CAMBRIDGE AND LONDON
At Cambridge great men and women began to come into my life. Women’s
colleges were a novelty, and distinguished visitors were brought
to see us as one of the sights. Turgenev came, and I was told off
to show him round. It was a golden opportunity. Dare I ask him to
speak just a word or two of Russian? He looked such a kind old
snow-white Lion. Alas! he spoke fluent English; it was a grievous
disappointment. Then Ruskin came. I showed him our small library. He
looked at it with disapproving eyes. “Each book”, he said gravely,
“that a young girl touches should be bound in white vellum.” I
thought with horror of the red moroccos and Spanish leather that had
been my choice. A few weeks later the old humbug sent us his own
works bound in dark blue calf! Then came Mr. Gladstone. His daughter
Helen was a college friend of mine, or rather, more exactly, a
friendly enemy. We fought about everything, and had not an idea in
common. She was the most breezy, boisterous creature possible; we
called her Boreas, for she had a habit of picking her friends up and
running with them the length of the corridors. She was a thorough
Lyttelton, without a trace of her father, whom she adored. I was a
rigid Tory in those days, and I resolutely refused to join the mob of
students in cheering and clapping the Grand Old Man on his arrival.
I shut myself up in my room. Thither--to tease me--she brought him.
He sat down and asked me who was my favourite Greek author. Tact
counselled Homer, but I was perverse and not quite truthful, so I
said “Euripides.” Æschylus would have been creditable, Sophocles
respectable, but the sceptic Euripides! It was too much, and with a
few words of warning he withdrew. And then last, but oh, so utterly
first, came George Eliot. It was in the days when her cult was at
its height--thank heaven I never left her shrine!--and we used to
wait outside Macmillan’s shop to seize the new instalments of _Daniel
Deronda_. She came for a few minutes to my room, and I was almost
senseless with excitement. I had just repapered my room with the
newest thing in dolorous Morris papers. Some one must have called her
attention to it, for I remember that she said in her shy, impressive
way, “Your paper makes a beautiful background for your face.” The
ecstasy was too much, and I knew no more. Later, in London, I met, of
course, many eminent men, but there never came again a moment like
that. Browning was only to me a cheerful, amusing gossip. Herbert
Spencer took me in to dinner once, but he would discuss the Athenæum
cook, and on that subject he found me ill-informed. Pater and his
sisters were good, and opened their house to me; I always think of
him as a soft, kind cat; he purred so persuasively that I lost the
sense of what he was saying. At his house I often met Henry James.
I liked to watch that ingenious spider weaving his webs, but to me
he had no appeal. Miss Bosanquet’s recent delightful _Henry James at
Work_ has made me realise what I lost.
[Illustration: JANE HARRISON (aged twenty-five).
_To face page 45._
]
Tennyson’s daughter-in-law, Mrs. Lionel Tennyson, later Mrs.
Augustine Birrell, was among my closest friends. She took me to stay
with the great man. He met us at the station, grunting fiercely that
he “was not going to dress for dinner because I had come.” It was
rather frightening, but absurd. The vain old thing (he was the most
openly vain man I ever met) knew quite well that he looked his best
in his ample poet’s cloak. It is a rare and austere charm that gains
by evening dress. He was very kind to me according to his rather
fierce lights; he took me a long, memorable Sunday morning walk,
recited “Maud” to me, and countless other things. It was an anxious
joy; he often forgot his own poems and was obviously annoyed if I
could not supply the words. He would stop suddenly and ask angrily:
“Do you think Browning could have written that line? Do you think
Swinburne could?” I could truthfully answer, “Impossible.” If he
posed a good deal, he was scarcely to blame; the house was so charged
with an atmosphere of hero-worship that free breathing was difficult.
Tennyson remains to me a great poet, and I am proud to have known
him. When I hear young reactionaries say he is no poet at all, I
think them simply silly. He was intensely English, and therefore not
at his best as a conscious thinker; but he felt soundly, and his
mastery of language was superb. While the English language is, such
poems as “In Memoriam”, “The Lotus-Eaters”, “Ulysses”, “Crossing the
Bar” must live. Of very great artists there were, in England, none
to know. But I learnt much from the young school of Impressionists
then fighting their way to recognition. Burne-Jones too was kind to
me; he used often to come and sit with me, turning over drawings of
Greek vases with eager, delighted fingers. Sometimes I sat with him
as he drew his strange visions; often a silent, decorative cat sat on
his shoulder. He wrote me many letters with whimsical illustrative
drawings. I am sorry now that I tore them up. The people I most
longed after, Christina Rossetti and Swinburne, were not diners-out,
and I never knew them. The men and women who influenced me most--my
real friends--are living still. Of them I may not write.
One dear, dead woman remains--Miss Thackeray, who later married
Richmond Ritchie, the brother of a college friend. I met her first
at Eton, and I like to think she took a fancy to me, for she asked
me down to Chiswick to see her. She suggested an afternoon, at five,
and at five I presented myself. She received me with open arms, and
hospitably put her hand on a small black satin bag in which I carried
my book for the train. “Let Susan take your luggage upstairs,”
she said. “Come and have tea.” I clung to the said “luggage”, and
explained that she had not asked me to stay the night. “Oh, but I
want you to stay a long, long time.” Why, oh why, did I not stay?
Was it that I shrank from breaking a dinner engagement, or was it a
snobbish fear that Susan, as she unpacked my “luggage”, might think
a copy of Christina Rossetti’s poems inadequate night-gear? I lost
my opportunity, she never asked me again. I met her soon after,
crossing Kensington Square; she shook hands, but seemed excited
and _affairée_. “I mustn’t stop; some friends--some dear, dear
friends--are coming to dinner, and I have promised to get them an
egg.” And she was gone to the High Street. She never, I think, had
her delicate feet quite on the ground. I have often been sorry that I
did not keep _Punch’s_ fine parody of her novels. It ended thus: “A
kind hand was outstretched to help me. Two kind hands. I never knew
which I took.”
* * * * *
Walter Raleigh was an early friend, he and his delightful mother and
sisters. I remember we were all sitting round the fire after dinner
one night, and Walter was reading out some of his verses. One poem
was about the on-coming of Night and contained the line:
And God leads round His starry Bear.
“How beautiful!” I murmured fatuously (my friends tell me that at any
mention of a bear I am apt to get maudlin). “Walter,” said his mother
fiercely, “how dare you be so blasphemous! God doesn’t lead round
bears.” “Well, mother,” said Walter, “it’s your fault; you always
used to tell us when we were children that God guided the stars in
their paths, and”, looking at me, “I learnt it all at my mother’s
knee.” “I am sure your father wouldn’t have liked it,” continued
his mother. At this appeal to his filial piety Walter, of course,
collapsed, but he told me afterwards, in private, that he was sure
his father would have liked the line about the Bear, and that he
should keep it in. Dr. Raleigh, it seems, held unusually wide views
for a Congregationalist minister. Mrs. Raleigh was always called in
her family “Mrs. Fox”, because of the unexpected whiskings of her
mind. When the British Government broke out into a sort of epidemic
of title-giving, confounding gentlemen and scholars with lord mayors
and profiteers, Walter was of course knighted. I had scarcely a
friend left who was not so mishandled. His family were amused and
rather disgusted, but Walter himself was simply delighted and played
with his absurd title like a toy. Smart ladies began to take him up
and pet him, and his sisters called him “the duchesses’ darling”,
but he just genuinely enjoyed it all. He was the one plain son in a
family of extraordinarily handsome daughters, all “variations”, as
some one said, “of a beautiful theme”. But though he was plain to
uncouthness as a young man, all through his life some unseen inner
spirit was at work, chiselling his face, and, before he died, he was
beautiful. He was the best talker I ever knew, and a quite inspired
lecturer. The views he tenaciously held were reactionary and, to my
mind, preposterous. We wrangled ceaselessly. He paid, alas, for his
fantastic militarism with his life.
* * * * *
In those days I met many specimens of a class of Victorian who, if
not exactly distinguished, were at least distinctive and are, I
think, all but extinct--British Lions and Lionesses. The Lionesses
first--that was the name we gave them at Newnham. They were all
spinsters, well-born, well-bred, well-educated and well off. They
attended my lectures on Greek Art. Greek Art was at that time booming
and was eminently respectable. At home they gardened a great deal;
they, most of them, had country houses. Their gardens were a terror
to me, for I never could remember the names of the plants with slips
attached to them, and to blunder over a plant’s name was as bad to a
Lioness as a false quantity. They kept diaries in which they entered
accurately the state of the weather on each day. If they lived in
London they promoted Friendly Girls and Workhouse Nursing. Above all,
they kept a vigilant eye on the shortcomings of local officials;
they frequently wrote to the _Times_, heading their letters: “_Re_
Mud and Slush”. In the spring and early summer they went to Italy,
accompanied usually by “a young relative”, whose expenses they paid;
they voyaged mainly to Rome and Florence, but the more adventurous
went to Assisi. Attired in mushroom hats, veils and dust cloaks,
they sketched a great deal. The subject of their sketches was always
recognisable--ruined towers and church porches. The ordinary man was
to them negligible, but they spoke of their own male relatives with
respect and frequently quoted the opinions of “my uncle, the Dean”,
or “my cousin, the Archdeacon”. They were a fine upstanding breed,
and I miss them. They had no unsatisfied longings, had never heard of
“suppressed complexes”, and lived happily their vigorous, if somewhat
angular, lives.
Their counterparts were the British Lions. Of them, naturally, I
knew less. Real intimacy between the two genders was not in those
days usual, but I watched them with delight from afar. You could
always count on them to roar suitably. I worked for some time on the
Council of the Girls’ Public Day School Company, which was largely
manned by British Lions, and I was privileged to go with them to
preside at local prize-givings. They made speeches and I held a
large and agonising bouquet. The sentiments of these speeches were
on well-established lines, and always, always, at the end came the
inevitable:
A perfect woman, nobly planned
To warn, to comfort, and command.
I thought at one time of offering a small prize of half-a-crown to
any Lion who would resist that temptation. A little later I worked
on the Council of the Classical Association. There I might safely
have raised the prize to five shillings. There lived no Lion who
could end his address without telling you that it was the writing
of Latin Prose that had made him what he was! Am I indiscreet if I
mention that I was yachting once with a British Lion? He was oldish
and had a deck-cabin. I happened to look in in passing. On the table
lay a Bible, on the Bible a tooth-brush. Cleanliness was “next to
godliness”. Oh England--my England!
* * * * *
It was about then that I began lecturing on Greek Art at boys’
schools. Archdeacon Wilson first asked me to Clifton; he told
me afterwards that he had not dared to tell his Council that the
lecturer was a woman till all was over. Later I learnt that among
my audience had been no less persons than Dr. MacTaggart and Roger
Fry, and that they had deigned to discuss my lecture. Then Mr. Warre
Cornish, always the kindest of friends, asked me to Eton. I do not
suppose the lectures did any good, but they amused the boys. One of
the masters asked a very small Winchester “man” if he had liked the
lecture. “Not the lecture,” he said candidly, “but I liked the lady;
she was like a beautiful green beetle.” In those days one’s evening
gowns were apt to be covered with spangles, and mine of blue-green
satin had caught the light of the magic-lantern. A young prig, who
bore an honoured name, was introduced to me at Eton; he wrote me next
day a patronising letter of thanks, in which he said he hoped to go
on with archæology, as he was going up to Oxford to “do Grates”.
Alas! he never _did_ anything half so useful. My youngest brother
was at Harrow; he wrote to me to say he had heard I was lecturing
at Eton. It didn’t matter, apparently, what I did at that benighted
place, but he “did hope I wasn’t coming lecturing at Harrow, as it
would make it very awkward for him with the other fellows.” I saw
his position and respected it.
[Illustration: JANE HARRISON (aged thirty-three).
_To face page 54._
]
* * * * *
Then there was the actual Cambridge Academic circle--a brilliant
circle, it seems to me, looking back. Cambridge society was then
small enough to be one, and there were endless small, but not
informal, dinner-parties. The order of University precedence was
always strictly observed. Henry Sidgwick was the centre, and with him
his two most intimate friends, Frederick Myers and Edmund Gurney.
Frederick Myers rang, perhaps, the most sonorously of all, but to me
he always rang a little false. Edmund Gurney was, I think, the most
lovable and beautiful human being I ever met. This was the Psychical
Research circle; their quest, scientific proof of immortality. To
put it thus seems almost grotesque now; then it was inspiring. About
this nucleus from a wider world ranged Balfours, Jebbs, and later
rose a younger generation--the three Darwin sons, the Verralls,
husband and wife, both my closest friends; Robert Neil of Pembroke,
whose sympathetic Scotch silences made the dreariest gathering burn
and glow; the George Protheros, Frederick Maitland, whose daughter,
Fredegond Shove, is now the sweetest of our lyrical singers. And in
the midst of them Mrs. Henry Sidgwick (the younger Miss Balfour)
shone like a star. She had none of her husband’s or her brother’s
social gifts, yet in any society she shone with a sort of lambent
light. When we took her for our Principal, I am afraid science lost
a fine researcher. Still, she had a perfect passion for accounts.
“Why need I dress for dinner,” she said to me plaintively, “when I
might be getting on with these?” touching her account-books tenderly.
She was meticulously true. We were talking once in Hall of the odd
lingo that shops and business invent, “haberdashery”, “hosiery”,
etc.--words unknown to the outside world. I cited, “_Alight_ here for
the Albert Memorial”. Whoever says “alight”? “I always say ‘alight’,”
remarked Mrs. Sidgwick; “it’s a very good word.” “Forgive me,” said
I “I’m quite sure you don’t.” A few minutes later she joined me in
the corridor. “You are quite right,” she said; “I find I don’t say
‘alight’ but”, cautiously, “I think I always shall now.” I do hope
she does! Another time I was holding forth on the supreme importance
of classics in education. “Don’t you think”, she said, “you a little
confuse between the importance of your subject and the extraordinary
delight you manage to extract from it?” That was well observed.
Her great truthfulness made her very naïve; she walked through a
vulgar and wicked world in perpetual blinkers. Though her austerity
of dress and manners always made me feel a vulgarian, how I adored
her! how she made me laugh! I never told my love, and, alas! on
college politics I had almost always to oppose her. Sheltered by the
publicity of _The Nation_ I tell it now. Why is it that those we most
adore most move us to mirth? As soon as we laugh at a person we begin
a little to love them.
One scientific friend, Francis Darwin, had lasting influence on me.
Classics he regarded with a suspicious eye, but he was kind to me.
One day he found me busy writing an article on the “Mystica vannus
Iacchi”. “I must get it off to-night,” I said industriously. “What
is a _vannus_?” he asked. “Oh, a ‘fan’,” I said; “it was a mystical
object used in ceremonies of initiation.” “Yes, but Virgil says
it is an agricultural implement. Have you ever seen one?” “No,”
I confessed. “_And you are writing about a thing you have never
seen_,” groaned my friend. “Oh, you classical people!” It did not end
there. He interviewed farmers--no result; he wrote to agricultural
institutes abroad, and, finally, in remote provincial France,
unearthed a mystic “fan” still in use, and had it despatched to
Cambridge. Luckily he also found that his old gardener was perhaps
the last man in England who could use the obsolete implement. On
his lawn were to be seen a gathering of learned scholars trying,
and failing, to winnow with the _vannus_. Its odd shape explained
all its uses, mystic and otherwise. Three months later I despatched
a paper to the _Hellenic Journal_ on what I _had_ seen and _did_
understand. It was a lifelong lesson to me. It was not quite all my
fault. I had been reared in a school that thought it was far more
important to parse a word than to understand it. I had myself, as a
student, eagerly asked why the _vannus_ was mystic, and the answer
had been, “You have construed the passage correctly; that will do for
the present.” And as my “coach” closed his Virgil, he remarked sadly,
“Bad sport in subjunctives to-day.” Such training was perhaps the
best possible for my always flighty mind.
* * * * *
The last distinguished person whom I helped to entertain years later,
at Newnham, was the Crown Prince of Japan. If you must curtsey
to a man young enough to be your grandson, it is at least some
consolation to know that he believes himself to be God. It was that
which interested me. I found in the Prince a strange charm. He was
intensely quiet and had about him a sort of serenity and security
that really seemed divine. Japanese is one of the few languages
which contain the hard _i_. All Indo-European languages have lost
it, except Russian, though a Russian told me that he had heard the
exact sound from the lips of a cockney newspaper boy pronouncing
“Piccad_i_lly”. The Prince was good enough to say his own royal name
to me two or three times, but alas! I forgot it.
My lot has not lain in the courts of kings, but one royal lady,
the Empress Frederick, was very gracious to me, and I am proud to
remember her goodness. The Empress sent for me to tell her about
some German excavations of Greek theatres, and to explain the new
theory started by Dörpfeld as to the Greek stage. Hers was almost the
saddest face I have ever seen, but she had the real sacred hunger for
knowledge, and I am sure, had fate not broken her wings and caged
her in a palace, she would have flown high. We were in the middle of
eager talk when a servant came in and said the Prince of Wales (King
Edward) wanted to see her. So little was I used to royal etiquette
(which for the subject is simply the etiquette of servants) that I
all but committed a _gaffe_ by getting up to release her;--she saved
me by shaking her head impatiently at the servant and saying “No,
no,” and turning to me, “Go on, go on, I must know.” My future King
had a good long wait. I saw the Empress again and again, and learnt
to love her. But, oh how glad I was when I heard she was safely dead,
dead and, though I could not know that then, spared the torture of
the war. She bade me, when I next went to Greece, go and see her
daughter, the Crown Princess of Greece. Of course I had to go, but
I was sorry I went. The daughter was as common as the mother was
distinguished. She had a bad Board-School accent and used slang. She
did not really care about Greek things at all, but talked loudly
about “our Waldstein who has made awfully jolly excavations”. She
bored me as much as I bored her. Every one ought to see a little
of royalties. It is so humbling and at first irritating to have to
behave like a servant, and it makes you understand how servants
really must feel.
* * * * *
Interviewers--after the first moment of excited importance--are not
an interesting tribe, but one of them comes back to me with a whiff
of fragrance, an American lady from the Middle West. A little old
lady she was, with white curls and a Quaker bonnet, and romance in
her heart. She brought a letter of introduction and asked if I would
visit her in her Bloomsbury lodgings. I found her there at eleven in
the morning with a dainty tea-tray before her; she must have spread
it with her own hands; no Bloomsbury landlady was capable of it.
She had heard, she said, that we English ladies liked to drink a
cup of tea at eleven. She must have heard it below stairs. And then
began the interview. She had been told that I was a great authority
on Greek vases, would I give her my idea on “their place in modern
education”. I began to stumble out a few platitudes. She interrupted
me with, “You’ll excuse me, Miss Harrison, but you’re dropping pearls
and diamonds from your mouth, and I must get out my pencil and
notebook.” Then, then at last, out came the romance; she herself was
a “school teacher”; she had saved up her money to come to Europe, not
to see Europe but to--write a book on Greek Art! Of Greek and Greek
Art she knew nothing, but, pencil in hand, she was travelling round
to the museums of Europe to learn, and then, O joy! to write: the
gallantry and the innocence of it! I don’t know if that strangely
compounded book ever saw the light. It may be death found her before
she reached her Happy Isles, but she had the spirit of Ulysses.
Before she left she asked, “Did I know Mr. Andrew Lang?” She had
a letter to him. “But”, she said sadly, “my mind misgives me, Miss
Harrison, that Mr. Andrew Lang is not an earnest seeker after truth.”
And that reminds me of my first meeting with “Andrew of the brindled
hair”, at a dinner-party. Our hostess brought him up to me and, with
a misguided desire to be pleasant, said, “You know Miss Harrison,
and I am sure you have read her delightful books.” “Don’t know Miss
Harrison,” muttered Andrew, “never read her delightful books, don’t
want to,” etc. (Oh, Andrew, and you had reviewed those “delightful
books” not too delightedly!) “Come, Mr. Lang,” I said, “we’re both
hungry, and I promise not to say a single word to you. Be a man.”
Alas! I broke my word. It was an enchanting dinner.