Produced by Andrew Templeton, Juliet Sutherland, David
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A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS (IN TWO VOLUMES), VOLUME II
BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD
Published November, 1918
[Illustration: HENRY JAMES]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. LONDON IN THE 'EIGHTIES
II. LONDON FRIENDS
III. THE PUBLICATION OF "ROBERT ELSMERE"
IV. FIRST VISITS TO ITALY
V. AMALFI AND ROME. HAMPDEN AND "MARCELLA"
VI. "HELBECK OF BANNISDALE"
VII. THE VILLA BARBERINI. HENRY JAMES
VIII. ROMAN FRIENDS. "ELEANOR"
EPILOGUE
ILLUSTRATIONS
HENRY JAMES
ARTHUR BALFOUR
GOLDWIN SMITH
M. JUSSERAND
CHAPTER I
LONDON IN THE 'EIGHTIES
The few recollections of William Forster that I have put together in the
preceding volume lead naturally, perhaps, to some account of my
friendship and working relations at this time with Forster's most
formidable critic in the political press--Mr. John Morley, now Lord
Morley. It was in the late 'seventies, I think, that I first saw Mr.
Morley. I sat next him at the Master's dinner-table, and the impression
he made upon me was immediate and lasting. I trust that a great man, to
whom I owed much, will forgive me for dwelling on some of the incidents
of literary comradeship which followed!
My husband and I, on the way home, compared notes. We felt that we had
just been in contact with a singular personal power combined with a
moral atmosphere which had in it both the bracing and the charm that,
physically, are the gift of the heights. The "austere" Radical, indeed,
was there. With regard to certain vices and corruptions of our life and
politics, my uncle might as well have used Mr. Morley's name as that of
Mr. Frederick Harrison, when he presented us, in "Friendship's Garland,"
with Mr. Harrison setting up a guillotine in his back garden. There was
something--there always has been something--of the somber intensity of
the prophet in Mr. Morley. Burke drew, as we all remember, an
ineffaceable picture of Marie Antoinette's young beauty as he saw it in
1774, contrasting it with the "abominable scenes" amid which she
perished. Mr. Morley's comment is:
But did not the protracted agonies of a nation deserve the tribute
of a tear? As Paine asked, were men to weep over the plumage and
forget the dying bird? ... It was no idle abstraction, no
metaphysical right of man for which the French cried, but only the
practical right of being permitted, by their own toil, to save
themselves and the little ones about their knees from hunger and
cruel death.
The cry of the poor, indeed, against the rich and tyrannous, the cry of
the persecuted Liberal, whether in politics or religion, against his
oppressors--it used to seem to me, in the 'eighties, when, to my
pleasure and profit, I was often associated with Mr. Morley, that in his
passionate response to this double appeal lay the driving impulse of his
life and the secret of his power over others. While we were still at
Oxford he had brought out most of his books: _On Compromise_--the fierce
and famous manifesto of 1874--and the well-known volumes on the
Encyclopedists, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot. It was not for nothing that
he had been a member of Pattison's college; and a follower of John
Stuart Mill. The will to look the grimmest facts of life and destiny in
the face, without flinching, and the resolve to accept no "anodyne" from
religion or philosophy, combined with a ceaseless interest in the human
fate and the human story, and a natural, inbred sympathy for the many
against the few, for the unfortunate against the prosperous; it was
these ardors and the burning sincerity with which he felt them, that
made him so great a power among us, his juniors by half a generation. I
shall never lose the impression that _Compromise_, with its almost
savage appeal for sincerity in word and deed, made upon me--an
impression which had its share in _Robert Elsmere_.
But together with this tragic strenuousness there was always the
personal magic which winged it and gave it power. Mr. Morley has known
all through his life what it was to be courted, by men and women alike,
for the mere pleasure of his company; in which he resembled another man
whom both he and I knew well--Sir Alfred Lyall. It is well known that
Mr. Gladstone was fascinated by the combination in his future biographer
of the Puritan, the man of iron conviction, and the delightful man of
letters. And in my own small sphere I realized both aspects of Mr.
Morley during the 'eighties. Just before we left Oxford I had begun to
write reviews and occasional notes for the _Pall Mall_, which he was
then editing; after we settled in London, and he had become also editor
of _Macmillan_, he asked me, to my no little conceit, to write a monthly
_causerie_ on a book or books for that magazine. I never succeeded in
writing nearly so many; but in two years I contributed perhaps eight or
ten papers--until I became absorbed in _Robert Elsmere_ and Mr. Morley
gave up journalism for politics. During that time my pleasant task
brought me into frequent contact with my editor. Nothing could have been
kinder than his letters; at the same time there was scarcely one of them
that did not convey some hint, some touch of the critical goad,
invaluable to the recipient. I wrote him a letter of wailing when he
gave up the editorship and literature and became Member for Newcastle.
Such a fall it seemed to me then! But Mr. Morley took it patiently. "Do
not lament over your friend, but pray for him!" As, indeed, one might
well do, in the case of one who for a few brief months--in 1886--was to
be Chief Secretary for Ireland, and again in 1892-95.
It was, indeed, in connection with Ireland that I became keenly and
personally aware of that other side of Mr. Morley's character--the side
which showed him the intransigent supporter of liberty at all costs and
all hazards. It was, I suppose, the brilliant and pitiless attacks in
the _Pall Mall_ on Mr. Forster's Chief-Secretaryship, which, as much as
anything else, and together with what they reflected in the Cabinet,
weakened my uncle's position and ultimately led to his resignation in
the spring of 1882. Many of Mr. Forster's friends and kinsfolk resented
them bitterly; and among the kinsfolk, one of them, I have reason to
know, made a strong private protest. Mr. Morley's attitude in reply
could only have been that which is well expressed by a sentence of
Darmesteter's about Renan: "So pliant in appearance, so courteous in
manner, he became a bar of iron as soon as one sought to wrest from him
an act or word contrary to the intimate sense of his conscience."
But no man has a monopoly of conscience. The tragedy was that here were
two men, both democrats, both humanitarians, but that an executive
office, in a time of hideous difficulty, had been imposed upon the one,
from which the other--his critic--was free. Ten years later, when Mr.
Morley was Chief Secretary, it was pointed out that the same statesman
who had so sincerely and vehemently protested in the case of William
Forster and Mr. Balfour against the revival of "obsolete" statutes, and
the suppression of public meetings, had himself been obliged to put
obsolete statutes in operation sixteen times, and to prohibit twenty-six
public meetings. These, however, are the whirligigs of politics, and no
politician escapes them.
In my eyes Lord Morley's crowning achievement in literature is his
biography of Mr. Gladstone. How easy it would have been to smother Mr.
Gladstone in stale politics!--and how stale politics may become in that
intermediate stage before they pass finally into history! English
political literature is full of biography of this kind. The three
notable exceptions of recent years which occur to me are Mr. Churchill's
_Life_ of his father, the Disraeli biography still in progress, and the
_Gladstone_. But it would be difficult indeed to "stale" the story of
either Lord Randolph or Dizzy. A biographer would have to set about it
of malice prepense. In the case, however, of Mr. Gladstone, the danger
was more real. Anglican orthodoxy, eminent virtue, unfailing decorum; a
comparatively weak sense of humor, and a literary gift much inferior to
his oratorical gift, so that the most famous of his speeches are but
cold reading now; interminable sentences, and an unfailing relish for
detail all important in its day, but long since dead and buried; the
kind of biography that, with this material, half a dozen of Mr.
Gladstone's colleagues might have written of him, for all his greatness,
rises formidably on the inward eye. The younger generation waiting for
the historian to come--except in the case of those whose professional
duty as politicians it would have been to read it--might quite well have
yawned and passed by.
But Mr. Morley's literary instinct, which is the artistic instinct,
solved the problem. The most interesting half of the book will always, I
think, be the later half. In the great matters of his hero's earlier
career--Free Trade, the Crimean War, the early budgets, the slow
development of the Liberal leader from the Church and State Conservative
of 1832, down to the franchise battle of the 'sixties and the "great
Ministry," as Mr. Morley calls it, of 1868, the story is told, indeed,
perhaps here and there at too great length, yet with unfailing ease and
lucidity. The teller, however, is one who, till the late 'seventies, was
only a spectator, and, on the whole, from a distance, of what he is
describing, who was indeed most of the time pursuing his own special
aims--i.e., the hewing down of orthodoxy and tradition, together with
the preaching of a frank and uncompromising agnosticism, in the
_Fortnightly Review_; aims which were, of all others, most opposed to
Mr. Gladstone's. But with the 'eighties everything changes. Mr. Morley
becomes a great part of what he tells. During the intermediate
stage--marked by his editorship of the _Pall Mall Gazette_--the tone of
the biography grows sensibly warmer and more vivid, as the writer draws
nearer and nearer to the central scene; and with Mr. Morley's election
to Newcastle and his acceptance of the Chief-Secretaryship in 1885, the
book becomes the fascinating record of not one man, but two, and that
without any intrusion whatever on the rights of the main figure. The
dreariness of the Irish struggle is lightened by touch after touch that
only Mr. Morley could have given. Take that picture of the somber,
discontented Parnell, coming, late in the evening, to Mr. Morley's room
in the House of Commons, to complain of the finance of the Home Rule
Bill--Mr. Gladstone's entrance at 10.30 P.M., after an exhausting
day--and he, the man of seventy-seven, sitting down to work between the
Chief Secretary and the Irish leader, till at last, with a sigh of
weariness at nearly 1 A.M., the tired Prime Minister pleads to go to
bed. Or that most dramatic story, later on, of Committee Room No. 15,
where Mr. Morley becomes the reporter to Mr. Gladstone of that moral and
political tragedy, the fall of Parnell; or a hundred other sharp lights
upon the inner and human truth of things, as it lay behind the political
spectacle. All through the later chapters, too, the happy use of
conversations between the two men on literary and philosophical matters
relieves what might have been the tedium of the end. For these vivid
notes of free talk not only bring the living Gladstone before you in the
most varied relation to his time; they keep up a perpetually interesting
comparison in the reader's mind between the hero and his biographer. One
is as eager to know what Mr. Morley is going to say as one is to listen
to Mr. Gladstone. The two men, with their radical differences and their
passionate sympathies, throw light on each other, and the agreeable
pages achieve a double end, without ever affecting the real unity of the
book. Thus handled, biography, so often the drudge of literature, rises
into its high places and becomes a delight instead of an edifying or
informing necessity.
I will add one other recollection of this early time--i.e., that in
1881 the reviewing of Mr. Morley's _Cobden_ in the _Times_ fell to my
husband, and as those were the days of many-column reviews, and as the
time given for the review was _exceedingly_ short, it could only be done
at all by a division of labor. We divided the sheets of the book, and we
just finished in time to let my husband rush off to Printing House
Square and correct the proofs as they went through the press for the
morning's issue. In those days, as is well known, the _Times_ went to
press much later than now, and a leader-writer rarely got home before 4,
and sometimes 5, A.M.
* * * * *
I find it extremely difficult, as I look back, to put any order into the
crowding memories of those early years in London. They were
extraordinarily stimulating to us both, and years of great happiness. At
home our children were growing up; our own lives were branching out into
new activities and bringing us always new friends, and a more
interesting share in that "great mundane movement" which Mr. Bottles
believed would perish without him. Our connection with the _Times_ and
with the Forsters, and the many new acquaintances and friends we made at
this time in that happy meeting-ground of men and causes--Mrs. Jeune's
drawing-room--opened to us the world of politicians; while my husband's
four volumes on _The English Poets_, published just as we left Oxford,
volumes to which all the most prominent writers of the day had
contributed, together with the ever-delightful fact that Matthew Arnold
was my uncle, brought us the welcome of those of our own _métier_ and
way of life; and when in 1884 my husband became art critic of the paper,
a function which he filled for more than five and twenty years, fresh
doors opened on the already crowded scene, and fresh figures stepped in.
The setting of it all was twofold--in the first place, our dear old
house in Russell Square, and, in the next, the farm on Rodborough
Common, four miles from Godalming, where, amid a beauty of gorse and
heather that filled every sense on a summer day with the mere joy of
breathing and looking, our children and we spent the holiday hours of
seven goodly years. The Russell Square house has been, so to speak,
twice demolished and twice buried, since we lived in it. Some of its
stones must still lie deep under the big hotel which now towers on its
site. That it does not still exist somewhere, I can hardly believe. The
westerly sun seems to me still to be pouring into the beautiful little
hall, built and decorated about 1750, with its panels of free scrollwork
in blue and white, and to be still glancing through the drawing-rooms to
the little powder-closet at the end, my tiny workroom, where I first
sketched the plan of _Robert Elsmere_ for my sister Julia Huxley, and
where, after three years, I wrote the last words. If I open the door of
the back drawing-room, there, to the right, is the children's
school-room. I see them at their lessons, and the fine plane-trees that
look in at the window. And up-stairs there are the pleasant bedrooms and
the nurseries. It was born, the old house, in the year of the Young
Pretender, and, after serving six generations, perhaps as faithfully as
it served us, it "fell on sleep." There should be a special Elysium,
surely, for the houses where the fates have been kind and where people
have been happy; and a special Tartarus for those--of Oedipus or
Atreus--in which "old, unhappy, far-off things" seem to be always
poisoning the present.
As to Borough Farm--now the head-quarters of the vast camp which
stretches to Hindhead--it stood then in an unspoiled wilderness of
common and wood, approached only by what we called "the sandy track"
from the main Portsmouth Road, with no neighbors for miles but a few
scattered cottages. Its fate had been harder than that of 61 Russell
Square. The old London house has gone clean out of sight, translated,
whole and fair, into a world of memory. But Borough and the common are
still here--as war has made them. Only--may I never see them again!
It was in 1882, the year of Tel-el-Kebir, when we took Peperharrow
Rectory (the Murewell Vicarage of _Robert Elsmere_) for the summer, that
we first came across Borough Farm. We left it in 1889. I did a great
deal of work, there and in London, in those seven years. The _Macmillan_
papers I have already spoken of. They were on many subjects--Tennyson's
"Becket," Mr. Pater's "Marius," "The Literature of Introspection," Jane
Austen, Keats, Gustavo Becquer, and various others. I still kept up my
Spanish to some extent, and I twice examined--in 1882 and 1888--for the
Taylorian scholarship in Spanish at Oxford, our old friend, Doctor
Kitchin, afterward Dean of Durham, writing to me with glee that I should
be "making history" as "the first woman examiner of men at either
University." My colleague on the first occasion was the old Spanish
scholar, Don Pascual de Gayangos, to whom the calendaring of the Spanish
MSS. in the British Museum had been largely intrusted; and the second
time, Mr. York Powell of Christ Church--I suppose one of the most
admirable Romance scholars of the time--was associated with me. But if I
remember right, I set the papers almost entirely, and wrote the report
on both occasions. It gave me a feeling of safety in 1888, when my
knowledge, such as it was, had grown very rusty, that Mr. York Powell
overlooked the papers, seeing that to set Scholarship questions for
postgraduate candidates is not easy for one who has never been through
any proper "mill"! But they passed his scrutiny satisfactorily, and in
1888 we appointed as Taylorian Scholar a man to whom for years I
confidently looked for _the_ history of Spain--combining both the
Spanish and Arabic sources--so admirable had his work been in the
examination. But, alack! that great book has still to be written. For
Mr. Butler Clarke died prematurely in 1904, and the hope died with him.
For the _Times_ I wrote a good many long, separate articles before 1884,
on "Spanish Novels," "American Novels," and so forth; the "leader" on
the death of Anthony Trollope; and various elaborate reviews of books on
Christian origins, a subject on which I was perpetually reading, always
with the same vision before me, growing in clearness as the
years passed.
But my first steps toward its realization were to begin with the short
story of _Miss Bretherton_, published in 1884, and then the translation
of Amiel's _Journal Intime_, which appeared in 1885. _Miss Bretherton_
was suggested to me by the brilliant success in 1883 of Mary Anderson,
and by the controversy with regard to her acting--as distinct from her
delightful beauty and her attractive personality--which arose between
the fastidious few and the enchanted many. I maintained then, and am
quite sure now, that Isabel Bretherton was in no sense a portrait of
Miss Anderson. She was to me a being so distinct from the living actress
that I offered her to the world with an entire good faith, which seems
to myself now, perhaps thirty years later, hardly less surprising than
it did to the readers of the time. For undoubtedly the situation in the
novel was developed out of the current dramatic debate. But it became to
me just _a_ situation--_a_ problem. It was really not far removed from
Diderot's problem in the _Paradoxe sur le Comédien_. What is the
relation of the actor to the part represented? One actress is
plain--Rachel; another actress is beautiful, and more than beautiful,
delightful--Miss Anderson. But all the time, is there or is there not a
region in which all these considerations count for nothing in comparison
with certain others? Is there a dramatic _art_--exacting, difficult,
supreme--or is there not? The choice of the subject, at that time, was,
it may be confessed, a piece of naïveté, and the book itself was young
and naïve throughout. But something in it has kept it in circulation all
this while; and for me it marks with a white stone the year in which it
appeared. For it brought me my first critical letter from Henry James;
it was the first landmark in our long friendship.
Beloved Henry James! It seems to me that my original meeting with him
was at the Andrew Langs' in 1882. He was then forty-two, in the prime of
his working life, and young enough to be still "Henry James, Junior," to
many. I cannot remember anything else of the Langs' dinner-party except
that we were also invited to meet the author of _Vice Versa_, "which Mr.
Lang thinks"--as I wrote to my mother--"the best thing of its kind since
Dickens." But shortly after that, Mr. James came to see us in Russell
Square and a little incident happened which stamped itself for good on a
still plastic memory. It was a very hot day; the western sun was beating
on the drawing-room windows, though the room within was comparatively
dark and cool. The children were languid with the heat, and the
youngest, Janet, then five, stole into the drawing-room and stood
looking at Mr. James. He put out a half-conscious hand to her; she came
nearer, while we talked on. Presently she climbed on his knee. I suppose
I made a maternal protest. He took no notice, and folded his arm round
her. We talked on; and presently the abnormal stillness of Janet
recalled her to me and made me look closely through the dark of the
room. She was fast asleep, her pale little face on the young man's
shoulder, her long hair streaming over his arm. Now Janet was a most
independent and critical mortal, no indiscriminate "climber up of
knees"; far from it. Nor was Mr. James an indiscriminate lover of
children; he was not normally much at home with them, though _always_
good to them. But the childish instinct had in fact divined the profound
tenderness and chivalry which were the very root of his nature; and he
was touched and pleased, as one is pleased when a robin perches on
one's hand.
From that time, as the precious bundle of his letters shows, he became
the friend of all of us--myself, my husband, and the children; though
with an increased intimacy from the 'nineties onward. In a subsequent
chapter I will try and summarize the general mark left on me by his
fruitful and stainless life. His letter to me about _Miss Bretherton_ is
dated December 9, 1884. He had already come to see me about it, and
there was never any critical discussion like his, for its suggestion of
a hundred points of view, its flashing of unexpected lights, its witness
to the depth and richness of his own artistic knowledge.
The whole thing is delicate and distinguished [he wrote me] and the
reader has the pleasure and security of feeling that he is with a
woman (distinctly a woman!) who knows how (rare bird!) to write. I
think your idea, your situation, interesting in a high degree--But
[and then come a series of most convincing "buts"! He objects
strongly to the happy ending]. I wish that your actress had been
carried away from Kendal [her critical lover, who worships herself,
but despises her art] altogether, carried away by the current of her
artistic life, the sudden growth of her power, and the excitement,
the ferocity and egotism (those of the artist realizing success, I
mean; I allude merely to the normal dose of those elements) which
the effort to create, to "arrive" (once she had had a glimpse of her
possible successes) would have brought with it. (Excuse that
abominable sentence.) Isabel, the Isabel you describe, has too much
to spare for Kendal--Kendal being what he is; and one doesn't feel
her, see her, enough, as the pushing actress, the _cabotine_! She
lapses toward him as if she were a failure, whereas you make her out
a great success. No!--she wouldn't have thought so much of him at
such a time as that--though very possibly she would have come back
to him later.
The whole letter, indeed, is full of admirable criticism, sprung from a
knowledge of life, which seemed to me, his junior by twelve years,
unapproachably rich and full. But how grateful I was to him for the
criticism!--how gracious and chivalrous was his whole attitude toward
the writer and the book! Indeed, as I look over the bundle of letters
which concern this first novel of mine, I am struck by the good fortune
which brought me such mingled chastening and praise, in such long
letters, from judges so generous and competent. Henry James, Walter
Pater, John Morley, "Mr. Creighton" (then Emmanuel Professor at
Cambridge), Cotter Morrison, Sir Henry Taylor, Edmond Scherer--they are
all there. Besides the renewal of the old throb of pleasure as one reads
them, one feels a sort of belated remorse that so much trouble was taken
for so slight a cause! Are there similar friends nowadays to help the
first steps of a writer? Or is there no leisure left in this choked
life of ours?
The decisive criticism, perhaps, of all, is that of Mr. Creighton: "I
find myself carried away by the delicate feeling with which the
development of character is traced." But--"You wrote this book as a
critic not as a creator. It is a sketch of the possible worth of
criticism in an unregenerate world. This was worth doing once; but if
you are going on with novels you must throw criticism overboard and let
yourself go, as a partner of common joys, common sorrows, and common
perplexities. There--I have told you what I think, just as I think it."
* * * * *
_Miss Bretherton_ was a trial trip, and it taught me a good deal. When
it came out I had nearly finished the translation of Amiel, which
appeared in 1885, and in March of that year some old friends drove me up
the remote Westmorland valley of Long Sleddale, at a moment when the
blackthorn made lines of white along the lanes; and from that day onward
the early chapters of _Robert Elsmere_ began to shape themselves in my
mind. All the main ideas of the novel were already there. Elsmere was to
be the exponent of a freer faith; Catharine had been suggested by an old
friend of my youth; while Langham was the fruit of my long communing
with the philosophic charm and the tragic impotence of Amiel. I began
the book in the early summer of 1885, and thenceforward it absorbed me
until its appearance in 1888.
The year 1885, indeed, was one of expanding horizons, of many new
friends, of quickened pulses generally. The vastness of London and its
myriad interests seemed to be invading our life more and more. I can
recall one summer afternoon, in particular, when, as I was in a hansom
driving idly westward toward Hyde Park Gate, thinking of a hundred
things at once, this consciousness of _intensification_, of a heightened
meaning in everything--the broad street, the crowd of moving figures and
carriages, the houses looking down upon it--seized upon me with a rush.
"Yes, it is good--the mere living!" Joy in the infinite variety of the
great city as compared with the "cloistered virtue" of Oxford; the sheer
pleasure of novelty, of the kind new faces, and the social discoveries
one felt opening on many sides; the delight of new perceptions, new
powers in oneself--all this seemed to flower for me in those few minutes
of reverie--if one can apply such a word to an experience so vivid. And
meanwhile the same intensity of pleasure from nature that I had always
been capable of flowed in upon me from new scenes; above all, from
solitary moments at Borough Farm, in the heart of the Surrey commons,
when the September heather blazed about me; or the first signs of spring
were on the gorse and the budding trees; or beside some lonely pool; and
always heightened now by the company of my children. It was a stage--a
normal stage, in normal life. But I might have missed it so easily! The
Fates were kind to us in those days.
As to the social scene, let me gather from it first a recollection of
pure romance. One night at a London dinner-party I found myself sent
down with a very stout gentleman, an American Colonel, who proclaimed
himself an "esoteric Buddhist," and provoked in me a rapid and vehement
dislike. I turned my back upon him and examined the table. Suddenly I
became aware of a figure opposite to me, the figure of a young girl who
seemed to me one of the most ravishing creatures I had ever seen. She
was very small, and exquisitely made. Her beautiful head, with its mass
of light-brown hair; the small features and delicate neck; the clear,
pale skin, the lovely eyes with rather heavy lids, which gave a slight
look of melancholy to the face; the grace and fire of every movement
when she talked; the dreamy silence into which she sometimes fell,
without a trace of awkwardness or shyness. But how vain is any mere
catalogue to convey the charm of Laura Tennant--the first Mrs. Alfred
Lyttelton--to those who never saw her!
I asked to be introduced to her as soon as we left the dining-room, and
we spent the evening in a corner together.
I fell in love with her there and then. The rare glimpses of her that
her busy life and mine allowed made one of my chief joys thenceforward,
and her early death was to me--as to so many, many others!--a grief
never forgotten.
The recent biography of Alfred Lyttelton--War Minister in Mr. Balfour's
latest Cabinet--skilfully and beautifully done by his second wife, has
conveyed to the public of thirty years later some idea of Laura's
imperishable charm. And I greatly hope that it may be followed some day
by a collection of her letters, for there are many in existence, and,
young as she was, they would, I believe, throw much light upon a crowded
moment in our national life. Laura was the fourth daughter of Sir
Charles Tennant, a rich Glasgow manufacturer, and the elder sister of
Mrs. Asquith. She and her sisters came upon the scene in the early
'eighties; and without any other extrinsic advantage but that of wealth,
which in this particular case would not have taken them very far, they
made a conquest--the younger two, Laura and Margot, in particular--of a
group of men and women who formed a kind of intellectual and social
_élite_; who were all of them accomplished; possessed, almost all of
them, of conspicuous good looks, or of the charm that counts as much;
and among whom there happened to be a remarkable proportion of men who
have since made their mark on English history. My generation knew them
as "The Souls." "The Souls" were envied, mocked at, caricatured, by
those who were not of them. They had their follies--why not? They were
young, and it was their golden day. Their dislike of convention and
routine had the effect on many--and those not fools--of making
convention and routine seem particularly desirable. But there was not, I
think, a young man or woman admitted to their inner ranks who did not
possess in some measure a certain quality very difficult to isolate and
define. Perhaps, to call it "disinterestedness" comes nearest. For they
were certainly no seekers after wealth, or courters of the great. It
might be said, of course, that they had no occasion; they had as much
birth and wealth as any one need want, among themselves. But that does
not explain it. For push and greed are among the commonest faults of an
aristocracy. The immortal pages of Saint Simon are there to show it.
"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also," says the
Gospel. Now the "treasure" among The Souls was, ultimately--or at least
tended to be--something spiritual. The typical expression of it, at its
best, is to be found in those exquisite last words left by Laura
Lyttelton for her husband, which the second Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton has,
as I think, so rightly published. That unique "will," which for thirty
years before it appeared in print was known to a wide circle of persons,
many of whom had never seen the living Laura, was the supreme expression
of a quality which, in greater or lesser degree, The Souls seemed to
demand of one another, and of those who wished to join their band. Yet,
combined with this passion, this poetry, this religious feeling, was
first the maddest delight in simple things--in open air and physical
exercise; then, a headlong joy in literature, art, music, acting; a
perpetual spring of fun; and a hatred of all the solemn pretenses that
too often make English society a weariness.
No doubt there is something--perhaps much--to be said on the other side.
But I do not intend to say it. I was never a Soul, nor could have been.
I came from too different a world. But there were a certain number of
persons--of whom I was one--who were their "harborers" and spectators. I
found delight in watching them. They were quite a new experience to me;
and I saw them dramatically, like a scene in a play, full of fresh
implications and suggestions. I find in an old letter to my mother an
account of an evening at 40 Grosvenor Square, where the Tennants lived.
It was not an evening party--we joined a dinner party there, after
dining somewhere else. So that the rooms were empty enough to let
one see the pretty creatures gathered in it, to perfection. In the
large drawing-room, which is really a ball-room with a polished
floor, people were dancing, or thought-reading, or making music, as
it pleased them.
Mr. Balfour was there, with whom we had made friends, as fellow-guests,
on a week-end visit to Oxford, not long before; Alfred Lyttelton, then
in the zenith of his magnificent youth; Lord Curzon, then plain Mr.
Curzon, and in the Foreign Office; Mr. Harry Gust; Mr. Rennell Rodd, now
the British Ambassador in Rome, and many others--a goodly company of
young men in their prime. And among the women there was a very high
proportion of beauty, but especially of grace. "The half-lit room, the
dresses and the beauty," says my letter, "reminded one of some _festa_
painted by Watteau or Lancret." But with what a difference! For, after
all, it was English, through and through.
A little after this evening, Laura Tennant came down to spend a day at
Borough Farm with the children and me. Another setting! Our principal
drawing-room there in summer was a sand-pit, shaded by an old ash-tree
and haunted by innumerable sand-martins. It was Ascension Day, and the
commons were a dream of beauty. Our guest, I find, was to have come down
"with Mr. Balfour and Mr. Burne-Jones." But in the end she came down
alone; and we talked all day, sitting under hawthorns white with bloom,
wandering through rushy fields ablaze with marsh marigold and orchis.
She wrote to me the same evening after her return to London:
I sit with my eyes resting on the medieval purple of the
sweet-breathing orchis you gave me, and my thoughts feasting on the
wonderful beauty of the snowy blossom against the blue.... This has
been a real Ascension Day.
Later in the year--in November--she wrote to me from Scotland--she was
then twenty-one:
I am still in Scotland, but don't pity me, for I love it more than
anything else in the wide world. If you could only hear the wind
throwing his arm against my window, and sobbing down the glen. I
think I shall never have a Lover I am so fond of as the wind. None
ever serenaded me so divinely. And when I open my window wide and
ask him what he wants, and tell him I am quite ready to elope with
him now--this moment--he only moans and sighs thro' my outblown
hair--and gives me neuralgia.... I read all day, except when I am
out with my Lover, or playing with my little nephew and niece, both
of whom I adore--for they are little poets. We have had a houseful
ever since August, so I am delighted to get a little calm. It is so
dreadful never, never to be alone--and really the housemaid would do
just as well! and yet, whenever I go to my sanctum I am routed out
as if I was of as much use as plums to plum pudding, and either made
to play lawn-tennis or hide-and-seek, or to talk to a young man
whose only idea of the Infinite is the Looking-glass. All these are
the trials that attend the "young lady" of the house. Poor devil!
Forgive strong language--but really my sympathy is deep.
I have, however, some really nice friends here, and am not entirely
discontented. Mr. Gerald Balfour left the other day. He is very
clever--and quite beautiful--like a young god. I wonder if you know
him. I know you know Arthur.... Lionel Tennyson, who was also here
with Gerald Balfour, has a splendid humor--witty and "fin," which is
rare in England. Lord Houghton, Alfred Lyttelton, Godfrey Webb,
George Curzon, the Chesterfields, the Hayters, Mary Gladstone, and a
lot more have been here. I went north, too, to the land of Thule and
was savagely happy. I wore no hat--no gloves--I bathed, fished,
boated, climbed, and kissed the earth, and danced round a cairn. It
was opposite Skye at a Heaven called Loch Ailsa.... Such
beauty--such weather--such a fortnight will not come again. Perhaps
it would be unjust to the crying world for one human being to have
more of the Spirit of Delight; but one is glad to have tasted of the
cup, and while it was in my hands I drank deeply.
I have read very little. I am hungering for a month or two's
silence.
But there was another lover than the west wind waiting for this most
lovable of mortals. A few days afterward she wrote to me from a house in
Hampshire, where many of her particular friends were gathered, among
them Alfred Lyttelton.
The conversation is pyrotechnic--and it is all quite delightful. A
beautiful place--paradoxical arguments--ideals raised and
shattered--temples torn and battered--temptations given way
to--newspapers unread--acting--rhyming--laughing--_ad infinitum_. I
wish you were here!
Six weeks afterward she was engaged to Mr. Lyttelton. She was to be
married in May, and in Easter week of that year we met her in Paris,
where she was buying her trousseau, enjoying it like a child, making
friends with all her dressmakers, and bubbling over with fun about it.
"It isn't 'dressing,'" she said, "unless you apply main force to them.
What they _want_ is always--_presque pas de corsage, et pas du
tout de manches!_"
One day she and Mr. Lyttelton and Mr. Balfour and one or two others came
to tea with us at the Hotel Chatham to meet Victor Cherbuliez. The
veteran French novelist fell in love with her, of course, and their
talk--Laura's French was as spontaneous and apparently as facile as her
English--kept the rest of us happy. Then she married in May, with half
London to see, and Mr. Gladstone--then Prime Minister--mounted on the
chair to make the wedding-speech. For by her marriage Laura became the
great man's niece, since Alfred Lyttelton's mother was a sister of Mrs.
Gladstone.
Then in the autumn came the hope of a child--to her who loved children
so passionately. But all through the waiting time she was overshadowed
by a strangely strong presentiment of death. I went to see her sometimes
toward the end of it, when she was resting on her sofa in the late
evening, and used to leave her listening for her husband's step, on his
return from his work, her little weary face already lit up with
expectation. The weeks passed, and those who loved her began to be
anxious. I went down to Borough Farm in May, and there, just two years
after she had sat with us under the hawthorn, I heard the news of her
little son's birth, and then ten days later the news of her death.
With that death a ray of pure joy was quenched on earth. But Laura
Lyttelton was not only youth and delight--she was also embodied love. I
have watched her in a crowded room where everybody wanted her, quietly
seek out the neglected person there, the stranger, the shy secretary or
governess, and make her happy--bring her in--with an art that few
noticed, because in her it was nature. When she died she left an
enduring mark in the minds of many who have since governed or guided
England; but she was mourned also by scores of humble folk, and by
disagreeable folk whom only she befriended. Mrs. Lyttelton quotes a
letter written by the young wife to her husband:
Tell me you love me and always will. Tell me, so that when I dream I
may dream of Love, and when I sleep dreamless Love may be holding me
in his wings, and when I wake Love may be the spirit in my feet, and
when I die Love may be the Angel that takes me home.
And in the room of death, when the last silence fell on those gathered
there, her sister Margot--by Laura's wish, expressed some time
before--read aloud the "will," in which she spoke her inmost heart.
Since its publication it belongs to those records of life and feeling
which are part of our common inheritance.
"She was a flame, beautiful, dancing, ardent," writes the second Mrs.
Lyttelton. "The wind of life was too fierce for such a spirit; she could
not live in it."
I make no apology for dwelling on the life and earthly death of this
young creature who was only known to a band--though a large band--of
friends during her short years. Throughout social and literary history
there have been a few apparitions like hers, which touch with peculiar
force, in the hearts of men and women, the old, deep, human notes which
"make us men." Youth, beauty, charm, death--they are the great themes
with which all art, plastic or literary, tries to conjure. It is given
to very few to handle them simply, yet sufficiently; with power, yet
without sentimentality. Breathed into Laura's short life, they affected
whose who knew her like the finest things in poetry.