AMALFI AND ROME. HAMPDEN AND _MARCELLA_
It was in November, 1891, that I finished _David Grieve_, after a long
wrestle of more than three years. I was tired out, and we fled south for
rest to Rome, Naples, Amalfi, and Ravello. The Cappucini Hotel at
Amalfi, Madame Palumbo's inn at Ravello, remain with me as places of
pure delight, shone on even in winter by a more than earthly sun.
Madame Palumbo was, as her many guests remember, an Englishwoman, and
showed a special zeal in making English folk comfortable. And can one
ever forget the sunrise over the Gulf of Salerno from the Ravello
windows? It was December when we were there; yet nothing spoke of
winter. From the inn, perched on a rocky point above the coast, one
looked straight down for hundreds of feet, through lemon-groves and
olive-gardens, to the blue water. Flaming over the mountains rose an
unclouded sun, shining on the purple coast, with its innumerable
rock-towns--"_tot congesta manu praeruptis oppida saxis_"--and sending
broad paths over the "wine-dark" sea. Never, I think, have I felt the
glory and beauty of the world more rapturously, more _painfully_--for
there is pain in it!--than when one was standing alone on a December
morning, at a window which seemed to make part of the precipitous rock
itself, looking over that fairest of scenes. From Ravello we went back
to Rome, and a short spell of its joys. What is it makes the peculiar
pleasure of society in Rome? A number of elements, of course, enter in.
The setting is incomparable; while the clashing of great world policies,
represented by the diplomats, and of the main religious and Liberal
forces of Europe, as embodied in the Papacy and modern Italy, kindles a
warmth and animation in the social air which matches the clearness of
the Roman day, when the bright spells of the winter weather arrive, and
the omnipresent fountains of the Eternal City flash the January or
February sun through its streets and piazzas. Ours, however, on this
occasion, was only a brief stay. Again we saw Contessa Maria, this time
in the stately setting of the Palazzo Sciarra; and Count Ugo Balzani, an
old friend of ours and of the Creightons since Oxford days, historian
and thinker, and, besides, one of the kindest and truest of men. But the
figure, perhaps, which chiefly stands out in memory as connected with
this short visit is that of Lord Dufferin, then our Ambassador in Rome.
Was there ever a greater charmer than Lord Dufferin? In the sketch of
the "Ambassador" in _Eleanor_, there are some points caught from the
living Lord Dufferin, so closely, indeed, that before the book came out
I sent him the proofs and asked his leave--which he gave at once, in one
of the graceful little notes of which he was always master. For the
diplomatic life and successes of Lord Dufferin are told in many official
documents and in the biography of him by Sir Alfred Lyall; but the key
to it all lay in cradle gifts that are hard to put into print.
In the first place, he was--even at sixty-five--wonderfully handsome. He
had inherited the beauty, and also the humor and the grace, of his
Sheridan ancestry. For his mother, as all the world knows, was Helen
Sheridan, one of the three famous daughters of Tom Sheridan, the
dramatist's only son. Mrs. Norton, the innocent heroine of the Melbourne
divorce suit, was one of his aunts, and the "Queen of Beauty" at the
Eglinton Tournament--then Lady Seymour, afterward Duchess of
Somerset--was the other. His mother's memory was a living thing to him
all his life; he published her letters and poems; and at Clandeboye, his
Ulster home,--in "Helen's Tower"--he had formed a collection of
memorials of her which he liked to show to those of whom he made
friends. "You must come to Clandeboye and let me show you Helen's
Tower," he would say, eagerly, and one would answer with hopeful
vagueness. But for me the time never came. My personal recollections of
him, apart from letters, are all connected with Rome, or Paris, whither
he was transferred the year after we saw him at the Roman Embassy, in
December, 1891.
It was, therefore, his last winter at Rome, and he had only been
Ambassador there a little more than two years--since he ceased to be
Viceroy of India in 1889. But he had already won everybody's affection.
The social duties of the British Embassy in Rome--what with the Italian
world in all its shades, the more or less permanent English colony, and
the rush of English tourists through the winter and spring--seemed to me
by no means easy. But Lady Dufferin's dignity and simplicity, and Lord
Dufferin's temperament, carried them triumphantly through the tangle.
Especially do I remember the informal Christmas dance to which we took,
by the Ambassador's special wish, our young daughter of seventeen, who
was not really "out." And no sooner was she in the room, shyly hiding
behind her elders, than he discovered her. I can see him still, as he
made her a smiling bow, his noble gray head and kind eyes, the blue
ribbon crossing his chest. "You promised me a dance!" And so for her
first waltz, in her first grown-up dance, D. was well provided, nervous
as the moment was.
There is a passage in _Eleanor_ which commemorates first this playful
sympathy and tact which made Lord Dufferin so delightful to all ages,
and next, an amusing conversation with him that I remember a year or two
later in Paris. As to the first--Lucy Foster, the young American girl,
is lunching at the Embassy.
"Ah! my dear lady!" said the Ambassador, "how few things in this
world one does to please one's self! This is one of them."
Lucy flushed with a young and natural pleasure. She was on the
Ambassador's left, and he had just laid his wrinkled hand for an
instant on hers--with a charming and paternal freedom.
"Have you enjoyed yourself?--have you lost your heart to Italy?"
said her host stooping to her....
"I have been in fairyland," said she, shyly, opening her blue eyes
upon him. "Nothing can ever be like it again."
"No--because one can never be twenty again," said the old man,
sighing. "Twenty years hence, you will wonder where the magic came
from. Never mind--just now, anyway, the world's your oyster."
Then he looked at her a little more closely.... He missed some of
that quiver of youth and enjoyment he had felt in her before; and
there were some very dark lines under the beautiful eyes. What was
wrong? Had she met the man--the appointed one?
He began to talk to her with a kindness that was at once simple and
stately.
"We must all have our ups and downs," he said to her, presently.
"Let me just give you a word of advice. It'll carry you through most
of them. Remember you are very young, and I shall soon be very old."
He stopped and surveyed her. His eyes blinked through their blanched
lashes. Lucy dropped her fork and looked back at him with smiling
expectancy.
"Learn Persian!" said the old man, in an urgent whisper--"and get
the dictionary by heart!"
Lucy still looked--wondering.
"I finished it this morning," said the Ambassador, in her ear.
"To-morrow I shall begin it again. My daughter hates the sight of
the thing. She says I overtire myself, and that when old people have
done their work they should take a nap. But I know that if it
weren't for my dictionary I should have given up long ago. When too
many tiresome people dine here in the evening--or when they worry me
from home--I take a column. But generally half a column's
enough--good tough Persian roots, and no nonsense. Oh! of course I
can read Hafiz and Omar Khayyam, and all that kind of thing. But
that's the whipped cream. That don't count. What one wants is
something to set one's teeth in. Latin verse will do. Last year I
put half Tommy Moore into hendecasyllables. But my youngest boy,
who's at Oxford, said he wouldn't be responsible for them--so I had
to desist. And I suppose the mathematicians have always something
handy. But, one way or another, one must learn one's dictionary. It
comes next to cultivating one's garden."
The pretty bit of kindness to a very young girl, in 1892, which I have
described, suggested part of this conversation; and I find the
foundation of the rest in a letter written to my father from Paris
in 1896.
We had a very pleasant three days in Paris ... including a most
agreeable couple of hours with the Dufferins. Lord Dufferin showed
me a number of relics of his Sheridan ancestry, and wound up by
taking me into his special little den and telling me Persian stories
with excellent grace and point! He is wild about Persian just now,
and has just finished learning the whole dictionary by heart. He
looks upon this as his chief _délassement_ from official work. Lady
Dufferin, however, does not approve of it at all! His remarks to
Humphry as to the ignorance and inexperience of the innumerable
French Foreign Ministers with whom he has to do, were amusing. An
interview with Berthelot (the famous French chemist and friend of
Renan) was really, he said, a deplorable business. Berthelot
(Foreign Minister 1891-92) knew _everything_ but what he should have
known as French Foreign Minister. And Jusserand's testimony was
practically the same! He is now acting head of the French Foreign
Office, and has had three Ministers in bewildering succession to
instruct in their duties, they being absolutely new to everything.
Now, however, in Hanotaux he has got a strong chief at last.
I recollect that in the course of our exploration of the Embassy, we
passed through a room with a large cheval-glass, of the Empire period.
Lord Dufferin paused before it, reminding me that the house had once
belonged to Pauline Borghese. "This was her room and this glass was
hers. I often stand before it and evoke her. She is there somewhere--if
one had eyes to see!"
And I thought, in the darkening room, as one looked into the shadows of
the glass, of the beautiful, shameless creature as she appears in the
Canova statue in the Villa Borghese, or as David has fixed her,
immortally young, in the Louvre picture.
But before I leave this second Roman visit of ours, let me recall one
more figure in the _entourage_ of the Ambassador--a young attaché,
fair-haired, with all the good looks and good manners that belong to the
post, and how much else of solid wit and capacity the years were then to
find out. I had already seen Mr. Rennell Rodd in the Tennant circle,
where he was everybody's friend. Soon we were to hear of him in Greece,
whence he sent me various volumes of poems and an admirable study of the
Morea, then in Egypt, and afterward in Sweden; while through all these
arduous years of war (I write in 1917) he has been Ambassador in that
same Rome where we saw him as second Secretary in 1891.
The appearance of _David Grieve_ in February, 1892, four years after
_Robert Elsmere_, was to me the occasion of very mixed feelings. The
public took warmly to the novel from the beginning; in its English
circulation and its length of life it has, I think, very nearly equaled
_Robert Elsmere_; only after twenty-five years has it now fallen behind
its predecessor. It has brought me correspondence from all parts and all
classes, more intimate and striking, perhaps, than in the case of any
other of my books. But of hostile reviewing at the moment of its
appearance there was certainly no lack! It was violently attacked in the
_Scots Observer_, then the organ of a group of Scotch Conservatives and
literary men, with W.E. Henley at their head, and received unfriendly
notice from Mrs. Oliphant in _Blackwood_. The two _Quarterlies_ opened
fire upon it, and many lesser guns. A letter from Mr. Meredith Townsend,
the very able, outspoken, and wholly independent colleague of Mr. Hutton
in the editorship of the _Spectator_, gave me some comfort under these
onslaughts!
I have read every word of _David Grieve_. Owing to the unusual and
unaccountable imbecility of the reviewing--(the _Athenaeum_ man, for
example, does not even comprehend that he is reading a
biography!)--it may be three months or so before the public fully
takes hold, but I have no doubt of the ultimate verdict.... The
consistency of the leading characters is wonderful, and there is not
one of the twenty-five, except possibly Dora--who is not human
enough--that is not the perfection of lifelikeness.... Louie is a
vivisection. I have the misfortune to know her well ... and I am
startled page after page by the accuracy of the drawing.
Walter Pater wrote, "It seems to me to have all the forces of its
predecessor at work in it, with perhaps a mellower kind of art." Henry
James reviewed it--so generously!--so subtly!--in the _English
Illustrated_. Stopford Brooke and Bishop Creighton wrote to me with a
warmth and emphasis that soon healed the wounds of the _Scots Observer_;
and that the public was with them, and not with my castigators, was
quickly visible from the wide success of the book.
Some of the most interesting letters that reached me about it were from
men of affairs who were voracious readers, but not makers of books--such
as Mr. Goschen, who "could stand an examination on it"; Sir James,
afterward Lord Hannen, one of the Judges of the Parnell Commission; and
Lord Derby, the Minister who seceded, with Lord Carnarvon, from
Disraeli's Government in 1878. We had made acquaintance not long before
with Lord Derby, through his niece, Lady Winifred Byng (now Lady
Burghclere), to whom we had all lost our hearts--children and
parents--at Lucerne in 1888. There are few things I regret more in
relation to London social life than the short time allowed me by fate
wherein to see something more of Lord Derby. If I remember right, we
first met him at a small dinner-party at Lady Winifred's in 1891, and he
died early in 1893. But he made a very great impression upon me, and,
though he was generally thought to be awkward and shy in general
society, in the conversations I remember with him nothing could have
been more genial or more attractive than his manner. He had been at
Rugby under my grandfather, which was a link to begin with; though he
afterward went to Cambridge, and never showed, that I know of, any signs
of the special Rugby influence which stamped men like Dean Stanley and
Clough. And yet of the moral independence and activity which my
grandfather prized and cultivated in his boys, there was certainly no
lack in Lord Derby's career. For the greater part of his political life
he was nominally a Conservative, yet the rank and file of his party only
half trusted a mind trained by John Stuart Mill and perpetually brooding
on social reform. As Lord Stanley, his close association and personal
friendship with Disraeli during the Ministries and politics of the
mid-nineteenth century have been well brought out in Mr. Buckle's last
volume of the Disraeli _Life_. But the ultimate parting between himself
and Dizzy was probably always inevitable. For his loathing of
adventurous policies of all kinds, and of any increase whatever in the
vast commitments of England, was sure at some point to bring him into
conflict with the imagination or, as we may now call it, the prescience,
of Disraeli. It was strange to remember, as one watched him at the
dinner-table, that he had been offered the throne of Greece in 1862.
If he accepts the charge [wrote Dizzy to Mrs. Bridges Williams] I shall
lose a powerful friend and colleague. It is a dazzling adventure for the
House of Stanley, but they are not an imaginative race, and I fancy they
will prefer Knowsley to the Parthenon, and Lancashire to the Attic
plain. It is a privilege to live in this age of rapid and brilliant
events. What an error to consider it an utilitarian age! It is one of
infinite romance. Thrones tumble down and crowns are offered like a
fairy-tale.
Sixteen years later came his famous resignation, in 1878, when the Fleet
was ordered to the Dardanelles, and Lord Derby, as he had now become,
then Foreign Secretary, refused to sanction a step that might lead to
war. That, for him, was the end as far as Toryism was concerned. In 1880
he joined Mr. Gladstone, but only to separate from him on Home Rule in
1886; and when I first knew him, in 1891, he was leader of the Liberal
Unionist peers in the House of Lords. A little later he became President
of the great Labor Commission in 1892, and before he could see
Gladstone's fresh defeat in 1893, he died.
Speculatively he was as open-minded as a reader and follower of Mill
might be expected to be. He had been interested in _Robert Elsmere_, and
the discussion of books and persons, to which it led him in conversation
with me, showed him fully aware of the new forces abroad in literature
and history. Especially interested, too, as to what Labor was going to
make of Christianity, and well aware--how could he fail to be, as
Chairman of that great, that epoch-making Commission of 1892?--of the
advancing strength of organized labor on all horizons. He appeared to
me, too, as a typical North-countryman--a son of Lancashire, proud of
the great Lancashire towns, and thoroughly at home in the life of the
Lancashire countryside. He could tell a story in dialect admirably. And
I realized that he had thought much--in his balanced, reticent way--on
matters in which I was then groping: how to humanize the relations
between employer and employed, how to enrich and soften the life of the
workman, how, in short, to break down the barrier between modern
industrialism and the stored-up treasures--art, science, thought--of
man's long history.
So that when _David Grieve_ was finished I sent it to Lord Derby, not
long after our first meeting, in no spirit of empty compliment, and I
have always kept his letter in return as a memento of a remarkable
personality. Some day I hope there may be a Memoir of him; for none has
yet appeared. He had not the charm, the versatility, the easy classical
culture, of his famous father--"the Rupert of debate." But with his
great stature--he was six feet two--his square head, and strong,
smooth-shaven face, he was noticeable everywhere. He was a childless
widower when I first knew him, and made the impression of a lonely man,
for all his busy political life and his vast estates. But he was
particularly interesting to me as representing a type I have once or
twice tried to draw--of the aristocrat standing between the old world,
before railways and the first Reform Bill, which saw his birth, and the
new world and new men of the later half of the century. He was
traditionally with the old world; by conviction and conscience, I think,
with the new; yet not sorry, probably, that he was to see no more than
its threshold!
The year 1892, it will be remembered, was the first year of American
copyright: and the great success of _David Grieve_ in America, following
on the extraordinary vogue there of _Robert Elsmere_, in its pirated
editions, brought me largely increased literary receipts. It seemed that
I was not destined, after all, to "ruin my publishers," as I had
despondently foretold in a letter to my husband before the appearance of
_Robert Elsmere;_ but that, with regular work, I might look forward to a
fairly steady income. We therefore felt justified in seizing an
opportunity brought to our notice by an old friend who lived in the
neighborhood, and migrating to a house north of London, in the real
heart of Middle England. After leaving Borough Farm, we had built a
house on a hill near Haslemere, looking south over the blue and purple
Weald; but two years' residence had convinced me that Surrey was almost
as populous as London, and that real solitude for literary work was not
to be found there--at any rate, in that corner of it where we had chosen
to build, and, also, while we were nursing our newly planted shrubberies
of baby pines and rhododendrons, there was always in my mind, as I find
from letters of the time, a discontented yearning for "an old house and
old trees"! We found both at Stocks, whither we migrated in the summer
of 1892. The little estate had then been recently inherited by Mrs.
Grey, mother of Sir Edward Grey, now Lord Grey of Falloden. We were at
first tenants of the house and grounds, but in 1896 we bought the small
property from the Greys, and have now been for more than twenty years
its happy possessors. The house lies on a high upland, under one of the
last easterly spurs of the Chilterns. It was built in 1780 (we rebuilt
it in 1908) in succession to a much older house of which a few fragments
remain, and the village at its gates had changed hardly at all in the
hundred years which preceded our arrival. A few new cottages had been
built; more needed to be built; and two residents, intimately connected
with the past of the village, had built houses just outside it. But
villadom did not exist. The village was rich in old folk, in whom were
stored the memories and traditions of its quiet past. The postmaster,
"Johnny Dolt," who was nearing his eighties, was the universal referee
on all local questions--rights of way, boundaries, village customs, and
the like; and of some of the old women of the village, as they were
twenty-five years ago, I have drawn as faithful a picture as I could in
one or two chapters of _Marcella_.
But the new novel owed not only much of its scenery and setting, but
also its main incident, to the new house. We first entered into
negotiation for Stocks in January, 1892. In the preceding December two
gamekeepers had been murdered on the Stocks property, in a field under a
big wood, not three hundred yards from the house; and naturally the
little community, as it lay in its rural quiet beneath its wooded hills,
was still, when we first entered it, under the shock and excitement of
the tragedy. We heard all the story on the spot, and then viewed it from
another point of view--the sociopolitical--when we went down from London
to stay at one of the neighboring country-houses, in February, and found
the Home Secretary, Mr. Matthews, afterward Lord Llandaff, among the
guests. The trial was over, the verdict given, and the two murderers
were under sentence of death. But there was a strong agitation going on
in favor of a reprieve; and what made the discussion of it, in this
country-house party, particularly piquant was that the case, at that
very moment, was a matter of close consultation between the judge and
the Home Secretary. It was not easy, therefore, to talk of it in Mr.
Matthews's presence. Voices dropped and groups dissolved when he
appeared. Mr. Asquith, who succeeded Mr. Matthews that very year as Home
Secretary, was also, if I remember right, of the party; and there was a
good deal of rather hot discussion of the game laws, and of English
landlordism in general.
With these things in my mind, as soon as we had settled into Stocks, I
began to think of _Marcella_. I wrote the sketch of the book in
September, 1892, and finished it in February, 1894. Many things went to
the making of it--not only the murdered keepers and the village talk,
not only the remembered beauty of Hampden which gave me the main setting
of the story, but a general ferment of mind, connected with much else
that had been happening to me.
For the New Brotherhood of _Robert Elsmere_ had become in some sort a
realized dream; so far as any dream can ever take to itself the
practical garments of this puzzling world. To show that the faith of
Green and Martineau and Stopford Brooke was a faith that would wear and
work--to provide a home for the new learning of a New Reformation, and a
practical outlet for its enthusiasm of humanity--were the chief aims in
the minds of those of us who in 1890 founded the University Hall
Settlement in London. I look back now with emotion on that astonishing
experiment. The scheme had taken shape in my mind during the summer of
1889, and in the following year I was able to persuade Doctor Martineau,
Mr. Stopford Brooke, my old friend Lord Carlisle, and a group of other
religious Liberals, to take part in its realization. We held a crowded
meeting in London, and an adequate subscription list was raised without
difficulty. University Hall in Gordon Square was taken as a residence
for young men, and was very soon filled. Continuous teaching by the best
men available, from all the churches, on the history and philosophy of
religion, was one half the scheme; the other half busied itself with an
attempt to bring about some real contact between brain and manual
workers. We took a little dingy hall in Marchmont Street, where the
residents of the Hall started clubs and classes, Saturday mornings, for
children and the like. The foundation of Toynbee Hall--the Universities
Settlement--in East London, in memory of Arnold Toynbee, was then a
fresh and striking fact in social history. A spirit of fraternization
was in the air, an ardent wish to break down the local and geographical
barriers that separated rich from poor, East End from West End. The new
venture in which I was interested attached itself, therefore, to a
growing movement. The work in Marchmont Street grew and prospered. Men
and women of the working class found in it a real center of comradeship,
and the residents at the Hall in Gordon Square, led by a remarkable man
of deeply religious temper and Quaker origin, the late Mr. Alfred
Robinson, devoted themselves in the evenings to a work marked by a very
genuine and practical enthusiasm.
Soon it was evident that larger premises were wanted. It was in the days
when Mr. Passmore Edwards was giving large sums to institutions of
different kinds in London, but especially to the founding of public
libraries. He began to haunt the shabby hall in Marchmont Street, and
presently offered to build us a new hall there for classes and social
gatherings. But the scheme grew and grew, in my mind as in his. And when
the question of a site arose we were fortunate enough to interest the
practical and generous mind of the chief ground landlord of Bloomsbury,
the Duke of Bedford. With him I explored various sites in the
neighborhood, and finally the Duke offered us a site in Tavistock Place,
on most liberal terms, he himself contributing largely to the building,
granting us a 999 years' lease, and returning us the ground rent.
And there the Settlement now stands, the most beautiful and commodious
Settlement building in London, with a large garden behind it, made by
the Duke out of various old private gardens, and lent to the Settlement
for its various purposes. Mr. Passmore Edwards contributed £14,000 to
its cost, and it bears his name. It was opened in 1898 by Lord Peel and
Mr. Morley, and for twenty years it has been a center of social work and
endeavor in St. Pancras. From it have sprung the Physically Defective
Schools under the Education Authority, now so plentiful in London, and
so frequent in our other large towns. The first school of the kind was
opened at this Settlement in 1898; and the first school ambulance in
London was given to us by Sir Thomas Barlow for our Cripple Children.
The first Play Center in England began there in 1898; and the first
Vacation School was held there in 1902.
During those twenty years the Settlement has played a large part in my
life. We have had our failures and our successes; and the original idea
has been much transformed with time. The Jowett Lectureship, still
devoted to a religious or philosophical subject, forms a link with the
religious lecturing of the past; but otherwise the Settlement, like the
Master himself, stands for the liberal and spiritual life, without
definitions or exclusions. Up to 1915 it was, like Toynbee Hall, a
Settlement for University and professional men who gave their evenings
to the work. Since 1915 it has been a Women's Settlement under a
distinguished head--Miss Hilda Oakeley, M.A., formerly Warden of King's
College for Women. It is now full of women residents and full of work.
There is a Cripple School building belonging to the Settlement, to the
East; our cripples still fill the Duke's garden with the shouts of their
play; and hundreds of other children crowd into the building every
evening in the winter, or sit under the plane-trees in summer. The
charming hall of the Settlement is well attended every winter week by
people to whom the beautiful music that the Settlement gives is a
constant joy; the Library, dedicated to the memory of T. H. Green, has
400 members; the classes and popular lectures have been steadily held
even during this devastating war; the Workers' Educational Association
carry on their work under our roof; mothers bring their babies to the
Infant Welfare Center in the afternoon; there are orchestral and choral
classes, boys' clubs and girls' clubs. Only one club has closed
down--the Men's Club, which occupied the top floor of the Invalid
Children's School before the war. Their members are scattered over
France, Salonika, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, and the Roll of Honor is
a long one.
Twenty years! How clearly one sees the mistakes, the lost opportunities,
of such an enterprise! But so much is certain--that the Settlement has
been an element of happiness in many, many lives. It has had scores of
devoted workers, in the past--men and women to whom the heart of its
founder goes out in gratitude. And I cannot imagine a time when the
spacious and beautiful house and garden, with all the activities that
have a home there, will not be necessary and welcome to St. Pancras. I
see it, in my dreams, at least, half a century hence, when all those who
first learned from it and in it have gone their way, still serving "the
future hour" of an England reborn. To two especially among the early
friends of the Settlement let me turn back with grateful
remembrance--George Howard, Lord Carlisle, whom I have already
mentioned, and Stopford Brooke. Lord Carlisle was one of the most
liberal and most modest of men, an artist himself, and the friend of
artists. On a Sunday in Russell Square, when the drawing-room door
opened to reveal his fine head and shy, kind eyes, one felt how well
worth while it was to stay at home on Sunday afternoons! I find a little
note from him in 1891, the year in which we left Russell Square to move
westward, regretting the "interesting old house" "with which I associate
you in my mind." He was not an easy talker, but his listening had the
quality that makes others talk their best; while the sudden play of
humor or sarcasm through the features that were no less strong than
refined, and the impression throughout of a singularly upright and
humane personality, made him a delightful companion. There were those
who would gladly have seen him take a more prominent part in public
life. Perhaps a certain natural indolence held him back; perhaps a
wonderful fairness of mind which made him slow to judge, and abnormally
sensitive to "the other side." It is well known that as a landlord he
left the administration of his great estates in the north almost wholly
to his wife, and that, except in the great matter of temperance, he and
she differed in politics, Lady Carlisle--who was a Stanley of
Alderley--going with Mr. Gladstone at the time of the Home Rule split,
while Lord Carlisle joined the Liberal Unionists. Both took a public
part, and the political differences of the parents were continued in
their children. Only a very rare and selfless nature could have carried
through so difficult a situation without lack of either dignity or
sweetness. Lord Carlisle, in the late 'eighties and early 'nineties,
when I knew him best, showed no want of either. The restrictions he laid
upon his own life were perhaps made natural by the fact that he was
first and foremost an artist by training and temperament, and that the
ordinary occupations, rural, social, or political, of the great
land-owning noble, had little or no attraction for him. In the years, at
any rate, when I saw him often, I was drawn to him by our common
interest in the liberalizing of religion, and by a common love of Italy
and Italian art. I remember him once in the incomparable setting of
Naworth; but more often in London, and in Stopford Brooke's company.
For he was an intimate friend and follower of Mr. Brooke's, and I came
very early under the spell of that same strong and magnetic personality.
While we were still at Oxford, through J.R.G. we made acquaintance with
Mr. Brooke, and with the wife whose early death in 1879 left desolate
one of the most affectionate of men. I remember well Mr. Brooke's last
sermon in the University pulpit, before his secession, on grounds of
what we should now call Modernism, from the Church of England. Mrs.
Brooke, I think, was staying with us, while Mr. Brooke was at All Souls,
and the strong individuality of both the husband and wife made a deep
impression upon one who was then much more responsive and recipient than
individual. The sermon was a great success; but it was almost Mr.
Brooke's latest utterance within the Anglican Church. The following year
came the news of Mrs. Brooke's mortal illness. During our short meeting
in 1877 I had been greatly attracted by her, and the news filled me with
unbearable pain. But I had not understood from it that the end itself
was near, and I went out into our little garden, which was a mass of
summer roses, and in a bewilderment of feeling gathered all I could
find--a glorious medley of bloom--that they might surround her, if only
for a day, with the beauty she loved. Next day, or the day after, she
died; and that basket of roses, arriving in the house of death--belated,
incongruous offering!--has stayed with me as the symbol of so much else
that is too late in life, and of our human helplessness and futility in
the face of sorrow.
After our move to London, my children and I went for a long time
regularly to hear Mr. Brooke at Bedford Chapel. At the time, I often
felt very critical of the sermons. Looking back, I cannot bring myself
to say a critical word. If only one could still go and hear him! Where
are the same gifts, the same magnetism, the same compelling personality
to be found to-day, among religious leaders? I remember a sermon on
Elijah and the priests of Baal, which for color and range, for
modernness, combined with ethical force and power, remains with me as
perhaps the best I ever heard. And then, the service. Prayers
simplified, repetitions omitted, the Beatitudes instead of the
Commandments, a dozen jarring, intolerable things left out; but for the
rest, no needless break with association. And the relief and consolation
of it! The simple Communion service, adapted very slightly from the
Anglican rite, and administered by Mr. Brooke with a reverence, an
ardor, a tenderness one can only think of with emotion, was an example
of what _could_ be done with our religious traditions, for those who
want new bottles for new wine, if only the courage and the imagination
were there.
The biography of Mr. Brooke, which his son-in-law, Principal Jacks, has
just brought out, will, I think, reveal to many what made the spell of
Stopford Brooke, to a degree which is not common in biography. For _le
papier est bête_!--and the charm of a man who was both poet and artist,
without writing poems or painting pictures, is very hard to hand on to
those who never knew him. But, luckily, Stopford Brooke's diaries and
letters reflect him with great fullness and freedom. They have his
faults, naturally. They are often exuberant or hasty--not, by any means,
always fair to men and women of a different temperament from his own.
Yet, on the whole, there is the same practical, warm-hearted wisdom in
them that many a friend found in the man himself when they went to
consult him in his little study at the back of Bedford Chapel, where he
wrote his sermons and books, and found quiet, without, however, barring
out the world, if it wanted him. And there breathes from them also the
enduring, eager passion for natural and artistic beauty which made the
joy of his own life, and which his letters and journals may well kindle
in others. His old age was a triumph in the most difficult of arts. He
was young to the end, and every day of the last waiting years was happy
for himself, and precious to those about him. He knew what to give up
and what to keep, and his freshness of feeling never failed. Perhaps his
best and most enduring memorial will be the Wordsworth Cottage at
Grasmere, which he planned and carried out. And I like to remember that
my last sight of him was at a spot only a stone's-throw from that
cottage on the Keswick Road, his gray hair beaten back by the light
breeze coming from the pass, and his cheerful eyes, full often, as it
seemed to me, of a mystical content, raised toward the evening glow over
Helm Crag and the Easedale fells.
On the threshold also of the Settlement's early history there stands the
venerable figure of James Martineau--thinker and saint. For he was a
member of the original Council, and his lectures on the Gospel of St.
Luke, in the old "Elsmerian" hall, marked the best of what we tried to
give in those first days. I knew Harriet Martineau in my childhood at
Fox How. Well I remember going to tea with that tremendous woman when I
was eight years old; sitting through a silent meal, in much awe of her
cap, her strong face, her ear-trumpet; and then being taken away to a
neighboring room by a kind niece, that I might not disturb her further.
Once or twice, during my growing up, I saw her. She lived only a mile
from Fox How, and was always on friendly terms with my people. Matthew
Arnold had a true admiration for her--sturdy fighter that she was in
Liberal causes. So had W.E. Forster; only he suffered a good deal at her
hands, as she disapproved of the Education Bill, and contrived so to
manage her trumpet when he came to see her as to take all the argument
and give him all the listening! When my eldest child was born, a
cot-blanket arrived, knitted by Miss Martineau's own hands--the busy
hands (soon then to be at rest) that wrote the _History of the Peace_,
_Feats on the Fiord_, the _Settlers at Home_, and those excellent
biographical sketches of the politicians of the Reform and Corn Law days
in the _Daily News_, which are still well worth reading.
Between Harriet Martineau and her brother James, as many people will
remember, there arose an unhappy difference in middle life which was
never mended or healed. I never heard him speak of her. His standards
were high and severe, for all the sensitive delicacy of his long,
distinguished face and visionary eyes; and neither he nor she was of the
stuff that allows kinship to supersede conscience. He published a
somewhat vehement criticism of a book in which she was part author, and
she never forgave it. And although to me, in the University Hall
venture, he was gentleness and courtesy itself, and though his presence
seemed to hallow a room directly he entered it, one felt always that he
was _formidable_. The prophet and the Puritan lay deep in him. Yet in
his two famous volumes of Sermons there are tones of an exquisite
tenderness and sweetness, together with harmonies of prose style, that
remind me often how he loved music and how his beautiful white head
might be seen at the Monday Popular Concerts, week after week, his
thinker's brow thrown back to catch the finest shades of
Joachim's playing.
The year after _David Grieve_ appeared, Mr. Jowett died. His long letter
to me on the book contained some characteristic passages, of which I
quote the following:
I should like to have a good talk with you. I seldom get any one to
talk on religious subjects. It seems to me that the world is growing
rather tired of German criticism, having got out of it nearly all
that it is capable of giving. To me it appears one of the most
hopeful signs of the present day that we are coming back to the old,
old doctrine, "he can't be wrong whose life is in the right." Yet
this has to be taught in a new way, adapted to the wants of the
age. We must give up doctrine and teach by the lives of men,
beginning with the life of Christ, instead. And the best words of
men, beginning with the Gospels and the prophets, will be our Bible.
At the end of the year we spent a weekend with him at Balliol, and that
was my last sight of my dear old friend. The year 1893 was for me one of
illness, and of hard work both in the organization of the new Settlement
and in the writing of _Marcella_. But that doesn't reconcile me to the
recollection of how little I knew of his failing health till, suddenly,
in September the news reached me that he was lying dangerously ill in
the house of Sir Robert Wright, in Surrey.
"Every one who waited on him in his illness loved him," wrote an old
friend of his and mine who was with him to the end. What were almost
his last words--"I bless God for my life!--I bless God for my
life!"--seemed to bring the noble story of it to a triumphant close;
and after death he lay "with the look of a little child on his
face.... He will live in the hearts of those who loved him, as well
as in his work."
He lives indeed; and as we recede farther from him the originality and
greatness of his character will become more and more clear to Oxford and
to England. The men whom he trained are now in the full stream of
politics and life. His pupils and friends are or have been everywhere,
and they have borne, in whatever vocation, the influence of his mind or
the mark of his friendship. Lord Lansdowne, Mr. Asquith, Lord Justice
Bowen, Lord Coleridge, Lord Milner, Sir Robert Morier, Matthew Arnold,
Tennyson, Lord Goschen, Miss Nightingale, and a hundred others of the
nation's leaders--amid profoundest difference, the memory of "the
Master" has been for them a common and a felt bond. No other religious
personality of the nineteenth century--unless it be that of Newman--has
stood for so much. In his very contradictions and inconsistencies of
thought he was the typical man of a time beset on all sides by new
problems to which Jowett knew very well there was no intellectual
answer; while through the passion of his faith in a Divine Life, which
makes itself known to man, not in miracle or mystery, but through the
channels of a common experience, he has been a kindling force in many
hearts and minds, and those among the most important to England.
Meanwhile, to these great matters the Jowettan oddities and
idiosyncrasies added just that touch of laughter and surprise that makes
a man loved by his own time and arrests the eye and ear of posterity.