A Writer's Recollections Volume I Part 2

But, dear Tom, I believe that though the hoped for flower and fruit have faded, yet that the plant has been strengthened and purified.... It would be a grief to me not to believe that you will yet be most happy in married life; and when you can make to yourself a home I shall perhaps lose some of my restless longing to be near you and ministering to your comfort, and sharing in your life--if I can think of you as cheered and helped by one who loved you as I did your own beloved father.

_Sunday, November 26._--Just a year, my son, since you left England!

But I really must not allow myself to dwell on this, and all the thoughts it brings with it; for I found last night that the contrast between the fulness of thought and feeling, and my own powerlessness to express it weighed on me heavily; and not having yet quite recovered my usual tone, I could not well bear it. So I will just try to collect for you a few more home Memoranda, and then have done.... Our new tenant, James Richardson, is now fairly established at his farm, and when I went up there and saw the cradle and the happy childish faces around the table, and the rows of oatmeal cake hanging up, and the cheerful, active Mother going hither and thither--now to her Dairy--now guiding the steps of the little one that followed her about--and all the time preparing things for her husband's return from his work at night, I could not but feel that it was a very happy picture of English life. Alas! that there are not larger districts where it exists! But I hope there is still much of it; and I feel that while there is an awful undercurrent of misery and sin--the latter both caused by the first and causing it--and while, on the surface, there is carelessness, and often recklessness and hardness and trifling, yet that still, in our English society, there is, between these two extremes, a strength of good mixed with baser elements, which must and will, I fully believe, support us nationally in the troublous times which are at hand--on which we are actually entered.

But again I am wandering, and now the others have gone off to the Rydal Chapel without me this lovely Sunday morning. There are the bells sounding invitingly across the valley, and the evergreens are white and sparkling in the sun.

I have a note from Clough.... His poem is as remarkable, I think, as you would expect, coming from him. Its _power_ quite overcame my dislike to the measure--so far at least as to make me read it with great interest--often, though, a painful one. And now I must end.

As to Miss Bronte's impressions of Matthew Arnold in that same afternoon call of 1850, they were by no means flattering. She understands that he was already the author of "a volume of poems" (_The Poems by A,_ 1849), remarks that his manner "displeases from its seeming foppery," but recognizes, nevertheless, in conversation with him, "some genuine intellectual aspirations"! It was but a few years later that my uncle paid his poet's homage to the genius of the two sisters--to Charlotte of the "expressive gray eyes"--to Emily of the "chainless soul." I often try to picture their meeting in the Fox How drawing-room: Matthew Arnold, tall, handsome, in the rich opening of his life, his first poetic honors thick upon him, looking with a half-critical, half-humorous eye at the famous little lady whom Miss Martineau had brought to call upon his mother; and beside him that small, intrepid figure, on which the worst storms of life had already beaten, which was but five short years from its own last rest. I doubt whether, face to face, they would ever have made much of each other. But the sister who could write of a sister's death as Charlotte wrote, in the letter that every lover of great prose ought to have by heart--

Emily suffers no more from pain or weakness now, she never will suffer more in this world. She is gone, after a hard, short conflict.... We are very calm at present, why should we be otherwise? The anguish of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of death is gone; the funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. No need now to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. _Emily does not feel them_.--

must have stretched out spiritual hands to Matthew Arnold, had she lived to read "A Southern Night"--that loveliest, surely, of all laments of brother for brother.

CHAPTER III

THE FAMILY OF FOX HOW

Doctor Arnold's eldest daughter, Jane Arnold, afterward Mrs. W.E.

Forster, my G.o.dmother, stands out for me on the tapestry of the past, as one of the n.o.blest personalities I have ever known. She was twenty-one when her father died, and she had been his chief companion among his children for years before death took him from her. He taught her Latin and Greek, he imbued her with his own political and historical interests, and her ardent Christian faith answered to his own. After his death she was her mother's right hand at Fox How; and her letters to her brothers--to my father, especially, since he was longest and farthest away--show her quick and cultivated mind, and all the sweetness of her nature. We hear of her teaching a younger brother Latin and Greek; she goes over to Miss Martineau on the other side of the valley to translate some German for that busy woman; she reads Dante beside her mother, when the rest of the family have gone to bed; she sympathizes pa.s.sionately with Mazzini and Garibaldi; and every week she walks over Loughrigg through fair weather and foul, summer and winter, to teach in a night school at Skelwith. Then the young Quaker manufacturer, William Forster, appears on the scene, and she falls happily and completely in love. Her letters to the brother in New Zealand become, in a moment, all joy and ardor, and nothing could be prettier than the account, given by one of the sisters, of the quiet wedding in Rydal Chapel, the family breakfast, the bride's simple dress and radiant look, Matthew Arnold giving his sister away--with the great fells standing sentinel. And there exists a delightful unpublished letter by Harriet Martineau which gives some idea of the excitement roused in the quiet Ambleside valley by Jane Arnold's engagement to the tall Yorks.h.i.+reman who came from surroundings so different from the academic and scholarly world in which the Arnolds had been brought up.

Then followed married life at Rawdon near Bradford, with supreme happiness at home, and many and growing interests in the manufacturing, religious, and social life around the young wife. In 1861 William Forster became member for Bradford, and in 1869 Gladstone included him in that Ministry of all the talents, which foundered under the onslaughts of Disraeli in 1874. Forster became Vice-President of the Council, which meant Minister for Education, with a few other trifles like the cattle-plague thrown in. The Education Bill, which William Forster brought in in 1870 (as a girl of eighteen, I was in the Ladies'

Gallery of the House of Commons on the great day to hear his speech), has been the foundation-stone ever since of English popular education.

It has always been clear to me that the scheme of the bill was largely influenced by William Forster's wife, and, through her, by the convictions and beliefs of her father. The compromise by which the Church schools, with the creeds and the Church catechism, were preserved, under a conscience clause, while the dissenters got their way as to the banishment of creeds and catechisms, and the subst.i.tution for them of "simple Bible-teaching," in the schools founded under the new School Boards, which the bill set up all over England, has practically--with, of course, modifications--held its ground for nearly half a century. It was illogical; and the dissenters have never ceased to resent the perpetuation of the Church school which it achieved. But English life is illogical. It met the real situation; and it would never have taken the shape it did--in my opinion--but for the ardent beliefs of the young and remarkable woman, at once a strong Liberal and a devoted daughter of the English Church, as Arnold, Kingsley, and Maurice understood it, who had married her Quaker husband in 1850, and had thereby been the innocent cause of his automatic severance from the Quaker body. His respect for her judgment and intellectual power was only equaled by his devotion to her. And when the last great test of his own life came, how she stood by him!--through those terrible days of the Land League struggle, when, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, Forster carried his life in his hand month after month, to be worn out finally by the double toil of Parliament and Ireland, and to die just before Mr.

Gladstone split the Liberal party in 1886, by the introduction of the Home Rule Bill, in which Forster would not have followed him.

I shall, however, have something to say later on in these Reminiscences about those tragic days. To those who watched Mrs. Forster through them, and who knew her intimately, she was one of the most interesting figures of that crowded time. Few people, however, outside the circle of her kindred, knew her intimately. She was, of course, in the ordinary social and political world, both before and after her husband's entrance upon office, and admission to the Cabinet; dining out and receiving at home; attending Drawing-rooms and public functions; staying at country houses, and invited to Windsor, like other Ministers' wives, and keenly interested in all the varying fortunes of Forster's party. But though she was in that world, she was never truly of it. She moved through it, yet veiled from it, by that pure, unconscious selflessness which is the saint's gift. Those who ask nothing for themselves, whose whole strength is spent on affections that are their life, and on ideals at one with their affections, are not easily popular, like the self-seeking, parti-colored folk who make up the rest of us; who flatter, caress, and court, that we in our turn may be flattered and courted. Their gentleness masks the indomitable soul within; and so their fellows are often unaware of their true spiritual rank.

It is interesting to recall the instinctive sympathy with which a nature so different from Charlotte Bronte's as that of Arnold's eldest daughter, met the challenge of the Bronte genius. It would not have been wonderful--in those days--if the quiet Fox How household, with its strong religious atmosphere, its daily psalms and lessons, its love for _The Christian Year_, its belief in "discipline" (how that comes out in all the letters!) had been repelled by the blunt strength of _Jane Eyre_; just as it would not have been wonderful if they had held aloof from Miss Martineau, in the days when it pleased that remarkable woman to preach mesmeric atheism, or atheistic mesmerism, as we choose to put it. But there was a lifelong friends.h.i.+p between them and Harriet Martineau; and they recognized at once the sincerity and truth--the literary rank, in fact--of _Jane Eyre_. Not long after her marriage, Jane Forster with her husband went over to Haworth to see Charlotte Bronte. My aunt's letter, describing the visit to the dismal parsonage and church, is given without her name in Mrs. Gaskell's _Life_, and Mr.

Shorter, in reprinting it in the second of his large volumes, does not seem to be aware of the ident.i.ty of the writer.

Miss Bronte put me so in mind of her own Jane Eyre [wrote my G.o.dmother]. She looked smaller than ever, and moved about so quietly and noiselessly, just like a little bird, as Rochester called her; except that all birds are joyous, and that joy can never have entered that house since it was built. And yet, perhaps, when that old man (Mr. Bronte) married and took home his bride, and children's voices and feet were heard about the house, even that desolate graveyard and biting blast could not quench cheerfulness and hope. Now (i.e. since the deaths of Emily and Anne) there is something touching in the sight of that little creature entombed in such a place, and moving about herself there like a spirit; especially when you think that the slight still frame incloses a force of strong, fiery life, which nothing has been able to freeze or extinguish.

This letter was written before my birth and about six years before the writer of it appeared, as an angel of help, in the dingy dock-side inn, where we tired travelers had taken shelter on our arrival from the other side of the world, and where I was first kissed by my G.o.dmother. As I grew up into girlhood, "Aunt K." (K. was the pet name by which Matthew Arnold always wrote to her) became for me part of the magic of Fox How, though I saw her, of course, often in her own home also. I felt toward her a pa.s.sionate and troubled affection. She was to me "a thing enskied"

and heavenly--for all her quick human interests, and her sweet ways with those she loved. How could any one be so good!--was often the despairing reflection of the child who adored her, caught herself in the toils of a hot temper and a stubborn will; but all the same, to see her enter a room was joy, and to sit by her the highest privilege. I don't know whether she could be strictly called beautiful. But to me everything about her was beautiful--her broad brow, her clear brown eyes and wavy brown hair, the touch of stately grace with which she moved, the mouth so responsive and soft, yet, at need, so determined, the hand so delicate, yet so characteristic.

She was the eldest of nine. Of her relation to the next of them--her brother Matthew--there are many indications in the collection of my uncle's letters, edited by Mr. George Russell. It was to her that "Resignation" was addressed, in recollection of their mountain walks and talks together; and in a letter to her, the Sonnet "To Shakespeare,"

"Others abide our question--thou art free," was first written out. Their affection for each other, in spite of profound differences of opinion, only quickened and deepened with time.

Between my father and his elder brother Matthew Arnold there was barely a year's difference of age. The elder was born in December, 1822, and the younger in November, 1823. They were always warmly attached to each other, and in spite of much that was outwardly divergent--sharply divergent--they were more alike fundamentally than was often suspected.

Both had derived from some remoter ancestry--possibly through their Cornish mother, herself the daughter of a Penrose and a Trevenen--elements and qualities which were lacking in the strong personality of their father. Imagination, "rebellion against fact,"

spirituality, a tendency to dream, unworldliness, the pa.s.sionate love of beauty and charm, "ineffectualness" in the practical compet.i.tive life--these, according to Matthew Arnold, when he came to lecture at Oxford on "The Study of Celtic Literature," were and are the characteristic marks of the Celt. They were unequally distributed between the two brothers. "Unworldliness," "rebellion against fact,"

"ineffectualness" in common life, fell rather to my father's share than my uncle's; though my uncle's "worldliness," of which he was sometimes accused, if it ever existed, was never more than skin-deep. Imagination in my father led to a lifelong and mystical preoccupation with religion; it made Matthew Arnold one of the great poets of the nineteenth century.

There is a sketch of my father made in 1847, which preserves the dreamy, sensitive look of early youth, when he was the center of a band of remarkable friends--Clough, Stanley, F.T. Palgrave, Alfred Domett (Browning's Waring), and others. It is the face--n.o.bly and delicately cut--of one to whom the successes of the practical, compet.i.tive life could never be of the same importance as those events which take place in thought, and for certain minds are the only real events. "For ages and ages the world has been constantly slipping ever more and more out of the Celt's grasp," wrote Matthew Arnold. But all the while the Celt has great compensations. To him belongs another world than the visible; the world of phantasmagoria, of emotion, the world of pa.s.sionate beginnings, rather than of things achieved. After the romantic and defiant days of his youth, my father, still pursuing the same natural tendency, found all that he needed in Catholicism, and specially, I think, in that endless poetry and mystery of the Ma.s.s which keeps Catholicism alive.

Matthew Arnold was very different in outward aspect. The face, strong and rugged, the large mouth, the broad lined brow, and vigorous coal-black hair, bore no resemblance, except for that fugitive yet vigorous something which we call "family likeness," to either his father or mother--still less to the brother so near to him in age. But the Celtic trace is there, though derived, I have sometimes thought, rather from an Irish than a Cornish source. Doctor Arnold's mother, Martha Delafield, according to a genealogy I see no reason to doubt, was partly of Irish blood; one finds, at any rate, Fitzgeralds and Dillons among the names of her forebears. And I have seen in Ireland faces belonging to the "black Celt" type--faces full of power and humor, and softness, visibly molded out of the good common earth by the nimble spirit within, which have reminded me of my uncle. Nothing, indeed, at first sight could have been less romantic or dreamy than his outer aspect.

"Ineffectualness" was not to be thought of in connection with him. He stood four-square--a courteous, competent man of affairs, an admirable inspector of schools, a delightful companion, a guest whom everybody wanted and no one could bind for long; one of the sanest, most independent, most cheerful and lovable of mortals. Yet his poems show what was the real inner life and genius of the man; how rich in that very "emotion," "love of beauty and charm," "rebellion against fact,"

"spirituality," "melancholy" which he himself catalogued as the cradle gifts of the Celt. Crossed, indeed, always, with the Rugby "earnestness," with that in him which came to him from his father.

It is curious to watch the growing perception of "Matt's" powers among the circle of his nearest kin, as it is reflected in these family letters to the emigrant brother, which reached him across the seas from 1847 to 1856, and now lie under my hand. The _Poems by A._ came out, as all lovers of English poetry know, in 1849. My grandmother writes to my father in March of that year, after protesting that she has not much news to give him:

But the little volume of Poems!--that is indeed a subject of new and very great interest. By degrees we hear more of public opinion concerning them, and I am very much mistaken if their power both in thought and execution is not more and more felt and acknowledged. I had a letter from dear Miss Fenwick to-day, whose first impressions were that they were by _you_, for it seems she had heard of the volume as much admired, and as by one of the family, and she had hardly thought it could be by one so moving in the busy haunts of men as dear Matt.... Matt himself says: "I have learned a good deal as to what is _practicable_ from the objections of people, even when I thought them not reasonable, and in some degree they may determine my course as to publis.h.i.+ng; e.g., I had thoughts of publis.h.i.+ng another volume of short poems next spring, and a tragedy I have long had in my head, the spring after: at present I shall leave the short poems to take their chance, only writing them when I cannot help it, and try to get on with my Tragedy ('Merope'), which however will not be a very quick affair. But as that must be in a regular and usual form, it may perhaps, if it succeeds, enable me to use meters in short poems which seem proper to myself; whether they suit the habits of readers at first sight or not. But all this is rather vague at present.... I think I am getting quite indifferent about the book. I have given away the only copy I had, and now never look at them. The most enthusiastic people about them are young men of course; but I have heard of one or two people who found pleasure in 'Resignation,' and poems of that stamp, which is what I like."

"The most enthusiastic people about them are young men, of course." The sentence might stand as the motto of all poetic beginnings. The young poet writes first of all for the young of his own day. They make his bodyguard. They open to him the gates of the House of Fame. But if the divine power is really his, it soon frees itself from the shackles of Time and Circ.u.mstance. The true poet becomes, in the language of the Greek epigram on Homer, "the ageless mouth of all the world." And if, "The Strayed Reveller," and the Sonnet "To Shakespeare," and "Resignation," delighted those who were young in 1849, that same generation, as the years pa.s.sed over it, instead of outgrowing their poet, took him all the more closely to their hearts. Only so can we explain the steady spread and deepening of his poetic reputation which befell my uncle up to the very end of his life, and had a.s.sured him by then--leaving out of count the later development of his influence both in the field of poetry and elsewhere--his place in the history of English literature.

But his entry as a poet was gradual, and but little heralded, compared to the debuts of our own time. Here is an interesting appreciation from his sister Mary, about whom I shall have more to say presently. At the time this letter was written, in 1849, she was twenty-three, and already a widow, after a tragic year of married life during which her young husband had developed paralysis of the brain. She was living in London, attending Bedford College, and F.D. Maurice's sermons, much influenced, like her brothers, by Emerson and Carlyle, and at this moment a fine, restless, immature creature, much younger than her years in some respects, and much older in others--with worlds. .h.i.therto unsuspected in the quiet home life. She writes:

I have been in London for several months this year, and I have seen a good deal of Matt, considering the very different lives we lead. I used to breakfast with him sometimes, and then his Poems seemed to make me know Matt so much better than I had ever done before.

Indeed it was almost like a new Introduction to him. I do not think those Poems could be read--quite independently of their poetical power--without leading one to expect a great deal from Matt; without raising I mean the kind of expectation one has from and for those who have, in some way or other, come face to face with life and asked it, in real earnest, what it means. I felt there was so much more of this practical questioning in Matt's book than I was at all prepared for; in fact that it showed a knowledge of life and conflict which was _strangely like experience_ if it was not the thing itself; and this with all Matt's great power I should not have looked for. I do not yet know the book well, but I think that "Mycerinus" struck me most, perhaps, as ill.u.s.trating what I have been speaking of.

And again, to another member of the family:

It is the moral strength, or, at any rate, the _moral consciousness_ which struck and surprised me so much in the poems. I could have been prepared for any degree of poetical power, for there being a great deal more than I could at all appreciate; but there is something altogether different from this, something which such a man as Clough has, for instance, which I did not expect to find in Matt; but it is there. Of course when I speak of his Poems I only speak of the impression received from those I understand. Some are perfect riddles to me, such as that to the Child at Douglas, which is surely more poetical than true.

_Strangely like experience!_ The words are an interesting proof of the difficulty we all have in seeing with accuracy the persons and things which are nearest to us. The astonishment of the sisters--for the same feeling is expressed by Mrs. Forster--was very natural. In these early days, "Matt" often figures in the family letters as the worldling of the group--the dear one who is making way in surroundings quite unknown to the Fox How circle, where, under the shadow of the mountains, the sisters, idealists all of them, looking out a little austerely, for all their tenderness, on the human scene, are watching with a certain anxiety lest Matt should be "spoiled." As Lord Lansdowne's private secretary, very much liked by his chief, he goes among rich and important people, and finds himself, as a rule, much cleverer than they; above all, able to amuse them, so often the surest road to social and other success. Already at Oxford "Matt" had been something of an exquisite--or, as Miss Bronte puts it, a trifle "foppish"; and (in the ma.n.u.script) _Fox How Magazine_, to which all the nine contributed, and in which Matthew Arnold's boyish poems may still be read, there are many family jests leveled at Matt's high standard in dress and deportment.

But how soon the nascent dread lest their poet should be somehow separated from them by the "great world" pa.s.ses away from mother and sisters--forever! With every year of his life Matthew Arnold, besides making the suns.h.i.+ne of his own married home, became a more attached, a more devoted son and brother. The two volumes of his published letters are there to show it. I will only quote here a sentence from a letter of Mrs. Arnold's, written in 1850, a year after the publication of the _Poems by A._ She and her eldest daughter, then shortly to become William Forster's wife, were at the time in London. "K" had been seriously ill, and the marriage had been postponed for a short time.

Matt [says Mrs. Arnold] has been with us almost every day since we came up--now so long ago!--and it is pleasant indeed to see his dear face, and to find him always so affectionate, and so unspoiled by his being so much sought after in a kind of society entirely different from anything we can enter into.

But, indeed, the time saved, day after day, for an invalid sister, by a run-after young man of twenty-seven, who might so easily have made one or other of the trifling or selfish excuses we are all so ready to make, was only a prophecy of those many "nameless unremembered acts" of simple kindness which filled the background of Matthew Arnold's middle and later life, and were not revealed, many of them, even to his own people, till after his death--kindness to a pupil-teacher, an unsuccessful writer, a hard-worked schoolmaster or schoolmistress, a budding poet, a school-boy. It was not possible to "spoil" Matthew Arnold. Meredith's "Comic Spirit" in him, his irrepressible humor, would alone have saved him from it. And as to his relation to "society," and the great ones in it, no one more frankly amused himself--within certain very definite limits--with the "cakes and ale" of life, and no one held more lightly to them. He never denied--none but the foolish ever do deny--the immense personal opportunities and advantages of an aristocratic cla.s.s, wherever it exists. He was quite conscious--none but those without imagination can fail to be conscious--of the glamour of long descent and great affairs. But he laughed at the "Barbarians," the materialized or stupid holders of power and place, and their "fortified posts"--i.e., the country houses--just as he laughed at the Philistines and Mr. Bottles; when he preached a sermon in later life, it was on Menander's motto, "Choose Equality"; and he and Clough--the Republican--were not really far apart. He mocked even at Clough, indeed, addressing his letters to him, "Citizen Clough, Oriel Lyceum, Oxford"; but in the midst of the revolutionary hubbub of 1848 he pours himself out to Clough only--he and "Thyrsis," to use his own expression in a letter, "agreeing like two lambs in a world of wolves," and in his early sonnet (1848) "To a Republican Friend" (who was certainly Clough) he says:

If sadness at the long heart-wasting show Wherein earth's great ones are disquieted; If thoughts, not idle, while before me flow

The armies of the homeless and unfed-- If these are yours, if this is what you are, Then I am yours, and what you feel, I share.

Yet, as he adds, in the succeeding sonnet, he has no belief in sudden radical change, nor in any earthly millennium--

Seeing this vale, this earth, whereon we dream, Is on all sides o'ershadowed by the high Uno'erleaped mountains of necessity, Sparing us narrower margin than we dream.

On the eagerness with which Matthew Arnold followed the revolutionary spectacle of 1848, an unpublished letter written--piquantly enough!--from Lansdowne House itself, on February 28th, in that famous year, to my father in New Zealand, throws a vivid light. One feels the artist in the writer. First, the quiet of the great house and courtyard, the flower-p.r.i.c.ked gra.s.s, the "still-faced babies"; then the sudden clash of the street-cries! "Your uncle's description of this house,"

writes the present Lord Lansdowne, in 1910, "might almost have been written yesterday, instead of in 1848. Little is changed, Romulus and Remus and the she-wolf are still on the top of the bookcase, and the clock is still hard by; but the picture of the Jewish Exiles...has been given to a local School of Art in Wilts.h.i.+re! The green lawn remains, but I am afraid the crocuses, which I can remember as a child, no longer come up through the turf. And lastly one of the 'still-faced babies'

[i.e., Lord Lansdowne himself] is still often to be seen in the gravel court! He was three years old when the letter was written."

Here, then, is the letter:

LANSDOWNE HOUSE, _Feb. 8, 1848._

MY DEAREST TOM,--...Here I sit, opposite a marble group of Romulus and Remus and the wolf; the two children fighting like mad, and the limp-uddered she-wolf affectionately snarling at the little demons struggling on her back. Above it is a great picture, Rembrandt's Jewish Exiles, which would do for Consuelo and Albert resting in one of their wanderings, worn out upon a wild stony heath sloping to the Baltic--she leaning over her two children who sleep in their torn rags at her feet. Behind me a most musical clock, marking now 24 Minutes past 1 P.M. On my left two great windows looking out on the court in front of the house, through one of which, slightly opened, comes in gushes the soft damp breath, with a tone of spring-life in it, which the close of an English February sometimes brings--so different from a November mildness. The green lawn which occupies nearly half the court is studded over with crocuses of all colors--growing out of the gra.s.s, for there are no flower-beds; delightful for the large still-faced white-robed babies whom their nurses carry up and down on the gravel court where it skirts the green. And from the square and the neighboring streets, through the open door whereat the civil porter moves to and fro, come the sounds of vehicles and men, in all gradations, some from near and some from far, but mellowed by the time they reach this backstanding lordly mansion.