The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward Part 3

At the same time it is not a novel of my sort. I demand that I should have given me an entire slice of life, and that I should see the mutual interaction of a number of characters. Your interest centres entirely on one character: your characters all move in the same region of ideas, and that a narrow one. Your book is dainty, but it does not touch the great springs of life. Of course you didn't mean it to do so: but I am putting before you what I conceive to be the novelist's ideal. It seems to me that a novelist must have seen much, must lay himself out to be conversant with many sides of life, must have no line of his own, but must lend himself to the life of those around him. This is the direct opposite of the critic. I wonder if the two trades can be combined.

Have you ever read Sainte Beuve's solitary novel, _Volupte_? It is instructive reading. You are a critic in your novel. Your object is really to show how criticism can affect a nature capable of receiving it. Now is this properly a subject of art? Is it not too didactic? It is not so for me, for I am an old-fas.h.i.+oned moralist: but the ma.s.s of people do not care for intellectual teaching in novels. They want an emotional thrill. Remember that you have deliberately put this aside. Kendal's love is not made to affect his life, his character, his work. Miss Bretherton only feels so far attracted to him as to listen to what he says.... I only say this to show you what the book made me think, that you wrote as a critic not as a creator. You threw into the form of a story many critical judgments, and gave an excellent sketch of the possible worth of criticism in an unregenerate world. This was worth doing once: but if you are going on with novels you must throw criticism to the winds and let yourself go as a partner of common joys, common sorrows and common perplexities. There, I have told you what I think just as I think it. I would not have done so to anyone else save you, to whom I am always,

Your most affectionate, M. CREIGHTON.

No doubt Mrs. Ward stored up this criticism for future use, for when she next embarked upon a novel the canvas was indeed broad enough.

They had not been settled in London for much more than a year before Mrs. Ward began to feel the need for some quiet and remote country place to which she might fly for peace and work when the strain of London became too great. Fortune favoured the quest, for in the summer of 1882 they took the rectory at Peper Harow, near G.o.dalming (the "Murewell Rectory" of _Robert Elsmere_), for a few weeks, and during that time were taken by Lord Midleton, the owner of Peper Harow, to see a delightful old farm in the heart of the lonely stretch of country that lies between the Portsmouth Road and Elstead. They fell in love with it at once, and during the following winter made an arrangement to take its six or seven front rooms by the year. So from the summer of 1883 onwards they possessed Borough Farm as a refuge and solace in the wilds, a paradise for elders and children alike, where London and its turmoil could be cast off and forgotten. It lay in a country of heather commons, woods, rough meadows, streams and lakes--those "Hammer Ponds" which remain as a relic of the iron-smelting days of Surrey, and in which we children amused ourselves by the hour in fis.h.i.+ng for perch with a bent pin and a worm. Here Mrs. Ward would lie out whenever the sun shone in the old sand-pit up the lane, where we had constructed a sort of terrace for her long chair, or else under the ash-tree on the little hill, writing or reading, while no sound came save the murmur of wind in the gorse, or in the dry bells of the heather. If her physique had been stronger she would, perhaps, have been too much tempted by the beauty of the country ever to have lain still and worked for so many hours as she did in that long chair; but she was never robust, she was extremely susceptible to bad weather, cold winds and every form of chill, and her longest expeditions were those which she took in a little pony-carriage over Ryal or Bagmoor Commons to Peper Harow, or up the Portsmouth Road to Thursley and Hindhead.

Here a few friends came at intervals to share the solitude with us: Laura Tennant, on a wonderful day in May, 1884, when she seemed to her dazzled hostess the very incarnation of the spring; M. Edmond Scherer, her earliest French friend, who, in 1884, was helping her with her translation of Amiel's _Journal_; Henry James, whose visit laid the foundation of a friends.h.i.+p that was to ripen into one of the most precious of all Mrs. Ward's possessions; Mlle. Souvestre, foundress of the well-known girls' school at Wimbledon, and one of the keenest intellects of her time; and once, for a whole fortnight, Miss Eugenie Sellers,[10] who had for many months been teaching the family their cla.s.sics, and who now came down to superintend their Greek a little and to roam the commons with them much. It was in 1886, just before this visit, that Mrs. Ward began seriously to read Greek, usually with her ten-year-old son; she bought a Thucydides in G.o.dalming one day and was delighted to find it easier than she expected. It was a pa.s.sion that grew upon her with the years, as any reader of her later books will clearly perceive.

Then, though the solitude of the farm itself was profound, there were a few, a very few, neighbours in the more eligible districts round about who made it their pleasure sometimes to call upon us; there were the Frederic Harrisons at Elstead, whose four boys dared us children to horrid feats of jumping and climbing in the sand-pit, while our elders were safely engaged elsewhere; John Morley also, for a few weeks in 1886, and in the other direction Lord and Lady Wolseley, who took a house near Milford, and thence made their way occasionally down our sandy track. But the neighbours who meant most to us were, after all, our landlords, the Brodricks of Peper Harow; they were not only endlessly kind, giving us leave to disport ourselves in all their ponds, but took a sort of pride of possession, I believe, in their pocket auth.o.r.ess, watching her struggles and her achievement with paternal eyes. And when _Robert Elsmere_ at length appeared, old Lord Midleton, pillar of Church and State as he was, came riding over to the farm, sitting his horse squarely in spite of his white hairs and his semi-blindness, and sent in word that the "Wicked Squire" was at the gate!

Two letters written to her father from Borough Farm during these years, give glimpses of her browsings in many books, and of her thoughts on Shakespeare, evolution and kindred matters:

"I have been reading Joubert's _Pensees_ and _Correspondance_ lately, with a view to the Amiel introduction. You would be charmed with the letters, and some of the _pensees_ are extraordinarily acute. Now I am deep in Senancour, and for miscellaneous reading I have been getting through Horace's Epistles and dawdling a good deal over Shakespeare. My feeling as to him gets stronger and stronger, that he was, strictly speaking, a great poet, but not a great dramatist! There's a remark over which I trust you will draw a fatherly veil! But one can only say what one feels, and I am more oppressed than I used to be by his faults of construction, his carelessness, his excrescences, while at the same time much more sensitive to his preternatural power as a poet and as a psychological a.n.a.lyst. He gets at the root of his characters in a marvellous way, he envisages them separately as no one else can, but it is when he comes to bring them into action to represent the play of outward circ.u.mstance and the interaction of character on character that he seems to me comparatively--only comparatively, of course--to fail. I have always felt it most strongly in Oth.e.l.lo, and of course in the last act of Hamlet, which, in spite of the magnificent poetry in it, is surely a piece of dramatic bungling....

"As to Renan it would be too long to argue it, but I think he very much saves himself in the pa.s.sage you quote by the qualifying word 'comme.' The Church is 'as it were' _un debris de l'Empire_. It is only another way of putting what Harnack said in that article you and I read at Sea View. 'The Empire built up the Church out of its own substance, and destroyed itself in so doing,' or words to that effect. I cannot help feeling that as far as organization and inst.i.tutions go it is very true, though I would never deny that G.o.d was in the Church, as I believe He is in all human society, moulding it to His will. Everything, from the critical and scientific standpoint, seems to me so continuous and natural--no sharp lines anywhere--one thing leading to another, event leading to event, belief to belief--and G.o.d enwrapping and enfolding all.

But this is one general principle, and yours is quite another. I quite agree that from your standpoint no explanation that Renan could give of the Church can appear other than meagre or grotesque."

Her translation of Amiel's _Journal Intime_ was a long and exacting piece of work, but she enjoyed the struggle with the precise meaning of the French phrases and always maintained that she owed much to it, both in her knowledge of French and of English. She had begun it, with the benevolent approval of its French editor, M. Scherer, early in 1884, and took it up again after _Miss Bretherton_ came out; found it indeed a far more troublesome task than she had foreseen, and was still wrestling with the Introduction in the summer of 1885, when her head was already full of her new novel, and she was fretting to begin upon it. But the book appeared at length in December, 1885, and very soon made its mark.

The wonderful language of the Swiss mystic appealed to a generation more occupied than ours with the things of the soul, while Mrs. Ward's introduction gave a masterly sketch of the writer's strange personality and the development of his mind. As Jowett wrote to her, "Shall I tell you the simple truth? It is wonderful to me how you could have thought and known so much about so many things." Mr. Talbot, the Warden of Keble (now Bishop of Winchester), wrote of the "almost breathless admiration of the truth and penetration of his thought" with which he had read the book, while Lord Arthur Russell reported that he had "met Mr. Gladstone, who spoke with great interest of Amiel, asked me whether I had compared the translation with the original, and said that a most interesting small volume might be extracted, of _Pensees_, quite equal to Pascal."

But it was, inevitably, "caviar to the general." Mrs. Ward's brother, Willie Arnold, her close comrade and friend in all things literary, wrote to her from Manchester a few months after its appearance: "I served on a jury at the a.s.sizes last week--two murder cases and general horrors. I sat next to a Mr. Amiel--p.r.o.nounced 'Aymiell'--a worthy Manchester tradesman; no doubt his ancestor was a Huguenot refugee. I had one of your vols. in my pocket, and showed him the pa.s.sage about the family. He was greatly interested, and borrowed it. Returned it next day with the remark that it was 'too religious for him.' Alas, divine philosophy!"

Ever since the previous winter the idea of a novel in which the clash between the older and the younger types of Christianity should be worked out in terms of human life, had been growing and fermenting in her mind.

_Miss Bretherton_ and Amiel's _Journal_ had given her a valuable apprentices.h.i.+p in the art of writing, while Amiel's luminous reflections on the decadence and formalism of the churches had tended to confirm her own pa.s.sionate conviction that all was not well with the established forms of religion. But the determining factor in the writing of _Robert Elsmere_ was the close and continuous study which she had given ever since her work for the _Dictionary of Christian Biography_ to the problem of "Christian origins." She was fascinated by the intricacy and difficulty of the whole subject, but more especially by such branches of it as the Synoptic Problem, or the relation of the Fourth Gospel to the rest; while the questions raised by the realization that the Books of the New Testament were the products of an age steeped in miracle and wholly uncritical of the records of it, struck her as vital to the whole orthodox position. At the same time her immense tenderness for Christianity, her belief that the life and teaching of the Founder were still the "master-light of all our seeing," made her yearn for a simplification of the creeds, so that the Message itself should once more appeal to the ma.s.ses without the intervention of formulae that perpetually challenged their reason. The argument of "Literature and Dogma" culminates in the picture of mankind waiting for the lifting of the burden of "Aberglaube" and dogmatism, with which the spirit of Christianity had been crushed down for centuries, waiting for the renewal that would come when the old coil was cast off. It was in that spirit also that Mrs. Ward attacked the problem; her Robert was to her a link in the chain of the liberators of all ages. Was her outlook too intellectual? Did she overestimate the repugnance to obsolete forms that possessed her generation? So it was said by many who rose up in startled defence of those forms, many who had never felt the uttermost clash between the things which they wished to believe and the things which Truth allowed them to believe. Yet still the response of her generation was to be greater than she ever dreamt. No doubt the renewal did not come in the precise form in which she looked for it; creeds were to prove tougher, the wors.h.i.+p of the Risen Lord more vital than she thought; yet still, in a hundred ways, the influence of the fermentation caused by the ideas of _Robert Elsmere_ may be traced in the Church to-day. "Biblical criticism" may now be out of fas.h.i.+on; but it is because its victory has in reality been won. All this lay hidden from the mind of the writer as she sat toiling over her task in the solitude of Borough Farm, or in the little "powder-closet" overlooking the back gardens of Russell Square; she wrote because she "could no other," and only rarely did she allow herself to feel, with trembling, that the _Zeitgeist_ might indeed be with her.

The book was begun in the autumn of 1885, with every hope that it would be finished in less than a year. It was offered, when a few chapters had been written, to the Macmillans for publication, since they had published both _Miss Bretherton_ and the _English Poets_, but to the sad disappointment of its author they rejected it on the ground that the subject was not likely to appeal to the British public. In this dilemma Mrs. Ward bethought herself of Mr. George Murray Smith, the publisher of Charlotte Bronte, and in some trepidation offered the book to him. Mr.

Smith had greater faith than the Macmillans and accepted it at once, sealing the bargain by making an advance of 200 upon it in May, 1886.

So began Mrs. Ward's connection with "George Smith," as she always familiarly spoke of him: a friend and counsellor indeed, to whom she owed incalculable things in the years that followed.

In the Preface to the "Westmorland Edition" of _Robert Elsmere_, issued twenty-three years later, Mrs. Ward herself confessed to her models for some of the princ.i.p.al characters--to the friend of her youth, Mark Pattison, for the figure of the Squire (though not in his landowning capacity!); to Thomas Hill Green, "the n.o.blest and most persuasive master of philosophic thought in modern Oxford," for that of Henry Grey; and to Amiel himself, the hapless intellectual tortured by the paralysis of will, for that of Langham. Both the Rector of Lincoln and Professor Green had recently died, the latter in the prime of his life and work, and Mrs. Ward sought both in the dedication and in her sketch of the strong and lovable tutor of St. Anselm's, to express her lasting admiration for this lost friend. But she claimed in each case the artist's freedom to treat her creatures as her own, once they had entered the little world of the novel: a thesis which she was to maintain and develop in later years, when she occasionally went to the past for her characters. Catherine was a more composite picture, drawn from the "strong souls" she had known among her own kinswomen from childhood up, and therefore, perhaps, more tenderly treated by the author than the rules of artistic detachment would allow. She was a type far more possible in the 'eighties than now, but it is perhaps comforting to know that no single human being inspired her. As to the scene in which these figures moved, it was on a sunny day at the end of May, 1885, that Mrs. Ward's old friend, Mr. James Cropper, of Ellergreen, took her for a drive up the valley of Long Sleddale, in a lonely part of Westmorland. There she saw the farm at the head of the dale, the vicarage, the Leyburns' house. Already her thoughts were busy with her story, and from that day onwards she peopled the quiet valley with her folk.

At first she was full of hope that the book would be finished before the summer of 1886, although she admits to her mother that "it is very difficult to write and the further I get the harder it is." In March of that year she writes to her sister-in-law: "I have made up my mind to come here [Borough Farm] for the whole of April, so as to get _Robert Elsmere done_! It must and shall be done by the end of April, if I expire in the attempt." In April she did indeed work herself nearly to death, writing sixteen, eighteen and even twenty pages of ma.n.u.script in the day, and a sort of confidence began to grow up in her mind that the book would not speak its message in vain. "I think this book _must_ interest a certain number of people," she writes to her mother; "I certainly feel as if I were writing parts of it with my heart's blood."

But the difficulties only increased, and actually it was the end of October before even the first two volumes were finished. And then "the more satisfied I become with the second volume the more discontented I am with the first. It must be re-cast, alas!" Her arm was often troublesome, especially in the autumn of this year, when she was staying at the Forsters' house near Fox How, working very hard. "I am dreadfully low about myself," she writes; "my arm has not been so bad since April, when it took me practically a month's rest to get it right again. I have been literally physically incapable of finis.h.i.+ng my last chapter. And to think of all the things I promised myself to do this week! And here I have time, ideas, inclination, and I can do nothing. I will dictate if I can to Gertrude, but I am so discouraged just at present I seem to have no heart for it." Then a few days later it has taken a turn for the better, and she is overjoyed: "The second volume was _finished_ last night! The arm is _decidedly_ better, though still shaky. I sleep badly, and rheumatism keeps flying about me, now here, now there, but I am not at all doleful--indeed in excellent spirits now that the arm is better!"

So, in spite of the distractions of London, she struggled on with the third volume all through that winter (1886-7), flying for a week in December to Borough Farm in order to get complete isolation for her task. "Oh, the quiet, the blissful quiet of it! It helps me most in thinking out the book. I can _write_ in London; I seem to be unable to think." Sometimes, however, her head was utterly exhausted. Returning to London, she wrote to her mother: "I did a splendid day's work yesterday, but it was fighting against headache all day, and this morning I felt quite incapable of writing and have been lying down, reading, though my wretched head is hardly fit for reading. It is not exactly pain, but a horrid feeling of tension and exhaustion, as if one hadn't slept for ever so long, which I don't at all approve of."

Often, when these fits of exhaustion came on, a small person would be sent for from the schoolroom, in whose finger-tips a quaint form of magic was believed to reside, and there she would sit for an hour, stroking her mother's head, or her hands, or her feet, while the "Jabberwock" on the Chinese cabinet curled his long tail at the pair in silence. "Chatter to me," she used to say; but this was not always easy, and a golden and friendly silence, peopled by many thoughts, usually lay between the two.

At length, on March 9, 1887, the last words of the third volume were written, there in the little powder-closet behind the back drawing-room.

But this did not mean the end. She was already painfully aware that the book was too long, and Mr. George Smith, best and truest of advisers, firmly indicated to her that the limits even of a three-volume novel had been overstepped. She herself had already admitted to her brother Willie that it was "not a novel at all," and she now plunged bravely into the task of cutting and revision, fondly hoping that it would take her no more than a fortnight's hard work. Instead it took her the best part of a year. Publication first in the summer season, then in the autumn, had to be given up, while her own fatigue increased so that sometimes for days together she could not touch the book. The few friends to whom she showed it were indeed encouraging, and her brother Willie was the first to prophesy that it would "make a great mark." After reading the first volume he wrote to Mrs. Arnold, "You may look forward to finding yourself the mother of a famous woman!" But the mood of this year was one of depression, while Mrs. Arnold's illness became an ever-increasing sorrow. In the Long Vacation Mrs. Ward took the empty Lady Margaret Hall, at Oxford, for a few weeks, in order to be near her mother--a step which brought her unexpectedly another pleasure. On the very day after they arrived she wrote: "I have had a great pleasure to-day, for at three o'clock arrived a note from Jowett saying that he was in Oxford for a day and would I come to tea? So I went down at five, stayed an hour, then he insisted on walking up here, and sat in the garden watching the children play tennis till about seven. Dear old man! I have the most lively and filial affection for him. We talked about all sorts of things--Cornwall, politics, St. Paul--and when I wanted to go he would not let me. I think he liked it, and certainly I did."

Through the autumn and into the month of January, 1888, she struggled with mountains of proofs, while Mr. Smith, though without much faith in the popular prospects of the book, was always "kind and indulgent," as she gratefully testifies in the _Recollections_. At length, towards the end of January, she sent in the last batch, and on February 24 the book appeared.

Six weeks later, in the little house in Bradmore Road, which had witnessed so many years of suffering indomitably borne, Julia Arnold lay dying. Through pain and exhaustion unspeakable she had yet kept her intense interest in the human scene, and now the last pleasure which she enjoyed on earth was the news that reached her of the growing success of her daughter's book. With a hand so weak that the pen kept falling from her fingers, she wrote her an account of the Oxford gossip on it; she asked her, with a flash of the old malice, to let her know at once should she hear what any of her aunts were saying. Alas, Julia knew better than anyone else on earth what the religious temperament of the Arnolds might mean; but before the answer came her poor tormented spirit was at rest for ever.

CHAPTER IV

_ROBERT ELSMERE_ AND AFTER

1888-1889

Three volumes, printed as closely as were those of _Robert Elsmere_, penetrated somewhat slowly among the fraternity of reviewers. The _Scotsman_ and the _Morning Post_ were the first to notice it on March 5, nine days after its appearance; the _British Weekly_ wept over it on March 9; the _Academy_ compared it to _Adam Bede_ on the 17th; the _Manchester Guardian_ gave it two columns on the 21st; the _Sat.u.r.day_ "slated" it on the 24th; while Walter Pater's article in the Church _Guardian_ on the 28th, calling it a "_chef d'uvre_ of that kind of quiet evolution of character through circ.u.mstance, introduced into English literature by Miss Austen and carried to perfection in France by George Sand," gave perhaps greater happiness to its author than any other review. _The Times_ waited till April 7, being in no hurry to show favour to one connected with its staff, but when it came the review duly spoke of _Robert_ as "a clever attack upon revealed religion," and all was well. By the end of March, however, the public interest in the book had begun in earnest; the first edition of 500 copies was exhausted and a second had appeared; this was sold out by the middle of April; a third appeared on April 19 and was gone within a week; a fourth followed in the same way. Matthew Arnold wrote from Wilton, the Pembrokes' house, a week before his death (which occurred on April 15), that he found all the guests there reading or intending to read it, and added, "George Russell, who was staying at Aston Clinton with Gladstone, says it is all true about his interest in the book. He talked of it incessantly and said he thought he should review it for Knowles."

As a matter of fact, Mr. Gladstone had already written the first draft of his article and was corresponding with Lord Acton on the various points which he wished to raise or to drive home. His biographer hints that Acton's replies were not too encouraging. But the old giant was not to be deterred. The book had moved him profoundly and he felt impelled to combat the all too dangerous conclusions to which it pointed. "Mamma and I," he wrote to his daughter in March, "are each of us still separately engaged in a death-grapple with _Robert Elsmere_. I complained of some of the novels you gave me to read as too stiff, but they are nothing to this. It is wholly out of the common order. At present I regard with doubt and dread the idea of doing anything on it, but cannot yet be sure whether your observations will be verified or not. In any case it is a tremendous book." And to Lord Acton he wrote: "It is not far from twice the length of an ordinary novel; and the labour and effort of reading it all, I should say, sixfold; while one could no more stop in it than in reading Thucydides." Early in April he came to Oxford to stay with the Edward Talbots at Keble College, and hearing that Mrs. Ward was also there, watching over her dying mother, he expressed a desire to see her, and, if possible, to talk the book over with her. She came on the day after her mother's death--April 8--towards evening, and waited for him alone in the Talbots'

drawing-room. That night she wrote down the following account of their conversation:

"I arrived at Keble at 7.10. Gladstone was not in the drawing-room.

I waited for about three minutes when I heard his slow step coming downstairs. He came in with a candle in his hand which he put out, then he came up most cordially and quickly. 'Mrs. Ward--this is most good of you to come and see me! If you had not come, I should myself have ventured to call and ask after yourself and Mr.

Arnold.'

"Then he sat down, he on a small uncomfortable chair, where he fidgeted greatly! He began to ask about Mamma. Had there been much suffering? Was death peaceful? I told him. He said that though he had seen many deaths, he had never seen any really peaceful. In all there had been much struggle. So much so that 'I myself have conceived what I will not call a terror of death, but a repugnance from the idea of death. It is the rending asunder of body and soul, the tearing apart of the two elements of our nature--for I hold the body to be an essential element as well as the soul, not a mere sheath or envelope.' He instanced the death of Sidney Herbert as an exception. _He_ had said 'can this indeed be dying?'--death had come so gently.

"Then after a pause he began to speak of the knowledge of Oxford shown by _Robert Elsmere_, and we went on to discuss the past and present state of Oxford. He mentioned it 'as one of the few points on which, outside Home Rule, I disagree with Hutton,'[11] that Hutton had given it as his opinion that Cardinal Newman and Matthew Arnold had had more influence than any other men on modern Oxford.

Newman's influence had been supreme up to 1845--nothing since, and he gathered from Oxford men that Professor Jowett and Mr. Green had counted for much more than Matthew Arnold. M.A.'s had been an influence on the general public, not on the Universities. How Oxford had been torn and rent, what a 'long agony of thought' she had gone through! How different from Cambridge!

"Then we talked again of Newman, how he had possessed the place, his influence comparable only to that of Abelard on Paris--the flatness after he left. I quoted Burne-Jones on the subject. Then I spoke of Pattison's autobiography as ill.u.s.trating Newman's hold. He agreed, but said that Pattison's religious phase was so disagreeable and unattractive that it did small credit to Newman.

He would much like to have seen more of the autobiography, but he understood that the personalities were too strong. I asked him if he had seen Pattison's last 'Confession of Faith,' which Mrs.

Pattison decided not to print, in MS. He said no. Then he asked me whether I had pleasant remembrances of Pattison. I warmly said yes, and described how kind he had been to me as a girl. 'Ah!' he said--'Church would never cast him off; and Church is almost the only person of whom he really speaks kindly in the Memoirs.'

"Then, from the state of Oxford, we pa.s.sed to the state of the country during the last half-century. 'It has been a _wonderful_ half-century! I often tell the young men who are coming on that we have had a better time than they can have, in the next half-century. Take one thing only--the abolition of slavery in the world (outside Africa I suppose he meant). You are too young to realize what that means. But I draw a distinction between the first twenty-five years of the period and the second; during the first, steady advance throughout all cla.s.ses, during the second, distinct recession, and retrogression, in the highest cla.s.s of all. That testing point, _marriage_, very disquieting. The scandals about marriage in the last twenty years unparallelled in the first half of the period. I don't trust my own opinion, but I asked two of the keenest social observers, and two of the coolest heads I ever knew--Lord Granville and the late Lord Clanwilliam--to tell me what they thought and they strongly confirmed my impression.' (Here one of the Talbot boys came in and stood by the fire, and Gladstone glanced at him once or twice, as though conversation on these points was difficult while he was there.) I suggested that more was made of scandals nowadays by the newspapers. But he would not have it--'When I was a boy--I left Eton in 1827--there were two papers, the _Age_ and the _Satirist_, worse than anything which exists now.

But they died out about 1830, and for about forty years there was _nothing of the kind_. Then sprang up this odious and deplorable crop of Society papers.' He thought the fact significant.

"He talked of the modern girl. 'They tell me she is not what she was--that she loves to be fast. I don't know. All I can bear testimony to is the girl of my youth. _She_ was excellent!'

"'But,' I asked him, 'in spite of all drawbacks, do you not see a gradual growth and diffusion of earnestness, of the social pa.s.sion during the whole period?' He a.s.sented, and added, 'With the decline of the Church and State spirit, with the slackening of State religion, there has unquestionably come about a quickening of the State conscience, of the _social_ conscience. I will not say what inference should be drawn.'

"Then we spoke of charity in London, and of the way in which the rich districts had elbowed out their poor. And thereupon--perhaps through talk of the _motives_ for charitable work--we came to religion. 'I don't believe in any new system,' he said, smiling, and with reference to _Robert Elsmere_; 'I cling to the old. The great traditions are what attract me. I believe in a degeneracy of man, in the Fall--in _sin_--in the intensity and virulence of sin.

No other religion but Christianity meets the sense of sin, and sin is the great fact in the world to me.'

"I suggested that though I did not wish for a moment to deny the existence of moral evil, the more one thought of it the more plain became its connection with physical and social and therefore _removable_ conditions. He disagreed, saying that the worst forms of evil seemed to him to belong to the highest and most favoured cla.s.s 'of _educated_ people'--with some emphasis.

"I asked him whether it did not give him any confidence in 'a new system'--i.e. a new construction of Christianity--to watch its effect on such a life as T. H. Green's. He replied individuals were no test; one must take the broad ma.s.s. Some men were born 'so that sin never came near them. Such men never felt the need of Christianity. They would be better if they were worse!'

"And as to difficulties, the great difficulties of all lay in the way of Theism. 'I am surprised at men who don't feel this--I am surprised at you!' he said, smiling. Newman had put these difficulties so powerfully in the _Apologia_. The Christian system satisfied all the demands of the conscience; and as to the intellectual difficulties--well there we came to the question of miracles.

"Here he restated the old argument against an _a priori_ impossibility of miracles. Granted a G.o.d, it is absurd to limit the scope and range of the _will_ of such a being. I agreed; then I asked him to let me tell him how I had approached the question--through a long immersion in doc.u.ments of the early Church, in critical and historical questions connected with miracles. I had come to see how miracles arise, and to feel it impossible to draw the line with any rigidity between one miraculous story and another.

"'The difficulty is'--he said slowly, 'if you sweep away miracles, you sweep away _the Resurrection_! With regard to the other miracles, I no longer feel as I once did that they are the most essential evidence for Christianity. The evidence which now comes _nearest_ to me is the evidence of Christian history, of the type of character Christianity has produced----'

"Here the Talbots' supper bell rang, and the clock struck eight. He said in the most cordial way it was impossible it could be so late, that he must not put the Warden's household out, but that our conversation could not end there, and would I come again? We settled 9.30 in the morning. He thanked me, came with me to the hall and bade me a most courteous and friendly good-bye."[12]