YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD
I
How little those who are school-girls of to-day can realize what it was
to be a school-girl in the fifties or the early sixties of the last
century! A modern girls' school, equipped as scores are now equipped
throughout the country, was of course not to be found in 1858, when I
first became a school boarder, or in 1867, when I ceased to be one. The
games, the gymnastics, the solid grounding in drawing and music,
together with the enormously improved teaching in elementary science, or
literature and language, which are at the service of the school-girl of
to-day, had not begun to be when I was at school. As far as intellectual
training was concerned, my nine years from seven to sixteen were
practically wasted. I learned nothing thoroughly or accurately, and the
German, French, and Latin which I soon discovered after my marriage to
be essential to the kind of literary work I wanted to do, had all to be
relearned before they could be of any real use to me; nor was it ever
possible for me-who married at twenty--to get that firm hold on the
structure and literary history of any language, ancient or modern, which
my brother William, only fifteen months my junior, got from his six
years at Rugby, and his training there in Latin and Greek. What I
learned during those years was learned from personalities; from contact
with a nature so simple, sincere, and strong as that of Miss Clough;
from the kindly old German governess, whose affection for me helped me
through some rather hard and lonely school-years spent at a school in
Shropshire; and from a gentle and high-minded woman, an ardent
Evangelical, with whom, a little later, at the age of fourteen or
fifteen, I fell headlong in love, as was the manner of school-girls
then, and is, I understand, frequently the case with school-girls now,
in spite of the greatly increased variety of subjects on which they may
spend their minds.
English girls' schools to-day providing the higher education are, so far
as my knowledge goes, worthily representative of that astonishing rise
in the intellectual standards of women which has taken place in the last
half-century. They are almost entirely taught by women, and women with
whom, in many cases, education--the shaping of the immature human
creature to noble ends--is the sincerest of passions; who find, indeed,
in the task that same creative joy which belongs to literature or art,
or philanthropic experiment. The schoolmistress to whom money is the
sole or even the chief motive of her work, is, in my experience, rare
to-day, though we have all in our time heard tales of modern "academies"
of the Miss Pinkerton type, brought up to date--fashionable, exclusive,
and luxurious--where, as in some boys' preparatory schools (before the
war!) the more the parents paid, the better they were pleased. But I
have not come across them. The leading boarding-schools in England and
America, at present, no less than the excellent day-schools for girls of
the middle class, with which this country has been covered since 1870,
are genuine products of that Women's Movement, as we vaguely call it, in
the early educational phases of which I myself was much engaged; whereof
the results are now widely apparent, though as yet only half-grown. If
one tracks it back to somewhere near its origins, its superficial
origins, at any rate, one is brought up, I think, as in the case of so
much else, against one leading cause--_railways_! With railways and a
cheap press, in the second third of the nineteenth century, there came
in, as we all know, the break-up of a thousand mental stagnations,
answering to the old physical disabilities and inconveniences. And the
break-up has nowhere had more startling results than in the world of
women, and the training of women for life. We have only to ask ourselves
what the women of Benjamin Constant, or of Beyle, or Balzac, would have
made of the keen school-girl and college girl of the present day, to
feel how vast is the change through which some of us have lived.
Exceptional women, of course, have led much the same kind of lives in
all generations. Mrs. Sidney Webb has gone through a very different sort
of self-education from that of Harriet Martineau; but she has not
thought more widely, and she will hardly influence her world so much as
that stanch fighter of the past. It is the rank and file--the average
woman--for whom the world has opened up so astonishingly. The revelation
of her wide-spread and various capacity that the present war has brought
about is only the suddenly conspicuous result of the liberating forces
set in action by the scientific and mechanical development of the
nineteenth century. It rests still with that world "after the war," to
which we are all looking forward with mingled hope and fear, to
determine the new forms, sociological and political, through which this
capacity, this heightened faculty, must some day organically express
itself.
In the years when I was at school, however--1858 to 1867--these good
days were only beginning to dawn. Poor teaching, poor school-books, and,
in many cases, indifferent food and much ignorance as to the physical
care of girls--these things were common in my school-time. I loved
nearly all my teachers; but it was not till I went home to live at
Oxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests and
influences that begin much earlier nowadays to affect any clever child.
I had few tools and little grounding; and I was much more childish than
I need have been. A few vivid impressions stand out from these years:
the great and to me mysterious figure of Newman haunting the streets of
Edgbaston, where, in 1861, my father became head classical master of the
Oratory School; the news of the murder of Lincoln, coming suddenly into
a quiet garden in a suburb of Birmingham, and an ineffaceable memory of
the pale faces and horror-stricken looks of those discussing it; the
haunting beauty of certain passages of Ruskin which I copied out and
carried about with me, without in the least caring to read as a whole
the books from which they came; my first visit to the House of Commons
in 1863; the recurrent visits to Fox How, and the winter and summer
beauty of the fells; together with an endless storytelling phase in
which I told stories to my school-fellows, on condition they told
stories to me; coupled with many attempts on my part at poetry and
fiction, which make me laugh and blush when I compare them to-day with
similar efforts of my own grandchildren. But on the whole they were
starved and rather unhappy years; through no one's fault. My parents
were very poor and perpetually in movement. Everybody did the best he
could.
With Oxford, however, and my seventeenth year, came a radical change.
It was in July, 1865, while I was still a school-girl, that in the very
middle of the Long Vacation I first saw Oxford. My father, after some
five years as Doctor Newman's colleague at the Oratory School, had then
become the subject of a strong temporary reaction against Catholicism.
He left the Roman Church in 1865, to return to it again, for good,
eleven years later. During the interval he took pupils at Oxford,
produced a very successful _Manual of English Literature,_ edited the
works of Wycliffe for the Clarendon Press, made himself an Anglo-Saxon
scholar, and became one of the most learned editors of the great Rolls
Series. To look at the endless piles of his note-books is to realize how
hard, how incessantly he worked. Historical scholarship was his destined
field; he found his happiness in it through all the troubles of life.
And the return to Oxford, to its memories, its libraries, its stately,
imperishable beauty, was delightful to him. So also, I think, for some
years, was the sense of intellectual freedom. Then began a kind of
nostalgia, which grew and grew till it took him back to the Catholic
haven in 1876, never to wander more.
But when he first showed me Oxford he was in the ardor of what seemed a
permanent severance from an admitted mistake. I see a deserted Oxford
street, and a hansom coming up it--myself and my father inside it. I was
returning from school, for the holidays. When I had last seen my people,
they were living near Birmingham. I now found them at Oxford, and I
remember the thrill of excitement with which I looked from side to side
as we neared the colleges. For I knew well, even at fourteen, that this
was "no mean city." As we drove up Beaumont Street we saw what was then
"new Balliol" in front of us, and a jutting window. "There lives the
arch-heretic!" said my father. It was a window in Mr. Jowett's rooms. He
was not yet Master of the famous College, but his name was a rallying-
cry, and his personal influence almost at its zenith. At the same time,
he was then rigorously excluded from the University pulpit; it was not
till a year later that even his close friend Dean Stanley ventured to
ask him to preach in Westminster Abbey; and his salary as Greek
Professor, due to him from the revenues of Christ Church, and withheld
from him on theological grounds for years, had only just been wrung--at
last--from the reluctant hands of a governing body which contained Canon
Liddon and Doctor Pusey.
To my father, on his settlement in Oxford, Jowett had been a kind and
helpful friend; he had a very quick sympathy with my mother; and as I
grew up he became my friend, too, so that as I look back upon my Oxford
years both before and after my marriage, the dear Master--he became
Master in 1870--plays a very marked part in the Oxford scene as I shall
ever remember it.
It was not, however, till two years later that I left school, and
slipped into the Oxford life as a fish into water. I was sixteen,
beginning to be conscious of all sorts of rising needs and ambitions,
keenly alive to the spell of Oxford and to the good fortune which had
brought me to live in her streets. There was in me, I think, a real
hunger to learn, and a very quick sense of romance in things or people.
But after sixteen, except in music, I had no definite teaching, and
everything I learned came to me from persons--and books--sporadically,
without any general guidance or plan. It was all a great voyage of
discovery, organized mainly by myself, on the advice of a few men and
women very much older, who took an interest in me and were endlessly
kind to the shy and shapeless creature I must have been.
It was in 1868 or 1869--I think I was seventeen--that I remember my
first sight of a college garden lying cool and shaded between gray
college walls, and on the grass a figure that held me fascinated--a lady
in a green brocade dress, with a belt and chatelaine of Russian silver,
who was playing croquet, then a novelty in Oxford, and seemed to me, as
I watched her, a perfect model of grace and vivacity. A man nearly
thirty years older than herself, whom I knew to be her husband, was
standing near her, and a handful of undergraduates made an amused and
admiring court round the lady. The elderly man--he was then fifty-
three--was Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, and the croquet-
player had been his wife about seven years. After the Rector's death in
1884, Mrs. Pattison married Sir Charles Dilke in the very midst of the
divorce proceedings which were to wreck in full stream a brilliant
political career; and she showed him a proud devotion till her death in
1904. None of her early friends who remember her later history can ever
think of the "Frances Pattison" of Oxford days without a strange
stirring of heart. I was much at Lincoln in the years before I married,
and derived an impression from the life lived there that has never left
me. Afterward I saw much less of Mrs. Pattison, who was generally on the
Riviera in the winter; but from 1868 to 1872, the Rector, learned,
critical, bitter, fastidious, and "Mrs. Pat," with her gaiety, her
picturesqueness, her impatience of the Oxford solemnities and decorums,
her sharp, restless wit, her determination _not_ to be academic, to hold
on to the greater world of affairs outside--mattered more to me perhaps
than anybody else. They were very good to me, and I was never tired of
going there; though I was much puzzled by their ways, and--while my
Evangelical phase lasted--much scandalized often by the speculative
freedom of the talk I heard. Sometimes my rather uneasy conscience
protested in ways which I think must have amused my hosts, though they
never said a word. They were fond of asking me to come to supper at
Lincoln on Sundays. It was a gay, unceremonious meal, at which Mrs.
Pattison appeared in the kind of gown which at a much later date began
to be called a tea-gown. It was generally white or gray, with various
ornaments and accessories which always seemed to me, accustomed for so
long to the rough-and-tumble of school life, marvels of delicacy and
prettiness; so that I was sharply conscious, on these occasions, of the
graceful figure made by the young mistress of the old house. But some
last stubborn trace in me of the Evangelical view of Sunday declared
that while one might talk--and one _must_ eat!--on Sunday, one mustn't
put on evening dress, or behave as though it were just like a week-day.
So while every one else was in evening dress, I more than once--at
seventeen--came to these Sunday gatherings on a winter evening,
purposely, in a high woolen frock, sternly but uncomfortably conscious
of being sublime--if only one were not ridiculous! The Rector, "Mrs.
Pat," Mr. Bywater, myself, and perhaps a couple of undergraduates--often
a bewildered and silent couple--I see that little vanished company in
the far past so plainly! Three of them are dead--and for me the gray
walls of Lincoln must always be haunted by their ghosts.
The historian of French painting and French decorative art was already
in those days unfolding in Mrs. Pattison. Her drawing-room was French,
sparely furnished with a few old girandoles and mirrors on its white
paneled walls, and a Persian carpet with a black center, on which both
the French furniture and the living inmates of the room looked their
best. And up-stairs, in "Mrs. Pat's" own working-room, there were
innumerable things that stirred my curiosity--old French drawings and
engravings, masses of foreign books that showed the young and brilliant
owner of the room to be already a scholar, even as her husband counted
scholarship; together with the tools and materials for etching, a
mysterious process in which I was occasionally allowed to lend a hand,
and which, as often as not, during the application of the acid to the
plate, ended in dire misfortune to the etcher's fingers or dress, and in
the helpless laughter of both artist and assistant.
The Rector himself was an endless study to me--he and his frequent
companion, Ingram Bywater, afterward the distinguished Greek Professor.
To listen to these two friends as they talked of foreign scholars in
Paris or Germany, of Renan, or Ranke, or Curtius; as they poured scorn
on Oxford scholarship, or the lack of it, and on the ideals of Balliol,
which aimed at turning out public officials, as compared with the
researching ideals of the German universities, which seemed to the
Rector the only ideals worth calling academic; or as they flung gibes at
Christ Church, whence Pusey and Liddon still directed the powerful
Church party of the University--was to watch the doors of new worlds
gradually opening before a girl's questioning intelligence. The Rector
would walk up and down, occasionally taking a book from his crowded
shelves, while Mr. By water and Mrs. Pattison smoked, with the after-
luncheon coffee--and in those days a woman with a cigarette was a rarity
in England--and sometimes, at a caustic _mot_ of the former's there
would break out the Rector's cackling laugh, which was ugly, no doubt,
but, when he was amused and at ease, extraordinarily full of mirth. To
me he was from the beginning the kindest friend. He saw that I came of a
literary stock and had literary ambitions; and he tried to direct me.
"Get to the bottom of something," he would say. "Choose a subject, and
know _everything_ about it!" I eagerly followed his advice, and began to
work at early Spanish in the Bodleian. But I think he was wrong--I
venture to think so!--though, as his half-melancholy, half-satirical
look comes back to me, I realize how easily he would defend himself, if
one could tell him so now. I think I ought to have been told to take a
history examination and learn Latin properly. But if I had, half the
exploring joy of those early years would, no doubt, have been cut away.
Later on, in the winters when Mrs. Pattison, threatened with rheumatic
gout, disappeared to the Riviera, I came to know a sadder and lonelier
Rector. I used to go to tea with him then in his own book-lined sanctum,
and we mended the blazing fire between us and talked endlessly.
Presently I married, and his interest in me changed; though our
friendship never lessened, and I shall always remember with emotion my
last sight of him lying, a white and dying man, on his sofa in London--
the clasp of the wasted hand, the sad, haunting eyes. When his _Memoirs_
appeared, after his death, a book of which Mr. Gladstone once said to me
that he reckoned it as among the most tragic and the most memorable
books of the nineteenth century, I understood him more clearly and more
tenderly than I could have done as a girl. Particularly, I understood
why in that skeptical and agnostic talk which never spared the Anglican
ecclesiastics of the moment, or such a later Catholic convert as
Manning, I cannot remember that I ever heard him mention the great name
of John Henry Newman with the slightest touch of disrespect. On the
other hand, I once saw him receive a message that some friend brought
him from Newman with an eager look and a start of pleasure. He had been
a follower of Newman's in the Tractarian days, and no one who ever came
near to Newman could afterward lightly speak ill of him. It was Stanley,
and not the Rector, indeed, who said of the famous Oratorian that the
whole course of English religious history might have been different if
Newman had known German. But Pattison might have said it, and if he had
it would have been without the smallest bitterness as the mere
expression of a sober and indisputable truth. Alas!--merely to quote it,
nowadays, carries one back to a Germany before the Flood--a Germany of
small States, a land of scholars and thinkers; a Germany that would
surely have recoiled in horror from any prevision of that deep and
hideous abyss which her descendants, maddened by wealth and success,
were one day to dig between themselves and the rest of Europe.
One of my clearest memories connected with the Pattisons and Lincoln is
that of meeting George Eliot and Mr. Lewes there, in the spring of 1870,
when I was eighteen. It was at one of the Sunday suppers. George Eliot
sat at the Rector's right hand. I was opposite her; on my left was
George Henry Lewes, to whom I took a prompt and active dislike. He and
Mrs. Pattison kept up a lively conversation in which Mr. Bywater, on the
other side of the table, played full part. George Eliot talked very
little, and I not at all. The Rector was shy or tired, and George Eliot
was in truth entirely occupied in watching or listening to Mrs. Lewes. I
was disappointed that she was so silent, and perhaps her quick eye may
have divined it, for, after supper, as we were going up the interesting
old staircase, made in the thickness of the wall, which led direct from
the dining-room to the drawing-room above, she said to me: "The Rector
tells me that you have been reading a good deal about Spain. Would you
care to hear something of our Spanish journey?"--the journey which had
preceded the appearance of _The Spanish Gypsy,_ then newly published. My
reply is easily imagined. The rest of the party passed through the dimly
lit drawing-room to talk and smoke in the gallery beyond, George Eliot
sat down in the darkness, and I beside her. Then she talked for about
twenty minutes, with perfect ease and finish, without misplacing a word
or dropping a sentence, and I realized at last that I was in the
presence of a great writer. Not a great _talker_. It is clear that
George Eliot never was that. Impossible for her to "talk" her books, or
evolve her books from conversation, like Madame de Staël. She was too
self-conscious, too desperately reflective, too rich in second-thoughts
for that. But in tête-à-tête, and with time to choose her words, she
could--in monologue, with just enough stimulus from a companion to keep
it going--produce on a listener exactly the impression of some of her
best work. As the low, clear voice flowed on in Mrs. Pattison's drawing-
room, I _saw_ Saragossa, Granada, the Escorial, and that survival of the
old Europe in the new, which one must go to Spain to find. Not that the
description was particularly vivid--in talking of famous places John
Richard Green could make words tell and paint with far greater success;
but it was singularly complete and accomplished. When it was done the
effect was there--the effect she had meant to produce. I shut my eyes,
and it all comes back--the darkened room, the long, pallid face, set in
black lace, the evident wish to be kind to a young girl.
Two more impressions of her let me record. The following day, the
Pattisons took their guests to see the "eights" races from Christ Church
meadow. A young Fellow of Merton, Mandell Creighton, afterward the
beloved and famous Bishop of London, was among those entertaining her on
the barge, and on the way home he took her and Mr. Lewes through Merton
garden. I was of the party, and I remember what a carnival of early
summer it was in that enchanting place. The chestnuts were all out, one
splendor from top to toe; the laburnums; the lilacs; the hawthorns, red
and white; the new-mown grass spreading its smooth and silky carpet
round the college walls; a May sky overhead, and through the trees
glimpses of towers and spires, silver gray, in the sparkling summer
air--the picture was one of those that Oxford throws before the
spectator at every turn, like the careless beauty that knows she has
only to show herself, to move, to breathe, to give delight. George Eliot
stood on the grass, in the bright sun, looking at the flower-laden
chestnuts, at the distant glimpses on all sides, of the surrounding
city, saying little--that she left to Mr. Lewes!--but drinking it in,
storing it in that rich, absorbent mind of hers. And afterward when Mr.
Lewes, Mr. Creighton, she, and I walked back to Lincoln, I remember
another little incident throwing light on the ever-ready instinct of the
novelist. As we turned into the quadrangle of Lincoln--suddenly, at one
of the upper windows of the Rector's lodgings, which occupied the far
right-hand corner of the quad, there appeared the head and shoulders of
Mrs. Pattison, as she looked out and beckoned, smiling, to Mrs. Lewes.
It was a brilliant apparition, as though a French portrait by Greuze or
Perronneau had suddenly slipped into a vacant space in the old college
wall. The pale, pretty head, _blond-cendrée_; the delicate, smiling
features and white throat; a touch of black, a touch of blue; a white
dress; a general eighteenth-century impression as though of powder and
patches--Mrs. Lewes perceived it in a flash, and I saw her run eagerly
to Mr. Lewes and draw his attention to the window and its occupant. She
took his arm, while she looked and waved. If she had lived longer, some
day, and somewhere in her books, that vision at the window and that
flower-laden garden would have reappeared. I seemed to see her
consciously and deliberately committing them both to memory.
But I do not believe that she ever meant to describe the Rector in "Mr.
Casaubon." She was far too good a scholar herself to have perpetrated a
caricature so flagrantly untrue. She knew Mark Pattison's quality, and
could never have meant to draw the writer of some of the most fruitful
and illuminating of English essays, and one of the most brilliant pieces
of European biography, in the dreary and foolish pedant who overshadows
_Middlemarch_. But the fact that Mark Pattison was an elderly scholar
with a young wife, and that George Eliot knew him, led later on to a
legend which was, I am sure, unwelcome to the writer of _Middlemarch_,
while her supposed victim passed it by with amused indifference.
As to the relation between the Rector and the Squire of _Robert Elsmere_
which has been often assumed, it was confined, as I have already said
(in the introduction to the library edition of _Robert Elsmere_
published in 1909), to a likeness in outward aspect--"a few personal
traits, and the two main facts of great learning and a general
impatience of fools." If one could imagine Mark Pattison a landowner, he
would certainly never have neglected his estates, or tolerated an
inefficient agent.
Only three years intervened between my leaving school and my engagement
to Mr. T. Humphry Ward, Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose College, Oxford.
But those three years seem to me now to have been extraordinarily full.
Lincoln and the Pattisons, Balliol and Mr. Jowett, and the Bodleian
Library, outside the influences and affections of my own home, stand in
the forefront of what memory looks back on as a broad and animated
scene. The great Library, in particular, became to me a living and
inspiring presence. When I think of it as it then was, I am, aware of a
medley of beautiful things--pale sunlight on book-lined walls, or
streaming through old armorial bearings on Tudor windows; spaces and
distances, all books, beneath a painted roof from which gleamed the
motto of the University--_Dominus illuminatio mea_; gowned figures
moving silently about the spaces; the faint scents of old leather and
polished wood; and fusing it all, a stately dignity and benignant charm,
through which the voices of the bells outside, as they struck each
successive quarter from Oxford's many towers, seemed to breathe a
certain eternal reminder of the past and the dead.
But regions of the Bodleian were open to me then that no ordinary reader
sees now. Mr. Coxe--the well-known, much-loved Bodley's Librarian of
those days--took kindly notice of the girl reader, and very soon,
probably on the recommendation of Mark Pattison, who was a Curator, made
me free of the lower floors, where was the "Spanish room," with its
shelves of seventeenth and eighteenth century volumes in sheepskin or
vellum, with their turned-in edges and leathern strings. Here I might
wander at will, absolutely alone, save for the visit of an occasional
librarian from the upper floor, seeking a book. To get to the Spanish
Room one had to pass through the Douce Library, the home of treasures
beyond price; on one side half the precious things of Renaissance
printing, French or Italian or Elizabethan; on the other, stands of
illuminated Missals and Hour Books, many of them rich in pictures and
flower-work, that shone like jewels in the golden light of the room.
That light was to me something tangible and friendly. It seemed to be
the mingled product of all the delicate browns and yellows and golds in
the bindings of the books, of the brass lattice-work that covered them,
and of reflections from the beautiful stone-work of the Schools
Quadrangle outside. It was in these noble surroundings that, with far
too little, I fear, of positive reading, and with much undisciplined
wandering from shelf to shelf and subject to subject, there yet sank
deep into me the sense of history, and of that vast ocean of the
recorded past from which the generations rise and into which they fall
back. And that in itself was a great boon--almost, one might say, a
training, of a kind.
But a girl of seventeen is not always thinking of books, especially in
the Oxford summer term.
In _Miss Bretherton_, my earliest novel, and in _Lady Connie_, so far my
latest,[1] will be found, by those who care to look for it, the
reflection of that other life of Oxford, the life which takes its shape,
not from age, but from youth, not from the past which created Oxford,
but from the lively, laughing present which every day renews it. For six
months of the year Oxford is a city of young men, for the most part
between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. In my maiden days it was
not also a city of young women, as it is to-day. Women--girls
especially--were comparatively on sufferance. The Heads of Houses were
married; the Professors were mostly married; but married tutors had
scarcely begun to be. Only at two seasons of the year was Oxford invaded
by women--by bevies of maidens who came, in early May and middle June,
to be made much of by their brothers and their brothers' friends, to be
danced with and flirted with, to know the joys of coming back on a
summer night from Nuneham up the long, fragrant reaches of the lower
river, or of "sitting out" in historic gardens where Philip Sidney or
Charles I had passed.
[Footnote 1: These chapters were written before the appearance of
_Missing_ in the autumn of 1917.]
At the "eights" and "Commem." the old, old place became a mere
background for pretty dresses and college luncheons and river picnics.
The seniors groaned often, as well they might; for there was little work
done in my day in the summer term. But it is perhaps worth while for any
nation to possess such harmless festivals in so beautiful a setting as
these Oxford gatherings. How many of our national festivals are spoiled
by ugly and sordid things--betting and drink, greed and display! Here,
all there is to see is a competition of boats, manned by England's best
youth, upon a noble river, flowing, in Virgilian phrase, "under ancient
walls"; a city of romance, given up for a few days to the pleasure of
the young, and breathing into that pleasure her own refining, exalting
note; a stately ceremony--the Encaenia--going back to the infancy of
English learning; and the dancing of young men and maidens in Gothic or
classical halls built long ago by the "fathers who begat us." My own
recollection of the Oxford summer, the Oxford river and hay-fields, the
dawn on Oxford streets, as one came out from a Commemoration ball, or
the evening under Nuneham woods where the swans on that still water,
now, as always, "float double, swan and shadow"--these things I hope
will be with me to the end. To have lived through them is to have tasted
youth and pleasure from a cup as pure, as little alloyed with baser
things, as the high gods allow to mortals.
Let me recall one more experience before I come to the married life
which began in 1872--my first sight of Taine, the great French
historian, in the spring of 1871. He had come over at the invitation of
the Curators of the Taylorian Institution to give a series of lectures
on Corneille and Racine. The lectures were arranged immediately after
the surrender of Paris to the German troops, when it might have been
hoped that the worst calamities of France were over. But before M. Taine
crossed to England the insurrection of the Commune had broken out, and
while he was actually in Oxford, delivering his six lectures, the
terrible news of the last days of May, the burning of the Tuileries, the
Hôtel de Ville, and the Cour des Comptes, all the savagery of the beaten
revolution, let loose on Paris itself, came crashing, day by day and
hour by hour, like so many horrible explosions in the heavy air of
Europe, still tremulous with the memories and agonies of recent war.
How well I remember the effect in Oxford!--the newspaper cries in the
streets, the fear each morning as to what new calamities might have
fallen on civilization, the intense fellow-feeling in a community of
students and scholars for the students and scholars of France!
When M. Taine arrived, he himself bears witness (see his published
Correspondence, Vol. II) that Oxford could not do enough to show her
sympathy with a distinguished Frenchman. He writes from Oxford on May
25th:
I have no courage for a letter to-day. I have just heard of the
horrors of Paris, the burning of the Louvre, the Tuileries, the
Hôtel de Ville, etc. My heart is wrung. I have energy for nothing. I
cannot go out and see people. I was in the Bodleian when the
Librarian told me this and showed me the newspapers. In presence of
such madness and such disasters, they treat a Frenchman here with a
kind of pitying sympathy.
Oxford residents, indeed, inside and outside the colleges, crowded the
first lecture to show our feeling not only for M. Taine, but for a
France wounded and trampled on by her own children. The few dignified
and touching words with which he opened his course, his fine, dark head,
the attractiveness of his subject, the lucidity of his handling of it,
made the lecture a great success; and a few nights afterward at dinner
at Balliol I found myself sitting next the great man. In his published
Correspondence there is a letter describing this dinner which shows that
I must have confided in him not a little--as to my Bodleian reading, and
the article on the "Poema del Cid" that I was writing. He confesses,
however, that he did his best to draw me--examining the English girl as
a new specimen for his psychological collection. As for me, I can only
perversely remember a passing phrase of his to the effect that there was
too much magenta in the dress of Englishwomen, and too much pepper in
the English _cuisine_. From English cooking--which showed ill in the
Oxford of those days--he suffered, indeed, a good deal. Nor, in spite of
his great literary knowledge of England and English, was his spoken
English clear enough to enable him to grapple with the lodging-house
cook. Professor Max Müller, who had induced him to give the lectures,
and watched over him during his stay, told me that on his first visit to
the historian in his Beaumont Street rooms he found him sitting
bewildered before the strangest of meals. It consisted entirely of a
huge beefsteak, served in the unappetizing, slovenly English way, and--a
large plate of buttered toast. Nothing else. "But I ordered bif-tek and
pott-a-toes!" cried the puzzled historian to his visitor!
Another guest of the Master's on that night was Mr. Swinburne, and of
him, too, I have a vivid recollection as he sat opposite to me on the
side next the fire, his small lower features and slender neck
overweighted by his thick reddish hair and capacious brow. I could not
think why he seemed so cross and uncomfortable. He was perpetually
beckoning to the waiters; then, when they came, holding peremptory
conversation with them; while I from my side of the table could see them
going away, with a whisper or a shrug to each other, like men asked for
the impossible. At last, with a kind of bound, Swinburne leaped from his
chair and seized a copy of the _Times_ which he seemed to have persuaded
one of the men to bring him. As he got up I saw that the fire behind
him, and very close to him, must indeed have been burning the very
marrow out of a long-suffering poet. And, alack! in that house without a
mistress the small conveniences of life, such as fire-screens, were
often overlooked. The Master did not possess any. In a pale exasperation
Swinburne folded the _Times_ over the back of his chair and sat down
again. Vain was the effort! The room was narrow, the party large, and
the servants, pushing by, had soon dislodged the _Times_. Again and
again did Swinburne in a fury replace it; and was soon reduced to
sitting silent and wild-eyed, his back firmly pressed against the chair
and the newspaper, in a concentrated struggle with fate.
Matthew Arnold was another of the party, and I have a vision of my uncle
standing talking with M. Taine, with whom he then and there made a
lasting friendship. The Frenchman was not, I trust, aware at that moment
of the heresies of the English critic who had ventured only a few years
before to speak of "the exaggerated French estimate of Racine," and even
to indorse the judgment of Joubert--"_Racine est le Virgile des
ignorants"!_ Otherwise M. Taine might have given an even sharper edge
than he actually did to his remarks, in his letters home, on the
critical faculty of the English. "In all that I read and hear," he says
to Madame Taine, "I see nowhere the fine literary sense which means the
gift--or the art--of understanding the souls and passions of the past."
And again, "I have had infinite trouble to-day to make my audience
appreciate some _finesses_ of Racine." There is a note of resigned
exasperation in these comments which reminds me of the passionate
feeling of another French critic--Edmond Scherer, Sainte-Beuve's best
successor--ten years later. _À propos_ of some judgment of Matthew
Arnold--whom Scherer delighted in--on Racine, of the same kind as those
I have already quoted, the French man of letters once broke out to me,
almost with fury, as we walked together at Versailles. But, after all,
was the Oxford which contained Pater, Pattison, and Bywater, which had
nurtured Matthew Arnold and Swinburne--Swinburne with his wonderful
knowledge of the intricacies and subtleties of the French tongue and the
French literature--merely "_solide and positif_," as Taine declares? The
judgment is, I think, a characteristic judgment of that man of
formulas--often so brilliant and often so mistaken--who, in the famous
_History of English Literature_, taught his English readers as much by
his blunders as by his merits. He provoked us into thinking. And what
critic does more? Is not the whole fraternity like so many successive
Penelopes, each unraveling the web of the one before? The point is that
the web should be eternally remade and eternally unraveled.
II
I married Mr. Thomas Humphry Ward, Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose
College, on April 6, 1872, the knot being tied by my father's friend, my
grandfather's pupil and biographer, Dean Stanley. For nine years, till
the spring of 1881, we lived in Oxford, in a little house north of the
Parks, in what was then the newest quarter of the University town. They
were years, for both of us, of great happiness and incessant activity.
Our children, two daughters and a son, were born in 1874, 1876, and
1879. We had many friends, all pursuing the same kind of life as
ourselves, and interested in the same kind of things. Nobody under the
rank of a Head of a College, except a very few privileged Professors,
possessed as much as a thousand a year. The average income of the new
race of married tutors was not much more than half that sum. Yet we all
gave dinner-parties and furnished our houses with Morris papers, old
chests and cabinets, and blue pots. The dinner-parties were simple and
short. At our own early efforts of the kind there certainly was not
enough to eat. But we all improved with time; and on the whole I think
we were very fair housekeepers and competent mothers. Most of us were
very anxious to be up-to-date and in the fashion, whether in esthetics,
in housekeeping, or in education. But our fashion was not that of
Belgravia or Mayfair, which, indeed, we scorned! It was the fashion of
the movement which sprang from Morris and Burne-Jones. Liberty stuffs
very plain in line, but elaborately "smocked," were greatly in vogue,
and evening dresses, "cut square," or with "Watteau pleats," were
generally worn, and often in conscious protest against the London "low
dress," which Oxford--young married Oxford--thought both ugly and
"fast." And when we had donned our Liberty gowns we went out to dinner,
the husband walking, the wife in a bath chair, drawn by an ancient
member of an ancient and close fraternity--the "chairmen" of old Oxford.
Almost immediately opposite to us in the Bradmore Road lived Walter
Pater and his sisters. The exquisiteness of their small house, and the
charm of the three people who lived in it, will never be forgotten by
those who knew them well in those days when by the publication of the
_Studies in the Renaissance_ (1873) their author had just become famous.
I recall very clearly the effect of that book, and of the strange and
poignant sense of beauty expressed in it; of its entire aloofness also
from the Christian tradition of Oxford, its glorification of the higher
and intenser forms of esthetic pleasure, of "passion" in the
intellectual sense--as against the Christian doctrine of self-denial and
renunciation. It was a gospel that both stirred and scandalized Oxford.
The bishop of the diocese thought it worth while to protest. There was a
cry of "Neo-paganism," and various attempts at persecution. The author
of the book was quite unmoved. In those days Walter Pater's mind was
still full of revolutionary ferments which were just as sincere, just as
much himself, as that later hesitating and wistful return toward
Christianity, and Christianity of the Catholic type, which is embodied
in _Marius the Epicurean_, the most beautiful of the spiritual romances
of Europe since the _Confessions_. I can remember a dinner-party at his
house, where a great tumult arose over some abrupt statement of his made
to the High Church wife of a well-known Professor. Pater had been in
some way pressed controversially beyond the point of wisdom, and had
said suddenly that no reasonable person could govern his life by the
opinions or actions of a man who died eighteen centuries ago. The
Professor and his wife--I look back to them both with the warmest
affection--departed hurriedly, in agitation; and the rest of us only
gradually found out what had happened.
But before we left Oxford in 1881 this attitude of mind had, I think,
greatly changed. Mr. Gosse, in the memoir of Walter Pater contributed to
the Dictionary of National Biography, says that before 1870 he had
gradually relinquished all belief in the Christian religion--and leaves
it there. But the interesting and touching thing to watch was the gentle
and almost imperceptible flowing back of the tide over the sands it had
left bare. It may be said, I think, that he never returned to
Christianity in the orthodox or intellectual sense. But his heart
returned to it. He became once more endlessly interested in it, and
haunted by the "something" in it which he thought inexplicable. A
remembrance of my own shows this. In my ardent years of exploration and
revolt, conditioned by the historical work that occupied me during the
later 'seventies, I once said to him in tête-à-tête, reckoning
confidently on his sympathy, and with the intolerance and certainty of
youth, that orthodoxy could not possibly maintain itself long against
its assailants, especially from the historical and literary camps, and
that we should live to see it break down. He shook his head and looked
rather troubled.
"I don't think so," he said. Then, with hesitation: "And we don't
altogether agree. You think it's all plain. But I can't. There are such
mysterious things. Take that saying, 'Come unto me, all ye that are
weary and heavy-laden.' How can you explain that? There is a mystery in
it--something supernatural."
A few years later, I should very likely have replied that the answer of
the modern critic would be, "The words you quote are in all probability
from a lost Wisdom book; there are very close analogies in Proverbs and
in the Apocrypha. They are a fragment without a context, and may
represent on the Lord's lips either a quotation or the text of a
discourse. Wisdom is speaking--the Wisdom 'which is justified of her
children.'" But if any one had made such a reply, it would not have
affected the mood in Pater, of which this conversation gave me my first
glimpse, and which is expressed again and again in the most exquisite
passages of _Marius_. Turn to the first time when Marius--under Marcus
Aurelius--is present at a Christian ceremony, and sees, for the first
time, the "wonderful spectacle of those who believed."
The people here collected might have figured as the earliest handsel
or pattern of a new world, from the very face of which discontent
had passed away.... They had faced life and were glad, by some
science or light of knowledge they had, to which there was certainly
no parallel in the older world. Was some credible message from
beyond "the flaming rampart of the world"--a message of hope ...
already molding their very bodies and looks and voices, now and
here?
Or again to the thoughts of Marius at the approach of death:
At this moment, his unclouded receptivity of soul, grown so steadily
through all those years, from experience to experience, was at its
height; the house was ready for the possible guest, the tablet of
the mind white and smooth, for whatever divine fingers might choose
to write there.
_Marius_ was published twelve years after the _Studies in the
Renaissance_, and there is a world between the two books. Some further
light will be thrown on this later phase of Mr. Pater's thought by a
letter he wrote to me in 1885 on my translation of Amiel's _From Journal
Intime_. Here it is rather the middle days of his life that concern me,
and the years of happy friendship with him and his sisters, when we were
all young together. Mr. Pater and my husband were both fellows and
tutors of Brasenose, though my husband was much the younger, a fact
which naturally brought us into frequent contact. And the beautiful
little house across the road, with its two dear mistresses, drew me
perpetually, both before and after my marriage. The drawing-room, which
runs the whole breadth of the house from the road to the garden behind,
was "Paterian" in every line and ornament. There were a Morris paper;
spindle-legged tables and chairs; a sparing allowance of blue plates and
pots, bought, I think, in Holland, where Oxford residents in my day were
always foraging, to return, often, with treasures of which the very
memory now stirs a half-amused envy of one's own past self, that had
such chances and lost them; framed embroidery of the most delicate
design and color, the work of Mr. Pater's elder sister; engravings, if I
remember right, from Botticelli, or Luini, or Mantegna; a few mirrors,
and a very few flowers, chosen and arranged with a simple yet conscious
art. I see that room always with the sun in it, touching the polished
surfaces of wood and brass and china, and bringing out its pure, bright
color. I see it too pervaded by the presence of the younger sister,
Clara--a personality never to be forgotten by those who loved her. Clara
Pater, whose grave and noble beauty in youth has been preserved in a
drawing by Mr. Wirgman, was indeed a "rare and dedicated spirit." When I
first knew her she was four or five and twenty, intelligent, alive,
sympathetic, with a delightful humor and a strong judgment, but without
much positive acquirement. Then after some years she began to learn
Latin and Greek with a view to teaching; and after we left Oxford she
became Vice-President of the new Somerville College for Women. Several
generations of girl-students must still preserve the tenderest and most
grateful memories of all that she was there, as woman, teacher, and
friend. Her point of view, her opinion, had always the crispness, the
savor that goes with perfect sincerity. She feared no one, and she loved
many, as they loved her. She loved animals, too, as all the household
did. How well I remember the devoted nursing given by the brother and
sisters to a poor little paralytic cat, whose life they tried to save--
in vain! When, later, I came across in _Marius_ the account of Marcus
Aurelius carrying away the dead child Annius Verus--"pressed closely to
his bosom, as if yearning just then for one thing only, to be united, to
be absolutely one with it, in its obscure distress"--I remembered the
absorption of the writer of those lines, and of his sisters, in the
suffering of that poor little creature, long years before. I feel
tolerably certain that in writing the words Walter Pater had that past
experience in mind.
After Walter Pater's death, Clara, with her elder sister, became the
vigilant and joint guardians of their brother's books and fame, till,
four years ago, a terrible illness cut short her life, and set free, in
her brother's words, the "unclouded and receptive soul."