(Those, it will be remembered, were the days before Anglo-American copyright.)
Oliver Wendell Holmes, to whom I was personally a stranger, wrote to me just such a letter as one might have dreamed of from the "Autocrat": "One of my elderly friends of long ago called a story of mine you may possibly have heard of--_Elsie Venner_--"a medicated novel," and such she said she was not in the habit of reading. I liked her expression; it t.i.tillated more than it tingled. _Robert Elsmere_ I suppose we should all agree is "a medicated novel"--but it is, I think, beyond question, the most effective and popular novel we have had since _Uncle Tom"s Cabin_."
A man of science, apparently an agnostic, wrote, severely: "I regret the popularity of _Robert Elsmere_ in this country. Our Western people are like sheep in such matters. They will not see that the book was written for a people with a State Church on its hands, so that a gross exaggeration of the importance of religion was necessary. It will revive interest in theology and r.e.t.a.r.d the progress of rationalism."
Another student and thinker from one of the universities of the West, after a brilliant criticism of the novel, written about a year after its publication, winds up, "The book, here, has entered into the evolution of a nation."
Goldwin Smith--my father"s and uncle"s early friend--wrote me from Canada:
The Grange, Toronto, _Oct. 31, 1888._
My dear Mrs. Ward,--You may be amused by seeing what a stir you are making even in this sequestered nook of the theological world, and by learning that the antidote to you is _Ben-Hur_. I am afraid, if it were so, I should prefer the poison to the antidote.
The state of opinion on this Continent is, I fancy, pretty much that to which Robert Elsmere would bring us--Theism, with Christ as a model of character, but without real belief in the miraculous part of Christianity. Churches are still being everywhere built, money is freely subscribed, young men are pressing into the clerical profession, and religion shows every sign of vitality. I cannot help suspecting, however, that a change is not far off. If it comes, it will come with a vengeance; for over the intellectual dead level of this democracy opinion courses like the tide running in over a flat.
As the end of life draws near I feel like the Scotchman who, being on his death-bed when the trial of O"Connell was going on, desired his Minister to pray for him that he might just live to see what came of O"Connell. A wonderful period of transition in all things, however, has begun, and I should like very much to see the result.
However, it is too likely that very rough times may be coming and that one will be just as well out of the way.
Yours most truly, GOLDWIN SMITH.
Exactly twenty years from the date of this letter I was in Toronto for the first time, and paid my homage to the veteran fighter who, living as he did amid a younger generation, hotly resenting his separatist and anti-Imperial views and his contempt for their own ideal of an equal and permanent union of free states under the British flag, was yet generously honored throughout the Dominion for his services to literature and education. He had been my father"s friend at Oxford--where he succeeded to Arthur Stanley"s tutorship at University College--and in Dublin. And when I first began to live in Oxford he was still Regius Professor, inhabiting a house very near that of my parents, which was well known to me afterward through many years as the house of the Max Mullers. I can remember the catastrophe it seemed to all his Oxford friends when he deserted England for America, despairing of the republic, as my father for a while in his youth had despaired, and sick of what seemed to him the forces of reaction in English life. I was eighteen when _Endymion_ came out, with Dizzy"s absurd attack on the "sedentary" professor who was also a "social parasite." It would be difficult to find two words in the English language more wholly and ludicrously inappropriate to Goldwin Smith; and the furious letter to the _Times_ in which he denounced "the stingless insults of a coward"
might well have been left unwritten. But I was living then among Oxford Liberals, and under the shadow of Goldwin Smith"s great reputation as historian and pamphleteer, and I can see myself listening with an angry and sympathetic thrill to my father as he read the letter aloud. Then came the intervening years, in which one learned to look on Goldwin Smith as _par excellence_ the great man "gone wrong," on that vital question, above all, of a sane Imperialism. It was difficult, after a time, to keep patience with the Englishman whose most pa.s.sionate desire seemed to be to break up the Empire, to incorporate Canada in the United States, to relieve us of India, that "splendid curse," to detach from us Australia and South Africa, and thereby to wreck forever that vision of a banded commonwealth of free nations which for innumerable minds at home was fast becoming the romance of English politics.
So it was that I went with some shrinking, yet still under the glamour of the old Oxford loyalty, to pay my visit at the Grange in 1908, walking thither from the house of one of the stanchest Imperialists in Canada, where I had been lunching. "You are going to see Mr. Goldwin Smith?" my host had said. "I have not crossed his threshold for twenty years. I abhor his political views. All the same, we are proud of him in Canada!" When I entered the drawing-room, which was rather dark, though it was a late May afternoon, there rose slowly from its chair beside a bright fire a figure I shall never forget. I had a fairly clear remembrance of Goldwin Smith in his earlier days. This was like his phantom, or, if one may say so, without disrespect--his mummy. Shriveled and spare, yet erect as ever, the iron-gray hair, closely shaven beard, dark complexion, and black eyes still formidably alive, made on me an impression at once of extreme age and unabated will. A prophet!--still delivering his message--but well aware that it found but few listeners in a degenerate world. He began immediately to talk politics, denouncing English Imperialism, whether of the Tory or the Liberal type. Canadian loyalty to the Empire was a mere delusion. A few years, he said, would see the Dominion merged in the United States; and it was far best it should be so. He spoke with a bitter, almost a fierce energy, as though perfectly conscious that, although I did not contradict him, I did not agree with him; and presently, to my great relief, he allowed the talk to slip back to old Oxford days.
[Ill.u.s.tration: GOLDWIN SMITH]
Two years later he died, still confident of the future as he dreamt it.
The "very rough times" that he foresaw have indeed come upon the world.
But as to the rest, I wish he could have stood with me, eight years after this conversation, on the Scherpenberg Hill, held by a Canadian division, the approach to its summit guarded by Canadian sentries, and have looked out over that plain, where Canadian and British graves, lying in their thousands side by side, have forever sealed in blood the union of the elder and the younger nations.
As to the circulation of _Robert Elsmere_, I have never been able to ascertain the exact figures in America, but it is probable, from the data I have, that about half a million copies were sold in the States within a year of the book"s publication. In England, an edition of 5,000 copies a fortnight was the rule for many months after the one-volume edition appeared; hundreds of thousands have been circulated in the sixpenny and sevenpenny editions; it has been translated into most foreign tongues; and it is still, after thirty years, a living book.
Fifteen years after its publication, M. Brunetiere, the well-known editor of the _Revue des deux Mondes_ and leader--in some sort--of the Catholic reaction in France, began a negotiation with me for the appearance of a French translation of the whole or part of the book in his _Revue_. "But how," I asked him (we were sitting in his editor"s sanctum, in the old house of the Rue de l"Universite), "could it possibly suit you, or the _Revue_, to do anything of the kind? And _now_--after fifteen years?"
But, according to him, the case was simple. When the book first appeared, the public of the _Revue_ could not have felt any interest in it. France is a logical country--a country of clear-cut solutions. And at that time either one was a Catholic or a free thinker. And if one was a Catholic, one accepted from the Church, say, the date of the Book of Daniel, as well as everything else. Renan, indeed, left the Church thirty years earlier because he came to see with certainty that the Book of Daniel was written under Antiochus Epiphanes, and not when his teachers at St. Sulpice said it was written. But while the secular world listened and applauded, the literary argument against dogma made very little impression on the general Catholic world for many years.
But now [said M. Brunetiere] everything is different. Modernism has arisen. It is penetrating the Seminaries. People begin to talk of it in the streets. And _Robert Elsmere_ is a study in Modernism--or at any rate it has so many affinities with Modernism, that _now_--the French public would be interested.
The length of the book, however, could not be got over, and the plan fell through. But I came away from my talk with a remarkable man, not a little stirred. For it had seemed to show that with all its many faults--and who knew them better than I?--my book had yet possessed a certain representative and pioneering force; and that, to some extent, at least, the generation in which it appeared had spoken through it.
CHAPTER IV
FIRST VISITS TO ITALY
I have already mentioned in these papers that I was one of the examiners for the Spanish Taylorian scholarship at Oxford in 1883, and again in 1888. But perhaps before I go farther in these _Recollections_ I may put down here--somewhat out of its place--a reminiscence connected with the first of these examinations, which seems to me worth recording. My Spanish colleague in 1883 was, as I have said, Don Pascual Gayangos, well known among students for his _History of Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain_, for his edition of the Correspondence of Cardinal Cisneros, and other historical work. _a propos_ of the examination, he came to see me in Russell Square, and his talk about Spain revived in me, for the time, a fading pa.s.sion. Senor Gayangos was born in 1809, so that in 1883 he was already an old man, though full of vigor and work. He told me the following story. Unfortunately, I took no contemporary note. I give it now as I remember it, and if any one who knew Don Pascual, or any student of Shakespearian lore, can correct and amplify it, no one will be better pleased than I. He said that as quite a young man, somewhere in the thirties of the last century, he was traveling through Spain to England, where, if I remember right, he had relations with Sir Thomas Phillipps, the ardent book and MSS. collector, so many of whose treasures are now in the great libraries of Europe. Sir Thomas employed him in the search for Spanish MSS. and rare Spanish books. I gathered that at the time to which the story refers Gayangos himself was not much acquainted with English or English literature. On his journey north from Madrid to Burgos, which was, of course, in the days before railways, he stopped at Valladolid for the night, and went to see an acquaintance of his, the newly appointed librarian of an aristocratic family having a "palace" in Valladolid. He found his friend in the old library of the old house, engaged in a work of destruction. On the floor of the long room was a large _brasero_ in which the new librarian was burning up a quant.i.ty of what he described as useless and miscellaneous books, with a view to the rearrangement of the library. The old sheepskin or vellum bindings had been stripped off, while the printed matter was burning steadily and the room was full of smoke. There was a pile of old books whose turn had not yet come lying on the floor. Gayangos picked one up.
It was a volume containing the plays of Mr. William Shakespeare, and published in 1623. In other words, it was a copy of the First Folio, and, as he declared to me, in excellent preservation. At that time he knew nothing about Shakespeare bibliography. He was struck, however, by the name of Shakespeare, and also by the fact that, according to an inscription inside it, the book had belonged to Count Gondomar, who had himself lived in Valladolid and collected a large library there. But his friend the librarian attached no importance to the book, and it was to go into the common holocaust with the rest. Gayangos noticed particularly, as he turned it over, that its margins were covered with notes in a seventeenth-century hand.
He continued his journey to England, and presently mentioned the incident to Sir Thomas Phillipps, and Sir Thomas"s future son-in-law, Mr. Halliwell--afterward Halliwell-Phillipps. The excitement of both knew no bounds. A First Folio--which had belonged to Count Gondomar, Spanish Amba.s.sador to England up to 1622--and covered with contemporary marginal notes! No doubt a copy which had been sent out to Gondomar from England; for he was well acquainted with English life and letters and had collected much of his library in London. The very thought of such a treasure perishing barbarously in a bonfire of waste paper was enough to drive a bibliophile out of his wits. Gayangos was sent back to Spain posthaste. But, alack! he found a library swept and garnished; no trace of the volume he had once held there in his hand, and on the face of his friend the librarian only a frank and peevish wonder that anybody should tease him with questions about such a trifle.
But just dream a little! Who sent the volume? Who wrote the thick marginal notes? An English correspondent of Gondomar"s? Or Gondomar himself, who arrived in England three years before Shakespeare"s death, was himself a man of letters, and had probably seen most of the plays?
In the few years which intervened between his withdrawal from England and his own death (1626), did he annotate the copy, storing there what he could remember of the English stage, and of "pleasant w.i.l.l.y" himself, perhaps, during his two sojourns in London? And was the book overlooked as English and of no importance in the transfer of Gondomar"s own library, a hundred and sixty years after his death, to Charles III of Spain? And had it been sold, perhaps, for an old song, and with other remnants of Gondomar"s books, just for their local interest, to some Valladolid grandee?
Above all, did those marginal notes which Gayangos had once idly looked through contain, perhaps--though the First Folio does not, of course, include the Poems--some faint key to the perennial Shakespeare mysteries--to Mr. W.H., and the "dark lady," and all the impenetrable story of the Sonnets?
If so, the G.o.ds themselves took care that the veil should not be rent.
The secret remains.
Others abide our question--Thou art free.
We ask and ask. Thou standest and art still, Outtopping knowledge.
One other recollection of the _Robert Elsmere_ year may fitly end my story of it. In September we spent an interesting afternoon at Hawarden--the only time I ever saw "Mr. G." at leisure, amid his own books and trees. We drove over with Sir Robert and Lady Cunliffe, Mr.
Gladstone"s neighbors on the Welsh border, with whom we were staying.
Sir Robert, formerly an ardent Liberal, had parted from Mr. Gladstone in the Home Rule crisis of 1886, and it was the first time they had called at Hawarden since the split. But nothing could have been kinder than the Gladstones" reception of them and of us. "Mr. G." and I let theology alone!--and he was at his best and brightest, talking books and poetry, showing us the octagonal room he had built out for his 60,000 selected letters--among them "hundreds from the Queen"--his library, the park, and the old keep. As I wrote to my father, his amazing intellectual and physical vigor, and the alertness with which, leading the way, he "skipped up the ruins of the keep," were enough "to make a Liberal Unionist thoughtful." Ulysses was for the time in exile, but the "day of return" was not far off.
Especially do I remember the animation with which he dwelt on the horrible story of Damiens, executed with every conceivable torture for the attempted a.s.sa.s.sination of Louis Quinze. He ran through the catalogue of torments so that we all shivered, winding up with a contemptuous, "And all that for just p.r.i.c.king the skin of that scoundrel Louis XV."
I was already thinking of some reply both to Mr. Gladstone"s article and to the attack on _Robert Elsmere_ in the _Quarterly_; but it took me longer than I expected, and it was not till March in the following year (1889) that I published "The New Reformation," a Dialogue, in the _Nineteenth Century_. Into that dialogue I was able to throw the reading and the argument which had been of necessity excluded from the novel.
Mr. Jowett was nervous about it, and came up on purpose from Oxford to persuade me, if he could, not to write it. His view--and that of Mr.
Stopford Brooke--was that a work of art moves on one plane, and historical or critical controversy on another, and that a novel cannot be justified by an essay. But my defense was not an essay; I put it in the form of a conversation, and made it as living and varied as I could.
By using this particular form, I was able to give the traditional as well as the critical case with some fullness, and I took great pains with both. From a recently published letter, I see that Lord Acton wrote to Mr. Gladstone that the role played by the orthodox anti-rational and wholly fanatical Newcome in the novel belonged "to the infancy of art,"
so little could he be taken as representing the orthodox case. I wonder!
I had very good reasons for Newcome. There are plenty of Newcomes in the theological literature of the last century. To have provided a more rational and plausible representative of orthodoxy would, I think, have slackened the pace and chilled the atmosphere of the novel. After all, what really supplied "the other side" was the whole system of things in which the readers of the book lived and moved--the ideas in which they had been brought up, the books they read, the churches in which they worshiped, the sermons to which they listened every week. The novel challenged this system of things; but it was always there to make reply.
It was the eternal _sous-entendu_ of the story, and really gave the story all its force.
But in the dialogue I could put the underlying conflict of thought into articulate and logical form, and build up, in outline at least, the history of "a new learning." When it was published, the dear Master, with a sigh of relief, confessed that it had "done no harm," and "showed a considerable knowledge of critical theology." I, too, felt that it had done no harm--rather that it had vindicated my right to speak, not as an expert and scholar--to that I never pretended for a moment--but as the interpreter of experts and scholars who had something to say to the English world, and of whom the English world was far too little aware.
In the preface to one of the latest editions of his Bampton Lectures, Canon Liddon wrote an elaborate answer to it, which, I think, implies that it was felt to have weight; and if Lord Acton had waited for its appearance he might not, perhaps, have been so ready to condemn the character of Newcome as belonging "to the infancy of art." That Newcome"s type might have been infinitely better presented is indeed most true. But in the scheme of the book, it is _right_. For the ultimate answer to the critical intellect, or, as Newman called it, the "wild living intellect of man," when it is dealing with Christianity and miracle, is that reason is _not_ the final judge--is, indeed, in the last resort, the enemy, and must at some point go down, defeated and trampled on. "Ideal Ward," and Archdeacon Denison, and Mr. Spurgeon--and not Doctor Figgis or Doctor Creighton--are the apologists who in the end hold the fort.
But with this a.n.a.lysis of what may be called the intellectual presuppositions of _Robert Elsmere_, my mind began to turn to what I believed to be the other side of the Greenian or Modernist message--i.e., that life itself, the ordinary human life and experience of every day as it has been slowly evolved through history, is the true source of religion, if man will but listen to the message in his own soul, to the voice of the Eternal Friend, speaking through Conscience, through Society, through Nature. Hence _David Grieve_, which was already in my mind within a few months of the publication of _Robert Elsmere_. We were at Borough Farm when the vision of it first came upon me. It was a summer evening of extraordinary beauty, and I had been wandering through the heather and the pine woods. "The country"--to quote an account written some years ago--"was drenched in sunset; white towering thunder-clouds descending upon and mingling with the crimson of the heath, the green stretches of bracken, the brown pools upon the common, everywhere a rosy suffusion, a majesty of light interweaving heaven and earth and transfiguring all dear familiar things--the old farm-house, the sand-pit where the children played and the sand-martins nested, the wood-pile by the farm door, the phloxes in the tumble-down farm-yard, the cottage down the lane." After months of rest, the fount of mental energy which had been exhausted in me the year before had filled again. I was eager to be at work, and this time on something "more hopeful, positive, and consoling" than the subject of the earlier book.
A visit to Derbyshire in the autumn gave me some of the setting for the story. Then I took the first chapters abroad during the winter to Valescure, and worked them in that fragrant, sunny spot, making acquaintance the while with a new and delightful friend, Emily Lawless, the author of _Hurrish_ and _Grania_, and of some few poems that deserve, I think, a long life in English anthologies. She and her most racy, most entertaining mother, old Lady Cloncurry, were spending the winter at Valescure, and my young daughter and I found them a great resource. Lady Cloncurry, who was a member of an old Galway family, the Kirwans of Castle Hackett, seemed to me a typical specimen of those Anglo-Irish gentry who have been harshly called the "English garrison"
in Ireland, but who were really in the last century the most natural and kindly link between the two countries. So far as I knew them, they loved both, with a strong preference for Ireland. All that English people instinctively resent in Irish character--its dreamy or laughing indifference toward the ordinary business virtues, thrift, prudence, tidiness, accuracy--they had been accustomed to, even where they had not been infected with it, from their childhood. They were not Catholics, most of them, and, so far as they were landlords, the part played by the priests in the Land League agitation tried them sore. But Miss Lawless"s _Grania_ is there to show how delicate and profound might be their sympathy with the lovely things in Irish Catholicism, and her best poems--"The Dirge of the Munster Forest" and "After Aughrim"--give a voice to Irish suffering and Irish patriotism which it would be hard to parallel in the Nationalist or rebel literature of recent years. The fact that they had both nations in their blood, both patriotisms in their hearts, infused a peculiar pathos often into their lives.
Pathos, however, was not a word that seemed--at first sight, at any rate--to have much to do with Lady Cloncurry. She was the most energetic and sprightly _grande dame_ as I remember her, small, with vivid black eyes and hair, her head always swathed in a becoming black lace coif, her hands in black mittens. She and her daughter Emily amused each other perennially, and were endless good company, besides, for other people.
Lady Cloncurry"s clothes varied very little. She had an Irish contempt for too much pains about your appearance, and a great dislike for _grande tenue_. When she arrived at an Irish country-house, of which the hostess told me the story, she said to the mistress of the house, on being taken to her room: "My dear, you don"t want me to come down smart?
I"m sure you don"t! Of course I"ve brought some smart gowns. _They_ [meaning her daughters] make me buy them. But they"ll just do for my maid to show your maid!" And there on the wardrobe shelves they lay throughout her visit.
At Valescure we were within easy reach of Cannes, where the Actons were settled at the Villa Madeleine. The awkwardness of the trains prevented us from seeing as much of them as we had hoped; but I remember some pleasant walks and talks with Lord Acton, and especially the vehement advice he gave us, when my husband joined us and we started on a short, a very short, flight to Italy--for my husband had only a meager holiday from the _Times: "Go to Rome_! Never mind the journeys. Go! You will have three days there, you say? Well, to have walked through Rome, to have spent an hour in the Forum, another on the Palatine; to have seen the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter"s; to have climbed the Janiculum and looked out over the Alban hills and the Campagna--and you can do all that in three days--well!--life is not the same afterward. If you only had an afternoon in Rome it would be well worth while. But _three days_!"
We laughed, took him at his word, and rushed on for Rome. And on the way we saw Perugia and a.s.sisi for the first time, dipping into spring as soon as we got south of the Apennines, and tasting that intoxication of Italian sun in winter which turns northern heads. Of our week in Rome I remember only the first overwhelming impression--as of something infinitely old and _pagan_, through which Christianity moved about like a _parvenu_ amid an elder generation of phantom presences, already gray with time long before Calvary--that, and the making of a few new friends. Of these friends, one, who was to hold a lasting place in my admiration and love through after-years, shall be mentioned here--Contessa Maria Pasolini.