A Writer's Recollections Volume II Part 1

A Writer's Recollections.

Volume II.

by Mrs. Humphry Ward.

CHAPTER I

LONDON IN THE 'EIGHTIES

The few recollections of William Forster that I have put together in the preceding volume lead naturally, perhaps, to some account of my friends.h.i.+p and working relations at this time with Forster's most formidable critic in the political press--Mr. John Morley, now Lord Morley. It was in the late 'seventies, I think, that I first saw Mr.

Morley. I sat next him at the Master's dinner-table, and the impression he made upon me was immediate and lasting. I trust that a great man, to whom I owed much, will forgive me for dwelling on some of the incidents of literary comrades.h.i.+p which followed!

My husband and I, on the way home, compared notes. We felt that we had just been in contact with a singular personal power combined with a moral atmosphere which had in it both the bracing and the charm that, physically, are the gift of the heights. The "austere" Radical, indeed, was there. With regard to certain vices and corruptions of our life and politics, my uncle might as well have used Mr. Morley's name as that of Mr. Frederick Harrison, when he presented us, in "Friends.h.i.+p's Garland,"

with Mr. Harrison setting up a guillotine in his back garden. There was something--there always has been something--of the somber intensity of the prophet in Mr. Morley. Burke drew, as we all remember, an ineffaceable picture of Marie Antoinette's young beauty as he saw it in 1774, contrasting it with the "abominable scenes" amid which she perished. Mr. Morley's comment is:

But did not the protracted agonies of a nation deserve the tribute of a tear? As Paine asked, were men to weep over the plumage and forget the dying bird? ... It was no idle abstraction, no metaphysical right of man for which the French cried, but only the practical right of being permitted, by their own toil, to save themselves and the little ones about their knees from hunger and cruel death.

The cry of the poor, indeed, against the rich and tyrannous, the cry of the persecuted Liberal, whether in politics or religion, against his oppressors--it used to seem to me, in the 'eighties, when, to my pleasure and profit, I was often a.s.sociated with Mr. Morley, that in his pa.s.sionate response to this double appeal lay the driving impulse of his life and the secret of his power over others. While we were still at Oxford he had brought out most of his books: _On Compromise_--the fierce and famous manifesto of 1874--and the well-known volumes on the Encyclopedists, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot. It was not for nothing that he had been a member of Pattison's college; and a follower of John Stuart Mill. The will to look the grimmest facts of life and destiny in the face, without flinching, and the resolve to accept no "anodyne" from religion or philosophy, combined with a ceaseless interest in the human fate and the human story, and a natural, inbred sympathy for the many against the few, for the unfortunate against the prosperous; it was these ardors and the burning sincerity with which he felt them, that made him so great a power among us, his juniors by half a generation. I shall never lose the impression that _Compromise_, with its almost savage appeal for sincerity in word and deed, made upon me--an impression which had its share in _Robert Elsmere_.

But together with this tragic strenuousness there was always the personal magic which winged it and gave it power. Mr. Morley has known all through his life what it was to be courted, by men and women alike, for the mere pleasure of his company; in which he resembled another man whom both he and I knew well--Sir Alfred Lyall. It is well known that Mr. Gladstone was fascinated by the combination in his future biographer of the Puritan, the man of iron conviction, and the delightful man of letters. And in my own small sphere I realized both aspects of Mr.

Morley during the 'eighties. Just before we left Oxford I had begun to write reviews and occasional notes for the _Pall Mall_, which he was then editing; after we settled in London, and he had become also editor of _Macmillan_, he asked me, to my no little conceit, to write a monthly _causerie_ on a book or books for that magazine. I never succeeded in writing nearly so many; but in two years I contributed perhaps eight or ten papers--until I became absorbed in _Robert Elsmere_ and Mr. Morley gave up journalism for politics. During that time my pleasant task brought me into frequent contact with my editor. Nothing could have been kinder than his letters; at the same time there was scarcely one of them that did not convey some hint, some touch of the critical goad, invaluable to the recipient. I wrote him a letter of wailing when he gave up the editors.h.i.+p and literature and became Member for Newcastle.

Such a fall it seemed to me then! But Mr. Morley took it patiently. "Do not lament over your friend, but pray for him!" As, indeed, one might well do, in the case of one who for a few brief months--in 1886--was to be Chief Secretary for Ireland, and again in 1892-95.

It was, indeed, in connection with Ireland that I became keenly and personally aware of that other side of Mr. Morley's character--the side which showed him the intransigent supporter of liberty at all costs and all hazards. It was, I suppose, the brilliant and pitiless attacks in the _Pall Mall_ on Mr. Forster's Chief-Secretarys.h.i.+p, which, as much as anything else, and together with what they reflected in the Cabinet, weakened my uncle's position and ultimately led to his resignation in the spring of 1882. Many of Mr. Forster's friends and kinsfolk resented them bitterly; and among the kinsfolk, one of them, I have reason to know, made a strong private protest. Mr. Morley's att.i.tude in reply could only have been that which is well expressed by a sentence of Darmesteter's about Renan: "So pliant in appearance, so courteous in manner, he became a bar of iron as soon as one sought to wrest from him an act or word contrary to the intimate sense of his conscience."

But no man has a monopoly of conscience. The tragedy was that here were two men, both democrats, both humanitarians, but that an executive office, in a time of hideous difficulty, had been imposed upon the one, from which the other--his critic--was free. Ten years later, when Mr.

Morley was Chief Secretary, it was pointed out that the same statesman who had so sincerely and vehemently protested in the case of William Forster and Mr. Balfour against the revival of "obsolete" statutes, and the suppression of public meetings, had himself been obliged to put obsolete statutes in operation sixteen times, and to prohibit twenty-six public meetings. These, however, are the whirligigs of politics, and no politician escapes them.

In my eyes Lord Morley's crowning achievement in literature is his biography of Mr. Gladstone. How easy it would have been to smother Mr.

Gladstone in stale politics!--and how stale politics may become in that intermediate stage before they pa.s.s finally into history! English political literature is full of biography of this kind. The three notable exceptions of recent years which occur to me are Mr. Churchill's _Life_ of his father, the Disraeli biography still in progress, and the _Gladstone_. But it would be difficult indeed to "stale" the story of either Lord Randolph or Dizzy. A biographer would have to set about it of malice prepense. In the case, however, of Mr. Gladstone, the danger was more real. Anglican orthodoxy, eminent virtue, unfailing decorum; a comparatively weak sense of humor, and a literary gift much inferior to his oratorical gift, so that the most famous of his speeches are but cold reading now; interminable sentences, and an unfailing relish for detail all important in its day, but long since dead and buried; the kind of biography that, with this material, half a dozen of Mr.

Gladstone's colleagues might have written of him, for all his greatness, rises formidably on the inward eye. The younger generation waiting for the historian to come--except in the case of those whose professional duty as politicians it would have been to read it--might quite well have yawned and pa.s.sed by.

But Mr. Morley's literary instinct, which is the artistic instinct, solved the problem. The most interesting half of the book will always, I think, be the later half. In the great matters of his hero's earlier career--Free Trade, the Crimean War, the early budgets, the slow development of the Liberal leader from the Church and State Conservative of 1832, down to the franchise battle of the 'sixties and the "great Ministry," as Mr. Morley calls it, of 1868, the story is told, indeed, perhaps here and there at too great length, yet with unfailing ease and lucidity. The teller, however, is one who, till the late 'seventies, was only a spectator, and, on the whole, from a distance, of what he is describing, who was indeed most of the time pursuing his own special aims--i.e., the hewing down of orthodoxy and tradition, together with the preaching of a frank and uncompromising agnosticism, in the _Fortnightly Review_; aims which were, of all others, most opposed to Mr. Gladstone's. But with the 'eighties everything changes. Mr. Morley becomes a great part of what he tells. During the intermediate stage--marked by his editors.h.i.+p of the _Pall Mall Gazette_--the tone of the biography grows sensibly warmer and more vivid, as the writer draws nearer and nearer to the central scene; and with Mr. Morley's election to Newcastle and his acceptance of the Chief-Secretarys.h.i.+p in 1885, the book becomes the fascinating record of not one man, but two, and that without any intrusion whatever on the rights of the main figure. The dreariness of the Irish struggle is lightened by touch after touch that only Mr. Morley could have given. Take that picture of the somber, discontented Parnell, coming, late in the evening, to Mr. Morley's room in the House of Commons, to complain of the finance of the Home Rule Bill--Mr. Gladstone's entrance at 10.30 P.M., after an exhausting day--and he, the man of seventy-seven, sitting down to work between the Chief Secretary and the Irish leader, till at last, with a sigh of weariness at nearly 1 A.M., the tired Prime Minister pleads to go to bed. Or that most dramatic story, later on, of Committee Room No. 15, where Mr. Morley becomes the reporter to Mr. Gladstone of that moral and political tragedy, the fall of Parnell; or a hundred other sharp lights upon the inner and human truth of things, as it lay behind the political spectacle. All through the later chapters, too, the happy use of conversations between the two men on literary and philosophical matters relieves what might have been the tedium of the end. For these vivid notes of free talk not only bring the living Gladstone before you in the most varied relation to his time; they keep up a perpetually interesting comparison in the reader's mind between the hero and his biographer. One is as eager to know what Mr. Morley is going to say as one is to listen to Mr. Gladstone. The two men, with their radical differences and their pa.s.sionate sympathies, throw light on each other, and the agreeable pages achieve a double end, without ever affecting the real unity of the book. Thus handled, biography, so often the drudge of literature, rises into its high places and becomes a delight instead of an edifying or informing necessity.

I will add one other recollection of this early time--i.e., that in 1881 the reviewing of Mr. Morley's _Cobden_ in the _Times_ fell to my husband, and as those were the days of many-column reviews, and as the time given for the review was _exceedingly_ short, it could only be done at all by a division of labor. We divided the sheets of the book, and we just finished in time to let my husband rush off to Printing House Square and correct the proofs as they went through the press for the morning's issue. In those days, as is well known, the _Times_ went to press much later than now, and a leader-writer rarely got home before 4, and sometimes 5, A.M.

I find it extremely difficult, as I look back, to put any order into the crowding memories of those early years in London. They were extraordinarily stimulating to us both, and years of great happiness. At home our children were growing up; our own lives were branching out into new activities and bringing us always new friends, and a more interesting share in that "great mundane movement" which Mr. Bottles believed would perish without him. Our connection with the _Times_ and with the Forsters, and the many new acquaintances and friends we made at this time in that happy meeting-ground of men and causes--Mrs. Jeune's drawing-room--opened to us the world of politicians; while my husband's four volumes on _The English Poets_, published just as we left Oxford, volumes to which all the most prominent writers of the day had contributed, together with the ever-delightful fact that Matthew Arnold was my uncle, brought us the welcome of those of our own _metier_ and way of life; and when in 1884 my husband became art critic of the paper, a function which he filled for more than five and twenty years, fresh doors opened on the already crowded scene, and fresh figures stepped in.

The setting of it all was twofold--in the first place, our dear old house in Russell Square, and, in the next, the farm on Rodborough Common, four miles from G.o.dalming, where, amid a beauty of gorse and heather that filled every sense on a summer day with the mere joy of breathing and looking, our children and we spent the holiday hours of seven goodly years. The Russell Square house has been, so to speak, twice demolished and twice buried, since we lived in it. Some of its stones must still lie deep under the big hotel which now towers on its site. That it does not still exist somewhere, I can hardly believe. The westerly sun seems to me still to be pouring into the beautiful little hall, built and decorated about 1750, with its panels of free scrollwork in blue and white, and to be still glancing through the drawing-rooms to the little powder-closet at the end, my tiny workroom, where I first sketched the plan of _Robert Elsmere_ for my sister Julia Huxley, and where, after three years, I wrote the last words. If I open the door of the back drawing-room, there, to the right, is the children's school-room. I see them at their lessons, and the fine plane-trees that look in at the window. And up-stairs there are the pleasant bedrooms and the nurseries. It was born, the old house, in the year of the Young Pretender, and, after serving six generations, perhaps as faithfully as it served us, it "fell on sleep." There should be a special Elysium, surely, for the houses where the fates have been kind and where people have been happy; and a special Tartarus for those--of Oedipus or Atreus--in which "old, unhappy, far-off things" seem to be always poisoning the present.

As to Borough Farm--now the head-quarters of the vast camp which stretches to Hindhead--it stood then in an unspoiled wilderness of common and wood, approached only by what we called "the sandy track"

from the main Portsmouth Road, with no neighbors for miles but a few scattered cottages. Its fate had been harder than that of 61 Russell Square. The old London house has gone clean out of sight, translated, whole and fair, into a world of memory. But Borough and the common are still here--as war has made them. Only--may I never see them again!

It was in 1882, the year of Tel-el-Kebir, when we took Peperharrow Rectory (the Murewell Vicarage of _Robert Elsmere_) for the summer, that we first came across Borough Farm. We left it in 1889. I did a great deal of work, there and in London, in those seven years. The _Macmillan_ papers I have already spoken of. They were on many subjects--Tennyson's "Becket," Mr. Pater's "Marius," "The Literature of Introspection," Jane Austen, Keats, Gustavo Becquer, and various others. I still kept up my Spanish to some extent, and I twice examined--in 1882 and 1888--for the Taylorian scholars.h.i.+p in Spanish at Oxford, our old friend, Doctor Kitchin, afterward Dean of Durham, writing to me with glee that I should be "making history" as "the first woman examiner of men at either University." My colleague on the first occasion was the old Spanish scholar, Don Pascual de Gayangos, to whom the calendaring of the Spanish MSS. in the British Museum had been largely intrusted; and the second time, Mr. York Powell of Christ Church--I suppose one of the most admirable Romance scholars of the time--was a.s.sociated with me. But if I remember right, I set the papers almost entirely, and wrote the report on both occasions. It gave me a feeling of safety in 1888, when my knowledge, such as it was, had grown very rusty, that Mr. York Powell overlooked the papers, seeing that to set Scholars.h.i.+p questions for postgraduate candidates is not easy for one who has never been through any proper "mill"! But they pa.s.sed his scrutiny satisfactorily, and in 1888 we appointed as Taylorian Scholar a man to whom for years I confidently looked for _the_ history of Spain--combining both the Spanish and Arabic sources--so admirable had his work been in the examination. But, alack! that great book has still to be written. For Mr. Butler Clarke died prematurely in 1904, and the hope died with him.

For the _Times_ I wrote a good many long, separate articles before 1884, on "Spanish Novels," "American Novels," and so forth; the "leader" on the death of Anthony Trollope; and various elaborate reviews of books on Christian origins, a subject on which I was perpetually reading, always with the same vision before me, growing in clearness as the years pa.s.sed.

But my first steps toward its realization were to begin with the short story of _Miss Bretherton_, published in 1884, and then the translation of Amiel's _Journal Intime_, which appeared in 1885. _Miss Bretherton_ was suggested to me by the brilliant success in 1883 of Mary Anderson, and by the controversy with regard to her acting--as distinct from her delightful beauty and her attractive personality--which arose between the fastidious few and the enchanted many. I maintained then, and am quite sure now, that Isabel Bretherton was in no sense a portrait of Miss Anderson. She was to me a being so distinct from the living actress that I offered her to the world with an entire good faith, which seems to myself now, perhaps thirty years later, hardly less surprising than it did to the readers of the time. For undoubtedly the situation in the novel was developed out of the current dramatic debate. But it became to me just _a_ situation--_a_ problem. It was really not far removed from Diderot's problem in the _Paradoxe sur le Comedien_. What is the relation of the actor to the part represented? One actress is plain--Rachel; another actress is beautiful, and more than beautiful, delightful--Miss Anderson. But all the time, is there or is there not a region in which all these considerations count for nothing in comparison with certain others? Is there a dramatic _art_--exacting, difficult, supreme--or is there not? The choice of the subject, at that time, was, it may be confessed, a piece of navete, and the book itself was young and nave throughout. But something in it has kept it in circulation all this while; and for me it marks with a white stone the year in which it appeared. For it brought me my first critical letter from Henry James; it was the first landmark in our long friends.h.i.+p.

Beloved Henry James! It seems to me that my original meeting with him was at the Andrew Langs' in 1882. He was then forty-two, in the prime of his working life, and young enough to be still "Henry James, Junior," to many. I cannot remember anything else of the Langs' dinner-party except that we were also invited to meet the author of _Vice Versa_, "which Mr.

Lang thinks"--as I wrote to my mother--"the best thing of its kind since d.i.c.kens." But shortly after that, Mr. James came to see us in Russell Square and a little incident happened which stamped itself for good on a still plastic memory. It was a very hot day; the western sun was beating on the drawing-room windows, though the room within was comparatively dark and cool. The children were languid with the heat, and the youngest, Janet, then five, stole into the drawing-room and stood looking at Mr. James. He put out a half-conscious hand to her; she came nearer, while we talked on. Presently she climbed on his knee. I suppose I made a maternal protest. He took no notice, and folded his arm round her. We talked on; and presently the abnormal stillness of Janet recalled her to me and made me look closely through the dark of the room. She was fast asleep, her pale little face on the young man's shoulder, her long hair streaming over his arm. Now Janet was a most independent and critical mortal, no indiscriminate "climber up of knees"; far from it. Nor was Mr. James an indiscriminate lover of children; he was not normally much at home with them, though _always_ good to them. But the childish instinct had in fact divined the profound tenderness and chivalry which were the very root of his nature; and he was touched and pleased, as one is pleased when a robin perches on one's hand.

From that time, as the precious bundle of his letters shows, he became the friend of all of us--myself, my husband, and the children; though with an increased intimacy from the 'nineties onward. In a subsequent chapter I will try and summarize the general mark left on me by his fruitful and stainless life. His letter to me about _Miss Bretherton_ is dated December 9, 1884. He had already come to see me about it, and there was never any critical discussion like his, for its suggestion of a hundred points of view, its flas.h.i.+ng of unexpected lights, its witness to the depth and richness of his own artistic knowledge.

The whole thing is delicate and distinguished [he wrote me] and the reader has the pleasure and security of feeling that he is with a woman (distinctly a woman!) who knows how (rare bird!) to write. I think your idea, your situation, interesting in a high degree--But [and then come a series of most convincing "buts"! He objects strongly to the happy ending]. I wish that your actress had been carried away from Kendal [her critical lover, who wors.h.i.+ps herself, but despises her art] altogether, carried away by the current of her artistic life, the sudden growth of her power, and the excitement, the ferocity and egotism (those of the artist realizing success, I mean; I allude merely to the normal dose of those elements) which the effort to create, to "arrive" (once she had had a glimpse of her possible successes) would have brought with it. (Excuse that abominable sentence.) Isabel, the Isabel you describe, has too much to spare for Kendal--Kendal being what he is; and one doesn't feel her, see her, enough, as the pus.h.i.+ng actress, the _cabotine_! She lapses toward him as if she were a failure, whereas you make her out a great success. No!--she wouldn't have thought so much of him at such a time as that--though very possibly she would have come back to him later.

The whole letter, indeed, is full of admirable criticism, sprung from a knowledge of life, which seemed to me, his junior by twelve years, unapproachably rich and full. But how grateful I was to him for the criticism!--how gracious and chivalrous was his whole att.i.tude toward the writer and the book! Indeed, as I look over the bundle of letters which concern this first novel of mine, I am struck by the good fortune which brought me such mingled chastening and praise, in such long letters, from judges so generous and competent. Henry James, Walter Pater, John Morley, "Mr. Creighton" (then Emmanuel Professor at Cambridge), Cotter Morrison, Sir Henry Taylor, Edmond Scherer--they are all there. Besides the renewal of the old throb of pleasure as one reads them, one feels a sort of belated remorse that so much trouble was taken for so slight a cause! Are there similar friends nowadays to help the first steps of a writer? Or is there no leisure left in this choked life of ours?

The decisive criticism, perhaps, of all, is that of Mr. Creighton: "I find myself carried away by the delicate feeling with which the development of character is traced." But--"You wrote this book as a critic not as a creator. It is a sketch of the possible worth of criticism in an unregenerate world. This was worth doing once; but if you are going on with novels you must throw criticism overboard and let yourself go, as a partner of common joys, common sorrows, and common perplexities. There--I have told you what I think, just as I think it."

_Miss Bretherton_ was a trial trip, and it taught me a good deal. When it came out I had nearly finished the translation of Amiel, which appeared in 1885, and in March of that year some old friends drove me up the remote Westmorland valley of Long Sleddale, at a moment when the blackthorn made lines of white along the lanes; and from that day onward the early chapters of _Robert Elsmere_ began to shape themselves in my mind. All the main ideas of the novel were already there. Elsmere was to be the exponent of a freer faith; Catharine had been suggested by an old friend of my youth; while Langham was the fruit of my long communing with the philosophic charm and the tragic impotence of Amiel. I began the book in the early summer of 1885, and thenceforward it absorbed me until its appearance in 1888.

The year 1885, indeed, was one of expanding horizons, of many new friends, of quickened pulses generally. The vastness of London and its myriad interests seemed to be invading our life more and more. I can recall one summer afternoon, in particular, when, as I was in a hansom driving idly westward toward Hyde Park Gate, thinking of a hundred things at once, this consciousness of _intensification_, of a heightened meaning in everything--the broad street, the crowd of moving figures and carriages, the houses looking down upon it--seized upon me with a rush.

"Yes, it is good--the mere living!" Joy in the infinite variety of the great city as compared with the "cloistered virtue" of Oxford; the sheer pleasure of novelty, of the kind new faces, and the social discoveries one felt opening on many sides; the delight of new perceptions, new powers in oneself--all this seemed to flower for me in those few minutes of reverie--if one can apply such a word to an experience so vivid. And meanwhile the same intensity of pleasure from nature that I had always been capable of flowed in upon me from new scenes; above all, from solitary moments at Borough Farm, in the heart of the Surrey commons, when the September heather blazed about me; or the first signs of spring were on the gorse and the budding trees; or beside some lonely pool; and always heightened now by the company of my children. It was a stage--a normal stage, in normal life. But I might have missed it so easily! The Fates were kind to us in those days.

As to the social scene, let me gather from it first a recollection of pure romance. One night at a London dinner-party I found myself sent down with a very stout gentleman, an American Colonel, who proclaimed himself an "esoteric Buddhist," and provoked in me a rapid and vehement dislike. I turned my back upon him and examined the table. Suddenly I became aware of a figure opposite to me, the figure of a young girl who seemed to me one of the most ravis.h.i.+ng creatures I had ever seen. She was very small, and exquisitely made. Her beautiful head, with its ma.s.s of light-brown hair; the small features and delicate neck; the clear, pale skin, the lovely eyes with rather heavy lids, which gave a slight look of melancholy to the face; the grace and fire of every movement when she talked; the dreamy silence into which she sometimes fell, without a trace of awkwardness or shyness. But how vain is any mere catalogue to convey the charm of Laura Tennant--the first Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton--to those who never saw her!

I asked to be introduced to her as soon as we left the dining-room, and we spent the evening in a corner together.

I fell in love with her there and then. The rare glimpses of her that her busy life and mine allowed made one of my chief joys thenceforward, and her early death was to me--as to so many, many others!--a grief never forgotten.

The recent biography of Alfred Lyttelton--War Minister in Mr. Balfour's latest Cabinet--skilfully and beautifully done by his second wife, has conveyed to the public of thirty years later some idea of Laura's imperishable charm. And I greatly hope that it may be followed some day by a collection of her letters, for there are many in existence, and, young as she was, they would, I believe, throw much light upon a crowded moment in our national life. Laura was the fourth daughter of Sir Charles Tennant, a rich Glasgow manufacturer, and the elder sister of Mrs. Asquith. She and her sisters came upon the scene in the early 'eighties; and without any other extrinsic advantage but that of wealth, which in this particular case would not have taken them very far, they made a conquest--the younger two, Laura and Margot, in particular--of a group of men and women who formed a kind of intellectual and social _elite_; who were all of them accomplished; possessed, almost all of them, of conspicuous good looks, or of the charm that counts as much; and among whom there happened to be a remarkable proportion of men who have since made their mark on English history. My generation knew them as "The Souls." "The Souls" were envied, mocked at, caricatured, by those who were not of them. They had their follies--why not? They were young, and it was their golden day. Their dislike of convention and routine had the effect on many--and those not fools--of making convention and routine seem particularly desirable. But there was not, I think, a young man or woman admitted to their inner ranks who did not possess in some measure a certain quality very difficult to isolate and define. Perhaps, to call it "disinterestedness" comes nearest. For they were certainly no seekers after wealth, or courters of the great. It might be said, of course, that they had no occasion; they had as much birth and wealth as any one need want, among themselves. But that does not explain it. For push and greed are among the commonest faults of an aristocracy. The immortal pages of Saint Simon are there to show it.

"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also," says the Gospel. Now the "treasure" among The Souls was, ultimately--or at least tended to be--something spiritual. The typical expression of it, at its best, is to be found in those exquisite last words left by Laura Lyttelton for her husband, which the second Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton has, as I think, so rightly published. That unique "will," which for thirty years before it appeared in print was known to a wide circle of persons, many of whom had never seen the living Laura, was the supreme expression of a quality which, in greater or lesser degree, The Souls seemed to demand of one another, and of those who wished to join their band. Yet, combined with this pa.s.sion, this poetry, this religious feeling, was first the maddest delight in simple things--in open air and physical exercise; then, a headlong joy in literature, art, music, acting; a perpetual spring of fun; and a hatred of all the solemn pretenses that too often make English society a weariness.

No doubt there is something--perhaps much--to be said on the other side.

But I do not intend to say it. I was never a Soul, nor could have been.

I came from too different a world. But there were a certain number of persons--of whom I was one--who were their "harborers" and spectators. I found delight in watching them. They were quite a new experience to me; and I saw them dramatically, like a scene in a play, full of fresh implications and suggestions. I find in an old letter to my mother an account of an evening at 40 Grosvenor Square, where the Tennants lived.

It was not an evening party--we joined a dinner party there, after dining somewhere else. So that the rooms were empty enough to let one see the pretty creatures gathered in it, to perfection. In the large drawing-room, which is really a ball-room with a polished floor, people were dancing, or thought-reading, or making music, as it pleased them.

Mr. Balfour was there, with whom we had made friends, as fellow-guests, on a week-end visit to Oxford, not long before; Alfred Lyttelton, then in the zenith of his magnificent youth; Lord Curzon, then plain Mr.

Curzon, and in the Foreign Office; Mr. Harry Gust; Mr. Rennell Rodd, now the British Amba.s.sador in Rome, and many others--a goodly company of young men in their prime. And among the women there was a very high proportion of beauty, but especially of grace. "The half-lit room, the dresses and the beauty," says my letter, "reminded one of some _festa_ painted by Watteau or Lancret." But with what a difference! For, after all, it was English, through and through.

A little after this evening, Laura Tennant came down to spend a day at Borough Farm with the children and me. Another setting! Our princ.i.p.al drawing-room there in summer was a sand-pit, shaded by an old ash-tree and haunted by innumerable sand-martins. It was Ascension Day, and the commons were a dream of beauty. Our guest, I find, was to have come down "with Mr. Balfour and Mr. Burne-Jones." But in the end she came down alone; and we talked all day, sitting under hawthorns white with bloom, wandering through rushy fields ablaze with marsh marigold and orchis.

She wrote to me the same evening after her return to London:

I sit with my eyes resting on the medieval purple of the sweet-breathing orchis you gave me, and my thoughts feasting on the wonderful beauty of the snowy blossom against the blue.... This has been a real Ascension Day.

Later in the year--in November--she wrote to me from Scotland--she was then twenty-one:

I am still in Scotland, but don't pity me, for I love it more than anything else in the wide world. If you could only hear the wind throwing his arm against my window, and sobbing down the glen. I think I shall never have a Lover I am so fond of as the wind. None ever serenaded me so divinely. And when I open my window wide and ask him what he wants, and tell him I am quite ready to elope with him now--this moment--he only moans and sighs thro' my outblown hair--and gives me neuralgia.... I read all day, except when I am out with my Lover, or playing with my little nephew and niece, both of whom I adore--for they are little poets. We have had a houseful ever since August, so I am delighted to get a little calm. It is so dreadful never, never to be alone--and really the housemaid would do just as well! and yet, whenever I go to my sanctum I am routed out as if I was of as much use as plums to plum pudding, and either made to play lawn-tennis or hide-and-seek, or to talk to a young man whose only idea of the Infinite is the Looking-gla.s.s. All these are the trials that attend the "young lady" of the house. Poor devil!

Forgive strong language--but really my sympathy is deep.

I have, however, some really nice friends here, and am not entirely discontented. Mr. Gerald Balfour left the other day. He is very clever--and quite beautiful--like a young G.o.d. I wonder if you know him. I know you know Arthur.... Lionel Tennyson, who was also here with Gerald Balfour, has a splendid humor--witty and "fin," which is rare in England. Lord Houghton, Alfred Lyttelton, G.o.dfrey Webb, George Curzon, the Chesterfields, the Hayters, Mary Gladstone, and a lot more have been here. I went north, too, to the land of Thule and was savagely happy. I wore no hat--no gloves--I bathed, fished, boated, climbed, and kissed the earth, and danced round a cairn. It was opposite Skye at a Heaven called Loch Ailsa.... Such beauty--such weather--such a fortnight will not come again. Perhaps it would be unjust to the crying world for one human being to have more of the Spirit of Delight; but one is glad to have tasted of the cup, and while it was in my hands I drank deeply.