FIRST VISITS TO ITALY
I have already mentioned in these papers that I was one of the examiners
for the Spanish Taylorian scholarship at Oxford in 1883, and again in
1888. But perhaps before I go farther in these _Recollections_ I may put
down here--somewhat out of its place--a reminiscence connected with the
first of these examinations, which seems to me worth recording. My
Spanish colleague in 1883 was, as I have said, Don Pascual Gayangos,
well known among students for his _History of Mohammedan Dynasties in
Spain_, for his edition of the Correspondence of Cardinal Cisneros, and
other historical work. _À propos_ of the examination, he came to see me
in Russell Square, and his talk about Spain revived in me, for the time,
a fading passion. Señor Gayangos was born in 1809, so that in 1883 he
was already an old man, though full of vigor and work. He told me the
following story. Unfortunately, I took no contemporary note. I give it
now as I remember it, and if any one who knew Don Pascual, or any
student of Shakespearian lore, can correct and amplify it, no one will
be better pleased than I. He said that as quite a young man, somewhere
in the thirties of the last century, he was traveling through Spain to
England, where, if I remember right, he had relations with Sir Thomas
Phillipps, the ardent book and MSS. collector, so many of whose
treasures are now in the great libraries of Europe. Sir Thomas employed
him in the search for Spanish MSS. and rare Spanish books. I gathered
that at the time to which the story refers Gayangos himself was not much
acquainted with English or English literature. On his journey north from
Madrid to Burgos, which was, of course, in the days before railways, he
stopped at Valladolid for the night, and went to see an acquaintance of
his, the newly appointed librarian of an aristocratic family having a
"palace" in Valladolid. He found his friend in the old library of the
old house, engaged in a work of destruction. On the floor of the long
room was a large _brasero_ in which the new librarian was burning up a
quantity of what he described as useless and miscellaneous books, with a
view to the rearrangement of the library. The old sheepskin or vellum
bindings had been stripped off, while the printed matter was burning
steadily and the room was full of smoke. There was a pile of old books
whose turn had not yet come lying on the floor. Gayangos picked one up.
It was a volume containing the plays of Mr. William Shakespeare, and
published in 1623. In other words, it was a copy of the First Folio,
and, as he declared to me, in excellent preservation. At that time he
knew nothing about Shakespeare bibliography. He was struck, however, by
the name of Shakespeare, and also by the fact that, according to an
inscription inside it, the book had belonged to Count Gondomar, who had
himself lived in Valladolid and collected a large library there. But his
friend the librarian attached no importance to the book, and it was to
go into the common holocaust with the rest. Gayangos noticed
particularly, as he turned it over, that its margins were covered with
notes in a seventeenth-century hand.
He continued his journey to England, and presently mentioned the
incident to Sir Thomas Phillipps, and Sir Thomas's future son-in-law,
Mr. Halliwell--afterward Halliwell-Phillipps. The excitement of both
knew no bounds. A First Folio--which had belonged to Count Gondomar,
Spanish Ambassador to England up to 1622--and covered with contemporary
marginal notes! No doubt a copy which had been sent out to Gondomar from
England; for he was well acquainted with English life and letters and
had collected much of his library in London. The very thought of such a
treasure perishing barbarously in a bonfire of waste paper was enough to
drive a bibliophile out of his wits. Gayangos was sent back to Spain
posthaste. But, alack! he found a library swept and garnished; no trace
of the volume he had once held there in his hand, and on the face of his
friend the librarian only a frank and peevish wonder that anybody should
tease him with questions about such a trifle.
But just dream a little! Who sent the volume? Who wrote the thick
marginal notes? An English correspondent of Gondomar's? Or Gondomar
himself, who arrived in England three years before Shakespeare's death,
was himself a man of letters, and had probably seen most of the plays?
In the few years which intervened between his withdrawal from England
and his own death (1626), did he annotate the copy, storing there what
he could remember of the English stage, and of "pleasant Willy" himself,
perhaps, during his two sojourns in London? And was the book overlooked
as English and of no importance in the transfer of Gondomar's own
library, a hundred and sixty years after his death, to Charles III of
Spain? And had it been sold, perhaps, for an old song, and with other
remnants of Gondomar's books, just for their local interest, to some
Valladolid grandee?
Above all, did those marginal notes which Gayangos had once idly looked
through contain, perhaps--though the First Folio does not, of course,
include the Poems--some faint key to the perennial Shakespeare
mysteries--to Mr. W.H., and the "dark lady," and all the impenetrable
story of the Sonnets?
If so, the gods themselves took care that the veil should not be rent.
The secret remains.
Others abide our question--Thou art free.
We ask and ask. Thou standest and art still,
Outtopping knowledge.
* * * * *
One other recollection of the _Robert Elsmere_ year may fitly end my
story of it. In September we spent an interesting afternoon at
Hawarden--the only time I ever saw "Mr. G." at leisure, amid his own
books and trees. We drove over with Sir Robert and Lady Cunliffe, Mr.
Gladstone's neighbors on the Welsh border, with whom we were staying.
Sir Robert, formerly an ardent Liberal, had parted from Mr. Gladstone in
the Home Rule crisis of 1886, and it was the first time they had called
at Hawarden since the split. But nothing could have been kinder than the
Gladstones' reception of them and of us. "Mr. G." and I let theology
alone!--and he was at his best and brightest, talking books and poetry,
showing us the octagonal room he had built out for his 60,000 selected
letters--among them "hundreds from the Queen"--his library, the park,
and the old keep. As I wrote to my father, his amazing intellectual and
physical vigor, and the alertness with which, leading the way, he
"skipped up the ruins of the keep," were enough "to make a Liberal
Unionist thoughtful." Ulysses was for the time in exile, but the "day of
return" was not far off.
Especially do I remember the animation with which he dwelt on the
horrible story of Damiens, executed with every conceivable torture for
the attempted assassination of Louis Quinze. He ran through the
catalogue of torments so that we all shivered, winding up with a
contemptuous, "And all that for just pricking the skin of that scoundrel
Louis XV."
I was already thinking of some reply both to Mr. Gladstone's article and
to the attack on _Robert Elsmere_ in the _Quarterly_; but it took me
longer than I expected, and it was not till March in the following year
(1889) that I published "The New Reformation," a Dialogue, in the
_Nineteenth Century_. Into that dialogue I was able to throw the reading
and the argument which had been of necessity excluded from the novel.
Mr. Jowett was nervous about it, and came up on purpose from Oxford to
persuade me, if he could, not to write it. His view--and that of Mr.
Stopford Brooke--was that a work of art moves on one plane, and
historical or critical controversy on another, and that a novel cannot
be justified by an essay. But my defense was not an essay; I put it in
the form of a conversation, and made it as living and varied as I could.
By using this particular form, I was able to give the traditional as
well as the critical case with some fullness, and I took great pains
with both. From a recently published letter, I see that Lord Acton wrote
to Mr. Gladstone that the rôle played by the orthodox anti-rational and
wholly fanatical Newcome in the novel belonged "to the infancy of art,"
so little could he be taken as representing the orthodox case. I wonder!
I had very good reasons for Newcome. There are plenty of Newcomes in the
theological literature of the last century. To have provided a more
rational and plausible representative of orthodoxy would, I think, have
slackened the pace and chilled the atmosphere of the novel. After all,
what really supplied "the other side" was the whole system of things in
which the readers of the book lived and moved--the ideas in which they
had been brought up, the books they read, the churches in which they
worshiped, the sermons to which they listened every week. The novel
challenged this system of things; but it was always there to make reply.
It was the eternal _sous-entendu_ of the story, and really gave the
story all its force.
But in the dialogue I could put the underlying conflict of thought into
articulate and logical form, and build up, in outline at least, the
history of "a new learning." When it was published, the dear Master,
with a sigh of relief, confessed that it had "done no harm," and "showed
a considerable knowledge of critical theology." I, too, felt that it had
done no harm--rather that it had vindicated my right to speak, not as an
expert and scholar--to that I never pretended for a moment--but as the
interpreter of experts and scholars who had something to say to the
English world, and of whom the English world was far too little aware.
In the preface to one of the latest editions of his Bampton Lectures,
Canon Liddon wrote an elaborate answer to it, which, I think, implies
that it was felt to have weight; and if Lord Acton had waited for its
appearance he might not, perhaps, have been so ready to condemn the
character of Newcome as belonging "to the infancy of art." That
Newcome's type might have been infinitely better presented is indeed
most true. But in the scheme of the book, it is _right_. For the
ultimate answer to the critical intellect, or, as Newman called it, the
"wild living intellect of man," when it is dealing with Christianity and
miracle, is that reason is _not_ the final judge--is, indeed, in the
last resort, the enemy, and must at some point go down, defeated and
trampled on. "Ideal Ward," and Archdeacon Denison, and Mr. Spurgeon--and
not Doctor Figgis or Doctor Creighton--are the apologists who in the end
hold the fort.
But with this analysis of what may be called the intellectual
presuppositions of _Robert Elsmere_, my mind began to turn to what I
believed to be the other side of the Greenian or Modernist
message--i.e., that life itself, the ordinary human life and
experience of every day as it has been slowly evolved through history,
is the true source of religion, if man will but listen to the message in
his own soul, to the voice of the Eternal Friend, speaking through
Conscience, through Society, through Nature. Hence _David Grieve_, which
was already in my mind within a few months of the publication of _Robert
Elsmere_. We were at Borough Farm when the vision of it first came upon
me. It was a summer evening of extraordinary beauty, and I had been
wandering through the heather and the pine woods. "The country"--to
quote an account written some years ago--"was drenched in sunset; white
towering thunder-clouds descending upon and mingling with the crimson of
the heath, the green stretches of bracken, the brown pools upon the
common, everywhere a rosy suffusion, a majesty of light interweaving
heaven and earth and transfiguring all dear familiar things--the old
farm-house, the sand-pit where the children played and the sand-martins
nested, the wood-pile by the farm door, the phloxes in the tumble-down
farm-yard, the cottage down the lane." After months of rest, the fount
of mental energy which had been exhausted in me the year before had
filled again. I was eager to be at work, and this time on something
"more hopeful, positive, and consoling" than the subject of the
earlier book.
A visit to Derbyshire in the autumn gave me some of the setting for the
story. Then I took the first chapters abroad during the winter to
Valescure, and worked them in that fragrant, sunny spot, making
acquaintance the while with a new and delightful friend, Emily Lawless,
the author of _Hurrish_ and _Grania_, and of some few poems that
deserve, I think, a long life in English anthologies. She and her most
racy, most entertaining mother, old Lady Cloncurry, were spending the
winter at Valescure, and my young daughter and I found them a great
resource. Lady Cloncurry, who was a member of an old Galway family, the
Kirwans of Castle Hackett, seemed to me a typical specimen of those
Anglo-Irish gentry who have been harshly called the "English garrison"
in Ireland, but who were really in the last century the most natural and
kindly link between the two countries. So far as I knew them, they loved
both, with a strong preference for Ireland. All that English people
instinctively resent in Irish character--its dreamy or laughing
indifference toward the ordinary business virtues, thrift, prudence,
tidiness, accuracy--they had been accustomed to, even where they had not
been infected with it, from their childhood. They were not Catholics,
most of them, and, so far as they were landlords, the part played by the
priests in the Land League agitation tried them sore. But Miss Lawless's
_Grania_ is there to show how delicate and profound might be their
sympathy with the lovely things in Irish Catholicism, and her best
poems--"The Dirge of the Munster Forest" and "After Aughrim"--give a
voice to Irish suffering and Irish patriotism which it would be hard to
parallel in the Nationalist or rebel literature of recent years. The
fact that they had both nations in their blood, both patriotisms in
their hearts, infused a peculiar pathos often into their lives.
Pathos, however, was not a word that seemed--at first sight, at any
rate--to have much to do with Lady Cloncurry. She was the most energetic
and sprightly _grande dame_ as I remember her, small, with vivid black
eyes and hair, her head always swathed in a becoming black lace coif,
her hands in black mittens. She and her daughter Emily amused each other
perennially, and were endless good company, besides, for other people.
Lady Cloncurry's clothes varied very little. She had an Irish contempt
for too much pains about your appearance, and a great dislike for
_grande tenue_. When she arrived at an Irish country-house, of which the
hostess told me the story, she said to the mistress of the house, on
being taken to her room: "My dear, you don't want me to come down smart?
I'm sure you don't! Of course I've brought some smart gowns. _They_
[meaning her daughters] make me buy them. But they'll just do for my
maid to show your maid!" And there on the wardrobe shelves they lay
throughout her visit.
At Valescure we were within easy reach of Cannes, where the Actons were
settled at the Villa Madeleine. The awkwardness of the trains prevented
us from seeing as much of them as we had hoped; but I remember some
pleasant walks and talks with Lord Acton, and especially the vehement
advice he gave us, when my husband joined us and we started on a short,
a very short, flight to Italy--for my husband had only a meager holiday
from the _Times: "Go to Rome_! Never mind the journeys. Go! You will
have three days there, you say? Well, to have walked through Rome, to
have spent an hour in the Forum, another on the Palatine; to have seen
the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter's; to have climbed the
Janiculum and looked out over the Alban hills and the Campagna--and you
can do all that in three days--well!--life is not the same afterward. If
you only had an afternoon in Rome it would be well worth while. But
_three days_!"
We laughed, took him at his word, and rushed on for Rome. And on the way
we saw Perugia and Assisi for the first time, dipping into spring as
soon as we got south of the Apennines, and tasting that intoxication of
Italian sun in winter which turns northern heads. Of our week in Rome I
remember only the first overwhelming impression--as of something
infinitely old and _pagan_, through which Christianity moved about like
a _parvenu_ amid an elder generation of phantom presences, already gray
with time long before Calvary--that, and the making of a few new
friends. Of these friends, one, who was to hold a lasting place in my
admiration and love through after-years, shall be mentioned
here--Contessa Maria Pasolini.
Contessa Maria for some thirty years has played a great role in the
social and intellectual history of Italy. She is the daughter of one of
the leading business families of Milan, sister to the Marchese Ponti,
who was for long Sindaco of that great city, and intimately concerned in
its stormy industrial history. She married Count Pasolini, the head of
an old aristocratic family with large estates in the Romagna, whose
father was President of the first Senate of United Italy. It was in the
neighborhood of the Pasolini estates that Garibaldi took refuge after
1848; and one may pass through them to reach the lonely hut in which
Anita Garibaldi died.
Count Pasolini's father was also one of Pio Nono's Liberal Ministers,
and the family, at the time, at any rate, of which I am speaking,
combined Liberalism and sympathies for England with an enlightened and
ardent Catholicism. I first made friends with Contessa Maria when we
found her, on a cold February day, receiving in an apartment in the
Piazza dei Santi Apostoli--rather gloomy rooms, to which her dark head
and eyes, her extraordinary expressiveness and grace, and the vivacity
of her talk, seemed to lend a positive brilliance and charm. In her I
first came to know, with some intimacy, a cultivated Italian woman, and
to realize what a strong kindred exists between the English and the
Italian educated mind. Especially, I think, in the case of the educated
_women_ of both nations. I have often felt, in talking to an Italian
woman friend, a similarity of standards, of traditions and instincts,
which would take some explaining, if one came to think it out.
Especially on the practical side of life, the side of what one may call
the minor morals and judgments, which are often more important to
friendship and understanding than the greater matters of the law. How an
Italian lady manages her servants and brings up her children; her
general attitude toward marriage, politics, books, social or economic
questions--in all these fields she is, in some mysterious way, much
nearer to the Englishwoman than the Frenchwoman is. Of course, these
remarks do not apply to the small circle of "black" families in Italy,
particularly in Rome, who still hold aloof from the Italian kingdom and
its institutions. But the Liberal Catholic, man or woman, who is both
patriotically Italian and sincerely religious, will discuss anything or
anybody in heaven or earth, and just as tolerantly as would Lord Acton
himself. They are cosmopolitans, and yet deep rooted in the Italian
soil. Contessa Maria, for instance, was in 1889 still near the
beginnings of what was to prove for twenty-five years the most
interesting _salon_ in Rome. Everybody met there. Grandees of all
nations, ambassadors, ecclesiastics, men of literature, science,
archeology, art, politicians, and diplomats--Contessa Pasolini was equal
to them all, and her talk, rapid, fearless, picturesque, full of
knowledge, yet without a hint of pedantry, gave a note of unity to a
scene that could hardly have been more varied or, in less skilful hands,
more full of jarring possibilities. But later on, when I knew her
better, I saw her also with peasant folk, with the country people of the
Campagna and the Alban hills. And here one realized the same ease, the
same sympathy, the same instinctive and unerring _success_, as one might
watch with delight on one of her "evenings" in the Palazzo Sciarra. When
she was talking to a peasant woman on the Alban ridge, something broad
and big and primitive seemed to come out in her, something of the _Magna
parens_, the Saturnian land; but something, too, that our Englishwomen,
who live in the country and care for their own people, also possess.
But I was to see much more of Contessa Maria and Roman society in later
years, especially when we were at the Villa Barberini and I was writing
_Eleanor_, in 1899. Now I will only recall a little saying of the
Contessa's at our first meeting, which lodged itself in memory. She did
not then talk English fluently, as she afterward came to do; but she was
learning English, with her two boys, from a delightful English tutor,
and evidently pondering English character and ways--"Ah, you
English!"--I can see the white arm and hand, with its cigarette, waving
in the darkness of the old Roman apartment; the broad brow, the smiling
eyes, and glint of white teeth. "You English! Why don't you _talk_?--why
_won't_ you talk? If French people come here, there is no trouble. If I
just tear up an envelope and throw down the pieces, they will talk about
it a whole evening, and so _well_! But you English!--you begin, and then
you stop; one must always start you again--always wind you up!"
Terribly true! But in her company, even we halting English learned to
talk, in our bad French, or whatever came along.
The summer of 1889 was filled with an adventure to which I still look
back with unalloyed delight, which provided me, moreover, with the
setting and one of the main themes of _Marcella_. We were at that time
half-way through the building of a house at Haslemere, which was to
supersede Borough Farm. We had grown out of Borough and were for the
moment houseless, so far as summer quarters were concerned. And for my
work's sake, I felt that eagerness for new scenes and suggestions which
is generally present, I think, in the story-teller of all shades.
Suddenly, in a house-agent's catalogue, we came across an astonishing
advertisement. Hampden House, on the Chiltern Hills, the ancestral home
of John Hampden, of ship-money fame, was to let for the summer, and for
a rent not beyond our powers. The new Lord Buckinghamshire, who had
inherited it, was not then able to live in it. It had, indeed, as we
knew, been let for a while, some years earlier, to our old friends, Sir
Mountstuart and Lady Grant Duff, before his departure for the
Governorship of Madras. The agents reported that it was scantily
furnished, but quite habitable; and without more ado we took it! I have
now before me the letter in which I reported our arrival, in mid-July,
to my husband, detained in town by his _Times_ work.
Hampden is enchanting!--more delightful than even I thought it would
be, and quite comfortable enough. Of course we want a multitude of
things--(baths, wine-glasses, tumblers, cans, etc.!) but those I can
hire from Wycombe. Our great deficiency is lamps! Last night we
crept about in this vast house, with hardly any light.... As to the
ghost, Mrs. Duval (the housekeeper) scoffs at it! The ghost-room is
the tapestry-room, from which there is a staircase down to the
breakfast-room. A good deal of the tapestry is loose, and when there
is any wind it flaps and flaps. Hence all the tales.... The servants
are rather bewildered by the size of everything, and--like me--were
almost too excited to sleep.... The children are wandering
blissfully about, exploring everything.
And what a place to wander in! After we left it, Hampden was restored,
beautified, and refurnished. It is now, I have no doubt, a charming and
comfortable country-house. But when we lived in it for three months--in
its half-finished and tatterdemalion condition--it was Romance pure and
simple. The old galleried hall, the bare rooms, the neglected
pictures--among them the "Queen Elizabeth," presented to the owner of
Hampden by the Queen herself after a visit; the gray walls of King
John's garden, and just beyond it the little church where Hampden lies
buried; the deserted library on the top floor, running along the
beautiful garden-front, with books in it that might have belonged to the
patriot himself, and a stately full-length portrait--painted about
1600--which stood up, torn and frameless, among lumber of various kinds,
the portrait of a beautiful lady in a flowered dress, walking in an
Elizabethan garden; the locked room, opened to us occasionally by the
agent of the property, which contained some of the ancestral treasures
of the house--the family Bible among them, with the births of John
Hampden and his cousin, Oliver Cromwell, recorded on the same fly-leaf;
the black cedars outside, and the great glade in front of the house,
stretching downward for half a mile toward the ruined lodges, just
visible from the windows--all this mingling of nature and history with
the slightest, gentlest touch of pathos and decay, seen, too, under the
golden light of a perfect summer, sank deep into mind and sense.
Whoever cares to turn to the first chapters of _Marcella_ will find as
much of Hampden as could be transferred to paper--Hampden as it was
then--in the description of Mellor.
Our old and dear friend, Mrs. J.R. Green, the widow of the historian,
and herself the most distinguished woman-historian of our time, joined
us in the venture. But she and I both went to Hampden to work. I set up
in one half-dismantled room, and she in another, with the
eighteenth-century drawing-room between us. Here our books and papers
soon made home. I was working at _David Grieve_; she, if I remember
right, at the brilliant book on _English Town Life_ she brought out in
1891. My husband came down to us for long week-ends, and as soon as we
had provided ourselves with the absolute necessaries of life, visitors
began to arrive: Professor and Mrs. Huxley; Sir Alfred Lyall; M.
Jusserand, then _Conseiller d'Ambassade_ under M. Waddington, now the
French Ambassador to Washington; Mr. and Mrs. Lyulph Stanley, now Lord
and Lady Sheffield; my first cousin, H. O. Arnold-Forster, afterward War
Minister in Mr. Balfour's Cabinet, and his wife; Mrs. Graham Smith,
Laura Lyttelton's sister, and many kinsfolk. In those days Hampden was
six miles from the nearest railway station; the Great Central Railway
which now passes through the valley below it was not built, and all
round us stretched beechwoods and commons and lanes, untouched since the
days of Roundhead and Cavalier, where the occasional sound of
wood-cutters in the beech solitudes was often, through a long walk, the
only hint of human life. What good walks and talks we had in those
summer days! My sister had married Professor Huxley's eldest son, so
that with him and his wife we were on terms always of the closest
intimacy and affection. "Pater" and "Moo," as all their kith and kin and
many of their friends called them, were the most racy of guests. He had
been that year pursuing an animated controversy in the _Nineteenth
Century_ with Doctor Wace, now Dean of Canterbury, who had also--about a
year before--belabored the author of _Robert Elsmere_ in the _Quarterly
Review_. The Professor and I naturally enjoyed dancing a little on our
opponents--when there was none to make reply!--as we strolled about
Hampden; but there was never a touch of bitterness in Huxley's nature,
and there couldn't have been much in mine at that moment, life was so
interesting, and its horizon so full of light and color! Of his wife,
"Moo," who outlived him many years, how much one might say! In this very
year, 1889, Huxley wrote to her from the Canaries, whither he had gone
alone for his health:
Catch me going out of reach of letters again. I have been horridly
anxious. Nobody--children or any one else--can be to me what you
are. Ulysses preferred his old woman to immortality, and this
absence has led me to see that he was as wise in that as in
other things.
They were indeed lovers to the end. He had waited and served for her
eight years in his youth, and her sunny, affectionate nature, with its
veins both of humor and of stoicism, gave her man of genius exactly what
he wanted. She survived him for many years, living her own life at
Eastbourne, climbing Beachy Head in all weathers, interested in
everything, and writing poems of little or no technical merit, but
raised occasionally by sheer intensity of feeling--about her
husband--into something very near the real thing. I quote these lines
from a privately printed volume she gave me:
If you were here,--and I were where you lie,
Would you, beloved, give your little span
Of life remaining unto tear and sigh?
No!--setting every tender memory
Within your breast, as faded roses kept
For giver's sake, of giver when bereft,
Still to the last the lamp of work you'd burn
For purpose high, nor any moment spurn.
So, as you would have done, I fain would do
In poorer fashion. Ah, how oft I try,
Try to fulfil your wishes, till at length
The scent of those dead roses steals my strength.
As to our other guests, to what company would not Sir Alfred Lyall have
added that touch of something provocative and challenging which draws
men and women after it, like an Orpheus-music? I can see him sitting
silent, his legs crossed, his white head bent, the corners of his mouth
drooping, his eyes downcast, like some one spent and wearied, from whom
all virtue had gone out. Then some one, a man he liked--but still
oftener a woman--would approach him, and the whole figure would wake to
life--a gentle, whimsical, melancholy life, yet possessed of a strange
spell and pungency. Brooding, sad and deep, seemed to me to hold his
inmost mind. The fatalism and dream of those Oriental religions to which
he had given so much of his scholar's mind had touched him profoundly.
His poems express it in mystical and somber verse, and his volumes of
_Asiatic Studies_ contain the intellectual analysis of that background
of thought from which the poems spring.
Yet no one was shrewder, more acute, than Sir Alfred in dealing with the
men and politics of the moment. He swore to no man's words, and one felt
in him not only the first-rate administrator, as shown by his Indian
career, but also the thinker's scorn for the mere party point of view.
He was an excellent gossip, of a refined and subtle sort; he was the
soul of honor; and there was that in his fragile and delicate
personality which earned the warm affection of many friends. So gentle,
so absent-minded, so tired he often seemed; and yet I could imagine
those gray-blue eyes of Sir Alfred's answering inexorably to any public
or patriotic call. He was a disillusioned spectator of the "great
mundane movement," yet eternally interested in it; and the man who loves
this poor human life of ours, without ever being fooled by it, at least
after youth is past, has a rare place among us. We forgive his insight,
because there is nothing in it Pharisaical. And the irony he uses on us
we know well that he has long since sharpened on himself.
When I think of M. Jusserand playing tennis on the big lawn at Hampden,
and determined to master it, like all else that was English, memory
leads one back behind that pleasant scene to earlier days still. We
first knew the future Ambassador as an official of the French Foreign
Office, who spent much of his scanty holidays in a scholarly pursuit of
English literature. In Russell Square we were close to the British
Museum, where M. Jusserand, during his visits to London, was deep in
Chaucerian and other problems, gathering the learning which he presently
began to throw into a series of books on the English centuries from
Chaucer to Shakespeare. Who introduced him to us I cannot remember, but
during his work at the Museum he would drop in sometimes for luncheon or
tea; so that we soon began to know him well. Then, later, he came to
London as _Conseiller d'Ambassade_ under M. Waddington, an office which
he filled till he became French Minister to Denmark in 1900. Finally, in
1904, he was sent as French Ambassador to the United States, and there
we found him in 1908, when we stayed for a delightful few days at the
British Embassy with Mr. and Mrs. Bryce.
It has always been a question with me, which of two French friends is
the more wonderful English scholar--M. Jusserand or André Chevrillon,
Taine's nephew and literary executor, and himself one of the leaders of
French letters; with whom, as with M. Jusserand, I may reckon now some
thirty years of friendship. No one could say that M. Jusserand speaks
our tongue exactly like an Englishman. He does much better. He uses
it--always, of course, with perfect correctness and fluency--to express
French ideas and French wits, in a way as nearly French as the foreign
language will permit. The result is extraordinarily stimulating to our
English wits. The slight differences both in accent and in phrase keep
the ear attentive and alive. New shades emerge; old _clichés_ are broken
up. M. Chevrillon has much less accent, and his talk is more flowingly
and convincingly English; for which, no doubt, a boyhood partly spent in
England accounts. While for vivacity and ease there is little or nothing
to choose.
But to these two distinguished and accomplished men England and America
owe a real debt of gratitude. They have not by any means always approved
of _our_ national behavior. M. Jusserand during his official career in
Egypt was, I believe, a very candid critic of British administration and
British methods, and in the days of our early acquaintance with him I
can remember many an amusing and caustic sally of his at the expense of
our politicians and our foreign policy.
[Illustration: JEAN JULES JUSSERAND]
M. Chevrillon took the Boer side in the South African war, and took it
with passion. All the same, the friendship of both the diplomat and the
man of letters for this country, based upon their knowledge of her, and
warmly returned to them by many English friends, has been a real factor
in the growth of that broad-based sympathy which we now call the
Entente. M. Chevrillon's knowledge of us is really uncanny. He knows
more than we know ourselves. And his last book about us--_L'Angleterre
et la Guerre_--is not only photographically close to the facts, but full
of a spiritual sympathy which is very moving to an English reader. Men
of such high gifts are not easily multiplied in any country. But,
looking to the future of Europe, the more that France and England--and
America--can cultivate in their citizens some degree, at any rate, of
that intimate understanding of a foreign nation which shines so
conspicuously in the work of these two Frenchmen the safer will that
future be.