EARLY MARRIED LIFE
How many other figures in that vanished Oxford world I should like to
draw!--Mandell or "Max" Creighton, our lifelong friend, then just
married to the wife who was his best comrade while he lived, and since
his death has made herself an independent force in English life. I first
remember the future Bishop of London when I was fifteen, and he was
reading history with my father on a Devonshire reading-party. The tall,
slight figure in blue serge, the red-gold hair, the spectacles, the keen
features and quiet, commanding eye--I see them first against a
background of rocks on the Lynton shore. Then again, a few years later,
in his beautiful Merton rooms, with the vine tendrils curling round the
windows, the Morris paper, and the blue willow-pattern plates upon it,
that he was surely the first to collect in Oxford. A luncheon-party
returns upon me--in Brasenose--where the brilliant Merton Fellow and
tutor, already a power in Oxford, first met his future wife; afterward,
their earliest married home in Oxford so near to ours, in the new region
of the Parks; then the Vicarage on the Northumberland coast where
Creighton wrestled with the north-country folk, with their virtues and
their vices, drinking deep draughts thereby from the sources of human
nature; where he read and wrote history, preparing for his _magnum
opus_, the history of the Renaissance Popes; where he entertained his
friends, brought up his children, and took mighty walks--always the same
restless, energetic, practical, pondering spirit, his mind set upon the
Kingdom of God, and convinced that in and through the English Church a
man might strive for the Kingdom as faithfully and honestly as anywhere
else. The intellectual doubts and misgivings on the subject of taking
orders, so common in the Oxford of his day, Creighton had never felt.
His life had ripened to a rich maturity without, apparently, any of
those fundamental conflicts which had scarred the lives of other men.
The fact set him in strong contrast with another historian who was also
our intimate friend--John Richard Green. When I first knew him, during
my engagement to my husband, and seven years before the _Short History_
was published, he had just practically--though not formally--given up
his orders. He had been originally curate to my husband's father, who
held a London living, and the bond between him and his Vicar's family
was singularly close and affectionate. After the death of the dear
mother of the flock, a saintly and tender spirit, to whom Mr. Green was
much attached, he remained the faithful friend of all her children. How
much I had heard of him before I saw him! The expectation of our first
meeting filled me with trepidation. Should I be admitted, too, into that
large and generous heart? Would he "pass" the girl who had dared to be
his "boy's" fiancée? But after ten minutes all was well, and he was my
friend no less than my husband's, to the last hour of his fruitful,
suffering life.
And how much it meant, his friendship! It became plain very soon after
our marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership. My first
published story, written when I was eighteen, had appeared in the
_Churchman's Magazine_ in 1870, and an article on the "Poema del Cid,"
the first-fruits of my Spanish browsings in the Bodleian, appeared in
_Macmillan_ early in 1872. My husband was already writing in the
_Saturday Review_ and other quarters, and had won his literary spurs as
one of the three authors of that _jeu d'esprit_ of no small fame in its
day, the _Oxford Spectator_. Our three children arrived in 1874, 1876,
and 1879, and all the time I was reading, listening, talking, and
beginning to write in earnest--mostly for the _Saturday Review_.
"J.R.G.," as we loved to call him, took up my efforts with the warmest
encouragement, tempered, indeed, by constant fears that I should become
a hopeless bookworm and dryasdust, yielding day after day to the mere
luxury of reading, and putting nothing into shape!
Against this supposed tendency in me he railed perpetually. "Any one can
read!" he would say; "anybody of decent wits can accumulate notes and
references; the difficulty is to _write_--to make something!" And later
on, when I was deep in Spanish chronicles and thinking vaguely of a
History of Spain--early Spain, at any rate--he wrote, almost
impatiently: "_Begin_--and begin your _book_. Don't do 'studies' and
that sort of thing--one's book teaches one everything as one writes it."
I was reminded of that letter years later when I came across, in
_Amiel's Journal_, a passage almost to the same effect: "It is by
writing that one learns--it is by pumping that one draws water into
one's well." But in J.R.G.'s case the advice he gave his friend was
carried out by himself through every hour of his short, concentrated
life. "He died learning," as the inscription on his grave testifies; but
he also died _making_. In other words, the shaping, creative instinct
wrestled in him with the powers of death through long years, and never
deserted him to the very end. Who that has ever known the passion of the
writer and the student can read without tears the record of his last
months? He was already doomed when I first saw him in 1871, for signs of
tuberculosis had been discovered in 1869, and all through the 'seventies
and till he died, in 1883, while he was writing the _Short History_, the
expanded Library Edition in four volumes, and the two brilliant
monographs on _The Making of England_ and _The Conquest of England_, the
last of which was put together from his notes, and finished by his
devoted wife and secretary after his death, he was fighting for his
life, in order that he might finish his work. He was a dying man from
January, 1881, but he finished and published _The Making of England_ in
1882, and began _The Conquest of England_. On February 25th, ten days
before his death, his wife told him that the end was near. He thought a
little, and said that he had still something to say in his book "which
is worth saying. I will make a fight for it. I will do what I can, and I
must have sleeping-draughts for a week. After that it will not matter if
they lose their effect." He worked on a little longer---but on March 7th
all was over. My husband had gone out to see him in February, and came
home marveling at the miracle of such life in death.
I have spoken of the wonderful stimulus and encouragement he could give
to the young student. But he was no flatterer. No one could strike
harder or swifter than he, when he chose.
It was to me--in his eager friendship for "Humphry's" young wife--he
first intrusted the task of that primer of English literature which
afterward Mr. Stopford Brooke carried out with such astonishing success.
But I was far too young for such a piece of work, and knew far too
little. I wrote a beginning, however, and took it up to him when he was
in rooms in Beaumont Street. He was entirely dissatisfied with it, and
as gently and kindly as possible told me it wouldn't do and that I must
give it up.[1] Then throwing it aside, he began to walk up and down his
room, sketching out how such a general outline of English literature
might be written and should be written. I sat by enchanted, all my
natural disappointment charmed away. The knowledge, the enthusiasm, the
_shaping_ power of the frail human being moving there before me--with
the slight, emaciated figure, the great brow, the bright eyes; all the
physical presence instinct, aflame, with the intellectual and poetic
passion which grew upon him as he traced the mighty stream of England's
thought and song--it was an experience never forgotten, one of those by
which mind teaches mind, and the endless succession is carried on.
[Footnote 1: Since writing these lines, I have been amused to discover
the following reference in the brilliant biography of Stopford Brooke,
by his son-in-law, Principal Jacks, to my unlucky attempt. "The only
advantage," says Mr. Brooke in his diary for May 8, 1899, "the older
writer has over the younger is that he knows what to leave out and has a
juster sense of proportion. I remember that when Green wanted the Primer
of English Literature to be done, Mrs. ---- asked if she might try her
hand at it. He said 'Yes,' and she set to work. She took a fancy to
_Beowulf_, and wrote twenty pages on it! At this rate the book would
have run to more than a thousand pages."]
There is another memory from the early time, which comes back to me--of
J.R.G. in Notre Dame. We were on our honeymoon journey, and we came
across him in Paris. We went together to Notre Dame, and there, as we
all lingered at the western end, looking up to the gleaming color of the
distant apse, the spirit came upon him. He began to describe what the
Church had seen, coming down through the generations, from vision to
vision. He spoke in a low voice, but without a pause or break, standing
in deep shadow close to the western door. One scarcely saw him, and I
almost lost the sense of his individuality. It seemed to be the very
voice of History--Life telling of itself.
Liberty and the passion for liberty were the very breath of his being.
In 1871, just after the Commune, I wrote him a cry of pity and horror
about the execution of Rossel, the "heroic young Protestant who had
fought the Versaillais because they had made peace, and prevented him
from fighting the Prussians." J.R.G. replied that the only defense of a
man who fought for the Commune was that he believed in it, while Rossel,
by his own statement, did not.
People like old Delescluze are more to my mind, men who believe,
rightly or wrongly (in the ideas of '93), and cling to their faith
through thirteen years of the hulks and of Cayenne, who get their
chance at last, fight, work, and then when all is over know how to
die--as Delescluze, with that gray head bared and the old threadbare
coat thrown open, walked quietly and without a word up to the fatal
barricade.
His place in the ranks of history is high and safe. That was abundantly
shown by the testimony of the large gathering of English scholars and
historians at the memorial meeting held in his own college some years
ago. He remains as one of the leaders of that school (there is, of
course, another and a strong one!) which holds that without imagination
and personality a man had better not write history at all; since no
recreation of the past is really possible without the kindling and
welding force that a man draws from his own spirit.
But it is as a friend that I desire--with undying love and gratitude--to
commemorate him here. To my husband, to all the motherless family he had
taken to his heart, he was affection and constancy itself. And as for
me, just before the last visit that we paid him at Mentone in 1882, a
year before he died, he was actually thinking out schemes for that
history of early Spain which it seemed, both to him and me, I must at
last begin, and was inquiring what help I could get from libraries on
the Riviera during our stay with him. Then, when we came, I remember our
talks in the little Villa St. Nicholas--his sympathy, his enthusiasm,
his unselfish help; while all the time he was wrestling with death for
just a few more months in which to finish his own work. Both Lord Bryce
and Sir Leslie Stephen have paid their tribute to this wonderful talk of
his later years. "No such talk," says Lord Bryce, "has been heard in our
generation." Of Madame de Staël it was said that she wrote her books out
of the talk of the distinguished men who frequented her _salon_. Her own
conversation was directed to evoking from the brains of others what she
afterward, as an artist, knew how to use better than they. Her talk--
small blame to her!--was plundering and acquisitive. But J.R.G.'s talk
_gave_ perpetually, admirable listener though he was. All that he had he
gave; so that our final thought of him is not that of the suffering
invalid, the thwarted workman, the life cut short, but rather that of
one who had richly done his part and left in his friends' memories no
mere pathetic appeal, but much more a bracing message for their own
easier and longer lives.
Of the two other historians with whom my youth threw me into contact,
Mr. Freeman and Bishop Stubbs, I have some lively memories. Mr. Freeman
was first known to me, I think, through "Johnny," as he was wont to call
J.R.G., whom he adored. Both he and J.R.G. were admirable letter-
writers, and a volume of their correspondence--much of it already
published separately--if it could be put together--like that of Flaubert
and George Sand--would make excellent reading for a future generation.
In 1877 and 1878, when I was plunged in the history of West-Gothic
Kings, I had many letters from Mr. Freeman, and never were letters about
grave matters less grave. Take this outburst about a lady who had sent
him some historical work to look at. He greatly liked and admired the
lady; but her work drove him wild. "I never saw anything like it for
missing the point of everything.... Then she has no notion of putting a
sentence together, so that she said some things which I fancy she did
not mean to say--as that 'the beloved Queen Louisa of Prussia' was the
mother of M. Thiers. When she said that the Duke of Orleans's horses ran
away, 'leaving two infant sons,' it may have been so: I have no evidence
either way."
Again, "I am going to send you the Spanish part of my Historical
Geography. It will be very bad, but--when I don't know a thing I believe
I generally know that I don't know it, and so manage to wrap it up in
some vague phrase which, if not right, may at least not be wrong. Thus I
have always held that the nursery account of Henry VIII--
"'And Henry the Eighth was as fat as a pig--'
"is to be preferred to Froude's version. For, though certainly an
inadequate account of the reign, it is true as far as it goes."
Once, certainly, we stayed at Somerleaze, and I retain the impression of
a very busy, human, energetic man of letters, a good Churchman, and a
good citizen, brimful of likes and dislikes, and waving his red beard
often as a flag of battle in many a hot skirmish, especially with
J.R.G., but always warm-hearted and generally placable--except in the
case of James Anthony Froude. The feud between Freeman and Froude was,
of course, a standing dish in the educated world of half a century ago.
It may be argued that the Muse of History has not decided the quarrel
quite according to justice; that Clio has shown herself something of a
jade in the matter, as easily influenced by fair externals as a certain
Helen was long ago. How many people now read the _Norman Conquest_--
except the few scholars who devote themselves to the same period?
Whereas Froude's History, with all its sins, lives, and in my belief
will long live, because the man who wrote it was a _writer_ and
understood his art.
Of Bishop Stubbs, the greatest historical name surely in the England of
the last half of the nineteenth century, I did not personally see much
while we lived in Oxford and he was Regius Professor. He had no gifts--
it was his chief weakness as a teacher--for creating a young school
around him, setting one man to work on this job, and another on that, as
has been done with great success in many instances abroad. He was too
reserved, too critical, perhaps too sensitive. But he stood as a great
influence in the background, felt if not seen. A word of praise from him
meant everything; a word of condemnation, in his own subjects, settled
the matter. I remember well, after I had written a number of articles on
early Spanish Kings and Bishops, for a historical Dictionary, and they
were already in proof, how on my daily visits to the Bodleian I began to
be puzzled by the fact that some of the very obscure books I had been
using were "out" when I wanted them, or had been abstracted from my
table by one of the sub-librarians. _Joannes Biclarensis_--he was
missing! Who in the world could want that obscure chronicle of an
obscure period but myself? I began to envisage some hungry German
_Privatdozent_, on his holiday, raiding my poor little subject, and my
books, with a view to his Doctor's thesis. Then one morning, as I went
in, I came across Doctor Stubbs, with an ancient and portly volume under
his arm. _Joannes Biclarensis_ himself!--I knew it at once. The
Professor gave me a friendly nod, and I saw a twinkle in his eye as we
passed. Going to my desk, I found another volume gone--this time the
_Acts of the Councils of Toledo_. So far as I knew, not the most ardent
Churchman in Oxford felt at that time any absorbing interest in the
Councils of Toledo. At any rate, I had been left in undisturbed
possession of them for months. Evidently something was happening, and I
sat down to my work in bewilderment.
Then, on my way home, I ran into a fellow-worker for the Dictionary--a
well-known don and history tutor. "Do you know what's happened?" he
said, in excitement. "_Stubbs_ has been going through our work! The
Editor wanted his imprimatur before the final printing. Can't expect
anybody but Stubbs to know all these things! My books are gone, too." We
walked up to the Parks together in a common anxiety, like a couple of
school-boys in for Smalls. Then in a few days the tension was over; my
books were on my desk again; the Professor stopped me in the Broad with
a smile, and the remark that Joannes Biclarensis was really quite an
interesting fellow, and I received a very friendly letter from the
Editor of the Dictionary.
And perhaps I may be allowed, after these forty years, one more
recollection, though I am afraid a proper reticence would suppress it! A
little later "Mr. Creighton" came to visit us, after his immigration to
Embleton and the north; and I timidly gave him some lives of West-Gothic
Kings and Bishops to read. He read them--they were very long and
terribly minute--and put down the proofs, without saying much. Then he
walked down to Oxford with my husband, and sent me back a message by
him: "Tell M. to go on. There is nobody but Stubbs doing such work in
Oxford now." The thrill of pride and delight such words gave me may be
imagined. But there were already causes at work why I should not "go
on."
I shall have more to say presently about the work on the origins of
modern Spain. It was the only thorough "discipline" I ever had; it
lasted about two years--years of incessant, arduous work, and it led
directly to the writing of _Robert Elsmere_. But before and after, how
full life was of other things! The joys of one's new home, of the
children that began to patter about it, of every bit of furniture and
blue pot it contained, each representing some happy _chasse_ or special
earning--of its garden of half an acre, where I used to feel as
Hawthorne felt in the garden of the Concord Manse--amazement that Nature
should take the trouble to produce things as big as vegetable marrows,
or as surprising as scarlet runners that topped one's head, just that we
might own and eat them. Then the life of the University town, with all
those marked antagonisms I have described, those intellectual and
religious movements, that were like the meeting currents of rivers in a
lake; and the pleasure of new friendships, where everybody was equal,
nobody was rich, and the intellectual average was naturally high. In
those days, too, a small group of women of whom I was one were laying
the foundations of the whole system of women's education in Oxford. Mrs.
Creighton and I, with Mrs. Max Müller, were the secretaries and founders
of the first organized series of lectures for women in the University
town; I was the first secretary of Somerville Hall, and it fell to me,
by chance, to suggest the name of the future college. My friends and I
were all on fire for women's education, including women's medical
education, and very emulous of Cambridge, where the movement was already
far advanced.
But hardly any of us were at all on fire for woman suffrage, wherein the
Oxford educational movement differed greatly from the Cambridge
movement. The majority, certainly, of the group to which I belonged at
Oxford were at that time persuaded that the development of women's power
in the State--or rather, in such a state as England, with its far-
reaching and Imperial obligations, resting ultimately on the sanction of
war--should be on lines of its own. We believed that growth through
Local Government, and perhaps through some special machinery for
bringing the wishes and influence of women of all classes to bear on
Parliament, other than the Parliamentary vote, was the real line of
progress. However, I shall return to this subject on some future
occasion, in connection with the intensified suffragist campaign which
began about ten years ago (1907-08) and in which I took some part. I
will only note here my first acquaintance with Mrs. Fawcett. I see her
so clearly as a fresh, picturesque figure--in a green silk dress and a
necklace of amber beads, when she came down to Oxford in the
mid-'seventies to give a course of lectures in the series that Mrs.
Creighton and I were organizing, and I remember well the atmosphere of
sympathy and admiration which surrounded her as she spoke to an audience
in which many of us were well acquainted with the heroic story of Mr.
Fawcett's blindness, and of the part played by his wife in enabling him
to continue his economic and Parliamentary work.
But life then was not all lectures!--nor was it all Oxford. There were
vacations, and vacations generally meant for us some weeks, at least, of
travel, even when pence were fewest. The Christmas vacation of 1874 we
were in Paris. The weather was bitter, and we were lodged, for
cheapness' sake, in an old-fashioned hotel, where the high canopied beds
with their mountainous duvets were very difficult to wake up in on a
cold morning. But in spite of snow and sleet we filled our days to the
brim. We took with us some introductions from Oxford--to Madame Mohl,
the Renans, the Gaston Parises, the Boutmys, the Ribots, and, from my
Uncle Matthew, to the Scherers at Versailles. Monsieur Taine was already
known to us, and it was at their house, on one of Madame Taine's
Thursdays, that I first heard French conversation at its best. There was
a young man there, dark-eyed, dark-haired, to whom I listened--not
always able to follow the rapid French in which he and two other men
were discussing some literary matter of the moment, but conscious, for
the first time, of what the conversation of intellectual equals might
be, if it were always practised as the French are trained to practise it
from their mother's milk, by the influence of a long tradition. The
young man was M. Paul Bourget, who had not yet begun to write novels,
while his literary and philosophical essays seemed rather to mark him
out as the disciple of M. Taine than as the Catholic protagonist he was
soon to become. M. Bourget did not then speak English, and my French
conversation, which had been wholly learned from books, had a way at
that time--and, alack! has still--of breaking down under me, just as one
reached the thing one really wanted to say. So that I did not attempt to
do more than listen. But I seem to remember that those with whom he
talked were M. Francis Charmes, then a writer on the staff of the
_Débats_, and afterward the editor of the _Revue des deux Mondes_ in
succession to M. Brunetière; and M. Gaston Paris, the brilliant head of
French philology at the Collège de France. What struck me then, and
through all the new experiences and new acquaintanceships of our
Christmas fortnight, was that strenuous and passionate intensity of the
French temper, which foreign nations so easily lose sight of, but which,
in truth, is as much part of the French nature as their gaiety, or as
what seems to us their frivolity. The war of 1870, the Commune, were but
three years behind them. Germany had torn from them Alsace-Lorraine; she
had occupied Paris; and their own Jacobins had ruined and burned what
even Germany had spared. In the minds of the intellectual class there
lay deep, on the one hand, a determination to rebuild France; on the
other, to avenge her defeat. The blackened ruins of the Tuileries and of
the Cour des Comptes still disfigured a city which grimly kept them
there as a warning against anarchy; while the statue of the Ville de
Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde had worn for three years the
funeral garlands, which, as France confidently hopes, the peace that
will end this war will, after nearly half a century, give way once more
to the rejoicing tricolor. At the same time reconstruction was
everywhere beginning--especially in the field of education. The corrupt,
political influence of the Empire, which had used the whole educational
system of the country for the purpose of keeping itself and its
supporters in power, was at an end. The recognized "École Normale" was
becoming a source of moral and mental strength among thousands of young
men and women; and the "École des Sciences politiques," the joint work
of Taine, Renan, and M. Boutmy, its first director, was laying
foundations whereof the results are to be seen conspicuously to-day, in
French character, French resource, French patience, French science, as
this hideous war has revealed them.
I remember an illuminating talk with M. Renan himself on this subject
during our visit. We had never yet seen him, and we carried an
introduction to him from Max Müller, our neighbor and friend in Oxford.
We found him alone, in a small working-room crowded with books, at the
College de France. Madame Renan was away, and he had abandoned his large
library for something more easily warmed. My first sight of him was
something of a shock--of the large, ungainly figure, the genial face
with its spreading cheeks and humorous eyes, the big head with its
scanty locks of hair. I think he felt an amused and kindly interest in
the two young folk from Oxford who had come as pilgrims to his shrine,
and, realizing that our French was not fluent and our shyness great, he
filled up the time--and the gaps--by a monologue, lit up by many touches
of Renanesque humor, on the situation in France.
First, as to literature--"No, we have no genius, no poets or writers of
the first rank just now--at least so it seems to me. But we _work--nous
travaillons beaucoup! Ce sera noire salut_." It was the same as to
politics. He had no illusions and few admirations. "The Chamber is full
of mediocrities. We are governed by _avocats_ and _pharmaciens_. But at
least _Ils ne feront pas la guerre_!"
He smiled, but there was that in the smile and the gesture which showed
the smart within; from which not even his scholar's philosophy, with its
ideal of a world of cosmopolitan science, could protect him. At that
moment he was inclined to despair of his country. The mad adventure of
the Commune had gone deep into his soul, and there were still a good
many pacifying years to run, before he could talk of his life as "_cette
charmante promenade à travers la realité_"--for which, with all it had
contained of bad and good, he yet thanked the Gods. At that time he was
fifty-one; he had just published _L'Antichrist,_ the most brilliant of
all the volumes of the "Origines"; and he was not yet a member of the
French Academy.
I turn to a few other impressions from that distant time. One night we
were in the Théâtre Français, and Racine's "Phèdre" was to be given. I
at least had never been in the Maison de Molière before, and in such
matters as acting I possessed, at twenty-three, only a very raw and
country-cousinish judgment. There had been a certain amount of talk in
Oxford of a new and remarkable French actress, but neither of us had
really any idea of what was before us. Then the play began. And before
the first act was over we were sitting, bent forward, gazing at the
stage in an intense and concentrated excitement such as I can scarcely
remember ever feeling again, except perhaps when the same actress played
"Hernani" in London for the first time in 1884. Sarah Bernhardt was
then--December, 1874--in the first full tide of her success. She was of
a ghostly and willowy slenderness. Each of the great speeches seemed
actually to rend the delicate frame. When she fell back after one of
them you felt an actual physical terror lest there should not be enough
life left in the slight, dying woman to let her speak again. And you
craved for yet more and more of the _voix d'or_ which rang in one's ears
as the frail yet exquisite instrument of a mighty music. Never before
had it been brought home to me what dramatic art might be, or the power
of the French Alexandrine. And never did I come so near quarreling with
"Uncle Matt" as when, on our return, after having heard my say about the
genius of Sarah Bernhardt, he patted my hand indulgently with the
remark, "But, my dear child, you see, you never saw Rachel!"
As we listened to Sarah Bernhardt we were watching the outset of a great
career which had still some forty years to run. On another evening we
made acquaintance with a little old woman who had been born in the first
year of the Terror, who had spent her first youth in the _salon_ of
Madame Récamier, valued there, above all, for her difficult success in
drawing a smile from that old and melancholy genius, Châteaubriand; and
had since held a _salon_ of her own, which deserves a special place in
the history of _salons_. For it was held, according to the French
tradition, and in Paris, by an Englishwoman. It was, I think, Max Müller
who gave us an introduction to Madame Mohl. She sent us an invitation to
one of her Friday evenings, and we duly mounted to the top of the old
house in the Rue du Bac which she made famous for so long. As we entered
the room I saw a small disheveled figure, gray-headed, crouching beside
a grate, with a kettle in her hand. It was Madame Mohl--then eighty-
one--who was trying to make the fire burn. She just raised herself to
greet us, with a swift investigating glance; and then returned to her
task of making the tea, in which I endeavored to help her. But she did
not like to be helped, and I soon subsided into my usual listening and
watching, which, perhaps, for one who at that time was singularly
immature in all social respects, was the best policy. I seem still to
see the tall, substantial form of Julius Mohl standing behind her, with
various other elderly men who were no doubt famous folk, if one had
known their names. And in the corner was the Spartan tea-table, with its
few biscuits, which stood for the plain living whereon was nourished the
high thinking and high talking which had passed through these rooms.
Guizot, Cousin, Ampère, Fauriel, Mignet, Lamartine, all the great men of
the middle century had talked there; not, in general, the poets and the
artists, but the politicians, the historians, and the _savants_. The
little Fairy Blackstick, incredibly old, kneeling on the floor, with the
shabby dress and tousled gray hair, had made a part of the central scene
in France, through the Revolution, the reign of the Citizen king, and
the Second Empire--playing the rôle, through it all, of a good friend of
freedom. If only one had heard her talk! But there were few people in
the room, and we were none of us inspired. I must sadly put down that
Friday evening among the lost opportunities of life. For Mrs. Simpson's
biography of Madame Mohl shows what a wealth of wit and memory there was
in that small head! Her social sense, her humor, never deserted her,
though she lived to be ninety. When she was dying, her favorite cat, a
tom, leaped on her bed. Her eyes lit up as she feebly stroked him. "He
is so distinguished!" she whispered. "But his wife is not distinguished
at all. He doesn't know it. But many men are like that." It was one of
the last sayings of an expert in the human scene.
Madame Mohl was twenty-one when the Allies entered Paris in 1814. She
had lived with those to whom the fall of the _Ancien Régime_, the
Terror, and the Revolutionary wars had been the experience of middle
life. As I look back to the _salon_ in the Rue du Bac, which I saw in
such a flash, yet where my hand rested for a moment in that of Madame
Récamier's pet and protegée, I am reminded, too, that I once saw, at the
Forsters', in 1869, when I was eighteen, the Doctor Lushington who was
Lady Byron's adviser and confidant when she left her husband, and who,
as a young man, had stayed with Pitt and ridden out with Lady Hester
Stanhope. One night, in Eccleston Square, we assembled for dinner in the
ground-floor library instead of the drawing-room, which was up-stairs. I
slipped in late, and saw in an arm-chair, his hands resting on a stick,
an old, white-haired man. When dinner was announced--if I remember
right--he was wheeled into the dining-room, to a place beside my aunt. I
was too far away to hear him talk, and he went home after dinner. But it
was one of the guests of the evening, a friend of his, who said to me--
with a kindly wish, no doubt, to thrill the girl just "out": "You ought
to remember Doctor Lushington! What are you?--eighteen?--and he is
eighty-six. He was in the theater on the night when the news reached
London of Marie Antoinette's execution, and he can remember, though he
was only a boy of eleven, how it was given out from the stage, and how
the audience instantly broke up."
Doctor Lushington, of course, carries one farther back than Madame Mohl.
He was born in 1782, four years after the deaths of Rousseau and
Voltaire, two years before the death of Diderot. He was only six years
younger than Lady Hester Stanhope, whose acquaintance he made during the
three years--1803-1806--when she was keeping house for her uncle,
William Pitt.
But on my right hand at the same dinner-party there sat a guest who was
to mean a good deal more to me personally than Doctor Lushington--young
Mr. George Otto Trevelyan, as he then was, Lord Macaulay's nephew,
already the brilliant author of _A Competition Wallah, Ladies in
Parliament_, and much else. We little thought, as we talked, that after
thirty-five years his son was to marry my daughter.