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

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

Your truly affectionate, dearest Tom,

M. ARNOLD.

To this let me add here two or three other letters or fragments, all unpublished, which I find among the papers from which I have been drawing, ending, for the present, with the jubilant letter describing his election to the Poetry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

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

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

Did ever anybody apply such adjectives to John Keble before! Yet if any one will look carefully at the engraving of Keble so often seen in quiet parsonages, they will understand, I think, exactly what Matthew Arnold meant.

In 1850 great changes came upon the Arnold family. The "Doctor's" elder three children—Jane, Matthew, and my father—married in that year, and a host of new interests sprang up for every member of the Fox How circle. I find in a letter to my father from Arthur Stanley, his father's biographer, and his own Oxford tutor, the following reference to "Matt's" marriage, and to the second series of Poems—containing "Sohrab and Rustum"—which were published in 1854. "You will have heard," writes Stanley, "of the great success of Matt's poems. He is in good heart about them. He is also—I must say so, though perhaps I have no right to say so—greatly improved by his marriage—retaining all the genius and nobleness of mind which you remember, with all the lesser faults pruned and softened down." Matt himself wrote to give news of his wedding, to describe the bride—Judge Wightman's daughter, the dear and gracious little lady whom we grandchildren knew and loved as "Aunt Fanny Lucy"—and to wish my father joy of his own. And then there is nothing among the waifs and strays that have come to me worth printing, till 1855, when my uncle writes to New Zealand:

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

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

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

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

HAMPTON, May 16, 1857.

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

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

On the same occasion, writing to his mother, the new Professor gives an amusing account of the election day, when my uncle and aunt came up to town from Hampton, where they were living, in order to get telegraphic news of the polling from friends at Oxford. "Christ Church"—i.e., the High Church party in Oxford—had put up an opposition candidate, and the excitement was great. My uncle was by this time the father of three small boys, Tom, Trevenen—alias Budge—and Richard—"Diddy."

We went first to the telegraph station at Charing Cross. Then, about 4, we got a message from Walrond—"nothing certain is known, but it is rumored that you are ahead." Then we went to get some toys for the children in the Lowther Arcade, and could scarcely have found a more genuine distraction than in selecting wagons for Tom and Trev, with horses of precisely the same color, not one of which should have a hair more in his tail than the other—and a musical cart for Diddy. A little after five we went back to the telegraph office, and got the following message—"Nothing declared, but you are said to be quite safe. Go to Eaton Place." ["Eaton Place" was then the house of Judge Wightman, Mrs. Matthew Arnold's father.] To Eaton Place we went, and then a little after 6 o'clock we were joined by the Judge in the highest state of joyful excitement with the news of my majority of 85, which had been telegraphed to him from Oxford after he had started and had been given to him at Paddington Station.... The income is L130 a year or thereabouts: the duties consist as far as I can learn in assisting to look over the prize compositions, in delivering a Latin oration in praise of founders at every alternate commemoration, and in preparing and giving three Latin lectures on ancient poetry in the course of the year. These lectures I hope to give in English.

The italics are mine. The intention expressed here and in the letter to my father was, as is well known, carried out, and Matthew Arnold's Lectures at Oxford, together with the other poetic and critical work produced by him during the years of his professorship, became so great a force in the development of English criticism and English taste, that the lifelike detail of this letter acquires a kind of historical value. As a child of fourteen I first made acquaintance with Oxford while my uncle was still Professor. I remember well some of his lectures, the crowded lecture-hall, the manner and personality of the speaker, and my own shy pride in him—from a great distance. For I was a self-conscious, bookish child, and my days of real friendship with him were still far ahead. But during the years that followed, the ten years that he held his professorship, what a spell he wielded over Oxford, and literary England in general! Looking back, one sees how the first series of Essays in Criticism, the Lectures on Celtic Literature, or On Translating Homer, Culture, and Anarchy and the rest, were all the time working on English taste and feeling, whether through sympathy or antagonism; so that after those ten years, 1857-1867, the intellectual life of the country had absorbed, for good and all, an influence, and a stimulus, which had set it moving on new paths to new ends. With these thoughts in mind, supplying a comment on the letter which few people could have foreseen in 1857, let me quote a few more sentences:

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

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

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

So the ten years of approach and attack—in the intellectual sense—came to an end, and the ten central years of mastery and success began. Toward the end of that time, as a girl of sixteen, I became a resident in Oxford. Up to then Ruskin—the Stones of Venice and certain chapters in Modern Painters—had been my chief intellectual passion in a childhood and first youth that cut but a very poor figure, as I look back upon them, beside the "wonderful children" of this generation! But it must have been about 1868 that I first read Essays in Criticism. It is not too much to say that the book set for me the currents of life; its effect heightened, no doubt, by the sense of kinship. Above all it determined in me, as in many others, an enduring love of France and of French literature, which played the part of schoolmaster to a crude youth. I owe this to my uncle, and it was a priceless boon. If he had only lived a little longer—if he had not died so soon after I had really begun to know him—how many debts to him would have been confessed, how many things said, which, after all, were never said!



CHAPTER IV

OTHER CHILDREN OF FOX HOW

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

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

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

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



The letters of 1848 and 1849 read like notes for Oakfield. They were written in bitterness of soul by a very young man, with high hopes and ideals, fresh from the surroundings of Oxford and Rugby, from the training of the Schoolhouse and Fox How, and plunged suddenly into a society of boys—the subalterns of the Bengal Native Infantry—living for the most part in idleness, often a vicious idleness, without any restraining public opinion, and practically unshepherded, amid the temptations of the Indian climate and life. They show that the novel is, indeed, as was always supposed, largely autobiographical, and the references in them to the struggle with the Indian climate point sadly forward to the writer's own fate, ten years later, when, like the hero of his novel, Edward Oakfield, he fell a victim to Indian heat and Indian work. The novel was published in 1853, while its author was at home on a long sick leave, and is still remembered for the anger and scandal it provoked in India, and the reforms to which, no doubt, after the Mutiny, it was one of the contributing impulses. It is, indeed, full of interest for any student of the development of Anglo-Indian life and society; even when one remembers how, soon after it was published, the great storm of the Mutiny came rushing over the society it describes, changing and uprooting everywhere. As fiction, it suffers from the Rugby "earnestness" which overmasters in it any purely artistic impulse, while infusing a certain fire and unity of its own. But various incidents in the story—the quarrel at the mess-table, the horse-whipping, the court martial, the death of Vernon, and the meeting between Oakfield and Stafford, the villain of the piece, after Chilianwallah—are told with force, and might have led on, had the writer lived, to something more detached and mature in the way of novel-writing.

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

Nothing could be more pathetic than the isolation and revolt of the early letters. The boy Ensign is desperately homesick, pining for Fox How, for his mother and sisters, for the Oxford he had so easily renounced, for the brothers parted from him by such leagues of land and sea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alack! the brothers never did meet again, in this world which both took so hardly. But for Willy a transformation scene was near. After two years in India, his gift and his character had made their mark. He had not only been dreaming of New Zealand; besides his daily routine, he had been working hard at Indian languages and history. The Lawrences, both John and Henry, had found him out, and realized his quality. It was at Sir Henry Lawrence's house in the spring of 1850 that he met Miss Fanny Hodgson, daughter of the distinguished soldier and explorer, General Hodgson, discoverer of the sources of the Ganges, and at that time the Indian Surveyor-General. The soldier of twenty-three fell instantly in love, and tumult and despondency melted away. The next letter to New Zealand is pitched in quite another key. He still judges Indian life and Indian government with a very critical eye. "The Alpha and Omega of the whole evil in Indian Society" is "the regarding India as a rupee-mine, instead of a Colony, and ourselves as Fortune-hunters and Pension-earners rather than as emigrants and missionaries." And outside his domestic life his prospects are still uncertain. But with every mail one can see the strained spirit relaxing, yielding to the spell of love and to the honorable interests of an opening life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The climate, indeed, had already begun its deadly attack upon an organism as fine and sensitive as any of the myriad victims which the secret forces of India's sun and soil have exacted from her European invaders. In 1853, William Delafield Arnold came home invalided, with his wife and his elder two children. The third, Oakeley (the future War Minister in Mr. Balfour's Government), was born in England in 1855. There were projects of giving up India and settling at home. The young soldier whose literary gift, always conspicuous among the nine in the old childish Fox How days, and already shown in Oakfield, was becoming more and more marked, was at this time a frequent contributor to the Times, the Economist, and Fraser, and was presently offered the editorship of the Economist. But just as he was about to accept it, came a flattering offer from India, no doubt through the influence of Sir John Lawrence, of the Directorship of Public Instruction in the Punjaub. He thought himself bound to accept it, and with his wife and two children went out again at the end of 1855. His business was to organize the whole of native education in the Punjaub, and he did it so well during the short time that remained to him before the Mutiny broke out, that during all that time of terror, education in the Punjaub was never interrupted, the attendances at the schools never dropped, and the young Director went about his work, not knowing often, indeed, whether the whole province might not be aflame within twenty-four hours, and its Anglo-Indian administration wiped out, but none the less undaunted and serene.

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

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

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

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

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

And a few days later:

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

Ever my beloved mother ...

Your very loving son,

W.D. ARNOLD.

He started for England, but at Gibraltar, a dying man, was carried ashore. His younger brother, sent out from England in post haste, missed him by ill chance at Alexandria and Malta, and arrived too late. He was buried under the shelter of the Rock of Spain and the British flag. His intimate friend, Meredith Townsend, the joint editor and creator of the Spectator, wrote to the Times shortly after his death:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Eastern sage pursuing "the pure goal of being"—"He by those Indian mountains old, might well repose." Crusader, troubadour, or maiden dying for love—

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

By this time Fox How was in truth a second home to me. But I have still to complete the tale of those who made it so. Edward Penrose, the Doctor's fourth son, who died in 1878, on the threshold of fifty, was a handsome, bearded man of winning presence and of many friends. He was at Balliol, then a Fellow of All Souls, and in Orders. But he first found his real vocation as an Inspector of Schools in Devon and Cornwall, and for eighteen years, from 1860 to 1878, through the great changes in elementary education produced by his brother-in-law's Education Act, he was the ever-welcome friend of teachers and children all over the wide and often remote districts of the West country which his work covered. He had not the gifts of his elder brothers—neither the genius of Matthew nor the restless energy and initiative of William Delafield, nor the scholarly and researching tastes of my father; and his later life was always a struggle against ill-health. But he had Matthew's kindness, and Matthew's humor—the "chaff" between the two brothers was endless!—and a large allowance of William's charm. His unconscious talk in his last illness was often of children. He seemed to see them before him in the country school-rooms, where his coming—the coming of "the tall gentleman with the kind blue eyes," as an eye-witness describes him—was a festa, excellent official though he was. He carried enthusiasm into the cause of popular education, and that is not a very common enthusiasm in this country of ours. Yet the cause is nothing more nor less than the cause of the international intelligence, and its sharpening for the national tasks. But education has always been the Cinderella of politics; this nation apparently does not love to be taught! Those who grapple with its stubbornness in this field can never expect the ready palm that falls to the workers in a dozen other fields. But in the seed sown, and the human duty done, they find their reward.

"Aunt Mary," Arnold's second daughter, I have already spoken of. When my father and mother reached England from Tasmania, she had just married again, a Leicestershire clergyman, with a house and small estate near Loughborough. Her home—Woodhouse—on the borders of Charnwood Forest, and the beautiful Beaumanoir Park, was another fairyland to me and to my cousins. Its ponds and woods and reed-beds; its distant summer-house between two waters, where one might live and read and dream through long summer hours, undisturbed; its pleasant rooms, above all the "tapestry room" where I generally slept, and which I always connected with the description of the huntsman on the "arras," in "Tristram and Iseult"; the Scott novels I devoured there, and the "Court" nights at Beaumanoir, where some feudal customs were still kept up, and its beautiful mistress, Mrs. Herrick, the young wife of an old man, queened it very graciously over neighbors and tenants—all these are among the lasting memories of life. Mrs. Herrick became identified in my imagination with each successive Scott heroine,—Rowena, Isabella, Rose Bradwardine, the White Lady of Avenel, and the rest. But it was Aunt Mary herself, after all, who held the scene. In that Leicestershire world of High Toryism, she raised the Liberal flag—her father's flag—with indomitable courage, but also with a humor which, after the tragic hours of her youth, flowered out in her like something new and unexpectedly delightful. It must have been always there, but not till marriage and motherhood, and F.D. Maurice's influence, had given her peace of soul does it seem to have shown itself as I remember it—a golden and pervading quality, which made life unfailingly pleasant beside her. Her clear, dark eyes, with their sweet sincerity, and the touch in them of a quiet laughter, of which the causes were not always clear to the bystanders, her strong face with its points of likeness to her father's, and all her warm and most human personality—they are still vividly present to me, though it is nearly thirty years since, after an hour or two's pain, she died suddenly and unexpectedly, of the same malady that killed her father. Consumed in her youth by a passionate idealism, she had accepted at the hands of life, and by the age of four and twenty, a lot by no means ideal—a home in the depths of the country, among neighbors often uncongenial, and far from the intellectual pleasures she had tasted during her young widowhood in London. But out of this lot she made something beautiful, and all her own—by sheer goodness, conscience, intelligence. She had her angles and inconsistencies; she often puzzled those who loved her; but she had a large brain and a large heart; and for us colonial children, conscious of many disadvantages beside our English-born cousins, she had a peculiar tenderness, a peculiar laughing sympathy, that led us to feel in "Aunt Maria" one of our best friends.

Susan Arnold, the Doctor's fourth daughter, married Mr. John Cropper in 1858, and here, too, in her house beside the Mersey, among fields and trees that still maintain a green though besmutted oasis in the busy heart of Liverpool, that girdles them now on all sides, and will soon engulf them, there were kindness and welcome for the little Tasmanians. She died a few years ago, mourned and missed by her own people—those lifelong neighbors who know truly what we are. Of the fifth daughter, Frances, "Aunt Fan," I may not speak, because she is still with us in the old house—alive to every political and intellectual interest of these darkened days, beloved by innumerable friends in many worlds, and making sunshine still for Arnold's grandchildren and their children's children. But it was to her that my own stormy childhood was chiefly confided, at Fox How; it was she who taught the Tasmanian child to read, and grappled with her tempers; and while she is there the same magic as of old clings about Fox How for those of us who have loved it, and all it stands for, so long.



CHAPTER V

THE FRIENDS OF FOX HOW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the poet's health was failing. His daughter Dora's death in 1847 had hit him terribly hard, and his sister's state—the helpless though gentle insanity of the unique, the beloved Dorothy—weighed heavily on his weakening strength. I find a touching picture of him in the unpublished letter referred to on a previous page, written in this very year—1848—to Dean Howson, as a young man, by his former pupil, the late Duke of Argyll, the distinguished author of The Reign of Law—which Dean Howson's son and the Duke's grandson allow me to print. The Rev. J.S. Howson, afterward Dean of Chester, married a sister of the John Cropper who married Susan Arnold, and was thus a few years later brought into connection with the Arnolds and Fox How. The Duke and Duchess had set out to visit both the Lakes and the Lakes "celebrities," advised, evidently, as to their tour, by the Duke's old tutor, who was already familiar with the valleys and some of their inmates. Their visit to Fox How is only briefly mentioned, but of Wordsworth and Rydal Mount the Duke gives a long account. The picture, first, of drooping health and spirits, and then of the flaming out of the old poetic fire, will, I think, interest any true Wordsworthian.

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

On the following day, Sunday, the Duke with a friend walked over to Rydal, but found no one at the Mount but an invalid lady, very old, and apparently paralyzed, "drawn in a bath chair by a servant." They did not realize that the poor sufferer, with her wandering speech and looks, was Dorothy Wordsworth, whose share in her great brother's fame will never be forgotten while literature lasts.

In the evening, however—

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henceforward, in the family letters to my father, it is Mrs. Wordsworth who comes into the foreground. The old age prophesied for her by her poet bridegroom in the early Grasmere days was about her for the nine years of her widowhood, "lovely as a Lapland night"; or rather like one of her own Rydal evenings when the sky is clear over the perfect little lake, and the reflections of island and wood and fell go down and down, unearthly far into the quiet depths, and Wansfell still "parleys with the setting sun." My grandmother writes of her—of "her sweet grace and dignity," and the little friendly acts she is always doing for this person and that, gentle or simple, in the valley—with a tender enthusiasm. She is "dear Mrs. Wordsworth" always, for them all. And it is my joy that in the year 1856 or 1857 my grandmother took me to Rydal Mount, and that I can vividly recollect sitting on a footstool at Mrs. Wordsworth's feet. I see still the little room, with its plain furniture, the chair beside the fire, and the old lady in it. I can still recall the childish feeling that this was no common visit, and the house no common house—that a presence still haunted it. Instinctively the childish mind said to itself, "Remember!"—and I have always remembered.

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

Fifty-two years passed, and I found myself, in September, 1911, the tenant of a renovated and rebuilt Rydal Mount, for a few autumn weeks. The house was occupied then, and is still occupied by Wordsworth's great-granddaughter and her husband—Mr. and Mrs. Fisher Wordsworth. My eldest daughter was with me, and a strange thing happened to us. I arrived at the Mount before my husband and daughter. She joined me there on September 13th. I remember how eagerly I showed her the many Wordsworthiana in the house, collected by the piety of its mistress—the Haydon portrait on the stairs, and the books, in the small low-ceiled room to the right of the hall, which is still just as it was in Wordsworth's day; the garden, too, and the poet's walk. All my own early recollections were alive; we chattered long and late. And now let the account of what happened afterward be given in my daughter's words as she wrote it down for me the following morning.

RYDAL MOUNT, September 14, 1911.

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

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

Neither the seer of this striking vision—unique in her experience—nor I, to whom she told it within eight hours, make any claim for it to a supernatural origin. It seemed to us an interesting example of the influence of mind and association on the visualizing power of the brain. A member of the Psychical Society, to whom I sent the contemporary record, classified it as "a visual hallucination," and I don't know that there is anything more to be said about it. But the pathetic coincidence remains still to be noted—we did not know it till afterward—that the seer of the vision was sleeping in Dorothy Wordsworth's room, where Dorothy spent so many sad years of death-in-life; and that in that very corner by the window Wordsworth must have sat, day after day, when he came to visit what remained to him of that creature of fire and dew, that child of genius, who had been the inspiration and support of his poetic youth.

In these rapid sketches of the surroundings and personal influences amid which my own childhood was passed I have already said something of my father's intimate friend Arthur Hugh Clough. Clough was, of course, a Rugbeian, and one of Arnold's ablest and most devoted pupils. He was about three years older than my father, and was already a Fellow of Oriel when Thomas Arnold, the younger, was reading for his First. But the difference of age made no difference to the friendship which grew up between them in Oxford, a friendship only less enduring and close than that between Clough and Matthew Arnold, which has been "eternized," to use a word of Fulke Greville's, by the noble dirge of "Thyrsis." Not many years before his own death, in 1895, my father wrote of the friend of his youth:

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

It was partly also the visit paid by my father and his friend, John Campbell Shairp, afterward Principal Shairp of St. Andrew's, to Clough's reading party at Drumnadrochit in 1845, and their report of incidents which had happened to them on their way along the shores of Loch Ericht, which suggested the scheme of the "Bothie." One of the half-dozen short poems of Clough which have entered permanently into literature—Qui laborat oral—was found by my father one morning on the table of his bachelor rooms in Mount Street, after Clough had spent the night on a shake-up in his sitting-room, and on his early departure had left the poem behind him as payment for his night's lodging. In one of Clough's letters to New Zealand I find, "Say not the struggle nought availeth"—another of the half-dozen—written out by him; and the original copy—tibi primo confisum, of the pretty, though unequal verses, "A London Idyll." The little volume of miscellaneous poems, called Ambarvalia, and the "Bothie of Tober-na-Vuo-lich" were sent out to New Zealand by Clough, at the same moment that Matt was sending his brother the Poems by A.

Clough writes from Liverpool in February, 1849—having just received Matt's volume:

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

But when the books arrive, my father writes to his sister with affectionate welcome indeed of the Poems by A, but with enthusiasm of the "Bothie."

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

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

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

The poet of the "Bothie" becomes the poet of "Dipsychus," "Easter Day," and the "Amours de Voyage"; and the young republican who writes in triumph—all humorous joy and animation—to my father, from the Paris of 1848, which has just seen the overthrow of Louis Philippe, says, a year later—February 24, 1849:

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

A few months later, the writer—at Rome—"was in at the death" of this same Roman Republic, listening to the French bombardment in bitterness of soul.

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

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

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

Thou hearest the immortal chants of old!—

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

I have used the words "physical joy," because, although such passionate pleasure in natural things as has been my constant Helper (in the sense of the Greek [Greek: epikouros]) through life, has connected itself, no doubt, in process of time, with various intimate beliefs, philosophic or religious, as to the Beauty which is Truth, and therewith the only conceivable key to man's experience, yet I could not myself indorse the famous contrast in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," between the "haunting passion" of youth's delight in Nature, and the more complex feeling of later years when Nature takes an aspect colored by our own moods and memories, when our sorrows and reflections enter so much into what we feel about the "bright and intricate device" of earth and her seasons, that "in our life alone doth Nature live." No one can answer for the changing moods that the future, long or short, may bring with it. But so far, I am inclined to think of this quick, intense pleasure in natural things, which I notice in myself and others, as something involuntary and inbred; independent—often selfishly independent—of the real human experience. I have been sometimes ashamed—pricked even with self- contempt—to remember how in the course of some tragic or sorrowful hours, concerning myself, or others of great account to me, I could not help observing some change in the clouds, some effect of color in the garden, some picture on the wall, which pleased me—even for the moment—intensely. The impression would be gone, perhaps, as soon as felt, rebuked by something like a flash of remorse. But it was not in my power to prevent its recurrence. And the delight in natural things— colors, forms, scents—when there was nothing to restrain or hamper it, has often been a kind of intoxication, in which thought and consciousness seemed suspended—"as though of hemlock one had drunk." Wordsworth has of course expressed it constantly, though increasingly, as life went on, in combination with his pantheistic philosophy. But it is my belief that it survived in him in its primitive form, almost to the end.

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

In these Westmorland walks, however, my father had sometimes another companion—a frequent visitor at Fox How, where he was almost another son to my grandmother, and an elder brother to her children. How shall one ever make the later generation understand the charm of Arthur Stanley? There are many—very many—still living, in whom the sense of it leaps up, at the very mention of his name. But for those who never saw him, who are still in their twenties and thirties, what shall I say? That he was the son of a Bishop of Norwich and a member of the old Cheshire family of the Stanleys of Alderley; that he was a Rugby boy and a devoted pupil of Arnold, whose Life he wrote, so that it stands out among the biographies of the century, not only for its literary merit, but for its wide and varied influence on feeling and opinion; that he was an Oxford tutor and Professor all through the great struggle of Liberal thought against the reactionary influences let loose by Newman and the Tractarian movement; that, as Regius Professor at Oxford, and Canon of Canterbury, if he added little to learning, or research, he at least kept alive—by his power of turning all he knew into image and color—that great "art" of history which the Dryasdusts so willingly let die; that as Dean of Westminster, he was still the life and soul of all the Liberalism in the Church, still the same generous friend and champion of all the spiritually oppressed that he had ever been? None of the old "causes" beloved of his youth could ever have said of him, as of so many others:

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

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

And then, what a joy he was to the eye! His small spare figure, miraculously light, his delicate face of tinted ivory—only that ivory is not sensitive and subtle, and incredibly expressive, as were the features of the little Dean; the eager, thin-lipped mouth, varying with every shade of feeling in the innocent great soul behind it; the clear eyes of china blue; the glistening white hair, still with the wave and spring of youth in it; the slender legs, and Dean's dress, which becomes all but the portly, with, on festal occasions, the red ribbon of the Bath crossing the mercurial frame: there are still a few pictures and photographs by which these characteristics are dimly recalled to those at least who knew the living man. To my father, who called him "Arthur," and to all the Fox How circle, he was the most faithful of friends, though no doubt my father's conversion to Catholicism to some extent, in later years, separated him from Stanley. In the letter I have printed on a former page, written on the night before my father left England for New Zealand in 1847, and cherished by its recipient all his life, there is a yearning, personal note, which was, perhaps, sometimes lacking in the much-surrounded, much-courted Dean of later life. It was not that Arthur Stanley, any more than Matthew Arnold, ever became a worldling in the ordinary sense. But "the world" asks too much of such men as Stanley. It heaps all its honors and all its tasks upon them, and without some slight stiffening of its substance the exquisite instrument cannot meet the strain.

Mr. Hughes always strongly denied that the George Arthur of Tom Brown's Schooldays had anything whatever to do with Arthur Stanley. But I should like to believe that some anecdote of Stanley's schooldays had entered at least into the well-known scene where Arthur, in class, breaks down in construing the last address of Helen to the dead Hector. Stanley's memory, indeed, was alive with the great things or the picturesque detail of literature and history, no less than with the humorous or striking things of contemporary life. I remember an amusing instance of it at my own wedding breakfast. Stanley married us, and a few days before he had buried Frederick Denison Maurice. His historical sense was pleased by the juxtaposition of the two names Maurice and Arnold, suggested by the funeral of Maurice and the marriage of Arnold's granddaughter. The consequence was that his speech at the wedding breakfast was quite as much concerned with "graves and worms and epitaphs" as with things hymeneal. But from "the little Dean" all things were welcome.

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

"Where did Henry the Fourth die?"

Confusion—and blank ignorance!

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

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

And off we ran together to the Jerusalem Chamber.

CHAPTER VI

YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD

I

How little those who are school-girls of to-day can realize what it was to be a school-girl in the fifties or the early sixties of the last century! A modern girls' school, equipped as scores are now equipped throughout the country, was of course not to be found in 1858, when I first became a school boarder, or in 1867, when I ceased to be one. The games, the gymnastics, the solid grounding in drawing and music, together with the enormously improved teaching in elementary science, or literature and language, which are at the service of the school-girl of to-day, had not begun to be when I was at school. As far as intellectual training was concerned, my nine years from seven to sixteen were practically wasted. I learned nothing thoroughly or accurately, and the German, French, and Latin which I soon discovered after my marriage to be essential to the kind of literary work I wanted to do, had all to be relearned before they could be of any real use to me; nor was it ever possible for me-who married at twenty—to get that firm hold on the structure and literary history of any language, ancient or modern, which my brother William, only fifteen months my junior, got from his six years at Rugby, and his training there in Latin and Greek. What I learned during those years was learned from personalities; from contact with a nature so simple, sincere, and strong as that of Miss Clough; from the kindly old German governess, whose affection for me helped me through some rather hard and lonely school-years spent at a school in Shropshire; and from a gentle and high-minded woman, an ardent Evangelical, with whom, a little later, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, I fell headlong in love, as was the manner of school-girls then, and is, I understand, frequently the case with school-girls now, in spite of the greatly increased variety of subjects on which they may spend their minds.

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

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

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

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

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