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

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

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

And there the Settlement now stands, the most beautiful and commodious Settlement building in London, with a large garden behind it, made by the Duke out of various old private gardens, and lent to the Settlement for its various purposes. Mr. Passmore Edwards contributed L14,000 to its cost, and it bears his name. It was opened in 1898 by Lord Peel and Mr. Morley, and for twenty years it has been a center of social work and endeavor in St. Pancras. From it have sprung the Physically Defective Schools under the Education Authority, now so plentiful in London, and so frequent in our other large towns. The first school of the kind was opened at this Settlement in 1898; and the first school ambulance in London was given to us by Sir Thomas Barlow for our Cripple Children. The first Play Center in England began there in 1898; and the first Vacation School was held there in 1902.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I should like to have a good talk with you. I seldom get any one to talk on religious subjects. It seems to me that the world is growing rather tired of German criticism, having got out of it nearly all that it is capable of giving. To me it appears one of the most hopeful signs of the present day that we are coming back to the old, old doctrine, "he can't be wrong whose life is in the right." Yet this has to be taught in a If new way, adapted to the wants of the age. We must give up doctrine and teach by the lives of men, beginning with the life of Christ, instead. And the best words of men, beginning with the Gospels and the prophets, will be our Bible.

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

"Every one who waited on him in his illness loved him," wrote an old friend of his and mine who was with him to the end. What were almost his last words—"I bless God for my life!—I bless God for my life!"—seemed to bring the noble story of it to a triumphant close; and after death he lay "with the look of a little child on his face.... He will live in the hearts of those who loved him, as well as in his work."

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



CHAPTER VI

HELBECK OF BANNISDALE

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

I am greatly interested in the book and pine for the denoument. So far Marcella, though I know her quite well, does not in the least awaken my sympathy. She is an intolerable girl—but there are many of them.... I only hope that she may be made to pay for it. Mr. and Mrs. Boyce are good and original, so is Wharton. I hope that condign vengeance awaits him. He is the modern politician entirely.... I really hope Marcella may be converted. It would serve her right to marry her to Wharton; he would beat her.

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

I so ravened on them that I sat still at Blosworth instead of getting out! The consequence is that all my plans are disarranged. I shall not get to M—— in time for my meeting, and for all this Marcella is to blame.... The station-master assured me he called out "Change for Northampton," but I was much too deep in the scene between Marcella, Lord Maxwell, and Raeburn to heed anything belonging to the outer world.

Mr. Goschen wrote:

I don't know how long it is since I have enjoyed reading anything so much. I can't satisfy myself as to the physical appearance of Wharton.... I do know some men of a character not quite unlike him, but they haven't the boyish face with curls. Marcella I see before me. Mrs. Boyce and Lord Maxwell both interested me very much....Alack! I must turn from Marcella's enthusiasm and aspirations to Sir W. Harcourt's speech—a great transition.

And dear Alfred Lyttelton wrote:

I feel a ridiculous pride in her triumphs which I have had the joy of witnessing on every side.... At least permit an expert to tell you that his heart beat over the ferrets (in the poaching scene) and at the intense vividness and truth of the legal episodes.

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

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

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

When Marcella arrived my thankfulness was alloyed with a feeling that the state of my eyesight made your kindness for the time a waste. But Mr. Nettleship has since then by an infusion supplied a temporary stimulus to the organ, such that I have been enabled to begin, and am reading the work with great pleasure and an agreeable sense of congeniality which I do not doubt I shall retain to the close.

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

Well, I have by my resignation passed into a new state of existence. And in that state I shall be very glad when our respective stars may cause our paths to meet. I am full of prospective work; but for the present a tenacious influenza greatly cripples me and prevents my making any definite arrangement for an expected operation on my eye.

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

It is one of the most legitimate interests of the old to watch with hope and joy these opening lives, and it has the secondary effect of whispering to them that they are not yet wholly frozen up.... I am busy as far as my limited powers of exertion allow upon a new edition of Bishop Butler's Works, which costs me a good deal of labor and leaves me, after a few hours upon it, good for very little else. And my perspective, dubious as it is, is filled with other work, in the Homeric region lying beyond. I hope it will be very long before you know anything of compulsory limitations on the exercise of your powers. Believe me always,

Sincerely yours,

W. E. GLADSTONE.

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

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

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

I have now seen four great funerals in the Abbey—Darwin, Browning, Tennyson, and the funeral service for Uncle Forster, which was very striking, too. But no one above forty of those in the Abbey yesterday will ever see the like again. It was as beautiful and noble as the "lying in state" was disappointing and ugly. The music was exquisite, and fitting in every respect; and when the high sentence rang out, "and their name liveth for evermore," the effect was marvelous. One seemed to hear the voice of the future already pealing through the Abbey—as though the verdict were secured, the judgment given.

We saw it all, admirably, from the Muniment Room, which is a sort of lower Triforium above the south Transept. To me, perhaps, the most thrilling moment was when, bending forward, one saw the white-covered coffin disappear amid the black crowd round it, and knew that it had sunk forever into its deep grave, amid that same primeval clay of Thorny Island on which Edward's Minister was first reared and the Red King built his hall of judgment and Council. The statue of Dizzy looked down on him—"So you have come at last!"—and all the other statues on either side seemed to welcome and receive him.... The sloping seats for Lords and Commons filled the transepts, a great black mass against the jeweled windows, the Lords on one side, the Commons on the other; in front of each black multitude was the glitter of a mace, and in the hollow between, the whiteness of the pall—perhaps you can fancy it so.

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

We have been at Margot Tennant's wedding to-day [I wrote to my son on May 10, 1894]—a great function, very tiring, but very brilliant and amusing—occasionally dramatic, too, as, when after the service had begun, the sound of cheering in the street outside drowned the voice of the Bishop of Rochester, and warned us that Mr. Gladstone was arriving. Afterward at the house we shook hands with three Cabinet Ministers on the door-step, and there were all the rest of them inside! The bride carried herself beautifully and was as composed and fresh as though it were any ordinary party. From our seat in the church one saw the interior of the vestry and Mr. Gladstone's white head against the window as he sat to sign the register; and the greeting between him and Mr. Balfour when he had done.

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

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

MY DEAR M.—Thanks for your pleasant letter. I do not know whether I like the praise or the scolding better. They, like pastry, need to be done with a light hand—especially praise—and I have swallowed all yours, and feel it thoroughly agrees with me.

As to the scolding I am going to defend myself tooth and nail. In the first place, by all my Gods and No Gods, neither Green, nor Martineau, nor the Cairds were in my mind when I talked of "Sentimental Deism," but the "Vicaire Savoyard," and Charming, and such as Voysey. There are two chapters of "Rousseauism," I have not touched yet—Rousseauism in Theology, and Rousseauism in Education. When I write the former I shall try to show that the people of whom I speak as "sentimental deists" are the lineal descendants of the Vicaire Savoyard. I was a great reader of Channing in my boyhood, and was much taken in by his theosophic confectionery. At present I have as much (intellectual) antipathy to him as St. John had to the Nicolaitans.

... Green I know only from his Introduction to Hume—which reminds me of nothing so much as a man with a hammer and chisel knocking out bits of bad stone in the Great Pyramid, with the view of bringing it down.... As to Caird's Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, I will get it and study it. But as a rule "Philosophies of Religion" in my experience turn out to be only "Religions of Philosophers"—quite another business, as you will admit.

And if you please, Ma'am, I wish to add that I think I am not without sympathy for Christian feeling—or rather for what you mean by it. Beneath the cooled logical upper strata of my microcosm there is a fused mass of prophetism and mysticism, and the Lord knows what might happen to me, in case a moral earthquake cracked the superincumbent deposit, and permitted an eruption of the demonic element below.... Luckily I am near 70, and not a G.O.M.—so the danger is slight.

One must stick to one's trade. It is my business to the best of my ability to fight for scientific clearness—that is what the world lacks. Feeling Christian or other, is superabundant....

Ever yours affectionately,

T. H. HUXLEY.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At last we arrived—saw the wonderful gray house rising above the river in the evening light, found G—— waiting at the open door for us, and plunged into the hall, the sitting-rooms, and all the intricacies of the upper passages and turrets with the delight and curiosity of a pack of children. Wood and peat fires were burning everywhere; the great chimneypieces in the drawing-room, the arms of Elizabeth over the hall fire, the stucco birds and beasts running round the Hall, showed dimly in the scanty lamplight (we shall want about six more lamps!)—and the beauty of the marvelous old place took us all by storm. Then through endless passages and kitchens, bright with long rows of copper pans and molds, we made our way out into the gardens among the clipped yews and cedars, and had just light enough to see that Levens apparently is like nothing else but itself. ... The drawback of the house at present is certainly the cold!

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

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

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

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

Your Helbeck of Bannisdale held me firmly in the reading and remains with me.... If I felt a monotony during the struggle, it came of your being faithful to your theme—rapt—or you would not have had such power over your reader. I know not another book that shows the classic so distinctly to view.... Yet a word of thanks for Doctor Friedland. He is the voice of spring in the book.

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

On Sunday I read Helbeck of Bannisdale, and I confess that the book moved me a great deal. It is her best book. It is a true tragedy, because the crash is inevitable. This is not so easy to effect in Art as many suppose. There are very few characters and situations which lead to inevitable crashes. It is a thousand to one that a woman who thinks she ought not to marry a man, but loves him passionately, will, in fact, marry him. She will either discover an ingenious way out of her woods or else just shut her eyes and "go it blind," relying on his strength and feeling that it is really right to relinquish to him her sense of responsibility. In choosing a girl with nothing left her in the world but loyalty to a dead father and memory of his attitude toward religion, without knowledge of his arguments for that attitude, I think that Mrs. Ward has hit on the only possible persona. Had Laura, herself, been a convinced rationalist, or had her father been still alive, she would have merged herself and her attitude in Helbeck's strength of character. Being a work of art, self-consistent and inevitable, the book becomes symbolic. It is a picture of incompatibility, but, being a true picture, it is a symbolic index to the incompatible which plays so large a part in the experience of man.

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

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

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

The Empress Frederick in the midst of the Bismarck crisis of March, 1890, when it was evident that the young Emperor William II was bent on getting rid of his Chancellor, and so "dropping the pilot" of his House, was sitting at home one afternoon, with the companion from whom I heard the story, when a servant, looking a good deal scared, announced that Prince Bismarck had called and wished to know whether her Majesty would receive him.

"Prince Bismarck!" said the Empress, in amazement. She had probably not seen him since the death of her husband, and relations between herself and him had been no more than official for years. Turning to her companion, she said, "What can he possibly want with me!"

She consented, however, to receive him, and the old Prince, agitated and hollow-eyed, made his appearance. He had come, as a last hope of placating the new Kaiser, to ask the Empress to use what influence she could on his behalf with her son. The Empress listened in growing astonishment. At the end there was a short silence. Then she said, with emotion: "I am sorry! You, yourself, Prince Bismarck, have destroyed all my influence with my son. I can do nothing."

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

D—— and I met at Windsor, and we mounted into the quadrangle, stopped at the third door on the right as Mrs. M—— had directed us, interviewed various gorgeous footmen, and were soon in Mrs. M——'s little sitting-room. Then we found we should have some little time to wait, as the Empress was just going out with the Queen and would see me at a quarter to 1. So we waited, much amused by the talk around us. (It turned, if I remember right, on a certain German Princess, who had arrived a day or two before as the old Queen's guest, and had been taken since her arrival on such a strenuous round of tombs and mausoleums that, hearing on this particular morning that the Queen proposed to take her in the afternoon to see yet another mausoleum, she had stubbornly refused to get up. She had a headache, she said, and would stay in bed. But the ladies in waiting, with fits of laughter, described how the Queen had at once ordered her phenacetin, and how there was really no chance at all for the poor lady. The Queen would get her way, and the departed would be duly honored—headache or no headache. As indeed it turned out.)

Presently we saw the Queen's little pony-carriage pass along beyond the windows with the Empress Frederick, and the Grand Duke and Duchess Serge walking beside it, and the Indians behind. Then in a little while the Empress Frederick came hurrying back alone, and almost directly came my summons. Countess Perponcher, her lady in waiting, took me up through the Long Corridor, past the entrance to the Queen's rooms on one side, and Gordon's Bible, in its glass case, on the other, till we turned to the left, and I was in a small sitting-room, where a lady, gray-haired and in black, came forward to meet me.... We talked for about 50 minutes:—of German books and Universities—Harnack—Renan, for whom she had the greatest admiration—Strauss, of whom she told me various interesting things—German colonies, that she thought were "all nonsense"—Dreyfus, who in her eyes is certainly innocent—reaction in France—the difference between the Greek Church in Russia and the Greek Church in Greece, the hopes of Greece, and the freeing of Crete. It is evident that her whole heart is with Greece and her daughter there [the young Queen Sophia, on whose character recently deciphered documents have thrown so strong a light], and she spoke bitterly, as she always does, about the English hanging-back, and the dawdling of the European Concert. Then she described how she read George Tressady aloud to her invalid daughter till the daughter begged her to stop, lest she should cry over it all night—she said charming things of Helbeck, talked of Italy, D'Annunzio, quoted "my dear old friend Minghetti" as to the fundamental paganism in the Italian mind, asked me to write my name in her book, and to come and see her in Berlin—and it was time to go.... She is a very attractive, sensitive, impulsive woman, more charming than I had imagined, and, perhaps, less intellectual—altogether the very woman to set up the backs of Bismarck and his like. Never was there a more thorough Englishwoman! I found myself constantly getting her out of focus, by that confusion of mind which made one think of her as German.

And to my father I wrote:

The Empress began by asking after Uncle Matt, and nothing could have been kinder and more sympathetic than her whole manner. But of course Bismarck hated her. She is absolutely English, parliamentary, and anti-despotic.... When I ventured to say in bidding her Good-by, that I had often felt great admiration and deep sympathy for her, which is true—she threw up her hands with a little sad or bitter gesture—"Oh!—admiration!—for me!"—as if she knew very well what it was to be conscious of the reverse. A touching, intelligent, impulsive woman, she seemed to me—no doubt often not a wise one—but very attractive.

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



CHAPTER VII

THE VILLA BARBERINI. HENRY JAMES

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

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

But with the night (as I wrote some years ago) the snow vanished and the sun emerged. We ran east to one balcony, and saw the light blazing on the Alban lake, and had but to cross the apartment to find ourselves, on the other side, with all the Campagna at our feet, sparkling in a thousand colors to the sea. And outside was the garden, with its lemon-trees growing in vast jars—like the jars of Knossos—but marked with Barberini bees; its white and red camellias be-carpeting the soft grass with their fallen petals; its dark and tragic recesses where melancholy trees hung above piled fragments of the great Domitian villa whose ruins lay everywhere beneath our feet; its olive gardens sloping to the west, and open to the sun, open, too, to white, nibbling goats, and wandering bambini; its magical glimpse of St. Peter's to the north, through a notch in a group of stone-pines; and, last and best, its marvelous terrace that roofed a crypto-porticus of the old villa, whence the whole vast landscape, from Ostia and the mountains of Viterbo to the Circaean promontory, might be discerned, where one might sit and watch the sunsets burn in scarlet and purple down through the wide west into the shining bosom of the Tyrrhenian sea.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Signor Lanciani is a great man who combines being the top authority in his profession with a kindness and bonhomie which make even an ignoramus feel happy with him—and with the frankest love for flanerie and "sport." We all fell in love with him. To hear him after lunch, in his fluent, but lisping English, holding forth about the ruins of Domitian's villa—"what treasures are still to be found in ziz garden if somebody would only dig!"—and saying with excitement—"ziz town, ziz Castello Gandolfo was built upon the site of Alba Longa, not Palazzuola at all. Here, Madame, beneath our feet, is Alba Longa"—And then suddenly—a pause, a deep sigh from his ample breast, and a whisper on the summer air—"I vonder—vether—von could make a golf-links around ziz garden!"



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

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

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

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

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

"A mortal, a mortal is dead!"

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

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

* * * * *

Yes!— ... He was a priest to us all Of the wonder and bloom of the world, Which we saw with his eyes and were glad.

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER VIII

ROMAN FRIENDS. ELEANOR

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

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

To me the revisiting of Rome is the brightest spot of the day-dreams of life, and I treasure all its recollections. After the disappointment of the day when we were to have seen Albano and Nemi under your guidance, we managed the expedition, and were entranced with the scene even beyond our hopes, and since that time I have lived through it again in the pages of Eleanor, which I read with greediness, waiting each number as it appeared.

Now about Manisty. What a fortunate beggar, to have two such charming women in love with him! It is always so. The less a man deserves it the more they adore him. That is the advantage you women writers have. You always figure men as they are and women as they ought to be. If I had the composition of the history I should never represent two women behaving so well to one another under the circumstances. Even American girls, according to my observation, do not show so much toleration to their rivals, even though in the end they carry off their man....

Your sincerely attached

W. V. HARCOURT.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . . the chance to overflow into my favorite occupation of rewriting as I read, such fiction as—I can read. I took this liberty in an inordinate degree with Eleanor—and I always feel it the highest tribute I can pay. I recomposed and reconstructed her from head to foot—which I give you for the real measure of what I think of her. I think her, less obscurely—a thing of rare beauty, a large and noble performance, rich, complex, comprehensive, deeply interesting and highly distinguished. I congratulate you heartily on having mene a bonne fin so intricate and difficult a problem, and on having seen your subject so wrapped in its air and so bristling with its relations. I should say that you had done nothing more homogeneous, nor more hanging and moving together. It has Beauty—the book, the theme and treatment alike, is magnificently mature, and is really a delightful thing to have been able to do—to have laid at the old golden door of the beloved Italy. You deserve well of her. I can't "criticize"—though I could (that is, I did—but can't do it again)—rewrite. The thing's infinitely delightful and distinguished, and that's enough. The success of it, specifically, to my sense is Eleanor, admirably sustained in the "high-note" way, without a break or a drop. She is a very exquisite and very rendered conception. I won't grossly pretend to you that I think the book hasn't a weakness and rather a grave one, or you will doubt of my intelligence. It has one, and in this way, to my troubled sense: that the anti-thesis on which your subject rests isn't a real, valid anti-thesis. It was utterly built, your subject, by your intention, of course, on one; but the one you chose seems to me not efficiently to have operated, so that if the book is so charming and touching even so, that is a proof of your affluence. Lucy has in respect to Eleanor—that is, the image of Lucy that you have tried to teach yourself to see—has no true, no adequate, no logical antithetic force—and this is not only, I think, because the girl is done a little more de chic than you would really have liked to do her, but because the nearer you had got to her type the less she would have served that particular condition of your subject. You went too far for her, or, going so far, should have brought her back—roughly speaking—stronger. (Irony—and various things!—should at its hour have presided.) But I throw out that more imperfectly, I recognize, than I should wish. It doesn't matter, and not a solitary reader in your millions, or critic in your hundreds, will either have missed, or have made it! And when a book's beautiful, nothing does matter! I hope greatly to see you after the New Year. Good night. It's my usual 1.30 A.M.

Yours, dear Mrs. Ward, always,

HENRY JAMES.

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