CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I.      LONDON IN THE 'EIGHTIES

II.     LONDON FRIENDS

III.    THE PUBLICATION OF "ROBERT ELSMERE"

IV.     FIRST VISITS TO ITALY

V.      AMALFI AND ROME. HAMPDEN AND "MARCELLA"

VI.     "HELBECK OF BANNISDALE"

VII.    THE VILLA BARBERINI. HENRY JAMES

VIII.   ROMAN FRIENDS. "ELEANOR"

          EPILOGUE

ILLUSTRATIONS

      HENRY JAMES

      ARTHUR BALFOUR

      GOLDWIN SMITH

      M. JUSSERAND

A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS

CHAPTER I

LONDON IN THE 'EIGHTIES

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

My husband and I, on the way home, compared notes. We felt that we had just been in contact with a singular personal power combined with a moral atmosphere which had in it both the bracing and the charm that, physically, are the gift of the heights. The "austere" Radical, indeed, was there. With regard to certain vices and corruptions of our life and politics, my uncle might as well have used Mr. Morley's name as that of Mr. Frederick Harrison, when he presented us, in "Friendship's Garland," with Mr. Harrison setting up a guillotine in his back garden. There was something--there always has been something--of the somber intensity of the prophet in Mr. Morley. Burke drew, as we all remember, an ineffaceable picture of Marie Antoinette's young beauty as he saw it in 1774, contrasting it with the "abominable scenes" amid which she perished. Mr. Morley's comment is:

The cry of the poor, indeed, against the rich and tyrannous, the cry of the persecuted Liberal, whether in politics or religion, against his oppressors--it used to seem to me, in the 'eighties, when, to my pleasure and profit, I was often associated with Mr. Morley, that in his passionate response to this double appeal lay the driving impulse of his life and the secret of his power over others. While we were still at Oxford he had brought out most of his books: On Compromise--the fierce and famous manifesto of 1874--and the well-known volumes on the Encyclopedists, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot. It was not for nothing that he had been a member of Pattison's college; and a follower of John Stuart Mill. The will to look the grimmest facts of life and destiny in the face, without flinching, and the resolve to accept no "anodyne" from religion or philosophy, combined with a ceaseless interest in the human fate and the human story, and a natural, inbred sympathy for the many against the few, for the unfortunate against the prosperous; it was these ardors and the burning sincerity with which he felt them, that made him so great a power among us, his juniors by half a generation. I shall never lose the impression that Compromise, with its almost savage appeal for sincerity in word and deed, made upon me--an impression which had its share in Robert Elsmere.

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

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

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

A J Balfour

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

But Mr. Morley's literary instinct, which is the artistic instinct, solved the problem. The most interesting half of the book will always, I think, be the later half. In the great matters of his hero's earlier career--Free Trade, the Crimean War, the early budgets, the slow development of the Liberal leader from the Church and State Conservative of 1832, down to the franchise battle of the 'sixties and the "great Ministry," as Mr. Morley calls it, of 1868, the story is told, indeed, perhaps here and there at too great length, yet with unfailing ease and lucidity. The teller, however, is one who, till the late 'seventies, was only a spectator, and, on the whole, from a distance, of what he is describing, who was indeed most of the time pursuing his own special aims--i.e., the hewing down of orthodoxy and tradition, together with the preaching of a frank and uncompromising agnosticism, in the Fortnightly Review; aims which were, of all others, most opposed to Mr. Gladstone's. But with the 'eighties everything changes. Mr. Morley becomes a great part of what he tells. During the intermediate stage--marked by his editorship of the Pall Mall Gazette--the tone of the biography grows sensibly warmer and more vivid, as the writer draws nearer and nearer to the central scene; and with Mr. Morley's election to Newcastle and his acceptance of the Chief-Secretaryship in 1885, the book becomes the fascinating record of not one man, but two, and that without any intrusion whatever on the rights of the main figure. The dreariness of the Irish struggle is lightened by touch after touch that only Mr. Morley could have given. Take that picture of the somber, discontented Parnell, coming, late in the evening, to Mr. Morley's room in the House of Commons, to complain of the finance of the Home Rule Bill--Mr. Gladstone's entrance at 10.30 P.M., after an exhausting day--and he, the man of seventy-seven, sitting down to work between the Chief Secretary and the Irish leader, till at last, with a sigh of weariness at nearly 1 A.M., the tired Prime Minister pleads to go to bed. Or that most dramatic story, later on, of Committee Room No. 15, where Mr. Morley becomes the reporter to Mr. Gladstone of that moral and political tragedy, the fall of Parnell; or a hundred other sharp lights upon the inner and human truth of things, as it lay behind the political spectacle. All through the later chapters, too, the happy use of conversations between the two men on literary and philosophical matters relieves what might have been the tedium of the end. For these vivid notes of free talk not only bring the living Gladstone before you in the most varied relation to his time; they keep up a perpetually interesting comparison in the reader's mind between the hero and his biographer. One is as eager to know what Mr. Morley is going to say as one is to listen to Mr. Gladstone. The two men, with their radical differences and their passionate sympathies, throw light on each other, and the agreeable pages achieve a double end, without ever affecting the real unity of the book. Thus handled, biography, so often the drudge of literature, rises into its high places and becomes a delight instead of an edifying or informing necessity.

I will add one other recollection of this early time--i.e., that in 1881 the reviewing of Mr. Morley's Cobden in the Times fell to my husband, and as those were the days of many-column reviews, and as the time given for the review was exceedingly short, it could only be done at all by a division of labor. We divided the sheets of the book, and we just finished in time to let my husband rush off to Printing House Square and correct the proofs as they went through the press for the morning's issue. In those days, as is well known, the Times went to press much later than now, and a leader-writer rarely got home before 4, and sometimes 5, A.M.

I find it extremely difficult, as I look back, to put any order into the crowding memories of those early years in London. They were extraordinarily stimulating to us both, and years of great happiness. At home our children were growing up; our own lives were branching out into new activities and bringing us always new friends, and a more interesting share in that "great mundane movement" which Mr. Bottles believed would perish without him. Our connection with the Times and with the Forsters, and the many new acquaintances and friends we made at this time in that happy meeting-ground of men and causes--Mrs. Jeune's drawing-room--opened to us the world of politicians; while my husband's four volumes on The English Poets, published just as we left Oxford, volumes to which all the most prominent writers of the day had contributed, together with the ever-delightful fact that Matthew Arnold was my uncle, brought us the welcome of those of our own métier and way of life; and when in 1884 my husband became art critic of the paper, a function which he filled for more than five and twenty years, fresh doors opened on the already crowded scene, and fresh figures stepped in.

The setting of it all was twofold--in the first place, our dear old house in Russell Square, and, in the next, the farm on Rodborough Common, four miles from Godalming, where, amid a beauty of gorse and heather that filled every sense on a summer day with the mere joy of breathing and looking, our children and we spent the holiday hours of seven goodly years. The Russell Square house has been, so to speak, twice demolished and twice buried, since we lived in it. Some of its stones must still lie deep under the big hotel which now towers on its site. That it does not still exist somewhere, I can hardly believe. The westerly sun seems to me still to be pouring into the beautiful little hall, built and decorated about 1750, with its panels of free scrollwork in blue and white, and to be still glancing through the drawing-rooms to the little powder-closet at the end, my tiny workroom, where I first sketched the plan of Robert Elsmere for my sister Julia Huxley, and where, after three years, I wrote the last words. If I open the door of the back drawing-room, there, to the right, is the children's school-room. I see them at their lessons, and the fine plane-trees that look in at the window. And up-stairs there are the pleasant bedrooms and the nurseries. It was born, the old house, in the year of the Young Pretender, and, after serving six generations, perhaps as faithfully as it served us, it "fell on sleep." There should be a special Elysium, surely, for the houses where the fates have been kind and where people have been happy; and a special Tartarus for those--of Oedipus or Atreus--in which "old, unhappy, far-off things" seem to be always poisoning the present.

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

It was in 1882, the year of Tel-el-Kebir, when we took Peperharrow Rectory (the Murewell Vicarage of Robert Elsmere) for the summer, that we first came across Borough Farm. We left it in 1889. I did a great deal of work, there and in London, in those seven years. The Macmillan papers I have already spoken of. They were on many subjects--Tennyson's "Becket," Mr. Pater's "Marius," "The Literature of Introspection," Jane Austen, Keats, Gustavo Becquer, and various others. I still kept up my Spanish to some extent, and I twice examined--in 1882 and 1888--for the Taylorian scholarship in Spanish at Oxford, our old friend, Doctor Kitchin, afterward Dean of Durham, writing to me with glee that I should be "making history" as "the first woman examiner of men at either University." My colleague on the first occasion was the old Spanish scholar, Don Pascual de Gayangos, to whom the calendaring of the Spanish MSS. in the British Museum had been largely intrusted; and the second time, Mr. York Powell of Christ Church--I suppose one of the most admirable Romance scholars of the time--was associated with me. But if I remember right, I set the papers almost entirely, and wrote the report on both occasions. It gave me a feeling of safety in 1888, when my knowledge, such as it was, had grown very rusty, that Mr. York Powell overlooked the papers, seeing that to set Scholarship questions for postgraduate candidates is not easy for one who has never been through any proper "mill"! But they passed his scrutiny satisfactorily, and in 1888 we appointed as Taylorian Scholar a man to whom for years I confidently looked for the history of Spain--combining both the Spanish and Arabic sources--so admirable had his work been in the examination. But, alack! that great book has still to be written. For Mr. Butler Clarke died prematurely in 1904, and the hope died with him.

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

But my first steps toward its realization were to begin with the short story of Miss Bretherton, published in 1884, and then the translation of Amiel's Journal Intime, which appeared in 1885. Miss Bretherton was suggested to me by the brilliant success in 1883 of Mary Anderson, and by the controversy with regard to her acting--as distinct from her delightful beauty and her attractive personality--which arose between the fastidious few and the enchanted many. I maintained then, and am quite sure now, that Isabel Bretherton was in no sense a portrait of Miss Anderson. She was to me a being so distinct from the living actress that I offered her to the world with an entire good faith, which seems to myself now, perhaps thirty years later, hardly less surprising than it did to the readers of the time. For undoubtedly the situation in the novel was developed out of the current dramatic debate. But it became to me just a situation--a problem. It was really not far removed from Diderot's problem in the Paradoxe sur le Comédien. What is the relation of the actor to the part represented? One actress is plain--Rachel; another actress is beautiful, and more than beautiful, delightful--Miss Anderson. But all the time, is there or is there not a region in which all these considerations count for nothing in comparison with certain others? Is there a dramatic art--exacting, difficult, supreme--or is there not? The choice of the subject, at that time, was, it may be confessed, a piece of naïveté, and the book itself was young and naïve throughout. But something in it has kept it in circulation all this while; and for me it marks with a white stone the year in which it appeared. For it brought me my first critical letter from Henry James; it was the first landmark in our long friendship.

Henry James

Beloved Henry James! It seems to me that my original meeting with him was at the Andrew Langs' in 1882. He was then forty-two, in the prime of his working life, and young enough to be still "Henry James, Junior," to many. I cannot remember anything else of the Langs' dinner-party except that we were also invited to meet the author of Vice Versa, "which Mr. Lang thinks"--as I wrote to my mother--"the best thing of its kind since Dickens." But shortly after that, Mr. James came to see us in Russell Square and a little incident happened which stamped itself for good on a still plastic memory. It was a very hot day; the western sun was beating on the drawing-room windows, though the room within was comparatively dark and cool. The children were languid with the heat, and the youngest, Janet, then five, stole into the drawing-room and stood looking at Mr. James. He put out a half-conscious hand to her; she came nearer, while we talked on. Presently she climbed on his knee. I suppose I made a maternal protest. He took no notice, and folded his arm round her. We talked on; and presently the abnormal stillness of Janet recalled her to me and made me look closely through the dark of the room. She was fast asleep, her pale little face on the young man's shoulder, her long hair streaming over his arm. Now Janet was a most independent and critical mortal, no indiscriminate "climber up of knees"; far from it. Nor was Mr. James an indiscriminate lover of children; he was not normally much at home with them, though always good to them. But the childish instinct had in fact divined the profound tenderness and chivalry which were the very root of his nature; and he was touched and pleased, as one is pleased when a robin perches on one's hand.

From that time, as the precious bundle of his letters shows, he became the friend of all of us--myself, my husband, and the children; though with an increased intimacy from the 'nineties onward. In a subsequent chapter I will try and summarize the general mark left on me by his fruitful and stainless life. His letter to me about Miss Bretherton is dated December 9, 1884. He had already come to see me about it, and there was never any critical discussion like his, for its suggestion of a hundred points of view, its flashing of unexpected lights, its witness to the depth and richness of his own artistic knowledge.

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

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

Miss Bretherton was a trial trip, and it taught me a good deal. When it came out I had nearly finished the translation of Amiel, which appeared in 1885, and in March of that year some old friends drove me up the remote Westmorland valley of Long Sleddale, at a moment when the blackthorn made lines of white along the lanes; and from that day onward the early chapters of Robert Elsmere began to shape themselves in my mind. All the main ideas of the novel were already there. Elsmere was to be the exponent of a freer faith; Catharine had been suggested by an old friend of my youth; while Langham was the fruit of my long communing with the philosophic charm and the tragic impotence of Amiel. I began the book in the early summer of 1885, and thenceforward it absorbed me until its appearance in 1888.

The year 1885, indeed, was one of expanding horizons, of many new friends, of quickened pulses generally. The vastness of London and its myriad interests seemed to be invading our life more and more. I can recall one summer afternoon, in particular, when, as I was in a hansom driving idly westward toward Hyde Park Gate, thinking of a hundred things at once, this consciousness of intensification, of a heightened meaning in everything--the broad street, the crowd of moving figures and carriages, the houses looking down upon it--seized upon me with a rush. "Yes, it is good--the mere living!" Joy in the infinite variety of the great city as compared with the "cloistered virtue" of Oxford; the sheer pleasure of novelty, of the kind new faces, and the social discoveries one felt opening on many sides; the delight of new perceptions, new powers in oneself--all this seemed to flower for me in those few minutes of reverie--if one can apply such a word to an experience so vivid. And meanwhile the same intensity of pleasure from nature that I had always been capable of flowed in upon me from new scenes; above all, from solitary moments at Borough Farm, in the heart of the Surrey commons, when the September heather blazed about me; or the first signs of spring were on the gorse and the budding trees; or beside some lonely pool; and always heightened now by the company of my children. It was a stage--a normal stage, in normal life. But I might have missed it so easily! The Fates were kind to us in those days.

As to the social scene, let me gather from it first a recollection of pure romance. One night at a London dinner-party I found myself sent down with a very stout gentleman, an American Colonel, who proclaimed himself an "esoteric Buddhist," and provoked in me a rapid and vehement dislike. I turned my back upon him and examined the table. Suddenly I became aware of a figure opposite to me, the figure of a young girl who seemed to me one of the most ravishing creatures I had ever seen. She was very small, and exquisitely made. Her beautiful head, with its mass of light-brown hair; the small features and delicate neck; the clear, pale skin, the lovely eyes with rather heavy lids, which gave a slight look of melancholy to the face; the grace and fire of every movement when she talked; the dreamy silence into which she sometimes fell, without a trace of awkwardness or shyness. But how vain is any mere catalogue to convey the charm of Laura Tennant--the first Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton--to those who never saw her!

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

I fell in love with her there and then. The rare glimpses of her that her busy life and mine allowed made one of my chief joys thenceforward, and her early death was to me--as to so many, many others!--a grief never forgotten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then in the autumn came the hope of a child--to her who loved children so passionately. But all through the waiting time she was overshadowed by a strangely strong presentiment of death. I went to see her sometimes toward the end of it, when she was resting on her sofa in the late evening, and used to leave her listening for her husband's step, on his return from his work, her little weary face already lit up with expectation. The weeks passed, and those who loved her began to be anxious. I went down to Borough Farm in May, and there, just two years after she had sat with us under the hawthorn, I heard the news of her little son's birth, and then ten days later the news of her death.

With that death a ray of pure joy was quenched on earth. But Laura Lyttelton was not only youth and delight--she was also embodied love. I have watched her in a crowded room where everybody wanted her, quietly seek out the neglected person there, the stranger, the shy secretary or governess, and make her happy--bring her in--with an art that few noticed, because in her it was nature. When she died she left an enduring mark in the minds of many who have since governed or guided England; but she was mourned also by scores of humble folk, and by disagreeable folk whom only she befriended. Mrs. Lyttelton quotes a letter written by the young wife to her husband:

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

"She was a flame, beautiful, dancing, ardent," writes the second Mrs. Lyttelton. "The wind of life was too fierce for such a spirit; she could not live in it."

I make no apology for dwelling on the life and earthly death of this young creature who was only known to a band--though a large band--of friends during her short years. Throughout social and literary history there have been a few apparitions like hers, which touch with peculiar force, in the hearts of men and women, the old, deep, human notes which "make us men." Youth, beauty, charm, death--they are the great themes with which all art, plastic or literary, tries to conjure. It is given to very few to handle them simply, yet sufficiently; with power, yet without sentimentality. Breathed into Laura's short life, they affected whose who knew her like the finest things in poetry.

CHAPTER II

LONDON FRIENDS

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

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

M. Scherer rose to greet us, and to introduce us to his wife and daughters. A tall, thin man, already white-haired, with something in his aspect which suggested his Genevese origin--something at once ascetic and delicately sensitive. He was then in his sixtieth year, deputy for the Seine-et-Oise, and an important member of the Left Center. The year after we saw him he became a Senator, and remained so through his life, becoming more Conservative as the years went on. But his real importance was as a man of letters--one of the recognized chiefs of French literature and thought, equally at war with the forces of Catholic reaction, then just beginning to find a leader in M. Bourget, and with the scientific materialism of M. Taine. He was--when we first knew him--a Protestant who had ceased to believe in any historical religion; a Liberal who, like another friend of ours, Mr. Goschen, about the same time was drifting into Conservatism; and also a man of strong and subtle character to whom questions of ethics were at all times as important as questions of pure literature. Above all, he was a scholar, specially conversant with England and English letters. He was, for instance, the "French critic on Milton," on whom Matthew Arnold wrote one of his most attractive essays; and he was fond of maintaining--and proving--that when French people did make a serious study of England, and English books, which he admitted was rare, they were apt to make fewer mistakes about us than English writers make about France.

Dear M. Scherer!--I see him first in the little suite of carpetless rooms, empty save for books and the most necessary tables and chairs, where he lived and worked at Versailles; amid a library "read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested," like that of Lord Acton, his English junior. And then, in a winter walk along the Champs-Élysées, a year or two later, discussing the prospects of Catholicism in France: "They haven't a man--a speaker--a book! It is a real drawback to us Liberals that they are so weak, so negligible. We have nothing to hold us together!" At the moment Scherer was perfectly right. But the following years were to see the flowing back of Catholicism into literature, the Universities, the École Normale. Twenty years later I quoted this remark of Scherer's to a young French philosopher. "True, for its date," he said. "There was then scarcely a single Catholic in the École Normale [i.e., at the headwaters of French education]. There are now a great many. But they are all Modernists!" Since then, again, we have seen the growing strength of Catholicism in the French literature of imagination, in French poetry and fiction. Whether in the end it will emerge the stronger for the vast stirring of the waters caused by the present war is one of the most interesting questions of the present day.

But I was soon to know Edmond Scherer more intimately. I imagine that it was he who in 1884 sent me a copy of the Journal Intime of Henri Frédéric Amiel, edited by himself. The book laid its spell upon me at once; and I felt a strong wish to translate it. M. Scherer consented and I plunged into it. It was a delightful but exacting task. At the end of it I knew a good deal more French than I did at the beginning! For the book abounded in passages that put one on one's mettle and seemed to challenge every faculty one possessed. M. Scherer came over with his daughter Jeanne--a schöne Seele, if ever there was one--and we spent hours in the Russell Square drawing-room, turning and twisting the most crucial sentences this way and that.

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

A passage, it seems to me, of considerable interest as throwing light upon the inner mind of one of the most perfect writers, and most important influences of the nineteenth century. Certainly there is no sign in it, on Mr. Pater's part, of "dropping Christianity"; very much the contrary.

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

Those were the years, after the defeat of the first Home Rule Bill, and the dismissal of Mr. Gladstone, of Lord Salisbury's Government and Mr. Balfour's Chief-Secretaryship. As I look back upon them--those five dramatic years culminating first in the Parnell Commission, and then in Parnell's tragic downfall and death, I see everything grouped round Mr. Balfour. From the moment when, in succession to Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Mr. Balfour took over the Chief-Secretaryship, his sudden and swift development seemed to me the most interesting thing in politics. We had first met him, as I have said, on a week-end visit to the Talbots at Oxford. It was then a question whether his health would stand the rough and tumble of politics. I recollect he came down late and looked far from robust. We traveled up to London with him, and he was reading Mr. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics, which, if I remember right, he was to review for Mind.

He was then a member of the Fourth Party, and engaged--though in a rather detached fashion--in those endless raids and excursions against the "Goats"--i.e., the bearded veterans of his own party, Sir Stafford Northcote in particular, of which Lord Randolph was the leader. But compared to Lord Randolph he had made no Parliamentary mark. One thought of him as the metaphysician, the lover of music, the delightful companion, always, I feel now, in looking back, with a prevailing consciousness of something reserved and potential in him, which gave a peculiar importance and value to his judgments of men and things. He was a leading figure among "The Souls," and I remember some delightful evenings in his company before 1886, when the conversation was entirely literary or musical.

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

It was in 1888, two years after Mr. Forster's death, that we found ourselves for a Sunday at Whittinghame. It was, I think, not long before the opening of the Special Commission which was to inquire into the charges brought by the Times against the Parnellites and the Land League. Nothing struck me more in Mr. Balfour than the absence in him of any sort of excitement or agitation, in dealing with the current charges against the Irishmen. It seemed to me that he had quietly accepted the fact that he was fighting a revolution, and, while perfectly clear as to his own course of action, wasted no nervous force on moral reprobation of the persons concerned. His business was to protect the helpless, to punish crime, and to expose the authors of it, whether high or low. But he took it as a job to be done--difficult--unpleasant--but all in the way of business. The tragic or pathetic emotion that so many people were ready to spend upon it he steadily kept at a distance. His nerve struck me as astonishing, and the absence of any disabling worry about things past. "One can only do one's best at the moment," he said to me once, à propos of some action of the Irish government which had turned out badly--"if it doesn't succeed, better luck next time! Nothing to be gained by going back upon things." After this visit to Whittinghame, I wrote to my father:

And the interesting and remarkable thing was the contrast between an attitude so composed and stoical, and his delicate physique, his sensitive, sympathetic character. All the time, of course, he was in constant personal danger. Detectives, much to his annoyance, lay in wait for us as we walked through his own park, and went with him in London wherever he dined. Like my uncle, he was impatient of being followed and guarded, and only submitted to it for the sake of other people. Once, at a dinner-party at our house, he met an old friend of ours, one of the most original thinkers of our day, Mr. Philip Wicksteed, economist, Dante scholar, and Unitarian minister. He and Mr. Balfour were evidently attracted to each other, and when the time for departure came, the two, deep in conversation, instead of taking cabs, walked off together in the direction of Mr. Balfour's house in Carlton Gardens. The detectives below-stairs remained for some time blissfully unconscious of what had happened. Then word reached them; and my husband, standing at the door to see a guest off, was the amused spectator of the rush in pursuit of two splendid long-legged fellows, who had, however, no chance whatever of catching up the Chief Secretary.

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

As to the Special Commission and the excitement produced by the Times attack on the Irish Members, including the publication of the forged Parnell letter in 1887, our connection with the Times brought us, of course, into the full blast of it. Night after night I would sit up, half asleep, to listen to the different phases of the story when in the early hours of the morning my husband came back from the Times, brimful of news, which he was as eager to tell as I to hear. My husband, however, was only occasionally asked to write upon Ireland, and was not in the inner counsels of the paper on that subject. We were both very anxious about the facsimiled letter, and when, after long preliminaries, the Commission came to the Times witnesses, I well remember the dismay with which I heard the first day of Mr. Macdonald's examination. Was that all? I came out of the Court behind Mr. Labouchere and Sir George Lewis, and in Mr. Labouchere's exultation one read the coming catastrophe. I was on the Riviera when Pigott's confession, flight, and suicide held the stage; yet even at that distance the shock was great. The Times attack was fatally discredited, and the influence of the great paper temporarily crippled. Yet how much of that attack was sound, how much of it was abundantly justified! After all, the report of the Commission--apart altogether from the forged letter or letters-- certainly gave Mr. Balfour in Ireland later on the reasoned support of English opinion in his hand-to-hand struggle with the Land League methods, as the Commission had both revealed and judged them. After thirty years one may well admit that the Irish land system had to go, and that the Land League was "a sordid revolution," with both the crimes and the excuses of a revolution. But at the time, British statesmen had to organize reform with one hand, and stop boycotting and murder with the other; and the light thrown by the Commission on the methods of Irish disaffection was invaluable to those who were actually grappling day by day with the problems of Irish government.

It was probably at Mrs. Jeune's that I first saw Mr. Goschen, and we rapidly made friends. His was a great position at that time. Independent of both parties, yet trusted by both; at once disinterested and sympathetic; a strong Liberal in some respects, an equally strong Conservative in others--he never spoke without being listened to, and his support was eagerly courted both by Mr. Gladstone, from whom he had refused office in 1880, without, however, breaking with the Liberal party, and by the Conservatives, who instinctively felt him their property, but were not yet quite clear as to how they were to finally capture him. That was decided in 1886, when Mr. Goschen voted in the majority that killed the Home Rule Bill, and more definitely in the following year when Randolph Churchill resigned the Exchequer in a fit of pique, thinking himself indispensable, and not at all expecting Lord Salisbury to accept his resignation. But, in his own historic phrase, he "forgot Goschen," and Mr. Goschen stepped easily into his shoes and remained there.

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

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

Mrs. Goschen, though full of kindness and goodness, was not literary, and the house was somewhat devoid of books, except in Mr. Goschen's study. I remember J.R.G.'s laughing fling when Mrs. Goschen complained that she could not get Pride and Prejudice, which he had recommended to her, "from the library." "But you could have bought it for sixpence at the railway bookstall," said J.R.G. Mr. Goschen himself, however, was a man of wide cultivation, as befitted the grandson of the intelligent German bourgeois who had been the publisher of both Schiller and Goethe. His biography of his grandfather in those happy days before the present life-and-death struggle between England and Germany has now a kind of symbolic value. It is a study by a man of German descent who had become one of the most trusted of English statesmen, of that earlier German life--with its measure, its kindness, its idealism--on which Germany has turned its back. The writing of this book was the pleasure of his later years, amid the heavy work which was imposed upon him as a Free-Trader, in spite of his personal friendship for Mr. Chamberlain, by the Tariff Reform campaign of 1903 onward; and the copy which he gave me reminds me of many happy talks with him, and of my own true affection for him. I am thankful that he did not live to see 1914.

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

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

These lines, of course, point to the Acton who was the lifelong friend of Dollinger and fought, side by side with the Bavarian scholar, the promulgation of the dogma of Papal Infallibility, at the Vatican Council of 1870. But while Dollinger broke with the Church, Lord Acton never did. That was what made the extraordinary interest of conversation with him. Here was a man whose denunciation of the crimes and corruption of Papal Rome--of the historic Church, indeed, and the clergy in general--was far more unsparing than that of the average educated Anglican. Yet he died a devout member of the Roman Church in which he was born; after his death it was revealed that he had never felt a serious doubt either of Catholic doctrine or of the supernatural mission of the Catholic Church; and it was to a dearly loved daughter on her death-bed that he said, with calm and tender faith, "My child, you will soon be with Jesus Christ." All his friends, except the very few who knew him most intimately, must, I think, have been perpetually puzzled by this apparent paradox in his life and thought. Take the subject of Biblical criticism. I had many talks with him while I was writing Robert Elsmere, and was always amazed at his knowledge of what Liddon would have called "German infidel" books. He had read them all, he possessed them all, he knew a great deal about the lives of the men who had written them, and he never spoke of them, both the books and the writers, without complete and, as it seemed to me, sympathetic tolerance. I remember, after the publication of the dialogue on "The New Reformation," in which I tried to answer Mr. Gladstone's review of Robert Elsmere by giving an outline of the history of religious inquiry and Biblical criticism from Lessing to Harnack, that I met Lord Acton one evening on the platform of Bletchley station, while we were both waiting for a train. He came up to me with a word of congratulation on the article. "I only wish," I said, "I had been able to consult you more about it." "No, no," he said. "Votre siège est faite! But I think you should have given more weight to so-and-so, and you have omitted so-and-so." Whereupon we walked up and down in the dusk, and he poured out that learning of his, in that way he had--so courteous, modest, thought-provoking--which made one both wonder at and love him.

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

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

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

M. Clémenceau was then at the height of his power as the maker and unmaker of French Ministries. It was he more than any other single man who had checkmated the Royalist reaction of 1877 and driven MacMahon from power; and in the year after we first met him he was to bring Jules Ferry to grief over L'affaire de Tongkin. He was then in the prime of life, and he is still (1917), thirty-three years later,^[1] one of the most vigorous of French political influences. Mr. Chamberlain, in 1884, was forty-eight, five years older than the French politician, and was at that time, of course, the leader of the Radicals, as distinguished from the old Liberals, both in the House of Commons and Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet.

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

[1] These lines were written shortly before, on the overthrow of M. Panlevé. M. Clémenceau, at the age of seventy-seven, became Prime Minister of France, at what may well be the deciding moment of French destiny (January, 1918).

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

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

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

À propos of some recent acting in London we began to talk of Molière, and presently, as though to shut out the stream of words opposite, which was damping conversation, the old poet--how the splendid brow and the white hair come back to me!--fell to quoting from the famous sonnet scene in "Le Misanthrope": first of all, Alceste's rage with Phillinte's flattery of the wretched verses declaimed by Oronte--"Morbleu! vil complaisant, vous louez des sottises"; then the admirable fencing between Oronte and Alceste, where Alceste at first tries to convey his contempt for Oronte's sonnet indirectly, and then bursts out:

breaking immediately into the vieille chanson, one line of which is worth all the affected stuff that Célimène and her circle admire.

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

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

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

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

Some fourteen years after his death I seemed to be brought very near in spirit to this great man, and--so far as a large portion of his work is concerned--great poet. We were in Venice. I was writing the Marriage of William Ashe, and, being in want of a Venetian setting for some of the scenes, I asked Mr. Pen Browning, who was, I think, at Asolo, if he would allow me access to the Palazzo Rezzonico, which was then uninhabited. He kindly gave me free leave to wander about it as I liked; and I went most days to sit and write in one of the rooms of the mezzanin. But when all chance of a tourist had gone, and the palace was shut, I used to walk all about it in the rich May light, finding it a little creepy! but endlessly attractive and interesting. There was a bust of Mr. Browning, with an inscription, in one of the rooms, and the place was haunted for me by his great ghost. It was there he had come to die, in the palace which he had given to his only son, whom he adored. The concierge pointed out to me what he believed to be the room in which he passed away. There was very little furniture in it. Everything was chill and deserted. I did not want to think of him there. I liked to imagine him strolling in the stately hall of the palace with its vast chandelier, its pillared sides and Tiepolo ceiling, breathing in the Italian spirit which through such long years had passed into his, and delighting, as a poet delights--not vulgarly, but with something of a child's adventurous pleasure--in the mellow magnificence of the beautiful old place.

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER III

THE PUBLICATION OF ROBERT ELSMERE

It was in 1885, after the completion of the Amiel translation, that I began Robert Elsmere, drawing the opening scenes from that expedition to Long Sleddale in the spring of that year which I have already mentioned. The book took me three years, nearly, to write. Again and again I found myself dreaming that the end was near and publication only a month or two away, only to sink back on the dismal conviction that the second, or the first, or the third volume--or some portion of each--must be rewritten, if I was to satisfy myself at all. I actually wrote the last words of the last chapter in March, 1887, and came out afterward, from my tiny writing-room at the end of the drawing-room, shaken with tears, and wondering, as I sat alone on the floor, by the fire, in the front room, what life would be like, now that the book was done! But it was nearly a year after that before it came out, a year of incessant hard work, of endless rewriting, and much nervous exhaustion. For all the work was saddened and made difficult by the fact that my mother's long illness was nearing its end and that I was torn incessantly between the claim of the book and the desire to be with her whenever I could possibly be spared from my home and children. Whenever there was a temporary improvement in her state, I would go down to Borough alone to work feverishly at revision, only to be drawn back to her side before long by worse news. And all the time London life went on as usual, and the strain at times was great.

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

The root difficulty was of course the dealing with such a subject in a novel at all. Yet I was determined to deal with it so, in order to reach the public. There were great precedents--Froude's Nemesis of Faith, Newman's Loss and Gain, Kingsley's Alton Locke--for the novel of religious or social propaganda. And it seemed to me that the novel was capable of holding and shaping real experience of any kind, as it affects the lives of men and women. It is the most elastic, the most adaptable of forms. No one has a right to set limits to its range. There is only one final test. Does it interest?--does it appeal? Personally, I should add another. Does it make in the long run for beauty? Beauty taken in the largest and most generous sense, and especially as including discord, the harsh and jangled notes which enrich the rest--but still Beauty--as Tolstoy was a master of it?

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

always supposing that the way chosen quickens the breath and stirs the heart of those who listen. But when the subject chosen has two aspects, the one intellectual and logical, the other poetic and emotional, the difficulty of holding the balance between them, so that neither overpowers the other, and interest is maintained, is admittedly great.

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

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

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

But in my case, what provoked the human and emotional crisis--what produced the story--was an intellectual process. Now the difficulty here in using suggestion--which is the master tool of the novelist--is much greater than in the case of ordinary experience. For the conscious use of the intellect on the accumulated data of life, through history and philosophy, is not ordinary experience. In its more advanced forms, it only applies to a small minority of the human race.

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

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

The problem, then, in intellectual poetry or fiction, is so to suggest the argument, that both the expert and the popular consciousness may feel its force, and to do this without overstepping the bounds of poetry or fiction; without turning either into mere ratiocination, and so losing the "simple, sensuous, passionate" element which is their true life.

It was this problem which made Robert Elsmere take three years to write, instead of one. Mr. Gladstone complained, in his famous review of it, that a majestic system which had taken centuries to elaborate, and gathered into itself the wisest brains of the ages, had gone down in a few weeks or months before the onslaught of the Squire's arguments; and that if the Squire's arguments were few, the orthodox arguments were fewer! The answer to the first part of the charge is that the well-taught schoolboy of to-day is necessarily wiser in a hundred respects than Sophocles or Plato, since he represents not himself, but the brainwork of a hundred generations since those great men lived. And as to the second, if Mr. Gladstone had seen the first redactions of the book--only if he had, I fear he would never have read it!--he would hardly have complained of lack of argument on either side, whatever he might have thought of its quality. Again and again I went on writing for hours, satisfying the logical sense in oneself, trying to put the arguments on both sides as fairly as possible, only to feel despairingly at the end that it must all come out. It might be decent controversy; but life, feeling, charm, humanity, had gone out of it; it had ceased, therefore, to be "making," to be literature.

So that in the long run there was no other method possible than suggestion--and, of course, selection!--as with all the rest of one's material. That being understood, what one had to aim at was so to use suggestion as to touch the two zones of thought--that of the scholar and that of what one may call the educated populace; who, without being scholars, were yet aware, more or less clearly, of what the scholars were doing. It is from these last that "atmosphere" and "diffusion" come; the atmosphere and diffusion which alone make wide penetration for a book illustrating an intellectual motive possible. I had to learn that, having read a great deal, I must as far as possible wipe out the traces of reading. All that could be done was to leave a few sign-posts as firmly planted as one could, so as to recall the real journey to those who already knew it, and, for the rest, to trust to the floating interest and passion surrounding a great controversy--the second religious battle of the nineteenth century--with which it had seemed to me, both in Oxford and in London, that the intellectual air was charged.

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

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

I have already told the story in the Introduction to the Library Edition of Robert Elsmere, and I will only run through it here as rapidly as possible, with a few fresh incidents and quotations. There was never any doubt at all of the book's fate, and I may repeat again that, before Mr. Gladstone's review of it, the three volumes were already in a third edition, the rush at all the libraries was in full course, and Matthew Arnold--so gay and kind, in those March weeks before his own sudden death!--had clearly foreseen the rising boom. "I shall take it with me to Bristol next week and get through it there, I hope [but he didn't achieve it!]. It is one of my regrets not to have known the Green of your dedication." And a week or two later he wrote an amusing letter to his sister, describing a country-house party at beautiful Wilton, Lord Pembroke's home near Salisbury, and the various stages in the book reached by the members of the party, including Mr. Goschen, who were all reading it, and all talking of it. I never, however, had any criticism of it from him, except of the first volume, which he liked. I doubt very much whether the second and third volumes would have appealed to him. My uncle was a Modernist long before the time. In Literature and Dogma he threw out in detail much of the argument suggested in Robert Elsmere, but to the end of his life he was a contented member of the Anglican Church, so far as attendance at her services was concerned, and belief in her mission of "edification" to the English people. He had little sympathy with people who "went out." Like Mr. Jowett, he would have liked to see the Church slowly reformed and "modernized" from within. So that with the main theme of my book--that a priest who doubts must depart--he could never have had full sympathy. And in the course of years--as I showed in a later novel written twenty-four years after Robert Elsmere--I feel that I have very much come to agree with him! These great national structures that we call churches are too precious for iconoclast handling, if any other method is possible. The strong assertion of individual liberty within them, as opposed to the attempt to break them down from without; that seems to me now the hopeful course. A few more heresy trials like those which sprang out of Essays and Reviews, or the persecution of Bishop Colenso, would let in fresh life and healing nowadays, as did those old stirrings of the waters. The first Modernist bishop who stays in his place forms a Modernist chapter and diocese around him, and fights the fight where he stands, will do more for liberty and faith in the Church, I now sadly believe, than those scores of brave "forgotten dead" who have gone out of her for conscience' sake, all these years.

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

Then all was shut out again. Through many days my mother asked constantly for news of the book, and smiled with a flicker of her old brightness when anything pleased her in a letter or review. But finally there came long hours when to think or speak of it seemed sacrilege. And on April 7th she died.

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

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

Could any remark have been more characteristic of that double life of his--the life of the politician and the life of the student--which kept him fresh and eager to the end of his days? Characteristic, too, of the amateurish element in all his historical and literary thinking. In dealing "with early Greek mythology, genealogy, and religion," says his old friend, Lord Bryce, Mr. Gladstone's theories "have been condemned by the unanimous voice of scholars as fantastic." Like his great contemporary, Newman--on whom a good deal of our conversation turned--he had no critical sense of evidence; and when he was writing on The Impregnable Rock of Scripture Lord Acton, who was staying at Hawarden at the time, ran after him in vain, with Welhausen or Kuenen under his arm, if haply he might persuade his host to read them.

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

But there the letter abruptly ended, and was never sent. I probably shrank from the added emotion of sending it, and I found it again the other day in a packet that had not been looked at for many years. I print it now as evidence of the effect that Mr. Gladstone's personality could produce on one forty years younger than himself, and in sharp rebellion at that time against his opinions and influence in two main fields--religion and politics.

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

To me his death at that moment was an irreparable personal loss. For it was only since our migration to London that we had been near enough to him to see much of him. My husband and he had become fast friends, and his visits to Russell Square, and our expeditions to Cobham, where he lived, in the pretty cottage beside the Mole, are marked in memory with a very white stone. The only drawback to the Cobham visits were the "dear, dear boys!"--i.e., the dachshunds, Max and Geist, who, however adorable in themselves, had no taste for visitors and no intention of letting such intruding creatures interfere with their possession of their master. One would go down to Cobham, eager to talk to "Uncle Matt" about a book or an article--covetous, at any rate, of some talk with him undisturbed. And it would all end in a breathless chase after Max, through field after field where the little wretch was harrying either sheep or cows, with the dear poet, hoarse with shouting, at his heels. The dogs were always in the party, talked to, caressed, or scolded exactly like spoiled children; and the cat of the house was almost equally dear. Once, at Harrow, the then ruling cat--a tom--broke his leg, and the house was in lamentation. The vet was called in, and hurt him horribly. Then Uncle Matt ran up to town, met Professor Huxley at the Athenaeum, and anxiously consulted him. "I'll go down with you," said Huxley. The two traveled back instanter to Harrow, and, while Uncle Matt held the cat, Huxley--who had begun life, let it be remembered, as surgeon to the Rattlesnake!--examined him, the two black heads together. There is a rumor that Charles Kingsley was included in the consultation. Finally the limb was put in splints and left to nature. All went well.

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

Among the letters that reached me on my uncle's death was one from Mr. Andrew Lang denouncing almost all the obituary notices of him. "Nobody seems to know that he was a poet!" cries Mr. Lang. But his poetic blossoming was really over with the 'sixties, and in the hubbub that arose round his critical and religious work--his attempts to drive "ideas" into the English mind, in the 'sixties and 'seventies--the main fact that he, with Browning and Tennyson, stood for English poetry, in the mid-nineteenth century, was often obscured and only slowly recognized. But it was recognized, and he himself had never any real doubt of it, from the moment when he sent the "Strayed Reveller" to my father in New Zealand in 1849, to those later times when his growing fame was in all men's ears. He writes to his sister in 1878:

But he had put it himself in poetry long before--this slow emergence above the tumult and the shouting of the stars that are to shine upon the next generation. Mr. Garnett, in the careful and learned notice of my uncle's life and work in the Dictionary of National Biography, says of his poetry that "most of it" is "immortal." This, indeed, is the great, the mystic word that rings in every poet's ear from the beginning. And there is scarcely any true poet who is not certain that sooner or later his work will "put on immortality." Matthew Arnold expressed, I think, his own secret faith, in the beautiful lines of his early poem, "The Bacchanalia--or the New Age":

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

And meanwhile letters poured in.

"I try to write upon you," wrote Mr. Gladstone; "wholly despair of satisfying myself--cannot quite tell whether to persevere or desist." Mr. Pater let me know that he was writing on it for the Guardian. "It is a chef d'oeuvre after its kind, and justifies the care you have devoted to it." "I see," said Andrew Lang, on April 30th, "that R.E. is running into as many editions as The Rights of Man by Tom Paine.... You know he is not my sort (at least unless you have a ghost, a murder, a duel, and some savages)." Burne-Jones wrote, with the fun and sweetness that made his letters a delight:

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

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

With May appeared Mr. Gladstone's review--"the refined criticism of Robert Elsmere"--"typical of his strong points," as Lord Bryce describes it--certainly one of the best things he ever wrote. I had no sooner read it than, after admiring it, I felt it must be answered. But it was desirable to take time to think how best to do it. At the moment my one desire was for rest and escape. At the beginning of June we took our eldest two children, aged eleven and thirteen, to Switzerland for the first time. Oh! the delight of Glion! with its hay-fields thick with miraculous spring flowers, the "peak of Jaman delicately tall," and that gorgeous pile of the Dent du Midi, bearing up the June heaven, to the east!--the joy of seeing the children's pleasure, and the relief of the mere physical rebound in the Swiss air, after the long months of strain and sorrow! My son, a slip of a person in knickerbockers, walked over the Simplon as though Alps were only made to be climbed by boys of eleven; and the Defile of Gondo, Domo d'Ossola, and beautiful Maggiore--they were all new and heavenly to each member of the party. Every year now there was growing on me the spell of Italy, the historic, the Saturnian land; and short as this wandering was, I remember, after it was over, and we turned homeward across the St. Gothard, leaving Italy behind us, a new sense as of a hidden treasure in life--of something sweet and inexhaustible always waiting for one's return; like a child's cake in a cupboard, or the gold and silver hoard of Odysseus that Athene helped him to hide in the Ithacan cave.

Then one day toward the end of June or the beginning of July my husband put down beside me a great brown paper package which the post had just brought. "There's America beginning!" he said, and we turned over the contents of the parcel in bewilderment. A kind American friend had made a collection for me of the reviews, sermons, and pamphlets that had been published so far about the book in the States, the correspondences, the odds and ends of all kinds, grave and gay. Every mail, moreover, began to bring me American letters from all parts of the States. "No book since Uncle Tom's Cabin has had so sudden and wide a diffusion among all classes of readers," wrote an American man of letters, "and I believe that no other book of equal seriousness ever had so quick a hearing. I have seen it in the hands of nursery-maids and of shopgirls behind the counters; of frivolous young women who read every novel that is talked about; of business men, professors, and students.... The proprietors of those large shops where anything--from a pin to a piano--can be bought, vie with each other in selling the cheapest edition. One pirate put his price even so low as four cents--two pence!" (Those, it will be remembered, were the days before Anglo-American copyright.)

Oliver Wendell Holmes, to whom I was personally a stranger, wrote to me just such a letter as one might have dreamed of from the "Autocrat": "One of my elderly friends of long ago called a story of mine you may possibly have heard of--Elsie Venner--'a medicated novel,' and such she said she was not in the habit of reading. I liked her expression; it titillated more than it tingled. Robert Elsmere I suppose we should all agree is 'a medicated novel'--but it is, I think, beyond question, the most effective and popular novel we have had since Uncle Tom's Cabin."

A man of science, apparently an agnostic, wrote, severely: "I regret the popularity of Robert Elsmere in this country. Our Western people are like sheep in such matters. They will not see that the book was written for a people with a State Church on its hands, so that a gross exaggeration of the importance of religion was necessary. It will revive interest in theology and retard the progress of rationalism."

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

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

Goldwin Smith

Exactly twenty years from the date of this letter I was in Toronto for the first time, and paid my homage to the veteran fighter who, living as he did amid a younger generation, hotly resenting his separatist and anti-Imperial views and his contempt for their own ideal of an equal and permanent union of free states under the British flag, was yet generously honored throughout the Dominion for his services to literature and education. He had been my father's friend at Oxford--where he succeeded to Arthur Stanley's tutorship at University College--and in Dublin. And when I first began to live in Oxford he was still Regius Professor, inhabiting a house very near that of my parents, which was well known to me afterward through many years as the house of the Max Müllers. I can remember the catastrophe it seemed to all his Oxford friends when he deserted England for America, despairing of the republic, as my father for a while in his youth had despaired, and sick of what seemed to him the forces of reaction in English life. I was eighteen when Endymion came out, with Dizzy's absurd attack on the "sedentary" professor who was also a "social parasite." It would be difficult to find two words in the English language more wholly and ludicrously inappropriate to Goldwin Smith; and the furious letter to the Times in which he denounced "the stingless insults of a coward" might well have been left unwritten. But I was living then among Oxford Liberals, and under the shadow of Goldwin Smith's great reputation as historian and pamphleteer, and I can see myself listening with an angry and sympathetic thrill to my father as he read the letter aloud. Then came the intervening years, in which one learned to look on Goldwin Smith as par excellence the great man "gone wrong," on that vital question, above all, of a sane Imperialism. It was difficult, after a time, to keep patience with the Englishman whose most passionate desire seemed to be to break up the Empire, to incorporate Canada in the United States, to relieve us of India, that "splendid curse," to detach from us Australia and South Africa, and thereby to wreck forever that vision of a banded commonwealth of free nations which for innumerable minds at home was fast becoming the romance of English politics.

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

Two years later he died, still confident of the future as he dreamt it. The "very rough times" that he foresaw have indeed come upon the world. But as to the rest, I wish he could have stood with me, eight years after this conversation, on the Scherpenberg Hill, held by a Canadian division, the approach to its summit guarded by Canadian sentries, and have looked out over that plain, where Canadian and British graves, lying in their thousands side by side, have forever sealed in blood the union of the elder and the younger nations.

As to the circulation of Robert Elsmere, I have never been able to ascertain the exact figures in America, but it is probable, from the data I have, that about half a million copies were sold in the States within a year of the book's publication. In England, an edition of 5,000 copies a fortnight was the rule for many months after the one-volume edition appeared; hundreds of thousands have been circulated in the sixpenny and sevenpenny editions; it has been translated into most foreign tongues; and it is still, after thirty years, a living book. Fifteen years after its publication, M. Brunetière, the well-known editor of the Revue des deux Mondes and leader--in some sort--of the Catholic reaction in France, began a negotiation with me for the appearance of a French translation of the whole or part of the book in his Revue. "But how," I asked him (we were sitting in his editor's sanctum, in the old house of the Rue de l'Université), "could it possibly suit you, or the Revue, to do anything of the kind? And now--after fifteen years?"

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

But now [said M. Brunetière] everything is different. Modernism has arisen. It is penetrating the Seminaries. People begin to talk of it in the streets. And Robert Elsmere is a study in Modernism--or at any rate it has so many affinities with Modernism, that now--the French public would be interested.

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

CHAPTER IV

FIRST VISITS TO ITALY

I have already mentioned in these papers that I was one of the examiners for the Spanish Taylorian scholarship at Oxford in 1883, and again in 1888. But perhaps before I go farther in these Recollections I may put down here--somewhat out of its place--a reminiscence connected with the first of these examinations, which seems to me worth recording. My Spanish colleague in 1883 was, as I have said, Don Pascual Gayangos, well known among students for his History of Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain, for his edition of the Correspondence of Cardinal Cisneros, and other historical work. À propos of the examination, he came to see me in Russell Square, and his talk about Spain revived in me, for the time, a fading passion. Señor Gayangos was born in 1809, so that in 1883 he was already an old man, though full of vigor and work. He told me the following story. Unfortunately, I took no contemporary note. I give it now as I remember it, and if any one who knew Don Pascual, or any student of Shakespearian lore, can correct and amplify it, no one will be better pleased than I. He said that as quite a young man, somewhere in the thirties of the last century, he was traveling through Spain to England, where, if I remember right, he had relations with Sir Thomas Phillipps, the ardent book and MSS. collector, so many of whose treasures are now in the great libraries of Europe. Sir Thomas employed him in the search for Spanish MSS. and rare Spanish books. I gathered that at the time to which the story refers Gayangos himself was not much acquainted with English or English literature. On his journey north from Madrid to Burgos, which was, of course, in the days before railways, he stopped at Valladolid for the night, and went to see an acquaintance of his, the newly appointed librarian of an aristocratic family having a "palace" in Valladolid. He found his friend in the old library of the old house, engaged in a work of destruction. On the floor of the long room was a large brasero in which the new librarian was burning up a quantity of what he described as useless and miscellaneous books, with a view to the rearrangement of the library. The old sheepskin or vellum bindings had been stripped off, while the printed matter was burning steadily and the room was full of smoke. There was a pile of old books whose turn had not yet come lying on the floor. Gayangos picked one up. It was a volume containing the plays of Mr. William Shakespeare, and published in 1623. In other words, it was a copy of the First Folio, and, as he declared to me, in excellent preservation. At that time he knew nothing about Shakespeare bibliography. He was struck, however, by the name of Shakespeare, and also by the fact that, according to an inscription inside it, the book had belonged to Count Gondomar, who had himself lived in Valladolid and collected a large library there. But his friend the librarian attached no importance to the book, and it was to go into the common holocaust with the rest. Gayangos noticed particularly, as he turned it over, that its margins were covered with notes in a seventeenth-century hand.

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

But just dream a little! Who sent the volume? Who wrote the thick marginal notes? An English correspondent of Gondomar's? Or Gondomar himself, who arrived in England three years before Shakespeare's death, was himself a man of letters, and had probably seen most of the plays?

In the few years which intervened between his withdrawal from England and his own death (1626), did he annotate the copy, storing there what he could remember of the English stage, and of "pleasant Willy" himself, perhaps, during his two sojourns in London? And was the book overlooked as English and of no importance in the transfer of Gondomar's own library, a hundred and sixty years after his death, to Charles III of Spain? And had it been sold, perhaps, for an old song, and with other remnants of Gondomar's books, just for their local interest, to some Valladolid grandee?

Above all, did those marginal notes which Gayangos had once idly looked through contain, perhaps--though the First Folio does not, of course, include the Poems--some faint key to the perennial Shakespeare mysteries--to Mr. W.H., and the "dark lady," and all the impenetrable story of the Sonnets?

If so, the gods themselves took care that the veil should not be rent. The secret remains.

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

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

I was already thinking of some reply both to Mr. Gladstone's article and to the attack on Robert Elsmere in the Quarterly; but it took me longer than I expected, and it was not till March in the following year (1889) that I published "The New Reformation," a Dialogue, in the Nineteenth Century. Into that dialogue I was able to throw the reading and the argument which had been of necessity excluded from the novel. Mr. Jowett was nervous about it, and came up on purpose from Oxford to persuade me, if he could, not to write it. His view--and that of Mr. Stopford Brooke--was that a work of art moves on one plane, and historical or critical controversy on another, and that a novel cannot be justified by an essay. But my defense was not an essay; I put it in the form of a conversation, and made it as living and varied as I could. By using this particular form, I was able to give the traditional as well as the critical case with some fullness, and I took great pains with both. From a recently published letter, I see that Lord Acton wrote to Mr. Gladstone that the rôle played by the orthodox anti-rational and wholly fanatical Newcome in the novel belonged "to the infancy of art," so little could he be taken as representing the orthodox case. I wonder! I had very good reasons for Newcome. There are plenty of Newcomes in the theological literature of the last century. To have provided a more rational and plausible representative of orthodoxy would, I think, have slackened the pace and chilled the atmosphere of the novel. After all, what really supplied "the other side" was the whole system of things in which the readers of the book lived and moved--the ideas in which they had been brought up, the books they read, the churches in which they worshiped, the sermons to which they listened every week. The novel challenged this system of things; but it was always there to make reply. It was the eternal sous-entendu of the story, and really gave the story all its force.

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

But with this analysis of what may be called the intellectual presuppositions of Robert Elsmere, my mind began to turn to what I believed to be the other side of the Greenian or Modernist message--i.e., that life itself, the ordinary human life and experience of every day as it has been slowly evolved through history, is the true source of religion, if man will but listen to the message in his own soul, to the voice of the Eternal Friend, speaking through Conscience, through Society, through Nature. Hence David Grieve, which was already in my mind within a few months of the publication of Robert Elsmere. We were at Borough Farm when the vision of it first came upon me. It was a summer evening of extraordinary beauty, and I had been wandering through the heather and the pine woods. "The country"--to quote an account written some years ago--"was drenched in sunset; white towering thunder-clouds descending upon and mingling with the crimson of the heath, the green stretches of bracken, the brown pools upon the common, everywhere a rosy suffusion, a majesty of light interweaving heaven and earth and transfiguring all dear familiar things--the old farm-house, the sand-pit where the children played and the sand-martins nested, the wood-pile by the farm door, the phloxes in the tumble-down farm-yard, the cottage down the lane." After months of rest, the fount of mental energy which had been exhausted in me the year before had filled again. I was eager to be at work, and this time on something "more hopeful, positive, and consoling" than the subject of the earlier book.

A visit to Derbyshire in the autumn gave me some of the setting for the story. Then I took the first chapters abroad during the winter to Valescure, and worked them in that fragrant, sunny spot, making acquaintance the while with a new and delightful friend, Emily Lawless, the author of Hurrish and Grania, and of some few poems that deserve, I think, a long life in English anthologies. She and her most racy, most entertaining mother, old Lady Cloncurry, were spending the winter at Valescure, and my young daughter and I found them a great resource. Lady Cloncurry, who was a member of an old Galway family, the Kirwans of Castle Hackett, seemed to me a typical specimen of those Anglo-Irish gentry who have been harshly called the "English garrison" in Ireland, but who were really in the last century the most natural and kindly link between the two countries. So far as I knew them, they loved both, with a strong preference for Ireland. All that English people instinctively resent in Irish character--its dreamy or laughing indifference toward the ordinary business virtues, thrift, prudence, tidiness, accuracy--they had been accustomed to, even where they had not been infected with it, from their childhood. They were not Catholics, most of them, and, so far as they were landlords, the part played by the priests in the Land League agitation tried them sore. But Miss Lawless's Grania is there to show how delicate and profound might be their sympathy with the lovely things in Irish Catholicism, and her best poems--"The Dirge of the Munster Forest" and "After Aughrim"--give a voice to Irish suffering and Irish patriotism which it would be hard to parallel in the Nationalist or rebel literature of recent years. The fact that they had both nations in their blood, both patriotisms in their hearts, infused a peculiar pathos often into their lives.

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

At Valescure we were within easy reach of Cannes, where the Actons were settled at the Villa Madeleine. The awkwardness of the trains prevented us from seeing as much of them as we had hoped; but I remember some pleasant walks and talks with Lord Acton, and especially the vehement advice he gave us, when my husband joined us and we started on a short, a very short, flight to Italy--for my husband had only a meager holiday from the Times: "Go to Rome! Never mind the journeys. Go! You will have three days there, you say? Well, to have walked through Rome, to have spent an hour in the Forum, another on the Palatine; to have seen the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter's; to have climbed the Janiculum and looked out over the Alban hills and the Campagna--and you can do all that in three days--well!--life is not the same afterward. If you only had an afternoon in Rome it would be well worth while. But three days!"

We laughed, took him at his word, and rushed on for Rome. And on the way we saw Perugia and Assisi for the first time, dipping into spring as soon as we got south of the Apennines, and tasting that intoxication of Italian sun in winter which turns northern heads. Of our week in Rome I remember only the first overwhelming impression--as of something infinitely old and pagan, through which Christianity moved about like a parvenu amid an elder generation of phantom presences, already gray with time long before Calvary--that, and the making of a few new friends. Of these friends, one, who was to hold a lasting place in my admiration and love through after-years, shall be mentioned here--Contessa Maria Pasolini.

Contessa Maria for some thirty years has played a great role in the social and intellectual history of Italy. She is the daughter of one of the leading business families of Milan, sister to the Marchese Ponti, who was for long Sindaco of that great city, and intimately concerned in its stormy industrial history. She married Count Pasolini, the head of an old aristocratic family with large estates in the Romagna, whose father was President of the first Senate of United Italy. It was in the neighborhood of the Pasolini estates that Garibaldi took refuge after 1848; and one may pass through them to reach the lonely hut in which Anita Garibaldi died.

Count Pasolini's father was also one of Pio Nono's Liberal Ministers, and the family, at the time, at any rate, of which I am speaking, combined Liberalism and sympathies for England with an enlightened and ardent Catholicism. I first made friends with Contessa Maria when we found her, on a cold February day, receiving in an apartment in the Piazza dei Santi Apostoli--rather gloomy rooms, to which her dark head and eyes, her extraordinary expressiveness and grace, and the vivacity of her talk, seemed to lend a positive brilliance and charm. In her I first came to know, with some intimacy, a cultivated Italian woman, and to realize what a strong kindred exists between the English and the Italian educated mind. Especially, I think, in the case of the educated women of both nations. I have often felt, in talking to an Italian woman friend, a similarity of standards, of traditions and instincts, which would take some explaining, if one came to think it out. Especially on the practical side of life, the side of what one may call the minor morals and judgments, which are often more important to friendship and understanding than the greater matters of the law. How an Italian lady manages her servants and brings up her children; her general attitude toward marriage, politics, books, social or economic questions--in all these fields she is, in some mysterious way, much nearer to the Englishwoman than the Frenchwoman is. Of course, these remarks do not apply to the small circle of "black" families in Italy, particularly in Rome, who still hold aloof from the Italian kingdom and its institutions. But the Liberal Catholic, man or woman, who is both patriotically Italian and sincerely religious, will discuss anything or anybody in heaven or earth, and just as tolerantly as would Lord Acton himself. They are cosmopolitans, and yet deep rooted in the Italian soil. Contessa Maria, for instance, was in 1889 still near the beginnings of what was to prove for twenty-five years the most interesting salon in Rome. Everybody met there. Grandees of all nations, ambassadors, ecclesiastics, men of literature, science, archeology, art, politicians, and diplomats--Contessa Pasolini was equal to them all, and her talk, rapid, fearless, picturesque, full of knowledge, yet without a hint of pedantry, gave a note of unity to a scene that could hardly have been more varied or, in less skilful hands, more full of jarring possibilities. But later on, when I knew her better, I saw her also with peasant folk, with the country people of the Campagna and the Alban hills. And here one realized the same ease, the same sympathy, the same instinctive and unerring success, as one might watch with delight on one of her "evenings" in the Palazzo Sciarra. When she was talking to a peasant woman on the Alban ridge, something broad and big and primitive seemed to come out in her, something of the Magna parens, the Saturnian land; but something, too, that our Englishwomen, who live in the country and care for their own people, also possess.

But I was to see much more of Contessa Maria and Roman society in later years, especially when we were at the Villa Barberini and I was writing Eleanor, in 1899. Now I will only recall a little saying of the Contessa's at our first meeting, which lodged itself in memory. She did not then talk English fluently, as she afterward came to do; but she was learning English, with her two boys, from a delightful English tutor, and evidently pondering English character and ways--"Ah, you English!"--I can see the white arm and hand, with its cigarette, waving in the darkness of the old Roman apartment; the broad brow, the smiling eyes, and glint of white teeth. "You English! Why don't you talk?--why won't you talk? If French people come here, there is no trouble. If I just tear up an envelope and throw down the pieces, they will talk about it a whole evening, and so well! But you English!--you begin, and then you stop; one must always start you again--always wind you up!"

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

The summer of 1889 was filled with an adventure to which I still look back with unalloyed delight, which provided me, moreover, with the setting and one of the main themes of Marcella. We were at that time half-way through the building of a house at Haslemere, which was to supersede Borough Farm. We had grown out of Borough and were for the moment houseless, so far as summer quarters were concerned. And for my work's sake, I felt that eagerness for new scenes and suggestions which is generally present, I think, in the story-teller of all shades. Suddenly, in a house-agent's catalogue, we came across an astonishing advertisement. Hampden House, on the Chiltern Hills, the ancestral home of John Hampden, of ship-money fame, was to let for the summer, and for a rent not beyond our powers. The new Lord Buckinghamshire, who had inherited it, was not then able to live in it. It had, indeed, as we knew, been let for a while, some years earlier, to our old friends, Sir Mountstuart and Lady Grant Duff, before his departure for the Governorship of Madras. The agents reported that it was scantily furnished, but quite habitable; and without more ado we took it! I have now before me the letter in which I reported our arrival, in mid-July, to my husband, detained in town by his Times work.

And what a place to wander in! After we left it, Hampden was restored, beautified, and refurnished. It is now, I have no doubt, a charming and comfortable country-house. But when we lived in it for three months--in its half-finished and tatterdemalion condition--it was Romance pure and simple. The old galleried hall, the bare rooms, the neglected pictures--among them the "Queen Elizabeth," presented to the owner of Hampden by the Queen herself after a visit; the gray walls of King John's garden, and just beyond it the little church where Hampden lies buried; the deserted library on the top floor, running along the beautiful garden-front, with books in it that might have belonged to the patriot himself, and a stately full-length portrait--painted about 1600--which stood up, torn and frameless, among lumber of various kinds, the portrait of a beautiful lady in a flowered dress, walking in an Elizabethan garden; the locked room, opened to us occasionally by the agent of the property, which contained some of the ancestral treasures of the house--the family Bible among them, with the births of John Hampden and his cousin, Oliver Cromwell, recorded on the same fly-leaf; the black cedars outside, and the great glade in front of the house, stretching downward for half a mile toward the ruined lodges, just visible from the windows--all this mingling of nature and history with the slightest, gentlest touch of pathos and decay, seen, too, under the golden light of a perfect summer, sank deep into mind and sense.

Whoever cares to turn to the first chapters of Marcella will find as much of Hampden as could be transferred to paper--Hampden as it was then--in the description of Mellor.

Our old and dear friend, Mrs. J.R. Green, the widow of the historian, and herself the most distinguished woman-historian of our time, joined us in the venture. But she and I both went to Hampden to work. I set up in one half-dismantled room, and she in another, with the eighteenth-century drawing-room between us. Here our books and papers soon made home. I was working at David Grieve; she, if I remember right, at the brilliant book on English Town Life she brought out in 1891. My husband came down to us for long week-ends, and as soon as we had provided ourselves with the absolute necessaries of life, visitors began to arrive: Professor and Mrs. Huxley; Sir Alfred Lyall; M. Jusserand, then Conseiller d'Ambassade under M. Waddington, now the French Ambassador to Washington; Mr. and Mrs. Lyulph Stanley, now Lord and Lady Sheffield; my first cousin, H. O. Arnold-Forster, afterward War Minister in Mr. Balfour's Cabinet, and his wife; Mrs. Graham Smith, Laura Lyttelton's sister, and many kinsfolk. In those days Hampden was six miles from the nearest railway station; the Great Central Railway which now passes through the valley below it was not built, and all round us stretched beechwoods and commons and lanes, untouched since the days of Roundhead and Cavalier, where the occasional sound of wood-cutters in the beech solitudes was often, through a long walk, the only hint of human life. What good walks and talks we had in those summer days! My sister had married Professor Huxley's eldest son, so that with him and his wife we were on terms always of the closest intimacy and affection. "Pater" and "Moo," as all their kith and kin and many of their friends called them, were the most racy of guests. He had been that year pursuing an animated controversy in the Nineteenth Century with Doctor Wace, now Dean of Canterbury, who had also--about a year before--belabored the author of Robert Elsmere in the Quarterly Review. The Professor and I naturally enjoyed dancing a little on our opponents--when there was none to make reply!--as we strolled about Hampden; but there was never a touch of bitterness in Huxley's nature, and there couldn't have been much in mine at that moment, life was so interesting, and its horizon so full of light and color! Of his wife, "Moo," who outlived him many years, how much one might say! In this very year, 1889, Huxley wrote to her from the Canaries, whither he had gone alone for his health:

They were indeed lovers to the end. He had waited and served for her eight years in his youth, and her sunny, affectionate nature, with its veins both of humor and of stoicism, gave her man of genius exactly what he wanted. She survived him for many years, living her own life at Eastbourne, climbing Beachy Head in all weathers, interested in everything, and writing poems of little or no technical merit, but raised occasionally by sheer intensity of feeling--about her husband--into something very near the real thing. I quote these lines from a privately printed volume she gave me:

As to our other guests, to what company would not Sir Alfred Lyall have added that touch of something provocative and challenging which draws men and women after it, like an Orpheus-music? I can see him sitting silent, his legs crossed, his white head bent, the corners of his mouth drooping, his eyes downcast, like some one spent and wearied, from whom all virtue had gone out. Then some one, a man he liked--but still oftener a woman--would approach him, and the whole figure would wake to life--a gentle, whimsical, melancholy life, yet possessed of a strange spell and pungency. Brooding, sad and deep, seemed to me to hold his inmost mind. The fatalism and dream of those Oriental religions to which he had given so much of his scholar's mind had touched him profoundly. His poems express it in mystical and somber verse, and his volumes of Asiatic Studies contain the intellectual analysis of that background of thought from which the poems spring.

Yet no one was shrewder, more acute, than Sir Alfred in dealing with the men and politics of the moment. He swore to no man's words, and one felt in him not only the first-rate administrator, as shown by his Indian career, but also the thinker's scorn for the mere party point of view. He was an excellent gossip, of a refined and subtle sort; he was the soul of honor; and there was that in his fragile and delicate personality which earned the warm affection of many friends. So gentle, so absent-minded, so tired he often seemed; and yet I could imagine those gray-blue eyes of Sir Alfred's answering inexorably to any public or patriotic call. He was a disillusioned spectator of the "great mundane movement," yet eternally interested in it; and the man who loves this poor human life of ours, without ever being fooled by it, at least after youth is past, has a rare place among us. We forgive his insight, because there is nothing in it Pharisaical. And the irony he uses on us we know well that he has long since sharpened on himself.

When I think of M. Jusserand playing tennis on the big lawn at Hampden, and determined to master it, like all else that was English, memory leads one back behind that pleasant scene to earlier days still. We first knew the future Ambassador as an official of the French Foreign Office, who spent much of his scanty holidays in a scholarly pursuit of English literature. In Russell Square we were close to the British Museum, where M. Jusserand, during his visits to London, was deep in Chaucerian and other problems, gathering the learning which he presently began to throw into a series of books on the English centuries from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Who introduced him to us I cannot remember, but during his work at the Museum he would drop in sometimes for luncheon or tea; so that we soon began to know him well. Then, later, he came to London as Conseiller d'Ambassade under M. Waddington, an office which he filled till he became French Minister to Denmark in 1900. Finally, in 1904, he was sent as French Ambassador to the United States, and there we found him in 1908, when we stayed for a delightful few days at the British Embassy with Mr. and Mrs. Bryce.

M. Jusserand

It has always been a question with me, which of two French friends is the more wonderful English scholar--M. Jusserand or André Chevrillon, Taine's nephew and literary executor, and himself one of the leaders of French letters; with whom, as with M. Jusserand, I may reckon now some thirty years of friendship. No one could say that M. Jusserand speaks our tongue exactly like an Englishman. He does much better. He uses it--always, of course, with perfect correctness and fluency--to express French ideas and French wits, in a way as nearly French as the foreign language will permit. The result is extraordinarily stimulating to our English wits. The slight differences both in accent and in phrase keep the ear attentive and alive. New shades emerge; old clichés are broken up. M. Chevrillon has much less accent, and his talk is more flowingly and convincingly English; for which, no doubt, a boyhood partly spent in England accounts. While for vivacity and ease there is little or nothing to choose.

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

M. Chevrillon took the Boer side in the South African war, and took it with passion. All the same, the friendship of both the diplomat and the man of letters for this country, based upon their knowledge of her, and warmly returned to them by many English friends, has been a real factor in the growth of that broad-based sympathy which we now call the Entente. M. Chevrillon's knowledge of us is really uncanny. He knows more than we know ourselves. And his last book about us--L'Angleterre et la Guerre--is not only photographically close to the facts, but full of a spiritual sympathy which is very moving to an English reader. Men of such high gifts are not easily multiplied in any country. But, looking to the future of Europe, the more that France and England--and America--can cultivate in their citizens some degree, at any rate, of that intimate understanding of a foreign nation which shines so conspicuously in the work of these two Frenchmen the safer will that future be.

CHAPTER V

AMALFI AND ROME. HAMPDEN AND MARCELLA

It was in November, 1891, that I finished David Grieve, after a long wrestle of more than three years. I was tired out, and we fled south for rest to Rome, Naples, Amalfi, and Ravello. The Cappucini Hotel at Amalfi, Madame Palumbo's inn at Ravello, remain with me as places of pure delight, shone on even in winter by a more than earthly sun.

Madame Palumbo was, as her many guests remember, an Englishwoman, and showed a special zeal in making English folk comfortable. And can one ever forget the sunrise over the Gulf of Salerno from the Ravello windows? It was December when we were there; yet nothing spoke of winter. From the inn, perched on a rocky point above the coast, one looked straight down for hundreds of feet, through lemon-groves and olive-gardens, to the blue water. Flaming over the mountains rose an unclouded sun, shining on the purple coast, with its innumerable rock-towns--"tot congesta manu praeruptis oppida saxis"--and sending broad paths over the "wine-dark" sea. Never, I think, have I felt the glory and beauty of the world more rapturously, more painfully--for there is pain in it!--than when one was standing alone on a December morning, at a window which seemed to make part of the precipitous rock itself, looking over that fairest of scenes. From Ravello we went back to Rome, and a short spell of its joys. What is it makes the peculiar pleasure of society in Rome? A number of elements, of course, enter in. The setting is incomparable; while the clashing of great world policies, represented by the diplomats, and of the main religious and Liberal forces of Europe, as embodied in the Papacy and modern Italy, kindles a warmth and animation in the social air which matches the clearness of the Roman day, when the bright spells of the winter weather arrive, and the omnipresent fountains of the Eternal City flash the January or February sun through its streets and piazzas. Ours, however, on this occasion, was only a brief stay. Again we saw Contessa Maria, this time in the stately setting of the Palazzo Sciarra; and Count Ugo Balzani, an old friend of ours and of the Creightons since Oxford days, historian and thinker, and, besides, one of the kindest and truest of men. But the figure, perhaps, which chiefly stands out in memory as connected with this short visit is that of Lord Dufferin, then our Ambassador in Rome. Was there ever a greater charmer than Lord Dufferin? In the sketch of the "Ambassador" in Eleanor, there are some points caught from the living Lord Dufferin, so closely, indeed, that before the book came out I sent him the proofs and asked his leave--which he gave at once, in one of the graceful little notes of which he was always master. For the diplomatic life and successes of Lord Dufferin are told in many official documents and in the biography of him by Sir Alfred Lyall; but the key to it all lay in cradle gifts that are hard to put into print.

In the first place, he was--even at sixty-five--wonderfully handsome. He had inherited the beauty, and also the humor and the grace, of his Sheridan ancestry. For his mother, as all the world knows, was Helen Sheridan, one of the three famous daughters of Tom Sheridan, the dramatist's only son. Mrs. Norton, the innocent heroine of the Melbourne divorce suit, was one of his aunts, and the "Queen of Beauty" at the Eglinton Tournament--then Lady Seymour, afterward Duchess of Somerset--was the other. His mother's memory was a living thing to him all his life; he published her letters and poems; and at Clandeboye, his Ulster home,--in "Helen's Tower"--he had formed a collection of memorials of her which he liked to show to those of whom he made friends. "You must come to Clandeboye and let me show you Helen's Tower," he would say, eagerly, and one would answer with hopeful vagueness. But for me the time never came. My personal recollections of him, apart from letters, are all connected with Rome, or Paris, whither he was transferred the year after we saw him at the Roman Embassy, in December, 1891.

It was, therefore, his last winter at Rome, and he had only been Ambassador there a little more than two years--since he ceased to be Viceroy of India in 1889. But he had already won everybody's affection. The social duties of the British Embassy in Rome--what with the Italian world in all its shades, the more or less permanent English colony, and the rush of English tourists through the winter and spring--seemed to me by no means easy. But Lady Dufferin's dignity and simplicity, and Lord Dufferin's temperament, carried them triumphantly through the tangle. Especially do I remember the informal Christmas dance to which we took, by the Ambassador's special wish, our young daughter of seventeen, who was not really "out." And no sooner was she in the room, shyly hiding behind her elders, than he discovered her. I can see him still, as he made her a smiling bow, his noble gray head and kind eyes, the blue ribbon crossing his chest. "You promised me a dance!" And so for her first waltz, in her first grown-up dance, D. was well provided, nervous as the moment was.

There is a passage in Eleanor which commemorates first this playful sympathy and tact which made Lord Dufferin so delightful to all ages, and next, an amusing conversation with him that I remember a year or two later in Paris. As to the first--Lucy Foster, the young American girl, is lunching at the Embassy.

The pretty bit of kindness to a very young girl, in 1892, which I have described, suggested part of this conversation; and I find the foundation of the rest in a letter written to my father from Paris in 1896.

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

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

But before I leave this second Roman visit of ours, let me recall one more figure in the entourage of the Ambassador--a young attaché, fair-haired, with all the good looks and good manners that belong to the post, and how much else of solid wit and capacity the years were then to find out. I had already seen Mr. Rennell Rodd in the Tennant circle, where he was everybody's friend. Soon we were to hear of him in Greece, whence he sent me various volumes of poems and an admirable study of the Morea, then in Egypt, and afterward in Sweden; while through all these arduous years of war (I write in 1917) he has been Ambassador in that same Rome where we saw him as second Secretary in 1891.

The appearance of David Grieve in February, 1892, four years after Robert Elsmere, was to me the occasion of very mixed feelings. The public took warmly to the novel from the beginning; in its English circulation and its length of life it has, I think, very nearly equaled Robert Elsmere; only after twenty-five years has it now fallen behind its predecessor. It has brought me correspondence from all parts and all classes, more intimate and striking, perhaps, than in the case of any other of my books. But of hostile reviewing at the moment of its appearance there was certainly no lack! It was violently attacked in the Scots Observer, then the organ of a group of Scotch Conservatives and literary men, with W.E. Henley at their head, and received unfriendly notice from Mrs. Oliphant in Blackwood. The two Quarterlies opened fire upon it, and many lesser guns. A letter from Mr. Meredith Townsend, the very able, outspoken, and wholly independent colleague of Mr. Hutton in the editorship of the Spectator, gave me some comfort under these onslaughts!

Walter Pater wrote, "It seems to me to have all the forces of its predecessor at work in it, with perhaps a mellower kind of art." Henry James reviewed it--so generously!--so subtly!--in the English Illustrated. Stopford Brooke and Bishop Creighton wrote to me with a warmth and emphasis that soon healed the wounds of the Scots Observer; and that the public was with them, and not with my castigators, was quickly visible from the wide success of the book.

Some of the most interesting letters that reached me about it were from men of affairs who were voracious readers, but not makers of books--such as Mr. Goschen, who "could stand an examination on it"; Sir James, afterward Lord Hannen, one of the Judges of the Parnell Commission; and Lord Derby, the Minister who seceded, with Lord Carnarvon, from Disraeli's Government in 1878. We had made acquaintance not long before with Lord Derby, through his niece, Lady Winifred Byng (now Lady Burghclere), to whom we had all lost our hearts--children and parents--at Lucerne in 1888. There are few things I regret more in relation to London social life than the short time allowed me by fate wherein to see something more of Lord Derby. If I remember right, we first met him at a small dinner-party at Lady Winifred's in 1891, and he died early in 1893. But he made a very great impression upon me, and, though he was generally thought to be awkward and shy in general society, in the conversations I remember with him nothing could have been more genial or more attractive than his manner. He had been at Rugby under my grandfather, which was a link to begin with; though he afterward went to Cambridge, and never showed, that I know of, any signs of the special Rugby influence which stamped men like Dean Stanley and Clough. And yet of the moral independence and activity which my grandfather prized and cultivated in his boys, there was certainly no lack in Lord Derby's career. For the greater part of his political life he was nominally a Conservative, yet the rank and file of his party only half trusted a mind trained by John Stuart Mill and perpetually brooding on social reform. As Lord Stanley, his close association and personal friendship with Disraeli during the Ministries and politics of the mid-nineteenth century have been well brought out in Mr. Buckle's last volume of the Disraeli Life. But the ultimate parting between himself and Dizzy was probably always inevitable. For his loathing of adventurous policies of all kinds, and of any increase whatever in the vast commitments of England, was sure at some point to bring him into conflict with the imagination or, as we may now call it, the prescience, of Disraeli. It was strange to remember, as one watched him at the dinner-table, that he had been offered the throne of Greece in 1862.

If he accepts the charge [wrote Dizzy to Mrs. Bridges Williams] I shall lose a powerful friend and colleague. It is a dazzling adventure for the House of Stanley, but they are not an imaginative race, and I fancy they will prefer Knowsley to the Parthenon, and Lancashire to the Attic plain. It is a privilege to live in this age of rapid and brilliant events. What an error to consider it an utilitarian age! It is one of infinite romance. Thrones tumble down and crowns are offered like a fairy-tale.

Sixteen years later came his famous resignation, in 1878, when the Fleet was ordered to the Dardanelles, and Lord Derby, as he had now become, then Foreign Secretary, refused to sanction a step that might lead to war. That, for him, was the end as far as Toryism was concerned. In 1880 he joined Mr. Gladstone, but only to separate from him on Home Rule in 1886; and when I first knew him, in 1891, he was leader of the Liberal Unionist peers in the House of Lords. A little later he became President of the great Labor Commission in 1892, and before he could see Gladstone's fresh defeat in 1893, he died.

Speculatively he was as open-minded as a reader and follower of Mill might be expected to be. He had been interested in Robert Elsmere, and the discussion of books and persons, to which it led him in conversation with me, showed him fully aware of the new forces abroad in literature and history. Especially interested, too, as to what Labor was going to make of Christianity, and well aware--how could he fail to be, as Chairman of that great, that epoch-making Commission of 1892?--of the advancing strength of organized labor on all horizons. He appeared to me, too, as a typical North-countryman--a son of Lancashire, proud of the great Lancashire towns, and thoroughly at home in the life of the Lancashire countryside. He could tell a story in dialect admirably. And I realized that he had thought much--in his balanced, reticent way--on matters in which I was then groping: how to humanize the relations between employer and employed, how to enrich and soften the life of the workman, how, in short, to break down the barrier between modern industrialism and the stored-up treasures--art, science, thought--of man's long history.

So that when David Grieve was finished I sent it to Lord Derby, not long after our first meeting, in no spirit of empty compliment, and I have always kept his letter in return as a memento of a remarkable personality. Some day I hope there may be a Memoir of him; for none has yet appeared. He had not the charm, the versatility, the easy classical culture, of his famous father--"the Rupert of debate." But with his great stature--he was six feet two--his square head, and strong, smooth-shaven face, he was noticeable everywhere. He was a childless widower when I first knew him, and made the impression of a lonely man, for all his busy political life and his vast estates. But he was particularly interesting to me as representing a type I have once or twice tried to draw--of the aristocrat standing between the old world, before railways and the first Reform Bill, which saw his birth, and the new world and new men of the later half of the century. He was traditionally with the old world; by conviction and conscience, I think, with the new; yet not sorry, probably, that he was to see no more than its threshold!

The year 1892, it will be remembered, was the first year of American copyright: and the great success of David Grieve in America, following on the extraordinary vogue there of Robert Elsmere, in its pirated editions, brought me largely increased literary receipts. It seemed that I was not destined, after all, to "ruin my publishers," as I had despondently foretold in a letter to my husband before the appearance of Robert Elsmere; but that, with regular work, I might look forward to a fairly steady income. We therefore felt justified in seizing an opportunity brought to our notice by an old friend who lived in the neighborhood, and migrating to a house north of London, in the real heart of Middle England. After leaving Borough Farm, we had built a house on a hill near Haslemere, looking south over the blue and purple Weald; but two years' residence had convinced me that Surrey was almost as populous as London, and that real solitude for literary work was not to be found there--at any rate, in that corner of it where we had chosen to build, and, also, while we were nursing our newly planted shrubberies of baby pines and rhododendrons, there was always in my mind, as I find from letters of the time, a discontented yearning for "an old house and old trees"! We found both at Stocks, whither we migrated in the summer of 1892. The little estate had then been recently inherited by Mrs. Grey, mother of Sir Edward Grey, now Lord Grey of Falloden. We were at first tenants of the house and grounds, but in 1896 we bought the small property from the Greys, and have now been for more than twenty years its happy possessors. The house lies on a high upland, under one of the last easterly spurs of the Chilterns. It was built in 1780 (we rebuilt it in 1908) in succession to a much older house of which a few fragments remain, and the village at its gates had changed hardly at all in the hundred years which preceded our arrival. A few new cottages had been built; more needed to be built; and two residents, intimately connected with the past of the village, had built houses just outside it. But villadom did not exist. The village was rich in old folk, in whom were stored the memories and traditions of its quiet past. The postmaster, "Johnny Dolt," who was nearing his eighties, was the universal referee on all local questions--rights of way, boundaries, village customs, and the like; and of some of the old women of the village, as they were twenty-five years ago, I have drawn as faithful a picture as I could in one or two chapters of Marcella.

But the new novel owed not only much of its scenery and setting, but also its main incident, to the new house. We first entered into negotiation for Stocks in January, 1892. In the preceding December two gamekeepers had been murdered on the Stocks property, in a field under a big wood, not three hundred yards from the house; and naturally the little community, as it lay in its rural quiet beneath its wooded hills, was still, when we first entered it, under the shock and excitement of the tragedy. We heard all the story on the spot, and then viewed it from another point of view--the sociopolitical--when we went down from London to stay at one of the neighboring country-houses, in February, and found the Home Secretary, Mr. Matthews, afterward Lord Llandaff, among the guests. The trial was over, the verdict given, and the two murderers were under sentence of death. But there was a strong agitation going on in favor of a reprieve; and what made the discussion of it, in this country-house party, particularly piquant was that the case, at that very moment, was a matter of close consultation between the judge and the Home Secretary. It was not easy, therefore, to talk of it in Mr. Matthews's presence. Voices dropped and groups dissolved when he appeared. Mr. Asquith, who succeeded Mr. Matthews that very year as Home Secretary, was also, if I remember right, of the party; and there was a good deal of rather hot discussion of the game laws, and of English landlordism in general.

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

For the New Brotherhood of Robert Elsmere had become in some sort a realized dream; so far as any dream can ever take to itself the practical garments of this puzzling world. To show that the faith of Green and Martineau and Stopford Brooke was a faith that would wear and work--to provide a home for the new learning of a New Reformation, and a practical outlet for its enthusiasm of humanity--were the chief aims in the minds of those of us who in 1890 founded the University Hall Settlement in London. I look back now with emotion on that astonishing experiment. The scheme had taken shape in my mind during the summer of 1889, and in the following year I was able to persuade Doctor Martineau, Mr. Stopford Brooke, my old friend Lord Carlisle, and a group of other religious Liberals, to take part in its realization. We held a crowded meeting in London, and an adequate subscription list was raised without difficulty. University Hall in Gordon Square was taken as a residence for young men, and was very soon filled. Continuous teaching by the best men available, from all the churches, on the history and philosophy of religion, was one half the scheme; the other half busied itself with an attempt to bring about some real contact between brain and manual workers. We took a little dingy hall in Marchmont Street, where the residents of the Hall started clubs and classes, Saturday mornings, for children and the like. The foundation of Toynbee Hall--the Universities Settlement--in East London, in memory of Arnold Toynbee, was then a fresh and striking fact in social history. A spirit of fraternization was in the air, an ardent wish to break down the local and geographical barriers that separated rich from poor, East End from West End. The new venture in which I was interested attached itself, therefore, to a growing movement. The work in Marchmont Street grew and prospered. Men and women of the working class found in it a real center of comradeship, and the residents at the Hall in Gordon Square, led by a remarkable man of deeply religious temper and Quaker origin, the late Mr. Alfred Robinson, devoted themselves in the evenings to a work marked by a very genuine and practical enthusiasm.

Soon it was evident that larger premises were wanted. It was in the days when Mr. Passmore Edwards was giving large sums to institutions of different kinds in London, but especially to the founding of public libraries. He began to haunt the shabby hall in Marchmont Street, and presently offered to build us a new hall there for classes and social gatherings. But the scheme grew and grew, in my mind as in his. And when the question of a site arose we were fortunate enough to interest the practical and generous mind of the chief ground landlord of Bloomsbury, the Duke of Bedford. With him I explored various sites in the neighborhood, and finally the Duke offered us a site in Tavistock Place, on most liberal terms, he himself contributing largely to the building, granting us a 999 years' lease, and returning us the ground rent.

And there the Settlement now stands, the most beautiful and commodious Settlement building in London, with a large garden behind it, made by the Duke out of various old private gardens, and lent to the Settlement for its various purposes. Mr. Passmore Edwards contributed £14,000 to its cost, and it bears his name. It was opened in 1898 by Lord Peel and Mr. Morley, and for twenty years it has been a center of social work and endeavor in St. Pancras. From it have sprung the Physically Defective Schools under the Education Authority, now so plentiful in London, and so frequent in our other large towns. The first school of the kind was opened at this Settlement in 1898; and the first school ambulance in London was given to us by Sir Thomas Barlow for our Cripple Children. The first Play Center in England began there in 1898; and the first Vacation School was held there in 1902.

During those twenty years the Settlement has played a large part in my life. We have had our failures and our successes; and the original idea has been much transformed with time. The Jowett Lectureship, still devoted to a religious or philosophical subject, forms a link with the religious lecturing of the past; but otherwise the Settlement, like the Master himself, stands for the liberal and spiritual life, without definitions or exclusions. Up to 1915 it was, like Toynbee Hall, a Settlement for University and professional men who gave their evenings to the work. Since 1915 it has been a Women's Settlement under a distinguished head--Miss Hilda Oakeley, M.A., formerly Warden of King's College for Women. It is now full of women residents and full of work. There is a Cripple School building belonging to the Settlement, to the East; our cripples still fill the Duke's garden with the shouts of their play; and hundreds of other children crowd into the building every evening in the winter, or sit under the plane-trees in summer. The charming hall of the Settlement is well attended every winter week by people to whom the beautiful music that the Settlement gives is a constant joy; the Library, dedicated to the memory of T. H. Green, has 400 members; the classes and popular lectures have been steadily held even during this devastating war; the Workers' Educational Association carry on their work under our roof; mothers bring their babies to the Infant Welfare Center in the afternoon; there are orchestral and choral classes, boys' clubs and girls' clubs. Only one club has closed down--the Men's Club, which occupied the top floor of the Invalid Children's School before the war. Their members are scattered over France, Salonika, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, and the Roll of Honor is a long one.

Twenty years! How clearly one sees the mistakes, the lost opportunities, of such an enterprise! But so much is certain--that the Settlement has been an element of happiness in many, many lives. It has had scores of devoted workers, in the past--men and women to whom the heart of its founder goes out in gratitude. And I cannot imagine a time when the spacious and beautiful house and garden, with all the activities that have a home there, will not be necessary and welcome to St. Pancras. I see it, in my dreams, at least, half a century hence, when all those who first learned from it and in it have gone their way, still serving "the future hour" of an England reborn. To two especially among the early friends of the Settlement let me turn back with grateful remembrance--George Howard, Lord Carlisle, whom I have already mentioned, and Stopford Brooke. Lord Carlisle was one of the most liberal and most modest of men, an artist himself, and the friend of artists. On a Sunday in Russell Square, when the drawing-room door opened to reveal his fine head and shy, kind eyes, one felt how well worth while it was to stay at home on Sunday afternoons! I find a little note from him in 1891, the year in which we left Russell Square to move westward, regretting the "interesting old house" "with which I associate you in my mind." He was not an easy talker, but his listening had the quality that makes others talk their best; while the sudden play of humor or sarcasm through the features that were no less strong than refined, and the impression throughout of a singularly upright and humane personality, made him a delightful companion. There were those who would gladly have seen him take a more prominent part in public life. Perhaps a certain natural indolence held him back; perhaps a wonderful fairness of mind which made him slow to judge, and abnormally sensitive to "the other side." It is well known that as a landlord he left the administration of his great estates in the north almost wholly to his wife, and that, except in the great matter of temperance, he and she differed in politics, Lady Carlisle--who was a Stanley of Alderley--going with Mr. Gladstone at the time of the Home Rule split, while Lord Carlisle joined the Liberal Unionists. Both took a public part, and the political differences of the parents were continued in their children. Only a very rare and selfless nature could have carried through so difficult a situation without lack of either dignity or sweetness. Lord Carlisle, in the late 'eighties and early 'nineties, when I knew him best, showed no want of either. The restrictions he laid upon his own life were perhaps made natural by the fact that he was first and foremost an artist by training and temperament, and that the ordinary occupations, rural, social, or political, of the great land-owning noble, had little or no attraction for him. In the years, at any rate, when I saw him often, I was drawn to him by our common interest in the liberalizing of religion, and by a common love of Italy and Italian art. I remember him once in the incomparable setting of Naworth; but more often in London, and in Stopford Brooke's company.

For he was an intimate friend and follower of Mr. Brooke's, and I came very early under the spell of that same strong and magnetic personality. While we were still at Oxford, through J.R.G. we made acquaintance with Mr. Brooke, and with the wife whose early death in 1879 left desolate one of the most affectionate of men. I remember well Mr. Brooke's last sermon in the University pulpit, before his secession, on grounds of what we should now call Modernism, from the Church of England. Mrs. Brooke, I think, was staying with us, while Mr. Brooke was at All Souls, and the strong individuality of both the husband and wife made a deep impression upon one who was then much more responsive and recipient than individual. The sermon was a great success; but it was almost Mr. Brooke's latest utterance within the Anglican Church. The following year came the news of Mrs. Brooke's mortal illness. During our short meeting in 1877 I had been greatly attracted by her, and the news filled me with unbearable pain. But I had not understood from it that the end itself was near, and I went out into our little garden, which was a mass of summer roses, and in a bewilderment of feeling gathered all I could find--a glorious medley of bloom--that they might surround her, if only for a day, with the beauty she loved. Next day, or the day after, she died; and that basket of roses, arriving in the house of death--belated, incongruous offering!--has stayed with me as the symbol of so much else that is too late in life, and of our human helplessness and futility in the face of sorrow.

After our move to London, my children and I went for a long time regularly to hear Mr. Brooke at Bedford Chapel. At the time, I often felt very critical of the sermons. Looking back, I cannot bring myself to say a critical word. If only one could still go and hear him! Where are the same gifts, the same magnetism, the same compelling personality to be found to-day, among religious leaders? I remember a sermon on Elijah and the priests of Baal, which for color and range, for modernness, combined with ethical force and power, remains with me as perhaps the best I ever heard. And then, the service. Prayers simplified, repetitions omitted, the Beatitudes instead of the Commandments, a dozen jarring, intolerable things left out; but for the rest, no needless break with association. And the relief and consolation of it! The simple Communion service, adapted very slightly from the Anglican rite, and administered by Mr. Brooke with a reverence, an ardor, a tenderness one can only think of with emotion, was an example of what could be done with our religious traditions, for those who want new bottles for new wine, if only the courage and the imagination were there.

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

On the threshold also of the Settlement's early history there stands the venerable figure of James Martineau--thinker and saint. For he was a member of the original Council, and his lectures on the Gospel of St. Luke, in the old "Elsmerian" hall, marked the best of what we tried to give in those first days. I knew Harriet Martineau in my childhood at Fox How. Well I remember going to tea with that tremendous woman when I was eight years old; sitting through a silent meal, in much awe of her cap, her strong face, her ear-trumpet; and then being taken away to a neighboring room by a kind niece, that I might not disturb her further. Once or twice, during my growing up, I saw her. She lived only a mile from Fox How, and was always on friendly terms with my people. Matthew Arnold had a true admiration for her--sturdy fighter that she was in Liberal causes. So had W.E. Forster; only he suffered a good deal at her hands, as she disapproved of the Education Bill, and contrived so to manage her trumpet when he came to see her as to take all the argument and give him all the listening! When my eldest child was born, a cot-blanket arrived, knitted by Miss Martineau's own hands--the busy hands (soon then to be at rest) that wrote the History of the Peace, Feats on the Fiord, the Settlers at Home, and those excellent biographical sketches of the politicians of the Reform and Corn Law days in the Daily News, which are still well worth reading.

Between Harriet Martineau and her brother James, as many people will remember, there arose an unhappy difference in middle life which was never mended or healed. I never heard him speak of her. His standards were high and severe, for all the sensitive delicacy of his long, distinguished face and visionary eyes; and neither he nor she was of the stuff that allows kinship to supersede conscience. He published a somewhat vehement criticism of a book in which she was part author, and she never forgave it. And although to me, in the University Hall venture, he was gentleness and courtesy itself, and though his presence seemed to hallow a room directly he entered it, one felt always that he was formidable. The prophet and the Puritan lay deep in him. Yet in his two famous volumes of Sermons there are tones of an exquisite tenderness and sweetness, together with harmonies of prose style, that remind me often how he loved music and how his beautiful white head might be seen at the Monday Popular Concerts, week after week, his thinker's brow thrown back to catch the finest shades of Joachim's playing.

The year after David Grieve appeared, Mr. Jowett died. His long letter to me on the book contained some characteristic passages, of which I quote the following:

At the end of the year we spent a weekend with him at Balliol, and that was my last sight of my dear old friend. The year 1893 was for me one of illness, and of hard work both in the organization of the new Settlement and in the writing of Marcella. But that doesn't reconcile me to the recollection of how little I knew of his failing health till, suddenly, in September the news reached me that he was lying dangerously ill in the house of Sir Robert Wright, in Surrey.

He lives indeed; and as we recede farther from him the originality and greatness of his character will become more and more clear to Oxford and to England. The men whom he trained are now in the full stream of politics and life. His pupils and friends are or have been everywhere, and they have borne, in whatever vocation, the influence of his mind or the mark of his friendship. Lord Lansdowne, Mr. Asquith, Lord Justice Bowen, Lord Coleridge, Lord Milner, Sir Robert Morier, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, Lord Goschen, Miss Nightingale, and a hundred others of the nation's leaders--amid profoundest difference, the memory of "the Master" has been for them a common and a felt bond. No other religious personality of the nineteenth century--unless it be that of Newman--has stood for so much. In his very contradictions and inconsistencies of thought he was the typical man of a time beset on all sides by new problems to which Jowett knew very well there was no intellectual answer; while through the passion of his faith in a Divine Life, which makes itself known to man, not in miracle or mystery, but through the channels of a common experience, he has been a kindling force in many hearts and minds, and those among the most important to England. Meanwhile, to these great matters the Jowettan oddities and idiosyncrasies added just that touch of laughter and surprise that makes a man loved by his own time and arrests the eye and ear of posterity.

CHAPTER VI

HELBECK OF BANNISDALE

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

Another old friend, one of the industrial leaders of the north, carried off half the proofs to read on his journey to Yorkshire.

Mr. Goschen wrote:

And dear Alfred Lyttelton wrote:

But there is no one letter in this old packet which moves me specially. It was on the 1st of March, 1894, that Mr. Gladstone said "Good-by" to his Cabinet in the Cabinet room at Downing Street, and a little later in the afternoon walked away for the last time from the House of Commons. No one who has read it will forget the telling of that episode, in Mr. Morley's biography, with what concentration, what dignity!--worthy alike of the subject and of the admirable man of letters--himself an eye-witness--who records it.

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

On this moving scene there followed what Mr. Gladstone himself described as the first period of comparative leisure he had ever known, extending to four and a half months. They were marked first by increasing blindness, then by an operation for cataract, and finally by a moderate return of sight. In July he notes that "during the last months of partial incapacity I have not written with my own hand probably so much as one letter a day." In this faded packet of mine lies one of these rare letters, written with his own hand--a full sheet--from Dollis Hill, on April 27th.

Then he describes a book--a novel--dealing with religious controversy, which he had lately been reading, in which every character embodying views opposed to those of the author "is exhibited as odious." With this he warmly contrasts the method and spirit of David Grieve, and then continues:

Eighty-five!--greatly crippled by influenza and blindness--yet "full of prospective work"! The following year, remembering Robert Elsmere days, and à propos of certain passages in his review of that book, I ventured to send him an Introduction I had contributed to my brother-in-law Leonard Huxley's translation of Hausrath's New Testament Times. This time the well-known handwriting is feebler and the old "fighter" is not roused. He puts discussion by, and turns instead to kind words about a near relative of my own who had been winning distinctions at Oxford.

But it was not till 1897, as he himself records, that the indomitable spirit so far yielded to these limitations as to resign--or rather contemplate resigning--the second great task of which he had spoken to me at Oxford, nine years before. "I have begun seriously to ask myself whether I shall ever be able to face--The Olympian Religion."

It was, I think, in the winter of 1895 that I saw him for the last time at our neighbors', the Rothschilds, at Tring Park. He was then full of animation and talk, mainly of things political, and, indeed, not long before he had addressed a meeting at Chester on the Turkish massacres in Armenia, and was still to address a large audience at Liverpool on the same subject--his last public appearance--a year later. When George Tressady appeared he sent me a message through Mrs. Drew that he feared George Tressady's Parliamentary conduct "was inconceivable in a man of honor"; and I was only comforted by the emphatic and laughing dissent of Lord Peel, to whom I repeated the verdict. "Nothing of the kind! But of course he was thinking of us--the Liberal Unionists."

Then came the last months when, amid a world's sympathy and reverence, the great life, in weariness and pain, wore to its end. The "lying in state" in Westminster Hall seemed to me ill arranged. But the burying remains with me as one of those perfect things, which only the Anglican Church at its best, in combination with the immemorial associations of English history, can achieve. After it, I wrote to my son:

But the impetus of memory has carried me on too fast. There are some other figures and scenes to be gathered from these years--1893-98--that may still interest this present day. Of the most varied kind! For, as I turn over letters and memoranda, a jumble of recollections passes through my mind. Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, on the one hand, a melancholy, kindly man, amid the splendors of Waddesden; a meeting of the Social Democratic Federation in a cellar in Lisson Grove; days of absorbing interest in the Jewish East End, and in sweaters' workshops, while George Tressady was in writing; a first visit to Mentmore while Lady Rosebery was alive; a talk with Lord Rosebery some time after her death, in a corner of a local ball-room, while Helbeck was shaping itself about the old Catholic families of England, which revealed to me yet another and unsuspected vein of knowledge in one of the best furnished of minds; the Asquith marriage in 1894; new acquaintances and experiences in Lancashire towns, again connected with George Tressady, and in which I was helped by that brilliant writer, worker, and fighter, Mrs. Sidney Webb; a nascent friendship with Sir William Harcourt, one of the most racy of all possible companions; happy evenings in the Tadema and Richmond studios with music and good talk; occasional meetings with and letters from "Pater," the dear and famous Professor, who, like my uncle, fought half the world and scarcely made an enemy; visits to Oxford and old friends--such are the scenes and persons that come back to me as I read old letters, while all through it ran the continual strain of hard literary work mingled with the new social and religious interests which the foundation of the Passmore Edwards Settlement had brought me.

This was written while Lord Rosebery was Prime Minister and Mr. Balfour, still free, until the following year, from the trammels of office, was finishing his brilliant Foundations of Belief, which came out in 1895. In acknowledging the copy which he sent me, I ventured to write some pages on behalf of certain arguments of the Higher Criticism which seemed to me to deserve a fuller treatment than Mr. Balfour had been willing to give them--in defense also of our English idealists, such as Green and Caird, in their relation to orthodoxy. A year or two earlier I find I had been breaking a lance on behalf of the same school of writers with a very different opponent. In the controversy between Professor Huxley and Doctor Wace, in 1889, which opened with the famous article on "The Gadarene Swine," the Professor had welcomed me as an ally, because of "The New Reformation," which appeared much about the same time; and the word of praise in which he compared my reply to Mr. Gladstone, to the work "of a strong housemaid brushing away cobwebs," gave me a fearful joy! I well remember a thrilling moment in the Russell Square drawing-room in 1889, when "Pater" and I were in full talk, he in his raciest and most amusing form, and suddenly the door opened, and "Doctor Wace" was announced--the opponent with whom at that moment he was grappling his hardest in the Nineteenth Century. Huxley gave me a merry look--and then how perfectly they both behaved! I really think the meeting was a pleasure to both of them, and when my old chief in the Dictionary of Christian Biography took his departure, Huxley found all kinds of pleasant personal things to say about him.

But the Professor and I were not always at one. Caird and Green--and, for other reasons, Martineau--were to me names "of great pith and moment," and Christian Theism was a reasonable faith. And Huxley, in controversy, was no more kind to my sacra than to other people's. Once I dared a mild remonstrance--in 1892--only to provoke one of his most vigorous replies:

A few more letters from him--racy, and living as himself--and then in 1895, just after his first article on the "Foundations of Belief," we heard with dismay of the illness which killed him. There was never a man more beloved--more deeply mourned.

The autumn of 1896 brought me a great loss in the death of an intimate friend, Lady Wemyss--as marked a personality in her own circle as was her indomitable husband, the famous Lord Elcho, of the Volunteer movement, on the bigger stage. It was at Balliol, at the Master's table, and in the early Oxford days, that we first made friends with Lord and Lady Wemyss, who were staying with the Master for the Sunday. I was sitting next to Lord Wemyss, and he presently discovered that I was absent-minded. And I found him so attractive and so human that I soon told him why. I had left a sick child at home, with a high temperature, and was fidgeting to get back to him.

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

Out came an envelope and a pencil. A message was sent round the dinner-table to Lady Wemyss, whose powerful dreaming face beside the Master lit up at once. The aconite was sent; the child's temperature went down; and, if I remember right, either one or both of his new medical advisers walked up to the Parks the next day to inquire for him. So began a friendship which for just twenty years, especially from about 1885 to 1896, meant a great deal to me.

How shall I describe Lady Wemyss? An unfriendly critic has recently allowed me the power of "interesting fashionable ladies in things of the mind." Was Lady Wemyss a "fashionable lady"? She was the wife, certainly, of a man of high rank and great possessions; but I met her first as a friend--a dear and intimate friend, as may be seen from his correspondence--of Mr. Jowett's; and Mr. Jowett was not very tolerant of "fashionable ladies." She was in reality a strong and very simple person, with a natural charm working through a very reserved and often harsh manner, like the charm of mountain places in spring. She was a Conservative, and I suppose an aristocrat, whatever that word may mean. She thought the Harcourt death-duties "terrible" because they broke up old families and old estates, and she had been brought up to think that both were useful. Yet I never knew anybody with a more instinctive passion for equality. This means that she was simply and deeply interested in all sorts of human beings and all sorts of human lots; also that, although she was often self-conscious, it was the self-consciousness one sees in the thoughtful and richly natured young, whose growth in thought or character has outrun their means of expression, and never mean or egotistical. Her deep voice; her fine, marked features; and the sudden play of humor, silent, self-restrained, yet most infectious to the bystander, that would lighten through them; her stately ways; and yet, withal, her childlike love of loving and being loved by the few to whom she gave her deepest affection--in some such phrases one tries to describe her; but they go a very little way.

I can see her now at the dinner-table at Gosford, sardonically watching a real "fashionable lady" who had arrived in the afternoon and was sitting next Lord Wemyss at the farther end--with a wonderful frizzled head, an infinitesimal waist sheathed in white muslin and blue ribbons, rouged cheeks, a marvelous concatenation of jewels, and a caressing, gesticulating manner meant, at fifty, to suggest the ways of "sweet and twenty." The frizzled head drew nearer and nearer to Lord Wemyss, the fingers flourished and pointed; and suddenly I heard Lady Wemyss's deep voice, meditatively amused, beside me:

"Her fingers will be in Frank's eyes soon!" Or again, I see her, stalled beneath the drawing-room table, on all-fours, by her imperious grandchildren, patiently playing "horse" or "cow," till her scandalized daughter-in-law discovered her and ran to her release. Or in her last illness, turning her noble head and faint, welcoming smile to the few friends that were admitted; and finally, in the splendid rest after death, when those of us who had not known her in youth could guess what the beauty of her youth had been.

She was an omnivorous and most intelligent reader, and a friend that never failed. Matthew Arnold was very fond of her, and she of him; Laura Lyttelton, who was nearly forty years her junior, loved her dearly and never felt the bar of years; the Master owed much to her affection, and gratefully acknowledged it. The Commonplace Book, privately printed after her death, showed the range of interests which had played upon her fresh and energetic mind. It was untrained, I suppose, compared to the woman graduate of to-day. But it was far less tired; and all its adventures were of its own seeking.

It was in 1896, not long after the appearance of George Tressady, that a conversation in a house on the outskirts of the Lakes suggested to me the main plot of Helbeck of Bannisdale. The talk turned on the fortunes of that interesting old place, Sizergh Castle, near Kendal, and of the Catholic family to whom it then still belonged, though mortgages and lack of pence were threatening imminently to submerge an ancient stock that had held it unbrokenly, from father to son, through many generations.

The relation between such a family--pinched and obscure, yet with its own proud record, and inherited consciousness of an unbroken loyalty to a once persecuted faith--and this modern world of ours struck me as an admirable subject for a novel. I thought about it next day, all through a long railway journey from Kendal to London, and by the time I reached Euston the plot of Helbeck of Bannisdale was more or less clear to me.

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

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

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

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

Thus began a happy and fruitful time. We managed to get warm in spite of a treacherous and tardy spring. Guests came to stay with us--Henry James, above all; the Creightons, he then in the first months of that remarkable London episcopate, which in four short years did so much to raise the name and fame of the Anglican Church in London, at least for the lay mind; the Neville Lytteltons, who had been since 1893 our summer neighbors at Stocks; Lord Lytton, then at Cambridge; the Sydney Buxtons; old Oxford friends, and many kinsfolk. The damson blossom along the hedgerows that makes of these northern vales in April a glistening network of white and green, the daffodils and violets, the lilies-of-the-valley in the Brigsteer woods came and went, the Helbeck made steady progress.

But we left Levens in May, and it took me another eight months to finish the book. Except perhaps in the case of Bessie Costrell, I was never more possessed by a subject, more shut in by it from the outer world. And, though its contemporary success was nothing like so great as that of most of my other books, the response it evoked, as my letters show, in those to whom the book appealed, was deep and passionate.

My first anxiety was as to my father, and after we had left England for abroad I was seized with misgivings lest certain passages in the talk of Doctor Friedland, who, it will perhaps be remembered, is made the spokesman in the book of certain points in the intellectual case against Catholicism, should wound or distress him. I, therefore, no sooner reached Italy than I sent for the proofs again, and worked at them as much as fatigue would let me, softening them, and, I think, improving them, too. Then we went on to Florence, and rest, coming home for the book's publication in June.

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

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

For the rest, I remember vividly the happy holiday of that summer at Stocks; the sense of having come through a great wrestle, and finding everything--my children, the garden, my little Huxley nephews, books and talk, the Settlement where we were just about to open our Cripple School, and all else in life, steeped in a special glamour. It faded soon, no doubt, "into the light of common day"; but if I shut my thoughts and eyes against the troubles of these dark hours of war, I can feel my way back into the "wind-warm space" and look into the faces that earth knows no more--my father, Leslie Stephen, Alfred Lyall, Mr. Goschen, Alfred Lyttelton, H. O. Arnold-Forster, my sister, Julia Huxley, my eldest brother--a vanished company!

And in the following year, to complete the story, I owed to Helbeck a striking and unexpected hour. A message reached me in November, 1898, to the effect that the Empress Frederick, who had just arrived at Windsor, admired the book and would like to see the writer of it.

A tragic figure at that moment--the Empress Frederick! That splendid Crown Prince, in his white uniform, whom we had seen at Schwalbach in 1872, had finished early in 1890 with his phantom reign and tortured life, and his son reigned in his stead. Bismarck, "the Englishwoman's" implacable enemy, had died some four months before I saw the Empress, after eight years' exclusion from power. The Empress herself was on the verge of the terrible illness which killed her two years later. To me her life and personality--or, rather, the little I knew of them--had always been very interesting. She had, of course, the reputation of being the ablest of her family, and the bitterness of her sudden and irreparable defeat at the hands of Fate and her son, in 1889-90, had often struck me as one of the grimmest stories in history. One incident in it, not, I think, very generally known, I happened to hear from an eye-witness of the scene, before 1898. It was as follows:

In a sense, it must have been a moment of triumph. But how tragic are all the implications of the story! It was in my mind as I traveled to Windsor on November 18, 1898. The following letter was written next day to one of my children:

And to my father I wrote:

Nineteen years ago! And two years later, after long suffering, like her husband, the last silence fell on this brave and stormy nature. Let us thank God for it as we look out upon Europe and see what her son has made of it.

CHAPTER VII

THE VILLA BARBERINI. HENRY JAMES

It was in the summer of 1898 that some suggestions gathered from the love-story of Châteaubriand and Madame de Beaumont, and jotted down on a sheet of note-paper, led to the writing of Eleanor. Madame de Beaumont's melancholy life came to an end in Rome, and the Roman setting imposed itself, so to speak, at once. But to write in Rome itself, played upon by all the influences of a place where the currents of life and thought, so far as those currents are political, historical, or artistic, seem to be running at double tides, would be, I knew, impossible, and we began to make inquiries for a place outside Rome, yet not too far away, where we might spend the spring. We tried to get an apartment at Frascati, but in vain. Then some friend suggested an apartment in the old Villa Barberini at Castel Gandolfo, well known to many an English and French diplomat, especially to the diplomat's wife and children, flying to the hills to escape the summer heat of Rome. We found by correspondence two kind little ladies living in Rome, who agreed to make all the preparations for us, find servants, and provide against a possibly cold spring to be spent in rooms meant only for villegiatura in the summer. We were to go early in March, and fires or stoves must be obtainable, if the weather pinched.

The little ladies did everything--engaged servants, and bargained with the Barberini Steward, but they could not bargain with the weather! On a certain March day when the snow lay thick on the olives, and all the furies were wailing round the Alban hills--we arrived. My husband, who had journeyed out with us to settle us in, and was then returning to his London work, was inclined to mocking prophecies that I should soon be back in Rome at a comfortable hotel. Oh, how cold it was that first night!--how dreary on the great stone staircase, and in the bare, comfortless rooms! We looked out over a gray storm-swept Campagna, to a distant line of surf-beaten coast; the kitchen was fifty-two steps below the dining-room; the Neapolitan cook seemed to us a most formidable gentleman, suggesting stilettos, and we sat down to our first meal wondering whether we could possibly stay it out.

And in one day we had made a home out of what seemed a desert. Books had been unpacked, flowers had been brought in, the stoves were made to burn, the hard chairs and sofas had been twisted and turned into something more human and sociable, and we had begun to realize that we were, after all, singularly fortunate mortals, put in possession for three months--at the most moderate of rents!--of as much Italian beauty, antiquity, and romance as any covetous soul could hope for--with Rome at our gates, and leisurely time for quiet work.

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

Roman history and antiquities, Italian art, Renaissance sculpture, the personalities and events of the Risorgimento, all these solid connaissances and many more, were to be recognized perpetually as rich elements in the general wealth of Mr. James's mind. That he had read immensely, observed immensely, talked immensely, became once more gradually and delightfully clear on this new field. That he spoke French to perfection was of course quickly evident to any one who had even a slight acquaintance with him. M. Bourget once gave me a wonderful illustration of it. He said that Mr. James was staying with himself and Madame Bourget at their villa at Hyeres, not long after the appearance of Kipling's "Seven Seas." M. Bourget, who by that time read and spoke English fluently, complained of Mr. Kipling's technicalities, and declared that he could not make head or tail of McAndrew's Hymn. Whereupon Mr. James took up the book and, standing by the fire, fronting his hosts, there and then put McAndrew's Hymn into vigorous idiomatic French--an extraordinary feat, as it seemed to M. Bourget. Something similar, it will be remembered, is told of Tennyson. "One evening," says F. T. Palgrave of the poet, "he read out, offhand, Pindar's great picture of the life of Heaven, in the Second Olympian, into pure modern prose splendidly lucid and musical." Let who will decide which tour de force was the more difficult.

But Mr. James was also very much at home in Italian, while in the literature, history, and art of both countries he moved with the well-earned sureness of foot of the student. Yet how little one ever thought of him as a student! That was the spell. He wore his learning--and in certain directions he was learned--"lightly, like a flower." It was to him not a burden to be carried, not a possession to be proud of, but merely something that made life more thrilling, more full of emotions and sensations--emotions and sensations which he was always eager, without a touch of pedantry, to share with other people. His knowledge was conveyed by suggestion, by the adroitest of hints and indirect approaches. He was politely certain, to begin with, that you knew it all; then to walk with you round and round the subject, turning it inside out, playing with it, making mock of it, and catching it again with a sudden grip, or a momentary flash of eloquence, seemed to be for the moment his business in life. How the thing emerged, after a few minutes, from the long involved sentences!--only involved because the impressions of a man of genius are so many, and the resources of speech so limited. This involution, this deliberation in attack, this slowness of approach toward a point which in the end was generally triumphantly rushed, always seemed to me more effective as Mr. James used it in speech than as he employed it--some of us would say, to excess--in a few of his latest books. For, in talk, his own living personality--his flashes of fun--of courtesy--of "chaff"--were always there, to do away with what, in the written word, became a difficult strain on attention.

I remember an amusing instance of it, when my daughter D----, who was housekeeping for us at Castel Gandolfo, asked his opinion as to how to deal with the Neapolitan cook, who had been anything but satisfactory, in the case of a luncheon-party of friends from Rome. It was decided to write a letter to the ex-bandit in the kitchen, at the bottom of the fifty-two steps, requesting him to do his best, and pointing out recent shortcomings. D----, whose Italian was then rudimentary, brought the letter to Mr. James, and he walked up and down the vast salone of the villa, striking his forehead, correcting and improvising. "A really nice pudding" was what we justly desired, since the Neapolitan genius for sweets is well known. Mr. James threw out half phrases--pursued them--improved upon them--withdrew them--till finally he rushed upon the magnificent bathos--"un dolce come si deve!"--which has ever since been the word with us for the tiptop thing.

With the country people he was simplicity and friendship itself. I recollect him in close talk with a brown-frocked, barefooted monk, coming from the monastery of Palazzuola on the farther side of the Alban lake, and how the super-subtle, supersensitive cosmopolitan found not the smallest difficulty in drawing out the peasant and getting at something real and vital in the ruder, simpler mind. And again, on a never-to-be-forgotten evening on the Nemi lake, when, on descending from Genzano to the strawberry-farm that now holds the site of the famous temple of Diana Nemorensis, we found a beautiful youth at the fattoria, who for a few pence undertook to show us the fragments that remain. Mr. James asked his name. "Aristodemo," said the boy, looking, as he spoke the Greek name, "like to a god in form and stature." Mr. James's face lit up, and he walked over the historic ground beside the lad, Aristodemo picking up for him fragments of terra-cotta from the furrows through which the plow had just passed, bits of the innumerable small figurines that used to crowd the temple walls as ex-votos, and are now mingled with the fragole in the rich alluvial earth. It was a wonderful evening; with a golden sun on the lake, on the wide stretches where the temple stood, and the niched wall where Lord Savile dug for treasure and found it; on the great ship timbers also, beside the lake, wreckage from Caligula's galleys, which still lie buried in the deepest depth of the water; on the rock of Nemi, and the fortress-like Orsini villa; on the Alban Mount itself, where it cut the clear sky. I presently came up with Mr. James and Aristodemo, who led us on serenely, a young Hermes in the transfiguring light. One almost looked for the winged feet and helmet of the messenger god! Mr. James paused--his eyes first on the boy, then on the surrounding scene. "Aristodemo!" he murmured, smiling, and more to himself than me, his voice caressing the word. "What a name! What a place!"

On another occasion I recall him in company with the well-known antiquary, Signer Lanciani, who came over to lunch, amusing us all by the combination of learning with le sport which he affected. Let me quote the account of it given by a girl of the party:

And I see still Mr. James's figure strolling along the terrace which roofed the crypto-porticus of the Roman villa, beside the professor--the short coat, the summer hat, the smooth-shaven, finely cut face, now alive with talk and laughter, now shrewdly, one might say coldly, observant; the face of a satirist--but so human!--so alive to all that underworld of destiny through which move the weaknesses of men and women. We were sorry indeed when he left us. But there were many other happy meetings to come through the sixteen years that remained--meetings at Stocks and in London; letters and talks that were landmarks in my literary life and in our friendship. Later on I shall quote from his Eleanor letter, the best, perhaps, of all his critical letters to me, though the Robert Elsmere letters, already published, run it hard. That, too, was followed by many more. But as I do not intend to give more than a general outline of the years that followed on 1900, I will record here the last time but one that I ever saw Henry James--a vision, an impression, which the retina of memory will surely keep to the end. It was at Grosvenor Place in the autumn of 1915, the second year of the war. How doubly close by then he had grown to all our hearts! His passionate sympathy for England and France, his English naturalization--a beau geste indeed, but so sincere, so moving--the pity and wrath that carried him to sit by wounded soldiers and made him put all literary work aside as something not worth doing, so that he might spend time and thought on helping the American ambulance in France--one must supply all this as the background of the scene.

It was a Sunday afternoon. Our London house had been let for a time, but we were in it again for a few weeks, drawn into the rushing tide of war-talk and war anxieties. The room was full when Henry James came in. I saw that he was in a stirred, excited mood, and the key to it was soon found. He began to repeat the conversation of an American envoy to Berlin--a well-known man--to whom he had just been listening. He described first the envoy's impression of the German leaders, political and military, of Berlin. "They seemed to him like men waiting in a room from which the air is being slowly exhausted. They know they can't win! It is only a question of how long, and how much damage they can do." The American further reported that after his formal business had been done with the Prussian Foreign Minister, the Prussian, relaxing his whole attitude and offering a cigarette, said, "Now then, let me talk to you frankly, as man to man!"--and began a bitter attack on the attitude of President Wilson. Colonel---- listened, and when the outburst was done, said: "Very well! Then I, too, will speak frankly. I have known President Wilson for many years. He is a very strong man, physically and morally. You can neither frighten him nor bluff him--"

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

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

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

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

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

For that was indeed true of Henry James as of Wordsworth. The "wonder and bloom," no less than the ugly or heartbreaking things, which, like the disfiguring rags of old Laertes, hide them from us--he could weave them all, with an untiring hand, into the many-colored web of his art. Olive Chancellor, Madame Mauve, Milly, in The Wings of a Dove--the most exquisite, in some ways, of all his women--Roderick Hudson, St. George, the woman doctor in the Bostonians, the French family in the Reverberation, Brooksmith--and innumerable others--it was the wealth and facility of it all that was so amazing! There is enough observation of character in a chapter of the Bostonians, a story he thought little of, and did not include in his collected edition, to shame a Wells novel of the newer sort, with its floods of clever, half-considered journalism in the guise of conversation, hiding an essential poverty of creation. Ann Veronica and the New Machiavelli, and several other tales by the same writer, set practically the same scene, and handle the same characters under different names. Of an art so false and confused Henry James could never have been capable. His people, his situations, have the sharp separateness--and something of the inexhaustibleness--of nature, which does not mix her molds.

As to method, naturally I often discussed with him some of the difficult problems of presentation. The posthumous sketches of work in progress, published since his death, show how he delighted in these problems, in their very difficulties, in their endless opportunities. As he often said to me, he could never read a novel that interested him without taking it mentally to pieces and rewriting it in his own way. Some of his letters to me are brilliant examples of this habit of his. Technique, presentation, were then immensely important to him; important as they never could have been to Tolstoy, who probably thought very little consciously about them. Mr. James, as we all know, thought a great deal about them--sometimes, I venture to think, too much. In The Wings of a Dove, for instance, a subject full of beauty and tragedy is almost spoiled by an artificial technique, which is responsible for a scene on which, as it seems to me, the whole illusion of the book is shattered. The conversation in the Venice apartment where the two fiancé's--one of whom, at least, the man, is commended to our sympathy as a decent and probable human being--make their cynical bargain in the very presence of the dying Milly, for whose money they are plotting, is in some ways a tour de force of construction. It is the central point on which many threads converge and from which many depart. But to my mind, as I have said, it invalidates the story. Mr. James is here writing as a virtuoso, and not as the great artist we know him to be. And the same, I think, is true of The Golden Bowl. That again is a wonderful exercise in virtuosity; but a score of his slighter sketches seem to me infinitely nearer to the truth and vitality of great art. The book in which perhaps technique and life are most perfectly blended--at any rate, among the later novels--is The Ambassador. There, the skill with which a deeply interesting subject is focused from many points of view, but always with the fascinating unity given to it, both by the personality of the "Ambassador" and by the mystery to which every character in the book is related, is kept in its place, the servant, not the master, of the theme. And the climax--which is the river scene, when the "Ambassador" penetrates at last the long-kept secret of the lovers--is as right as it is surprising, and sinks away through admirable modulations to the necessary close. And what beautiful things in the course of the handling!--the old French Academician and his garden, on the rive gauche, for example; or the summer afternoon on the upper Seine, with its pleasure-boats, and the red parasol which finally tells all--a picture drawn with the sparkle and truth of a Daubigny, only the better to bring out the unwelcome fact which is its center. The Ambassador is the masterpiece of Mr. James's later work and manner, just as The Portrait of a Lady is the masterpiece of the earlier.

And the whole?--his final place?--when the stars of his generation rise into their place above the spent field? I, at least, have no doubt whatever about his security of fame; though very possibly he may be no more generally read in the time to come than are most of the other great masters of literature. Personally, I regret that, from What Maisie Knew onward, he adopted the method of dictation. A mind so teeming, and an art so flexible, were surely the better for the slight curb imposed by the physical toil of writing. I remember how and when we first discussed the pros and cons of dictation, on the fell above Cartmel Chapel, when he was with us at Levens in 1887. He was then enchanted by the endless vistas of work and achievement which the new method seemed to open out. And indeed it is plain that he produced more with it than he could have produced without it. Also, that in the use of dictation, as in everything else, he showed himself the extraordinary craftsman that he was, to whom all difficulty was a challenge, and the conquest of it a delight. Still, the diffuseness and over-elaboration which were the natural snares of his astonishing gifts were encouraged rather than checked by the new method; and one is jealous of anything whatever that may tend to stand between him and the unstinted pleasure of those to come after.

But when these small cavils are done, one returns in delight and wonder to the accomplished work. To the wealth of it, above all--the deep draughts from human life that it represents. It is true indeed that there are large tracts of modern existence which Mr. James scarcely touches, the peasant life, the industrial life, the small-trading life, the political life; though it is clear that he divined them all, enough, at least, for his purposes. But in his vast, indeterminate range of busy or leisured folk, men and women with breeding and without it, backed with ancestors or merely the active "sons of their works," young girls and youths and children, he is a master indeed, and there is scarcely anything in human feeling, normal or strange, that he cannot describe or suggest. If he is without passion, as some are ready to declare, so are Stendhal and Turguénieff, and half the great masters of the novel; and if he seems sometimes to evade the tragic or rapturous moments, it is perhaps only that he may make his reader his co-partner, that he may evoke from us that heat of sympathy and intelligence which supplies the necessary atmosphere for the subtler and greater kinds of art.

And all through, the dominating fact is that it is "Henry James" speaking--Henry James, with whose delicate, ironic mind and most human heart we are in contact. There is much that can be learned in fiction; the resources of mere imitation, which we are pleased to call realism, are endless; we see them in scores of modern books. But at the root of every book is the personality of the man who wrote it. And in the end, that decides.

CHAPTER VIII

ROMAN FRIENDS. ELEANOR

The spring of the following year (1900) saw us again in Rome. We spent our April fortnight there, of which I specially remember some amusing hours with Sir William Harcourt. I see myself, for instance, as a rather nervous tourist in his wake and that of the very determined wife of a young diplomat, storming the Vatican library at an hour when a bland custode assured us firmly it was not open to visitors. But Sir William's great height and bulk, aided by his pretty companion's self-will, simply carried us through the gates by their natural momentum. Father Ehrle was sent for and came, and we spent a triumphant and delightful hour. After all, one is not an ex-British Cabinet Minister for nothing. Sir William was perfectly civil to everybody, with a blinking smile like that of the Cheshire cat; but nothing stopped him. I laugh still at the remembrance. On the way home it was wet, and he and I shared a legno. I remember we talked of Mr. Chamberlain, with whom at that moment--May, 1899--Sir William was not in love; and of Lord Hartington. "Hartington came to me one day when we were both serving under Mr. G., and said to me in a temper, 'I wish I could get Gladstone to answer letters.' 'My dear fellow, he always answers letters.' 'Well, I have been trying to do something and I can't get a word out of him.' 'What have you been trying to do?' 'Well, to tell the truth, I've been trying to make a bishop.' 'Have you? Not much in your line, I should think. Now if it had been something about a horse--' 'Don't be absurd. He would have made a very good bishop. C---- and S---- [naming two well-known Liberals] told me I must--so I wrote--- and not a word! Very uncivil, I call it.' 'Who was it?' 'Oh, I can't remember. Let me think. Oh yes, it was a man with a double name--Llewellyn-Davies.' Sir William, with a shout of laughter, 'Why, it took me five years to get him made a Canon!'"

The following year I sent him Eleanor, as a reminder of our meeting in Rome, and he wrote:

Let me detach a few other figures from a gay and crowded time, the ever-delightful and indefatigable Boni--Commendatore Boni--for instance. To hear him talk in the Forum or hold forth at a small gathering of friends on the problems of the earliest Italian races, and the causes that met in the founding and growth of Rome, was to understand how no scholar or archeologist can be quite first-rate who is not also something of a poet. The sleepy blue eyes, so suddenly alive; the apparently languid manner which was the natural defense against the outer world of a man all compact of imagination and sleepless energy; the touch in him of "the imperishable child," combined with the brooding intensity of the explorer who is always guessing at the next riddle; the fun, simplicity, bonhomie he showed with those who knew him well--all these are vividly present to me.

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

When we met Monseigneur Duchesne at the house of Count Ugo Balzani, or in the drawing-room of the French Embassy, all that showed, at first, was the witty ecclesiastic of the old school, an abbe of the eighteenth century, fin, shrewd, well versed in men and affairs, and capable of throwing an infinity of meaning into the inflection of a word or the lift of an eyebrow. I remember listening to an account by him of certain ceremonies in the catacombs in which he had taken part, in the train of an Ultramontane Cardinal whom he particularly disliked. He himself had preached the sermon. A member of the party said, "I hear your audience were greatly moved, Monsignore." Duchesne bowed, with just a touch of irony. Then some one who knew the Cardinal well and the relation between him and Duchesne, said, with malice prepense, "Was his Eminence moved, Monsignore?" Duchesne looked up and shook off the end of his cigarette. "Non, Monsieur," he said, dryly, "his Eminence was not moved--oh, not at all!" A ripple of laughter went round the group which had heard the question. For a second, Duchesne's eyes laughed, too, and were then as impenetrable as before. My last remembrance of him is as the center of a small party in one of the famous rooms of the Palazzo Borghese which were painted by the Caracci, this time in a more serious and communicative mood, so that one realized in him more clearly the cosmopolitan and liberal scholar, whose work on the early Papacy, and the origins of Christianity in Rome, is admired and used by men of all faiths and none. Shortly afterward, a Roman friend of ours, an Englishman who knew Monseigneur Duchesne well, described to me the impressions of an English Catholic who had gone with him to Egypt on some learned mission, and had been thrown for a time into relations of intimacy with him. My friend reported the touch of astonishment in the Englishman's mind, as he became aware of the religious passion in his companion, the devotion of his daily mass, the rigor and simplicity of his personal life; and we both agreed that as long as Catholicism could produce such types, men at once so daring and so devout, so free, and yet so penetrated with--so steeped in--the immemorial life of Catholicism, the Roman Church was not likely to perish out of Europe.

Let me, however, contrast with Monseigneur Duchesne another Catholic personality--that of Cardinal Vaughan. I remember being asked to join a small group of people who were to meet Cardinal Vaughan on the steps of St. Peter's, and to go with him, and Canon Oakley, an English convert to Catholicism, through the famous crypt and its monuments. We stood for some twenty minutes outside St. Peter's, while Cardinal Vaughan, in the manner of a cicerone reeling off his task, gave us in extenso the legendary stories of St. Peter's and St. Paul's martyrdoms. Not a touch of criticism, of knowledge, of insight--a childish tale, told by a man who had never asked himself for a moment whether he really believed it. I stood silently by him, inwardly comparing the performance with certain pages by the Abbe Duchesne, which I had just been reading. Then we descended to the crypt, the Cardinal first kneeling at the statue of St. Peter. The crypt, as every one knows, is full of fragments from Christian antiquity, sarcophagi of early Popes, indications of the structures that preceded the present building, fragments from papal tombs, and so on. But it was quite useless to ask the Cardinal for an explanation or a date. He knew nothing, and he had never cared to know. Again and again, I thought, as we passed some shrine or sarcophagus bearing a name or names that sent a thrill through one's historical sense--"If only J.R. Green were here!--how these dead bones would live!" But the agnostic historian was in his grave, and the Prince of the Roman Church passed ignorantly and heedlessly by.

A little while before, I had sat beside the Cardinal at a luncheon-party, where the case of Doctor Schell, the Rector of the Catholic University of Würzburg, who had published a book condemned by the Congregation of the Index, came up for discussion. Doctor Schell's book, Catholicismus und Fortschritt, was a plea on behalf of the Catholic Universities of Bavaria against the Jesuit seminaries which threatened to supplant them; and he had shown with striking clearness the disastrous results which the gradual narrowing of Catholic education had had on the Catholic culture of Bavaria. The Jesuit influence at Rome had procured the condemnation of the book. Doctor Schell at first submitted; then, just before the luncheon-party at which I was present, withdrew his submission.

I saw the news given to the Cardinal. He shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, poor fellow!" he said. "Poor fellow!" It was not said unkindly, rather with a kind of easy pity; but the recollection came back to me in the crypt of St. Peter's, and I seemed to see the man who could not shut his ear to knowledge and history struggling in the grip of men like the Cardinal, who knew no history.

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

So the full weeks passed on. Half Eleanor had been written, and in June we turned homeward. But before then, one visitor came to the Villa Barberini in our last weeks there, who brought with him, for myself, a special and peculiar joy. My dear father, with his second wife, arrived to spend a week with us. Never before, throughout all his ardent Catholic life, had it been possible for him to tread the streets of Rome or kneel in St. Peter's. At last, the year before his death, he was to climb the Janiculum, and to look out over the city and the plain whence Europe received her civilization and the vast system of the Catholic Church. He felt as a Catholic; but hardly less as a scholar, one to whom Horace and Virgil had been familiar from his boyhood, the greater portion of them known by heart, to a degree which is not common now. I remember well that one bright May morning at Castle Gandolfo, he vanished from the villa, and presently, after some hours, reappeared with shining eyes.

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

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

As to this, a personal experience, even from one who in Greek literature is only a "proselyte of the gate," may not be without interest. I shall never forget the first time, when, in middle life, I read in the Greek, so as to understand and enjoy, the "Agamemnon" of Æschylus. The feeling of sheer amazement at the range and power of human thought--and at such a date in history--which a leisurely and careful reading of that play awakened in me, left deep marks behind. It was as though for me, thenceforward, the human intellect had been suddenly related, much more clearly than ever before, to an absolute, ineffable source, "not itself." So that, in realizing the greatness of the mind of Æschylus, the creative Mind from which it sprang had in some new and powerful way touched my own; with both new light on the human Past, and mysterious promise for the Future. Now, for many years, the daily reading of Greek and Latin has been not only a pleasure, but the only continuous bit of mental discipline I have been able to keep up.

I do not believe this will seem exaggerated to those on whom Greek poetry and life have really worked. My father, or the Master, or Matthew Arnold, had any amateur spoken in similar fashion to them, would have smiled, but only as those do who are in secure possession of some precious thing, on the eagerness of the novice who has just laid a precarious hold upon it.

At any rate, as I look back upon my father's life of constant labor and many baffled hopes, there are at least two bright lights upon the scene. He had the comfort of religious faith, and the double joy of the scholar and of the enthusiast for letters. He would not have bartered these great things, these seeming phantoms--

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

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

I could not but feel, indeed, that the book had given great pleasure to those I might well wish to please. My old friend, Mr. Frederic Harrison, wrote to me:--"I have read it all through with great attention and delight, and have returned to it again and again.... I am quite sure that it is the most finished and artistic of all your books and one of the most subtle and graceful things in all our modern fiction." And Charles Eliot Norton's letter from Shady Hill, the letter of one who never praised perfunctorily or insincerely, made me glad:

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

It was during our stay on the Alban hills that I first became conscious in myself, after a good many springs spent in Italy, of a deep and passionate sympathy for the modern Italian State and people; a sympathy widely different from that common temper in the European traveler which regards Italy as the European playground, picture-gallery, and curiosity-shop, and grudges the smallest encroachment by the needs of the new nation on the picturesque ruin of the past. Italy in 1899 was passing through a period of humiliation and unrest. The defeats of the luckless Erythrean expedition were still hot in Italian memory. The extreme Catholic party at home, the sentimental Catholic tourist from abroad, were equally contemptuous and critical; and I was often indignantly aware of a tone which seemed to me ungenerous and unjust toward the struggling Italian State, on the part of those who had really most cause to be grateful for all that the youngest--and oldest--of European Powers had done in the forty years since 1860 to furnish itself with the necessary equipment, moral, legal, and material, of a modern democracy.

This vein of feeling finds expression in Eleanor. Manisty represents the scornful dilettante, the impatient accuser of an Italy he does not attempt to understand; while the American Lucy, on the other side draws from her New England tradition a glowing sympathy for the Risorgimento and its fruits, for the efforts and sacrifices from which modern Italy arose, that refuses to be chilled by the passing corruptions and scandals of the new régime. Her influence prevails and Manisty recants. He spends six solitary weeks wandering through middle Italy, in search of the fugitives--Eleanor and Lucy--who have escaped him--and at the end of it he sees the old, old country and her people with new eyes--which are Lucy's eyes.

In this mood it was that, when the book came out in the autumn of 1900, I prefixed to it the dedication--"To Italy, the beloved and beautiful, Instructress of our past, Delight of our present, Comrade of our future, the heart of an Englishwoman offers this book."

"Comrade of our future." As one looks out to-day upon the Italian fighting-line, where English troops are interwoven with those of Italy and France for the defense of the Lombard and Venetian plain against the attack of Italy's old and bitter enemy, an attack in which are concerned not only the fortunes of Italy, but those also of the British Empire, I wonder what touch of prophecy, what whisper from a far-off day, suggested these words written eighteen years ago?

EPILOGUE

And here, for a time at least, I bring these Recollections to an end with the century in which I was born, and my own fiftieth year. Since Eleanor appeared, and my father died, eighteen years have gone--years for me of constant work, literary and other. On the one hand, increasing interest in and preoccupation with politics, owing to personal links and friendships, and a life spent, as to half the year, in London, have been reflected in my books; and on the other, the English rural scene, with its country houses and villages, its religion, and its elements of change and revolution, has been always at my home gates, as a perpetually interesting subject. Old historic situations, also, have come to life for me again in new surroundings, as in Lady Rose's Daughter, The Marriage of William Ashe, and Fenwick's Career; in Richard Meynell I attempted the vision of a Church of England recreated from within, with a rebel, and not--as in Robert Elsmere--an exile, for a hero; Lady Connie is a picture of Oxford as I saw her in my youth, as faithful as I can now make it; Eltham House is a return to the method of William Ashe, and both Lady Connie and Missing have been written since the war. Missing takes for its subject a fragment from the edge of that vast upheaval which no novel of real life in future will be able to leave out of its ken. In the first two years of the war, the cry both of writers and public--so far as the literature of imagination was concerned--tended to be--"anything but the war"! There was an eager wish in both, for a time, in the first onrush of the great catastrophe, to escape from it and the newspapers, into the world behind it. That world looks to us now as the Elysian fields looked to Æneas as he approached them from the heights--full not only of souls in a blessed calm, but of those also who had yet to make their way into existence as it terribly is, had still to taste reality and pain. We were thankful, for a time, to go back to that kind, unconscious, unforeseeing world. But it is no longer possible. The war has become our life, and will be so for years after the signing of peace.

As to the three main interests, outside my home life, which, as I look back upon half a century, seem to have held sway over my thoughts--contemporary literature, religious development, and social experiment--one is tempted to say a few last summarizing things, though, amid the noise of war, it is hard to say them with any real detachment of mind.

When we came up to London in 1881, George Eliot was just dead (December, 1880); Browning and Carlyle passed away in the course of the 'eighties; Tennyson in 1892. I saw the Tennyson funeral in the Abbey, and remember it vividly. The burying of Mr. Gladstone was more stately; this of Tennyson, as befitted a poet, had a more intimate beauty. A great multitude filled the Abbey, and the rendering, in Sir Frederick Bridge's setting, of "Crossing the Bar" by the Abbey Choir sent the "wild echoes" of the dead man's verse flying up and on through the great arches overhead with a dramatic effect not to be forgotten. Yet the fame of the poet was waning when he died, and has been hotly disputed since; though, as it seems to me, these later years have seen the partial return of an ebbing tide. What was merely didactic in Tennyson is dead years ago; the difficulties of faith and philosophy, with which his own mind had wrestled, were, long before his death, swallowed up in others far more vital, to which his various optimisms, for all the grace in which he clothed them, had no key, or suggestion of a key, to offer. The "Idylls," so popular in their day, and almost all, indeed, of the narrative and dramatic work, no longer answer to the needs of a generation that has learned from younger singers and thinkers a more restless method, a more poignant and discontented thought. A literary world fed on Meredith and Henry James, on Ibsen or Bernard Shaw or Anatole France, or Synge or Yeats, rebels against the versified argument, however musical or skilful, built up in "In Memoriam," and makes mock of what it conceives to be the false history and weak sentiment of the "Idylls." All this, of course, is true, and has been said a thousand times, but--and here again the broad verdict is emerging--it does not touch the lyrical fame of a supreme lyrical poet. It may be that one small volume will ultimately contain all that is really immortal in Tennyson's work. But that volume, it seems to me, will be safe among the golden books of our literature, cherished alike by young lovers and the "drooping old."

I only remember seeing Tennyson twice--once in a crowded drawing-room, and once on the slopes of Blackdown, in his big cloak. The strong set face under the wide-awake, the energy of undefeated age that breathed from the figure, remains with me, stamped on my memory, like the gentle face of Mrs. Wordsworth, or a passing glimpse--a gesture--of George Meredith as we met on the threshold of Mr. Cotter Morison's house at Hampstead, one day perhaps in 1886 or 1887, and he turned his handsome curly head with a smile and a word when Mr. Morison introduced us. He was then not yet sixty, already a little lame, but the radiant physical presence scarcely marred. We had some passing talk that day, but--to my infinite regret--that was the only time I ever saw him. Of his work and his genius I began to be aware when "Beauchamp's Career"--a much truncated version--was coming out in the Fortnightly in 1874. I had heard him and his work discussed in the Lincoln circle, where both the Pattisons were quite alive to Meredith's quality; but I was at the time and for long afterward under the spell of the French limpidity and clarity, and the Meredithian manner repelled me. About the same time, when I was no more than three or four and twenty, I remember a visit to Cambridge, when we spent a week-end at the Bull Inn, and were the guests by day of Frederic Myers, and some of his Trinity and King's friends. Those two days of endless talk in beautiful College rooms with men like Frederic Myers, Edmund Gurney, Mr. Gerald Balfour, Mr. George Prothero, and others, left a deep mark on me. Cambridge seemed to me then a hearth whereon the flame of thought burnt with far greater daring and freedom than at Oxford. Men were not so afraid of one another; the sharp religious divisions of Oxford were absent; ideas were thrown up like balls in air, sure that some light hand would catch and pass them on. And among the subjects which rose and fell in that warm electric atmosphere, was the emergence of a new and commanding genius in George Meredith. The place in literature that some of these brilliant men were already giving to Richard Feverel, which had been published some fifteen years earlier, struck me greatly; but if I was honest with myself, my enthusiasm was much more qualified than theirs. It was not till Diana of the Crossways came out, after we had moved to London, that the Meredithian power began to grip me; and to this day the saturation with French books and French ideals that I owed to my uncle's influence during our years at Oxford, stands somewhat between me and a great master. And yet, in this case, as in that of Mr. James, there is no doubt that difficulty--even obscurity!--are part of the spell. The man behind is great enough, and rewards the reader's effort to understand him with a sense of heightened power, just as a muscle is strengthened by exercise. In other words, the effort is worth while; we are admitted by it to a world of beauty or romance or humor that without it we should not know; and with the thing gained goes, as in Alpine-climbing, the pleasure of the effort itself.

Especially is this the case in poetry, where the artist's thought fashions for itself a manner more intimate and personal than in prose. George Meredith's poetry is still only the possession of a minority, even among those who form the poetic audience of a generation. There are many of us who have wanted much help, in regard to it, from others--the young and ardent--who are the natural initiates, the "Mystae" of the poetic world. But once let the strange and poignant magic of it, its music in discord, its sharp sweetness, touch the inward ear--thenceforward we shall follow its piping.

Let me record another regret for another lost opportunity. In spite of common friends, and worlds that might have met, I never saw Robert Louis Stevenson--the writer who more, perhaps, than any other of his generation touched the feeling and won the affection of his time. And that by a double spell--of the life lived and the books written. Stevenson's hold both upon his contemporaries, and those who since his death have had only the printed word of his letters and tales whereby to approach him, has not been without some points of likeness--amid great difference--to the hold of the Brontës on their day and ours. The sense of an unsurpassable courage--against great odds--has been the same in both cases; and a great tenderness in the public mind for work so gallant, so defiant of ill fortune, so loyal to its own aims. In Stevenson's case, quite apart from the claims of his work as literature, there was also an added element which, with all their genius, the Brontës did not possess--the element of charm, the petit carillon, to which Renan attributed his own success in literature: undefinable, always, this last!--but supreme.^[2] There is scarcely a letter of Stevenson's that is without it, it plays about the slender volumes of essays or of travel that we know so well; but it is present not only in the lighter books and tales, not only in the enchanting fairy-tale, "Prince Otto," but in his most tragic, or his most intellectual work--in the fragment "Weir of Hermiston," or in that fine piece of penetrating psychology and admirable narrative, The Master of Ballantrae. It may, I think, be argued whether in the far future Stevenson will be more widely and actively remembered--whether he will enter into the daily pleasure of those who love literature--more as a letter-writer, or more as a writer of fiction. Whether, in other words, his own character and personality will not prove the enduring thing, rather than the characters he created. The volumes of letters, with their wonderful range and variety, their humor, their bravery, their vision--whether of persons or scenes--already mean to some of us more than his stories, dear to us as these are.

He died in his forty-fifth year, at the height of his power. If he had lived ten--twenty--years longer, he might well have done work that would have set him with Scott in the history of letters. As it is, he remains the most graceful and appealing, the most animated and delightful, figure in the literary history of the late nineteenth century. He is sure of his place. "Myriad-footed Time will discover many other inventions; but mine are mine!" And to that final award his poems no less than his letters will richly contribute--the haunting beauty of the "Requiem," the noble lines "To my Father," the lovely verses "In memory of F.A.S."--surely immortal, so long as mother-hearts endure.

[2]Greek: Ti gar chariton agapaton Anthropois apaneuthen;

Another great name was steadily finding its place during our first London years. Thomas Hardy had already published some of his best novels in the 'seventies, and was in full production all through the 'eighties and 'nineties. The first of the Hardy novels that strongly affected me was the Return of the Native, and I did not read it till some time after its publication. Although there had been a devoted and constantly growing audience for Mr. Hardy's books for twenty years before the publication of Tess of the Durbervilles, my own recollection is that Tess marked the conversion of the larger public, who then began to read all the earlier books, in that curiously changed mood which sets in when a writer is no longer on trial, but has, so to speak, "made good."

And since that date how intimately have the scenes and characters of Mr. Hardy's books entered into the mind and memory of his country, compelling many persons, slowly and by degrees--I count myself among this tardy company--to realize their truth, sincerity, and humanity, in spite of the pessimism with which so many of them are tinged; their beauty also, notwithstanding the clashing discords that a poet, who is also a realist, cannot fail to strike; their permanence in English literature; and the greatness of Mr. Hardy's genius! Personally, I would make only one exception. I wish Mr. Hardy had not written Jude the Obscure! On the other hand, in the three volumes of The Dynasts he has given us one of the noblest, and possibly one of the most fruitful, experiments in recent English letters.

Far more rapid was the success of Mr. Kipling, which came a decade later than Mr. Hardy's earlier novels. It thrills one's literary pulse now to look back to those early paper-covered treasures, written by a youth, a boy of genius; which for the first time made India interesting to hundreds of thousands in the Western world; which were the heralds also of a life's work of thirty years, unfailingly rich, and still unspent! The debt that two generations owe to Mr. Kipling is, I think, past calculating. There is a poem of his specially dear to me--"To the True Romance." It contains, to my thinking, the very essence and spirit of his work. Through all realism, through all technical accomplishment, through all the marvelous and detailed knowledge he has accumulated on this wonderful earth, there rings the lovely Linos-song of the higher imagination, which is the enduring salt of art. Whether it is Mowgli, or Kim, or the Brushwood Boy, or McAndrew, or the Centurion of the Roman Wall, or the trawlers and submarines and patrol-boats to which he lends actual life and speech, he carries through all the great company the flag of his lady--the flag of the "True Romance." It was Meredith's flag, and Stevenson's and Scott's--it comes handed down in an endless chain from the story-tellers of old Greece. For a man to have taken undisputed place in that succession is, I think, the best and most that literary man can do. And that it has fallen to our generation to watch and rejoice in Rudyard Kipling's work may be counted among those gifts of the gods which bring no Nemesis with them.

Another star--was it the one that danced when Beatrice was born?--was rising about the same time as Rudyard Kipling's. The Window in Thrums appeared in 1889--a masterpiece to set beside the French masterpiece, drawn likewise from peasant life, of almost the same date, Pêcheur d'Islande. Barrie's gift, also, has been a gift making for the joy of his generation; he too has carried the flag of the True Romance--slight, twinkling, fantastic thing, compared to that of Kipling, but consecrate to the same great service.

And then beside this group of men, who, dealing as they constantly are with the most prosaic and intractable material, are yet poets at heart, there appears that other group who, headed perhaps by Mr. Shaw, and kindred in method with Thomas Hardy, are the chief gods of a younger race, as hostile to "sentimentalism" as George Meredith, but without either the power--or the wish--to replace it by the forces of the poetic imagination. Mr. Shaw, whose dramatic work has been the goad, the gadfly of a whole generation, stirring it into thought by the help of a fascinating art, will not, I think, elect to stand upon his novels; though his whole work has deeply affected English novel-writing. But Mr. Wells and Mr. Arnold Bennett have been during the last ten or fifteen years--vitally different as they are--the leaders of the New Novel--of that fiction which at any given moment is chiefly attracting and stimulating the men and women under forty. There is always a New Novel, and a New Poetry, as there was once, and many times, a New Learning. The New Novel may be Romantic, or Realist, or Argumentative. In our day it appears to be a compound of the last two--at any rate, in the novels of Mr. Wells.

Mr. Wells seems to me a journalist of very great powers, of unequal education, and much crudity of mind, who has inadvertently strayed into the literature of imagination. The earlier books were excellent story-telling, though without any Stevensonian distinction; Kipps was almost a masterpiece; Tono-Bungay a piece of admirable fooling, enriched with some real character-creation, a thing extremely rare in Mr. Wells's books; while Mr. Britling Sees It Through is perhaps more likely to live than any other of his novels, because the subject with which it deals comes home so closely to so vast an audience. Mr. Britling, considered as a character, has neither life nor joints. He, like the many other heroes from other Wells novels, whose names one can never recollect, is Mr. Wells himself, talking this time on a supremely interesting topic, and often talking extraordinarily well. There are no more brilliant pages, of their kind, in modern literature than the pages describing Mr. Britling's motor-drive on the night of the declaration of war. They compare with the description of the Thames in Tono-Bungay. These, and a few others like them, will no doubt appear among the morceaux choisis of a coming day.

But who, after a few years more, will ever want to turn the restless, ill-written, undigested pages of The New Machiavelli again--or of half a dozen other volumes, marked often by a curious monotony both of plot and character, and a fatal fluency of clever talk? The only thing which can keep journalism alive--journalism, which is born of the moment, serves the moment, and, as a rule, dies with the moment--is--again the Stevensonian secret!--charm. Diderot, the prince of journalists, is the great instance of it in literature; the phrase "sous le charme" is of his own invention. But Mr. Wells has not a particle of charm, and the reason of the difference is not far to seek. Diderot wrote for a world of friends--"C'est pour moi et pour mes amis que je lis, que je réfléchis, que j'écris"--Mr. Wells for a world of enemies or fools, whom he wishes to instruct or show up. Le Neveu de Rameau is a masterpiece of satire; yet there is no ill-nature in it. But the snarl is never very long absent from Mr. Wells's work; the background of it is disagreeable. Hence its complete lack of magic, of charm. And without some touch of these qualities, the à peu près of journalism, of that necessarily hurried and improvised work which is the spendthrift of talent, can never become literature, as it once did--under the golden pen of Denis Diderot.

Sainte Beuve said of Stendhal that he was an excitateur d'idées. Mr. Wells no doubt deserves the phrase. As an able journalist, a preacher of method, of foresight, and of science, he has much to say that his own time will do well to heed. But the writer among us who has most general affinity with Stendhal, and seems to me more likely to live than Mr. Wells, is Mr. Arnold Bennett. Mr. Bennett's achievement in his three principal books, the Old Wives' Tale, Clayhanger, and Hilda Lessways, has the solidity and relief--the ugliness also!--of Balzac, or of Stendhal; a detachment, moreover, and a coolness, which Mr. Wells lacks. These qualities may well preserve them, if "those to come" find their subject-matter sufficiently interesting. But the Comédie Humaine has a breadth and magnificence of general conception which govern all its details, and Stendhal's work is linked to one of the most significant periods of European history, and reflects its teeming ideas. Mr. Bennett's work seems to many readers to be choked by detail. But a writer of a certain quality may give us as much detail as he pleases--witness the great Russians. Whenever Mr. Bennett succeeds in offering us detail at once so true and so exquisite as the detail which paints the household of Lissy-Gory in War and Peace, or the visit of Dolly to Anna and Wronsky in Anna Karénin, or the nursing of the dying Nicolas by Kitty and Levin, he will have justified his method--with all its longueurs. Has he justified it yet?

One great writer, however, we possess who can give us any detail he likes without tedium, because of the quality of the intelligence which presents it. Mr. Conrad is not an Englishman by race, and he is the master, moreover, of a vast exotic experience of strange lands and foreign seas, where very few of his readers can follow him with any personal knowledge. And yet we instinctively feel that in all his best work he is none the less richly representative of what goes to make the English mind, as compared with the French, or the German, or the Italian mind--a mind, that is, shaped by sea-power and far-flung responsibilities, by all the customs and traditions, written and unwritten, which are the fruit of our special history, and our long-descended life. It is this which gives value often to Mr. Conrad's slightest tales, or intense significance to detail, which, without this background, would be lifeless or dull. In it, of course, he is at one with Mr. Kipling. Only the tone and accent are wholly different. Mr. Conrad's extraordinary intelligence seems to stand outside his subject, describing what he sees, as though he were crystal-gazing at figures and scenes, at gestures and movements, magically clear and sharp. Mr. Kipling, on the other hand, is part of--intimately one with--what he tells us; never for a moment really outside it; though he has at command every detail and every accessory that he needs.

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

On the religious development of the last thirty years I can find but little that is gladdening, to myself, at any rate, to say. There are ferments going on in the Church of England which have shown themselves in a series of books produced by Oxford and Cambridge men, each of them representing some greater concession to modern critical and historical knowledge than the one before it. The war, no doubt, has gripped the hearts and stirred the minds of men, in relation to the fundamental problems of life and destiny, as nothing else in living experience has ever done. The religious minds among the men who are perpetually fronting death in the battle-line seem to develop, on the one hand, a new and individual faith of their own, and, on the other, an instinctive criticism of the faiths hitherto offered them, which in time may lead us far. The complaints, meanwhile, of "empty churches" and the failing hold of the Church of England, are perhaps more persistent and more melancholy than of old; and there is a general anxiety as to how the loosening and vivifying action of the war will express itself religiously when normal life begins again. The "Life and Liberty" movement in the Anglican Church, which has sprung up since the war, is endeavoring to rouse a new Christian enthusiasm, especially among the young; and with the young lies the future. But the war itself has brought us no commanding message, though all the time it may be silently providing the "pile of gray heather" from which, when the moment comes, the beacon-light may spring.

The greatest figure in the twenty years before the war seems to me to have been George Tyrrell. The two volumes of his biography, with all their absorbing interest, have not, I think, added much to the effect of his books. A Much-abused Letter, Lex Orandi, Scylla and Charybdis, and Christianity at the Cross-Roads have settled nothing. What book of real influence does? They present many contradictions; but are thereby, perhaps, only the more living. For one leading school of thought they go not nearly far enough; for another a good deal too far. But they contain passages drawn straight from a burning spiritual experience, passages also of a compelling beauty, which can hardly fall to the ground unfruitful. Whether as Father Tyrrell's own, or as assimilated by other minds, they belong, at least, to the free movement of experimental and inductive thought, which, in religion as in science, is ever the victorious movement, however fragmentary and inconclusive it may seem at any given moment to be. Other men--Doctor Figgis, for instance--build up shapely and plausible systems, on given material, which, just because they are plausible and shapely, can have very little to do with truth. It is the seekers, the men of difficult, half-inspired speech, like T. H. Green and George Tyrrell, through whose work there flashes at intervals the "gleam" that lights human thought a little farther on its way.

Meanwhile, it must often seem to any one who ponders these past years, as if what is above all wanting to our religious moment is courage and imagination. If only Bishop Henson had stood his trial for heresy!--there would have been a seed of new life in this lifeless day. If only, instead of deserting the churches, the Modernists of to-day would have the courage to claim them!--there again would be a stirring of the waters. Is it not possible that Christianity, which we have thought of as an old faith, is only now, with the falling away of its original sheath-buds, at the beginning of its true and mightier development? A religion of love, rooted in and verified by the simplest experiences of each common day, possessing in the Life of Christ a symbol and rallying cry of inexhaustible power, and drawing from its own corporate life of service and aspiration, developed through millions of separate lives, the only reasonable hope of immortality, and the only convincing witness to a Divine and Righteous Will at work in the universe;--it is under some such form that one tries to dream the future. The chaos into which religious observance has fallen at the present day is, surely, a real disaster. Religious services in which men and women cannot take part, either honestly or with any spiritual gain, are better let alone. Yet the ideal of a common worship is an infinitely noble one. Year after year the simplest and most crying reforms in the liturgy of the Church of England are postponed, because nobody can agree upon them. And all the time the starving of "the hungry sheep" goes on.

But if religious ideals have not greatly profited by the war, it is plain that in the field of social change we are on the eve of transformations--throughout Europe--which may well rank in history with the establishment of the Pax Romana, or the incursion of the northern races upon the Empire; with the Renaissance, or the French Revolution. In our case, the vast struggle, in the course of which millions of British men and women have been forcibly shaken out of all their former ways of life and submitted to a sterner discipline than anything they have ever known, while, at the same time, they have been roused by mere change of circumstance and scene to a strange new consciousness both of themselves and the world, cannot pass away without permanently affecting the life of the State and the relation of all its citizens to each other. In the country districts, especially, no one of my years can watch what is going on without a thrilling sense, as though, for us who are nearing the last stage of life, the closed door of the future had fallen mysteriously ajar and one caught a glimpse through it of a coming world which no one could have dreamt of before 1914. Here, for instance, is a clumsy, speechless laborer of thirty-five, called up under the Derby scheme two years ago. He was first in France and is now in Mesopotamia. On his first leave he reappears in his native village. His family and friends scarcely know him. Always a good fellow, he has risen immeasurably in mental and spiritual stature. For him, as for Cortez, on the "peak in Darien," the veil has been drawn aside from wonders and secrets of the world that, but for the war, he would have died without even guessing at. He stands erect; his eyes are brighter and larger; his speech is different. Here is another--a boy--a careless and troublesome boy he used to be--who has been wounded, and has had a company officer of whom he speaks, quietly indeed, but as he could never have spoken of any one in the old days. He has learned to love a man of another social world, with whom he has gone, unflinching, into a hell of fire and torment. He has seen that other dare and die, leading his men, and has learned that a "swell" can reckon his life--his humble, insignificant life as it used to be--as worth more than his own.

And there are thousands on whom the mere excitement of the new scenes, the new countries, cities, and men, has acted like flame on invisible ink, bringing out a hundred unexpected aptitudes, developing a mental energy that surprises themselves. "On my farm," says a farmer I know, "I have both men that have been at the front, and are allowed to come back for agricultural purposes, and others that have never left me. They were all much the same kind of men before the war; but now the men who have been to the front are worth twice the others. I don't think they know that they are doing more work, and doing it better than they used to do. It is unconscious. Simply, they are twice the men they were."

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

Ah, let us take what comfort we can from these facts, for they are facts--in face of these crowded graveyards in the battle zone, and all the hideous wastage of war. They mean, surely, that a new heat of intelligence, a new passion of sympathy and justice, has been roused in our midst by this vast and terrible effort, which, when the war is over, will burn out of itself the rotten things in our social structure, and make reforms easy which, but for the war, might have rent us in sunder. Employers and employed, townsman and peasant, rich and poor--in the ears of all, the same still small voice, in the lulls of the war tempest, seems to have been urging the same message. More life--more opportunity--more leisure--more joy--more beauty!--for the masses of plain men and women, who have gone so bare in the past and are now putting forth their just and ardent claim on the future.

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

Midway in the course of them, 1908 was marked out for me, for whom a yearly visit to Italy or France, and occasionally to Germany, made the limits of possible travel, by the great event of a spring spent in the United States and Canada. We saw nothing more in the States than every tourist sees--New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and a few other towns; but the interest of every hour seemed to renew in me a nervous energy and a capacity for enjoyment that had been flagging before. Our week at Washington at the British Embassy with Mr. and Mrs. Bryce, as they then were, our first acquaintance with Mr. Roosevelt, then at the White House, and with American men of politics and affairs, like Mr. Root, Mr. Garfield, and Mr. Bacon--set all of it in spring sunshine, amid a sheen of white magnolias and May leaf--will always stay with me as a time of pleasure, unmixed and unspoiled, such as one's fairy godmother seldom provides without some medicinal drawback! And to find the Jusserands there so entirely in their right place--he so unchanged from the old British Museum days when we knew him first--was one of the chief items in the delightful whole. So, too, was the discussion of the President, first with one Ambassador and then with another. For who could help discussing him! And what true and admiring friends he had in both these able men who knew him through and through, and were daily in contact with him, both as diplomats and in social life.

Then Philadelphia, where I lectured on behalf of the London Play Centers; Boston, with Mrs. Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett--a pair of friends, gentle, eager, distinguished, whom none who loved them will forget; Cambridge, and our last sight of Charles Eliot Norton, standing to bid us farewell on the steps of Shady Hill; Hawthorne's house at Concord; and the lovely shore of Newport. The wonderful new scenes unrolled themselves day by day; kind faces and welcoming voices were always round us, and it was indeed hard to tear ourselves away.

But at the end of April we went north to Canada for yet another chapter of quickened life. A week at Montreal, first with Sir William van Horne, then Ottawa, and a week with Lord and Lady Grey; and finally the never-to-be-forgotten experience of three weeks in the "Saskatchewan," Sir William's car on the Canadian Pacific Railway, which took us first from Toronto to Vancouver, and then from Vancouver to Quebec. So in a swallow's flight from sea to sea I saw the marvelous land wherein, perhaps, in a far hidden future, lies the destiny of our race.

Of all this--of the historic figures of Sir William van Home, of beloved Lord Grey, of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and Sir Robert Borden, as they were ten years ago, there would be much to say. But my present task is done.

Nor is there any room here for those experiences of the war, and of the actual fighting front, to which I have already given utterance in England's Effort and Towards the Goal. Some day, perhaps, if these Recollections find an audience, and when peace has loosened our tongues and abolished that very necessary person, the Censor, there will be something more to be written. But now, at any rate, I lay down my pen. For a while these Recollections, during the hours I have been at work on them, have swept me out of the shadow of the vast and tragic struggle in which we live, into days long past on which there is still sunlight--though it be a ghostly sunlight; and above them the sky of normal life. But the dream and the illusion are done. The shadow descends again, and the evening paper comes in, bringing yet another mad speech of a guilty Emperor to desecrate yet another Christmas Eve.

The heart of the world is set on peace. But for us, the Allies, in whose hands lies the infant hope of the future, it must be a peace worthy of our dead and of their sacrifice. "Let us gird up the loins of our minds. In due time we shall reap, if we faint not."

And meanwhile across the western ocean America, through these winter days, sends incessantly the long procession of her men and ships to the help of the Old World and an undying cause. Silently they come, for there are powers of evil lying in wait for them. But "still they come." The air thickens, as it were with the sense of an ever-gathering host. On this side, and on that, it is the Army of Freedom, and of Judgment.

Christmas Eve, 1917

THE END