THE BEGINNINGS OF _ROBERT ELSMERE_
If these are to be the recollections of a writer, in which perhaps other
writers by profession, as well as the more general public, may take some
interest, I shall perhaps be forgiven if I give some account of the
processes of thought and work which led to the writing of my first
successful novel, _Robert Elsmere_.
It was in 1878 that a new editor was appointed for one of the huge well-
known volumes, in which under the aegis of the John Murray of the day,
the _Nineteenth Century_ was accustomed to concentrate its knowledge--
classical, historical, and theological--in convenient, if not exactly
handy, form. Doctor Wace, now a Canon of Canterbury, was then an
indefatigable member of the _Times_ staff. Yet he undertook this extra
work, and carried it bravely through. He came to Oxford to beat up
recruits for Smith's _Dictionary of Christian Biography_, a companion
volume to that of _Classical Biography_, and dealing with the first
seven centuries of Christianity. He had been told that I had been
busying myself with early Spain, and he came to me to ask whether I
would take the Spanish lives for the period, especially those concerned
with the West-Goths in Spain; while at the same time he applied to
various Oxford historians for work on the Ostrogoths and the Franks.
I was much tempted, but I had a good deal to consider. The French and
Spanish reading it involved was no difficulty. But the power of reading
Latin rapidly, both the degraded Latin of the fifth and sixth centuries
and the learned Latin of the sixteenth and seventeenth, was essential;
and I had only learned some Latin since my marriage, and was by no means
at home in it. I had long since found out, too, in working at the
Spanish literature of the eleventh to the fourteenth century, that the
only critics and researches worth following in that field were German;
and though I had been fairly well grounded in German at school, and had
read a certain amount, the prospect of a piece of work which meant, in
the main, Latin texts and German commentaries, was rather daunting. The
well-trained woman student of the present day would have felt probably
no such qualms. But I had not been well trained; and the Pattison
standards of what work should be stood like dragons in the way.
However, I took the plunge, and I have always been grateful to Canon
Wace. The sheer, hard, brain-stretching work of the two or three years
which followed I look back to now with delight. It altered my whole
outlook and gave me horizons and sympathies that I have never lost,
however dim all the positive knowledge brought me by the work has long
since become. The strange thing was that out of the work which seemed
both to myself and others to mark the abandonment of any foolish hopes
of novel-writing I might have cherished as a girl, _Robert Elsmere_
should have arisen. For after my marriage I had made various attempts to
write fiction. They were clearly failures. J. R. G. dealt very
faithfully with me on the subject; and I could only conclude that the
instinct to tell stories which had been so strong in me as a child and
girl meant nothing, and was to be suppressed. I did, indeed, write a
story for my children, which came out in 1880--_Milly and Olly_; but
that wrote itself and was a mere transcript of their little lives.
And yet I venture to think it was, after all, the instinct for "making
out," as the Brontës used to call their own wonderful story-telling
passion, which rendered this historical work so enthralling to me. Those
far-off centuries became veritably alive to me--the Arian kings fighting
an ever-losing battle against the ever-encroaching power of the Catholic
Church, backed by the still lingering and still potent ghost of the
Roman Empire; the Catholic Bishops gathering, sometimes through winter
snow, to their Councils at Seville and Toledo; the centers of culture in
remote corners of the peninsula, where men lived with books and holy
things, shrinking from the wild life around them, and handing on the
precious remnants and broken traditions of the older classical world;
the mutual scorn of Goth and Roman; martyrs, fanatics, heretics,
nationalists, and cosmopolitans; and, rising upon, enveloping them all,
as the seventh and eighth centuries drew on, the tide of Islam, and the
menace of that time when the great church of Cordova should be half a
mosque and half a Christian cathedral.
I lived, indeed, in that old Spain, while I was at work in the Bodleian
and at home. To spend hours and days over the signatures to an obscure
Council, identifying each name so far as the existing materials allowed,
and attaching to it some fragment of human interest, so that gradually
something of a picture emerged, as of a thing lost and recovered--
dredged up from the deeps of time--that, I think, was the joy of it all.
I see, in memory, the small Oxford room, as it was on a winter evening,
between nine and midnight, my husband in one corner preparing his
college lectures, or writing a "Saturday" "middle"; my books and I in
another; the reading-lamp, always to me a symbol of peace and
"recollection"; the Oxford quiet outside. And yet, it was not so
tranquil as it looked. For beating round us all the time were the
spiritual winds of an agitated day. The Oxford of thought was not quiet;
it was divided, as I have shown, by sharper antagonisms and deeper feuds
than exist to-day. Darwinism was penetrating everywhere; Pusey was
preaching against its effects on belief; Balliol stood for an unfettered
history and criticism, Christ Church for authority and creeds; Renan's
_Origines_ were still coming out, Strauss's last book also; my uncle was
publishing _God and the Bible_ in succession to _Literature and Dogma_;
and _Supernatural Religion_ was making no small stir. And meanwhile what
began to interest and absorb me were _sources_--_testimony_. To what--to
whom--did it all go back, this great story of early civilization, early
religion, which modern men could write and interpret so differently?
And on this question the writers and historians of four early centuries,
from the fifth to the ninth, as I lived with them, seemed to throw a
partial, but yet a searching, light. I have expressed it in _Robert
Elsmere_. Langham and Robert, talking in the Squire's library on
Robert's plans for a history of Gaul during the breakdown of the Empire
and the emergence of modern France, come to the vital question: "History
depends on _testimony_. What is the nature and virtue of testimony at
given times? In other words, did the man of the third century
understand, or report, or interpret facts in the same way as the man of
the sixteenth or the nineteenth? And if not, what are the differences?--
and what are the deductions to be made from them?"
Robert replies that his work has not yet dug deep enough to make him
answer the question.
"It is enormously important, I grant--enormously," he repeated,
reflectively.
On which Langham says to himself, though not to Elsmere, that the whole
of "orthodoxy" is in it, and depends on it.
And in a later passage, when Elsmere is mastering the "Quellen" of his
subject, he expresses himself with bewilderment to Catherine on this
same subject of "testimony." He is immersed in the chronicles and
biographies of the fifth and sixth centuries. Every history, every
biography, is steeped in marvel. A man divided by only a few years from
the bishop or saint whose life he is writing reports the most fantastic
miracles. What is the psychology of it all? The whole age seems to
Robert "non-sane." And, meanwhile, across and beyond the medieval
centuries, behind the Christian era itself, the modern student looks
back inevitably, involuntarily, to certain Greeks and certain Latins,
who "represent a forward strain," who intellectually "belong to a world
ahead of them." "You"--he says to them--"_you_ are really my kindred."
That, after all, I tried to express this intellectual experience--which
was, of course, an experience of my own--not in critical or historical
work, but in a novel, that is to say in terms of human life, was the
result of an incident which occurred toward the close of our lives in
Oxford. It was not long after the appearance of _Supernatural Religion_,
and the rise of that newer school of Biblical criticism in Germany
expressed by the once-honored name of Doctor Harnack. Darwinian debate
in the realm of natural science was practically over. The spread of
evolutionary ideas in the fields of history and criticism was the real
point of interest. Accordingly, the University pulpit was often filled
by men endeavoring "to fit a not very exacting science to a very
grudging orthodoxy"; and the heat of an ever-strengthening controversy
was in the Oxford air.
In 1881, as it happened, the Bampton Lectures were preached by the Rev.
John Wordsworth, then Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose, and, later, Bishop
of Salisbury. He and my husband--who, before our marriage, was also a
Fellow of Brasenose--were still tutorial colleagues, and I therefore
knew him personally, and his first wife, the brilliant daughter of the
beloved Bodley's Librarian of my day, Mr. Coxe. We naturally attended
Mr. Wordsworth's first Bampton. He belonged, very strongly, to what I
have called the Christ Church camp; while we belonged, very strongly, to
the Balliol camp. But no one could fail to respect John Wordsworth
deeply; while his connection with his great-uncle, the poet, to whom he
bore a strong personal likeness, gave him always a glamour in my eyes.
Still, I remember going with a certain shrinking; and it was the shock
of indignation excited in me by the sermon which led directly--though
after seven intervening years--to _Robert Elsmere._
The sermon was on "The present unsettlement in religion"; and it
connected the "unsettlement" definitely with "sin." The "moral causes of
unbelief," said the preacher, "were (1) prejudice; (2) severe claims of
religion; (3) intellectual faults, especially indolence, coldness,
recklessness, pride, and avarice."
The sermon expounded and developed this outline with great vigor, and
every skeptical head received its due buffeting in a tone and fashion
that now scarcely survive. I sat in the darkness under the gallery. The
preacher's fine ascetic face was plainly visible in the middle light of
the church; and while the confident priestly voice flowed on, I seemed
to see, grouped around the speaker, the forms of those, his colleagues
and contemporaries, the patient scholars and thinkers of the Liberal
host, Stanley, Jowett, Green of Balliol, Lewis Nettleship, Henry
Sidgwick, my uncle, whom he, in truth--though perhaps not consciously--
was attacking. My heart was hot within me. How could one show England
what was really going on in her midst? Surely the only way was through
imagination; through a picture of actual life and conduct; through
something as "simple, sensuous, passionate" as one could make it. Who
and what were the persons of whom the preacher gave this grotesque
account? What was their history? How had their thoughts and doubts come
to be? What was the effect of them on conduct?
The _immediate_ result of the sermon, however, was a pamphlet called
_Unbelief and Sin: a Protest addressed to those who attended the Bampton
Lecture of Sunday, March 6th_. It was rapidly written and printed, and
was put up in the windows of a well-known shop in the High Street. In
the few hours of its public career it enjoyed a very lively sale. Then
an incident--quite unforeseen by its author--slit its little life! A
well-known clergyman walked into the shop and asked for the pamphlet. He
turned it over, and at once pointed out to one of the partners of the
firm in the shop that there was no printer's name upon it. The
booksellers who had produced the pamphlet, no doubt with an eye to their
large clerical _clientèle_, had omitted the printer's name, and the
omission was illegal. Pains and penalties were threatened, and the
frightened booksellers at once withdrew the pamphlet and sent word of
what had happened to my much-astonished self, who had neither noticed
the omission nor was aware of the law. But Doctor Foulkes, the clergyman
in question--no one that knew the Oxford of my day will have forgotten
his tall, militant figure, with the defiant white hair and the long
clerical coat, as it haunted the streets of the University!--had only
stimulated the tare he seemed to have rooted up. For the pamphlet thus
easily suppressed was really the germ of the later book; in that,
without attempting direct argument, it merely sketched two types of
character: the character that either knows no doubts or has suppressed
them, and the character that fights its stormy way to truth.
The latter was the first sketch of _Robert Elsmere_. That same evening,
at a College party, Professor Green came up to me. I had sent him the
pamphlet the night before, and had not yet had a word from him. His kind
brown eyes smiled upon me as he said a hearty "thank you," adding "a
capital piece of work," or something to that effect; after which my
spirits were quite equal to telling him the story of Doctor Foulkes's
raid.
* * * * *
The year 1880-81, however, was marked for me by three other events of
quite a different kind: Monsieur Renan's visit to Oxford, my husband's
acceptance of a post on the staff of the _Times_, and a visit that we
paid to the W.E. Forsters in Ireland, in December, 1880, at almost the
blackest moment of the Irish land-war.
Of Renan's visit I have mingled memories--all pleasant, but some touched
with comedy. Gentle Madame Renan came with her famous husband and soon
won all hearts. Oxford in mid-April was then, as always, a dream of
gardens just coming into leaf, enchasing buildings of a silvery gray,
and full to the brim of the old walls with the early blossom--almond, or
cherry, or flowering currant. M. Renan was delivering the Hibbert
Lectures in London, and came down to stay for a long week-end with our
neighbors, the Max Müllers. Doctor Hatch was then preaching the Bampton
Lectures, that first admirable series of his on the debt of the Church
to Latin organization, and M. Renan attended one of them. He had himself
just published _Marc Aurèle_, and Doctor Hatch's subject was closely
akin to that of his own Hibbert Lectures. I remember seeing him emerge
from the porch of St. Mary's, his strange, triangular face pleasantly
dreamy. "You were interested?" said some one at his elbow. "_Mais oui_!"
said M. Renan, smiling. "He might have given my lecture, and I might
have preached his sermon! _(Nous aurions du changer de cahiers_!)" Renan
in the pulpit of Pusey, Newman, and Burgon would indeed have been a
spectacle of horror to the ecclesiastical mind. I remember once, many
years after, following the _parroco_ of Castel Gandolfo, through the
dreary and deserted rooms of the Papal villa, where, before 1870, the
Popes used to make _villegiatura_, on that beautiful ridge overlooking
the Alban lake. All the decoration of the villa seemed to me curiously
tawdry and mean. But suddenly my attention was arrested by a great
fresco covering an entire wall. It represented the triumph of the Papacy
over the infidel of all dates. A Pope sat enthroned, wearing the triple
crown, with angels hovering overhead; and in a huge brazier at his feet
burned the writings of the world's heretics. The blazing volumes were
inscribed--Arius--Luther--Voltaire--_Renan_!
We passed on through the empty rooms, and the _parroco_ locked the door
behind us. I thought, as we walked away, of the summer light fading from
the childish picture, painted probably not long before the entry of the
Italian troops into Rome, and of all that was symbolized by it and the
deserted villa, to which the "prisoner of the Vatican" no longer
returns. But at least Rome had given Ernest Renan no mean place among
her enemies--Arius, Luther, Voltaire--_Renan_!
But in truth, Renan, personally, was not the enemy of any church, least
of all of the great Church which had trained his youth. He was a born
scholar and thinker, in temper extremely gentle and scrupulous, and with
a sense of humor, or rather irony, not unlike that of Anatole France,
who has learned much from him. There was, of course, a streak in him of
that French paradox, that impish trifling with things fundamental, which
the English temperament dislikes and resents; as when he wrote the
_Abbesse de Jouarre_, or threw out the whimsical doubt in a passing
sentence of one of his latest books, whether, after all, his life of
labor and self-denial had been worth while, and whether, if he had lived
the life of an Epicurean, like Théophile Gautier, he might not have got
more out of existence. "He was really a good and great man," said
Jowett, writing after his death. But "I regret that he wrote at the end
of his life that strange drama about the Reign of Terror."
There are probably few of M. Renan's English admirers who do not share
the regret. At the same time, there, for all to see, is the long life as
it was lived--of the ever-toiling scholar and thinker, the devoted
husband and brother, the admirable friend. And certainly, during the
Oxford visit I remember, M. Renan was at his best. He was in love--
apparently--with Oxford, and his charm, his gaiety, played over all that
we presented to him. I recall him in Wadham Gardens, wandering in a kind
of happy dream--"Ah, if one had only such places as this to work in, in
France! What pages--and how perfect!--one might write here!" Or again,
in a different scene, at luncheon in our little house in the Parks, when
Oxford was showing, even more than usual, its piteous inability to talk
decently to the great man in his own tongue. It is true that he neither
understood ours--in conversation--nor spoke a word of it. But that did
not at all mitigate our own shame--and surprise! For at that time, in
the Oxford world proper, everybody, probably, read French habitually,
and many of us thought we spoke it. But a mocking spirit suggested to
one of the guests at this luncheon-party--an energetic historical
tutor--the wish to enlighten M. Renan as to how the University was
governed, the intricacies of Convocation and Congregation, the
Hebdomadal Council, and all the rest. The other persons present fell at
first breathlessly silent, watching the gallant but quite hopeless
adventure. Then, in sheer sympathy with a good man in trouble, one after
another we rushed in to help, till the constitution of the University
must have seemed indeed a thing of Bedlam to our smiling but much-
puzzled guest; and all our cheeks were red. But M. Renan cut the knot.
Since he could not understand, and we could not explain, what the
constitution of Oxford University _was_, he suavely took up his parable
as to what it should be. He drew the ideal University, as it were, in
the clouds; clothing his notion, as he went on, in so much fun and so
much charm, that his English hosts more than forgot their own defeat in
his success. The little scene has always remained with me as a crowning
instance of the French genius for conversation. Throw what obstacles in
the way you please; it will surmount them all.
To judge, however, from M. Renan's letter to his friend, M. Berthelot,
written from Oxford on this occasion, he was not so much pleased as we
thought he was, or as we were with him. He says, "Oxford is the
strangest relic of the past, the type of living death. Each of its
colleges is a terrestrial paradise, but a deserted Paradise." (I see
from the date that the visit took place in the Easter vacation!) And he
describes the education given as "purely humanist and clerical,"
administered to "a gilded youth that comes to chapel in surplices. There
is an almost total absence of the scientific spirit." And the letter
further contains a mild gibe at All Souls, for its absentee Fellows.
"The lawns are admirable, and the Fellows eat up the college revenues,
hunting and shooting up and down England. Only one of them works--my
kind host, Max Müller."
At that moment the list of the Fellows of All Souls contained the names
of men who have since rendered high service to England; and M. Renan was
probably not aware that the drastic reforms introduced by the two great
University Commissions of 1854 and 1877 had made the sarcastic picture
he drew for his friend not a little absurd. No doubt a French
intellectual will always feel that the mind-life of England is running
at a slower pace than that of his own country. But if Renan had worked
for a year in Oxford, the old priestly training in him, based so solidly
on the moral discipline of St. Nicholas and St. Sulpice, would have
become aware of much else. I like to think that he would have echoed the
verdict on the Oxford undergraduate of a young and brilliant Frenchman
who spent much time at Oxford fifteen years later. "There is no
intellectual _élite_ here so strong as ours (i.e., among French
students)," says M. Jacques Bardouz, "but they undoubtedly have a
political _élite_, and, a much rarer thing, a moral _élite_.... What an
environment!--and how full is this education of moral stimulus and
force!"
Has not every word of this been justified to the letter by the
experience of the war?
After the present cataclysm, we know very well that we shall have to
improve and extend our higher education. Only, in building up the new,
let us not lose grip upon the irreplaceable things of the old!
It was not long after M. Renan's visit that, just as we were starting
for a walk on a May afternoon, the second post brought my husband a
letter which changed our lives. It contained a suggestion that my
husband should take work on the _Times_ as a member of the editorial
staff. We read it in amazement, and walked on to Port Meadow. It was a
fine day. The river was alive with boats; in the distance rose the
towers and domes of the beautiful city; and the Oxford magic blew about
us in the summer wind. It seemed impossible to leave the dear Oxford
life! All the drawbacks and difficulties of the new proposal presented
themselves; hardly any of the advantages. As for me, I was convinced we
must and should refuse, and I went to sleep in that conviction.
But the mind travels far--and mysteriously--in sleep. With the first
words that my husband and I exchanged in the morning, we knew that the
die was cast and that our Oxford days were over.
The rest of the year was spent in preparation for the change; and in the
Christmas vacation of 1880-81 my husband wrote his first "leaders" for
the paper. But before that we went for a week to Dublin to stay with the
Forsters, at the Chief Secretary's Lodge.
A visit I shall never forget! It was the first of the two terrible
winters my uncle spent in Dublin as Chief Secretary, and the struggle
with the Land League was at its height. Boycotting, murder, and outrage
filled the news of every day. Owing to the refusal of the Liberal
Government to renew the Peace Preservation Act when they took office in
1880--a disastrous but perhaps intelligible mistake--the Chief
Secretary, when we reached Dublin, was facing an agrarian and political
revolt of the most determined character, with nothing but the ordinary
law, resting on juries and evidence, as his instrument--an instrument
which the Irish Land League had taken good care to shatter in his hands.
Threatening letters were flowing in upon both himself and my godmother;
and the tragedy of 1882, with the revelations as to the various murder
plots of the time, to which it led, were soon to show how terrible was
the state of the country and how real the danger in which he personally
stood. But, none the less, social life had to be carried on;
entertainments had to be given; and we went over, if I remember right,
for the two Christmas balls to be given by the Chief Secretary and the
Viceroy. On myself, fresh from the quiet Oxford life, the Irish
spectacle, seen from such a point of view, produced an overwhelming
impression. And the dancing, the visits and dinner-parties, the keeping
up of a brave social show--quite necessary and right under the
circumstances!--began to seem to me, after only twenty-four hours, like
some pageant seen under a thunder-cloud.
Mr. Forster had then little more than five years to live. He was on the
threshold of the second year of his Chief-Secretary ship. During the
first year he had faced the difficulties of the position in Ireland, and
the perpetual attacks of the Irish Members in Parliament, with a
physical nerve and power still intact. I can recall my hot sympathy with
him during 1880, while with one hand he was fighting the Land League and
with the other--a fact never sufficiently recognized--giving all the
help he could to the preparation of Mr. Gladstone's second Land Act. The
position then was hard, sometimes heartbreaking; but it was not beyond
his strength. The second year wore him out. The unlucky Protection Act--
an experiment for which the Liberal Cabinet and even its Radical
Members, Mr. Bright and Mr. Chamberlain, were every whit as chargeable
as himself--imposed a personal responsibility on him for every case out
of the many hundreds of prisoners made under the Act, which was in
itself intolerable. And while he tried in front to dam back the flood of
Irish outrage, English Radicalism at his heels was making the task
impossible. What he was doing satisfied nobody, least of all himself.
The official and land-owning classes in Ireland, the Tories in England,
raged because, in spite of the Act, outrage continued; the Radical party
in the country, which had always disliked the Protection Act, and the
Radical press, were on the lookout for every sign of failure; while the
daily struggle in the House with the Irish Members while Parliament was
sitting, in addition to all the rest, exhausted a man on whose decision
important executive acts, dealing really with a state of revolution,
were always depending. All through the second year, as it seemed to me,
he was overwhelmed by a growing sense of a monstrous and insoluble
problem, to which no one, through nearly another forty years--not Mr.
Gladstone with his Home Rule Acts, as we were soon to see, nor Mr.
Balfour's wonderful brain-power sustained by a unique temperament--was
to find the true key. It is not found yet. Twenty years of Tory
Government practically solved the Land Question and agricultural Ireland
has begun to be rich. But the past year has seen an Irish rebellion; a
Home Rule Act has at last, after thirty years, been passed, and is dead
before its birth; while at the present moment an Irish Convention is
sitting.[1] Thirty-six years have gone since my husband and I walked
with William Forster through the Phoenix Park, over the spot where, a
year later, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke were murdered. And
still the Aeschylean "curse" goes on, from life to life, from Government
to Government. When will the Furies of the past become the "kind
goddesses" of the future--and the Irish and English peoples build them a
shrine of reconciliation?
[Footnote 1: These words were written in the winter of 1917. At the
present moment (June, 1918) we have just seen the deportation of the
Sinn Feiners, and are still expecting yet another Home Rule Bill!]
With such thoughts one looks back over the past. Amid its darkness, I
shall always see the pathetic figure of William Forster, the man of
Quaker training, at grips with murder and anarchy; the man of sensitive,
affectionate spirit, weighed down under the weight of rival appeals, now
from the side of democracy, now from the side of authority; bitterly
conscious, as an English Radical, of his breach with Radicalism; still
more keenly sensitive, as a man responsible for the executive government
of a country, in which the foundations had given way, to that atmosphere
of cruelty and wrong in which the Land League moved, and to the hideous
instances poured every day into his ears.
He bore it for more than a year after we saw him in Ireland at his
thankless work. It was our first year in London, and we were near enough
to watch closely the progress of his fight. But it was a fight not to be
won. The spring of 1882 saw his resignation--on May 2d--followed on May
6th by the Phoenix Park murders and the long and gradual disintegration
of the powerful Ministry of 1880, culminating in the Home Rule disaster
of 1886. Mr. Churchill in the _Life_ of his father, Lord Randolph, says
of Mr. Forster's resignation, "he passed out of the Ministry to become
during the rest of Parliament one of its most dangerous and vigilant
opponents." The physical change, indeed, caused by the Irish struggle,
which was for a time painfully evident to the House of Commons, seemed
to pass away with rest and travel. The famous attack he made on Parnell
in the spring of 1883, as the responsible promoter of outrage in
Ireland, showed certainly no lack of power--rather an increase. I
happened to be in the House the following day, to hear Parnell's reply.
I remember my uncle's taking me down with him to the House, and begging
a seat for me in Mrs. Brand's gallery. The figure of Parnell; the
speech, nonchalant, terse, defiant, without a single grace of any kind,
his hands in the pockets of his coat; and the tense silence of the
crowded House, remain vividly with me. Afterward my uncle came up-stairs
for me, and we descended toward Palace Yard through various side-
passages. Suddenly a door communicating with the House itself opened in
front of us, and Parnell came out. My uncle pressed my arm and we held
back, while Parnell passed by, somberly absorbed, without betraying by
the smallest movement or gesture any recognition of my uncle's identity.
In other matters--Gordon, Imperial Federation, the Chairmanship of the
Manchester Ship Canal, and the rest--William Forster showed, up till
1885, what his friends fondly hoped was the promise of renewed and
successful work. But in reality he never recovered Ireland. The mark of
those two years had gone too deep. He died in April, 1886, just before
the introduction of the Home Rule Bill, and I have always on the retina
of the inward eye the impression of a moment at the western door of
Westminster Abbey, after the funeral service. The flower-heaped coffin
had gone through. My aunt and her adopted children followed it. After
them came Mr. Gladstone, with other members of the Cabinet. At the
threshold Mr. Gladstone moved forward, and took my aunt's hand, bending
over it bareheaded. Then she went with the dead, and he turned away
toward the House of Commons. To those of us who remembered what the
relations of the dead and the living had once been, and how they had
parted, there was a peculiar pathos in the little scene.
A few days later Mr. Gladstone brought in the Home Rule Bill, and the
two stormy months followed which ended in the Liberal Unionist split and
the defeat of the Bill on June 7th by thirty votes, and were the prelude
to the twenty years of Tory Government. If William Forster had lived,
there is no doubt that he must have played a leading part in the
struggles of that and subsequent sessions. In 1888 Mr. Balfour said to
my husband, after some generous words on the part played by Forster in
those two terrible years: "Forster's loss was irreparable to us [i.e.,
to the Unionist party]. If he and Fawcett had lived, Gladstone could not
have made head."
It has been, I think, widely recognized by men of all parties in recent
years that personally William Forster bore the worst of the Irish day,
whatever men may think of his policy. But, after all, it is not for
this, primarily, that England remembers him. His monument is
everywhere--in the schools that have covered the land since 1870, when
his great Act was passed. And if I have caught a little picture from the
moment when death forestalled that imminent parting between himself and
the great leader he had so long admired and followed, which life could
only have broadened, let me match it by an earlier and happier one,
borrowed from a letter of my own, written to my father when I was
eighteen, and describing the bringing in of the Education Act.
He sat down amidst loud cheering.... _Gladstone pulled him down with
a sort of hug of delight._ It is certain that he is very much
pleased with the Bill, and, what is of great consequence, that he
thinks the Government has throughout been treated with great
consideration in it. After the debate he said to Uncle F., "Well, I
think our pair of ponies will run through together!"
Gladstone's "pony" was, of course, the Land Act of 1870.
THE END OF VOL. I