A Writer's Recollections Volume II Part 3

Here, then, is the opening for suggestion--in connection with the various forms of imagination which enter into Literature; with poetry, and fiction, which, as Goethe saw, is really a form of poetry. And a quite legitimate opening. For to use it is to quicken the intellectual process itself, and to induce a larger number of minds to take part in it.

The problem, then, in intellectual poetry or fiction, is so to suggest the argument, that both the expert and the popular consciousness may feel its force, and to do this without overstepping the bounds of poetry or fiction; without turning either into mere ratiocination, and so losing the "simple, sensuous, pa.s.sionate" element which is their true life.

It was this problem which made _Robert Elsmere_ take three years to write, instead of one. Mr. Gladstone complained, in his famous review of it, that a majestic system which had taken centuries to elaborate, and gathered into itself the wisest brains of the ages, had gone down in a few weeks or months before the onslaught of the Squire's arguments; and that if the Squire's arguments were few, the orthodox arguments were fewer! The answer to the first part of the charge is that the well-taught schoolboy of to-day is necessarily wiser in a hundred respects than Sophocles or Plato, since he represents not himself, but the brainwork of a hundred generations since those great men lived. And as to the second, if Mr. Gladstone had seen the first redactions of the book--only if he had, I fear he would never have read it!--he would hardly have complained of lack of argument on either side, whatever he might have thought of its quality. Again and again I went on writing for hours, satisfying the logical sense in oneself, trying to put the arguments on both sides as fairly as possible, only to feel despairingly at the end that it must all come out. It might be decent controversy; but life, feeling, charm, _humanity_, had gone out of it; it had ceased, therefore, to be "making," to be literature.

So that in the long run there was no other method possible than suggestion--and, of course, _selection_!--as with all the rest of one's material. That being understood, what one had to aim at was so to use suggestion as to touch the two zones of thought--that of the scholar and that of what one may call the educated populace; who, without being scholars, were yet aware, more or less clearly, of what the scholars were doing. It is from these last that "atmosphere" and "diffusion"

come; the atmosphere and diffusion which alone make wide penetration for a book ill.u.s.trating an intellectual motive possible. I had to learn that, having read a great deal, I must as far as possible wipe out the traces of reading. All that could be done was to leave a few sign-posts as firmly planted as one could, so as to recall the real journey to those who already knew it, and, for the rest, to trust to the floating interest and pa.s.sion surrounding a great controversy--the _second_ religious battle of the nineteenth century--with which it had seemed to me, both in Oxford and in London, that the intellectual air was charged.

I grew very weary in the course of the long effort, and often very despairing. But there were omens of hope now and then; first, a letter from my dear eldest brother, the late W.T. Arnold, who died in 1904, leaving a record as journalist and scholar which has been admirably told by his intimate friend and colleague, Mr. (now Captain) C.E. Montague.

He and I had shared many intellectual interests connected with the history of the Empire. His monograph on _Roman Provincial Administration_, first written as an Arnold Essay, still holds the field; and in the realm of pure literature his one-volume edition of Keats is there to show his eagerness for beauty and his love of English verse. I sent him the first volume in proof, about a year before the book came out, and awaited his verdict with much anxiety. It came one May day in 1889. I happened to be very tired and depressed at the moment, and I remember sitting alone for a little while with the letter in my hand, without courage to open it. Then at last I opened it.

Warm congratulation--Admirable!--Full of character and color....

_Miss Bretherton_ was an intellectual exercise. This is quite a different affair, and has interested and touched me deeply, as I feel sure it will all the world. The biggest thing that--with a few other things of the same kind--has been done for years.

Well!--that was enough to go on with, to carry me through the last wrestle with proofs and revision. But by the following November nervous fatigue made me put work aside for a few weeks, and we went abroad for rest, only to be abruptly summoned home by my mother's state.

Thenceforward I lived a double life--the one overshadowed by my mother's approaching death, the other amid the agitation of the book's appearance and all the incidents of its rapid success.

I have already told the story in the Introduction to the Library Edition of _Robert Elsmere_, and I will only run through it here as rapidly as possible, with a few fresh incidents and quotations. There was never any doubt at all of the book's fate, and I may repeat again that, before Mr.

Gladstone's review of it, the three volumes were already in a third edition, the rush at all the libraries was in full course, and Matthew Arnold--so gay and kind, in those March weeks before his own sudden death!--had clearly foreseen the rising boom. "I shall take it with me to Bristol next week and get through it there, I hope [but he didn't achieve it!]. It is one of my regrets not to have known the Green of your dedication." And a week or two later he wrote an amusing letter to his sister, describing a country-house party at beautiful Wilton, Lord Pembroke's home near Salisbury, and the various stages in the book reached by the members of the party, including Mr. Goschen, who were all reading it, and all talking of it. I never, however, had any criticism of it from him, except of the first volume, which he liked. I doubt very much whether the second and third volumes would have appealed to him. My uncle was a Modernist long before the time. In _Literature and Dogma_ he threw out in detail much of the argument suggested in _Robert Elsmere_, but to the end of his life he was a contented member of the Anglican Church, so far as attendance at her services was concerned, and belief in her mission of "edification" to the English people. He had little sympathy with people who "went out." Like Mr. Jowett, he would have liked to see the Church slowly reformed and "modernized" from within. So that with the main theme of my book--that a priest who doubts must depart--he could never have had full sympathy. And in the course of years--as I showed in a later novel written twenty-four years after _Robert Elsmere_--I feel that I have very much come to agree with him!

These great national structures that we call churches are too precious for iconoclast handling, if any other method is possible. The strong a.s.sertion of individual liberty within them, as opposed to the attempt to break them down from without; that seems to me now the hopeful course. A few more heresy trials like those which sprang out of _Essays and Reviews_, or the persecution of Bishop Colenso, would let in fresh life and healing nowadays, as did those old stirrings of the waters. The first Modernist bishop who stays in his place forms a Modernist chapter and diocese around him, and fights the fight where he stands, will do more for liberty and faith in the Church, I now sadly believe, than those scores of brave "forgotten dead" who have gone out of her for conscience' sake, all these years.

But to return to the book. All through March the tide of success was rapidly rising; and when I was able to think of it I was naturally carried away by the excitement and astonishment of it. But with the later days of March a veil dropped between me and the book. My mother's suffering and storm-beaten life was coming rapidly to its close, and I could think of nothing else. In an interval of slight improvement, indeed, when it seemed as though she might rally for a time, I heard Mr.

Gladstone's name quoted for the first time in connection with the book.

It will be remembered that he was then out of office, having been overthrown on the Home Rule Question in 1886, and he happened to be staying for an Easter visit with the Warden of Keble, and Mrs. Talbot, who was his niece by marriage. I was with my mother, about a mile away, and Mrs. Talbot, who came to ask for news of her, reported to me that Mr. Gladstone was deep in the book. He was reading it, pencil in hand, marking all the pa.s.sages he disliked or quarreled with, with the Italian "_Ma_!"--and those he approved of with mysterious signs which she who followed him through the volumes could not always decipher. Mr. Knowles, she reported, the busy editor of the _Nineteenth Century_, was trying to persuade the great man to review it. But "Mr. G." had not made up his mind.

Then all was shut out again. Through many days my mother asked constantly for news of the book, and smiled with a flicker of her old brightness when anything pleased her in a letter or review. But finally there came long hours when to think or speak of it seemed sacrilege. And on April 7th she died.

The day after her death I saw Mr. Gladstone at Keble. We talked for a couple of hours, and then when I rose to go he asked if I would come again on the following morning before he went back to town. I had been deeply interested and touched, and I went again for another long visit.

My account, written down at the time, of the first day's talk, has been printed as an appendix to the Library Edition of the book. Of the second conversation, which was the more interesting of the two since we came to much closer quarters in it, my only record is the following letter to my husband:

I have certainly had a wonderful experience last night and this morning! Last night two hours' talk with Gladstone, this morning, again an hour and a half's strenuous argument, during which the great man got quite white sometimes and tremulous with interest and excitement.... The talk this morning was a battle royal over the book and Christian evidences. He was _very_ charming personally, though at times he looked stern and angry and white to a degree, so that I wondered sometimes how I had the courage to go on--the drawn brows were so formidable! There was one moment when he talked of "trumpery objections," in his most House of Commons manner. It was as I thought. The new lines of criticism are not familiar to him, and they really press him hard. He meets them out of Bishop Butler, and things a.n.a.logous. But there is a sense, I think, that question and answer don't fit, and with it ever-increasing interest and--sometimes--irritation. His own autobiographical reminiscences were wonderfully interesting, and his repet.i.tion of the 42d psalm--"Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks"--_grand_!

He said that he had never read any book on the hostile side written in such a spirit of, "generous appreciation" of the Christian side.

Yes, those were hours to which I shall always look back with grat.i.tude and emotion. Wonderful old man! I see him still standing, as I took leave of him, one hand leaning on the table beside him, his lined, pallid face and eagle eyes framed in his n.o.ble white hair, s.h.i.+ning amid the dusk of the room. "There are still two things left for me to do!" he said, finally, in answer to some remark of mine. "One is to carry Home Rule; the other is to prove the intimate connection between the Hebrew and Olympian revelations!"

Could any remark have been more characteristic of that double life of his--the life of the politician and the life of the student--which kept him fresh and eager to the end of his days? Characteristic, too, of the amateurish element in all his historical and literary thinking. In dealing "with early Greek mythology, genealogy, and religion," says his old friend, Lord Bryce, Mr. Gladstone's theories "have been condemned by the unanimous voice of scholars as fantastic." Like his great contemporary, Newman--on whom a good deal of our conversation turned--he had no critical sense of evidence; and when he was writing on _The Impregnable Rock of Scripture_ Lord Acton, who was staying at Hawarden at the time, ran after him in vain, with Welhausen or Kuenen under his arm, if haply he might persuade his host to read them.

But it was not for that he was born; and those who look back to the mighty work he did for his country in the forty years preceding the Home Rule split can only thank the Powers "that hold the broad Heaven" for the part which the pa.s.sion of his Christian faith, the eagerness of his love for letters--for the Homer and the Dante he knew by heart--played in refres.h.i.+ng and sustaining so great a soul. I remember returning, shaken and uplifted, through the April air, to the house where my mother lay in death; and among my old papers lies a torn fragment of a letter thirty years old, which I began to write to Mr. Gladstone a few days later, and was too shy to send.

This morning [says the letter, written from Fox How, on the day of my mother's funeral] we laid my dear Mother to rest in her grave among the mountains, and this afternoon I am free to think a little over what has befallen me personally and separately during this past week. It is not that I wish to continue our argument--quite the contrary. As I walked home from Keble on Monday morning, I felt it a hard fate that I should have been arguing, rather than listening....

Argument, perhaps, was inevitable, but none the less I felt afterward as though there were something incongruous and unfitting in it. In a serious discussion it seemed to me right to say plainly what I felt and believed; but if in doing so I have given pain, or expressed myself on any point with a too great trenchancy and confidence, please believe that I regret it very sincerely. I shall always remember our talks. If consciousness lasts "beyond these voices"--my inmost hope as well as yours--we shall know of all these things. Till then I cherish the belief that we are not so far apart as we seem.

But there the letter abruptly ended, and was never sent. I probably shrank from the added emotion of sending it, and I found it again the other day in a packet that had not been looked at for many years. I print it now as evidence of the effect that Mr. Gladstone's personality could produce on one forty years younger than himself, and in sharp rebellion at that time against his opinions and influence in two main fields--religion and politics.

Four days later, Monday, April 16th, my husband came into my room with the face of one bringing ill tidings. "Matthew Arnold is dead!" My uncle, as many will remember, had fallen suddenly in a Liverpool street while walking with his wife to meet his daughter, expected that day from America, and without a sound or movement had pa.s.sed away. The heart disease which killed so many of his family was his fate also. A merciful one it always seemed to me, which took him thus suddenly and without pain from the life in which he had played so fruitful and blameless a part. That word "blameless" has always seemed to me particularly to fit him. And the quality to which it points was what made his humor so sharp-tipped and so harmless. He had no hidden interest to serve--no malice--not a touch, not a trace of cruelty--so that men allowed him to jest about their most sacred idols and superst.i.tions and bore him no grudge.

To me his death at that moment was an irreparable personal loss. For it was only since our migration to London that we had been near enough to him to see much of him. My husband and he had become fast friends, and his visits to Russell Square, and our expeditions to Cobham, where he lived, in the pretty cottage beside the Mole, are marked in memory with a very white stone. The only drawback to the Cobham visits were the "dear, dear boys!"--i.e., the dachshunds, Max and Geist, who, however adorable in themselves, had no taste for visitors and no intention of letting such intruding creatures interfere with their possession of their master. One would go down to Cobham, eager to talk to "Uncle Matt"

about a book or an article--covetous, at any rate, of _some_ talk with him undisturbed. And it would all end in a breathless chase after Max, through field after field where the little wretch was harrying either sheep or cows, with the dear poet, hoa.r.s.e with shouting, at his heels.

The dogs were always _in the party_, talked to, caressed, or scolded exactly like spoiled children; and the cat of the house was almost equally dear. Once, at Harrow, the then ruling cat--a tom--broke his leg, and the house was in lamentation. The vet was called in, and hurt him horribly. Then Uncle Matt ran up to town, met Professor Huxley at the Athenaeum, and anxiously consulted him. "I'll go down with you,"

said Huxley. The two traveled back instanter to Harrow, and, while Uncle Matt held the cat, Huxley--who had begun life, let it be remembered, as surgeon to the _Rattlesnake_!--examined him, the two black heads together. There is a rumor that Charles Kingsley was included in the consultation. Finally the limb was put in splints and left to nature.

All went well.

n.o.body who knew the modest Cobham cottage while its master lived will ever forget it; the garden beside the Mole, where every bush and flower-bed had its history; and that little study-dressing-room where some of the best work in nineteenth-century letters was done. Not a great mult.i.tude of books, but all cherished, all read, each one the friend of its owner. No untidiness anywhere; the ordinary litter of an author's room was quite absent. For long after his death the room remained just as he had left it, his coat hanging behind the door, his slippers beside his chair, the last letters he had received, and all the small and simple equipment of his writing-table ready to his hand, waiting for the master who would never know "a day of return." In that room--during fifteen years, he wrote _G.o.d and the Bible_, the many suggestive and fruitful Essays, including the American addresses, of his later years--seeds, almost all of them, dropped into the mind of his generation for a future harvesting; a certain number of poems, including the n.o.ble elegiac poem on Arthur Stanley's death, "Geist's Grave" and "Poor Matthias"; a ma.s.s of writing on education which is only now, helped by the war, beginning to tell on the English mind; and the endlessly kind and gracious letters to all sorts and conditions of men--and women--the literary beginner, the young teacher wanting advice, even the stranger greedy for an autograph. Every little playful note to friends or kinsfolk he ever wrote was dear to those who received it; but he--the most fastidious of men--would have much disliked to see them all printed at length in Mr. Russell's indiscriminate volumes. He talked to me once of his wish to make a small volume--"such a little one!"--of George Sand's best letters. And that is just what he would have wished for himself.

Among the letters that reached me on my uncle's death was one from Mr.

Andrew Lang denouncing almost all the obituary notices of him. "n.o.body seems to know that he _was a poet_!" cries Mr. Lang. But his poetic blossoming was really over with the 'sixties, and in the hubbub that arose round his critical and religious work--his attempts to drive "ideas" into the English mind, in the 'sixties and 'seventies--the main fact that he, with Browning and Tennyson, _stood for English poetry_, in the mid-nineteenth century, was often obscured and only slowly recognized. But it was recognized, and he himself had never any real doubt of it, from the moment when he sent the "Strayed Reveller" to my father in New Zealand in 1849, to those later times when his growing fame was in all men's ears. He writes to his sister in 1878:

It is curious how the public is beginning to take my poems to its bosom after long years of comparative neglect. The wave of thought and change has rolled on until people begin to find a significance and an attraction in what had none for them formerly.

But he had put it himself in poetry long before--this slow emergence above the tumult and the shouting of the stars that are to s.h.i.+ne upon the next generation. Mr. Garnett, in the careful and learned notice of my uncle's life and work in the _Dictionary of National Biography_, says of his poetry that "most of it" is "immortal." This, indeed, is the great, the mystic word that rings in every poet's ear from the beginning. And there is scarcely any true poet who is not certain that sooner or later his work will "put on immortality." Matthew Arnold expressed, I think, his own secret faith, in the beautiful lines of his early poem, "The Baccha.n.a.lia--or the New Age":

The epoch ends, the world is still.

The age has talk'd and work'd its fill--

And in the after-silence sweet, Now strife is hush'd, our ears doth meet, Ascending pure, the bell-like fame Of this or that down-trodden name, Delicate spirits, push'd away In the hot press of the noonday.

And o'er the plain, where the dead age Did its now silent warfare wage-- O'er that wide plain, now wrapt in gloom, Where many a splendor finds its tomb, Many spent fames and fallen nights-- The one or two immortal lights Rise slowly up into the sky To s.h.i.+ne there everlastingly, Like stars over the bounding hill.

The epoch ends, the world is still.

It was on the way home from Laleham, after my uncle's burial there, that Mr. George Smith gave me fresh and astonis.h.i.+ng news of _Robert Elsmere's_ success. The circulating libraries were being fretted to death for copies, and the whirlwind of talk was constantly rising. A little later in the same month of April, if I remember right, I was going from Waterloo to G.o.dalming and Borough Farm, when, just as the train was starting, a lady rushed along the platform, waving a book aloft and signaling to another lady who was evidently waiting to see her off. "I've got it--I've got it!" she said, triumphantly. "Get in, ma-am--get in!" said the porter, bundling her into the compartment where I sat alone. Then she hung out of the window, breathlessly talking.

"They told me no chance for weeks--not the slightest! Then--just as I was standing at the counter, who should come up but somebody bringing back the first volume. Of course it was promised to somebody else; but as I was _there_, I laid hands on it, and here it is!" The train went off, my companion plunged into her book, and I watched her as she turned the pages of the familiar green volume. We were quite alone. I had half a mind to say something revealing; but on the whole it was more amusing to sit still!

And meanwhile letters poured in.

"I try to write upon you," wrote Mr. Gladstone; "wholly despair of satisfying myself--cannot quite tell whether to persevere or desist."

Mr. Pater let me know that he was writing on it for the _Guardian_. "It is a _chef d'oeuvre_ after its kind, and justifies the care you have devoted to it." "I see," said Andrew Lang, on April 30th, "that _R.E._ is running into as many editions as _The Rights of Man_ by Tom Paine....

You know he is not _my_ sort (at least unless you have a ghost, a murder, a duel, and some savages)." Burne-Jones wrote, with the fun and sweetness that made his letters a delight:

Not one least bitter word in it!--threading your way through intricacies of parsons so finely and justly.... As each new one came on the scene, I wondered if you would fall upon him and rend him--but you never do.... Certainly I never thought I should devour a book about parsons--my desires lying toward--"time upon once there was a dreadful pirate"--but I am back again five and thirty years and feeling softened and subdued with memories you have wakened up so piercingly--and I wanted to tell you this.

And in the same packet lie letters from the honored and beloved Edward Talbot, now Bishop of Winchester, Stopford Brooke--the Master of Balliol--Lord Justice Bowen--Professor Huxley--and so many, many more.

Best of all, Henry James! His two long letters I have already printed, naturally with his full leave and blessing, in the Library Edition of the novel. Not his the grudging and faultfinding temper that besets the lesser man when he comes to write of his contemporaries! Full of generous honor for what he thought good and honest work, however faulty, his praise kindled--and his blame no less. He appreciated so fully _your_ way of doing it; and his suggestion, alongside, of what would have been _his_ way of doing it, was so stimulating--touched one with so light a Socratean sting, and set a hundred thoughts on the alert. Of this delightful critical art of his his letters to myself over many years are one long ill.u.s.tration.

And now--"There is none like him--none!" The honeyed lips are silent and the helping hand at rest.

With May appeared Mr. Gladstone's review--"the refined criticism of _Robert Elsmere_"--"typical of his strong points," as Lord Bryce describes it--certainly one of the best things he ever wrote. I had no sooner read it than, after admiring it, I felt it must be answered. But it was desirable to take time to think how best to do it. At the moment my one desire was for rest and escape. At the beginning of June we took our eldest two children, aged eleven and thirteen, to Switzerland for the first time. Oh! the delight of Glion! with its hay-fields thick with miraculous spring flowers, the "peak of Jaman delicately tall," and that gorgeous pile of the Dent du Midi, bearing up the June heaven, to the east!--the joy of seeing the children's pleasure, and the relief of the mere physical rebound in the Swiss air, after the long months of strain and sorrow! My son, a slip of a person in knickerbockers, walked over the Simplon as though Alps were only made to be climbed by boys of eleven; and the Defile of Gondo, Domo d'Ossola, and beautiful Maggiore--they were all new and heavenly to each member of the party.

Every year now there was growing on me the spell of Italy, the historic, the Saturnian land; and short as this wandering was, I remember, after it was over, and we turned homeward across the St. Gothard, leaving Italy behind us, a new sense as of a hidden treasure in life--of something sweet and inexhaustible always waiting for one's return; like a child's cake in a cupboard, or the gold and silver h.o.a.rd of Odysseus that Athene helped him to hide in the Ithacan cave.

Then one day toward the end of June or the beginning of July my husband put down beside me a great brown paper package which the post had just brought. "There's America beginning!" he said, and we turned over the contents of the parcel in bewilderment. A kind American friend had made a collection for me of the reviews, sermons, and pamphlets that had been published so far about the book in the States, the correspondences, the odds and ends of all kinds, grave and gay. Every mail, moreover, began to bring me American letters from all parts of the States. "No book since _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ has had so sudden and wide a diffusion among all cla.s.ses of readers," wrote an American man of letters, "and I believe that no other book of equal seriousness ever had so quick a hearing. I have seen it in the hands of nursery-maids and of shopgirls behind the counters; of frivolous young women who read every novel that is talked about; of business men, professors, and students.... The proprietors of those large shops where anything--from a pin to a piano--can be bought, vie with each other in selling the cheapest edition. One pirate put his price even so low as four cents--two pence!"