A Writer's Recollections Volume II Part 8

George Meredith wrote:

Your _Helbeck of Bannisdale_ held me firmly in the reading and remains with me.... If I felt a monotony during the struggle, it came of your being faithful to your theme--rapt--or you would not have had such power over your reader. I know not another book that shows the cla.s.sic so distinctly to view.... Yet a word of thanks for Doctor Friedland. He is the voice of spring in the book.

J.M. Barrie's generous, enthusiastic note delights and inspires me again as I read it over. Mr. Morley, my old editor and critic, wrote: "I find it intensely interesting and with all the elements of beauty, power, and pathos." For Leslie Stephen, with whom I had only lately made warm and close friends, I had a copy bound, without the final chapter, that the book might not, by its tragic close, depress one who had known so much sorrow. Sir Alfred Lyall thought--"the story reaches a higher pitch of vigor and dramatic presentation than is to be found even in your later books"; while Lord Halifax's letter--"how lovable they both are, each in his way, and how true to the ideal on both sides!"--and others, from Mr.

G.o.dkin, of the American _Nation_, from Frederic Harrison, Lord Goschen, Lord Dufferin, and many, many more, produced in me that curious mood which for the artist is much nearer dread than boasting--dread that the best is over and that one will never earn such sympathy again. One letter not written to myself, from Mr. George Wyndham to Mr. Wilfred Ward, I have asked leave to print as a piece of independent criticism:

On Sunday I read _Helbeck of Bannisdale_, and I confess that the book moved me a great deal. It is her best book. It is a true tragedy, because the crash is inevitable. This is not so easy to effect in Art as many suppose. There are very few characters and situations which lead to inevitable crashes. It is a thousand to one that a woman who thinks she ought not to marry a man, but loves him pa.s.sionately, will, in fact, marry him. She will either discover an ingenious way out of her woods or else just shut her eyes and "go it blind," relying on his strength and feeling that it is really right to relinquish to him her sense of responsibility. In choosing a girl with nothing left her in the world but loyalty to a dead father and memory of his att.i.tude toward religion, without knowledge of his arguments for that att.i.tude, I think that Mrs. Ward has. .h.i.t on the only possible _persona_. Had Laura, herself, been a convinced rationalist, or had her father been still alive, she would have merged herself and her att.i.tude in Helbeck's strength of character.

Being a work of art, self-consistent and inevitable, the book becomes symbolic. It is a picture of incompatibility, but, being a true picture, it is a symbolic index to the incompatible which plays so large a part in the experience of man.

For the rest, I remember vividly the happy holiday of that summer at Stocks; the sense of having come through a great wrestle, and finding everything--my children, the garden, my little Huxley nephews, books and talk, the Settlement where we were just about to open our Cripple School, and all else in life, steeped in a special glamour. It faded soon, no doubt, "into the light of common day"; but if I shut my thoughts and eyes against the troubles of these dark hours of war, I can feel my way back into the "wind-warm s.p.a.ce" and look into the faces that earth knows no more--my father, Leslie Stephen, Alfred Lyall, Mr.

Goschen, Alfred Lyttelton, H. O. Arnold-Forster, my sister, Julia Huxley, my eldest brother--a vanished company!

And in the following year, to complete the story, I owed to _Helbeck_ a striking and unexpected hour. A message reached me in November, 1898, to the effect that the Empress Frederick, who had just arrived at Windsor, admired the book and would like to see the writer of it.

A tragic figure at that moment--the Empress Frederick! That splendid Crown Prince, in his white uniform, whom we had seen at Schwalbach in 1872, had finished early in 1890 with his phantom reign and tortured life, and his son reigned in his stead. Bismarck, "the Englishwoman's"

implacable enemy, had died some four months before I saw the Empress, after eight years' exclusion from power. The Empress herself was on the verge of the terrible illness which killed her two years later. To me her life and personality--or, rather, the little I knew of them--had always been very interesting. She had, of course, the reputation of being the ablest of her family, and the bitterness of her sudden and irreparable defeat at the hands of Fate and her son, in 1889-90, had often struck me as one of the grimmest stories in history. One incident in it, not, I think, very generally known, I happened to hear from an eye-witness of the scene, before 1898. It was as follows:

The Empress Frederick in the midst of the Bismarck crisis of March, 1890, when it was evident that the young Emperor William II was bent on getting rid of his Chancellor, and so "dropping the pilot" of his House, was sitting at home one afternoon, with the companion from whom I heard the story, when a servant, looking a good deal scared, announced that Prince Bismarck had called and wished to know whether her Majesty would receive him.

"Prince Bismarck!" said the Empress, in amazement. She had probably not seen him since the death of her husband, and relations between herself and him had been no more than official for years. Turning to her companion, she said, "What can he possibly want with me!"

She consented, however, to receive him, and the old Prince, agitated and hollow-eyed, made his appearance. He had come, as a last hope of placating the new Kaiser, to ask the Empress to use what influence she could on his behalf with her son. The Empress listened in growing astonishment. At the end there was a short silence. Then she said, with emotion: "I am sorry! You, yourself, Prince Bismarck, have destroyed all my influence with my son. I can do nothing."

In a sense, it must have been a moment of triumph. But how tragic are all the implications of the story! It was in my mind as I traveled to Windsor on November 18, 1898. The following letter was written next day to one of my children:

D---- and I met at Windsor, and we mounted into the quadrangle, stopped at the third door on the right as Mrs. M---- had directed us, interviewed various gorgeous footmen, and were soon in Mrs.

M----'s little sitting-room. Then we found we should have some little time to wait, as the Empress was just going out with the Queen and would see me at a quarter to 1. So we waited, much amused by the talk around us. (It turned, if I remember right, on a certain German Princess, who had arrived a day or two before as the old Queen's guest, and had been taken since her arrival on such a strenuous round of tombs and mausoleums that, hearing on this particular morning that the Queen proposed to take her in the afternoon to see yet another mausoleum, she had stubbornly refused to get up. She had a headache, she said, and would stay in bed. But the ladies in waiting, with fits of laughter, described how the Queen had at once ordered her phenacetin, and how there was really no chance at all for the poor lady. The Queen would get her way, and the departed would be duly honored--headache or no headache. As indeed it turned out.)

Presently we saw the Queen's little pony-carriage pa.s.s along beyond the windows with the Empress Frederick, and the Grand Duke and d.u.c.h.ess Serge walking beside it, and the Indians behind. Then in a little while the Empress Frederick came hurrying back alone, and almost directly came my summons. Countess Perponcher, her lady in waiting, took me up through the Long Corridor, past the entrance to the Queen's rooms on one side, and Gordon's Bible, in its gla.s.s case, on the other, till we turned to the left, and I was in a small sitting-room, where a lady, gray-haired and in black, came forward to meet me.... We talked for about 50 minutes:--of German books and Universities--Harnack--Renan, for whom she had the greatest admiration--Strauss, of whom she told me various interesting things--German colonies, that she thought were "all nonsense"--Dreyfus, who in her eyes is certainly innocent--reaction in France--the difference between the Greek Church in Russia and the Greek Church in Greece, the hopes of Greece, and the freeing of Crete. It is evident that her whole heart is with Greece and her daughter there [the young Queen Sophia, on whose character recently deciphered doc.u.ments have thrown so strong a light], and she spoke bitterly, as she always does, about the English hanging-back, and the dawdling of the European Concert. Then she described how she read _George Tressady_ aloud to her invalid daughter till the daughter begged her to stop, lest she should cry over it all night--she said charming things of _Helbeck_, talked of Italy, D'Annunzio, quoted "my dear old friend Minghetti" as to the fundamental paganism in the Italian mind, asked me to write my name in her book, and to come and see her in Berlin--and it was time to go.... She is a very attractive, sensitive, impulsive woman, more charming than I had imagined, and, perhaps, less intellectual--altogether the very woman to set up the backs of Bismarck and his like. Never was there a more thorough Englishwoman!

I found myself constantly getting her out of focus, by that confusion of mind which made one think of her as German.

And to my father I wrote:

The Empress began by asking after Uncle Matt, and nothing could have been kinder and more sympathetic than her whole manner. But of course Bismarck hated her. She is absolutely English, parliamentary, and anti-despotic.... When I ventured to say in bidding her Good-by, that I had often felt great admiration and deep sympathy for her, which is true--she threw up her hands with a little sad or bitter gesture--"Oh!--admiration!--for _me_!"--as if she knew very well what it was to be conscious of the reverse. A touching, intelligent, impulsive woman, she seemed to me--no doubt often not a wise one--but very attractive.

Nineteen years ago! And two years later, after long suffering, like her husband, the last silence fell on this brave and stormy nature. Let us thank G.o.d for it as we look out upon Europe and see what her son has made of it.

CHAPTER VII

THE VILLA BARBERINI. HENRY JAMES

It was in the summer of 1898 that some suggestions gathered from the love-story of Chateaubriand and Madame de Beaumont, and jotted down on a sheet of note-paper, led to the writing of _Eleanor_. Madame de Beaumont's melancholy life came to an end in Rome, and the Roman setting imposed itself, so to speak, at once. But to write in Rome itself, played upon by all the influences of a place where the currents of life and thought, so far as those currents are political, historical, or artistic, seem to be running at double tides, would be, I knew, impossible, and we began to make inquiries for a place outside Rome, yet not too far away, where we might spend the spring. We tried to get an apartment at Frascati, but in vain. Then some friend suggested an apartment in the old Villa Barberini at Castel Gandolfo, well known to many an English and French diplomat, especially to the diplomat's wife and children, flying to the hills to escape the summer heat of Rome. We found by correspondence two kind little ladies living in Rome, who agreed to make all the preparations for us, find servants, and provide against a possibly cold spring to be spent in rooms meant only for _villegiatura_ in the summer. We were to go early in March, and fires or stoves must be obtainable, if the weather pinched.

The little ladies did everything--engaged servants, and bargained with the Barberini Steward, but they could not bargain with the weather! On a certain March day when the snow lay thick on the olives, and all the furies were wailing round the Alban hills--we arrived. My husband, who had journeyed out with us to settle us in, and was then returning to his London work, was inclined to mocking prophecies that I should soon be back in Rome at a comfortable hotel. Oh, how cold it was that first night!--how dreary on the great stone staircase, and in the bare, comfortless rooms! We looked out over a gray storm-swept Campagna, to a distant line of surf-beaten coast; the kitchen was fifty-two steps below the dining-room; the Neapolitan cook seemed to us a most formidable gentleman, suggesting stilettos, and we sat down to our first meal wondering whether we could possibly stay it out.

But with the night (as I wrote some years ago) the snow vanished and the sun emerged. We ran east to one balcony, and saw the light blazing on the Alban lake, and had but to cross the apartment to find ourselves, on the other side, with all the Campagna at our feet, sparkling in a thousand colors to the sea. And outside was the garden, with its lemon-trees growing in vast jars--like the jars of Knossos--but marked with Barberini bees; its white and red camellias be-carpeting the soft gra.s.s with their fallen petals; its dark and tragic recesses where melancholy trees hung above piled fragments of the great Domitian villa whose ruins lay everywhere beneath our feet; its olive gardens sloping to the west, and open to the sun, open, too, to white, nibbling goats, and wandering _bambini_; its magical glimpse of St. Peter's to the north, through a notch in a group of stone-pines; and, last and best, its marvelous terrace that roofed a crypto-porticus of the old villa, whence the whole vast landscape, from Ostia and the mountains of Viterbo to the Circaean promontory, might be discerned, where one might sit and watch the sunsets burn in scarlet and purple down through the wide west into the s.h.i.+ning bosom of the Tyrrhenian sea.

And in one day we had made a home out of what seemed a desert. Books had been unpacked, flowers had been brought in, the stoves were made to burn, the hard chairs and sofas had been twisted and turned into something more human and sociable, and we had begun to realize that we were, after all, singularly fortunate mortals, put in possession for three months--at the most moderate of rents!--of as much Italian beauty, antiquity, and romance as any covetous soul could hope for--with Rome at our gates, and leisurely time for quiet work.

Our earliest guest was Henry James, and never did I see Henry James in a happier light. A new light, too. For here, in this Italian country, and in the Eternal City, the man whom I had so far mainly known as a Londoner was far more at home than I; and I realized, perhaps more fully than ever before, the extraordinary range of his knowledge and sympathies.

Roman history and antiquities, Italian art, Renaissance sculpture, the personalities and events of the Risorgimento, all these solid _connaissances_ and many more, were to be recognized perpetually as rich elements in the general wealth of Mr. James's mind. That he had read immensely, observed immensely, talked immensely, became once more gradually and delightfully clear on this new field. That he spoke French to perfection was of course quickly evident to any one who had even a slight acquaintance with him. M. Bourget once gave me a wonderful ill.u.s.tration of it. He said that Mr. James was staying with himself and Madame Bourget at their villa at Hyeres, not long after the appearance of Kipling's "Seven Seas." M. Bourget, who by that time read and spoke English fluently, complained of Mr. Kipling's technicalities, and declared that he could not make head or tail of McAndrew's Hymn.

Whereupon Mr. James took up the book and, standing by the fire, fronting his hosts, there and then put McAndrew's Hymn into vigorous idiomatic French--an extraordinary feat, as it seemed to M. Bourget. Something similar, it will be remembered, is told of Tennyson. "One evening," says F. T. Palgrave of the poet, "he read out, offhand, Pindar's great picture of the life of Heaven, in the Second Olympian, into pure modern prose splendidly lucid and musical." Let who will decide which _tour de force_ was the more difficult.

But Mr. James was also very much at home in Italian, while in the literature, history, and art of both countries he moved with the well-earned sureness of foot of the student. Yet how little one ever thought of him as a student! That was the spell. He wore his learning--and in certain directions he was learned--"lightly, like a flower." It was to him not a burden to be carried, not a possession to be proud of, but merely something that made life more thrilling, more full of emotions and sensations--emotions and sensations which he was always eager, without a touch of pedantry, to share with other people.

His knowledge was conveyed by suggestion, by the adroitest of hints and indirect approaches. He was politely certain, to begin with, that you knew it all; then to walk _with you_ round and round the subject, turning it inside out, playing with it, making mock of it, and catching it again with a sudden grip, or a momentary flash of eloquence, seemed to be for the moment his business in life. How the thing emerged, after a few minutes, from the long involved sentences!--only involved because the impressions of a man of genius are so many, and the resources of speech so limited. This involution, this deliberation in attack, this slowness of approach toward a point which in the end was generally triumphantly rushed, always seemed to me more effective as Mr. James used it in speech than as he employed it--some of us would say, to excess--in a few of his latest books. For, in talk, his own living personality--his flashes of fun--of courtesy--of "chaff"--were always there, to do away with what, in the written word, became a difficult strain on attention.

I remember an amusing instance of it, when my daughter D----, who was housekeeping for us at Castel Gandolfo, asked his opinion as to how to deal with the Neapolitan cook, who had been anything but satisfactory, in the case of a luncheon-party of friends from Rome. It was decided to write a letter to the ex-bandit in the kitchen, at the bottom of the fifty-two steps, requesting him to do his best, and pointing out recent shortcomings. D----, whose Italian was then rudimentary, brought the letter to Mr. James, and he walked up and down the vast _salone_ of the villa, striking his forehead, correcting and improvising. "A really nice pudding" was what we justly desired, since the Neapolitan genius for sweets is well known. Mr. James threw out half phrases--pursued them--improved upon them--withdrew them--till finally he rushed upon the magnificent bathos--"_un dolce come si deve_!"--which has ever since been the word with us for the tiptop thing.

With the country people he was simplicity and friends.h.i.+p itself. I recollect him in close talk with a brown-frocked, barefooted monk, coming from the monastery of Palazzuola on the farther side of the Alban lake, and how the super-subtle, supersensitive cosmopolitan found not the smallest difficulty in drawing out the peasant and getting at something real and vital in the ruder, simpler mind. And again, on a never-to-be-forgotten evening on the Nemi lake, when, on descending from Genzano to the strawberry-farm that now holds the site of the famous temple of Diana Nemorensis, we found a beautiful youth at the _fattoria_, who for a few pence undertook to show us the fragments that remain. Mr. James asked his name. "Aristodemo," said the boy, looking, as he spoke the Greek name, "like to a G.o.d in form and stature." Mr.

James's face lit up, and he walked over the historic ground beside the lad, Aristodemo picking up for him fragments of terra-cotta from the furrows through which the plow had just pa.s.sed, bits of the innumerable small figurines that used to crowd the temple walls as ex-votos, and are now mingled with the _fragole_ in the rich alluvial earth. It was a wonderful evening; with a golden sun on the lake, on the wide stretches where the temple stood, and the niched wall where Lord Savile dug for treasure and found it; on the great s.h.i.+p timbers also, beside the lake, wreckage from Caligula's galleys, which still lie buried in the deepest depth of the water; on the rock of Nemi, and the fortress-like Orsini villa; on the Alban Mount itself, where it cut the clear sky. I presently came up with Mr. James and Aristodemo, who led us on serenely, a young Hermes in the transfiguring light. One almost looked for the winged feet and helmet of the messenger G.o.d! Mr. James paused--his eyes first on the boy, then on the surrounding scene. "Aristodemo!" he murmured, smiling, and more to himself than me, his voice caressing the word. "What a name! What a place!"

On another occasion I recall him in company with the well-known antiquary, Signer Lanciani, who came over to lunch, amusing us all by the combination of learning with _le sport_ which he affected. Let me quote the account of it given by a girl of the party:

Signor Lanciani is a great man who combines being _the_ top authority in his profession with a kindness and _bonhomie_ which make even an ignoramus feel happy with him--and with the frankest love for _flanerie_ and "sport." We all fell in love with him. To hear him after lunch, in his fluent, but lisping English, holding forth about the ruins of Domitian's villa--"what treasures are still to be found in ziz garden if somebody would only _dig_!"--and saying with excitement--"ziz town, ziz Castello Gandolfo was built upon the site of Alba Longa, not Palazzuola at all. _Here_, Madame, beneath our feet, is Alba Longa"--And then suddenly--a pause, a deep sigh from his ample breast, and a whisper on the summer air--"I vonder--vether--von could make a golf-links around ziz garden!"

And I see still Mr. James's figure strolling along the terrace which roofed the crypto-porticus of the Roman villa, beside the professor--the short coat, the summer hat, the smooth-shaven, finely cut face, now alive with talk and laughter, now shrewdly, one might say coldly, observant; the face of a satirist--but so human!--so alive to all that underworld of destiny through which move the weaknesses of men and women. We were sorry indeed when he left us. But there were many other happy meetings to come through the sixteen years that remained--meetings at Stocks and in London; letters and talks that were landmarks in my literary life and in our friends.h.i.+p. Later on I shall quote from his _Eleanor_ letter, the best, perhaps, of all his critical letters to me, though the _Robert Elsmere_ letters, already published, run it hard.

That, too, was followed by many more. But as I do not intend to give more than a general outline of the years that followed on 1900, I will record here the last time but one that I ever saw Henry James--a vision, an impression, which the retina of memory will surely keep to the end.

It was at Grosvenor Place in the autumn of 1915, the second year of the war. How doubly close by then he had grown to all our hearts! His pa.s.sionate sympathy for England and France, his English naturalization--a _beau geste_ indeed, but so sincere, so moving--the pity and wrath that carried him to sit by wounded soldiers and made him put all literary work aside as something not worth doing, so that he might spend time and thought on helping the American ambulance in France--one must supply all this as the background of the scene.

It was a Sunday afternoon. Our London house had been let for a time, but we were in it again for a few weeks, drawn into the rus.h.i.+ng tide of war-talk and war anxieties. The room was full when Henry James came in.

I saw that he was in a stirred, excited mood, and the key to it was soon found. He began to repeat the conversation of an American envoy to Berlin--a well-known man--to whom he had just been listening. He described first the envoy's impression of the German leaders, political and military, of Berlin. "They seemed to him like men waiting in a room from which the air is being slowly exhausted. They _know_ they can't win! It is only a question of how long, and how much damage they can do." The American further reported that after his formal business had been done with the Prussian Foreign Minister, the Prussian, relaxing his whole att.i.tude and offering a cigarette, said, "Now then, let me talk to you frankly, as man to man!"--and began a bitter attack on the att.i.tude of President Wilson. Colonel ---- listened, and when the outburst was done, said: "Very well! Then I, too, will speak frankly. I have known President Wilson for many years. He is a very strong man, physically and morally. You can neither frighten him nor bluff him--"

And then, springing up in his seat, "And, by Heaven! if you want war with America, you can have it to-morrow!"

Mr. James's dramatic repet.i.tion of this story, his eyes on fire, his hand striking the arm of his chair, remains with me as my last sight of him in a typical representative moment.

Six months later, on March 6, 1916, my daughter and I were guests at the British Headquarters in France. I was there at the suggestion of Mr.

Roosevelt and by the wish of our Foreign Office, in order to collect the impressions and information that were afterward embodied in _England's Effort_. We came down ready to start for the front, in a military motor, when our kind officer escort handed us some English telegrams which had just come in. One of them announced the death of Henry James; and all through that wonderful day, when we watched a German counter-attack in the Ypres salient from one of the hills southeast of Poperinghe, the ruined tower of Ypres rising from the mists of the horizon, the news was intermittently with me as a dull pain, breaking in upon the excitement and novelty of the great spectacle around us.

"_A mortal, a mortal is dead_!"

I was looking over ground where every inch was consecrated to the dead sons of England, dead for her; but even through their ghostly voices came the voice of Henry James, who, spiritually, had fought in their fight and suffered in their pain.

One year and a month before the American declaration of war. What he would have given to see it--my dear old friend--whose life and genius will enter forever into the bonds uniting England and America!