A Writer's Recollections Volume II Part 7

Gladstone sat composed and still as marble, and the emotion of the Cabinet did not gain him for an instant." When the spokesmen ceased, he made his own little speech of four or five minutes in reply: "then hardly above a breath, but every accent heard, he said, 'G.o.d bless you all.' He rose slowly and went out of one door, while his colleagues with minds oppressed filed out by the other."

On this moving scene there followed what Mr. Gladstone himself described as the first period of comparative leisure he had ever known, extending to four and a half months. They were marked first by increasing blindness, then by an operation for cataract, and finally by a moderate return of sight. In July he notes that "during the last months of partial incapacity I have not written with my own hand probably so much as one letter a day." In this faded packet of mine lies one of these rare letters, written with his own hand--a full sheet--from Dollis Hill, on April 27th.

When _Marcella_ arrived my thankfulness was alloyed with a feeling that the state of my eyesight made your kindness for the time a waste. But Mr. Nettles.h.i.+p has since then by an infusion supplied a temporary stimulus to the organ, such that I have been enabled to begin, and am reading the work with great pleasure and an agreeable sense of congeniality which I do not doubt I shall retain to the close.

Then he describes a book--a novel--dealing with religious controversy, which he had lately been reading, in which every character embodying views opposed to those of the author "is exhibited as odious." With this he warmly contrasts the method and spirit of _David Grieve_, and then continues:

Well, I have by my resignation pa.s.sed into a new state of existence.

And in that state I shall be very glad when our respective stars may cause our paths to meet. I am full of prospective work; but for the present a tenacious influenza greatly cripples me and prevents my making any definite arrangement for an expected operation on my eye.

Eighty-five!--greatly crippled by influenza and blindness--yet "full of prospective work"! The following year, remembering _Robert Elsmere_ days, and _a propos_ of certain pa.s.sages in his review of that book, I ventured to send him an Introduction I had contributed to my brother-in-law Leonard Huxley's translation of Hausrath's _New Testament Times._ This time the well-known handwriting is feebler and the old "fighter" is not roused. He puts discussion by, and turns instead to kind words about a near relative of my own who had been winning distinctions at Oxford.

It is one of the most legitimate interests of the old to watch with hope and joy these opening lives, and it has the secondary effect of whispering to them that they are not yet wholly frozen up.... I am busy as far as my limited powers of exertion allow upon a new edition of Bishop Butler's Works, which costs me a good deal of labor and leaves me, after a few hours upon it, good for very little else. And my perspective, dubious as it is, is filled with other work, in the Homeric region lying beyond. I hope it will be very long before you know anything of compulsory limitations on the exercise of your powers. Believe me always,

Sincerely yours,

W. E. GLADSTONE.

But it was not till 1897, as he himself records, that the indomitable spirit so far yielded to these limitations as to resign--or rather contemplate resigning--the second great task of which he had spoken to me at Oxford, nine years before. "I have begun seriously to ask myself whether I shall ever be able to face--_The Olympian Religion_."

It was, I think, in the winter of 1895 that I saw him for the last time at our neighbors', the Rothschilds, at Tring Park. He was then full of animation and talk, mainly of things political, and, indeed, not long before he had addressed a meeting at Chester on the Turkish ma.s.sacres in Armenia, and was still to address a large audience at Liverpool on the same subject--his last public appearance--a year later. When _George Tressady_ appeared he sent me a message through Mrs. Drew that he feared George Tressady's Parliamentary conduct "was inconceivable in a man of honor"; and I was only comforted by the emphatic and laughing dissent of Lord Peel, to whom I repeated the verdict. "Nothing of the kind! But of course he was thinking of _us_--the Liberal Unionists."

Then came the last months when, amid a world's sympathy and reverence, the great life, in weariness and pain, wore to its end. The "lying in state" in Westminster Hall seemed to me ill arranged. But the burying remains with me as one of those perfect things, which only the Anglican Church at its best, in combination with the immemorial a.s.sociations of English history, can achieve. After it, I wrote to my son:

I have now seen four great funerals in the Abbey--Darwin, Browning, Tennyson, and the funeral service for Uncle Forster, which was very striking, too. But no one above forty of those in the Abbey yesterday will ever see the like again. It was as beautiful and n.o.ble as the "lying in state" was disappointing and ugly. The music was exquisite, and fitting in every respect; and when the high sentence rang out, "and their name liveth for evermore," the effect was marvelous. One seemed to hear the voice of the future already pealing through the Abbey--as though the verdict were secured, the judgment given.

We saw it all, admirably, from the Muniment Room, which is a sort of lower Triforium above the south Transept. To me, perhaps, the most thrilling moment was when, bending forward, one saw the white-covered coffin disappear amid the black crowd round it, and knew that it had sunk forever into its deep grave, amid that same primeval clay of Th.o.r.n.y Island on which Edward's Minister was first reared and the Red King built his hall of judgment and Council. The statue of Dizzy looked down on him--"So you have come at last!"--and all the other statues on either side seemed to welcome and receive him.... The sloping seats for Lords and Commons filled the transepts, a great black ma.s.s against the jeweled windows, the Lords on one side, the Commons on the other; in front of each black mult.i.tude was the glitter of a mace, and in the hollow between, the whiteness of the pall--perhaps you can fancy it so.

But the impetus of memory has carried me on too fast. There are some other figures and scenes to be gathered from these years--1893-98--that may still interest this present day. Of the most varied kind! For, as I turn over letters and memoranda, a jumble of recollections pa.s.ses through my mind. Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, on the one hand, a melancholy, kindly man, amid the splendors of Waddesden; a meeting of the Social Democratic Federation in a cellar in Lisson Grove; days of absorbing interest in the Jewish East End, and in sweaters' workshops, while _George Tressady_ was in writing; a first visit to Mentmore while Lady Rosebery was alive; a talk with Lord Rosebery some time after her death, in a corner of a local ball-room, while _Helbeck_ was shaping itself about the old Catholic families of England, which revealed to me yet another and unsuspected vein of knowledge in one of the best furnished of minds; the Asquith marriage in 1894; new acquaintances and experiences in Lancas.h.i.+re towns, again connected with _George Tressady_, and in which I was helped by that brilliant writer, worker, and fighter, Mrs. Sidney Webb; a nascent friends.h.i.+p with Sir William Harcourt, one of the most racy of all possible companions; happy evenings in the Tadema and Richmond studios with music and good talk; occasional meetings with and letters from "Pater," the dear and famous Professor, who, like my uncle, fought half the world and scarcely made an enemy; visits to Oxford and old friends--such are the scenes and persons that come back to me as I read old letters, while all through it ran the continual strain of hard literary work mingled with the new social and religious interests which the foundation of the Pa.s.smore Edwards Settlement had brought me.

We have been at Margot Tennant's wedding to-day [I wrote to my son on May 10, 1894]--a great function, very tiring, but very brilliant and amusing--occasionally dramatic, too, as, when after the service had begun, the sound of cheering in the street outside drowned the voice of the Bishop of Rochester, and warned us that Mr. Gladstone was arriving. Afterward at the house we shook hands with three Cabinet Ministers on the door-step, and there were all the rest of them inside! The bride carried herself beautifully and was as composed and fresh as though it were any ordinary party. From our seat in the church one saw the interior of the vestry and Mr.

Gladstone's white head against the window as he sat to sign the register; and the greeting between him and Mr. Balfour when he had done.

This was written while Lord Rosebery was Prime Minister and Mr. Balfour, still free, until the following year, from the trammels of office, was finis.h.i.+ng his brilliant _Foundations of Belief_, which came out in 1895.

In acknowledging the copy which he sent me, I ventured to write some pages on behalf of certain arguments of the Higher Criticism which seemed to me to deserve a fuller treatment than Mr. Balfour had been willing to give them--in defense also of our English idealists, such as Green and Caird, in their relation to orthodoxy. A year or two earlier I find I had been breaking a lance on behalf of the same school of writers with a very different opponent. In the controversy between Professor Huxley and Doctor Wace, in 1889, which opened with the famous article on "The Gadarene Swine," the Professor had welcomed me as an ally, because of "The New Reformation," which appeared much about the same time; and the word of praise in which he compared my reply to Mr. Gladstone, to the work "of a strong housemaid brus.h.i.+ng away cobwebs," gave me a fearful joy! I well remember a thrilling moment in the Russell Square drawing-room in 1889, when "Pater" and I were in full talk, he in his raciest and most amusing form, and suddenly the door opened, and "Doctor Wace" was announced--the opponent with whom at that moment he was grappling his hardest in the _Nineteenth Century_. Huxley gave me a merry look--and then how perfectly they both behaved! I really think the meeting was a pleasure to both of them, and when my old chief in the _Dictionary of Christian Biography_ took his departure, Huxley found all kinds of pleasant personal things to say about him.

But the Professor and I were not always at one. Caird and Green--and, for other reasons, Martineau--were to me names "of great pith and moment," and Christian Theism was a reasonable faith. And Huxley, in controversy, was no more kind to my _sacra_ than to other people's. Once I dared a mild remonstrance--in 1892--only to provoke one of his most vigorous replies:

MY DEAR M.--Thanks for your pleasant letter. I do not know whether I like the praise or the scolding better. They, like pastry, need to be done with a light hand--especially praise--and I have swallowed all yours, and feel it thoroughly agrees with me.

As to the scolding I am going to defend myself tooth and nail. In the first place, by all my G.o.ds and No G.o.ds, neither Green, nor Martineau, nor the Cairds were in my mind when I talked of "Sentimental Deism," but the "Vicaire Savoyard," and Charming, and such as Voysey. There are two chapters of "Rousseauism," I have not touched yet--Rousseauism in Theology, and Rousseauism in Education.

When I write the former I shall try to show that the people of whom I speak as "sentimental deists" are the lineal descendants of the Vicaire Savoyard. I was a great reader of Channing in my boyhood, and was much taken in by his theosophic confectionery. At present I have as much (intellectual) antipathy to him as St. John had to the Nicolaitans.

... Green I know only from his Introduction to Hume--which reminds me of nothing so much as a man with a hammer and chisel knocking out bits of bad stone in the Great Pyramid, with the view of bringing it down.... As to Caird's _Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion_, I will get it and study it. But as a rule "Philosophies of Religion"

in my experience turn out to be only "Religions of Philosophers"--quite another business, as you will admit.

And if you please, Ma'am, I wish to add that I think I am _not_ without sympathy for Christian feeling--or rather for what you mean by it. Beneath the cooled logical upper strata of my microcosm there is a fused ma.s.s of prophetism and mysticism, and the Lord knows what might happen to me, in case a moral earthquake cracked the superinc.u.mbent deposit, and permitted an eruption of the demonic element below.... Luckily I am near 70, and not a G.O.M.--so the danger is slight.

One must stick to one's trade. It is my business to the best of my ability to fight for scientific clearness--that is what the world lacks. Feeling Christian or other, is superabundant....

Ever yours affectionately,

T. H. HUXLEY.

A few more letters from him--racy, and living as himself--and then in 1895, just after his first article on the "Foundations of Belief," we heard with dismay of the illness which killed him. There was never a man more beloved--more deeply mourned.

The autumn of 1896 brought me a great loss in the death of an intimate friend, Lady Wemyss--as marked a personality in her own circle as was her indomitable husband, the famous Lord Elcho, of the Volunteer movement, on the bigger stage. It was at Balliol, at the Master's table, and in the early Oxford days, that we first made friends with Lord and Lady Wemyss, who were staying with the Master for the Sunday. I was sitting next to Lord Wemyss, and he presently discovered that I was absent-minded. And I found him so attractive and so human that I soon told him why. I had left a sick child at home, with a high temperature, and was fidgeting to get back to him.

"What is the matter?--Fever?--throat? Aconite, of course! You're a homeopath, aren't you? All sensible people are. Look here--I've got a servant with me. I'll send him with some aconite at once. Where do you live?--in the Parks? All right. Give me your address."

Out came an envelope and a pencil. A message was sent round the dinner-table to Lady Wemyss, whose powerful dreaming face beside the Master lit up at once. The aconite was sent; the child's temperature went down; and, if I remember right, either one or both of his new medical advisers walked up to the Parks the next day to inquire for him.

So began a friends.h.i.+p which for just twenty years, especially from about 1885 to 1896, meant a great deal to me.

How shall I describe Lady Wemyss? An unfriendly critic has recently allowed me the power of "interesting fas.h.i.+onable ladies in things of the mind." Was Lady Wemyss a "fas.h.i.+onable lady"? She was the wife, certainly, of a man of high rank and great possessions; but I met her first as a friend--a dear and intimate friend, as may be seen from his correspondence--of Mr. Jowett's; and Mr. Jowett was not very tolerant of "fas.h.i.+onable ladies." She was in reality a strong and very simple person, with a natural charm working through a very reserved and often harsh manner, like the charm of mountain places in spring. She was a Conservative, and I suppose an aristocrat, whatever that word may mean.

She thought the Harcourt death-duties "terrible" because they broke up old families and old estates, and she had been brought up to think that both were useful. Yet I never knew anybody with a more instinctive pa.s.sion for equality. This means that she was simply and deeply interested in all sorts of human beings and all sorts of human lots; also that, although she was often self-conscious, it was the self-consciousness one sees in the thoughtful and richly natured young, whose growth in thought or character has outrun their means of expression, and never mean or egotistical. Her deep voice; her fine, marked features; and the sudden play of humor, silent, self-restrained, yet most infectious to the bystander, that would lighten through them; her stately ways; and yet, withal, her childlike love of loving and being loved by the few to whom she gave her deepest affection--in some such phrases one tries to describe her; but they go a very little way.

I can see her now at the dinner-table at Gosford, sardonically watching a real "fas.h.i.+onable lady" who had arrived in the afternoon and was sitting next Lord Wemyss at the farther end--with a wonderful frizzled head, an infinitesimal waist sheathed in white muslin and blue ribbons, rouged cheeks, a marvelous concatenation of jewels, and a caressing, gesticulating manner meant, at fifty, to suggest the ways of "sweet and twenty." The frizzled head drew nearer and nearer to Lord Wemyss, the fingers flourished and pointed; and suddenly I heard Lady Wemyss's deep voice, meditatively amused, beside me:

"Her fingers will be in Frank's eyes soon!" Or again, I see her, stalled beneath the drawing-room table, on all-fours, by her imperious grandchildren, patiently playing "horse" or "cow," till her scandalized daughter-in-law discovered her and ran to her release. Or in her last illness, turning her n.o.ble head and faint, welcoming smile to the few friends that were admitted; and finally, in the splendid rest after death, when those of us who had not known her in youth could guess what the beauty of her youth had been.

She was an omnivorous and most intelligent reader, and a friend that never failed. Matthew Arnold was very fond of her, and she of him; Laura Lyttelton, who was nearly forty years her junior, loved her dearly and never felt the bar of years; the Master owed much to her affection, and gratefully acknowledged it. The _Commonplace Book_, privately printed after her death, showed the range of interests which had played upon her fresh and energetic mind. It was untrained, I suppose, compared to the woman graduate of to-day. But it was far less tired; and all its adventures were of its own seeking.

It was in 1896, not long after the appearance of _George Tressady_, that a conversation in a house on the outskirts of the Lakes suggested to me the main plot of _Helbeck of Bannisdale._ The talk turned on the fortunes of that interesting old place, Sizergh Castle, near Kendal, and of the Catholic family to whom it then still belonged, though mortgages and lack of pence were threatening imminently to submerge an ancient stock that had held it unbrokenly, from father to son, through many generations.

The relation between such a family--pinched and obscure, yet with its own proud record, and inherited consciousness of an unbroken loyalty to a once persecuted faith--and this modern world of ours struck me as an admirable subject for a novel. I thought about it next day, all through a long railway journey from Kendal to London, and by the time I reached Euston the plot of _Helbeck of Bannisdale_ was more or less clear to me.

I confided it to Lord Acton a little while afterward. We discussed it, and he cordially encouraged me to work it out. Then I consulted my father, my Catholic father, without whose a.s.sent I should never have written the book at all; and he raised no difficulty. So I only had to begin.

But I wanted a setting--somewhere in the border country between the Lakes mountains and Morecambe Bay. And here another piece of good luck befell, almost equal to that which had carried us to Hampden for the summer of 1889. Levens Hall, it appeared, was to be let for the spring--the famous Elizabethan house, five miles from Kendal, and about a mile from Sizergh. I had already seen Levens; and we took the chance at once.

Bannisdale in the novel is a combination, I suppose, of Sizergh and Levens. The two houses, though of much the same date, are really very different, and suggest phases of life quite distinct from each other.

Levens compared to Sizergh is--or was then, before the modern restoration of Sizergh--the spoiled beauty beside the shabby ascetic.

Levens has always been cared for and lived in by people who had money to spend upon the house and garden they loved, and the result is a wonderful example of Elizabethan and Jacobean decoration, mellowed by time into a perfect whole. Yet, for my purposes, there was always Sizergh, close by, with its austere suggestions of sacrifice and suffering under the penal laws, borne without flinching by a long succession of quiet, simple, undistinguished people.

We arrived there in March, 1897. The house greeted us on a clear and chilly evening under the mingled light of a frosty sunset, and the blaze of wood fires which had been lit everywhere to warm its new guests.

At last we arrived--saw the wonderful gray house rising above the river in the evening light, found G---- waiting at the open door for us, and plunged into the hall, the sitting-rooms, and all the intricacies of the upper pa.s.sages and turrets with the delight and curiosity of a pack of children. Wood and peat fires were burning everywhere; the great chimneypieces in the drawing-room, the arms of Elizabeth over the hall fire, the stucco birds and beasts running round the Hall, showed dimly in the scanty lamplight (we shall want about six more lamps!)--and the beauty of the marvelous old place took us all by storm. Then through endless pa.s.sages and kitchens, bright with long rows of copper pans and molds, we made our way out into the gardens among the clipped yews and cedars, and had just light enough to see that Levens apparently is like nothing else but itself.

... The drawback of the house at present is certainly _the cold_!

Thus began a happy and fruitful time. We managed to get warm in spite of a treacherous and tardy spring. Guests came to stay with us--Henry James, above all; the Creightons, he then in the first months of that remarkable London episcopate, which in four short years did so much to raise the name and fame of the Anglican Church in London, at least for the lay mind; the Neville Lytteltons, who had been since 1893 our summer neighbors at Stocks; Lord Lytton, then at Cambridge; the Sydney Buxtons; old Oxford friends, and many kinsfolk. The damson blossom along the hedgerows that makes of these northern vales in April a glistening network of white and green, the daffodils and violets, the lilies-of-the-valley in the Brigsteer woods came and went, the _Helbeck_ made steady progress.

But we left Levens in May, and it took me another eight months to finish the book. Except perhaps in the case of _Bessie Costrell_, I was never more possessed by a subject, more shut in by it from the outer world.

And, though its contemporary success was nothing like so great as that of most of my other books, the response it evoked, as my letters show, in those to whom the book appealed, was deep and pa.s.sionate.

My first anxiety was as to my father, and after we had left England for abroad I was seized with misgivings lest certain pa.s.sages in the talk of Doctor Friedland, who, it will perhaps be remembered, is made the spokesman in the book of certain points in the _intellectual_ case against Catholicism, should wound or distress him. I, therefore, no sooner reached Italy than I sent for the proofs again, and worked at them as much as fatigue would let me, softening them, and, I think, improving them, too. Then we went on to Florence, and rest, coming home for the book's publication in June.

The joy and emotion of it were great. George Meredith, J. M. Barrie, Paul Bourget, and Henry James--the men who at that time stood at the head of my own art--gave the book a welcome that I can never forget.