_HELBECK OF BANNISDALE_
The coming out of _Marcella_, in April, 1894, will always mark for me
perhaps the happiest date in my literary life. The book, for all the
hard work that had gone to it, had none the less been a pleasure to
write; and the good-will that greeted it made the holiday I had
earned--which again was largely spent in Rome--a golden time. Not long
after we left England, "Piccadilly," my sister wrote me, was "placarded
with _Marcella_," the name appearing on the notice-boards of most of the
evening papers--a thing which never happened to me before or since; and
when we arrived in Rome, the content-bills of the London newspapers,
displayed in the Piazza di Spagna, announced her no less flamingly. The
proof-sheets of the book had been tried on various friends, as usual,
with some amusing results. Bishop Creighton, with only the first
two-thirds of the book before him, wrote me denunciations of Marcella.
I am greatly interested in the book and pine for the _dénoûment_. So
far Marcella, though I know her quite well, does not in the least
awaken my sympathy. She is an intolerable girl--but there are many
of them.... I only hope that she may be made to pay for it. Mr. and
Mrs. Boyce are good and original, so is Wharton. I hope that condign
vengeance awaits him. He is the modern politician entirely.... I
really hope Marcella may be converted. It would serve her right to
marry her to Wharton; he would beat her.
Another old friend, one of the industrial leaders of the north, carried
off half the proofs to read on his journey to Yorkshire.
I so ravened on them that I sat still at Blosworth instead of
getting out! The consequence is that all my plans are disarranged. I
shall not get to M---- in time for my meeting, and for all this
Marcella is to blame.... The station-master assured me he called out
"Change for Northampton," but I was much too deep in the scene
between Marcella, Lord Maxwell, and Raeburn to heed anything
belonging to the outer world.
Mr. Goschen wrote:
I don't know how long it is since I have enjoyed reading anything so
much. I can't satisfy myself as to the physical appearance of
Wharton.... I do know some men of a _character_ not quite unlike
him, but they haven't the boyish face with curls. Marcella I see
before me. Mrs. Boyce and Lord Maxwell both interested me very
much....Alack! I must turn from Marcella's enthusiasm and
aspirations to Sir W. Harcourt's speech--a great transition.
And dear Alfred Lyttelton wrote:
I feel a ridiculous pride in her triumphs which I have had the joy
of witnessing on every side.... At least permit an expert to tell
you that his heart beat over the ferrets (in the poaching scene) and
at the intense vividness and truth of the legal episodes.
But there is no one letter in this old packet which moves me specially.
It was on the 1st of March, 1894, that Mr. Gladstone said "Good-by" to
his Cabinet in the Cabinet room at Downing Street, and a little later in
the afternoon walked away for the last time from the House of Commons.
No one who has read it will forget the telling of that episode, in Mr.
Morley's biography, with what concentration, what dignity!--worthy alike
of the subject and of the admirable man of letters--himself an
eye-witness--who records it.
While Lord Kimberley and Sir William Harcourt, on behalf of the rest of
their colleagues, were bidding their great chief farewell, "Mr.
Gladstone sat composed and still as marble, and the emotion of the
Cabinet did not gain him for an instant." When the spokesmen ceased, he
made his own little speech of four or five minutes in reply: "then
hardly above a breath, but every accent heard, he said, 'God bless you
all.' He rose slowly and went out of one door, while his colleagues with
minds oppressed filed out by the other."
On this moving scene there followed what Mr. Gladstone himself described
as the first period of comparative leisure he had ever known, extending
to four and a half months. They were marked first by increasing
blindness, then by an operation for cataract, and finally by a moderate
return of sight. In July he notes that "during the last months of
partial incapacity I have not written with my own hand probably so much
as one letter a day." In this faded packet of mine lies one of these
rare letters, written with his own hand--a full sheet--from Dollis Hill,
on April 27th.
When _Marcella_ arrived my thankfulness was alloyed with a feeling
that the state of my eyesight made your kindness for the time a
waste. But Mr. Nettleship has since then by an infusion supplied a
temporary stimulus to the organ, such that I have been enabled to
begin, and am reading the work with great pleasure and an agreeable
sense of congeniality which I do not doubt I shall retain to
the close.
Then he describes a book--a novel--dealing with religious controversy,
which he had lately been reading, in which every character embodying
views opposed to those of the author "is exhibited as odious." With this
he warmly contrasts the method and spirit of _David Grieve_, and then
continues:
Well, I have by my resignation passed into a new state of existence.
And in that state I shall be very glad when our respective stars may
cause our paths to meet. I am full of prospective work; but for the
present a tenacious influenza greatly cripples me and prevents my
making any definite arrangement for an expected operation on my eye.
Eighty-five!--greatly crippled by influenza and blindness--yet "full of
prospective work"! The following year, remembering _Robert Elsmere_
days, and _à propos_ of certain passages in his review of that book, I
ventured to send him an Introduction I had contributed to my
brother-in-law Leonard Huxley's translation of Hausrath's _New Testament
Times._ This time the well-known handwriting is feebler and the old
"fighter" is not roused. He puts discussion by, and turns instead to
kind words about a near relative of my own who had been winning
distinctions at Oxford.
It is one of the most legitimate interests of the old to watch with
hope and joy these opening lives, and it has the secondary effect of
whispering to them that they are not yet wholly frozen up.... I am
busy as far as my limited powers of exertion allow upon a new
edition of Bishop Butler's Works, which costs me a good deal of
labor and leaves me, after a few hours upon it, good for very little
else. And my perspective, dubious as it is, is filled with other
work, in the Homeric region lying beyond. I hope it will be very
long before you know anything of compulsory limitations on the
exercise of your powers. Believe me always,
Sincerely yours,
W. E. GLADSTONE.
But it was not till 1897, as he himself records, that the indomitable
spirit so far yielded to these limitations as to resign--or rather
contemplate resigning--the second great task of which he had spoken to
me at Oxford, nine years before. "I have begun seriously to ask myself
whether I shall ever be able to face--_The Olympian Religion_."
It was, I think, in the winter of 1895 that I saw him for the last time
at our neighbors', the Rothschilds, at Tring Park. He was then full of
animation and talk, mainly of things political, and, indeed, not long
before he had addressed a meeting at Chester on the Turkish massacres in
Armenia, and was still to address a large audience at Liverpool on the
same subject--his last public appearance--a year later. When _George
Tressady_ appeared he sent me a message through Mrs. Drew that he feared
George Tressady's Parliamentary conduct "was inconceivable in a man of
honor"; and I was only comforted by the emphatic and laughing dissent of
Lord Peel, to whom I repeated the verdict. "Nothing of the kind! But of
course he was thinking of _us_--the Liberal Unionists."
Then came the last months when, amid a world's sympathy and reverence,
the great life, in weariness and pain, wore to its end. The "lying in
state" in Westminster Hall seemed to me ill arranged. But the burying
remains with me as one of those perfect things, which only the Anglican
Church at its best, in combination with the immemorial associations of
English history, can achieve. After it, I wrote to my son:
I have now seen four great funerals in the Abbey--Darwin, Browning,
Tennyson, and the funeral service for Uncle Forster, which was very
striking, too. But no one above forty of those in the Abbey
yesterday will ever see the like again. It was as beautiful and
noble as the "lying in state" was disappointing and ugly. The music
was exquisite, and fitting in every respect; and when the high
sentence rang out, "and their name liveth for evermore," the effect
was marvelous. One seemed to hear the voice of the future already
pealing through the Abbey--as though the verdict were secured, the
judgment given.
We saw it all, admirably, from the Muniment Room, which is a sort of
lower Triforium above the south Transept. To me, perhaps, the most
thrilling moment was when, bending forward, one saw the
white-covered coffin disappear amid the black crowd round it, and
knew that it had sunk forever into its deep grave, amid that same
primeval clay of Thorny Island on which Edward's Minister was first
reared and the Red King built his hall of judgment and Council. The
statue of Dizzy looked down on him--"So you have come at last!"--and
all the other statues on either side seemed to welcome and receive
him.... The sloping seats for Lords and Commons filled the
transepts, a great black mass against the jeweled windows, the Lords
on one side, the Commons on the other; in front of each black
multitude was the glitter of a mace, and in the hollow between, the
whiteness of the pall--perhaps you can fancy it so.
But the impetus of memory has carried me on too fast. There are some
other figures and scenes to be gathered from these years--1893-98--that
may still interest this present day. Of the most varied kind! For, as I
turn over letters and memoranda, a jumble of recollections passes
through my mind. Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, on the one hand, a
melancholy, kindly man, amid the splendors of Waddesden; a meeting of
the Social Democratic Federation in a cellar in Lisson Grove; days of
absorbing interest in the Jewish East End, and in sweaters' workshops,
while _George Tressady_ was in writing; a first visit to Mentmore while
Lady Rosebery was alive; a talk with Lord Rosebery some time after her
death, in a corner of a local ball-room, while _Helbeck_ was shaping
itself about the old Catholic families of England, which revealed to me
yet another and unsuspected vein of knowledge in one of the best
furnished of minds; the Asquith marriage in 1894; new acquaintances and
experiences in Lancashire towns, again connected with _George Tressady_,
and in which I was helped by that brilliant writer, worker, and fighter,
Mrs. Sidney Webb; a nascent friendship with Sir William Harcourt, one of
the most racy of all possible companions; happy evenings in the Tadema
and Richmond studios with music and good talk; occasional meetings with
and letters from "Pater," the dear and famous Professor, who, like my
uncle, fought half the world and scarcely made an enemy; visits to
Oxford and old friends--such are the scenes and persons that come back
to me as I read old letters, while all through it ran the continual
strain of hard literary work mingled with the new social and religious
interests which the foundation of the Passmore Edwards Settlement had
brought me.
We have been at Margot Tennant's wedding to-day [I wrote to my son
on May 10, 1894]--a great function, very tiring, but very brilliant
and amusing--occasionally dramatic, too, as, when after the service
had begun, the sound of cheering in the street outside drowned the
voice of the Bishop of Rochester, and warned us that Mr. Gladstone
was arriving. Afterward at the house we shook hands with three
Cabinet Ministers on the door-step, and there were all the rest of
them inside! The bride carried herself beautifully and was as
composed and fresh as though it were any ordinary party. From our
seat in the church one saw the interior of the vestry and Mr.
Gladstone's white head against the window as he sat to sign the
register; and the greeting between him and Mr. Balfour when he
had done.
This was written while Lord Rosebery was Prime Minister and Mr. Balfour,
still free, until the following year, from the trammels of office, was
finishing his brilliant _Foundations of Belief_, which came out in 1895.
In acknowledging the copy which he sent me, I ventured to write some
pages on behalf of certain arguments of the Higher Criticism which
seemed to me to deserve a fuller treatment than Mr. Balfour had been
willing to give them--in defense also of our English idealists, such as
Green and Caird, in their relation to orthodoxy. A year or two earlier I
find I had been breaking a lance on behalf of the same school of writers
with a very different opponent. In the controversy between Professor
Huxley and Doctor Wace, in 1889, which opened with the famous article on
"The Gadarene Swine," the Professor had welcomed me as an ally, because
of "The New Reformation," which appeared much about the same time; and
the word of praise in which he compared my reply to Mr. Gladstone, to
the work "of a strong housemaid brushing away cobwebs," gave me a
fearful joy! I well remember a thrilling moment in the Russell Square
drawing-room in 1889, when "Pater" and I were in full talk, he in his
raciest and most amusing form, and suddenly the door opened, and "Doctor
Wace" was announced--the opponent with whom at that moment he was
grappling his hardest in the _Nineteenth Century_. Huxley gave me a
merry look--and then how perfectly they both behaved! I really think the
meeting was a pleasure to both of them, and when my old chief in the
_Dictionary of Christian Biography_ took his departure, Huxley found all
kinds of pleasant personal things to say about him.
But the Professor and I were not always at one. Caird and Green--and,
for other reasons, Martineau--were to me names "of great pith and
moment," and Christian Theism was a reasonable faith. And Huxley, in
controversy, was no more kind to my _sacra_ than to other people's. Once
I dared a mild remonstrance--in 1892--only to provoke one of his most
vigorous replies:
MY DEAR M.--Thanks for your pleasant letter. I do not know whether I
like the praise or the scolding better. They, like pastry, need to
be done with a light hand--especially praise--and I have swallowed
all yours, and feel it thoroughly agrees with me.
As to the scolding I am going to defend myself tooth and nail. In
the first place, by all my Gods and No Gods, neither Green, nor
Martineau, nor the Cairds were in my mind when I talked of
"Sentimental Deism," but the "Vicaire Savoyard," and Charming, and
such as Voysey. There are two chapters of "Rousseauism," I have not
touched yet--Rousseauism in Theology, and Rousseauism in Education.
When I write the former I shall try to show that the people of whom
I speak as "sentimental deists" are the lineal descendants of the
Vicaire Savoyard. I was a great reader of Channing in my boyhood,
and was much taken in by his theosophic confectionery. At present I
have as much (intellectual) antipathy to him as St. John had to the
Nicolaitans.
... Green I know only from his Introduction to Hume--which reminds
me of nothing so much as a man with a hammer and chisel knocking out
bits of bad stone in the Great Pyramid, with the view of bringing it
down.... As to Caird's _Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion_,
I will get it and study it. But as a rule "Philosophies of Religion"
in my experience turn out to be only "Religions of
Philosophers"--quite another business, as you will admit.
And if you please, Ma'am, I wish to add that I think I am _not_
without sympathy for Christian feeling--or rather for what you mean
by it. Beneath the cooled logical upper strata of my microcosm there
is a fused mass of prophetism and mysticism, and the Lord knows what
might happen to me, in case a moral earthquake cracked the
superincumbent deposit, and permitted an eruption of the demonic
element below.... Luckily I am near 70, and not a G.O.M.--so the
danger is slight.
One must stick to one's trade. It is my business to the best of my
ability to fight for scientific clearness--that is what the world
lacks. Feeling Christian or other, is superabundant....
Ever yours affectionately,
T. H. HUXLEY.
A few more letters from him--racy, and living as himself--and then in
1895, just after his first article on the "Foundations of Belief," we
heard with dismay of the illness which killed him. There was never a man
more beloved--more deeply mourned.
The autumn of 1896 brought me a great loss in the death of an intimate
friend, Lady Wemyss--as marked a personality in her own circle as was
her indomitable husband, the famous Lord Elcho, of the Volunteer
movement, on the bigger stage. It was at Balliol, at the Master's table,
and in the early Oxford days, that we first made friends with Lord and
Lady Wemyss, who were staying with the Master for the Sunday. I was
sitting next to Lord Wemyss, and he presently discovered that I was
absent-minded. And I found him so attractive and so human that I soon
told him why. I had left a sick child at home, with a high temperature,
and was fidgeting to get back to him.
"What is the matter?--Fever?--throat? Aconite, of course! You're a
homeopath, aren't you? All sensible people are. Look here--I've got a
servant with me. I'll send him with some aconite at once. Where do you
live?--in the Parks? All right. Give me your address."
Out came an envelope and a pencil. A message was sent round the
dinner-table to Lady Wemyss, whose powerful dreaming face beside the
Master lit up at once. The aconite was sent; the child's temperature
went down; and, if I remember right, either one or both of his new
medical advisers walked up to the Parks the next day to inquire for him.
So began a friendship which for just twenty years, especially from about
1885 to 1896, meant a great deal to me.
How shall I describe Lady Wemyss? An unfriendly critic has recently
allowed me the power of "interesting fashionable ladies in things of the
mind." Was Lady Wemyss a "fashionable lady"? She was the wife,
certainly, of a man of high rank and great possessions; but I met her
first as a friend--a dear and intimate friend, as may be seen from his
correspondence--of Mr. Jowett's; and Mr. Jowett was not very tolerant of
"fashionable ladies." She was in reality a strong and very simple
person, with a natural charm working through a very reserved and often
harsh manner, like the charm of mountain places in spring. She was a
Conservative, and I suppose an aristocrat, whatever that word may mean.
She thought the Harcourt death-duties "terrible" because they broke up
old families and old estates, and she had been brought up to think that
both were useful. Yet I never knew anybody with a more instinctive
passion for equality. This means that she was simply and deeply
interested in all sorts of human beings and all sorts of human lots;
also that, although she was often self-conscious, it was the
self-consciousness one sees in the thoughtful and richly natured young,
whose growth in thought or character has outrun their means of
expression, and never mean or egotistical. Her deep voice; her fine,
marked features; and the sudden play of humor, silent, self-restrained,
yet most infectious to the bystander, that would lighten through them;
her stately ways; and yet, withal, her childlike love of loving and
being loved by the few to whom she gave her deepest affection--in some
such phrases one tries to describe her; but they go a very little way.
I can see her now at the dinner-table at Gosford, sardonically watching
a real "fashionable lady" who had arrived in the afternoon and was
sitting next Lord Wemyss at the farther end--with a wonderful frizzled
head, an infinitesimal waist sheathed in white muslin and blue ribbons,
rouged cheeks, a marvelous concatenation of jewels, and a caressing,
gesticulating manner meant, at fifty, to suggest the ways of "sweet and
twenty." The frizzled head drew nearer and nearer to Lord Wemyss, the
fingers flourished and pointed; and suddenly I heard Lady Wemyss's deep
voice, meditatively amused, beside me:
"Her fingers will be in Frank's eyes soon!" Or again, I see her, stalled
beneath the drawing-room table, on all-fours, by her imperious
grandchildren, patiently playing "horse" or "cow," till her scandalized
daughter-in-law discovered her and ran to her release. Or in her last
illness, turning her noble head and faint, welcoming smile to the few
friends that were admitted; and finally, in the splendid rest after
death, when those of us who had not known her in youth could guess what
the beauty of her youth had been.
She was an omnivorous and most intelligent reader, and a friend that
never failed. Matthew Arnold was very fond of her, and she of him; Laura
Lyttelton, who was nearly forty years her junior, loved her dearly and
never felt the bar of years; the Master owed much to her affection, and
gratefully acknowledged it. The _Commonplace Book_, privately printed
after her death, showed the range of interests which had played upon her
fresh and energetic mind. It was untrained, I suppose, compared to the
woman graduate of to-day. But it was far less tired; and all its
adventures were of its own seeking.
It was in 1896, not long after the appearance of _George Tressady_, that
a conversation in a house on the outskirts of the Lakes suggested to me
the main plot of _Helbeck of Bannisdale._ The talk turned on the
fortunes of that interesting old place, Sizergh Castle, near Kendal, and
of the Catholic family to whom it then still belonged, though mortgages
and lack of pence were threatening imminently to submerge an ancient
stock that had held it unbrokenly, from father to son, through many
generations.
The relation between such a family--pinched and obscure, yet with its
own proud record, and inherited consciousness of an unbroken loyalty to
a once persecuted faith--and this modern world of ours struck me as an
admirable subject for a novel. I thought about it next day, all through
a long railway journey from Kendal to London, and by the time I reached
Euston the plot of _Helbeck of Bannisdale_ was more or less clear to me.
I confided it to Lord Acton a little while afterward. We discussed it,
and he cordially encouraged me to work it out. Then I consulted my
father, my Catholic father, without whose assent I should never have
written the book at all; and he raised no difficulty. So I only had
to begin.
But I wanted a setting--somewhere in the border country between the
Lakes mountains and Morecambe Bay. And here another piece of good luck
befell, almost equal to that which had carried us to Hampden for the
summer of 1889. Levens Hall, it appeared, was to be let for the
spring--the famous Elizabethan house, five miles from Kendal, and about
a mile from Sizergh. I had already seen Levens; and we took the
chance at once.
Bannisdale in the novel is a combination, I suppose, of Sizergh and
Levens. The two houses, though of much the same date, are really very
different, and suggest phases of life quite distinct from each other.
Levens compared to Sizergh is--or was then, before the modern
restoration of Sizergh--the spoiled beauty beside the shabby ascetic.
Levens has always been cared for and lived in by people who had money to
spend upon the house and garden they loved, and the result is a
wonderful example of Elizabethan and Jacobean decoration, mellowed by
time into a perfect whole. Yet, for my purposes, there was always
Sizergh, close by, with its austere suggestions of sacrifice and
suffering under the penal laws, borne without flinching by a long
succession of quiet, simple, undistinguished people.
We arrived there in March, 1897. The house greeted us on a clear and
chilly evening under the mingled light of a frosty sunset, and the blaze
of wood fires which had been lit everywhere to warm its new guests.
At last we arrived--saw the wonderful gray house rising above the
river in the evening light, found G---- waiting at the open door for
us, and plunged into the hall, the sitting-rooms, and all the
intricacies of the upper passages and turrets with the delight and
curiosity of a pack of children. Wood and peat fires were burning
everywhere; the great chimneypieces in the drawing-room, the arms of
Elizabeth over the hall fire, the stucco birds and beasts running
round the Hall, showed dimly in the scanty lamplight (we shall want
about six more lamps!)--and the beauty of the marvelous old place
took us all by storm. Then through endless passages and kitchens,
bright with long rows of copper pans and molds, we made our way out
into the gardens among the clipped yews and cedars, and had just
light enough to see that Levens apparently is like nothing else
but itself.
... The drawback of the house at present is certainly _the cold_!
Thus began a happy and fruitful time. We managed to get warm in spite of
a treacherous and tardy spring. Guests came to stay with us--Henry
James, above all; the Creightons, he then in the first months of that
remarkable London episcopate, which in four short years did so much to
raise the name and fame of the Anglican Church in London, at least for
the lay mind; the Neville Lytteltons, who had been since 1893 our summer
neighbors at Stocks; Lord Lytton, then at Cambridge; the Sydney Buxtons;
old Oxford friends, and many kinsfolk. The damson blossom along the
hedgerows that makes of these northern vales in April a glistening
network of white and green, the daffodils and violets, the
lilies-of-the-valley in the Brigsteer woods came and went, the _Helbeck_
made steady progress.
But we left Levens in May, and it took me another eight months to finish
the book. Except perhaps in the case of _Bessie Costrell_, I was never
more possessed by a subject, more shut in by it from the outer world.
And, though its contemporary success was nothing like so great as that
of most of my other books, the response it evoked, as my letters show,
in those to whom the book appealed, was deep and passionate.
My first anxiety was as to my father, and after we had left England for
abroad I was seized with misgivings lest certain passages in the talk of
Doctor Friedland, who, it will perhaps be remembered, is made the
spokesman in the book of certain points in the _intellectual_ case
against Catholicism, should wound or distress him. I, therefore, no
sooner reached Italy than I sent for the proofs again, and worked at
them as much as fatigue would let me, softening them, and, I think,
improving them, too. Then we went on to Florence, and rest, coming home
for the book's publication in June.
The joy and emotion of it were great. George Meredith, J. M. Barrie,
Paul Bourget, and Henry James--the men who at that time stood at the
head of my own art--gave the book a welcome that I can never forget.
George Meredith wrote:
Your _Helbeck of Bannisdale_ held me firmly in the reading and
remains with me.... If I felt a monotony during the struggle, it
came of your being faithful to your theme--rapt--or you would not
have had such power over your reader. I know not another book that
shows the classic so distinctly to view.... Yet a word of thanks for
Doctor Friedland. He is the voice of spring in the book.
J.M. Barrie's generous, enthusiastic note delights and inspires me again
as I read it over. Mr. Morley, my old editor and critic, wrote: "I find
it intensely interesting and with all the elements of beauty, power, and
pathos." For Leslie Stephen, with whom I had only lately made warm and
close friends, I had a copy bound, without the final chapter, that the
book might not, by its tragic close, depress one who had known so much
sorrow. Sir Alfred Lyall thought--"the story reaches a higher pitch of
vigor and dramatic presentation than is to be found even in your later
books"; while Lord Halifax's letter--"how lovable they both are, each in
his way, and how true to the ideal on both sides!"--and others, from Mr.
Godkin, of the American _Nation_, from Frederic Harrison, Lord Goschen,
Lord Dufferin, and many, many more, produced in me that curious mood
which for the artist is much nearer dread than boasting--dread that the
best is over and that one will never earn such sympathy again. One
letter not written to myself, from Mr. George Wyndham to Mr. Wilfred
Ward, I have asked leave to print as a piece of independent criticism:
On Sunday I read _Helbeck of Bannisdale_, and I confess that the
book moved me a great deal. It is her best book. It is a true
tragedy, because the crash is inevitable. This is not so easy to
effect in Art as many suppose. There are very few characters and
situations which lead to inevitable crashes. It is a thousand to one
that a woman who thinks she ought not to marry a man, but loves him
passionately, will, in fact, marry him. She will either discover an
ingenious way out of her woods or else just shut her eyes and "go it
blind," relying on his strength and feeling that it is really right
to relinquish to him her sense of responsibility. In choosing a girl
with nothing left her in the world but loyalty to a dead father and
memory of his attitude toward religion, without knowledge of his
arguments for that attitude, I think that Mrs. Ward has hit on the
only possible _persona_. Had Laura, herself, been a convinced
rationalist, or had her father been still alive, she would have
merged herself and her attitude in Helbeck's strength of character.
Being a work of art, self-consistent and inevitable, the book
becomes symbolic. It is a picture of incompatibility, but, being a
true picture, it is a symbolic index to the incompatible which plays
so large a part in the experience of man.
For the rest, I remember vividly the happy holiday of that summer at
Stocks; the sense of having come through a great wrestle, and finding
everything--my children, the garden, my little Huxley nephews, books and
talk, the Settlement where we were just about to open our Cripple
School, and all else in life, steeped in a special glamour. It faded
soon, no doubt, "into the light of common day"; but if I shut my
thoughts and eyes against the troubles of these dark hours of war, I can
feel my way back into the "wind-warm space" and look into the faces that
earth knows no more--my father, Leslie Stephen, Alfred Lyall, Mr.
Goschen, Alfred Lyttelton, H. O. Arnold-Forster, my sister, Julia
Huxley, my eldest brother--a vanished company!
And in the following year, to complete the story, I owed to _Helbeck_ a
striking and unexpected hour. A message reached me in November, 1898, to
the effect that the Empress Frederick, who had just arrived at Windsor,
admired the book and would like to see the writer of it.
A tragic figure at that moment--the Empress Frederick! That splendid
Crown Prince, in his white uniform, whom we had seen at Schwalbach in
1872, had finished early in 1890 with his phantom reign and tortured
life, and his son reigned in his stead. Bismarck, "the Englishwoman's"
implacable enemy, had died some four months before I saw the Empress,
after eight years' exclusion from power. The Empress herself was on the
verge of the terrible illness which killed her two years later. To me
her life and personality--or, rather, the little I knew of them--had
always been very interesting. She had, of course, the reputation of
being the ablest of her family, and the bitterness of her sudden and
irreparable defeat at the hands of Fate and her son, in 1889-90, had
often struck me as one of the grimmest stories in history. One incident
in it, not, I think, very generally known, I happened to hear from an
eye-witness of the scene, before 1898. It was as follows:
The Empress Frederick in the midst of the Bismarck crisis of March,
1890, when it was evident that the young Emperor William II was bent
on getting rid of his Chancellor, and so "dropping the pilot" of his
House, was sitting at home one afternoon, with the companion from
whom I heard the story, when a servant, looking a good deal scared,
announced that Prince Bismarck had called and wished to know whether
her Majesty would receive him.
"Prince Bismarck!" said the Empress, in amazement. She had probably
not seen him since the death of her husband, and relations between
herself and him had been no more than official for years. Turning to
her companion, she said, "What can he possibly want with me!"
She consented, however, to receive him, and the old Prince, agitated
and hollow-eyed, made his appearance. He had come, as a last hope of
placating the new Kaiser, to ask the Empress to use what influence
she could on his behalf with her son. The Empress listened in
growing astonishment. At the end there was a short silence. Then she
said, with emotion: "I am sorry! You, yourself, Prince Bismarck,
have destroyed all my influence with my son. I can do nothing."
In a sense, it must have been a moment of triumph. But how tragic are
all the implications of the story! It was in my mind as I traveled to
Windsor on November 18, 1898. The following letter was written next day
to one of my children:
D---- and I met at Windsor, and we mounted into the quadrangle,
stopped at the third door on the right as Mrs. M---- had directed
us, interviewed various gorgeous footmen, and were soon in Mrs.
M----'s little sitting-room. Then we found we should have some
little time to wait, as the Empress was just going out with the
Queen and would see me at a quarter to 1. So we waited, much amused
by the talk around us. (It turned, if I remember right, on a certain
German Princess, who had arrived a day or two before as the old
Queen's guest, and had been taken since her arrival on such a
strenuous round of tombs and mausoleums that, hearing on this
particular morning that the Queen proposed to take her in the
afternoon to see yet another mausoleum, she had stubbornly refused
to get up. She had a headache, she said, and would stay in bed. But
the ladies in waiting, with fits of laughter, described how the
Queen had at once ordered her phenacetin, and how there was really
no chance at all for the poor lady. The Queen would get her way, and
the departed would be duly honored--headache or no headache. As
indeed it turned out.)
Presently we saw the Queen's little pony-carriage pass along beyond
the windows with the Empress Frederick, and the Grand Duke and
Duchess Serge walking beside it, and the Indians behind. Then in a
little while the Empress Frederick came hurrying back alone, and
almost directly came my summons. Countess Perponcher, her lady in
waiting, took me up through the Long Corridor, past the entrance to
the Queen's rooms on one side, and Gordon's Bible, in its glass
case, on the other, till we turned to the left, and I was in a small
sitting-room, where a lady, gray-haired and in black, came forward
to meet me.... We talked for about 50 minutes:--of German books and
Universities--Harnack--Renan, for whom she had the greatest
admiration--Strauss, of whom she told me various interesting
things--German colonies, that she thought were "all
nonsense"--Dreyfus, who in her eyes is certainly innocent--reaction
in France--the difference between the Greek Church in Russia and the
Greek Church in Greece, the hopes of Greece, and the freeing of
Crete. It is evident that her whole heart is with Greece and her
daughter there [the young Queen Sophia, on whose character recently
deciphered documents have thrown so strong a light], and she spoke
bitterly, as she always does, about the English hanging-back, and
the dawdling of the European Concert. Then she described how she
read _George Tressady_ aloud to her invalid daughter till the
daughter begged her to stop, lest she should cry over it all
night--she said charming things of _Helbeck_, talked of Italy,
D'Annunzio, quoted "my dear old friend Minghetti" as to the
fundamental paganism in the Italian mind, asked me to write my name
in her book, and to come and see her in Berlin--and it was time to
go.... She is a very attractive, sensitive, impulsive woman, more
charming than I had imagined, and, perhaps, less
intellectual--altogether the very woman to set up the backs of
Bismarck and his like. Never was there a more thorough Englishwoman!
I found myself constantly getting her out of focus, by that
confusion of mind which made one think of her as German.
And to my father I wrote:
The Empress began by asking after Uncle Matt, and nothing could have
been kinder and more sympathetic than her whole manner. But of
course Bismarck hated her. She is absolutely English, parliamentary,
and anti-despotic.... When I ventured to say in bidding her Good-by,
that I had often felt great admiration and deep sympathy for her,
which is true--she threw up her hands with a little sad or bitter
gesture--"Oh!--admiration!--for _me_!"--as if she knew very well
what it was to be conscious of the reverse. A touching, intelligent,
impulsive woman, she seemed to me--no doubt often not a wise
one--but very attractive.
Nineteen years ago! And two years later, after long suffering, like her
husband, the last silence fell on this brave and stormy nature. Let us
thank God for it as we look out upon Europe and see what her son has
made of it.