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

Yes, those were hours to which I shall always look back with 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.

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

But there the letter abruptly ended, and was never sent. I 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:

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

But he had put it himself in poetry long before—this slow 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":

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

It was on the way home from Laleham, after my uncle's burial there, 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:

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

And in the same packet lie letters from the honored and beloved 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:

The Grange, Toronto, Oct. 31, 1888.

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

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

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

* * * * *

Yours most truly, GOLDWIN SMITH.

Exactly twenty years from the date of this letter I was in Toronto 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 Muellers. 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 says. 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. Brunetiere, 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'Universite), "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. Brunetiere] 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. A propos of the examination, he came to see me in Russell Square, and his talk about Spain revived in me, for the time, a fading passion. Senor Gayangos was born in 1809, so that in 1883 he was already an old man, though full of 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.

Others abide our question—Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou standest and art still, Outtopping knowledge.

* * * * *

One other recollection of the Robert Elsmere year may fitly end 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 role played by the orthodox anti-rational and wholly fanatical Newcome in the novel belonged "to the infancy of art," so little could he be taken as representing the orthodox case. I wonder! I had very good reasons for Newcome. There are plenty of Newcomes in the theological 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.

Hampden is enchanting!—more delightful than even I thought it would be, and quite comfortable enough. Of course we want a multitude of things—(baths, wine-glasses, tumblers, cans, etc.!) but those I can hire from Wycombe. Our great deficiency is lamps! Last night we crept about in this vast house, with hardly any light.... As to the ghost, Mrs. Duval (the housekeeper) scoffs at it! The ghost-room is the tapestry-room, from which there is a staircase down to the breakfast-room. A good deal of the tapestry is loose, and when there is any wind it flaps and flaps. Hence all the tales.... The servants are rather bewildered by the size of everything, and—like me—were almost too excited to sleep.... The children are wandering blissfully about, exploring everything.

And what a place to wander in! After we left it, Hampden was restored, beautified, and refurnished. It is now, I have no doubt, a charming 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:

Catch me going out of reach of letters again. I have been horridly anxious. Nobody—children or any one else—can be to me what you are. Ulysses preferred his old woman to immortality, and this absence has led me to see that he was as wise in that as in other things.

They were indeed lovers to the end. He had waited and served for 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:

If you were here,—and I were where you lie, Would you, beloved, give your little span Of life remaining unto tear and sigh? No!—setting every tender memory Within your breast, as faded roses kept For giver's sake, of giver when bereft, Still to the last the lamp of work you'd burn For purpose high, nor any moment spurn. So, as you would have done, I fain would do In poorer fashion. Ah, how oft I try, Try to fulfil your wishes, till at length The scent of those dead roses steals my strength.

As to our other guests, to what company would not Sir Alfred Lyall have added that touch of something provocative and challenging which draws men and women after it, 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.

It has always been a question with me, which of two French friends is the more wonderful English scholar—M. Jusserand or Andre Chevrillon, Taine's nephew and literary executor, and himself one of the leaders of French letters; with whom, as with M. Jusserand, I may reckon now some thirty years of friendship. No one could say that M. Jusserand speaks our tongue exactly like an Englishman. He does much better. He uses it—always, of course, with perfect correctness and fluency—to express French ideas and French wits, in a way as nearly French as the foreign language will permit. The result is 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 cliches 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.

"Ah! my dear lady!" said the Ambassador, "how few things in this world one does to please one's self! This is one of them."

Lucy flushed with a young and natural pleasure. She was on the Ambassador's left, and he had just laid his wrinkled hand for an instant on hers—with a charming and paternal freedom.

"Have you enjoyed yourself?—have you lost your heart to Italy?" said her host stooping to her....

"I have been in fairyland," said she, shyly, opening her blue eyes upon him. "Nothing can ever be like it again."

"No—because one can never be twenty again," said the old man, sighing. "Twenty years hence, you will wonder where the magic came from. Never mind—just now, anyway, the world's your oyster."

Then he looked at her a little more closely.... He missed some of that quiver of youth and enjoyment he had felt in her before; and there were some very dark lines under the beautiful eyes. What was wrong? Had she met the man—the appointed one?

He began to talk to her with a kindness that was at once simple and stately.

"We must all have our ups and downs," he said to her, presently. "Let me just give you a word of advice. It'll carry you through most of them. Remember you are very young, and I shall soon be very old."

He stopped and surveyed her. His eyes blinked through their blanched lashes. Lucy dropped her fork and looked back at him with smiling expectancy.

"Learn Persian!" said the old man, in an urgent whisper—"and get the dictionary by heart!"

Lucy still looked—wondering.

"I finished it this morning," said the Ambassador, in her ear. "To-morrow I shall begin it again. My daughter hates the sight of the thing. She says I overtire myself, and that when old people have done their work they should take a nap. But I know that if it weren't for my dictionary I should have given up long ago. When too many tiresome people dine here in the evening—or when they worry me from home—I take a column. But generally half a column's enough—good tough Persian roots, and no nonsense. Oh! of course I can read Hafiz and Omar Khayyam, and all that kind of thing. But that's the whipped cream. That don't count. What one wants is something to set one's teeth in. Latin verse will do. Last year I put half Tommy Moore into hendecasyllables. But my youngest boy, who's at Oxford, said he wouldn't be responsible for them—so I had to desist. And I suppose the mathematicians have always something handy. But, one way or another, one must learn one's dictionary. It comes next to cultivating one's garden."

The pretty bit of kindness to a very young girl, in 1892, which I 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.

We had a very pleasant three days in Paris ... including a most agreeable couple of hours with the Dufferins. Lord Dufferin showed me a number of relics of his Sheridan ancestry, and wound up by taking me into his special little den and telling me Persian stories with excellent grace and point! He is wild about Persian just now, and has just finished learning the whole dictionary by heart. He looks upon this as his chief delassement from official work. Lady Dufferin, however, does not approve of it at all! His remarks to Humphry as to the ignorance and inexperience of the innumerable French Foreign Ministers with whom he has to do, were amusing. An interview with Berthelot (the famous French chemist and friend of Renan) was really, he said, a deplorable business. Berthelot (Foreign Minister 1891-92) knew everything but what he should have known as French Foreign Minister. And Jusserand's testimony was practically the same! He is now acting head of the French Foreign Office, and has had three Ministers in bewildering succession to instruct in their duties, they being absolutely new to everything. Now, however, in Hanotaux he has got a strong chief at last.

I recollect that in the course of our exploration of the Embassy, 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 attache, fair-haired, with all the good looks and good manners that belong to the post, and how much else of solid wit and capacity the years were then to find out. I had already seen Mr. Rennell 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!

I have read every word of David Grieve. Owing to the unusual and unaccountable imbecility of the reviewing—(the Athenaeum man, for example, does not even comprehend that he is reading a biography!)—it may be three months or so before the public fully takes hold, but I have no doubt of the ultimate verdict.... The consistency of the leading characters is wonderful, and there is not one of the twenty-five, except possibly Dora—who is not human enough—that is not the perfection of lifelikeness.... Louie is a vivisection. I have the misfortune to know her well ... and I am startled page after page by the accuracy of the drawing.

Walter Pater wrote, "It seems to me to have all the forces of 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.