A Writer's Recollections Volume I Part 9

He smiled, but there was that in the smile and the gesture which showed the smart within; from which not even his scholar's philosophy, with its ideal of a world of cosmopolitan science, could protect him. At that moment he was inclined to despair of his country. The mad adventure of the Commune had gone deep into his soul, and there were still a good many pacifying years to run, before he could talk of his life as "_cette charmante promenade a travers la realite_"--for which, with all it had contained of bad and good, he yet thanked the G.o.ds. At that time he was fifty-one; he had just published _L'Antichrist,_ the most brilliant of all the volumes of the "Origines"; and he was not yet a member of the French Academy.

I turn to a few other impressions from that distant time. One night we were in the Theatre Francais, and Racine's "Phedre" was to be given. I at least had never been in the Maison de Moliere before, and in such matters as acting I possessed, at twenty-three, only a very raw and country-cousinish judgment. There had been a certain amount of talk in Oxford of a new and remarkable French actress, but neither of us had really any idea of what was before us. Then the play began. And before the first act was over we were sitting, bent forward, gazing at the stage in an intense and concentrated excitement such as I can scarcely remember ever feeling again, except perhaps when the same actress played "Hernani" in London for the first time in 1884. Sarah Bernhardt was then--December, 1874--in the first full tide of her success. She was of a ghostly and willowy slenderness. Each of the great speeches seemed actually to rend the delicate frame. When she fell back after one of them you felt an actual physical terror lest there should not be enough life left in the slight, dying woman to let her speak again. And you craved for yet more and more of the _voix d'or_ which rang in one's ears as the frail yet exquisite instrument of a mighty music. Never before had it been brought home to me what dramatic art might be, or the power of the French Alexandrine. And never did I come so near quarreling with "Uncle Matt" as when, on our return, after having heard my say about the genius of Sarah Bernhardt, he patted my hand indulgently with the remark, "But, my dear child, you see, you never saw Rachel!"

As we listened to Sarah Bernhardt we were watching the outset of a great career which had still some forty years to run. On another evening we made acquaintance with a little old woman who had been born in the first year of the Terror, who had spent her first youth in the _salon_ of Madame Recamier, valued there, above all, for her difficult success in drawing a smile from that old and melancholy genius, Chateaubriand; and had since held a _salon_ of her own, which deserves a special place in the history of _salons_. For it was held, according to the French tradition, and in Paris, by an Englishwoman. It was, I think, Max Muller who gave us an introduction to Madame Mohl. She sent us an invitation to one of her Friday evenings, and we duly mounted to the top of the old house in the Rue du Bac which she made famous for so long. As we entered the room I saw a small disheveled figure, gray-headed, crouching beside a grate, with a kettle in her hand. It was Madame Mohl--then eighty- one--who was trying to make the fire burn. She just raised herself to greet us, with a swift investigating glance; and then returned to her task of making the tea, in which I endeavored to help her. But she did not like to be helped, and I soon subsided into my usual listening and watching, which, perhaps, for one who at that time was singularly immature in all social respects, was the best policy. I seem still to see the tall, substantial form of Julius Mohl standing behind her, with various other elderly men who were no doubt famous folk, if one had known their names. And in the corner was the Spartan tea-table, with its few biscuits, which stood for the plain living whereon was nourished the high thinking and high talking which had pa.s.sed through these rooms.

Guizot, Cousin, Ampere, Fauriel, Mignet, Lamartine, all the great men of the middle century had talked there; not, in general, the poets and the artists, but the politicians, the historians, and the _savants_. The little Fairy Blackstick, incredibly old, kneeling on the floor, with the shabby dress and tousled gray hair, had made a part of the central scene in France, through the Revolution, the reign of the Citizen king, and the Second Empire--playing the role, through it all, of a good friend of freedom. If only one had heard her talk! But there were few people in the room, and we were none of us inspired. I must sadly put down that Friday evening among the lost opportunities of life. For Mrs. Simpson's biography of Madame Mohl shows what a wealth of wit and memory there was in that small head! Her social sense, her humor, never deserted her, though she lived to be ninety. When she was dying, her favorite cat, a tom, leaped on her bed. Her eyes lit up as she feebly stroked him. "He is so distinguished!" she whispered. "But his wife is not distinguished at all. He doesn't know it. But many men are like that." It was one of the last sayings of an expert in the human scene.

Madame Mohl was twenty-one when the Allies entered Paris in 1814. She had lived with those to whom the fall of the _Ancien Regime_, the Terror, and the Revolutionary wars had been the experience of middle life. As I look back to the _salon_ in the Rue du Bac, which I saw in such a flash, yet where my hand rested for a moment in that of Madame Recamier's pet and protegee, I am reminded, too, that I once saw, at the Forsters', in 1869, when I was eighteen, the Doctor Lus.h.i.+ngton who was Lady Byron's adviser and confidant when she left her husband, and who, as a young man, had stayed with Pitt and ridden out with Lady Hester Stanhope. One night, in Eccleston Square, we a.s.sembled for dinner in the ground-floor library instead of the drawing-room, which was up-stairs. I slipped in late, and saw in an arm-chair, his hands resting on a stick, an old, white-haired man. When dinner was announced--if I remember right--he was wheeled into the dining-room, to a place beside my aunt. I was too far away to hear him talk, and he went home after dinner. But it was one of the guests of the evening, a friend of his, who said to me-- with a kindly wish, no doubt, to thrill the girl just "out": "You ought to remember Doctor Lus.h.i.+ngton! What are you?--eighteen?--and he is eighty-six. He was in the theater on the night when the news reached London of Marie Antoinette's execution, and he can remember, though he was only a boy of eleven, how it was given out from the stage, and how the audience instantly broke up."

Doctor Lus.h.i.+ngton, of course, carries one farther back than Madame Mohl.

He was born in 1782, four years after the deaths of Rousseau and Voltaire, two years before the death of Diderot. He was only six years younger than Lady Hester Stanhope, whose acquaintance he made during the three years--1803-1806--when she was keeping house for her uncle, William Pitt.

But on my right hand at the same dinner-party there sat a guest who was to mean a good deal more to me personally than Doctor Lus.h.i.+ngton--young Mr. George Otto Trevelyan, as he then was, Lord Macaulay's nephew, already the brilliant author of _A Compet.i.tion Wallah, Ladies in Parliament_, and much else. We little thought, as we talked, that after thirty-five years his son was to marry my daughter.

CHAPTER IX

THE BEGINNINGS OF _ROBERT ELSMERE_

If these are to be the recollections of a writer, in which perhaps other writers by profession, as well as the more general public, may take some interest, I shall perhaps be forgiven if I give some account of the processes of thought and work which led to the writing of my first successful novel, _Robert Elsmere_.

It was in 1878 that a new editor was appointed for one of the huge well- known volumes, in which under the aegis of the John Murray of the day, the _Nineteenth Century_ was accustomed to concentrate its knowledge-- cla.s.sical, historical, and theological--in convenient, if not exactly handy, form. Doctor Wace, now a Canon of Canterbury, was then an indefatigable member of the _Times_ staff. Yet he undertook this extra work, and carried it bravely through. He came to Oxford to beat up recruits for Smith's _Dictionary of Christian Biography_, a companion volume to that of _Cla.s.sical Biography_, and dealing with the first seven centuries of Christianity. He had been told that I had been busying myself with early Spain, and he came to me to ask whether I would take the Spanish lives for the period, especially those concerned with the West-Goths in Spain; while at the same time he applied to various Oxford historians for work on the Ostrogoths and the Franks.

I was much tempted, but I had a good deal to consider. The French and Spanish reading it involved was no difficulty. But the power of reading Latin rapidly, both the degraded Latin of the fifth and sixth centuries and the learned Latin of the sixteenth and seventeenth, was essential; and I had only learned some Latin since my marriage, and was by no means at home in it. I had long since found out, too, in working at the Spanish literature of the eleventh to the fourteenth century, that the only critics and researches worth following in that field were German; and though I had been fairly well grounded in German at school, and had read a certain amount, the prospect of a piece of work which meant, in the main, Latin texts and German commentaries, was rather daunting. The well-trained woman student of the present day would have felt probably no such qualms. But I had not been well trained; and the Pattison standards of what work should be stood like dragons in the way.

However, I took the plunge, and I have always been grateful to Canon Wace. The sheer, hard, brain-stretching work of the two or three years which followed I look back to now with delight. It altered my whole outlook and gave me horizons and sympathies that I have never lost, however dim all the positive knowledge brought me by the work has long since become. The strange thing was that out of the work which seemed both to myself and others to mark the abandonment of any foolish hopes of novel-writing I might have cherished as a girl, _Robert Elsmere_ should have arisen. For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures. J. R. G. dealt very faithfully with me on the subject; and I could only conclude that the instinct to tell stories which had been so strong in me as a child and girl meant nothing, and was to be suppressed. I did, indeed, write a story for my children, which came out in 1880--_Milly and Olly_; but that wrote itself and was a mere transcript of their little lives.

And yet I venture to think it was, after all, the instinct for "making out," as the Brontes used to call their own wonderful story-telling pa.s.sion, which rendered this historical work so enthralling to me. Those far-off centuries became veritably alive to me--the Arian kings fighting an ever-losing battle against the ever-encroaching power of the Catholic Church, backed by the still lingering and still potent ghost of the Roman Empire; the Catholic Bishops gathering, sometimes through winter snow, to their Councils at Seville and Toledo; the centers of culture in remote corners of the peninsula, where men lived with books and holy things, shrinking from the wild life around them, and handing on the precious remnants and broken traditions of the older cla.s.sical world; the mutual scorn of Goth and Roman; martyrs, fanatics, heretics, nationalists, and cosmopolitans; and, rising upon, enveloping them all, as the seventh and eighth centuries drew on, the tide of Islam, and the menace of that time when the great church of Cordova should be half a mosque and half a Christian cathedral.

I lived, indeed, in that old Spain, while I was at work in the Bodleian and at home. To spend hours and days over the signatures to an obscure Council, identifying each name so far as the existing materials allowed, and attaching to it some fragment of human interest, so that gradually something of a picture emerged, as of a thing lost and recovered-- dredged up from the deeps of time--that, I think, was the joy of it all.

I see, in memory, the small Oxford room, as it was on a winter evening, between nine and midnight, my husband in one corner preparing his college lectures, or writing a "Sat.u.r.day" "middle"; my books and I in another; the reading-lamp, always to me a symbol of peace and "recollection"; the Oxford quiet outside. And yet, it was not so tranquil as it looked. For beating round us all the time were the spiritual winds of an agitated day. The Oxford of thought was not quiet; it was divided, as I have shown, by sharper antagonisms and deeper feuds than exist to-day. Darwinism was penetrating everywhere; Pusey was preaching against its effects on belief; Balliol stood for an unfettered history and criticism, Christ Church for authority and creeds; Renan's _Origines_ were still coming out, Strauss's last book also; my uncle was publis.h.i.+ng _G.o.d and the Bible_ in succession to _Literature and Dogma_; and _Supernatural Religion_ was making no small stir. And meanwhile what began to interest and absorb me were _sources_--_testimony_. To what--to whom--did it all go back, this great story of early civilization, early religion, which modern men could write and interpret so differently?

And on this question the writers and historians of four early centuries, from the fifth to the ninth, as I lived with them, seemed to throw a partial, but yet a searching, light. I have expressed it in _Robert Elsmere_. Langham and Robert, talking in the Squire's library on Robert's plans for a history of Gaul during the breakdown of the Empire and the emergence of modern France, come to the vital question: "History depends on _testimony_. What is the nature and virtue of testimony at given times? In other words, did the man of the third century understand, or report, or interpret facts in the same way as the man of the sixteenth or the nineteenth? And if not, what are the differences?-- and what are the deductions to be made from them?"

Robert replies that his work has not yet dug deep enough to make him answer the question.

"It is enormously important, I grant--enormously," he repeated, reflectively.

On which Langham says to himself, though not to Elsmere, that the whole of "orthodoxy" is in it, and depends on it.

And in a later pa.s.sage, when Elsmere is mastering the "Quellen" of his subject, he expresses himself with bewilderment to Catherine on this same subject of "testimony." He is immersed in the chronicles and biographies of the fifth and sixth centuries. Every history, every biography, is steeped in marvel. A man divided by only a few years from the bishop or saint whose life he is writing reports the most fantastic miracles. What is the psychology of it all? The whole age seems to Robert "non-sane." And, meanwhile, across and beyond the medieval centuries, behind the Christian era itself, the modern student looks back inevitably, involuntarily, to certain Greeks and certain Latins, who "represent a forward strain," who intellectually "belong to a world ahead of them." "You"--he says to them--"_you_ are really my kindred."

That, after all, I tried to express this intellectual experience--which was, of course, an experience of my own--not in critical or historical work, but in a novel, that is to say in terms of human life, was the result of an incident which occurred toward the close of our lives in Oxford. It was not long after the appearance of _Supernatural Religion_, and the rise of that newer school of Biblical criticism in Germany expressed by the once-honored name of Doctor Harnack. Darwinian debate in the realm of natural science was practically over. The spread of evolutionary ideas in the fields of history and criticism was the real point of interest. Accordingly, the University pulpit was often filled by men endeavoring "to fit a not very exacting science to a very grudging orthodoxy"; and the heat of an ever-strengthening controversy was in the Oxford air.

In 1881, as it happened, the Bampton Lectures were preached by the Rev.

John Wordsworth, then Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose, and, later, Bishop of Salisbury. He and my husband--who, before our marriage, was also a Fellow of Brasenose--were still tutorial colleagues, and I therefore knew him personally, and his first wife, the brilliant daughter of the beloved Bodley's Librarian of my day, Mr. c.o.xe. We naturally attended Mr. Wordsworth's first Bampton. He belonged, very strongly, to what I have called the Christ Church camp; while we belonged, very strongly, to the Balliol camp. But no one could fail to respect John Wordsworth deeply; while his connection with his great-uncle, the poet, to whom he bore a strong personal likeness, gave him always a glamour in my eyes.

Still, I remember going with a certain shrinking; and it was the shock of indignation excited in me by the sermon which led directly--though after seven intervening years--to _Robert Elsmere._

The sermon was on "The present unsettlement in religion"; and it connected the "unsettlement" definitely with "sin." The "moral causes of unbelief," said the preacher, "were (1) prejudice; (2) severe claims of religion; (3) intellectual faults, especially indolence, coldness, recklessness, pride, and avarice."

The sermon expounded and developed this outline with great vigor, and every skeptical head received its due buffeting in a tone and fas.h.i.+on that now scarcely survive. I sat in the darkness under the gallery. The preacher's fine ascetic face was plainly visible in the middle light of the church; and while the confident priestly voice flowed on, I seemed to see, grouped around the speaker, the forms of those, his colleagues and contemporaries, the patient scholars and thinkers of the Liberal host, Stanley, Jowett, Green of Balliol, Lewis Nettles.h.i.+p, Henry Sidgwick, my uncle, whom he, in truth--though perhaps not consciously-- was attacking. My heart was hot within me. How could one show England what was really going on in her midst? Surely the only way was through imagination; through a picture of actual life and conduct; through something as "simple, sensuous, pa.s.sionate" as one could make it. Who and what were the persons of whom the preacher gave this grotesque account? What was their history? How had their thoughts and doubts come to be? What was the effect of them on conduct?

The _immediate_ result of the sermon, however, was a pamphlet called _Unbelief and Sin: a Protest addressed to those who attended the Bampton Lecture of Sunday, March 6th_. It was rapidly written and printed, and was put up in the windows of a well-known shop in the High Street. In the few hours of its public career it enjoyed a very lively sale. Then an incident--quite unforeseen by its author--slit its little life! A well-known clergyman walked into the shop and asked for the pamphlet. He turned it over, and at once pointed out to one of the partners of the firm in the shop that there was no printer's name upon it. The booksellers who had produced the pamphlet, no doubt with an eye to their large clerical _clientele_, had omitted the printer's name, and the omission was illegal. Pains and penalties were threatened, and the frightened booksellers at once withdrew the pamphlet and sent word of what had happened to my much-astonished self, who had neither noticed the omission nor was aware of the law. But Doctor Foulkes, the clergyman in question--no one that knew the Oxford of my day will have forgotten his tall, militant figure, with the defiant white hair and the long clerical coat, as it haunted the streets of the University!--had only stimulated the tare he seemed to have rooted up. For the pamphlet thus easily suppressed was really the germ of the later book; in that, without attempting direct argument, it merely sketched two types of character: the character that either knows no doubts or has suppressed them, and the character that fights its stormy way to truth.

The latter was the first sketch of _Robert Elsmere_. That same evening, at a College party, Professor Green came up to me. I had sent him the pamphlet the night before, and had not yet had a word from him. His kind brown eyes smiled upon me as he said a hearty "thank you," adding "a capital piece of work," or something to that effect; after which my spirits were quite equal to telling him the story of Doctor Foulkes's raid.

The year 1880-81, however, was marked for me by three other events of quite a different kind: Monsieur Renan's visit to Oxford, my husband's acceptance of a post on the staff of the _Times_, and a visit that we paid to the W.E. Forsters in Ireland, in December, 1880, at almost the blackest moment of the Irish land-war.

Of Renan's visit I have mingled memories--all pleasant, but some touched with comedy. Gentle Madame Renan came with her famous husband and soon won all hearts. Oxford in mid-April was then, as always, a dream of gardens just coming into leaf, enchasing buildings of a silvery gray, and full to the brim of the old walls with the early blossom--almond, or cherry, or flowering currant. M. Renan was delivering the Hibbert Lectures in London, and came down to stay for a long week-end with our neighbors, the Max Mullers. Doctor Hatch was then preaching the Bampton Lectures, that first admirable series of his on the debt of the Church to Latin organization, and M. Renan attended one of them. He had himself just published _Marc Aurele_, and Doctor Hatch's subject was closely akin to that of his own Hibbert Lectures. I remember seeing him emerge from the porch of St. Mary's, his strange, triangular face pleasantly dreamy. "You were interested?" said some one at his elbow. "_Mais oui_!"

said M. Renan, smiling. "He might have given my lecture, and I might have preached his sermon! _(Nous aurions du changer de cahiers_!)" Renan in the pulpit of Pusey, Newman, and Burgon would indeed have been a spectacle of horror to the ecclesiastical mind. I remember once, many years after, following the _parroco_ of Castel Gandolfo, through the dreary and deserted rooms of the Papal villa, where, before 1870, the Popes used to make _villegiatura_, on that beautiful ridge overlooking the Alban lake. All the decoration of the villa seemed to me curiously tawdry and mean. But suddenly my attention was arrested by a great fresco covering an entire wall. It represented the triumph of the Papacy over the infidel of all dates. A Pope sat enthroned, wearing the triple crown, with angels hovering overhead; and in a huge brazier at his feet burned the writings of the world's heretics. The blazing volumes were inscribed--Arius--Luther--Voltaire--_Renan_!

We pa.s.sed on through the empty rooms, and the _parroco_ locked the door behind us. I thought, as we walked away, of the summer light fading from the childish picture, painted probably not long before the entry of the Italian troops into Rome, and of all that was symbolized by it and the deserted villa, to which the "prisoner of the Vatican" no longer returns. But at least Rome had given Ernest Renan no mean place among her enemies--Arius, Luther, Voltaire--_Renan_!

But in truth, Renan, personally, was not the enemy of any church, least of all of the great Church which had trained his youth. He was a born scholar and thinker, in temper extremely gentle and scrupulous, and with a sense of humor, or rather irony, not unlike that of Anatole France, who has learned much from him. There was, of course, a streak in him of that French paradox, that impish trifling with things fundamental, which the English temperament dislikes and resents; as when he wrote the _Abbesse de Jouarre_, or threw out the whimsical doubt in a pa.s.sing sentence of one of his latest books, whether, after all, his life of labor and self-denial had been worth while, and whether, if he had lived the life of an Epicurean, like Theophile Gautier, he might not have got more out of existence. "He was really a good and great man," said Jowett, writing after his death. But "I regret that he wrote at the end of his life that strange drama about the Reign of Terror."

There are probably few of M. Renan's English admirers who do not share the regret. At the same time, there, for all to see, is the long life as it was lived--of the ever-toiling scholar and thinker, the devoted husband and brother, the admirable friend. And certainly, during the Oxford visit I remember, M. Renan was at his best. He was in love-- apparently--with Oxford, and his charm, his gaiety, played over all that we presented to him. I recall him in Wadham Gardens, wandering in a kind of happy dream--"Ah, if one had only such places as this to work in, in France! What pages--and how perfect!--one might write here!" Or again, in a different scene, at luncheon in our little house in the Parks, when Oxford was showing, even more than usual, its piteous inability to talk decently to the great man in his own tongue. It is true that he neither understood ours--in conversation--nor spoke a word of it. But that did not at all mitigate our own shame--and surprise! For at that time, in the Oxford world proper, everybody, probably, read French habitually, and many of us thought we spoke it. But a mocking spirit suggested to one of the guests at this luncheon-party--an energetic historical tutor--the wish to enlighten M. Renan as to how the University was governed, the intricacies of Convocation and Congregation, the Hebdomadal Council, and all the rest. The other persons present fell at first breathlessly silent, watching the gallant but quite hopeless adventure. Then, in sheer sympathy with a good man in trouble, one after another we rushed in to help, till the const.i.tution of the University must have seemed indeed a thing of Bedlam to our smiling but much- puzzled guest; and all our cheeks were red. But M. Renan cut the knot.

Since he could not understand, and we could not explain, what the const.i.tution of Oxford University _was_, he suavely took up his parable as to what it should be. He drew the ideal University, as it were, in the clouds; clothing his notion, as he went on, in so much fun and so much charm, that his English hosts more than forgot their own defeat in his success. The little scene has always remained with me as a crowning instance of the French genius for conversation. Throw what obstacles in the way you please; it will surmount them all.

To judge, however, from M. Renan's letter to his friend, M. Berthelot, written from Oxford on this occasion, he was not so much pleased as we thought he was, or as we were with him. He says, "Oxford is the strangest relic of the past, the type of living death. Each of its colleges is a terrestrial paradise, but a deserted Paradise." (I see from the date that the visit took place in the Easter vacation!) And he describes the education given as "purely humanist and clerical,"

administered to "a gilded youth that comes to chapel in surplices. There is an almost total absence of the scientific spirit." And the letter further contains a mild gibe at All Souls, for its absentee Fellows.

"The lawns are admirable, and the Fellows eat up the college revenues, hunting and shooting up and down England. Only one of them works--my kind host, Max Muller."

At that moment the list of the Fellows of All Souls contained the names of men who have since rendered high service to England; and M. Renan was probably not aware that the drastic reforms introduced by the two great University Commissions of 1854 and 1877 had made the sarcastic picture he drew for his friend not a little absurd. No doubt a French intellectual will always feel that the mind-life of England is running at a slower pace than that of his own country. But if Renan had worked for a year in Oxford, the old priestly training in him, based so solidly on the moral discipline of St. Nicholas and St. Sulpice, would have become aware of much else. I like to think that he would have echoed the verdict on the Oxford undergraduate of a young and brilliant Frenchman who spent much time at Oxford fifteen years later. "There is no intellectual _elite_ here so strong as ours (i.e., among French students)," says M. Jacques Bardouz, "but they undoubtedly have a political _elite_, and, a much rarer thing, a moral _elite_.... What an environment!--and how full is this education of moral stimulus and force!"

Has not every word of this been justified to the letter by the experience of the war?

After the present cataclysm, we know very well that we shall have to improve and extend our higher education. Only, in building up the new, let us not lose grip upon the irreplaceable things of the old!

It was not long after M. Renan's visit that, just as we were starting for a walk on a May afternoon, the second post brought my husband a letter which changed our lives. It contained a suggestion that my husband should take work on the _Times_ as a member of the editorial staff. We read it in amazement, and walked on to Port Meadow. It was a fine day. The river was alive with boats; in the distance rose the towers and domes of the beautiful city; and the Oxford magic blew about us in the summer wind. It seemed impossible to leave the dear Oxford life! All the drawbacks and difficulties of the new proposal presented themselves; hardly any of the advantages. As for me, I was convinced we must and should refuse, and I went to sleep in that conviction.

But the mind travels far--and mysteriously--in sleep. With the first words that my husband and I exchanged in the morning, we knew that the die was cast and that our Oxford days were over.

The rest of the year was spent in preparation for the change; and in the Christmas vacation of 1880-81 my husband wrote his first "leaders" for the paper. But before that we went for a week to Dublin to stay with the Forsters, at the Chief Secretary's Lodge.

A visit I shall never forget! It was the first of the two terrible winters my uncle spent in Dublin as Chief Secretary, and the struggle with the Land League was at its height. Boycotting, murder, and outrage filled the news of every day. Owing to the refusal of the Liberal Government to renew the Peace Preservation Act when they took office in 1880--a disastrous but perhaps intelligible mistake--the Chief Secretary, when we reached Dublin, was facing an agrarian and political revolt of the most determined character, with nothing but the ordinary law, resting on juries and evidence, as his instrument--an instrument which the Irish Land League had taken good care to shatter in his hands.

Threatening letters were flowing in upon both himself and my G.o.dmother; and the tragedy of 1882, with the revelations as to the various murder plots of the time, to which it led, were soon to show how terrible was the state of the country and how real the danger in which he personally stood. But, none the less, social life had to be carried on; entertainments had to be given; and we went over, if I remember right, for the two Christmas b.a.l.l.s to be given by the Chief Secretary and the Viceroy. On myself, fresh from the quiet Oxford life, the Irish spectacle, seen from such a point of view, produced an overwhelming impression. And the dancing, the visits and dinner-parties, the keeping up of a brave social show--quite necessary and right under the circ.u.mstances!--began to seem to me, after only twenty-four hours, like some pageant seen under a thunder-cloud.

Mr. Forster had then little more than five years to live. He was on the threshold of the second year of his Chief-Secretary s.h.i.+p. During the first year he had faced the difficulties of the position in Ireland, and the perpetual attacks of the Irish Members in Parliament, with a physical nerve and power still intact. I can recall my hot sympathy with him during 1880, while with one hand he was fighting the Land League and with the other--a fact never sufficiently recognized--giving all the help he could to the preparation of Mr. Gladstone's second Land Act. The position then was hard, sometimes heartbreaking; but it was not beyond his strength. The second year wore him out. The unlucky Protection Act-- an experiment for which the Liberal Cabinet and even its Radical Members, Mr. Bright and Mr. Chamberlain, were every whit as chargeable as himself--imposed a personal responsibility on him for every case out of the many hundreds of prisoners made under the Act, which was in itself intolerable. And while he tried in front to dam back the flood of Irish outrage, English Radicalism at his heels was making the task impossible. What he was doing satisfied n.o.body, least of all himself.

The official and land-owning cla.s.ses in Ireland, the Tories in England, raged because, in spite of the Act, outrage continued; the Radical party in the country, which had always disliked the Protection Act, and the Radical press, were on the lookout for every sign of failure; while the daily struggle in the House with the Irish Members while Parliament was sitting, in addition to all the rest, exhausted a man on whose decision important executive acts, dealing really with a state of revolution, were always depending. All through the second year, as it seemed to me, he was overwhelmed by a growing sense of a monstrous and insoluble problem, to which no one, through nearly another forty years--not Mr.

Gladstone with his Home Rule Acts, as we were soon to see, nor Mr.

Balfour's wonderful brain-power sustained by a unique temperament--was to find the true key. It is not found yet. Twenty years of Tory Government practically solved the Land Question and agricultural Ireland has begun to be rich. But the past year has seen an Irish rebellion; a Home Rule Act has at last, after thirty years, been pa.s.sed, and is dead before its birth; while at the present moment an Irish Convention is sitting.[1] Thirty-six years have gone since my husband and I walked with William Forster through the Phoenix Park, over the spot where, a year later, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke were murdered. And still the Aeschylean "curse" goes on, from life to life, from Government to Government. When will the Furies of the past become the "kind G.o.ddesses" of the future--and the Irish and English peoples build them a shrine of reconciliation?

[Footnote 1: These words were written in the winter of 1917. At the present moment (June, 1918) we have just seen the deportation of the Sinn Feiners, and are still expecting yet another Home Rule Bill!]

With such thoughts one looks back over the past. Amid its darkness, I shall always see the pathetic figure of William Forster, the man of Quaker training, at grips with murder and anarchy; the man of sensitive, affectionate spirit, weighed down under the weight of rival appeals, now from the side of democracy, now from the side of authority; bitterly conscious, as an English Radical, of his breach with Radicalism; still more keenly sensitive, as a man responsible for the executive government of a country, in which the foundations had given way, to that atmosphere of cruelty and wrong in which the Land League moved, and to the hideous instances poured every day into his ears.

He bore it for more than a year after we saw him in Ireland at his thankless work. It was our first year in London, and we were near enough to watch closely the progress of his fight. But it was a fight not to be won. The spring of 1882 saw his resignation--on May 2d--followed on May 6th by the Phoenix Park murders and the long and gradual disintegration of the powerful Ministry of 1880, culminating in the Home Rule disaster of 1886. Mr. Churchill in the _Life_ of his father, Lord Randolph, says of Mr. Forster's resignation, "he pa.s.sed out of the Ministry to become during the rest of Parliament one of its most dangerous and vigilant opponents." The physical change, indeed, caused by the Irish struggle, which was for a time painfully evident to the House of Commons, seemed to pa.s.s away with rest and travel. The famous attack he made on Parnell in the spring of 1883, as the responsible promoter of outrage in Ireland, showed certainly no lack of power--rather an increase. I happened to be in the House the following day, to hear Parnell's reply.

I remember my uncle's taking me down with him to the House, and begging a seat for me in Mrs. Brand's gallery. The figure of Parnell; the speech, nonchalant, terse, defiant, without a single grace of any kind, his hands in the pockets of his coat; and the tense silence of the crowded House, remain vividly with me. Afterward my uncle came up-stairs for me, and we descended toward Palace Yard through various side- pa.s.sages. Suddenly a door communicating with the House itself opened in front of us, and Parnell came out. My uncle pressed my arm and we held back, while Parnell pa.s.sed by, somberly absorbed, without betraying by the smallest movement or gesture any recognition of my uncle's ident.i.ty.