A Writer's Recollections Volume II Part 6

I recollect that in the course of our exploration of the Emba.s.sy, we pa.s.sed through a room with a large cheval-gla.s.s, of the Empire period.

Lord Dufferin paused before it, reminding me that the house had once belonged to Pauline Borghese. "This was her room and this gla.s.s was hers. I often stand before it and evoke her. She is there somewhere--if one had eyes to see!"

And I thought, in the darkening room, as one looked into the shadows of the gla.s.s, of the beautiful, shameless creature as she appears in the Canova statue in the Villa Borghese, or as David has fixed her, immortally young, in the Louvre picture.

But before I leave this second Roman visit of ours, let me recall one more figure in the _entourage_ of the Amba.s.sador--a young attache, fair-haired, with all the good looks and good manners that belong to the post, and how much else of solid wit and capacity the years were then to find out. I had already seen Mr. Rennell Rodd in the Tennant circle, where he was everybody's friend. Soon we were to hear of him in Greece, whence he sent me various volumes of poems and an admirable study of the Morea, then in Egypt, and afterward in Sweden; while through all these arduous years of war (I write in 1917) he has been Amba.s.sador in that same Rome where we saw him as second Secretary in 1891.

The appearance of _David Grieve_ in February, 1892, four years after _Robert Elsmere_, was to me the occasion of very mixed feelings. The public took warmly to the novel from the beginning; in its English circulation and its length of life it has, I think, very nearly equaled _Robert Elsmere_; only after twenty-five years has it now fallen behind its predecessor. It has brought me correspondence from all parts and all cla.s.ses, more intimate and striking, perhaps, than in the case of any other of my books. But of hostile reviewing at the moment of its appearance there was certainly no lack! It was violently attacked in the _Scots Observer_, then the organ of a group of Scotch Conservatives and literary men, with W.E. Henley at their head, and received unfriendly notice from Mrs. Oliphant in _Blackwood_. The two _Quarterlies_ opened fire upon it, and many lesser guns. A letter from Mr. Meredith Townsend, the very able, outspoken, and wholly independent colleague of Mr. Hutton in the editors.h.i.+p of the _Spectator_, gave me some comfort under these onslaughts!

I have read every word of _David Grieve_. Owing to the unusual and unaccountable imbecility of the reviewing--(the _Athenaeum_ man, for example, does not even comprehend that he is reading a biography!)--it may be three months or so before the public fully takes hold, but I have no doubt of the ultimate verdict.... The consistency of the leading characters is wonderful, and there is not one of the twenty-five, except possibly Dora--who is not human enough--that is not the perfection of lifelikeness.... Louie is a vivisection. I have the misfortune to know her well ... and I am startled page after page by the accuracy of the drawing.

Walter Pater wrote, "It seems to me to have all the forces of its predecessor at work in it, with perhaps a mellower kind of art." Henry James reviewed it--so generously!--so subtly!--in the _English Ill.u.s.trated_. Stopford Brooke and Bishop Creighton wrote to me with a warmth and emphasis that soon healed the wounds of the _Scots Observer_; and that the public was with them, and not with my castigators, was quickly visible from the wide success of the book.

Some of the most interesting letters that reached me about it were from men of affairs who were voracious readers, but not makers of books--such as Mr. Goschen, who "could stand an examination on it"; Sir James, afterward Lord Hannen, one of the Judges of the Parnell Commission; and Lord Derby, the Minister who seceded, with Lord Carnarvon, from Disraeli's Government in 1878. We had made acquaintance not long before with Lord Derby, through his niece, Lady Winifred Byng (now Lady Burghclere), to whom we had all lost our hearts--children and parents--at Lucerne in 1888. There are few things I regret more in relation to London social life than the short time allowed me by fate wherein to see something more of Lord Derby. If I remember right, we first met him at a small dinner-party at Lady Winifred's in 1891, and he died early in 1893. But he made a very great impression upon me, and, though he was generally thought to be awkward and shy in general society, in the conversations I remember with him nothing could have been more genial or more attractive than his manner. He had been at Rugby under my grandfather, which was a link to begin with; though he afterward went to Cambridge, and never showed, that I know of, any signs of the special Rugby influence which stamped men like Dean Stanley and Clough. And yet of the moral independence and activity which my grandfather prized and cultivated in his boys, there was certainly no lack in Lord Derby's career. For the greater part of his political life he was nominally a Conservative, yet the rank and file of his party only half trusted a mind trained by John Stuart Mill and perpetually brooding on social reform. As Lord Stanley, his close a.s.sociation and personal friends.h.i.+p with Disraeli during the Ministries and politics of the mid-nineteenth century have been well brought out in Mr. Buckle's last volume of the Disraeli _Life_. But the ultimate parting between himself and Dizzy was probably always inevitable. For his loathing of adventurous policies of all kinds, and of any increase whatever in the vast commitments of England, was sure at some point to bring him into conflict with the imagination or, as we may now call it, the prescience, of Disraeli. It was strange to remember, as one watched him at the dinner-table, that he had been offered the throne of Greece in 1862.

If he accepts the charge [wrote Dizzy to Mrs. Bridges Williams] I shall lose a powerful friend and colleague. It is a dazzling adventure for the House of Stanley, but they are not an imaginative race, and I fancy they will prefer Knowsley to the Parthenon, and Lancas.h.i.+re to the Attic plain. It is a privilege to live in this age of rapid and brilliant events. What an error to consider it an utilitarian age! It is one of infinite romance. Thrones tumble down and crowns are offered like a fairy-tale.

Sixteen years later came his famous resignation, in 1878, when the Fleet was ordered to the Dardanelles, and Lord Derby, as he had now become, then Foreign Secretary, refused to sanction a step that might lead to war. That, for him, was the end as far as Toryism was concerned. In 1880 he joined Mr. Gladstone, but only to separate from him on Home Rule in 1886; and when I first knew him, in 1891, he was leader of the Liberal Unionist peers in the House of Lords. A little later he became President of the great Labor Commission in 1892, and before he could see Gladstone's fresh defeat in 1893, he died.

Speculatively he was as open-minded as a reader and follower of Mill might be expected to be. He had been interested in _Robert Elsmere_, and the discussion of books and persons, to which it led him in conversation with me, showed him fully aware of the new forces abroad in literature and history. Especially interested, too, as to what Labor was going to make of Christianity, and well aware--how could he fail to be, as Chairman of that great, that epoch-making Commission of 1892?--of the advancing strength of organized labor on all horizons. He appeared to me, too, as a typical North-countryman--a son of Lancas.h.i.+re, proud of the great Lancas.h.i.+re towns, and thoroughly at home in the life of the Lancas.h.i.+re countryside. He could tell a story in dialect admirably. And I realized that he had thought much--in his balanced, reticent way--on matters in which I was then groping: how to humanize the relations between employer and employed, how to enrich and soften the life of the workman, how, in short, to break down the barrier between modern industrialism and the stored-up treasures--art, science, thought--of man's long history.

So that when _David Grieve_ was finished I sent it to Lord Derby, not long after our first meeting, in no spirit of empty compliment, and I have always kept his letter in return as a memento of a remarkable personality. Some day I hope there may be a Memoir of him; for none has yet appeared. He had not the charm, the versatility, the easy cla.s.sical culture, of his famous father--"the Rupert of debate." But with his great stature--he was six feet two--his square head, and strong, smooth-shaven face, he was noticeable everywhere. He was a childless widower when I first knew him, and made the impression of a lonely man, for all his busy political life and his vast estates. But he was particularly interesting to me as representing a type I have once or twice tried to draw--of the aristocrat standing between the old world, before railways and the first Reform Bill, which saw his birth, and the new world and new men of the later half of the century. He was traditionally with the old world; by conviction and conscience, I think, with the new; yet not sorry, probably, that he was to see no more than its threshold!

The year 1892, it will be remembered, was the first year of American copyright: and the great success of _David Grieve_ in America, following on the extraordinary vogue there of _Robert Elsmere_, in its pirated editions, brought me largely increased literary receipts. It seemed that I was not destined, after all, to "ruin my publishers," as I had despondently foretold in a letter to my husband before the appearance of _Robert Elsmere;_ but that, with regular work, I might look forward to a fairly steady income. We therefore felt justified in seizing an opportunity brought to our notice by an old friend who lived in the neighborhood, and migrating to a house north of London, in the real heart of Middle England. After leaving Borough Farm, we had built a house on a hill near Haslemere, looking south over the blue and purple Weald; but two years' residence had convinced me that Surrey was almost as populous as London, and that real solitude for literary work was not to be found there--at any rate, in that corner of it where we had chosen to build, and, also, while we were nursing our newly planted shrubberies of baby pines and rhododendrons, there was always in my mind, as I find from letters of the time, a discontented yearning for "an old house and old trees"! We found both at Stocks, whither we migrated in the summer of 1892. The little estate had then been recently inherited by Mrs.

Grey, mother of Sir Edward Grey, now Lord Grey of Falloden. We were at first tenants of the house and grounds, but in 1896 we bought the small property from the Greys, and have now been for more than twenty years its happy possessors. The house lies on a high upland, under one of the last easterly spurs of the Chilterns. It was built in 1780 (we rebuilt it in 1908) in succession to a much older house of which a few fragments remain, and the village at its gates had changed hardly at all in the hundred years which preceded our arrival. A few new cottages had been built; more needed to be built; and two residents, intimately connected with the past of the village, had built houses just outside it. But villadom did not exist. The village was rich in old folk, in whom were stored the memories and traditions of its quiet past. The postmaster, "Johnny Dolt," who was nearing his eighties, was the universal referee on all local questions--rights of way, boundaries, village customs, and the like; and of some of the old women of the village, as they were twenty-five years ago, I have drawn as faithful a picture as I could in one or two chapters of _Marcella_.

But the new novel owed not only much of its scenery and setting, but also its main incident, to the new house. We first entered into negotiation for Stocks in January, 1892. In the preceding December two gamekeepers had been murdered on the Stocks property, in a field under a big wood, not three hundred yards from the house; and naturally the little community, as it lay in its rural quiet beneath its wooded hills, was still, when we first entered it, under the shock and excitement of the tragedy. We heard all the story on the spot, and then viewed it from another point of view--the sociopolitical--when we went down from London to stay at one of the neighboring country-houses, in February, and found the Home Secretary, Mr. Matthews, afterward Lord Llandaff, among the guests. The trial was over, the verdict given, and the two murderers were under sentence of death. But there was a strong agitation going on in favor of a reprieve; and what made the discussion of it, in this country-house party, particularly piquant was that the case, at that very moment, was a matter of close consultation between the judge and the Home Secretary. It was not easy, therefore, to talk of it in Mr.

Matthews's presence. Voices dropped and groups dissolved when he appeared. Mr. Asquith, who succeeded Mr. Matthews that very year as Home Secretary, was also, if I remember right, of the party; and there was a good deal of rather hot discussion of the game laws, and of English landlordism in general.

With these things in my mind, as soon as we had settled into Stocks, I began to think of _Marcella_. I wrote the sketch of the book in September, 1892, and finished it in February, 1894. Many things went to the making of it--not only the murdered keepers and the village talk, not only the remembered beauty of Hampden which gave me the main setting of the story, but a general ferment of mind, connected with much else that had been happening to me.

For the New Brotherhood of _Robert Elsmere_ had become in some sort a realized dream; so far as any dream can ever take to itself the practical garments of this puzzling world. To show that the faith of Green and Martineau and Stopford Brooke was a faith that would wear and work--to provide a home for the new learning of a New Reformation, and a practical outlet for its enthusiasm of humanity--were the chief aims in the minds of those of us who in 1890 founded the University Hall Settlement in London. I look back now with emotion on that astonis.h.i.+ng experiment. The scheme had taken shape in my mind during the summer of 1889, and in the following year I was able to persuade Doctor Martineau, Mr. Stopford Brooke, my old friend Lord Carlisle, and a group of other religious Liberals, to take part in its realization. We held a crowded meeting in London, and an adequate subscription list was raised without difficulty. University Hall in Gordon Square was taken as a residence for young men, and was very soon filled. Continuous teaching by the best men available, from all the churches, on the history and philosophy of religion, was one half the scheme; the other half busied itself with an attempt to bring about some real contact between brain and manual workers. We took a little dingy hall in Marchmont Street, where the residents of the Hall started clubs and cla.s.ses, Sat.u.r.day mornings, for children and the like. The foundation of Toynbee Hall--the Universities Settlement--in East London, in memory of Arnold Toynbee, was then a fresh and striking fact in social history. A spirit of fraternization was in the air, an ardent wish to break down the local and geographical barriers that separated rich from poor, East End from West End. The new venture in which I was interested attached itself, therefore, to a growing movement. The work in Marchmont Street grew and prospered. Men and women of the working cla.s.s found in it a real center of comrades.h.i.+p, and the residents at the Hall in Gordon Square, led by a remarkable man of deeply religious temper and Quaker origin, the late Mr. Alfred Robinson, devoted themselves in the evenings to a work marked by a very genuine and practical enthusiasm.

Soon it was evident that larger premises were wanted. It was in the days when Mr. Pa.s.smore Edwards was giving large sums to inst.i.tutions of different kinds in London, but especially to the founding of public libraries. He began to haunt the shabby hall in Marchmont Street, and presently offered to build us a new hall there for cla.s.ses and social gatherings. But the scheme grew and grew, in my mind as in his. And when the question of a site arose we were fortunate enough to interest the practical and generous mind of the chief ground landlord of Bloomsbury, the Duke of Bedford. With him I explored various sites in the neighborhood, and finally the Duke offered us a site in Tavistock Place, on most liberal terms, he himself contributing largely to the building, granting us a 999 years' lease, and returning us the ground rent.

And there the Settlement now stands, the most beautiful and commodious Settlement building in London, with a large garden behind it, made by the Duke out of various old private gardens, and lent to the Settlement for its various purposes. Mr. Pa.s.smore Edwards contributed 14,000 to its cost, and it bears his name. It was opened in 1898 by Lord Peel and Mr. Morley, and for twenty years it has been a center of social work and endeavor in St. Pancras. From it have sprung the Physically Defective Schools under the Education Authority, now so plentiful in London, and so frequent in our other large towns. The first school of the kind was opened at this Settlement in 1898; and the first school ambulance in London was given to us by Sir Thomas Barlow for our Cripple Children.

The first Play Center in England began there in 1898; and the first Vacation School was held there in 1902.

During those twenty years the Settlement has played a large part in my life. We have had our failures and our successes; and the original idea has been much transformed with time. The Jowett Lectures.h.i.+p, still devoted to a religious or philosophical subject, forms a link with the religious lecturing of the past; but otherwise the Settlement, like the Master himself, stands for the liberal and spiritual life, without definitions or exclusions. Up to 1915 it was, like Toynbee Hall, a Settlement for University and professional men who gave their evenings to the work. Since 1915 it has been a Women's Settlement under a distinguished head--Miss Hilda Oakeley, M.A., formerly Warden of King's College for Women. It is now full of women residents and full of work.

There is a Cripple School building belonging to the Settlement, to the East; our cripples still fill the Duke's garden with the shouts of their play; and hundreds of other children crowd into the building every evening in the winter, or sit under the plane-trees in summer. The charming hall of the Settlement is well attended every winter week by people to whom the beautiful music that the Settlement gives is a constant joy; the Library, dedicated to the memory of T. H. Green, has 400 members; the cla.s.ses and popular lectures have been steadily held even during this devastating war; the Workers' Educational a.s.sociation carry on their work under our roof; mothers bring their babies to the Infant Welfare Center in the afternoon; there are orchestral and choral cla.s.ses, boys' clubs and girls' clubs. Only one club has closed down--the Men's Club, which occupied the top floor of the Invalid Children's School before the war. Their members are scattered over France, Salonika, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, and the Roll of Honor is a long one.

Twenty years! How clearly one sees the mistakes, the lost opportunities, of such an enterprise! But so much is certain--that the Settlement has been an element of happiness in many, many lives. It has had scores of devoted workers, in the past--men and women to whom the heart of its founder goes out in grat.i.tude. And I cannot imagine a time when the s.p.a.cious and beautiful house and garden, with all the activities that have a home there, will not be necessary and welcome to St. Pancras. I see it, in my dreams, at least, half a century hence, when all those who first learned from it and in it have gone their way, still serving "the future hour" of an England reborn. To two especially among the early friends of the Settlement let me turn back with grateful remembrance--George Howard, Lord Carlisle, whom I have already mentioned, and Stopford Brooke. Lord Carlisle was one of the most liberal and most modest of men, an artist himself, and the friend of artists. On a Sunday in Russell Square, when the drawing-room door opened to reveal his fine head and shy, kind eyes, one felt how well worth while it was to stay at home on Sunday afternoons! I find a little note from him in 1891, the year in which we left Russell Square to move westward, regretting the "interesting old house" "with which I a.s.sociate you in my mind." He was not an easy talker, but his listening had the quality that makes others talk their best; while the sudden play of humor or sarcasm through the features that were no less strong than refined, and the impression throughout of a singularly upright and humane personality, made him a delightful companion. There were those who would gladly have seen him take a more prominent part in public life. Perhaps a certain natural indolence held him back; perhaps a wonderful fairness of mind which made him slow to judge, and abnormally sensitive to "the other side." It is well known that as a landlord he left the administration of his great estates in the north almost wholly to his wife, and that, except in the great matter of temperance, he and she differed in politics, Lady Carlisle--who was a Stanley of Alderley--going with Mr. Gladstone at the time of the Home Rule split, while Lord Carlisle joined the Liberal Unionists. Both took a public part, and the political differences of the parents were continued in their children. Only a very rare and selfless nature could have carried through so difficult a situation without lack of either dignity or sweetness. Lord Carlisle, in the late 'eighties and early 'nineties, when I knew him best, showed no want of either. The restrictions he laid upon his own life were perhaps made natural by the fact that he was first and foremost an artist by training and temperament, and that the ordinary occupations, rural, social, or political, of the great land-owning n.o.ble, had little or no attraction for him. In the years, at any rate, when I saw him often, I was drawn to him by our common interest in the liberalizing of religion, and by a common love of Italy and Italian art. I remember him once in the incomparable setting of Naworth; but more often in London, and in Stopford Brooke's company.

For he was an intimate friend and follower of Mr. Brooke's, and I came very early under the spell of that same strong and magnetic personality.

While we were still at Oxford, through J.R.G. we made acquaintance with Mr. Brooke, and with the wife whose early death in 1879 left desolate one of the most affectionate of men. I remember well Mr. Brooke's last sermon in the University pulpit, before his secession, on grounds of what we should now call Modernism, from the Church of England. Mrs.

Brooke, I think, was staying with us, while Mr. Brooke was at All Souls, and the strong individuality of both the husband and wife made a deep impression upon one who was then much more responsive and recipient than individual. The sermon was a great success; but it was almost Mr.

Brooke's latest utterance within the Anglican Church. The following year came the news of Mrs. Brooke's mortal illness. During our short meeting in 1877 I had been greatly attracted by her, and the news filled me with unbearable pain. But I had not understood from it that the end itself was near, and I went out into our little garden, which was a ma.s.s of summer roses, and in a bewilderment of feeling gathered all I could find--a glorious medley of bloom--that they might surround her, if only for a day, with the beauty she loved. Next day, or the day after, she died; and that basket of roses, arriving in the house of death--belated, incongruous offering!--has stayed with me as the symbol of so much else that is too late in life, and of our human helplessness and futility in the face of sorrow.

After our move to London, my children and I went for a long time regularly to hear Mr. Brooke at Bedford Chapel. At the time, I often felt very critical of the sermons. Looking back, I cannot bring myself to say a critical word. If only one could still go and hear him! Where are the same gifts, the same magnetism, the same compelling personality to be found to-day, among religious leaders? I remember a sermon on Elijah and the priests of Baal, which for color and range, for modernness, combined with ethical force and power, remains with me as perhaps the best I ever heard. And then, the service. Prayers simplified, repet.i.tions omitted, the Beat.i.tudes instead of the Commandments, a dozen jarring, intolerable things left out; but for the rest, no needless break with a.s.sociation. And the relief and consolation of it! The simple Communion service, adapted very slightly from the Anglican rite, and administered by Mr. Brooke with a reverence, an ardor, a tenderness one can only think of with emotion, was an example of what _could_ be done with our religious traditions, for those who want new bottles for new wine, if only the courage and the imagination were there.

The biography of Mr. Brooke, which his son-in-law, Princ.i.p.al Jacks, has just brought out, will, I think, reveal to many what made the spell of Stopford Brooke, to a degree which is not common in biography. For _le papier est bete_!--and the charm of a man who was both poet and artist, without writing poems or painting pictures, is very hard to hand on to those who never knew him. But, luckily, Stopford Brooke's diaries and letters reflect him with great fullness and freedom. They have his faults, naturally. They are often exuberant or hasty--not, by any means, always fair to men and women of a different temperament from his own.

Yet, on the whole, there is the same practical, warm-hearted wisdom in them that many a friend found in the man himself when they went to consult him in his little study at the back of Bedford Chapel, where he wrote his sermons and books, and found quiet, without, however, barring out the world, if it wanted him. And there breathes from them also the enduring, eager pa.s.sion for natural and artistic beauty which made the joy of his own life, and which his letters and journals may well kindle in others. His old age was a triumph in the most difficult of arts. He was young to the end, and every day of the last waiting years was happy for himself, and precious to those about him. He knew what to give up and what to keep, and his freshness of feeling never failed. Perhaps his best and most enduring memorial will be the Wordsworth Cottage at Grasmere, which he planned and carried out. And I like to remember that my last sight of him was at a spot only a stone's-throw from that cottage on the Keswick Road, his gray hair beaten back by the light breeze coming from the pa.s.s, and his cheerful eyes, full often, as it seemed to me, of a mystical content, raised toward the evening glow over Helm Crag and the Easedale fells.

On the threshold also of the Settlement's early history there stands the venerable figure of James Martineau--thinker and saint. For he was a member of the original Council, and his lectures on the Gospel of St.

Luke, in the old "Elsmerian" hall, marked the best of what we tried to give in those first days. I knew Harriet Martineau in my childhood at Fox How. Well I remember going to tea with that tremendous woman when I was eight years old; sitting through a silent meal, in much awe of her cap, her strong face, her ear-trumpet; and then being taken away to a neighboring room by a kind niece, that I might not disturb her further.

Once or twice, during my growing up, I saw her. She lived only a mile from Fox How, and was always on friendly terms with my people. Matthew Arnold had a true admiration for her--st.u.r.dy fighter that she was in Liberal causes. So had W.E. Forster; only he suffered a good deal at her hands, as she disapproved of the Education Bill, and contrived so to manage her trumpet when he came to see her as to take all the argument and give him all the listening! When my eldest child was born, a cot-blanket arrived, knitted by Miss Martineau's own hands--the busy hands (soon then to be at rest) that wrote the _History of the Peace_, _Feats on the Fiord_, the _Settlers at Home_, and those excellent biographical sketches of the politicians of the Reform and Corn Law days in the _Daily News_, which are still well worth reading.

Between Harriet Martineau and her brother James, as many people will remember, there arose an unhappy difference in middle life which was never mended or healed. I never heard him speak of her. His standards were high and severe, for all the sensitive delicacy of his long, distinguished face and visionary eyes; and neither he nor she was of the stuff that allows kins.h.i.+p to supersede conscience. He published a somewhat vehement criticism of a book in which she was part author, and she never forgave it. And although to me, in the University Hall venture, he was gentleness and courtesy itself, and though his presence seemed to hallow a room directly he entered it, one felt always that he was _formidable_. The prophet and the Puritan lay deep in him. Yet in his two famous volumes of Sermons there are tones of an exquisite tenderness and sweetness, together with harmonies of prose style, that remind me often how he loved music and how his beautiful white head might be seen at the Monday Popular Concerts, week after week, his thinker's brow thrown back to catch the finest shades of Joachim's playing.

The year after _David Grieve_ appeared, Mr. Jowett died. His long letter to me on the book contained some characteristic pa.s.sages, of which I quote the following:

I should like to have a good talk with you. I seldom get any one to talk on religious subjects. It seems to me that the world is growing rather tired of German criticism, having got out of it nearly all that it is capable of giving. To me it appears one of the most hopeful signs of the present day that we are coming back to the old, old doctrine, "he can't be wrong whose life is in the right." Yet this has to be taught in a new way, adapted to the wants of the age. We must give up doctrine and teach by the lives of men, beginning with the life of Christ, instead. And the best words of men, beginning with the Gospels and the prophets, will be our Bible.

At the end of the year we spent a weekend with him at Balliol, and that was my last sight of my dear old friend. The year 1893 was for me one of illness, and of hard work both in the organization of the new Settlement and in the writing of _Marcella_. But that doesn't reconcile me to the recollection of how little I knew of his failing health till, suddenly, in September the news reached me that he was lying dangerously ill in the house of Sir Robert Wright, in Surrey.

"Every one who waited on him in his illness loved him," wrote an old friend of his and mine who was with him to the end. What were almost his last words--"I bless G.o.d for my life!--I bless G.o.d for my life!"--seemed to bring the n.o.ble story of it to a triumphant close; and after death he lay "with the look of a little child on his face.... He will live in the hearts of those who loved him, as well as in his work."

He lives indeed; and as we recede farther from him the originality and greatness of his character will become more and more clear to Oxford and to England. The men whom he trained are now in the full stream of politics and life. His pupils and friends are or have been everywhere, and they have borne, in whatever vocation, the influence of his mind or the mark of his friends.h.i.+p. Lord Lansdowne, Mr. Asquith, Lord Justice Bowen, Lord Coleridge, Lord Milner, Sir Robert Morier, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, Lord Goschen, Miss Nightingale, and a hundred others of the nation's leaders--amid profoundest difference, the memory of "the Master" has been for them a common and a felt bond. No other religious personality of the nineteenth century--unless it be that of Newman--has stood for so much. In his very contradictions and inconsistencies of thought he was the typical man of a time beset on all sides by new problems to which Jowett knew very well there was no intellectual answer; while through the pa.s.sion of his faith in a Divine Life, which makes itself known to man, not in miracle or mystery, but through the channels of a common experience, he has been a kindling force in many hearts and minds, and those among the most important to England.

Meanwhile, to these great matters the Jowettan oddities and idiosyncrasies added just that touch of laughter and surprise that makes a man loved by his own time and arrests the eye and ear of posterity.

CHAPTER VI

_HELBECK OF BANNISDALE_

The coming out of _Marcella_, in April, 1894, will always mark for me perhaps the happiest date in my literary life. The book, for all the hard work that had gone to it, had none the less been a pleasure to write; and the good-will that greeted it made the holiday I had earned--which again was largely spent in Rome--a golden time. Not long after we left England, "Piccadilly," my sister wrote me, was "placarded with _Marcella_," the name appearing on the notice-boards of most of the evening papers--a thing which never happened to me before or since; and when we arrived in Rome, the content-bills of the London newspapers, displayed in the Piazza di Spagna, announced her no less flamingly. The proof-sheets of the book had been tried on various friends, as usual, with some amusing results. Bishop Creighton, with only the first two-thirds of the book before him, wrote me denunciations of Marcella.

I am greatly interested in the book and pine for the _denoument_. So far Marcella, though I know her quite well, does not in the least awaken my sympathy. She is an intolerable girl--but there are many of them.... I only hope that she may be made to pay for it. Mr. and Mrs. Boyce are good and original, so is Wharton. I hope that condign vengeance awaits him. He is the modern politician entirely.... I really hope Marcella may be converted. It would serve her right to marry her to Wharton; he would beat her.

Another old friend, one of the industrial leaders of the north, carried off half the proofs to read on his journey to Yorks.h.i.+re.

I so ravened on them that I sat still at Blosworth instead of getting out! The consequence is that all my plans are disarranged. I shall not get to M---- in time for my meeting, and for all this Marcella is to blame.... The station-master a.s.sured me he called out "Change for Northampton," but I was much too deep in the scene between Marcella, Lord Maxwell, and Raeburn to heed anything belonging to the outer world.

Mr. Goschen wrote:

I don't know how long it is since I have enjoyed reading anything so much. I can't satisfy myself as to the physical appearance of Wharton.... I do know some men of a _character_ not quite unlike him, but they haven't the boyish face with curls. Marcella I see before me. Mrs. Boyce and Lord Maxwell both interested me very much....Alack! I must turn from Marcella's enthusiasm and aspirations to Sir W. Harcourt's speech--a great transition.

And dear Alfred Lyttelton wrote:

I feel a ridiculous pride in her triumphs which I have had the joy of witnessing on every side.... At least permit an expert to tell you that his heart beat over the ferrets (in the poaching scene) and at the intense vividness and truth of the legal episodes.

But there is no one letter in this old packet which moves me specially.

It was on the 1st of March, 1894, that Mr. Gladstone said "Good-by" to his Cabinet in the Cabinet room at Downing Street, and a little later in the afternoon walked away for the last time from the House of Commons.

No one who has read it will forget the telling of that episode, in Mr.

Morley's biography, with what concentration, what dignity!--worthy alike of the subject and of the admirable man of letters--himself an eye-witness--who records it.

While Lord Kimberley and Sir William Harcourt, on behalf of the rest of their colleagues, were bidding their great chief farewell, "Mr.