her experience--norI, to whom she told it within eight hours, make any claim for it to asupernatural origin. It seemed to us an interesting example of theinfluence of mind and association on the visualizing power of the brain. A member of the Psychical Society, to whom I sent the contemporaryrecord, classified it as "a visual hallucination, " and I don't know thatthere is anything more to be said about it. But the pathetic coincidenceremains still to be noted--we did not know it till afterward--that theseer of the vision was sleeping in Dorothy Wordsworth's room, whereDorothy spent so many sad years of death-in-life; and that in that verycorner by the window Wordsworth must have sat, day after day, when hecame to visit what remained to him of that creature of fire and dew, that child of genius, who had been the inspiration and support of hispoetic youth. 

In these rapid sketches of the surroundings and personal influences amidwhich my own childhood was passed I have already said something of myfather's intimate friend Arthur Hugh Clough. Clough was, of course, aRugbeian, and one of Arnold's ablest and most devoted pupils. He wasabout three years older than my father, and was already a Fellow ofOriel when Thomas Arnold, the younger, was reading for his First. Butthe difference of age made no difference to the friendship which grew upbetween them in Oxford, a friendship only less enduring and close thanthat between Clough and Matthew Arnold, which has been "eternized, " touse a word of Fulke Greville's, by the noble dirge of "Thyrsis. " Notmany years before his own death, in 1895, my father wrote of the friendof his youth:

 I loved him, oh, so well: and also respected him more profoundly than any man, anywhere near my own age, whom I ever met. His pure soul was without stain: he seemed incapable of being inflamed by wrath, or tempted to vice, or enslaved by any unworthy passion of any sort. As to "Philip, " something that he saw in me helped to suggest the character--that was all. There is much in Philip that is Clough himself, and there is a dialectic force in him that certainly was never in me. A great yearning for possessing one's soul in freedom--for trampling on ceremony and palaver, for trying experiments in equality, being common to me and Philip, sent me out to New Zealand; and in the two years before I sailed (December, 1847) Clough and I were a great deal together. 

It was partly also the visit paid by my father and his friend, JohnCampbell Shairp, afterward Principal Shairp of St. Andrew's, to Clough'sreading party at Drumnadrochit in 1845, and their report of incidentswhich had happened to them on their way along the shores of Loch Ericht, which suggested the scheme of the "Bothie. " One of the half-dozen shortpoems of Clough which have entered permanently into literature--_Quilaborat oral_--was found by my father one morning on the table of hisbachelor rooms in Mount Street, after Clough had spent the night on ashake-up in his sitting-room, and on his early departure had left thepoem behind him as payment for his night's lodging. In one of Clough'sletters to New Zealand I find, "Say not the struggle noughtavaileth"--another of the half-dozen--written out by him; and theoriginal copy--_tibi primo confisum_, of the pretty, though unequalverses, "A London Idyll. " The little volume of miscellaneous poems, called _Ambarvalia, _ and the "Bothie of Tober-na-Vuo-lich" were sent outto New Zealand by Clough, at the same moment that Matt was sending hisbrother the _Poems by A_. 

Clough writes from Liverpool in February, 1849--having just receivedMatt's volume:

 At last our own Matt's book! Read mine first, my child, if our volumes go forth together. Otherwise you won't read mine--_Ambarvalia_, at any rate--at all. Froude also has published a new book of religious biography, auto or otherwise (_The Nemesis of Faith_), and therewithal resigns his Fellowship. But the Rector (of Exeter) talks of not accepting the resignation, but having an expulsion--fire and fagot fashion. _Quo usque_?

But when the books arrive, my father writes to his sister withaffectionate welcome indeed of the _Poems by A_, but with enthusiasm ofthe "Bothie. "

 It greatly surpasses my expectations! It is on the whole a noble poem, well held together, clear, full of purpose, and full of promise. With joy I see the old fellow bestiring himself, "awakening like a strong man out of sleep and shaking his invincible locks"; and if he remains true and works, I think there is nothing too high or too great to be expected from him. 

"True, " and a worker, Clough remained to the last hours of his shortlife. But in spite of a happy marriage, the burden and perplexity ofphilosophic thought, together with the strain of failing health, checked, before long, the strong poetic impulse shown in the "Bothie, "its buoyant delight in natural beauty, and in the simplicities of humanfeeling and passion. The "music" of his "rustic flute". 

 Kept not for long its happy, country tone; Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note Of men contention-tost, of men who groan. 

The poet of the "Bothie" becomes the poet of "Dipsychus, " "Easter Day, "and the "Amours de Voyage"; and the young republican who writes intriumph--all humorous joy and animation--to my father, from the Paris of1848, which has just seen the overthrow of Louis Philippe, says, a yearlater--February 24, 1849:

 To-day, my dear brother republican, is the glorious anniversary of '48, whereof what shall I now say? Put not your trust in republics, nor in any constitution of man! God be praised for the downfall of Louis Philippe. This with a faint feeble echo of that loud last year's scream of "_À bas Guizot_!" seems to be the sum total. Or are we to salute the rising sun, with "_Vive l'Empereur!"_ and the green liveries? President for life I think they'll make him, and then begin to tire of him. Meanwhile the Great Powers are to restore the Pope and crush the renascent Roman Republic, of which Joseph Mazzini has just been declared a citizen!

A few months later, the writer--at Rome--"was in at the death" of thissame Roman Republic, listening to the French bombardment in bitternessof soul. 

 I saw the French enter [he writes to my father]. Unto this has come our grand Lib. Eq. And Frat. Revolution! And then I went to Naples-- and home. I am full of admiration for Mazzini.... But on the whole--"Farewell Politics!" utterly!--What can I do? Study is much more to the purpose. 

So in disillusion and disappointment, "Citizen Clough, " leaving Oxfordand politics behind him, settled down to educational work in London, married, and became the happy father of children, wrote much that wasremarkable, and will be long read--whether it be poetry or no--by thosewho find perennial attraction in the lesser-known ways of literature andthought, and at last closed his short life at Florence in 1862, at theage of forty-one, leaving an indelible memory in the hearts of those whohad talked and lived with him. 

 To a boon southern country he is fled, And now in happier air, Wandering with the Great Mother's train divine (And purer or more subtle soul than thee, I trow the mighty Mother doth not see) Within a folding of the Apennine, Thou hearest the immortal chants of old!--

But I remember him, in an English setting, and on the slopes of Englishhills. In the year 1858, as a child of seven, I was an inmate of alittle school kept at Ambleside, by Miss Anne Clough, the poet's sister, afterward the well-known head of Newnham College, Cambridge, and wisestleader in the cause of women. It was a small day-school for Amblesidechildren of all ranks, and I was one of two boarders, spending mySundays often at Fox How. I can recall one or two golden days, at longintervals, when my father came for me, with "Mr. Clough, " and the twoold friends, who, after nine years' separation, had recently met again, walked up the Sweden Bridge lane into the heart of Scandale Fell, whileI, paying no more attention to them than they--after a first tenminutes--did to me, went wandering and skipping and dreaming by myself. In those days every rock along the mountain lane, every boggy patch, every stretch of silken, flower-sown grass, every bend of the wildstream, and all its sounds, whether it chattered gently over stonyshallows or leaped full-throated into deep pools, swimming with foam--were to me the never-ending joys of a "land of pure delight. " Should Ifind a ripe wild strawberry in a patch under a particular rock I knew byheart?--or the first Grass of Parnassus, or the big auricula, orstreaming cotton-plant, amid a stretch of wet moss ahead? I might quitesafely explore these enchanted spots under male eyes, since they took noaccount, mercifully, of a child's boots and stockings--male tongues, besides, being safely busy with books and politics. Was that a dipper, rising and falling along the stream, or--positively--a fat brown troutin hiding under that shady bank?--or that a buzzard, hovering overhead. Such hopes and doubts kept a child's heart and eyes as quick and busy asthe "beck" itself. It was a point of honor with me to get to SwedenBridge--a rough crossing for the shepherds and sheep, near the head ofthe valley--before my companions; and I would sit dangling my feet overthe unprotected edge of its grass-grown arch, blissfully conscious on asummer day of the warm stretches of golden fell folding in the stream, the sheep, the hovering hawks, the stony path that wound up and up toregions beyond the ken of thought; and of myself, queening it there onthe weather-worn keystone of the bridge, dissolved in the mere physicaljoy of each contented sense--the sun on my cotton dress, the scents fromgrass and moss, the marvelous rush of cloud-shadow along the hills, thebrilliant browns and blues in the water, the little white stones on itstiny beaches, or the purples of the bigger rocks, whether in the streamor on the mountain-side. How did they come there--those big rocks? Ipuzzled my head about them a good deal, especially as my father, in thewalks we had to ourselves, would sometimes try and teach me a littlegeology. 

I have used the words "physical joy, " because, although such passionatepleasure in natural things as has been my constant Helper (in the senseof the Greek [Greek: epikouros]) through life, has connected itself, nodoubt, in process of time, with various intimate beliefs, philosophic orreligious, as to the Beauty which is Truth, and therewith the onlyconceivable key to man's experience, yet I could not myself indorse thefamous contrast in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey, " between the "hauntingpassion" of youth's delight in Nature, and the more complex feeling oflater years when Nature takes an aspect colored by our own moods andmemories, when our sorrows and reflections enter so much into what wefeel about the "bright and intricate device" of earth and her seasons, that "in our life alone doth Nature live. " No one can answer for thechanging moods that the future, long or short, may bring with it. But sofar, I am inclined to think of this quick, intense pleasure in naturalthings, which I notice in myself and others, as something involuntaryand inbred; independent--often selfishly independent--of the real humanexperience. I have been sometimes ashamed--pricked even with self-contempt--to remember how in the course of some tragic or sorrowfulhours, concerning myself, or others of great account to me, I could nothelp observing some change in the clouds, some effect of color in thegarden, some picture on the wall, which pleased me--even for themoment--intensely. The impression would be gone, perhaps, as soon asfelt, rebuked by something like a flash of remorse. But it was not in mypower to prevent its recurrence. And the delight in natural things--colors, forms, scents--when there was nothing to restrain or hamper it, has often been a kind of intoxication, in which thought andconsciousness seemed suspended--"as though of hemlock one had drunk. "Wordsworth has of course expressed it constantly, though increasingly, as life went on, in combination with his pantheistic philosophy. But itis my belief that it survived in him in its primitive form, almost tothe end. 

The best and noblest people I have known have been, on the whole--exceptin first youth--without this correspondence between some constantpleasure-sense in the mind, and natural beauty. It cannot, therefore, beanything to be proud of. But it is certainly something to be gladof--"amid the chances and changes of this mortal life"; it is one of thejoys "in widest commonalty spread"--and that may last longest. It istherefore surely to be encouraged both in oneself and in children; andthat, although I have often felt that there is something inhuman, orinfrahuman, in it, as though the earth-gods in us all--Pan, or Demeter--laid ghostly hands again, for a space, upon the soul and sense thatnobler or sadder faiths have ravished from them. 

In these Westmorland walks, however, my father had sometimes anothercompanion--a frequent visitor at Fox How, where he was almost anotherson to my grandmother, and an elder brother to her children. How shallone ever make the later generation understand the charm of ArthurStanley? There are many--very many--still living, in whom the sense ofit leaps up, at the very mention of his name. But for those who neversaw him, who are still in their twenties and thirties, what shall I say?That he was the son of a Bishop of Norwich and a member of the oldCheshire family of the Stanleys of Alderley; that he was a Rugby boy anda devoted pupil of Arnold, whose _Life_ he wrote, so that it stands outamong the biographies of the century, not only for its literary merit, but for its wide and varied influence on feeling and opinion; that hewas an Oxford tutor and Professor all through the great struggle ofLiberal thought against the reactionary influences let loose by Newmanand the Tractarian movement; that, as Regius Professor at Oxford, andCanon of Canterbury, if he added little to learning, or research, he atleast kept alive--by his power of turning all he knew into image andcolor--that great "art" of history which the Dryasdusts so willingly letdie; that as Dean of Westminster, he was still the life and soul of allthe Liberalism in the Church, still the same generous friend andchampion of all the spiritually oppressed that he had ever been? None ofthe old "causes" beloved of his youth could ever have said of him, as ofso many others:

 Just for a handful of silver he left us, Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat--

He was, no doubt, the friend of kings and princes, and keenly conscious, always, of things long-descended, with picturesque or heroicassociations. But it was he who invited Colenso to preach in the Abbey, after his excommunication by the fanatical and now forgotten Bishop ofCape Town; it was he who brought about that famous Communion of theRevisers in the Abbey, where the Unitarian received the Sacrament ofChrist's death beside the Wesleyan and the Anglican, and who bore withunflinching courage the idle tumult which followed; it was he, too, whofirst took special pains to open the historical Abbey to working-men, and to give them an insight into the meaning of its treasures. He wasnot a social reformer in the modern sense; that was not his business. But his unfailing power of seeing and pouncing upon the _interesting_--the _dramatic_--in any human lot, soon brought him into relation withmen of callings and types the most different from his own; and for therest he fulfilled to perfection that hard duty--"the duty to ourequals"--on which Mr. Jowett once preached a caustic and suggestivesermon. But for him John Richard Green would have abandoned history, andstudent after student, heretic after heretic, found in him the man whoeagerly understood them and chivalrously fought for them. 

And then, what a joy he was to the eye! His small spare figure, miraculously light, his delicate face of tinted ivory--only that ivoryis not sensitive and subtle, and incredibly expressive, as were thefeatures of the little Dean; the eager, thin-lipped mouth, varying withevery shade of feeling in the innocent great soul behind it; the cleareyes of china blue; the glistening white hair, still with the wave andspring of youth in it; the slender legs, and Dean's dress, which becomesall but the portly, with, on festal occasions, the red ribbon of theBath crossing the mercurial frame: there are still a few pictures andphotographs by which these characteristics are dimly recalled to thoseat least who knew the living man. To my father, who called him "Arthur, "and to all the Fox How circle, he was the most faithful of friends, though no doubt my father's conversion to Catholicism to some extent, inlater years, separated him from Stanley. In the letter I have printed ona former page, written on the night before my father left England forNew Zealand in 1847, and cherished by its recipient all his life, thereis a yearning, personal note, which was, perhaps, sometimes lacking inthe much-surrounded, much-courted Dean of later life. It was not thatArthur Stanley, any more than Matthew Arnold, ever became a worldling inthe ordinary sense. But "the world" asks too much of such men asStanley. It heaps all its honors and all its tasks upon them, andwithout some slight stiffening of its substance the exquisite instrumentcannot meet the strain. 

Mr. Hughes always strongly denied that the George Arthur of _Tom Brown'sSchooldays_ had anything whatever to do with Arthur Stanley. But Ishould like to believe that some anecdote of Stanley's schooldays hadentered at least into the well-known scene where Arthur, in class, breaks down in construing the last address of Helen to the dead Hector. Stanley's memory, indeed, was alive with the great things or thepicturesque detail of literature and history, no less than with thehumorous or striking things of contemporary life. I remember an amusinginstance of it at my own wedding breakfast. Stanley married us, and afew days before he had buried Frederick Denison Maurice. His historicalsense was pleased by the juxtaposition of the two names Maurice andArnold, suggested by the funeral of Maurice and the marriage of Arnold'sgranddaughter. The consequence was that his speech at the weddingbreakfast was quite as much concerned with "graves and worms andepitaphs" as with things hymeneal. But from "the little Dean" all thingswere welcome. 

My personal memory of him goes back to much earlier days. As a child atFox How, he roused in me a mingled fascination and terror. To listen tohim quoting Shakspeare or Scott or Macaulay was fascination; to find hiseye fixed on one, and his slender finger darting toward one, as he askeda sudden historical question--"Where did Edward the First die?"--"Wherewas the Black Prince buried?"--was terror, lest, at seven years old, oneshould not be able to play up. I remember a particular visit of his toFox How, when the dates and places of these royal deaths and burialskept us--myself in particular--in a perpetual ferment. It must, I think, have been when he was still at Canterbury, investigating, almost withthe zest and passion of the explorer of Troy or Mycenae, what bones liehid, and where, under the Cathedral floor, what sands--"fallen from theruined sides of Kings"--that this passion of deaths and dates was uponhim. I can see myself as a child of seven or eight, standing outside thedrawing-room door at Fox How, bracing myself in a mixture of delight andfear, as to what "Doctor Stanley" might ask me when the door was opened;then the opening, and the sudden sharp turn of the slight figure, writing letters at the middle table, at the sight of "little Mary"--andthe expected thunderbolt:

"_Where did Henry the Fourth die_?"

Confusion--and blank ignorance!

But memory leaps forward to a day four or five years later, when myfather and I invaded the dark high room in the old Deanery, and thelittle Dean standing at his reading-desk. He looks round--sees "Tom, "and the child with him. His charming face breaks into a broad smile; heremembers instantly, though it is some years since he and "little Mary"met. He holds out both his hands to the little girl--

"Come and see the place where Henry the Fourth died!"

And off we ran together to the Jerusalem Chamber. 

CHAPTER VI

YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD

I

How little those who are school-girls of to-day can realize what it wasto be a school-girl in the fifties or the early sixties of the lastcentury! A modern girls' school, equipped as scores are now equippedthroughout the country, was of course not to be found in 1858, when Ifirst became a school boarder, or in 1867, when I ceased to be one. Thegames, the gymnastics, the solid grounding in drawing and music, together with the enormously improved teaching in elementary science, orliterature and language, which are at the service of the school-girl ofto-day, had not begun to be when I was at school. As far as intellectualtraining was concerned, my nine years from seven to sixteen werepractically wasted. I learned nothing thoroughly or accurately, and theGerman, French, and Latin which I soon discovered after my marriage tobe essential to the kind of literary work I wanted to do, had all to berelearned before they could be of any real use to me; nor was it everpossible for me-who married at twenty--to get that firm hold on thestructure and literary history of any language, ancient or modern, whichmy brother William, only fifteen months my junior, got from his sixyears at Rugby, and his training there in Latin and Greek. What Ilearned during those years was learned from personalities; from contactwith a nature so simple, sincere, and strong as that of Miss Clough;from the kindly old German governess, whose affection for me helped methrough some rather hard and lonely school-years spent at a school inShropshire; and from a gentle and high-minded woman, an ardentEvangelical, with whom, a little later, at the age of fourteen orfifteen, I fell headlong in love, as was the manner of school-girlsthen, and is, I understand, frequently the case with school-girls now, in spite of the greatly increased variety of subjects on which they mayspend their minds. 

English girls' schools to-day providing the higher education are, so faras my knowledge goes, worthily representative of that astonishing risein the intellectual standards of women which has taken place in the lasthalf-century. They are almost entirely taught by women, and women withwhom, in many cases, education--the shaping of the immature humancreature to noble ends--is the sincerest of passions; who find, indeed, in the task that same creative joy which belongs to literature or art, or philanthropic experiment. The schoolmistress to whom money is thesole or even the chief motive of her work, is, in my experience, rareto-day, though we have all in our time heard tales of modern "academies"of the Miss Pinkerton type, brought up to date--fashionable, exclusive, and luxurious--where, as in some boys' preparatory schools (before thewar!) the more the parents paid, the better they were pleased. But Ihave not come across them. The leading boarding-schools in England andAmerica, at present, no less than the excellent day-schools for girls ofthe middle class, with which this country has been covered since 1870, are genuine products of that Women's Movement, as we vaguely call it, inthe early educational phases of which I myself was much engaged; whereofthe results are now widely apparent, though as yet only half-grown. Ifone tracks it back to somewhere near its origins, its superficialorigins, at any rate, one is brought up, I think, as in the case of somuch else, against one leading cause--_railways_! With railways and acheap press, in the second third of the nineteenth century, there camein, as we all know, the break-up of a thousand mental stagnations, answering to the old physical disabilities and inconveniences. And thebreak-up has nowhere had more startling results than in the world ofwomen, and the training of women for life. We have only to ask ourselveswhat the women of Benjamin Constant, or of Beyle, or Balzac, would havemade of the keen school-girl and college girl of the present day, tofeel how vast is the change through which some of us have lived. Exceptional women, of course, have led much the same kind of lives inall generations. Mrs. Sidney Webb has gone through a very different sortof self-education from that of Harriet Martineau; but she has notthought more widely, and she will hardly influence her world so much asthat stanch fighter of the past. It is the rank and file--the averagewoman--for whom the world has opened up so astonishingly. The revelationof her wide-spread and various capacity that the present war has broughtabout is only the suddenly conspicuous result of the liberating forcesset in action by the scientific and mechanical development of thenineteenth century. It rests still with that world "after the war, " towhich we are all looking forward with mingled hope and fear, todetermine the new forms, sociological and political, through which thiscapacity, this heightened faculty, must some day organically expressitself. 

In the years when I was at school, however--1858 to 1867--these gooddays were only beginning to dawn. Poor teaching, poor school-books, and, in many cases, indifferent food and much ignorance as to the physicalcare of girls--these things were common in my school-time. I lovednearly all my teachers; but it was not till I went home to live atOxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests andinfluences that begin much earlier nowadays to affect any clever child. I had few tools and little grounding; and I was much more childish thanI need have been. A few vivid impressions stand out from these years:the great and to me mysterious figure of Newman haunting the streets ofEdgbaston, where, in 1861, my father became head classical master of theOratory School; the news of the murder of Lincoln, coming suddenly intoa quiet garden in a suburb of Birmingham, and an ineffaceable memory ofthe pale faces and horror-stricken looks of those discussing it; thehaunting beauty of certain passages of Ruskin which I copied out andcarried about with me, without in the least caring to read as a wholethe books from which they came; my first visit to the House of Commonsin 1863; the recurrent visits to Fox How, and the winter and summerbeauty of the fells; together with an endless storytelling phase inwhich I told stories to my school-fellows, on condition they toldstories to me; coupled with many attempts on my part at poetry andfiction, which make me laugh and blush when I compare them to-day withsimilar efforts of my own grandchildren. But on the whole they werestarved and rather unhappy years; through no one's fault. My parentswere very poor and perpetually in movement. Everybody did the best hecould. 

With Oxford, however, and my seventeenth year, came a radical change. 

It was in July, 1865, while I was still a school-girl, that in the verymiddle of the Long Vacation I first saw Oxford. My father, after somefive years as Doctor Newman's colleague at the Oratory School, had thenbecome the subject of a strong temporary reaction against Catholicism. He left the Roman Church in 1865, to return to it again, for good, eleven years later. During the interval he took pupils at Oxford, produced a very successful _Manual of English Literature, _ edited theworks of Wycliffe for the Clarendon Press, made himself an Anglo-Saxonscholar, and became one of the most learned editors of the great RollsSeries. To look at the endless piles of his note-books is to realize howhard, how incessantly he worked. Historical scholarship was his destinedfield; he found his happiness in it through all the troubles of life. And the return to Oxford, to its memories, its libraries, its stately, imperishable beauty, was delightful to him. So also, I think, for someyears, was the sense of intellectual freedom. Then began a kind ofnostalgia, which grew and grew till it took him back to the Catholichaven in 1876, never to wander more. 

But when he first showed me Oxford he was in the ardor of what seemed apermanent severance from an admitted mistake. I see a deserted Oxfordstreet, and a hansom coming up it--myself and my father inside it. I wasreturning from school, for the holidays. When I had last seen my people, they were living near Birmingham. I now found them at Oxford, and Iremember the thrill of excitement with which I looked from side to sideas we neared the colleges. For I knew well, even at fourteen, that thiswas "no mean city. " As we drove up Beaumont Street we saw what was then"new Balliol" in front of us, and a jutting window. "There lives thearch-heretic!" said my father. It was a window in Mr. Jowett's rooms. Hewas not yet Master of the famous College, but his name was a rallying-cry, and his personal influence almost at its zenith. At the same time, he was then rigorously excluded from the University pulpit; it was nottill a year later that even his close friend Dean Stanley ventured toask him to preach in Westminster Abbey; and his salary as GreekProfessor, due to him from the revenues of Christ Church, and withheldfrom him on theological grounds for years, had only just been wrung--atlast--from the reluctant hands of a governing body which contained CanonLiddon and Doctor Pusey. 

To my father, on his settlement in Oxford, Jowett had been a kind andhelpful friend; he had a very quick sympathy with my mother; and as Igrew up he became my friend, too, so that as I look back upon my Oxfordyears both before and after my marriage, the dear Master--he becameMaster in 1870--plays a very marked part in the Oxford scene as I shallever remember it. 

It was not, however, till two years later that I left school, andslipped into the Oxford life as a fish into water. I was sixteen, beginning to be conscious of all sorts of rising needs and ambitions, keenly alive to the spell of Oxford and to the good fortune which hadbrought me to live in her streets. There was in me, I think, a realhunger to learn, and a very quick sense of romance in things or people. But after sixteen, except in music, I had no definite teaching, andeverything I learned came to me from persons--and books--sporadically, without any general guidance or plan. It was all a great voyage ofdiscovery, organized mainly by myself, on the advice of a few men andwomen very much older, who took an interest in me and were endlesslykind to the shy and shapeless creature I must have been. 

It was in 1868 or 1869--I think I was seventeen--that I remember myfirst sight of a college garden lying cool and shaded between graycollege walls, and on the grass a figure that held me fascinated--a ladyin a green brocade dress, with a belt and chatelaine of Russian silver, who was playing croquet, then a novelty in Oxford, and seemed to me, asI watched her, a perfect model of grace and vivacity. A man nearlythirty years older than herself, whom I knew to be her husband, wasstanding near her, and a handful of undergraduates made an amused andadmiring court round the lady. The elderly man--he was then fifty-three--was Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, and the croquet-player had been his wife about seven years. After the Rector's death in1884, Mrs. Pattison married Sir Charles Dilke in the very midst of thedivorce proceedings which were to wreck in full stream a brilliantpolitical career; and she showed him a proud devotion till her death in1904. None of her early friends who remember her later history can everthink of the "Frances Pattison" of Oxford days without a strangestirring of heart. I was much at Lincoln in the years before I married, and derived an impression from the life lived there that has never leftme. Afterward I saw much less of Mrs. Pattison, who was generally on theRiviera in the winter; but from 1868 to 1872, the Rector, learned, critical, bitter, fastidious, and "Mrs. Pat, " with her gaiety, herpicturesqueness, her impatience of the Oxford solemnities and decorums, her sharp, restless wit, her determination _not_ to be academic, to holdon to the greater world of affairs outside--mattered more to me perhapsthan anybody else. They were very good to me, and I was never tired ofgoing there; though I was much puzzled by their ways, and--while myEvangelical phase lasted--much scandalized often by the speculativefreedom of the talk I heard. Sometimes my rather uneasy conscienceprotested in ways which I think must have amused my hosts, though theynever said a word. They were fond of asking me to come to supper atLincoln on Sundays. It was a gay, unceremonious meal, at which Mrs. Pattison appeared in the kind of gown which at a much later date beganto be called a tea-gown. It was generally white or gray, with variousornaments and accessories which always seemed to me, accustomed for solong to the rough-and-tumble of school life, marvels of delicacy andprettiness; so that I was sharply conscious, on these occasions, of thegraceful figure made by the young mistress of the old house. But somelast stubborn trace in me of the Evangelical view of Sunday declaredthat while one might talk--and one _must_ eat!--on Sunday, one mustn'tput on evening dress, or behave as though it were just like a week-day. So while every one else was in evening dress, I more than once--atseventeen--came to these Sunday gatherings on a winter evening, purposely, in a high woolen frock, sternly but uncomfortably consciousof being sublime--if only one were not ridiculous! The Rector, "Mrs. Pat, " Mr. Bywater, myself, and perhaps a couple of undergraduates--oftena bewildered and silent couple--I see that little vanished company inthe far past so plainly! Three of them are dead--and for me the graywalls of Lincoln must always be haunted by their ghosts. 

The historian of French painting and French decorative art was alreadyin those days unfolding in Mrs. Pattison. Her drawing-room was French, sparely furnished with a few old girandoles and mirrors on its whitepaneled walls, and a Persian carpet with a black center, on which boththe French furniture and the living inmates of the room looked theirbest. And up-stairs, in "Mrs. Pat's" own working-room, there wereinnumerable things that stirred my curiosity--old French drawings andengravings, masses of foreign books that showed the young and brilliantowner of the room to be already a scholar, even as her husband countedscholarship; together with the tools and materials for etching, amysterious process in which I was occasionally allowed to lend a hand, and which, as often as not, during the application of the acid to theplate, ended in dire misfortune to the etcher's fingers or dress, and inthe helpless laughter of both artist and assistant. 

The Rector himself was an endless study to me--he and his frequentcompanion, Ingram Bywater, afterward the distinguished Greek Professor. To listen to these two friends as they talked of foreign scholars inParis or Germany, of Renan, or Ranke, or Curtius; as they poured scornon Oxford scholarship, or the lack of it, and on the ideals of Balliol, which aimed at turning out public officials, as compared with theresearching ideals of the German universities, which seemed to theRector the only ideals worth calling academic; or as they flung gibes atChrist Church, whence Pusey and Liddon still directed the powerfulChurch party of the University--was to watch the doors of new worldsgradually opening before a girl's questioning intelligence. The Rectorwould walk up and down, occasionally taking a book from his crowdedshelves, while Mr. By water and Mrs. Pattison smoked, with the after-luncheon coffee--and in those days a woman with a cigarette was a rarityin England--and sometimes, at a caustic _mot_ of the former's therewould break out the Rector's cackling laugh, which was ugly, no doubt, but, when he was amused and at ease, extraordinarily full of mirth. Tome he was from the beginning the kindest friend. He saw that I came of aliterary stock and had literary ambitions; and he tried to direct me. "Get to the bottom of something, " he would say. "Choose a subject, andknow _everything_ about it!" I eagerly followed his advice, and began towork at early Spanish in the Bodleian. But I think he was wrong--Iventure to think so!--though, as his half-melancholy, half-satiricallook comes back to me, I realize how easily he would defend himself, ifone could tell him so now. I think I ought to have been told to take ahistory examination and learn Latin properly. But if I had, half theexploring joy of those early years would, no doubt, have been cut away. 

Later on, in the winters when Mrs. Pattison, threatened with rheumaticgout, disappeared to the Riviera, I came to know a sadder and lonelierRector. I used to go to tea with him then in his own book-lined sanctum, and we mended the blazing fire between us and talked endlessly. Presently I married, and his interest in me changed; though ourfriendship never lessened, and I shall always remember with emotion mylast sight of him lying, a white and dying man, on his sofa in London--the clasp of the wasted hand, the sad, haunting eyes. When his _Memoirs_appeared, after his death, a book of which Mr. Gladstone once said to methat he reckoned it as among the most tragic and the most memorablebooks of the nineteenth century, I understood him more clearly and moretenderly than I could have done as a girl. Particularly, I understoodwhy in that skeptical and agnostic talk which never spared the Anglicanecclesiastics of the moment, or such a later Catholic convert asManning, I cannot remember that I ever heard him mention the great nameof John Henry Newman with the slightest touch of disrespect. On theother hand, I once saw him receive a message that some friend broughthim from Newman with an eager look and a start of pleasure. He had beena follower of Newman's in the Tractarian days, and no one who ever camenear to Newman could afterward lightly speak ill of him. It was Stanley, and not the Rector, indeed, who said of the famous Oratorian that thewhole course of English religious history might have been different ifNewman had known German. But Pattison might have said it, and if he hadit would have been without the smallest bitterness as the mereexpression of a sober and indisputable truth. Alas!--merely to quote it, nowadays, carries one back to a Germany before the Flood--a Germany ofsmall States, a land of scholars and thinkers; a Germany that wouldsurely have recoiled in horror from any prevision of that deep andhideous abyss which her descendants, maddened by wealth and success, were one day to dig between themselves and the rest of Europe. 

One of my clearest memories connected with the Pattisons and Lincoln isthat of meeting George Eliot and Mr. Lewes there, in the spring of 1870, when I was eighteen. It was at one of the Sunday suppers. George Eliotsat at the Rector's right hand. I was opposite her; on my left wasGeorge Henry Lewes, to whom I took a prompt and active dislike. He andMrs. Pattison kept up a lively conversation in which Mr. Bywater, on theother side of the table, played full part. George Eliot talked verylittle, and I not at all. The Rector was shy or tired, and George Eliotwas in truth entirely occupied in watching or listening to Mrs. Lewes. Iwas disappointed that she was so silent, and perhaps her quick eye mayhave divined it, for, after supper, as we were going up the interestingold staircase, made in the thickness of the wall, which led direct fromthe dining-room to the drawing-room above, she said to me: "The Rectortells me that you have been reading a good deal about Spain. Would youcare to hear something of our Spanish journey?"--the journey which hadpreceded the appearance of _The Spanish Gypsy, _ then newly published. Myreply is easily imagined. The rest of the party passed through the dimlylit drawing-room to talk and smoke in the gallery beyond, George Eliotsat down in the darkness, and I beside her. Then she talked for abouttwenty minutes, with perfect ease and finish, without misplacing a wordor dropping a sentence, and I realized at last that I was in thepresence of a great writer. Not a great _talker_. It is clear thatGeorge Eliot never was that. Impossible for her to "talk" her books, orevolve her books from conversation, like Madame de Staël. She was tooself-conscious, too desperately reflective, too rich in second-thoughtsfor that. But in tête-à-tête, and with time to choose her words, shecould--in monologue, with just enough stimulus from a companion to keepit going--produce on a listener exactly the impression of some of herbest work. As the low, clear voice flowed on in Mrs. Pattison's drawing-room, I _saw_ Saragossa, Granada, the Escorial, and that survival of theold Europe in the new, which one must go to Spain to find. Not that thedescription was particularly vivid--in talking of famous places JohnRichard Green could make words tell and paint with far greater success;but it was singularly complete and accomplished. When it was done theeffect was there--the effect she had meant to produce. I shut my eyes, and it all comes back--the darkened room, the long, pallid face, set inblack lace, the evident wish to be kind to a young girl. 

Two more impressions of her let me record. The following day, thePattisons took their guests to see the "eights" races from Christ Churchmeadow. A young Fellow of Merton, Mandell Creighton, afterward thebeloved and famous Bishop of London, was among those entertaining her onthe barge, and on the way home he took her and Mr. Lewes through Mertongarden. I was of the party, and I remember what a carnival of earlysummer it was in that enchanting place. The chestnuts were all out, onesplendor from top to toe; the laburnums; the lilacs; the hawthorns, redand white; the new-mown grass spreading its smooth and silky carpetround the college walls; a May sky overhead, and through the treesglimpses of towers and spires, silver gray, in the sparkling summerair--the picture was one of those that Oxford throws before thespectator at every turn, like the careless beauty that knows she hasonly to show herself, to move, to breathe, to give delight. George Eliotstood on the grass, in the bright sun, looking at the flower-ladenchestnuts, at the distant glimpses on all sides, of the surroundingcity, saying little--that she left to Mr. Lewes!--but drinking it in, storing it in that rich, absorbent mind of hers. And afterward when Mr. Lewes, Mr. Creighton, she, and I walked back to Lincoln, I rememberanother little incident throwing light on the ever-ready instinct of thenovelist. As we turned into the quadrangle of Lincoln--suddenly, at oneof the upper windows of the Rector's lodgings, which occupied the farright-hand corner of the quad, there appeared the head and shoulders ofMrs. Pattison, as she looked out and beckoned, smiling, to Mrs. Lewes. It was a brilliant apparition, as though a French portrait by Greuze orPerronneau had suddenly slipped into a vacant space in the old collegewall. The pale, pretty head, _blond-cendrée_; the delicate, smilingfeatures and white throat; a touch of black, a touch of blue; a whitedress; a general eighteenth-century impression as though of powder andpatches--Mrs. Lewes perceived it in a flash, and I saw her run eagerlyto Mr. Lewes and draw his attention to the window and its occupant. Shetook his arm, while she looked and waved. If she had lived longer, someday, and somewhere in her books, that vision at the window and thatflower-laden garden would have reappeared. I seemed to see herconsciously and deliberately committing them both to memory. 

But I do not believe that she ever meant to describe the Rector in "Mr. Casaubon. " She was far too good a scholar herself to have perpetrated acaricature so flagrantly untrue. She knew Mark Pattison's quality, andcould never have meant to draw the writer of some of the most fruitfuland illuminating of English essays, and one of the most brilliant piecesof European biography, in the dreary and foolish pedant who overshadows_Middlemarch_. But the fact that Mark Pattison was an elderly scholarwith a young wife, and that George Eliot knew him, led later on to alegend which was, I am sure, unwelcome to the writer of _Middlemarch_, while her supposed victim passed it by with amused indifference. 

As to the relation between the Rector and the Squire of _Robert Elsmere_which has been often assumed, it was confined, as I have already said(in the introduction to the library edition of _Robert Elsmere_published in 1909), to a likeness in outward aspect--"a few personaltraits, and the two main facts of great learning and a generalimpatience of fools. " If one could imagine Mark Pattison a landowner, hewould certainly never have neglected his estates, or tolerated aninefficient agent. 

Only three years intervened between my leaving school and my engagementto Mr. T. Humphry Ward, Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose College, Oxford. But those three years seem to me now to have been extraordinarily full. Lincoln and the Pattisons, Balliol and Mr. Jowett, and the BodleianLibrary, outside the influences and affections of my own home, stand inthe forefront of what memory looks back on as a broad and animatedscene. The great Library, in particular, became to me a living andinspiring presence. When I think of it as it then was, I am, aware of amedley of beautiful things--pale sunlight on book-lined walls, orstreaming through old armorial bearings on Tudor windows; spaces anddistances, all books, beneath a painted roof from which gleamed themotto of the University--_Dominus illuminatio mea_; gowned figuresmoving silently about the spaces; the faint scents of old leather andpolished wood; and fusing it all, a stately dignity and benignant charm, through which the voices of the bells outside, as they struck eachsuccessive quarter from Oxford's many towers, seemed to breathe acertain eternal reminder of the past and the dead. 

But regions of the Bodleian were open to me then that no ordinary readersees now. Mr. Coxe--the well-known, much-loved Bodley's Librarian ofthose days--took kindly notice of the girl reader, and very soon, probably on the recommendation of Mark Pattison, who was a Curator, mademe free of the lower floors, where was the "Spanish room, " with itsshelves of seventeenth and eighteenth century volumes in sheepskin orvellum, with their turned-in edges and leathern strings. Here I mightwander at will, absolutely alone, save for the visit of an occasionallibrarian from the upper floor, seeking a book. To get to the SpanishRoom one had to pass through the Douce Library, the home of treasuresbeyond price; on one side half the precious things of Renaissanceprinting, French or Italian or Elizabethan; on the other, stands ofilluminated Missals and Hour Books, many of them rich in pictures andflower-work, that shone like jewels in the golden light of the room. That light was to me something tangible and friendly. It seemed to bethe mingled product of all the delicate browns and yellows and golds inthe bindings of the books, of the brass lattice-work that covered them, and of reflections from the beautiful stone-work of the SchoolsQuadrangle outside. It was in these noble surroundings that, with fartoo little, I fear, of positive reading, and with much undisciplinedwandering from shelf to shelf and subject to subject, there yet sankdeep into me the sense of history, and of that vast ocean of therecorded past from which the generations rise and into which they fallback. And that in itself was a great boon--almost, one might say, atraining, of a kind. 

But a girl of seventeen is not always thinking of books, especially inthe Oxford summer term. 

In _Miss Bretherton_, my earliest novel, and in _Lady Connie_, so far mylatest, [1] will be found, by those who care to look for it, thereflection of that other life of Oxford, the life which takes its shape, not from age, but from youth, not from the past which created Oxford, but from the lively, laughing present which every day renews it. For sixmonths of the year Oxford is a city of young men, for the most partbetween the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. In my maiden days it wasnot also a city of young women, as it is to-day. Women--girlsespecially--were comparatively on sufferance. The Heads of Houses weremarried; the Professors were mostly married; but married tutors hadscarcely begun to be. Only at two seasons of the year was Oxford invadedby women--by bevies of maidens who came, in early May and middle June, to be made much of by their brothers and their brothers' friends, to bedanced with and flirted with, to know the joys of coming back on asummer night from Nuneham up the long, fragrant reaches of the lowerriver, or of "sitting out" in historic gardens where Philip Sidney orCharles I had passed. 

[Footnote 1: These chapters were written before the appearance of_Missing_ in the autumn of 1917. ]

At the "eights" and "Commem. " the old, old place became a merebackground for pretty dresses and college luncheons and river picnics. The seniors groaned often, as well they might; for there was little workdone in my day in the summer term. But it is perhaps worth while for anynation to possess such harmless festivals in so beautiful a setting asthese Oxford gatherings. How many of our national festivals are spoiledby ugly and sordid things--betting and drink, greed and display! Here, all there is to see is a competition of boats, manned by England's bestyouth, upon a noble river, flowing, in Virgilian phrase, "under ancientwalls"; a city of romance, given up for a few days to the pleasure ofthe young, and breathing into that pleasure her own refining, exaltingnote; a stately ceremony--the Encaenia--going back to the infancy ofEnglish learning; and the dancing of young men and maidens in Gothic orclassical halls built long ago by the "fathers who begat us. " My ownrecollection of the Oxford summer, the Oxford river and hay-fields, thedawn on Oxford streets, as one came out from a Commemoration ball, orthe evening under Nuneham woods where the swans on that still water, now, as always, "float double, swan and shadow"--these things I hopewill be with me to the end. To have lived through them is to have tastedyouth and pleasure from a cup as pure, as little alloyed with baserthings, as the high gods allow to mortals. 

Let me recall one more experience before I come to the married lifewhich began in 1872--my first sight of Taine, the great Frenchhistorian, in the spring of 1871. He had come over at the invitation ofthe Curators of the Taylorian Institution to give a series of lectureson Corneille and Racine. The lectures were arranged immediately afterthe surrender of Paris to the German troops, when it might have beenhoped that the worst calamities of France were over. But before M. Tainecrossed to England the insurrection of the Commune had broken out, andwhile he was actually in Oxford, delivering his six lectures, theterrible news of the last days of May, the burning of the Tuileries, theHôtel de Ville, and the Cour des Comptes, all the savagery of the beatenrevolution, let loose on Paris itself, came crashing, day by day andhour by hour, like so many horrible explosions in the heavy air ofEurope, still tremulous with the memories and agonies of recent war. 

How well I remember the effect in Oxford!--the newspaper cries in thestreets, the fear each morning as to what new calamities might havefallen on civilization, the intense fellow-feeling in a community ofstudents and scholars for the students and scholars of France!

When M. Taine arrived, he himself bears witness (see his publishedCorrespondence, Vol. II) that Oxford could not do enough to show hersympathy with a distinguished Frenchman. He writes from Oxford on May25th:

 I have no courage for a letter to-day. I have just heard of the horrors of Paris, the burning of the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Hôtel de Ville, etc. My heart is wrung. I have energy for nothing. I cannot go out and see people. I was in the Bodleian when the Librarian told me this and showed me the newspapers. In presence of such madness and such disasters, they treat a Frenchman here with a kind of pitying sympathy. 

Oxford residents, indeed, inside and outside the colleges, crowded thefirst lecture to show our feeling not only for M. Taine, but for aFrance wounded and trampled on by her own children. The few dignifiedand touching words with which he opened his course, his fine, dark head, the attractiveness of his subject, the lucidity of his handling of it, made the lecture a great success; and a few nights afterward at dinnerat Balliol I found myself sitting next the great man. In his publishedCorrespondence there is a letter describing this dinner which shows thatI must have confided in him not a little--as to my Bodleian reading, andthe article on the "Poema del Cid" that I was writing. He confesses, however, that he did his best to draw me--examining the English girl asa new specimen for his psychological collection. As for me, I can onlyperversely remember a passing phrase of his to the effect that there wastoo much magenta in the dress of Englishwomen, and too much pepper inthe English _cuisine_. From English cooking--which showed ill in theOxford of those days--he suffered, indeed, a good deal. Nor, in spite ofhis great literary knowledge of England and English, was his spokenEnglish clear enough to enable him to grapple with the lodging-housecook. Professor Max Müller, who had induced him to give the lectures, and watched over him during his stay, told me that on his first visit tothe historian in his Beaumont Street rooms he found him sittingbewildered before the strangest of meals. It consisted entirely of ahuge beefsteak, served in the unappetizing, slovenly English way, and--alarge plate of buttered toast. Nothing else. "But I ordered bif-tek andpott-a-toes!" cried the puzzled historian to his visitor!

Another guest of the Master's on that night was Mr. Swinburne, and ofhim, too, I have a vivid recollection as he sat opposite to me on theside next the fire, his small lower features and slender neckoverweighted by his thick reddish hair and capacious brow. I could notthink why he seemed so cross and uncomfortable. He was perpetuallybeckoning to the waiters; then, when they came, holding peremptoryconversation with them; while I from my side of the table could see themgoing away, with a whisper or a shrug to each other, like men asked forthe impossible. At last, with a kind of bound, Swinburne leaped from hischair and seized a copy of the _Times_ which he seemed to have persuadedone of the men to bring him. As he got up I saw that the fire behindhim, and very close to him, must indeed have been burning the verymarrow out of a long-suffering poet. And, alack! in that house without amistress the small conveniences of life, such as fire-screens, wereoften overlooked. The Master did not possess any. In a pale exasperationSwinburne folded the _Times_ over the back of his chair and sat downagain. Vain was the effort! The room was narrow, the party large, andthe servants, pushing by, had soon dislodged the _Times_. Again andagain did Swinburne in a fury replace it; and was soon reduced tositting silent and wild-eyed, his back firmly pressed against the chairand the newspaper, in a concentrated struggle with fate. 

Matthew Arnold was another of the party, and I have a vision of my unclestanding talking with M. Taine, with whom he then and there made alasting friendship. The Frenchman was not, I trust, aware at that momentof the heresies of the English critic who had ventured only a few yearsbefore to speak of "the exaggerated French estimate of Racine, " and evento indorse the judgment of Joubert--"_Racine est le Virgile designorants"!_ Otherwise M. Taine might have given an even sharper edgethan he actually did to his remarks, in his letters home, on thecritical faculty of the English. "In all that I read and hear, " he saysto Madame Taine, "I see nowhere the fine literary sense which means thegift--or the art--of understanding the souls and passions of the past. "And again, "I have had infinite trouble to-day to make my audienceappreciate some _finesses_ of Racine. " There is a note of resignedexasperation in these comments which reminds me of the passionatefeeling of another French critic--Edmond Scherer, Sainte-Beuve's bestsuccessor--ten years later. _À propos_ of some judgment of MatthewArnold--whom Scherer delighted in--on Racine, of the same kind as thoseI have already quoted, the French man of letters once broke out to me, almost with fury, as we walked together at Versailles. But, after all, was the Oxford which contained Pater, Pattison, and Bywater, which hadnurtured Matthew Arnold and Swinburne--Swinburne with his wonderfulknowledge of the intricacies and subtleties of the French tongue and theFrench literature--merely "_solide and positif_, " as Taine declares? Thejudgment is, I think, a characteristic judgment of that man offormulas--often so brilliant and often so mistaken--who, in the famous_History of English Literature_, taught his English readers as much byhis blunders as by his merits. He provoked us into thinking. And whatcritic does more? Is not the whole fraternity like so many successivePenelopes, each unraveling the web of the one before? The point is thatthe web should be eternally remade and eternally unraveled. 

II

I married Mr. Thomas Humphry Ward, Fellow and Tutor of BrasenoseCollege, on April 6, 1872, the knot being tied by my father's friend, mygrandfather's pupil and biographer, Dean Stanley. For nine years, tillthe spring of 1881, we lived in Oxford, in a little house north of theParks, in what was then the newest quarter of the University town. Theywere years, for both of us, of great happiness and incessant activity. Our children, two daughters and a son, were born in 1874, 1876, and1879. We had many friends, all pursuing the same kind of life asourselves, and interested in the same kind of things. Nobody under therank of a Head of a College, except a very few privileged Professors, possessed as much as a thousand a year. The average income of the newrace of married tutors was not much more than half that sum. Yet we allgave dinner-parties and furnished our houses with Morris papers, oldchests and cabinets, and blue pots. The dinner-parties were simple andshort. At our own early efforts of the kind there certainly was notenough to eat. But we all improved with time; and on the whole I thinkwe were very fair housekeepers and competent mothers. Most of us werevery anxious to be up-to-date and in the fashion, whether in esthetics, in housekeeping, or in education. But our fashion was not that ofBelgravia or Mayfair, which, indeed, we scorned! It was the fashion ofthe movement which sprang from Morris and Burne-Jones. Liberty stuffsvery plain in line, but elaborately "smocked, " were greatly in vogue, and evening dresses, "cut square, " or with "Watteau pleats, " weregenerally worn, and often in conscious protest against the London "lowdress, " which Oxford--young married Oxford--thought both ugly and"fast. " And when we had donned our Liberty gowns we went out to dinner, the husband walking, the wife in a bath chair, drawn by an ancientmember of an ancient and close fraternity--the "chairmen" of old Oxford. 

Almost immediately opposite to us in the Bradmore Road lived WalterPater and his sisters. The exquisiteness of their small house, and thecharm of the three people who lived in it, will never be forgotten bythose who knew them well in those days when by the publication of the_Studies in the Renaissance_ (1873) their author had just become famous. I recall very clearly the effect of that book, and of the strange andpoignant sense of beauty expressed in it; of its entire aloofness alsofrom the Christian tradition of Oxford, its glorification of the higherand intenser forms of esthetic pleasure, of "passion" in theintellectual sense--as against the Christian doctrine of self-denial andrenunciation. It was a gospel that both stirred and scandalized Oxford. The bishop of the diocese thought it worth while to protest. There was acry of "Neo-paganism, " and various attempts at persecution. The authorof the book was quite unmoved. In those days Walter Pater's mind wasstill full of revolutionary ferments which were just as sincere, just asmuch himself, as that later hesitating and wistful return towardChristianity, and Christianity of the Catholic type, which is embodiedin _Marius the Epicurean_, the most beautiful of the spiritual romancesof Europe since the _Confessions_. I can remember a dinner-party at hishouse, where a great tumult arose over some abrupt statement of his madeto the High Church wife of a well-known Professor. Pater had been insome way pressed controversially beyond the point of wisdom, and hadsaid suddenly that no reasonable person could govern his life by theopinions or actions of a man who died eighteen centuries ago. TheProfessor and his wife--I look back to them both with the warmestaffection--departed hurriedly, in agitation; and the rest of us onlygradually found out what had happened. 

But before we left Oxford in 1881 this attitude of mind had, I think, greatly changed. Mr. Gosse, in the memoir of Walter Pater contributed tothe Dictionary of National Biography, says that before 1870 he hadgradually relinquished all belief in the Christian religion--and leavesit there. But the interesting and touching thing to watch was the gentleand almost imperceptible flowing back of the tide over the sands it hadleft bare. It may be said, I think, that he never returned toChristianity in the orthodox or intellectual sense. But his heartreturned to it. He became once more endlessly interested in it, andhaunted by the "something" in it which he thought inexplicable. Aremembrance of my own shows this. In my ardent years of exploration andrevolt, conditioned by the historical work that occupied me during thelater 'seventies, I once said to him in tête-à-tête, reckoningconfidently on his sympathy, and with the intolerance and certainty ofyouth, that orthodoxy could not possibly maintain itself long againstits assailants, especially from the historical and literary camps, andthat we should live to see it break down. He shook his head and lookedrather troubled. 

"I don't think so, " he said. Then, with hesitation: "And we don'taltogether agree. You think it's all plain. But I can't. There are suchmysterious things. Take that saying, 'Come unto me, all ye that areweary and heavy-laden. ' How can you explain that? There is a mystery init--something supernatural. "

A few years later, I should very likely have replied that the answer ofthe modern critic would be, "The words you quote are in all probabilityfrom a lost Wisdom book; there are very close analogies in Proverbs andin the Apocrypha. They are a fragment without a context, and mayrepresent on the Lord's lips either a quotation or the text of adiscourse. Wisdom is speaking--the Wisdom 'which is justified of herchildren. '" But if any one had made such a reply, it would not haveaffected the mood in Pater, of which this conversation gave me my firstglimpse, and which is expressed again and again in the most exquisitepassages of _Marius_. Turn to the first time when Marius--under MarcusAurelius--is present at a Christian ceremony, and sees, for the firsttime, the "wonderful spectacle of those who believed. "

 The people here collected might have figured as the earliest handsel or pattern of a new world, from the very face of which discontent had passed away.... They had faced life and were glad, by some science or light of knowledge they had, to which there was certainly no parallel in the older world. Was some credible message from beyond "the flaming rampart of the world"--a message of hope ... Already molding their very bodies and looks and voices, now and here?

Or again to the thoughts of Marius at the approach of death:

 At this moment, his unclouded receptivity of soul, grown so steadily through all those years, from experience to experience, was at its height; the house was ready for the possible guest, the tablet of the mind white and smooth, for whatever divine fingers might choose to write there. 

_Marius_ was published twelve years after the _Studies in theRenaissance_, and there is a world between the two books. Some furtherlight will be thrown on this later phase of Mr. Pater's thought by aletter he wrote to me in 1885 on my translation of Amiel's _From JournalIntime_. Here it is rather the middle days of his life that concern me, and the years of happy friendship with him and his sisters, when we wereall young together. Mr. Pater and my husband were both fellows andtutors of Brasenose, though my husband was much the younger, a factwhich naturally brought us into frequent contact. And the beautifullittle house across the road, with its two dear mistresses, drew meperpetually, both before and after my marriage. The drawing-room, whichruns the whole breadth of the house from the road to the garden behind, was "Paterian" in every line and ornament. There were a Morris paper;spindle-legged tables and chairs; a sparing allowance of blue plates andpots, bought, I think, in Holland, where Oxford residents in my day werealways foraging, to return, often, with treasures of which the verymemory now stirs a half-amused envy of one's own past self, that hadsuch chances and lost them; framed embroidery of the most delicatedesign and color, the work of Mr. Pater's elder sister; engravings, if Iremember right, from Botticelli, or Luini, or Mantegna; a few mirrors, and a very few flowers, chosen and arranged with a simple yet consciousart. I see that room always with the sun in it, touching the polishedsurfaces of wood and brass and china, and bringing out its pure, brightcolor. I see it too pervaded by the presence of the younger sister, Clara--a personality never to be forgotten by those who loved her. ClaraPater, whose grave and noble beauty in youth has been preserved in adrawing by Mr. Wirgman, was indeed a "rare and dedicated spirit. " When Ifirst knew her she was four or five and twenty, intelligent, alive, sympathetic, with a delightful humor and a strong judgment, but withoutmuch positive acquirement. Then after some years she began to learnLatin and Greek with a view to teaching; and after we left Oxford shebecame Vice-President of the new Somerville College for Women. Severalgenerations of girl-students must still preserve the tenderest and mostgrateful memories of all that she was there, as woman, teacher, andfriend. Her point of view, her opinion, had always the crispness, thesavor that goes with perfect sincerity. She feared no one, and she lovedmany, as they loved her. She loved animals, too, as all the householddid. How well I remember the devoted nursing given by the brother andsisters to a poor little paralytic cat, whose life they tried to save--in vain! When, later, I came across in _Marius_ the account of MarcusAurelius carrying away the dead child Annius Verus--"pressed closely tohis bosom, as if yearning just then for one thing only, to be united, tobe absolutely one with it, in its obscure distress"--I remembered theabsorption of the writer of those lines, and of his sisters, in thesuffering of that poor little creature, long years before. I feeltolerably certain that in writing the words Walter Pater had that pastexperience in mind. 

After Walter Pater's death, Clara, with her elder sister, became thevigilant and joint guardians of their brother's books and fame, till, four years ago, a terrible illness cut short her life, and set free, inher brother's words, the "unclouded and receptive soul. "

CHAPTER VII

BALLIOL AND LINCOLN

When the Oxford historian of the future comes across the name andinfluence of Benjamin Jowett, the famous Master of Balliol, and Greekprofessor, in the mid-current of the nineteenth century, he will not bewithout full means of finding out what made that slight figure (whereofhe will be able to study the outward and visible presence in someexcellent portraits, and in many caricatures) so significant and sorepresentative. The _Life_ of the Master, by Evelyn Abbott and LewisCampbell, is to me one of the most interesting biographies of ourgeneration. It is long--for those who have no Oxford ties, no doubt, toolong; and it is cumbered with the echoes of old controversies, theological and academic, which have mostly, though by no means wholly, passed into a dusty limbo. But it is one of the rare attempts thatEnglish biography has seen to paint a man as he really was; and to painthim not with the sub-malicious strokes of a Purcell, but in love, although in truth. 

[Illustration: BENJAMIN JOWETT]

The Master, as he fought his many fights, with his abnormally strongwill and his dominating personality; the Master, as he appeared, on theone hand, to the upholders of "research, " of learning, that is, as anend in itself apart from teaching, and, on the other, to the High-Churchmen encamped in Christ Church, to Pusey, Liddon, and all theirclan--pugnacious, formidable, and generally successful--here he is tothe life. This is the Master whose personality could never be forgottenin any room he chose to enter; who brought restraint rather than ease tothe gatherings of his friends, mainly because, according to his ownaccount, of a shyness he could never overcome; whose company on a walkwas too often more of a torture than an honor to the undergraduateselected for it; whose lightest words were feared, quoted, chuckledover, or resented, like those of no one else. 

Of this Master I have many remembrances. I see, for instance, a drawing-room full of rather tongue-tied, embarrassed guests, some Oxfordresidents, some Londoners; and the Master among them, as a stimulating--but disintegrating!--force, of whom every one was uneasily conscious. The circle was wide, the room bare, and the Balliol arm-chairs were notplaced for conversation. On a high chair against the wall sat a smallboy of ten--we will call him Arthur--oppressed by his surroundings. Thetalk languished and dropped. From one side of the large room, theMaster, raising his voice, addressed the small boy on the other side. 

"Well, Arthur, so I hear you've begun Greek. How are you getting on?"

To the small boy looking round the room it seemed as though twenty awfulgrownups were waiting in a dead silence to eat him up. He rushed uponhis answer. 

"I--I'm reading the Anabasis, " he said, desperately. 

The false quantity sent a shock through the room. Nobody laughed, out ofsympathy with the boy, who already knew that something dreadful hadhappened. The boy's miserable parents, Londoners, who were among thetwenty, wished themselves under the floor. The Master smiled. 

"The Anábasis, Arthur, " he said, cheerfully. "You'll get it right nexttime. "

And he went across to the boy, evidently feeling for him and wishing toput him at ease. But after thirty years the boy and his parents stillremember the incident with a shiver. It could not have produced such aneffect except in an atmosphere of tension; and that, alas! too often, was the atmosphere which surrounded the Master. 

I can remember, too, many proud yet anxious half-hours in the Master'sstudy--such a privilege, yet such an ordeal!--when, after our migrationto London, we became, at regular intervals, the Master's week-endvisitors. "Come and talk to me a little in my study, " the Master wouldsay, pleasantly. And there in the room where he worked for so manyyears, as the interpreter of Greek thought to the English world, onewould take a chair beside the fire, with the Master opposite. I havedescribed my fireside tête-à-têtes, as a girl, with another head of aCollege--the Rector of Lincoln, Mark Pattison. But the Master was a farmore strenuous companion. With him, there were no diversions, none!--norelief from the breathless adventure of trying to please him and doingone's best. The Rector once, being a little invalidish, allowed me tomake up the fire, and, after watching the process sharply, said: "Good!Does it drive _you_ distracted, too, when people put on coals the wrongway?" An interruption which made for human sympathy! The Master, as faras I can remember, had no "nerves"; and "nerves" are a bond betweenmany. But he occasionally had sudden returns upon himself. I rememberonce after we had been discussing a religious book which had interestedus both, he abruptly drew himself up, in the full tide of talk, andsaid, with a curious impatience, "But one can't be always thinking ofthese things!" and changed the subject. 

So much for the Master, the stimulus of whose mere presence was, according to his biographers, "often painful. " But there were at leasttwo other Masters in the "Mr. Jowett" we reverenced. And they, too, arefully shown in this biography. The Master who loved his friends andthought no pains too great to take for them, including the very rarepains of trying to mend their characters by faithfulness and plainspeaking, whenever he thought they wanted it. The Master, again, whosesympathies were always with social reform and with the poor, whosehidden life was full of deeds of kindness and charity, who, in spite ofhis difficulties of manner, was loved by all sorts and conditions ofmen--and women--in all circles of life, by politicians and great ladies, by diplomats and scholars and poets, by his secretary and his servants--there are many traits of this good man and useful citizen recorded byhis biographers. 

And, finally, there was the Master who reminded his most intimatefriends of a sentence of his about Greek literature, which occurs in theIntroduction to the _Phoedrus_: "Under the marble exterior of Greekliterature was concealed a soul thrilling with spiritual emotion, " saysthe Master. His own was not exactly a marble exterior; but the placidand yet shrewd cheerfulness of his delicately rounded face, with itssmall mouth and chin, its great brow and frame of snowy hair, gave butlittle clue to the sensitive and mystical soul within. If ever a man was_Gottbetrunken_, it was the Master, many of whose meditations andpassing thoughts, withdrawn, while he lived, from all human ken, yetwritten down--in thirty or forty volumes!--for his own discipline andremembrance, can now be read, thanks to his biographers, in the pages ofthe _Life_, They are extraordinarily frank and simple; startling, often, in their bareness and truth. But they are, above all, the thoughts of amystic, moving in a Divine presence. An old and intimate friend of theMaster's once said to me that he believed "Jowett's inner mind, especially toward the end of his life, was always in an attitude ofPrayer. One would go and talk to him on University or College businessin his study, and suddenly see his lips moving, slightly and silently, and know what it meant. " The records of him which his death revealed--and his closest friends realized it in life--show a man perpetuallyconscious of a mysterious and blessed companionship; which is the markof the religious man, in all faiths and all churches. Yet this was theman who, for the High Church party at Oxford, with its headquarters atChrist Church, under the flag of Doctor Pusey and Canon Liddon, was thesymbol and embodiment of all heresy; whose University salary as Greekprofessor, which depended on a Christ Church subsidy, was withheld foryears by the same High-Churchmen, because of their inextinguishablewrath against the Liberal leader who had contributed so largely to thetest-abolishing legislation of 1870--legislation by which Oxford, inLiddon's words, was "logically lost to the Church of England. "

Yet no doubt they had their excuses! For this, too, was the man who, ina city haunted by Tractarian shades, once said to his chief biographerthat "Voltaire had done more good than all the Fathers of the Church puttogether!"--who scornfully asks himself in his diary, _à propos_ of theBishops' condemnation of _Essays and Reviews_, "What is Truth against an_esprit de corps_?"--and drops out the quiet dictum, "Half the booksthat are published are religious books, and what trash this religiousliterature is!" Nor did the Evangelicals escape. The Master's dislikefor many well-known hymns specially dear to that persuasion was neverconcealed. "How cocky they are!" he would say, contemptuously. "'Whenupward I fly--Quite justified I'--who can repeat a thing like that?"

How the old war-cries ring again in one's ears as one looks back! Thosewho have only known the Oxford of the last twenty years can never, Ithink, feel toward that "august place" as we did, in the seventies ofthe last century; we who were still within sight and hearing of thegreat fighting years of an earlier generation, and still scorched bytheir dying fires. Balliol, Christ Church, Lincoln--the Liberal andutilitarian camp, the Church camp, the researching and pure scholarshipcamp--with Science and the Museum hovering in the background, as thegrowing aggressive powers of the future seeking whom they might devour--they were the signs and symbols of mighty hosts, of great forces stillvisibly incarnate, and in marching array. Balliol _versus_ ChristChurch--Jowett _versus_ Pusey and Liddon--while Lincoln despised both, and the new scientific forces watched and waited--that was how we sawthe field of battle, and the various alarms and excursions it was alwaysproviding. 

But Balliol meant more to me than the Master. Professor Thomas HillGreen--"Green of Balliol"--was no less representative in our days of thespiritual and liberating forces of the great college; and the time whichhas now elapsed since his death has clearly shown that his philosophicwork and influence hold a lasting and conspicuous place in the historyof nineteenth-century thought. He and his wife became our intimatefriends, and in the Grey of _Robert Elsmere_ I tried to reproduce a fewof those traits--traits of a great thinker and teacher, who was also oneof the simplest, sincerest, and most practical of men--which Oxford willnever forget, so long as high culture and noble character are dear toher. His wife--so his friend and biographer, Lewis Nettleship, tellsus--once compared him to Sir Bors in "The Holy Grail":

 A square-set man and honest; and his eyes, An outdoor sign of all the wealth within, Smiled with his lips--a smile beneath a cloud, But Heaven had meant it for a sunny one!

A quotation in which the mingling of a cheerful, practical, humoroustemper, the temper of the active citizen and politician, with the heavytasks of philosophic thought, is very happily suggested. As we knew him, indeed, and before the publication of the _Prolegomena to Ethics_ andthe Introduction to the Clarendon Press edition of Hume had led to hisappointment as Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy, Mr. Green was notonly a leading Balliol tutor, but an energetic Liberal, a member both ofthe Oxford Town Council and of various University bodies; a helper inall the great steps taken for the higher education of women at Oxford, and keenly attracted by the project of a High School for the town boysof Oxford--a man, in other words, preoccupied, just as the Master was, and, for all his philosophic genius, with the need of leading "a usefullife. "

Let me pause to think how much that phrase meant in the mouths of thebest men whom Balliol produced, in the days when I knew Oxford. TheMaster, Green, Toynbee--their minds were full, half a century ago, ofthe "condition of the people" question, of temperance, housing, wages, electoral reform; and within the University, and by the help of theweapons of thought and teaching, they regarded themselves as the naturalallies of the Liberal party which was striving for these things throughpolitics and Parliament. "Usefulness, " "social reform, " the bettering ofdaily life for the many--these ideas are stamped on all their work andon all the biographies of them that remain to us. 

And the significance of it is only to be realized when we turn to therival group, to Christ Church, and the religious party which that namestood for. Read the lives of Liddon, of Pusey, or--to go farther back--of the great Newman himself. Nobody will question the personal goodnessand charity of any of the three. But how little the leading ideas ofthat seething time of social and industrial reform, from the appearanceof _Sybil_ in 1843 to the Education Bill of 1870, mattered either toPusey or to Liddon, compared with the date of the Book of Daniel or theretention of the Athanasian Creed? Newman, at a time when nationaldrunkenness was an overshadowing terror in the minds of all reformers, confesses with a pathetic frankness that he had never considered"whether there were too many public-houses in England or no"; and in allhis religious controversies of the 'thirties and the 'forties, you willlook in vain for any word of industrial or political reform. So also inthe _Life_ of that great rhetorician and beautiful personality, CanonLiddon, you will scarcely find a single letter that touches on anyquestion of social betterment. How to safeguard the "principle ofauthority, " how to uphold the traditional authorship of the Pentateuch, and of the Book of Daniel, against "infidel" criticism; how to stifleamong the younger High-Churchmen like Mr. (now Bishop) Gore, then headof the Pusey House, the first advances toward a reasonable freedom ofthought; how to maintain the doctrine of Eternal Punishment against theprotest of the religious consciousness itself--it is on these mattersthat Canon Liddon's correspondence turns, it was to them his life wasdevoted. 

How vainly! Who can doubt now which type of life and thought had in itthe seeds of growth and permanence--the Balliol type, or the ChristChurch type? There are many High-Churchmen, it is true, at the presentday, and many Ritualist Churches. But they are alive to-day, just in sofar as they have learned the lesson of social pity, and the lesson of areasonable criticism, from the men whom Pusey and Liddon and half thebishops condemned and persecuted in the middle years of the nineteenthcentury. 

When we were living in Oxford, however, this was not exactly the pointof view from which the great figure of Liddon presented itself, to us ofthe Liberal camp. We were constantly aware of him, no doubt, as therival figure to the Master of Balliol, as the arch wire-puller andecclesiastical intriguer in University affairs, leading the Churchforces with a more than Roman astuteness. But his great mark was made, of course, by his preaching, and that not so much by the things said asby the man saying them. Who now would go to Liddon's famous Bamptons, for all their learning, for a still valid defense of the orthodoxdoctrine of the Incarnation? Those wonderful paragraphs of subtleargumentation from which the great preacher emerged, as triumphantly asMr. Gladstone from a Gladstonian sentence in a House of Commons debate--what remains of them? Liddon wrote of Stanley that he--Stanley--was"more entirely destitute of the logical faculty" than any educated manhe knew. In a sense it was true. But Stanley, if he had been aware ofthe criticism, might have replied that, if he lacked logic, Liddonlacked something much more vital--i. E. , the sense of history--and of therelative value of testimony!

Newman, Pusey, Liddon--all three, great schoolmen, arguing from anaccepted brief; the man of genius, the man of a vast industry, intensebut futile, the man of captivating presence and a perfect rhetoric--history, with its patient burrowings, has surely undermined the work ofall three, sparing only that element in the work of one of them--Newman--which is the preserving salt of all literature--i. E. , the magicof personality. And some of the most efficacious burrowers have beentheir own spiritual children. As was fitting! For the Tractarianmovement, with its appeal to the primitive Church, was in truth, andquite unconsciously, one of the agencies in a great process ofhistorical inquiry which is still going on, and of which the end is notyet. 

But to me, in my twenties, these great names were not merely names orsymbols, as they are to the men and women of the present generation. Newman I had seen in my childhood, walking about the streets ofEdgbaston, and had shrunk from him in a dumb, childish resentment asfrom some one whom I understood to be the author of our familymisfortunes. In those days, as I have already recalled in an earlierchapter, the daughters of a "mixed marriage" were brought up in themother's faith, and the sons in the father's. I, therefore, as aschoolgirl under Evangelical influence, was not allowed to make friendswith any of my father's Catholic colleagues. Then, in 1880, twenty yearslater, Newman came to Oxford, and on Trinity Monday there was a greatgathering at Trinity College, where the Cardinal in his red, a blanchedand spiritual presence, received the homage of a new generation who sawin him a great soul and a great master of English, and cared little ornothing for the controversies in which he had spent his prime. As myturn came to shake hands, I recalled my father to him and the Edgbastondays. His face lit up--almost mischievously. "Are you the little girl Iremember seeing sometimes--in the distance?" he said to me, with a smileand a look that only he and I understood. 

On the Sunday preceding that gathering I went to hear his last sermon inthe city he had loved so well, preached at the new Jesuit church in thesuburbs; while little more than a mile away, Bidding Prayer and sermonwere going on as usual in the University Church where in his youth, weekby week, he had so deeply stirred the hearts and consciences of men. Thesermon in St. Aloysius's was preached with great difficulty, and wasalmost incoherent from the physical weakness of the speaker. Yet whothat was present on that Sunday will ever forget the great ghost thatfronted them, the faltering accents, the words from which the life-bloodhad departed, yet not the charm?

Then--Pusey! There comes back to me a bowed and uncouth figure, whom oneused to see both in the Cathedral procession on a Sunday, and--rarely--in the University pulpit. One sermon on Darwinism, which was preached, if I remember right, in the early 'seventies, remains with me, as theappearance of some modern Elijah, returning after long silence and exileto protest against an unbelieving world. Sara Coleridge had years beforedescribed Pusey in the pulpit with a few vivid strokes. 

 He has not one of the graces of oratory [she says]. His discourse is generally a rhapsody describing with infinite repetition the wickedness of sin, the worthlessness of earth, and the blessedness of Heaven. He is as still as a statue all the time he is uttering it, looks as white as a sheet, and is as monotonous in delivery as possible. 

Nevertheless, Pusey wielded a spell which is worth much oratory--thespell of a soul dwelling spiritually on the heights; and a prophet, moreover, may be as monotonous or as incoherent as he pleases, while theworld is still in tune with his message. But in the 'seventies, Oxford, at least, was no longer in tune with Pusey's message, and the effect ofthe veteran leader, trying to come to terms with Darwinism, struggling, that is, with new and stubborn forces he had no further power to bind, was tragic, or pathetic, as such things must always be. New Puseys arisein every century. The "sons of authority" will never perish out of theearth. But the language changes and the argument changes; and perhapsthere are none more secretly impatient with the old prophet than thoseyounger spirits of his own kind who are already stepping into his shoes. 

Far different was the effect of Liddon, in those days, upon us youngerfolk! The grace and charm of Liddon's personal presence were as valuableto his party in the 'seventies as that of Dean Stanley had been toLiberalism at an earlier stage. There was indeed much in common betweenthe aspect and manner of the two men, though no likeness, in the strictsense, whatever. But the exquisite delicacy of feature, the brightnessof eye, the sensitive play of expression, were alike in both. SaintSimon says of Fenelon:

 He was well made, pale, with eyes that showered intelligence and fire--and with a physiognomy that no one who had seen it once could forget. It had both gravity and polish, seriousness and gaiety; it spoke equally of the scholar, the bishop, and the _grand seigneur_, and the final impression was one of intelligence, subtlety, grace, charm; above all, of dignity. One had to tear oneself from looking at him. 

Many of those who knew Liddon best could, I think, have adapted thislanguage to him; and there is much in it that fitted Arthur Stanley. 

But the love and gift for managing men was of course a secondary thingin the case of our great preacher. The University politics of Liddon andhis followers are dead and gone; and as I have ventured to think, theintellectual force of Liddon's thoughts and arguments, as they arepresented to us now on the printed page, is also a thing of the past. But the vision of the preacher in those who saw it is imperishable. Thescene in St. Paul's has been often described, by none better than byDoctor Liddon's colleague, Canon Scott Holland. But the Oxford scene, with all its Old World setting, was more touching, more interesting. AsI think of it, I seem to be looking out from those dark seats under theundergraduates' gallery--where sat the wives of the Masters of Arts--atthe crowded church, as it waited for the preacher. First came the stirof the procession; the long line of Heads of Houses, in their scarletrobes as Doctors of Divinity--all but the two heretics, Pattison andJowett, who walked in their plain black, and warmed my heart alwaysthereby! And then the Vice-Chancellor, with the "pokers" and thepreacher. All eyes were fixed on the slender, willowy figure, and thedark head touched with silver. The bow to the Vice-Chancellor as theyparted at the foot of the pulpit stairs, the mounting of the pulpit, thequiet look out over the Church, the Bidding Prayer, the voice--it wasall part of an incomparable performance which cannot be paralleled to-day. 

The voice was high and penetrating, without much variety, as I rememberit; but of beautiful quality, and at times wonderfully moving. And whatwas still more appealing was the evident strain upon the speaker of hismessage. It wore him out visibly as he delivered it. He came down fromthe pulpit white and shaken, dripping with perspiration. Virtue had goneout of him. Yet his effort had never for a moment weakened his perfectself-control, the flow and finish of the long sentences, or the subtleinterconnection of the whole! One Sunday I remember in particular. Oxford had been saddened the day before by the somewhat sudden death ofa woman whom everybody loved and respected--Mrs. Acland, the wife of thewell-known doctor and professor. And Liddon, with a wonderfully happyinstinct, had added to his sermon a paragraph dealing with Mrs. Acland'sdeath, which held us all spellbound till the beautiful words died intosilence. It was done with a fastidious literary taste that is ratherFrench than English; and yet it came from the very heart of the speaker. Looking back through my many memories of Doctor Liddon as a preacher, that tribute to a noble woman in death remains with me as the finest andmost lasting of them all. 

CHAPTER VIII

EARLY MARRIED LIFE

How many other figures in that vanished Oxford world I should like todraw!--Mandell or "Max" Creighton, our lifelong friend, then justmarried to the wife who was his best comrade while he lived, and sincehis death has made herself an independent force in English life. I firstremember the future Bishop of London when I was fifteen, and he wasreading history with my father on a Devonshire reading-party. The tall, slight figure in blue serge, the red-gold hair, the spectacles, the keenfeatures and quiet, commanding eye--I see them first against abackground of rocks on the Lynton shore. Then again, a few years later, in his beautiful Merton rooms, with the vine tendrils curling round thewindows, the Morris paper, and the blue willow-pattern plates upon it, that he was surely the first to collect in Oxford. A luncheon-partyreturns upon me--in Brasenose--where the brilliant Merton Fellow andtutor, already a power in Oxford, first met his future wife; afterward, their earliest married home in Oxford so near to ours, in the new regionof the Parks; then the Vicarage on the Northumberland coast whereCreighton wrestled with the north-country folk, with their virtues andtheir vices, drinking deep draughts thereby from the sources of humannature; where he read and wrote history, preparing for his _magnumopus_, the history of the Renaissance Popes; where he entertained hisfriends, brought up his children, and took mighty walks--always the samerestless, energetic, practical, pondering spirit, his mind set upon theKingdom of God, and convinced that in and through the English Church aman might strive for the Kingdom as faithfully and honestly as anywhereelse. The intellectual doubts and misgivings on the subject of takingorders, so common in the Oxford of his day, Creighton had never felt. His life had ripened to a rich maturity without, apparently, any ofthose fundamental conflicts which had scarred the lives of other men. 

The fact set him in strong contrast with another historian who was alsoour intimate friend--John Richard Green. When I first knew him, duringmy engagement to my husband, and seven years before the _Short History_was published, he had just practically--though not formally--given uphis orders. He had been originally curate to my husband's father, whoheld a London living, and the bond between him and his Vicar's familywas singularly close and affectionate. After the death of the dearmother of the flock, a saintly and tender spirit, to whom Mr. Green wasmuch attached, he remained the faithful friend of all her children. Howmuch I had heard of him before I saw him! The expectation of our firstmeeting filled me with trepidation. Should I be admitted, too, into thatlarge and generous heart? Would he "pass" the girl who had dared to behis "boy's" fiancée? But after ten minutes all was well, and he was myfriend no less than my husband's, to the last hour of his fruitful, suffering life. 

And how much it meant, his friendship! It became plain very soon afterour marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership. My firstpublished story, written when I was eighteen, had appeared in the_Churchman's Magazine_ in 1870, and an article on the "Poema del Cid, "the first-fruits of my Spanish browsings in the Bodleian, appeared in_Macmillan_ early in 1872. My husband was already writing in the_Saturday Review_ and other quarters, and had won his literary spurs asone of the three authors of that _jeu d'esprit_ of no small fame in itsday, the _Oxford Spectator_. Our three children arrived in 1874, 1876, and 1879, and all the time I was reading, listening, talking, andbeginning to write in earnest--mostly for the _Saturday Review_. "J. R. G. , " as we loved to call him, took up my efforts with the warmestencouragement, tempered, indeed, by constant fears that I should becomea hopeless bookworm and dryasdust, yielding day after day to the mereluxury of reading, and putting nothing into shape!

Against this supposed tendency in me he railed perpetually. "Any one canread!" he would say; "anybody of decent wits can accumulate notes andreferences; the difficulty is to _write_--to make something!" And lateron, when I was deep in Spanish chronicles and thinking vaguely of aHistory of Spain--early Spain, at any rate--he wrote, almostimpatiently: "_Begin_--and begin your _book_. Don't do 'studies' andthat sort of thing--one's book teaches one everything as one writes it. "I was reminded of that letter years later when I came across, in_Amiel's Journal_, a passage almost to the same effect: "It is bywriting that one learns--it is by pumping that one draws water intoone's well. " But in J. R. G. 's case the advice he gave his friend wascarried out by himself through every hour of his short, concentratedlife. "He died learning, " as the inscription on his grave testifies; buthe also died _making_. In other words, the shaping, creative instinctwrestled in him with the powers of death through long years, and neverdeserted him to the very end. Who that has ever known the passion of thewriter and the student can read without tears the record of his lastmonths? He was already doomed when I first saw him in 1871, for signs oftuberculosis had been discovered in 1869, and all through the 'seventiesand till he died, in 1883, while he was writing the _Short History_, theexpanded Library Edition in four volumes, and the two brilliantmonographs on _The Making of England_ and _The Conquest of England_, thelast of which was put together from his notes, and finished by hisdevoted wife and secretary after his death, he was fighting for hislife, in order that he might finish his work. He was a dying man fromJanuary, 1881, but he finished and published _The Making of England_ in1882, and began _The Conquest of England_. On February 25th, ten daysbefore his death, his wife told him that the end was near. He thought alittle, and said that he had still something to say in his book "whichis worth saying. I will make a fight for it. I will do what I can, and Imust have sleeping-draughts for a week. After that it will not matter ifthey lose their effect. " He worked on a little longer---but on March 7thall was over. My husband had gone out to see him in February, and camehome marveling at the miracle of such life in death. 

I have spoken of the wonderful stimulus and encouragement he could giveto the young student. But he was no flatterer. No one could strikeharder or swifter than he, when he chose. 

It was to me--in his eager friendship for "Humphry's" young wife--hefirst intrusted the task of that primer of English literature whichafterward Mr. Stopford Brooke carried out with such astonishing success. But I was far too young for such a piece of work, and knew far toolittle. I wrote a beginning, however, and took it up to him when he wasin rooms in Beaumont Street. He was entirely dissatisfied with it, andas gently and kindly as possible told me it wouldn't do and that I mustgive it up. [1] Then throwing it aside, he began to walk up and down hisroom, sketching out how such a general outline of English literaturemight be written and should be written. I sat by enchanted, all mynatural disappointment charmed away. The knowledge, the enthusiasm, the_shaping_ power of the frail human being moving there before me--withthe slight, emaciated figure, the great brow, the bright eyes; all thephysical presence instinct, aflame, with the intellectual and poeticpassion which grew upon him as he traced the mighty stream of England'sthought and song--it was an experience never forgotten, one of those bywhich mind teaches mind, and the endless succession is carried on. 

[Footnote 1: Since writing these lines, I have been amused to discoverthe following reference in the brilliant biography of Stopford Brooke, by his son-in-law, Principal Jacks, to my unlucky attempt. "The onlyadvantage, " says Mr. Brooke in his diary for May 8, 1899, "the olderwriter has over the younger is that he knows what to leave out and has ajuster sense of proportion. I remember that when Green wanted the Primerof English Literature to be done, Mrs. ---- asked if she might try herhand at it. He said 'Yes, ' and she set to work. She took a fancy to_Beowulf_, and wrote twenty pages on it! At this rate the book wouldhave run to more than a thousand pages. "]

There is another memory from the early time, which comes back to me--ofJ. R. G. In Notre Dame. We were on our honeymoon journey, and we cameacross him in Paris. We went together to Notre Dame, and there, as weall lingered at the western end, looking up to the gleaming color of thedistant apse, the spirit came upon him. He began to describe what theChurch had seen, coming down through the generations, from vision tovision. He spoke in a low voice, but without a pause or break, standingin deep shadow close to the western door. One scarcely saw him, and Ialmost lost the sense of his individuality. It seemed to be the veryvoice of History--Life telling of itself. 

Liberty and the passion for liberty were the very breath of his being. In 1871, just after the Commune, I wrote him a cry of pity and horrorabout the execution of Rossel, the "heroic young Protestant who hadfought the Versaillais because they had made peace, and prevented himfrom fighting the Prussians. " J. R. G. Replied that the only defense of aman who fought for the Commune was that he believed in it, while Rossel, by his own statement, did not. 

 People like old Delescluze are more to my mind, men who believe, rightly or wrongly (in the ideas of '93), and cling to their faith through thirteen years of the hulks and of Cayenne, who get their chance at last, fight, work, and then when all is over know how to die--as Delescluze, with that gray head bared and the old threadbare coat thrown open, walked quietly and without a word up to the fatal barricade. 

His place in the ranks of history is high and safe. That was abundantlyshown by the testimony of the large gathering of English scholars andhistorians at the memorial meeting held in his own college some yearsago. He remains as one of the leaders of that school (there is, ofcourse, another and a strong one!) which holds that without imaginationand personality a man had better not write history at all; since norecreation of the past is really possible without the kindling andwelding force that a man draws from his own spirit. 

But it is as a friend that I desire--with undying love and gratitude--tocommemorate him here. To my husband, to all the motherless family he hadtaken to his heart, he was affection and constancy itself. And as forme, just before the last visit that we paid him at Mentone in 1882, ayear before he died, he was actually thinking out schemes for thathistory of early Spain which it seemed, both to him and me, I must atlast begin, and was inquiring what help I could get from libraries onthe Riviera during our stay with him. Then, when we came, I remember ourtalks in the little Villa St. Nicholas--his sympathy, his enthusiasm, his unselfish help; while all the time he was wrestling with death forjust a few more months in which to finish his own work. Both Lord Bryceand Sir Leslie Stephen have paid their tribute to this wonderful talk ofhis later years. "No such talk, " says Lord Bryce, "has been heard in ourgeneration. " Of Madame de Staël it was said that she wrote her books outof the talk of the distinguished men who frequented her _salon_. Her ownconversation was directed to evoking from the brains of others what sheafterward, as an artist, knew how to use better than they. Her talk--small blame to her!--was plundering and acquisitive. But J. R. G. 's talk_gave_ perpetually, admirable listener though he was. All that he had hegave; so that our final thought of him is not that of the sufferinginvalid, the thwarted workman, the life cut short, but rather that ofone who had richly done his part and left in his friends' memories nomere pathetic appeal, but much more a bracing message for their owneasier and longer lives. 

Of the two other historians with whom my youth threw me into contact, Mr. Freeman and Bishop Stubbs, I have some lively memories. Mr. Freemanwas first known to me, I think, through "Johnny, " as he was wont to callJ. R. G. , whom he adored. Both he and J. R. G. Were admirable letter-writers, and a volume of their correspondence--much of it alreadypublished separately--if it could be put together--like that of Flaubertand George Sand--would make excellent reading for a future generation. In 1877 and 1878, when I was plunged in the history of West-GothicKings, I had many letters from Mr. Freeman, and never were letters aboutgrave matters less grave. Take this outburst about a lady who had senthim some historical work to look at. He greatly liked and admired thelady; but her work drove him wild. "I never saw anything like it formissing the point of everything.... Then she has no notion of putting asentence together, so that she said some things which I fancy she didnot mean to say--as that 'the beloved Queen Louisa of Prussia' was themother of M. Thiers. When she said that the Duke of Orleans's horses ranaway, 'leaving two infant sons, ' it may have been so: I have no evidenceeither way. "

Again, "I am going to send you the Spanish part of my HistoricalGeography. It will be very bad, but--when I don't know a thing I believeI generally know that I don't know it, and so manage to wrap it up insome vague phrase which, if not right, may at least not be wrong. Thus Ihave always held that the nursery account of Henry VIII--

 "'And Henry the Eighth was as fat as a pig--'

"is to be preferred to Froude's version. For, though certainly aninadequate account of the reign, it is true as far as it goes. "

Once, certainly, we stayed at Somerleaze, and I retain the impression ofa very busy, human, energetic man of letters, a good Churchman, and agood citizen, brimful of likes and dislikes, and waving his red beardoften as a flag of battle in many a hot skirmish, especially withJ. R. G. , but always warm-hearted and generally placable--except in thecase of James Anthony Froude. The feud between Freeman and Froude was, of course, a standing dish in the educated world of half a century ago. It may be argued that the Muse of History has not decided the quarrelquite according to justice; that Clio has shown herself something of ajade in the matter, as easily influenced by fair externals as a certainHelen was long ago. How many people now read the _Norman Conquest_--except the few scholars who devote themselves to the same period?Whereas Froude's History, with all its sins, lives, and in my beliefwill long live, because the man who wrote it was a _writer_ andunderstood his art. 

Of Bishop Stubbs, the greatest historical name surely in the England ofthe last half of the nineteenth century, I did not personally see muchwhile we lived in Oxford and he was Regius Professor. He had no gifts--it was his chief weakness as a teacher--for creating a young schoolaround him, setting one man to work on this job, and another on that, ashas been done with great success in many instances abroad. He was tooreserved, too critical, perhaps too sensitive. But he stood as a greatinfluence in the background, felt if not seen. A word of praise from himmeant everything; a word of condemnation, in his own subjects, settledthe matter. I remember well, after I had written a number of articles onearly Spanish Kings and Bishops, for a historical Dictionary, and theywere already in proof, how on my daily visits to the Bodleian I began tobe puzzled by the fact that some of the very obscure books I had beenusing were "out" when I wanted them, or had been abstracted from mytable by one of the sub-librarians. _Joannes Biclarensis_--he wasmissing! Who in the world could want that obscure chronicle of anobscure period but myself? I began to envisage some hungry German_Privatdozent_, on his holiday, raiding my poor little subject, and mybooks, with a view to his Doctor's thesis. Then one morning, as I wentin, I came across Doctor Stubbs, with an ancient and portly volume underhis arm. _Joannes Biclarensis_ himself!--I knew it at once. TheProfessor gave me a friendly nod, and I saw a twinkle in his eye as wepassed. Going to my desk, I found another volume gone--this time the_Acts of the Councils of Toledo_. So far as I knew, not the most ardentChurchman in Oxford felt at that time any absorbing interest in theCouncils of Toledo. At any rate, I had been left in undisturbedpossession of them for months. Evidently something was happening, and Isat down to my work in bewilderment. 

Then, on my way home, I ran into a fellow-worker for the Dictionary--awell-known don and history tutor. "Do you know what's happened?" hesaid, in excitement. "_Stubbs_ has been going through our work! TheEditor wanted his imprimatur before the final printing. Can't expectanybody but Stubbs to know all these things! My books are gone, too. " Wewalked up to the Parks together in a common anxiety, like a couple ofschool-boys in for Smalls. Then in a few days the tension was over; mybooks were on my desk again; the Professor stopped me in the Broad witha smile, and the remark that Joannes Biclarensis was really quite aninteresting fellow, and I received a very friendly letter from theEditor of the Dictionary. 

And perhaps I may be allowed, after these forty years, one morerecollection, though I am afraid a proper reticence would suppress it! Alittle later "Mr. Creighton" came to visit us, after his immigration toEmbleton and the north; and I timidly gave him some lives of West-GothicKings and Bishops to read. He read them--they were very long andterribly minute--and put down the proofs, without saying much. Then hewalked down to Oxford with my husband, and sent me back a message byhim: "Tell M. To go on. There is nobody but Stubbs doing such work inOxford now. " The thrill of pride and delight such words gave me may beimagined. But there were already causes at work why I should not "goon. "

I shall have more to say presently about the work on the origins ofmodern Spain. It was the only thorough "discipline" I ever had; itlasted about two years--years of incessant, arduous work, and it leddirectly to the writing of _Robert Elsmere_. But before and after, howfull life was of other things! The joys of one's new home, of thechildren that began to patter about it, of every bit of furniture andblue pot it contained, each representing some happy _chasse_ or specialearning--of its garden of half an acre, where I used to feel asHawthorne felt in the garden of the Concord Manse--amazement that Natureshould take the trouble to produce things as big as vegetable marrows, or as surprising as scarlet runners that topped one's head, just that wemight own and eat them. Then the life of the University town, with allthose marked antagonisms I have described, those intellectual andreligious movements, that were like the meeting currents of rivers in alake; and the pleasure of new friendships, where everybody was equal, nobody was rich, and the intellectual average was naturally high. Inthose days, too, a small group of women of whom I was one were layingthe foundations of the whole system of women's education in Oxford. Mrs. Creighton and I, with Mrs. Max Müller, were the secretaries and foundersof the first organized series of lectures for women in the Universitytown; I was the first secretary of Somerville Hall, and it fell to me, by chance, to suggest the name of the future college. My friends and Iwere all on fire for women's education, including women's medicaleducation, and very emulous of Cambridge, where the movement was alreadyfar advanced. 

But hardly any of us were at all on fire for woman suffrage, wherein theOxford educational movement differed greatly from the Cambridgemovement. The majority, certainly, of the group to which I belonged atOxford were at that time persuaded that the development of women's powerin the State--or rather, in such a state as England, with its far-reaching and Imperial obligations, resting ultimately on the sanction ofwar--should be on lines of its own. We believed that growth throughLocal Government, and perhaps through some special machinery forbringing the wishes and influence of women of all classes to bear onParliament, other than the Parliamentary vote, was the real line ofprogress. However, I shall return to this subject on some futureoccasion, in connection with the intensified suffragist campaign whichbegan about ten years ago (1907-08) and in which I took some part. Iwill only note here my first acquaintance with Mrs. Fawcett. I see herso clearly as a fresh, picturesque figure--in a green silk dress and anecklace of amber beads, when she came down to Oxford in themid-'seventies to give a course of lectures in the series that Mrs. Creighton and I were organizing, and I remember well the atmosphere ofsympathy and admiration which surrounded her as she spoke to an audiencein which many of us were well acquainted with the heroic story of Mr. Fawcett's blindness, and of the part played by his wife in enabling himto continue his economic and Parliamentary work. 

But life then was not all lectures!--nor was it all Oxford. There werevacations, and vacations generally meant for us some weeks, at least, oftravel, even when pence were fewest. The Christmas vacation of 1874 wewere in Paris. The weather was bitter, and we were lodged, forcheapness' sake, in an old-fashioned hotel, where the high canopied bedswith their mountainous duvets were very difficult to wake up in on acold morning. But in spite of snow and sleet we filled our days to thebrim. We took with us some introductions from Oxford--to Madame Mohl, the Renans, the Gaston Parises, the Boutmys, the Ribots, and, from myUncle Matthew, to the Scherers at Versailles. Monsieur Taine was alreadyknown to us, and it was at their house, on one of Madame Taine'sThursdays, that I first heard French conversation at its best. There wasa young man there, dark-eyed, dark-haired, to whom I listened--notalways able to follow the rapid French in which he and two other menwere discussing some literary matter of the moment, but conscious, forthe first time, of what the conversation of intellectual equals mightbe, if it were always practised as the French are trained to practise itfrom their mother's milk, by the influence of a long tradition. Theyoung man was M. Paul Bourget, who had not yet begun to write novels, while his literary and philosophical essays seemed rather to mark himout as the disciple of M. Taine than as the Catholic protagonist he wassoon to become. M. Bourget did not then speak English, and my Frenchconversation, which had been wholly learned from books, had a way atthat time--and, alack! has still--of breaking down under me, just as onereached the thing one really wanted to say. So that I did not attempt todo more than listen. But I seem to remember that those with whom hetalked were M. Francis Charmes, then a writer on the staff of the_Débats_, and afterward the editor of the _Revue des deux Mondes_ insuccession to M. Brunetière; and M. Gaston Paris, the brilliant head ofFrench philology at the Collège de France. What struck me then, andthrough all the new experiences and new acquaintanceships of ourChristmas fortnight, was that strenuous and passionate intensity of theFrench temper, which foreign nations so easily lose sight of, but which, in truth, is as much part of the French nature as their gaiety, or aswhat seems to us their frivolity. The war of 1870, the Commune, were butthree years behind them. Germany had torn from them Alsace-Lorraine; shehad occupied Paris; and their own Jacobins had ruined and burned whateven Germany had spared. In the minds of the intellectual class therelay deep, on the one hand, a determination to rebuild France; on theother, to avenge her defeat. The blackened ruins of the Tuileries and ofthe Cour des Comptes still disfigured a city which grimly kept themthere as a warning against anarchy; while the statue of the Ville deStrasbourg in the Place de la Concorde had worn for three years thefuneral garlands, which, as France confidently hopes, the peace thatwill end this war will, after nearly half a century, give way once moreto the rejoicing tricolor. At the same time reconstruction waseverywhere beginning--especially in the field of education. The corrupt, political influence of the Empire, which had used the whole educationalsystem of the country for the purpose of keeping itself and itssupporters in power, was at an end. The recognized "École Normale" wasbecoming a source of moral and mental strength among thousands of youngmen and women; and the "École des Sciences politiques, " the joint workof Taine, Renan, and M. Boutmy, its first director, was layingfoundations whereof the results are to be seen conspicuously to-day, inFrench character, French resource, French patience, French science, asthis hideous war has revealed them. 

I remember an illuminating talk with M. Renan himself on this subjectduring our visit. We had never yet seen him, and we carried anintroduction to him from Max Müller, our neighbor and friend in Oxford. We found him alone, in a small working-room crowded with books, at theCollege de France. Madame Renan was away, and he had abandoned his largelibrary for something more easily warmed. My first sight of him wassomething of a shock--of the large, ungainly figure, the genial facewith its spreading cheeks and humorous eyes, the big head with itsscanty locks of hair. I think he felt an amused and kindly interest inthe two young folk from Oxford who had come as pilgrims to his shrine, and, realizing that our French was not fluent and our shyness great, hefilled up the time--and the gaps--by a monologue, lit up by many touchesof Renanesque humor, on the situation in France. 

First, as to literature--"No, we have no genius, no poets or writers ofthe first rank just now--at least so it seems to me. But we _work--noustravaillons beaucoup! Ce sera noire salut_. " It was the same as topolitics. He had no illusions and few admirations. "The Chamber is fullof mediocrities. We are governed by _avocats_ and _pharmaciens_. But atleast _Ils ne feront pas la guerre_!"

He smiled, but there was that in the smile and the gesture which showedthe smart within; from which not even his scholar's philosophy, with itsideal of a world of cosmopolitan science, could protect him. At thatmoment he was inclined to despair of his country. The mad adventure ofthe Commune had gone deep into his soul, and there were still a goodmany pacifying years to run, before he could talk of his life as "_cettecharmante promenade à travers la realité_"--for which, with all it hadcontained of bad and good, he yet thanked the Gods. At that time he wasfifty-one; he had just published _L'Antichrist, _ the most brilliant ofall the volumes of the "Origines"; and he was not yet a member of theFrench Academy. 

I turn to a few other impressions from that distant time. One night wewere in the Théâtre Français, and Racine's "Phèdre" was to be given. Iat least had never been in the Maison de Molière before, and in suchmatters as acting I possessed, at twenty-three, only a very raw andcountry-cousinish judgment. There had been a certain amount of talk inOxford of a new and remarkable French actress, but neither of us hadreally any idea of what was before us. Then the play began. And beforethe first act was over we were sitting, bent forward, gazing at thestage in an intense and concentrated excitement such as I can scarcelyremember ever feeling again, except perhaps when the same actress played"Hernani" in London for the first time in 1884. Sarah Bernhardt wasthen--December, 1874--in the first full tide of her success. She was ofa ghostly and willowy slenderness. Each of the great speeches seemedactually to rend the delicate frame. When she fell back after one ofthem you felt an actual physical terror lest there should not be enoughlife left in the slight, dying woman to let her speak again. And youcraved for yet more and more of the _voix d'or_ which rang in one's earsas the frail yet exquisite instrument of a mighty music. Never beforehad it been brought home to me what dramatic art might be, or the powerof the French Alexandrine. And never did I come so near quarreling with"Uncle Matt" as when, on our return, after having heard my say about thegenius of Sarah Bernhardt, he patted my hand indulgently with theremark, "But, my dear child, you see, you never saw Rachel!"

As we listened to Sarah Bernhardt we were watching the outset of a greatcareer which had still some forty years to run. On another evening wemade acquaintance with a little old woman who had been born in the firstyear of the Terror, who had spent her first youth in the _salon_ ofMadame Récamier, valued there, above all, for her difficult success indrawing a smile from that old and melancholy genius, Châteaubriand; andhad since held a _salon_ of her own, which deserves a special place inthe history of _salons_. For it was held, according to the Frenchtradition, and in Paris, by an Englishwoman. It was, I think, Max Müllerwho gave us an introduction to Madame Mohl. She sent us an invitation toone of her Friday evenings, and we duly mounted to the top of the oldhouse in the Rue du Bac which she made famous for so long. As we enteredthe room I saw a small disheveled figure, gray-headed, crouching besidea grate, with a kettle in her hand. It was Madame Mohl--then eighty-one--who was trying to make the fire burn. She just raised herself togreet us, with a swift investigating glance; and then returned to hertask of making the tea, in which I endeavored to help her. But she didnot like to be helped, and I soon subsided into my usual listening andwatching, which, perhaps, for one who at that time was singularlyimmature in all social respects, was the best policy. I seem still tosee the tall, substantial form of Julius Mohl standing behind her, withvarious other elderly men who were no doubt famous folk, if one hadknown their names. And in the corner was the Spartan tea-table, with itsfew biscuits, which stood for the plain living whereon was nourished thehigh thinking and high talking which had passed through these rooms. Guizot, Cousin, Ampère, Fauriel, Mignet, Lamartine, all the great men ofthe middle century had talked there; not, in general, the poets and theartists, but the politicians, the historians, and the _savants_. Thelittle Fairy Blackstick, incredibly old, kneeling on the floor, with theshabby dress and tousled gray hair, had made a part of the central scenein France, through the Revolution, the reign of the Citizen king, andthe Second Empire--playing the rôle, through it all, of a good friend offreedom. If only one had heard her talk! But there were few people inthe room, and we were none of us inspired. I must sadly put down thatFriday evening among the lost opportunities of life. For Mrs. Simpson'sbiography of Madame Mohl shows what a wealth of wit and memory there wasin that small head! Her social sense, her humor, never deserted her, though she lived to be ninety. When she was dying, her favorite cat, atom, leaped on her bed. Her eyes lit up as she feebly stroked him. "Heis so distinguished!" she whispered. "But his wife is not distinguishedat all. He doesn't know it. But many men are like that. " It was one ofthe last sayings of an expert in the human scene. 

Madame Mohl was twenty-one when the Allies entered Paris in 1814. Shehad lived with those to whom the fall of the _Ancien Régime_, theTerror, and the Revolutionary wars had been the experience of middlelife. As I look back to the _salon_ in the Rue du Bac, which I saw insuch a flash, yet where my hand rested for a moment in that of MadameRécamier's pet and protegée, I am reminded, too, that I once saw, at theForsters', in 1869, when I was eighteen, the Doctor Lushington who wasLady Byron's adviser and confidant when she left her husband, and who, as a young man, had stayed with Pitt and ridden out with Lady HesterStanhope. One night, in Eccleston Square, we assembled for dinner in theground-floor library instead of the drawing-room, which was up-stairs. Islipped in late, and saw in an arm-chair, his hands resting on a stick, an old, white-haired man. When dinner was announced--if I rememberright--he was wheeled into the dining-room, to a place beside my aunt. Iwas too far away to hear him talk, and he went home after dinner. But itwas one of the guests of the evening, a friend of his, who said to me--with a kindly wish, no doubt, to thrill the girl just "out": "You oughtto remember Doctor Lushington! What are you?--eighteen?--and he iseighty-six. He was in the theater on the night when the news reachedLondon of Marie Antoinette's execution, and he can remember, though hewas only a boy of eleven, how it was given out from the stage, and howthe audience instantly broke up. "

Doctor Lushington, of course, carries one farther back than Madame Mohl. He was born in 1782, four years after the deaths of Rousseau andVoltaire, two years before the death of Diderot. He was only six yearsyounger than Lady Hester Stanhope, whose acquaintance he made during thethree years--1803-1806--when she was keeping house for her uncle, William Pitt. 

But on my right hand at the same dinner-party there sat a guest who wasto mean a good deal more to me personally than Doctor Lushington--youngMr. George Otto Trevelyan, as he then was, Lord Macaulay's nephew, already the brilliant author of _A Competition Wallah, Ladies inParliament_, and much else. We little thought, as we talked, that afterthirty-five years his son was to marry my daughter. 

CHAPTER IX

THE BEGINNINGS OF _ROBERT ELSMERE_

If these are to be the recollections of a writer, in which perhaps otherwriters by profession, as well as the more general public, may take someinterest, I shall perhaps be forgiven if I give some account of theprocesses of thought and work which led to the writing of my firstsuccessful novel, _Robert Elsmere_. 

It was in 1878 that a new editor was appointed for one of the huge well-known volumes, in which under the aegis of the John Murray of the day, the _Nineteenth Century_ was accustomed to concentrate its knowledge--classical, historical, and theological--in convenient, if not exactlyhandy, form. Doctor Wace, now a Canon of Canterbury, was then anindefatigable member of the _Times_ staff. Yet he undertook this extrawork, and carried it bravely through. He came to Oxford to beat uprecruits for Smith's _Dictionary of Christian Biography_, a companionvolume to that of _Classical Biography_, and dealing with the firstseven centuries of Christianity. He had been told that I had beenbusying myself with early Spain, and he came to me to ask whether Iwould take the Spanish lives for the period, especially those concernedwith the West-Goths in Spain; while at the same time he applied tovarious Oxford historians for work on the Ostrogoths and the Franks. 

I was much tempted, but I had a good deal to consider. The French andSpanish reading it involved was no difficulty. But the power of readingLatin rapidly, both the degraded Latin of the fifth and sixth centuriesand the learned Latin of the sixteenth and seventeenth, was essential;and I had only learned some Latin since my marriage, and was by no meansat home in it. I had long since found out, too, in working at theSpanish literature of the eleventh to the fourteenth century, that theonly critics and researches worth following in that field were German;and though I had been fairly well grounded in German at school, and hadread a certain amount, the prospect of a piece of work which meant, inthe main, Latin texts and German commentaries, was rather daunting. Thewell-trained woman student of the present day would have felt probablyno such qualms. But I had not been well trained; and the Pattisonstandards of what work should be stood like dragons in the way. 

However, I took the plunge, and I have always been grateful to CanonWace. The sheer, hard, brain-stretching work of the two or three yearswhich followed I look back to now with delight. It altered my wholeoutlook and gave me horizons and sympathies that I have never lost, however dim all the positive knowledge brought me by the work has longsince become. The strange thing was that out of the work which seemedboth to myself and others to mark the abandonment of any foolish hopesof novel-writing I might have cherished as a girl, _Robert Elsmere_should have arisen. For after my marriage I had made various attempts towrite fiction. They were clearly failures. J. R. G. Dealt veryfaithfully with me on the subject; and I could only conclude that theinstinct to tell stories which had been so strong in me as a child andgirl meant nothing, and was to be suppressed. I did, indeed, write astory for my children, which came out in 1880--_Milly and Olly_; butthat wrote itself and was a mere transcript of their little lives. 

And yet I venture to think it was, after all, the instinct for "makingout, " as the Brontës used to call their own wonderful story-tellingpassion, which rendered this historical work so enthralling to me. Thosefar-off centuries became veritably alive to me--the Arian kings fightingan ever-losing battle against the ever-encroaching power of the CatholicChurch, backed by the still lingering and still potent ghost of theRoman Empire; the Catholic Bishops gathering, sometimes through wintersnow, to their Councils at Seville and Toledo; the centers of culture inremote corners of the peninsula, where men lived with books and holythings, shrinking from the wild life around them, and handing on theprecious remnants and broken traditions of the older classical world;the mutual scorn of Goth and Roman; martyrs, fanatics, heretics, nationalists, and cosmopolitans; and, rising upon, enveloping them all, as the seventh and eighth centuries drew on, the tide of Islam, and themenace of that time when the great church of Cordova should be half amosque and half a Christian cathedral. 

I lived, indeed, in that old Spain, while I was at work in the Bodleianand at home. To spend hours and days over the signatures to an obscureCouncil, identifying each name so far as the existing materials allowed, and attaching to it some fragment of human interest, so that graduallysomething of a picture emerged, as of a thing lost and recovered--dredged up from the deeps of time--that, I think, was the joy of it all. 

I see, in memory, the small Oxford room, as it was on a winter evening, between nine and midnight, my husband in one corner preparing hiscollege lectures, or writing a "Saturday" "middle"; my books and I inanother; the reading-lamp, always to me a symbol of peace and"recollection"; the Oxford quiet outside. And yet, it was not sotranquil as it looked. For beating round us all the time were thespiritual winds of an agitated day. The Oxford of thought was not quiet;it was divided, as I have shown, by sharper antagonisms and deeper feudsthan exist to-day. Darwinism was penetrating everywhere; Pusey waspreaching against its effects on belief; Balliol stood for an unfetteredhistory and criticism, Christ Church for authority and creeds; Renan's_Origines_ were still coming out, Strauss's last book also; my uncle waspublishing _God and the Bible_ in succession to _Literature and Dogma_;and _Supernatural Religion_ was making no small stir. And meanwhile whatbegan to interest and absorb me were _sources_--_testimony_. To what--towhom--did it all go back, this great story of early civilization, earlyreligion, which modern men could write and interpret so differently?

And on this question the writers and historians of four early centuries, from the fifth to the ninth, as I lived with them, seemed to throw apartial, but yet a searching, light. I have expressed it in _RobertElsmere_. Langham and Robert, talking in the Squire's library onRobert's plans for a history of Gaul during the breakdown of the Empireand the emergence of modern France, come to the vital question: "Historydepends on _testimony_. What is the nature and virtue of testimony atgiven times? In other words, did the man of the third centuryunderstand, or report, or interpret facts in the same way as the man ofthe sixteenth or the nineteenth? And if not, what are the differences?--and what are the deductions to be made from them?"

Robert replies that his work has not yet dug deep enough to make himanswer the question. 

"It is enormously important, I grant--enormously, " he repeated, reflectively. 

On which Langham says to himself, though not to Elsmere, that the wholeof "orthodoxy" is in it, and depends on it. 

And in a later passage, when Elsmere is mastering the "Quellen" of hissubject, he expresses himself with bewilderment to Catherine on thissame subject of "testimony. " He is immersed in the chronicles andbiographies of the fifth and sixth centuries. Every history, everybiography, is steeped in marvel. A man divided by only a few years fromthe bishop or saint whose life he is writing reports the most fantasticmiracles. What is the psychology of it all? The whole age seems toRobert "non-sane. " And, meanwhile, across and beyond the medievalcenturies, behind the Christian era itself, the modern student looksback inevitably, involuntarily, to certain Greeks and certain Latins, who "represent a forward strain, " who intellectually "belong to a worldahead of them. " "You"--he says to them--"_you_ are really my kindred. "

That, after all, I tried to express this intellectual experience--whichwas, of course, an experience of my own--not in critical or historicalwork, but in a novel, that is to say in terms of human life, was theresult of an incident which occurred toward the close of our lives inOxford. It was not long after the appearance of _Supernatural Religion_, and the rise of that newer school of Biblical criticism in Germanyexpressed by the once-honored name of Doctor Harnack. Darwinian debatein the realm of natural science was practically over. The spread ofevolutionary ideas in the fields of history and criticism was the realpoint of interest. Accordingly, the University pulpit was often filledby men endeavoring "to fit a not very exacting science to a verygrudging orthodoxy"; and the heat of an ever-strengthening controversywas in the Oxford air. 

In 1881, as it happened, the Bampton Lectures were preached by the Rev. John Wordsworth, then Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose, and, later, Bishopof Salisbury. He and my husband--who, before our marriage, was also aFellow of Brasenose--were still tutorial colleagues, and I thereforeknew him personally, and his first wife, the brilliant daughter of thebeloved Bodley's Librarian of my day, Mr. Coxe. We naturally attendedMr. Wordsworth's first Bampton. He belonged, very strongly, to what Ihave called the Christ Church camp; while we belonged, very strongly, tothe Balliol camp. But no one could fail to respect John Wordsworthdeeply; while his connection with his great-uncle, the poet, to whom hebore a strong personal likeness, gave him always a glamour in my eyes. Still, I remember going with a certain shrinking; and it was the shockof indignation excited in me by the sermon which led directly--thoughafter seven intervening years--to _Robert Elsmere. _

The sermon was on "The present unsettlement in religion"; and itconnected the "unsettlement" definitely with "sin. " The "moral causes ofunbelief, " said the preacher, "were (1) prejudice; (2) severe claims ofreligion; (3) intellectual faults, especially indolence, coldness, recklessness, pride, and avarice. "

The sermon expounded and developed this outline with great vigor, andevery skeptical head received its due buffeting in a tone and fashionthat now scarcely survive. I sat in the darkness under the gallery. Thepreacher's fine ascetic face was plainly visible in the middle light ofthe church; and while the confident priestly voice flowed on, I seemedto see, grouped around the speaker, the forms of those, his colleaguesand contemporaries, the patient scholars and thinkers of the Liberalhost, Stanley, Jowett, Green of Balliol, Lewis Nettleship, HenrySidgwick, my uncle, whom he, in truth--though perhaps not consciously--was attacking. My heart was hot within me. How could one show Englandwhat was really going on in her midst? Surely the only way was throughimagination; through a picture of actual life and conduct; throughsomething as "simple, sensuous, passionate" as one could make it. Whoand what were the persons of whom the preacher gave this grotesqueaccount? What was their history? How had their thoughts and doubts cometo be? What was the effect of them on conduct?

The _immediate_ result of the sermon, however, was a pamphlet called_Unbelief and Sin: a Protest addressed to those who attended the BamptonLecture of Sunday, March 6th_. It was rapidly written and printed, andwas put up in the windows of a well-known shop in the High Street. Inthe few hours of its public career it enjoyed a very lively sale. Thenan incident--quite unforeseen by its author--slit its little life! Awell-known clergyman walked into the shop and asked for the pamphlet. Heturned it over, and at once pointed out to one of the partners of thefirm in the shop that there was no printer's name upon it. Thebooksellers who had produced the pamphlet, no doubt with an eye to theirlarge clerical _clientèle_, had omitted the printer's name, and theomission was illegal. Pains and penalties were threatened, and thefrightened booksellers at once withdrew the pamphlet and sent word ofwhat had happened to my much-astonished self, who had neither noticedthe omission nor was aware of the law. But Doctor Foulkes, the clergymanin question--no one that knew the Oxford of my day will have forgottenhis tall, militant figure, with the defiant white hair and the longclerical coat, as it haunted the streets of the University!--had onlystimulated the tare he seemed to have rooted up. For the pamphlet thuseasily suppressed was really the germ of the later book; in that, without attempting direct argument, it merely sketched two types ofcharacter: the character that either knows no doubts or has suppressedthem, and the character that fights its stormy way to truth. 

The latter was the first sketch of _Robert Elsmere_. That same evening, at a College party, Professor Green came up to me. I had sent him thepamphlet the night before, and had not yet had a word from him. His kindbrown eyes smiled upon me as he said a hearty "thank you, " adding "acapital piece of work, " or something to that effect; after which myspirits were quite equal to telling him the story of Doctor Foulkes'sraid. 

 * * * * *

The year 1880-81, however, was marked for me by three other events ofquite a different kind: Monsieur Renan's visit to Oxford, my husband'sacceptance of a post on the staff of the _Times_, and a visit that wepaid to the W. E. Forsters in Ireland, in December, 1880, at almost theblackest moment of the Irish land-war. 

Of Renan's visit I have mingled memories--all pleasant, but some touchedwith comedy. Gentle Madame Renan came with her famous husband and soonwon all hearts. Oxford in mid-April was then, as always, a dream ofgardens just coming into leaf, enchasing buildings of a silvery gray, and full to the brim of the old walls with the early blossom--almond, orcherry, or flowering currant. M. Renan was delivering the HibbertLectures in London, and came down to stay for a long week-end with ourneighbors, the Max Müllers. Doctor Hatch was then preaching the BamptonLectures, that first admirable series of his on the debt of the Churchto Latin organization, and M. Renan attended one of them. He had himselfjust published _Marc Aurèle_, and Doctor Hatch's subject was closelyakin to that of his own Hibbert Lectures. I remember seeing him emergefrom the porch of St. Mary's, his strange, triangular face pleasantlydreamy. "You were interested?" said some one at his elbow. "_Mais oui_!"said M. Renan, smiling. "He might have given my lecture, and I mighthave preached his sermon! _(Nous aurions du changer de cahiers_!)" Renanin the pulpit of Pusey, Newman, and Burgon would indeed have been aspectacle of horror to the ecclesiastical mind. I remember once, manyyears after, following the _parroco_ of Castel Gandolfo, through thedreary and deserted rooms of the Papal villa, where, before 1870, thePopes used to make _villegiatura_, on that beautiful ridge overlookingthe Alban lake. All the decoration of the villa seemed to me curiouslytawdry and mean. But suddenly my attention was arrested by a greatfresco covering an entire wall. It represented the triumph of the Papacyover the infidel of all dates. A Pope sat enthroned, wearing the triplecrown, with angels hovering overhead; and in a huge brazier at his feetburned the writings of the world's heretics. The blazing volumes wereinscribed--Arius--Luther--Voltaire--_Renan_!

We passed on through the empty rooms, and the _parroco_ locked the doorbehind us. I thought, as we walked away, of the summer light fading fromthe childish picture, painted probably not long before the entry of theItalian troops into Rome, and of all that was symbolized by it and thedeserted villa, to which the "prisoner of the Vatican" no longerreturns. But at least Rome had given Ernest Renan no mean place amongher enemies--Arius, Luther, Voltaire--_Renan_!

But in truth, Renan, personally, was not the enemy of any church, leastof all of the great Church which had trained his youth. He was a bornscholar and thinker, in temper extremely gentle and scrupulous, and witha sense of humor, or rather irony, not unlike that of Anatole France, who has learned much from him. There was, of course, a streak in him ofthat French paradox, that impish trifling with things fundamental, whichthe English temperament dislikes and resents; as when he wrote the_Abbesse de Jouarre_, or threw out the whimsical doubt in a passingsentence of one of his latest books, whether, after all, his life oflabor and self-denial had been worth while, and whether, if he had livedthe life of an Epicurean, like Théophile Gautier, he might not have gotmore out of existence. "He was really a good and great man, " saidJowett, writing after his death. But "I regret that he wrote at the endof his life that strange drama about the Reign of Terror. "

There are probably few of M. Renan's English admirers who do not sharethe regret. At the same time, there, for all to see, is the long life asit was lived--of the ever-toiling scholar and thinker, the devotedhusband and brother, the admirable friend. And certainly, during theOxford visit I remember, M. Renan was at his best. He was in love--apparently--with Oxford, and his charm, his gaiety, played over all thatwe presented to him. I recall him in Wadham Gardens, wandering in a kindof happy dream--"Ah, if one had only such places as this to work in, inFrance! What pages--and how perfect!--one might write here!" Or again, in a different scene, at luncheon in our little house in the Parks, whenOxford was showing, even more than usual, its piteous inability to talkdecently to the great man in his own tongue. It is true that he neitherunderstood ours--in conversation--nor spoke a word of it. But that didnot at all mitigate our own shame--and surprise! For at that time, inthe Oxford world proper, everybody, probably, read French habitually, and many of us thought we spoke it. But a mocking spirit suggested toone of the guests at this luncheon-party--an energetic historicaltutor--the wish to enlighten M. Renan as to how the University wasgoverned, the intricacies of Convocation and Congregation, theHebdomadal Council, and all the rest. The other persons present fell atfirst breathlessly silent, watching the gallant but quite hopelessadventure. Then, in sheer sympathy with a good man in trouble, one afteranother we rushed in to help, till the constitution of the Universitymust have seemed indeed a thing of Bedlam to our smiling but much-puzzled guest; and all our cheeks were red. But M. Renan cut the knot. Since he could not understand, and we could not explain, what theconstitution of Oxford University _was_, he suavely took up his parableas to what it should be. He drew the ideal University, as it were, inthe clouds; clothing his notion, as he went on, in so much fun and somuch charm, that his English hosts more than forgot their own defeat inhis success. The little scene has always remained with me as a crowninginstance of the French genius for conversation. Throw what obstacles inthe way you please; it will surmount them all. 

To judge, however, from M. Renan's letter to his friend, M. Berthelot, written from Oxford on this occasion, he was not so much pleased as wethought he was, or as we were with him. He says, "Oxford is thestrangest relic of the past, the type of living death. Each of itscolleges is a terrestrial paradise, but a deserted Paradise. " (I seefrom the date that the visit took place in the Easter vacation!) And hedescribes the education given as "purely humanist and clerical, "administered to "a gilded youth that comes to chapel in surplices. Thereis an almost total absence of the scientific spirit. " And the letterfurther contains a mild gibe at All Souls, for its absentee Fellows. "The lawns are admirable, and the Fellows eat up the college revenues, hunting and shooting up and down England. Only one of them works--mykind host, Max Müller. "

At that moment the list of the Fellows of All Souls contained the namesof men who have since rendered high service to England; and M. Renan wasprobably not aware that the drastic reforms introduced by the two greatUniversity Commissions of 1854 and 1877 had made the sarcastic picturehe drew for his friend not a little absurd. No doubt a Frenchintellectual will always feel that the mind-life of England is runningat a slower pace than that of his own country. But if Renan had workedfor a year in Oxford, the old priestly training in him, based so solidlyon the moral discipline of St. Nicholas and St. Sulpice, would havebecome aware of much else. I like to think that he would have echoed theverdict on the Oxford undergraduate of a young and brilliant Frenchmanwho spent much time at Oxford fifteen years later. "There is nointellectual _élite_ here so strong as ours (i. E. , among Frenchstudents), " says M. Jacques Bardouz, "but they undoubtedly have apolitical _élite_, and, a much rarer thing, a moral _élite_.... What anenvironment!--and how full is this education of moral stimulus andforce!"

Has not every word of this been justified to the letter by theexperience of the war?

After the present cataclysm, we know very well that we shall have toimprove and extend our higher education. Only, in building up the new, let us not lose grip upon the irreplaceable things of the old!

It was not long after M. Renan's visit that, just as we were startingfor a walk on a May afternoon, the second post brought my husband aletter which changed our lives. It contained a suggestion that myhusband should take work on the _Times_ as a member of the editorialstaff. We read it in amazement, and walked on to Port Meadow. It was afine day. The river was alive with boats; in the distance rose thetowers and domes of the beautiful city; and the Oxford magic blew aboutus in the summer wind. It seemed impossible to leave the dear Oxfordlife! All the drawbacks and difficulties of the new proposal presentedthemselves; hardly any of the advantages. As for me, I was convinced wemust and should refuse, and I went to sleep in that conviction. 

But the mind travels far--and mysteriously--in sleep. With the firstwords that my husband and I exchanged in the morning, we knew that thedie was cast and that our Oxford days were over. 

The rest of the year was spent in preparation for the change; and in theChristmas vacation of 1880-81 my husband wrote his first "leaders" forthe paper. But before that we went for a week to Dublin to stay with theForsters, at the Chief Secretary's Lodge. 

A visit I shall never forget! It was the first of the two terriblewinters my uncle spent in Dublin as Chief Secretary, and the strugglewith the Land League was at its height. Boycotting, murder, and outragefilled the news of every day. Owing to the refusal of the LiberalGovernment to renew the Peace Preservation Act when they took office in1880--a disastrous but perhaps intelligible mistake--the ChiefSecretary, when we reached Dublin, was facing an agrarian and politicalrevolt of the most determined character, with nothing but the ordinarylaw, resting on juries and evidence, as his instrument--an instrumentwhich the Irish Land League had taken good care to shatter in his hands. Threatening letters were flowing in upon both himself and my godmother;and the tragedy of 1882, with the revelations as to the various murderplots of the time, to which it led, were soon to show how terrible wasthe state of the country and how real the danger in which he personallystood. But, none the less, social life had to be carried on;entertainments had to be given; and we went over, if I remember right, for the two Christmas balls to be given by the Chief Secretary and theViceroy. On myself, fresh from the quiet Oxford life, the Irishspectacle, seen from such a point of view, produced an overwhelmingimpression. And the dancing, the visits and dinner-parties, the keepingup of a brave social show--quite necessary and right under thecircumstances!--began to seem to me, after only twenty-four hours, likesome pageant seen under a thunder-cloud. 

Mr. Forster had then little more than five years to live. He was on thethreshold of the second year of his Chief-Secretary ship. During thefirst year he had faced the difficulties of the position in Ireland, andthe perpetual attacks of the Irish Members in Parliament, with aphysical nerve and power still intact. I can recall my hot sympathy withhim during 1880, while with one hand he was fighting the Land League andwith the other--a fact never sufficiently recognized--giving all thehelp he could to the preparation of Mr. Gladstone's second Land Act. Theposition then was hard, sometimes heartbreaking; but it was not beyondhis strength. The second year wore him out. The unlucky Protection Act--an experiment for which the Liberal Cabinet and even its RadicalMembers, Mr. Bright and Mr. Chamberlain, were every whit as chargeableas himself--imposed a personal responsibility on him for every case outof the many hundreds of prisoners made under the Act, which was initself intolerable. And while he tried in front to dam back the flood ofIrish outrage, English Radicalism at his heels was making the taskimpossible. What he was doing satisfied nobody, least of all himself. The official and land-owning classes in Ireland, the Tories in England, raged because, in spite of the Act, outrage continued; the Radical partyin the country, which had always disliked the Protection Act, and theRadical press, were on the lookout for every sign of failure; while thedaily struggle in the House with the Irish Members while Parliament wassitting, in addition to all the rest, exhausted a man on whose decisionimportant executive acts, dealing really with a state of revolution, were always depending. All through the second year, as it seemed to me, he was overwhelmed by a growing sense of a monstrous and insolubleproblem, to which no one, through nearly another forty years--not Mr. Gladstone with his Home Rule Acts, as we were soon to see, nor Mr. Balfour's wonderful brain-power sustained by a unique temperament--wasto find the true key. It is not found yet. Twenty years of ToryGovernment practically solved the Land Question and agricultural Irelandhas begun to be rich. But the past year has seen an Irish rebellion; aHome Rule Act has at last, after thirty years, been passed, and is deadbefore its birth; while at the present moment an Irish Convention issitting. [1] Thirty-six years have gone since my husband and I walkedwith William Forster through the Phoenix Park, over the spot where, ayear later, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke were murdered. Andstill the Aeschylean "curse" goes on, from life to life, from Governmentto Government. When will the Furies of the past become the "kindgoddesses" of the future--and the Irish and English peoples build them ashrine of reconciliation?

[Footnote 1: These words were written in the winter of 1917. At thepresent moment (June, 1918) we have just seen the deportation of theSinn Feiners, and are still expecting yet another Home Rule Bill!]

With such thoughts one looks back over the past. Amid its darkness, Ishall always see the pathetic figure of William Forster, the man ofQuaker training, at grips with murder and anarchy; the man of sensitive, affectionate spirit, weighed down under the weight of rival appeals, nowfrom the side of democracy, now from the side of authority; bitterlyconscious, as an English Radical, of his breach with Radicalism; stillmore keenly sensitive, as a man responsible for the executive governmentof a country, in which the foundations had given way, to that atmosphereof cruelty and wrong in which the Land League moved, and to the hideousinstances poured every day into his ears. 

He bore it for more than a year after we saw him in Ireland at histhankless work. It was our first year in London, and we were near enoughto watch closely the progress of his fight. But it was a fight not to bewon. The spring of 1882 saw his resignation--on May 2d--followed on May6th by the Phoenix Park murders and the long and gradual disintegrationof the powerful Ministry of 1880, culminating in the Home Rule disasterof 1886. Mr. Churchill in the _Life_ of his father, Lord Randolph, saysof Mr. Forster's resignation, "he passed out of the Ministry to becomeduring the rest of Parliament one of its most dangerous and vigilantopponents. " The physical change, indeed, caused by the Irish struggle, which was for a time painfully evident to the House of Commons, seemedto pass away with rest and travel. The famous attack he made on Parnellin the spring of 1883, as the responsible promoter of outrage inIreland, showed certainly no lack of power--rather an increase. Ihappened to be in the House the following day, to hear Parnell's reply. I remember my uncle's taking me down with him to the House, and begginga seat for me in Mrs. Brand's gallery. The figure of Parnell; thespeech, nonchalant, terse, defiant, without a single grace of any kind, his hands in the pockets of his coat; and the tense silence of thecrowded House, remain vividly with me. Afterward my uncle came up-stairsfor me, and we descended toward Palace Yard through various side-passages. Suddenly a door communicating with the House itself opened infront of us, and Parnell came out. My uncle pressed my arm and we heldback, while Parnell passed by, somberly absorbed, without betraying bythe smallest movement or gesture any recognition of my uncle's identity. 

In other matters--Gordon, Imperial Federation, the Chairmanship of theManchester Ship Canal, and the rest--William Forster showed, up till1885, what his friends fondly hoped was the promise of renewed andsuccessful work. But in reality he never recovered Ireland. The mark ofthose two years had gone too deep. He died in April, 1886, just beforethe introduction of the Home Rule Bill, and I have always on the retinaof the inward eye the impression of a moment at the western door ofWestminster Abbey, after the funeral service. The flower-heaped coffinhad gone through. My aunt and her adopted children followed it. Afterthem came Mr. Gladstone, with other members of the Cabinet. At thethreshold Mr. Gladstone moved forward, and took my aunt's hand, bendingover it bareheaded. Then she went with the dead, and he turned awaytoward the House of Commons. To those of us who remembered what therelations of the dead and the living had once been, and how they hadparted, there was a peculiar pathos in the little scene. 

A few days later Mr. Gladstone brought in the Home Rule Bill, and thetwo stormy months followed which ended in the Liberal Unionist split andthe defeat of the Bill on June 7th by thirty votes, and were the preludeto the twenty years of Tory Government. If William Forster had lived, there is no doubt that he must have played a leading part in thestruggles of that and subsequent sessions. In 1888 Mr. Balfour said tomy husband, after some generous words on the part played by Forster inthose two terrible years: "Forster's loss was irreparable to us [i. E. , to the Unionist party]. If he and Fawcett had lived, Gladstone could nothave made head. "

It has been, I think, widely recognized by men of all parties in recentyears that personally William Forster bore the worst of the Irish day, whatever men may think of his policy. But, after all, it is not forthis, primarily, that England remembers him. His monument iseverywhere--in the schools that have covered the land since 1870, whenhis great Act was passed. And if I have caught a little picture from themoment when death forestalled that imminent parting between himself andthe great leader he had so long admired and followed, which life couldonly have broadened, let me match it by an earlier and happier one, borrowed from a letter of my own, written to my father when I waseighteen, and describing the bringing in of the Education Act. 

 He sat down amidst loud cheering.... _Gladstone pulled him down with a sort of hug of delight. _ It is certain that he is very much pleased with the Bill, and, what is of great consequence, that he thinks the Government has throughout been treated with great consideration in it. After the debate he said to Uncle F. , "Well, I think our pair of ponies will run through together!"

Gladstone's "pony" was, of course, the Land Act of 1870. 

THE END OF VOL. I