THE PUBLICATION OF _ROBERT ELSMERE_
It was in 1885, after the completion of the Amiel translation, that I
began _Robert Elsmere_, drawing the opening scenes from that expedition
to Long Sleddale in the spring of that year which I have already
mentioned. The book took me three years, nearly, to write. Again and
again I found myself dreaming that the end was near and publication only
a month or two away, only to sink back on the dismal conviction that the
second, or the first, or the third volume--or some portion of each--must
be rewritten, if I was to satisfy myself at all. I actually wrote the
last words of the last chapter in March, 1887, and came out afterward,
from my tiny writing-room at the end of the drawing-room, shaken with
tears, and wondering, as I sat alone on the floor, by the fire, in the
front room, what life would be like, now that the book was done! But it
was nearly a year after that before it came out, a year of incessant
hard work, of endless rewriting, and much nervous exhaustion. For all
the work was saddened and made difficult by the fact that my mother's
long illness was nearing its end and that I was torn incessantly between
the claim of the book and the desire to be with her whenever I could
possibly be spared from my home and children. Whenever there was a
temporary improvement in her state, I would go down to Borough alone to
work feverishly at revision, only to be drawn back to her side before
long by worse news. And all the time London life went on as usual, and
the strain at times was great.
The difficulty of finishing the book arose first of all from its length.
I well remember the depressed countenance of Mr. George Smith--who was
to be to me through fourteen years afterward the kindest of publishers
and friends--when I called one day in Waterloo Place, bearing a
basketful of typewritten sheets. "I am afraid you have brought us a
perfectly unmanageable book!" he said; and I could only mournfully agree
that so it was. It was far too long, and my heart sank at the thought of
all there was still to do. But how patient Mr. Smith was over it! and
how generous in the matter of unlimited fresh proofs and endless
corrections. I am certain that he had no belief in the book's success;
and yet, on the ground of his interest in _Miss Bretherton_ he had made
liberal terms with me, and all through the long incubation he was always
indulgent and sympathetic.
The root difficulty was of course the dealing with such a subject in a
novel at all. Yet I was determined to deal with it so, in order to reach
the public. There were great precedents--Froude's _Nemesis of Faith_,
Newman's _Loss and Gain_, Kingsley's _Alton Locke_--for the novel of
religious or social propaganda. And it seemed to me that the novel was
capable of holding and shaping real experience of any kind, as it
affects the lives of men and women. It is the most elastic, the most
adaptable of forms. No one has a right to set limits to its range. There
is only one final test. Does it interest?--does it appeal? Personally, I
should add another. Does it make in the long run for _beauty_? Beauty
taken in the largest and most generous sense, and especially as
including discord, the harsh and jangled notes which enrich the
rest--but still Beauty--as Tolstoy was a master of it?
But at any rate, no one will deny that _interest_ is the crucial matter.
There are five and twenty ways
Of constructing tribal lays--
And every single one of them is right!
always supposing that the way chosen quickens the breath and stirs the
heart of those who listen. But when the subject chosen has two aspects,
the one intellectual and logical, the other poetic and emotional, the
difficulty of holding the balance between them, so that neither
overpowers the other, and interest is maintained, is admittedly great.
I wanted to show how a man of sensitive and noble character, born for
religion, comes to throw off the orthodoxies of his day and moment, and
to go out into the wilderness where all is experiment, and spiritual
life begins again. And with him I wished to contrast a type no less fine
of the traditional and guided mind, and to imagine the clash of two such
tendencies of thought as it might affect all practical life, and
especially the life of two people who loved each other.
Here then, to begin with, were Robert and Catharine. Yes, but Robert
must be made intellectually intelligible. Closely looked at, all
novel-writing is a sort of shorthand. Even the most simple and broadly
human situation cannot really be told in full. Each reader in following
it unconsciously supplies a vast amount himself. A great deal of the
effect is owing to things quite out of the picture given--things in the
reader's own mind, first and foremost. The writer is playing on common
experience; and mere suggestion is often far more effective than
analysis. Take the paragraph in Turguénieff's _Lisa_--it was pointed out
to me by Henry James--where Lavretsky on the point of marriage, after
much suffering, with the innocent and noble girl whom he adores,
suddenly hears that his intolerable first wife, whom he had long
believed dead, is alive. Turguénieff, instead of setting out the
situation in detail, throws himself on the reader: "It was dark.
Lavretsky went into the garden, and walked up and down there till dawn."
That is all. And it is enough. The reader who is not capable of sharing
that night walk with Lavretsky, and entering into his thoughts, has read
the novel to no purpose. He would not understand, though Lavretsky or
his creator were to spend pages on explaining.
But in my case, what provoked the human and emotional crisis--what
produced the _story_--was an intellectual process. Now the difficulty
here in using suggestion--which is the master tool of the novelist--is
much greater than in the case of ordinary experience. For the conscious
use of the intellect on the accumulated data of life, through history
and philosophy, is not ordinary experience. In its more advanced forms,
it only applies to a small minority of the human race.
Still, in every generation, while a minority is making or taking part in
the intellectual process itself, there is an atmosphere, a diffusion,
produced around them, which affects many thousands who have but little
share--but little _conscious_ share, at any rate--in the actual process.
Here, then, is the opening for suggestion--in connection with the
various forms of imagination which enter into Literature; with poetry,
and fiction, which, as Goethe saw, is really a form of poetry. And a
quite legitimate opening. For to use it is to quicken the intellectual
process itself, and to induce a larger number of minds to take part
in it.
The problem, then, in intellectual poetry or fiction, is so to suggest
the argument, that both the expert and the popular consciousness may
feel its force, and to do this without overstepping the bounds of poetry
or fiction; without turning either into mere ratiocination, and so
losing the "simple, sensuous, passionate" element which is their
true life.
It was this problem which made _Robert Elsmere_ take three years to
write, instead of one. Mr. Gladstone complained, in his famous review of
it, that a majestic system which had taken centuries to elaborate, and
gathered into itself the wisest brains of the ages, had gone down in a
few weeks or months before the onslaught of the Squire's arguments; and
that if the Squire's arguments were few, the orthodox arguments were
fewer! The answer to the first part of the charge is that the
well-taught schoolboy of to-day is necessarily wiser in a hundred
respects than Sophocles or Plato, since he represents not himself, but
the brainwork of a hundred generations since those great men lived. And
as to the second, if Mr. Gladstone had seen the first redactions of the
book--only if he had, I fear he would never have read it!--he would
hardly have complained of lack of argument on either side, whatever he
might have thought of its quality. Again and again I went on writing for
hours, satisfying the logical sense in oneself, trying to put the
arguments on both sides as fairly as possible, only to feel despairingly
at the end that it must all come out. It might be decent controversy;
but life, feeling, charm, _humanity_, had gone out of it; it had ceased,
therefore, to be "making," to be literature.
So that in the long run there was no other method possible than
suggestion--and, of course, _selection_!--as with all the rest of one's
material. That being understood, what one had to aim at was so to use
suggestion as to touch the two zones of thought--that of the scholar and
that of what one may call the educated populace; who, without being
scholars, were yet aware, more or less clearly, of what the scholars
were doing. It is from these last that "atmosphere" and "diffusion"
come; the atmosphere and diffusion which alone make wide penetration for
a book illustrating an intellectual motive possible. I had to learn
that, having read a great deal, I must as far as possible wipe out the
traces of reading. All that could be done was to leave a few sign-posts
as firmly planted as one could, so as to recall the real journey to
those who already knew it, and, for the rest, to trust to the floating
interest and passion surrounding a great controversy--the _second_
religious battle of the nineteenth century--with which it had seemed to
me, both in Oxford and in London, that the intellectual air was charged.
I grew very weary in the course of the long effort, and often very
despairing. But there were omens of hope now and then; first, a letter
from my dear eldest brother, the late W.T. Arnold, who died in 1904,
leaving a record as journalist and scholar which has been admirably told
by his intimate friend and colleague, Mr. (now Captain) C.E. Montague.
He and I had shared many intellectual interests connected with the
history of the Empire. His monograph on _Roman Provincial
Administration_, first written as an Arnold Essay, still holds the
field; and in the realm of pure literature his one-volume edition of
Keats is there to show his eagerness for beauty and his love of English
verse. I sent him the first volume in proof, about a year before the
book came out, and awaited his verdict with much anxiety. It came one
May day in 1889. I happened to be very tired and depressed at the
moment, and I remember sitting alone for a little while with the letter
in my hand, without courage to open it. Then at last I opened it.
Warm congratulation--Admirable!--Full of character and color....
_Miss Bretherton_ was an intellectual exercise. This is quite a
different affair, and has interested and touched me deeply, as I
feel sure it will all the world. The biggest thing that--with a few
other things of the same kind--has been done for years.
Well!--that was enough to go on with, to carry me through the last
wrestle with proofs and revision. But by the following November nervous
fatigue made me put work aside for a few weeks, and we went abroad for
rest, only to be abruptly summoned home by my mother's state.
Thenceforward I lived a double life--the one overshadowed by my mother's
approaching death, the other amid the agitation of the book's appearance
and all the incidents of its rapid success.
I have already told the story in the Introduction to the Library Edition
of _Robert Elsmere_, and I will only run through it here as rapidly as
possible, with a few fresh incidents and quotations. There was never any
doubt at all of the book's fate, and I may repeat again that, before Mr.
Gladstone's review of it, the three volumes were already in a third
edition, the rush at all the libraries was in full course, and Matthew
Arnold--so gay and kind, in those March weeks before his own sudden
death!--had clearly foreseen the rising boom. "I shall take it with me
to Bristol next week and get through it there, I hope [but he didn't
achieve it!]. It is one of my regrets not to have known the Green of
your dedication." And a week or two later he wrote an amusing letter to
his sister, describing a country-house party at beautiful Wilton, Lord
Pembroke's home near Salisbury, and the various stages in the book
reached by the members of the party, including Mr. Goschen, who were all
reading it, and all talking of it. I never, however, had any criticism
of it from him, except of the first volume, which he liked. I doubt very
much whether the second and third volumes would have appealed to him. My
uncle was a Modernist long before the time. In _Literature and Dogma_ he
threw out in detail much of the argument suggested in _Robert Elsmere_,
but to the end of his life he was a contented member of the Anglican
Church, so far as attendance at her services was concerned, and belief
in her mission of "edification" to the English people. He had little
sympathy with people who "went out." Like Mr. Jowett, he would have
liked to see the Church slowly reformed and "modernized" from within. So
that with the main theme of my book--that a priest who doubts must
depart--he could never have had full sympathy. And in the course of
years--as I showed in a later novel written twenty-four years after
_Robert Elsmere_--I feel that I have very much come to agree with him!
These great national structures that we call churches are too precious
for iconoclast handling, if any other method is possible. The strong
assertion of individual liberty within them, as opposed to the attempt
to break them down from without; that seems to me now the hopeful
course. A few more heresy trials like those which sprang out of _Essays
and Reviews_, or the persecution of Bishop Colenso, would let in fresh
life and healing nowadays, as did those old stirrings of the waters. The
first Modernist bishop who stays in his place forms a Modernist chapter
and diocese around him, and fights the fight where he stands, will do
more for liberty and faith in the Church, I now sadly believe, than
those scores of brave "forgotten dead" who have gone out of her for
conscience' sake, all these years.
But to return to the book. All through March the tide of success was
rapidly rising; and when I was able to think of it I was naturally
carried away by the excitement and astonishment of it. But with the
later days of March a veil dropped between me and the book. My mother's
suffering and storm-beaten life was coming rapidly to its close, and I
could think of nothing else. In an interval of slight improvement,
indeed, when it seemed as though she might rally for a time, I heard Mr.
Gladstone's name quoted for the first time in connection with the book.
It will be remembered that he was then out of office, having been
overthrown on the Home Rule Question in 1886, and he happened to be
staying for an Easter visit with the Warden of Keble, and Mrs. Talbot,
who was his niece by marriage. I was with my mother, about a mile away,
and Mrs. Talbot, who came to ask for news of her, reported to me that
Mr. Gladstone was deep in the book. He was reading it, pencil in hand,
marking all the passages he disliked or quarreled with, with the Italian
"_Ma_!"--and those he approved of with mysterious signs which she who
followed him through the volumes could not always decipher. Mr. Knowles,
she reported, the busy editor of the _Nineteenth Century_, was trying to
persuade the great man to review it. But "Mr. G." had not made up
his mind.
Then all was shut out again. Through many days my mother asked
constantly for news of the book, and smiled with a flicker of her old
brightness when anything pleased her in a letter or review. But finally
there came long hours when to think or speak of it seemed sacrilege. And
on April 7th she died.
* * * * *
The day after her death I saw Mr. Gladstone at Keble. We talked for a
couple of hours, and then when I rose to go he asked if I would come
again on the following morning before he went back to town. I had been
deeply interested and touched, and I went again for another long visit.
My account, written down at the time, of the first day's talk, has been
printed as an appendix to the Library Edition of the book. Of the second
conversation, which was the more interesting of the two since we came to
much closer quarters in it, my only record is the following letter to
my husband:
I have certainly had a wonderful experience last night and this
morning! Last night two hours' talk with Gladstone, this morning,
again an hour and a half's strenuous argument, during which the
great man got quite white sometimes and tremulous with interest and
excitement.... The talk this morning was a battle royal over the
book and Christian evidences. He was _very_ charming personally,
though at times he looked stern and angry and white to a degree, so
that I wondered sometimes how I had the courage to go on--the drawn
brows were so formidable! There was one moment when he talked of
"trumpery objections," in his most House of Commons manner. It was
as I thought. The new lines of criticism are not familiar to him,
and they really press him hard. He meets them out of Bishop Butler,
and things analogous. But there is a sense, I think, that question
and answer don't fit, and with it ever-increasing interest
and--sometimes--irritation. His own autobiographical reminiscences
were wonderfully interesting, and his repetition of the 42d
psalm--"Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks"--_grand_!
He said that he had never read any book on the hostile side written
in such a spirit of, "generous appreciation" of the Christian side.
Yes, those were hours to which I shall always look back with gratitude
and emotion. Wonderful old man! I see him still standing, as I took
leave of him, one hand leaning on the table beside him, his lined,
pallid face and eagle eyes framed in his noble white hair, shining amid
the dusk of the room. "There are still two things left for me to do!" he
said, finally, in answer to some remark of mine. "One is to carry Home
Rule; the other is to prove the intimate connection between the Hebrew
and Olympian revelations!"
Could any remark have been more characteristic of that double life of
his--the life of the politician and the life of the student--which kept
him fresh and eager to the end of his days? Characteristic, too, of the
amateurish element in all his historical and literary thinking. In
dealing "with early Greek mythology, genealogy, and religion," says his
old friend, Lord Bryce, Mr. Gladstone's theories "have been condemned by
the unanimous voice of scholars as fantastic." Like his great
contemporary, Newman--on whom a good deal of our conversation turned--he
had no critical sense of evidence; and when he was writing on _The
Impregnable Rock of Scripture_ Lord Acton, who was staying at Hawarden
at the time, ran after him in vain, with Welhausen or Kuenen under his
arm, if haply he might persuade his host to read them.
But it was not for that he was born; and those who look back to the
mighty work he did for his country in the forty years preceding the Home
Rule split can only thank the Powers "that hold the broad Heaven" for
the part which the passion of his Christian faith, the eagerness of his
love for letters--for the Homer and the Dante he knew by heart--played
in refreshing and sustaining so great a soul. I remember returning,
shaken and uplifted, through the April air, to the house where my mother
lay in death; and among my old papers lies a torn fragment of a letter
thirty years old, which I began to write to Mr. Gladstone a few days
later, and was too shy to send.
This morning [says the letter, written from Fox How, on the day of
my mother's funeral] we laid my dear Mother to rest in her grave
among the mountains, and this afternoon I am free to think a little
over what has befallen me personally and separately during this past
week. It is not that I wish to continue our argument--quite the
contrary. As I walked home from Keble on Monday morning, I felt it a
hard fate that I should have been arguing, rather than listening....
Argument, perhaps, was inevitable, but none the less I felt
afterward as though there were something incongruous and unfitting
in it. In a serious discussion it seemed to me right to say plainly
what I felt and believed; but if in doing so I have given pain, or
expressed myself on any point with a too great trenchancy and
confidence, please believe that I regret it very sincerely. I shall
always remember our talks. If consciousness lasts "beyond these
voices"--my inmost hope as well as yours--we shall know of all these
things. Till then I cherish the belief that we are not so far apart
as we seem.
But there the letter abruptly ended, and was never sent. I probably
shrank from the added emotion of sending it, and I found it again the
other day in a packet that had not been looked at for many years. I
print it now as evidence of the effect that Mr. Gladstone's personality
could produce on one forty years younger than himself, and in sharp
rebellion at that time against his opinions and influence in two main
fields--religion and politics.
* * * * *
Four days later, Monday, April 16th, my husband came into my room with
the face of one bringing ill tidings. "Matthew Arnold is dead!" My
uncle, as many will remember, had fallen suddenly in a Liverpool street
while walking with his wife to meet his daughter, expected that day from
America, and without a sound or movement had passed away. The heart
disease which killed so many of his family was his fate also. A merciful
one it always seemed to me, which took him thus suddenly and without
pain from the life in which he had played so fruitful and blameless a
part. That word "blameless" has always seemed to me particularly to fit
him. And the quality to which it points was what made his humor so
sharp-tipped and so harmless. He had no hidden interest to serve--no
malice--not a touch, not a trace of cruelty--so that men allowed him to
jest about their most sacred idols and superstitions and bore him
no grudge.
To me his death at that moment was an irreparable personal loss. For it
was only since our migration to London that we had been near enough to
him to see much of him. My husband and he had become fast friends, and
his visits to Russell Square, and our expeditions to Cobham, where he
lived, in the pretty cottage beside the Mole, are marked in memory with
a very white stone. The only drawback to the Cobham visits were the
"dear, dear boys!"--i.e., the dachshunds, Max and Geist, who, however
adorable in themselves, had no taste for visitors and no intention of
letting such intruding creatures interfere with their possession of
their master. One would go down to Cobham, eager to talk to "Uncle Matt"
about a book or an article--covetous, at any rate, of _some_ talk with
him undisturbed. And it would all end in a breathless chase after Max,
through field after field where the little wretch was harrying either
sheep or cows, with the dear poet, hoarse with shouting, at his heels.
The dogs were always _in the party_, talked to, caressed, or scolded
exactly like spoiled children; and the cat of the house was almost
equally dear. Once, at Harrow, the then ruling cat--a tom--broke his
leg, and the house was in lamentation. The vet was called in, and hurt
him horribly. Then Uncle Matt ran up to town, met Professor Huxley at
the Athenaeum, and anxiously consulted him. "I'll go down with you,"
said Huxley. The two traveled back instanter to Harrow, and, while Uncle
Matt held the cat, Huxley--who had begun life, let it be remembered, as
surgeon to the _Rattlesnake_!--examined him, the two black heads
together. There is a rumor that Charles Kingsley was included in the
consultation. Finally the limb was put in splints and left to nature.
All went well.
Nobody who knew the modest Cobham cottage while its master lived will
ever forget it; the garden beside the Mole, where every bush and
flower-bed had its history; and that little study-dressing-room where
some of the best work in nineteenth-century letters was done. Not a
great multitude of books, but all cherished, all read, each one the
friend of its owner. No untidiness anywhere; the ordinary litter of an
author's room was quite absent. For long after his death the room
remained just as he had left it, his coat hanging behind the door, his
slippers beside his chair, the last letters he had received, and all the
small and simple equipment of his writing-table ready to his hand,
waiting for the master who would never know "a day of return." In that
room--during fifteen years, he wrote _God and the Bible_, the many
suggestive and fruitful Essays, including the American addresses, of his
later years--seeds, almost all of them, dropped into the mind of his
generation for a future harvesting; a certain number of poems, including
the noble elegiac poem on Arthur Stanley's death, "Geist's Grave" and
"Poor Matthias"; a mass of writing on education which is only now,
helped by the war, beginning to tell on the English mind; and the
endlessly kind and gracious letters to all sorts and conditions of
men--and women--the literary beginner, the young teacher wanting advice,
even the stranger greedy for an autograph. Every little playful note to
friends or kinsfolk he ever wrote was dear to those who received it; but
he--the most fastidious of men--would have much disliked to see them all
printed at length in Mr. Russell's indiscriminate volumes. He talked to
me once of his wish to make a small volume--"such a little one!"--of
George Sand's best letters. And that is just what he would have wished
for himself.
Among the letters that reached me on my uncle's death was one from Mr.
Andrew Lang denouncing almost all the obituary notices of him. "Nobody
seems to know that he _was a poet_!" cries Mr. Lang. But his poetic
blossoming was really over with the 'sixties, and in the hubbub that
arose round his critical and religious work--his attempts to drive
"ideas" into the English mind, in the 'sixties and 'seventies--the main
fact that he, with Browning and Tennyson, _stood for English poetry_, in
the mid-nineteenth century, was often obscured and only slowly
recognized. But it was recognized, and he himself had never any real
doubt of it, from the moment when he sent the "Strayed Reveller" to my
father in New Zealand in 1849, to those later times when his growing
fame was in all men's ears. He writes to his sister in 1878:
It is curious how the public is beginning to take my poems to its
bosom after long years of comparative neglect. The wave of thought
and change has rolled on until people begin to find a significance
and an attraction in what had none for them formerly.
But he had put it himself in poetry long before--this slow emergence
above the tumult and the shouting of the stars that are to shine upon
the next generation. Mr. Garnett, in the careful and learned notice of
my uncle's life and work in the _Dictionary of National Biography_, says
of his poetry that "most of it" is "immortal." This, indeed, is the
great, the mystic word that rings in every poet's ear from the
beginning. And there is scarcely any true poet who is not certain that
sooner or later his work will "put on immortality." Matthew Arnold
expressed, I think, his own secret faith, in the beautiful lines of his
early poem, "The Bacchanalia--or the New Age":
The epoch ends, the world is still.
The age has talk'd and work'd its fill--
* * * * *
And in the after-silence sweet,
Now strife is hush'd, our ears doth meet,
Ascending pure, the bell-like fame
Of this or that down-trodden name,
Delicate spirits, push'd away
In the hot press of the noonday.
And o'er the plain, where the dead age
Did its now silent warfare wage--
O'er that wide plain, now wrapt in gloom,
Where many a splendor finds its tomb,
Many spent fames and fallen nights--
The one or two immortal lights
Rise slowly up into the sky
To shine there everlastingly,
Like stars over the bounding hill.
The epoch ends, the world is still.
* * * * *
It was on the way home from Laleham, after my uncle's burial there, that
Mr. George Smith gave me fresh and astonishing news of _Robert
Elsmere's_ success. The circulating libraries were being fretted to
death for copies, and the whirlwind of talk was constantly rising. A
little later in the same month of April, if I remember right, I was
going from Waterloo to Godalming and Borough Farm, when, just as the
train was starting, a lady rushed along the platform, waving a book
aloft and signaling to another lady who was evidently waiting to see her
off. "I've got it--I've got it!" she said, triumphantly. "Get in,
ma-am--get in!" said the porter, bundling her into the compartment where
I sat alone. Then she hung out of the window, breathlessly talking.
"They told me no chance for weeks--not the slightest! Then--just as I
was standing at the counter, who should come up but somebody bringing
back the first volume. Of course it was promised to somebody else; but
as I was _there_, I laid hands on it, and here it is!" The train went
off, my companion plunged into her book, and I watched her as she turned
the pages of the familiar green volume. We were quite alone. I had half
a mind to say something revealing; but on the whole it was more amusing
to sit still!
And meanwhile letters poured in.
"I try to write upon you," wrote Mr. Gladstone; "wholly despair of
satisfying myself--cannot quite tell whether to persevere or desist."
Mr. Pater let me know that he was writing on it for the _Guardian_. "It
is a _chef d'oeuvre_ after its kind, and justifies the care you have
devoted to it." "I see," said Andrew Lang, on April 30th, "that _R.E._
is running into as many editions as _The Rights of Man_ by Tom Paine....
You know he is not _my_ sort (at least unless you have a ghost, a
murder, a duel, and some savages)." Burne-Jones wrote, with the fun and
sweetness that made his letters a delight:
Not one least bitter word in it!--threading your way through
intricacies of parsons so finely and justly.... As each new one came
on the scene, I wondered if you would fall upon him and rend
him--but you never do.... Certainly I never thought I should devour
a book about parsons--my desires lying toward--"time upon once there
was a dreadful pirate"--but I am back again five and thirty years
and feeling softened and subdued with memories you have wakened up
so piercingly--and I wanted to tell you this.
And in the same packet lie letters from the honored and beloved Edward
Talbot, now Bishop of Winchester, Stopford Brooke--the Master of
Balliol--Lord Justice Bowen--Professor Huxley--and so many, many more.
Best of all, Henry James! His two long letters I have already printed,
naturally with his full leave and blessing, in the Library Edition of
the novel. Not his the grudging and faultfinding temper that besets the
lesser man when he comes to write of his contemporaries! Full of
generous honor for what he thought good and honest work, however faulty,
his praise kindled--and his blame no less. He appreciated so fully
_your_ way of doing it; and his suggestion, alongside, of what would
have been _his_ way of doing it, was so stimulating--touched one with so
light a Socratean sting, and set a hundred thoughts on the alert. Of
this delightful critical art of his his letters to myself over many
years are one long illustration.
And now--"There is none like him--none!" The honeyed lips are silent and
the helping hand at rest.
With May appeared Mr. Gladstone's review--"the refined criticism of
_Robert Elsmere_"--"typical of his strong points," as Lord Bryce
describes it--certainly one of the best things he ever wrote. I had no
sooner read it than, after admiring it, I felt it must be answered. But
it was desirable to take time to think how best to do it. At the moment
my one desire was for rest and escape. At the beginning of June we took
our eldest two children, aged eleven and thirteen, to Switzerland for
the first time. Oh! the delight of Glion! with its hay-fields thick with
miraculous spring flowers, the "peak of Jaman delicately tall," and that
gorgeous pile of the Dent du Midi, bearing up the June heaven, to the
east!--the joy of seeing the children's pleasure, and the relief of the
mere physical rebound in the Swiss air, after the long months of strain
and sorrow! My son, a slip of a person in knickerbockers, walked over
the Simplon as though Alps were only made to be climbed by boys of
eleven; and the Defile of Gondo, Domo d'Ossola, and beautiful
Maggiore--they were all new and heavenly to each member of the party.
Every year now there was growing on me the spell of Italy, the historic,
the Saturnian land; and short as this wandering was, I remember, after
it was over, and we turned homeward across the St. Gothard, leaving
Italy behind us, a new sense as of a hidden treasure in life--of
something sweet and inexhaustible always waiting for one's return; like
a child's cake in a cupboard, or the gold and silver hoard of Odysseus
that Athene helped him to hide in the Ithacan cave.
Then one day toward the end of June or the beginning of July my husband
put down beside me a great brown paper package which the post had just
brought. "There's America beginning!" he said, and we turned over the
contents of the parcel in bewilderment. A kind American friend had made
a collection for me of the reviews, sermons, and pamphlets that had been
published so far about the book in the States, the correspondences, the
odds and ends of all kinds, grave and gay. Every mail, moreover, began
to bring me American letters from all parts of the States. "No book
since _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ has had so sudden and wide a diffusion among
all classes of readers," wrote an American man of letters, "and I
believe that no other book of equal seriousness ever had so quick a
hearing. I have seen it in the hands of nursery-maids and of shopgirls
behind the counters; of frivolous young women who read every novel that
is talked about; of business men, professors, and students.... The
proprietors of those large shops where anything--from a pin to a
piano--can be bought, vie with each other in selling the cheapest
edition. One pirate put his price even so low as four cents--two pence!"
(Those, it will be remembered, were the days before Anglo-American
copyright.)
Oliver Wendell Holmes, to whom I was personally a stranger, wrote to me
just such a letter as one might have dreamed of from the "Autocrat":
"One of my elderly friends of long ago called a story of mine you may
possibly have heard of--_Elsie Venner_--'a medicated novel,' and such
she said she was not in the habit of reading. I liked her expression; it
titillated more than it tingled. _Robert Elsmere_ I suppose we should
all agree is 'a medicated novel'--but it is, I think, beyond question,
the most effective and popular novel we have had since _Uncle
Tom's Cabin_."
A man of science, apparently an agnostic, wrote, severely: "I regret the
popularity of _Robert Elsmere_ in this country. Our Western people are
like sheep in such matters. They will not see that the book was written
for a people with a State Church on its hands, so that a gross
exaggeration of the importance of religion was necessary. It will revive
interest in theology and retard the progress of rationalism."
Another student and thinker from one of the universities of the West,
after a brilliant criticism of the novel, written about a year after its
publication, winds up, "The book, here, has entered into the evolution
of a nation."
Goldwin Smith--my father's and uncle's early friend--wrote me from
Canada:
The Grange, Toronto, _Oct. 31, 1888._
My dear Mrs. Ward,--You may be amused by seeing what a stir you are
making even in this sequestered nook of the theological world, and
by learning that the antidote to you is _Ben-Hur_. I am afraid, if
it were so, I should prefer the poison to the antidote.
The state of opinion on this Continent is, I fancy, pretty much that
to which Robert Elsmere would bring us--Theism, with Christ as a
model of character, but without real belief in the miraculous part
of Christianity. Churches are still being everywhere built, money is
freely subscribed, young men are pressing into the clerical
profession, and religion shows every sign of vitality. I cannot help
suspecting, however, that a change is not far off. If it comes, it
will come with a vengeance; for over the intellectual dead level of
this democracy opinion courses like the tide running in over a flat.
As the end of life draws near I feel like the Scotchman who, being
on his death-bed when the trial of O'Connell was going on, desired
his Minister to pray for him that he might just live to see what
came of O'Connell. A wonderful period of transition in all things,
however, has begun, and I should like very much to see the result.
However, it is too likely that very rough times may be coming and
that one will be just as well out of the way.
* * * * *
Yours most truly, GOLDWIN SMITH.
Exactly twenty years from the date of this letter I was in Toronto for
the first time, and paid my homage to the veteran fighter who, living as
he did amid a younger generation, hotly resenting his separatist and
anti-Imperial views and his contempt for their own ideal of an equal and
permanent union of free states under the British flag, was yet
generously honored throughout the Dominion for his services to
literature and education. He had been my father's friend at
Oxford--where he succeeded to Arthur Stanley's tutorship at University
College--and in Dublin. And when I first began to live in Oxford he was
still Regius Professor, inhabiting a house very near that of my parents,
which was well known to me afterward through many years as the house of
the Max Müllers. I can remember the catastrophe it seemed to all his
Oxford friends when he deserted England for America, despairing of the
republic, as my father for a while in his youth had despaired, and sick
of what seemed to him the forces of reaction in English life. I was
eighteen when _Endymion_ came out, with Dizzy's absurd attack on the
"sedentary" professor who was also a "social parasite." It would be
difficult to find two words in the English language more wholly and
ludicrously inappropriate to Goldwin Smith; and the furious letter to
the _Times_ in which he denounced "the stingless insults of a coward"
might well have been left unwritten. But I was living then among Oxford
Liberals, and under the shadow of Goldwin Smith's great reputation as
historian and pamphleteer, and I can see myself listening with an angry
and sympathetic thrill to my father as he read the letter aloud. Then
came the intervening years, in which one learned to look on Goldwin
Smith as _par excellence_ the great man "gone wrong," on that vital
question, above all, of a sane Imperialism. It was difficult, after a
time, to keep patience with the Englishman whose most passionate desire
seemed to be to break up the Empire, to incorporate Canada in the United
States, to relieve us of India, that "splendid curse," to detach from us
Australia and South Africa, and thereby to wreck forever that vision of
a banded commonwealth of free nations which for innumerable minds at
home was fast becoming the romance of English politics.
So it was that I went with some shrinking, yet still under the glamour
of the old Oxford loyalty, to pay my visit at the Grange in 1908,
walking thither from the house of one of the stanchest Imperialists in
Canada, where I had been lunching. "You are going to see Mr. Goldwin
Smith?" my host had said. "I have not crossed his threshold for twenty
years. I abhor his political views. All the same, we are proud of him in
Canada!" When I entered the drawing-room, which was rather dark, though
it was a late May afternoon, there rose slowly from its chair beside a
bright fire a figure I shall never forget. I had a fairly clear
remembrance of Goldwin Smith in his earlier days. This was like his
phantom, or, if one may say so, without disrespect--his mummy. Shriveled
and spare, yet erect as ever, the iron-gray hair, closely shaven beard,
dark complexion, and black eyes still formidably alive, made on me an
impression at once of extreme age and unabated will. A prophet!--still
delivering his message--but well aware that it found but few listeners
in a degenerate world. He began immediately to talk politics, denouncing
English Imperialism, whether of the Tory or the Liberal type. Canadian
loyalty to the Empire was a mere delusion. A few years, he said, would
see the Dominion merged in the United States; and it was far best it
should be so. He spoke with a bitter, almost a fierce energy, as though
perfectly conscious that, although I did not contradict him, I did not
agree with him; and presently, to my great relief, he allowed the talk
to slip back to old Oxford days.
[Illustration: GOLDWIN SMITH]
Two years later he died, still confident of the future as he dreamt it.
The "very rough times" that he foresaw have indeed come upon the world.
But as to the rest, I wish he could have stood with me, eight years
after this conversation, on the Scherpenberg Hill, held by a Canadian
division, the approach to its summit guarded by Canadian sentries, and
have looked out over that plain, where Canadian and British graves,
lying in their thousands side by side, have forever sealed in blood the
union of the elder and the younger nations.
As to the circulation of _Robert Elsmere_, I have never been able to
ascertain the exact figures in America, but it is probable, from the
data I have, that about half a million copies were sold in the States
within a year of the book's publication. In England, an edition of 5,000
copies a fortnight was the rule for many months after the one-volume
edition appeared; hundreds of thousands have been circulated in the
sixpenny and sevenpenny editions; it has been translated into most
foreign tongues; and it is still, after thirty years, a living book.
Fifteen years after its publication, M. Brunetière, the well-known
editor of the _Revue des deux Mondes_ and leader--in some sort--of the
Catholic reaction in France, began a negotiation with me for the
appearance of a French translation of the whole or part of the book in
his _Revue_. "But how," I asked him (we were sitting in his editor's
sanctum, in the old house of the Rue de l'Université), "could it
possibly suit you, or the _Revue_, to do anything of the kind? And
_now_--after fifteen years?"
But, according to him, the case was simple. When the book first
appeared, the public of the _Revue_ could not have felt any interest in
it. France is a logical country--a country of clear-cut solutions. And
at that time either one was a Catholic or a free thinker. And if one was
a Catholic, one accepted from the Church, say, the date of the Book of
Daniel, as well as everything else. Renan, indeed, left the Church
thirty years earlier because he came to see with certainty that the Book
of Daniel was written under Antiochus Epiphanes, and not when his
teachers at St. Sulpice said it was written. But while the secular world
listened and applauded, the literary argument against dogma made very
little impression on the general Catholic world for many years.
But now [said M. Brunetière] everything is different. Modernism has
arisen. It is penetrating the Seminaries. People begin to talk of it in
the streets. And _Robert Elsmere_ is a study in Modernism--or at any
rate it has so many affinities with Modernism, that _now_--the French
public would be interested.
The length of the book, however, could not be got over, and the plan
fell through. But I came away from my talk with a remarkable man, not a
little stirred. For it had seemed to show that with all its many
faults--and who knew them better than I?--my book had yet possessed a
certain representative and pioneering force; and that, to some extent,
at least, the generation in which it appeared had spoken through it.