And the significance of it is only to be realized when we turn to the rival group, to Christ Church, and the religious party which that name stood for. Read the lives of Liddon, of Pusey, or--to go farther back-- of the great Newman himself. n.o.body will question the personal goodness and charity of any of the three. But how little the leading ideas of that seething time of social and industrial reform, from the appearance of _Sybil_ in 1843 to the Education Bill of 1870, mattered either to Pusey or to Liddon, compared with the date of the Book of Daniel or the retention of the Athanasian Creed? Newman, at a time when national drunkenness was an overshadowing terror in the minds of all reformers, confesses with a pathetic frankness that he had never considered "whether there were too many public-houses in England or no"; and in all his religious controversies of the "thirties and the "forties, you will look in vain for any word of industrial or political reform. So also in the _Life_ of that great rhetorician and beautiful personality, Canon Liddon, you will scarcely find a single letter that touches on any question of social betterment. How to safeguard the "principle of authority," how to uphold the traditional authorship of the Pentateuch, and of the Book of Daniel, against "infidel" criticism; how to stifle among the younger High-Churchmen like Mr. (now Bishop) Gore, then head of the Pusey House, the first advances toward a reasonable freedom of thought; how to maintain the doctrine of Eternal Punishment against the protest of the religious consciousness itself--it is on these matters that Canon Liddon"s correspondence turns, it was to them his life was devoted.
How vainly! Who can doubt now which type of life and thought had in it the seeds of growth and permanence--the Balliol type, or the Christ Church type? There are many High-Churchmen, it is true, at the present day, and many Ritualist Churches. But they are alive to-day, just in so far as they have learned the lesson of social pity, and the lesson of a reasonable criticism, from the men whom Pusey and Liddon and half the bishops condemned and persecuted in the middle years of the nineteenth century.
When we were living in Oxford, however, this was not exactly the point of view from which the great figure of Liddon presented itself, to us of the Liberal camp. We were constantly aware of him, no doubt, as the rival figure to the Master of Balliol, as the arch wire-puller and ecclesiastical intriguer in University affairs, leading the Church forces with a more than Roman astuteness. But his great mark was made, of course, by his preaching, and that not so much by the things said as by the man saying them. Who now would go to Liddon"s famous Bamptons, for all their learning, for a still valid defense of the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation? Those wonderful paragraphs of subtle argumentation from which the great preacher emerged, as triumphantly as Mr. Gladstone from a Gladstonian sentence in a House of Commons debate-- what remains of them? Liddon wrote of Stanley that he--Stanley--was "more entirely dest.i.tute of the logical faculty" than any educated man he knew. In a sense it was true. But Stanley, if he had been aware of the criticism, might have replied that, if he lacked logic, Liddon lacked something much more vital--i.e., the sense of history--and of the relative value of testimony!
Newman, Pusey, Liddon--all three, great schoolmen, arguing from an accepted brief; the man of genius, the man of a vast industry, intense but futile, the man of captivating presence and a perfect rhetoric-- history, with its patient burrowings, has surely undermined the work of all three, sparing only that element in the work of one of them-- Newman--which is the preserving salt of all literature--i.e., the magic of personality. And some of the most efficacious burrowers have been their own spiritual children. As was fitting! For the Tractarian movement, with its appeal to the primitive Church, was in truth, and quite unconsciously, one of the agencies in a great process of historical inquiry which is still going on, and of which the end is not yet.
But to me, in my twenties, these great names were not merely names or symbols, as they are to the men and women of the present generation.
Newman I had seen in my childhood, walking about the streets of Edgbaston, and had shrunk from him in a dumb, childish resentment as from some one whom I understood to be the author of our family misfortunes. In those days, as I have already recalled in an earlier chapter, the daughters of a "mixed marriage" were brought up in the mother"s faith, and the sons in the father"s. I, therefore, as a schoolgirl under Evangelical influence, was not allowed to make friends with any of my father"s Catholic colleagues. Then, in 1880, twenty years later, Newman came to Oxford, and on Trinity Monday there was a great gathering at Trinity College, where the Cardinal in his red, a blanched and spiritual presence, received the homage of a new generation who saw in him a great soul and a great master of English, and cared little or nothing for the controversies in which he had spent his prime. As my turn came to shake hands, I recalled my father to him and the Edgbaston days. His face lit up--almost mischievously. "Are you the little girl I remember seeing sometimes--in the distance?" he said to me, with a smile and a look that only he and I understood.
On the Sunday preceding that gathering I went to hear his last sermon in the city he had loved so well, preached at the new Jesuit church in the suburbs; while little more than a mile away, Bidding Prayer and sermon were going on as usual in the University Church where in his youth, week by week, he had so deeply stirred the hearts and consciences of men. The sermon in St. Aloysius"s was preached with great difficulty, and was almost incoherent from the physical weakness of the speaker. Yet who that was present on that Sunday will ever forget the great ghost that fronted them, the faltering accents, the words from which the life-blood had departed, yet not the charm?
Then--Pusey! There comes back to me a bowed and uncouth figure, whom one used to see both in the Cathedral procession on a Sunday, and--rarely-- in the University pulpit. One sermon on Darwinism, which was preached, if I remember right, in the early "seventies, remains with me, as the appearance of some modern Elijah, returning after long silence and exile to protest against an unbelieving world. Sara Coleridge had years before described Pusey in the pulpit with a few vivid strokes.
He has not one of the graces of oratory [she says]. His discourse is generally a rhapsody describing with infinite repet.i.tion the wickedness of sin, the worthlessness of earth, and the blessedness of Heaven. He is as still as a statue all the time he is uttering it, looks as white as a sheet, and is as monotonous in delivery as possible.
Nevertheless, Pusey wielded a spell which is worth much oratory--the spell of a soul dwelling spiritually on the heights; and a prophet, moreover, may be as monotonous or as incoherent as he pleases, while the world is still in tune with his message. But in the "seventies, Oxford, at least, was no longer in tune with Pusey"s message, and the effect of the veteran leader, trying to come to terms with Darwinism, struggling, that is, with new and stubborn forces he had no further power to bind, was tragic, or pathetic, as such things must always be. New Puseys arise in every century. The "sons of authority" will never perish out of the earth. But the language changes and the argument changes; and perhaps there are none more secretly impatient with the old prophet than those younger spirits of his own kind who are already stepping into his shoes.
Far different was the effect of Liddon, in those days, upon us younger folk! The grace and charm of Liddon"s personal presence were as valuable to his party in the "seventies as that of Dean Stanley had been to Liberalism at an earlier stage. There was indeed much in common between the aspect and manner of the two men, though no likeness, in the strict sense, whatever. But the exquisite delicacy of feature, the brightness of eye, the sensitive play of expression, were alike in both. Saint Simon says of Fenelon:
He was well made, pale, with eyes that showered intelligence and fire--and with a physiognomy that no one who had seen it once could forget. It had both gravity and polish, seriousness and gaiety; it spoke equally of the scholar, the bishop, and the _grand seigneur_, and the final impression was one of intelligence, subtlety, grace, charm; above all, of dignity. One had to tear oneself from looking at him.
Many of those who knew Liddon best could, I think, have adapted this language to him; and there is much in it that fitted Arthur Stanley.
But the love and gift for managing men was of course a secondary thing in the case of our great preacher. The University politics of Liddon and his followers are dead and gone; and as I have ventured to think, the intellectual force of Liddon"s thoughts and arguments, as they are presented to us now on the printed page, is also a thing of the past.
But the vision of the preacher in those who saw it is imperishable. The scene in St. Paul"s has been often described, by none better than by Doctor Liddon"s colleague, Canon Scott Holland. But the Oxford scene, with all its Old World setting, was more touching, more interesting. As I think of it, I seem to be looking out from those dark seats under the undergraduates" gallery--where sat the wives of the Masters of Arts--at the crowded church, as it waited for the preacher. First came the stir of the procession; the long line of Heads of Houses, in their scarlet robes as Doctors of Divinity--all but the two heretics, Pattison and Jowett, who walked in their plain black, and warmed my heart always thereby! And then the Vice-Chancellor, with the "pokers" and the preacher. All eyes were fixed on the slender, willowy figure, and the dark head touched with silver. The bow to the Vice-Chancellor as they parted at the foot of the pulpit stairs, the mounting of the pulpit, the quiet look out over the Church, the Bidding Prayer, the voice--it was all part of an incomparable performance which cannot be paralleled to- day.
The voice was high and penetrating, without much variety, as I remember it; but of beautiful quality, and at times wonderfully moving. And what was still more appealing was the evident strain upon the speaker of his message. It wore him out visibly as he delivered it. He came down from the pulpit white and shaken, dripping with perspiration. Virtue had gone out of him. Yet his effort had never for a moment weakened his perfect self-control, the flow and finish of the long sentences, or the subtle interconnection of the whole! One Sunday I remember in particular.
Oxford had been saddened the day before by the somewhat sudden death of a woman whom everybody loved and respected--Mrs. Acland, the wife of the well-known doctor and professor. And Liddon, with a wonderfully happy instinct, had added to his sermon a paragraph dealing with Mrs. Acland"s death, which held us all spellbound till the beautiful words died into silence. It was done with a fastidious literary taste that is rather French than English; and yet it came from the very heart of the speaker.
Looking back through my many memories of Doctor Liddon as a preacher, that tribute to a n.o.ble woman in death remains with me as the finest and most lasting of them all.
CHAPTER VIII
EARLY MARRIED LIFE
How many other figures in that vanished Oxford world I should like to draw!--Mandell or "Max" Creighton, our lifelong friend, then just married to the wife who was his best comrade while he lived, and since his death has made herself an independent force in English life. I first remember the future Bishop of London when I was fifteen, and he was reading history with my father on a Devonshire reading-party. The tall, slight figure in blue serge, the red-gold hair, the spectacles, the keen features and quiet, commanding eye--I see them first against a background of rocks on the Lynton sh.o.r.e. Then again, a few years later, in his beautiful Merton rooms, with the vine tendrils curling round the windows, the Morris paper, and the blue willow-pattern plates upon it, that he was surely the first to collect in Oxford. A luncheon-party returns upon me--in Brasenose--where the brilliant Merton Fellow and tutor, already a power in Oxford, first met his future wife; afterward, their earliest married home in Oxford so near to ours, in the new region of the Parks; then the Vicarage on the Northumberland coast where Creighton wrestled with the north-country folk, with their virtues and their vices, drinking deep draughts thereby from the sources of human nature; where he read and wrote history, preparing for his _magnum opus_, the history of the Renaissance Popes; where he entertained his friends, brought up his children, and took mighty walks--always the same restless, energetic, practical, pondering spirit, his mind set upon the Kingdom of G.o.d, and convinced that in and through the English Church a man might strive for the Kingdom as faithfully and honestly as anywhere else. The intellectual doubts and misgivings on the subject of taking orders, so common in the Oxford of his day, Creighton had never felt.
His life had ripened to a rich maturity without, apparently, any of those fundamental conflicts which had scarred the lives of other men.
The fact set him in strong contrast with another historian who was also our intimate friend--John Richard Green. When I first knew him, during my engagement to my husband, and seven years before the _Short History_ was published, he had just practically--though not formally--given up his orders. He had been originally curate to my husband"s father, who held a London living, and the bond between him and his Vicar"s family was singularly close and affectionate. After the death of the dear mother of the flock, a saintly and tender spirit, to whom Mr. Green was much attached, he remained the faithful friend of all her children. How much I had heard of him before I saw him! The expectation of our first meeting filled me with trepidation. Should I be admitted, too, into that large and generous heart? Would he "pa.s.s" the girl who had dared to be his "boy"s" fiancee? But after ten minutes all was well, and he was my friend no less than my husband"s, to the last hour of his fruitful, suffering life.
And how much it meant, his friendship! It became plain very soon after our marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership. My first published story, written when I was eighteen, had appeared in the _Churchman"s Magazine_ in 1870, and an article on the "Poema del Cid,"
the first-fruits of my Spanish browsings in the Bodleian, appeared in _Macmillan_ early in 1872. My husband was already writing in the _Sat.u.r.day Review_ and other quarters, and had won his literary spurs as one of the three authors of that _jeu d"esprit_ of no small fame in its day, the _Oxford Spectator_. Our three children arrived in 1874, 1876, and 1879, and all the time I was reading, listening, talking, and beginning to write in earnest--mostly for the _Sat.u.r.day Review_.
"J.R.G.," as we loved to call him, took up my efforts with the warmest encouragement, tempered, indeed, by constant fears that I should become a hopeless bookworm and dryasdust, yielding day after day to the mere luxury of reading, and putting nothing into shape!
Against this supposed tendency in me he railed perpetually. "Any one can read!" he would say; "anybody of decent wits can acc.u.mulate notes and references; the difficulty is to _write_--to make something!" And later on, when I was deep in Spanish chronicles and thinking vaguely of a History of Spain--early Spain, at any rate--he wrote, almost impatiently: "_Begin_--and begin your _book_. Don"t do "studies" and that sort of thing--one"s book teaches one everything as one writes it."
I was reminded of that letter years later when I came across, in _Amiel"s Journal_, a pa.s.sage almost to the same effect: "It is by writing that one learns--it is by pumping that one draws water into one"s well." But in J.R.G."s case the advice he gave his friend was carried out by himself through every hour of his short, concentrated life. "He died learning," as the inscription on his grave testifies; but he also died _making_. In other words, the shaping, creative instinct wrestled in him with the powers of death through long years, and never deserted him to the very end. Who that has ever known the pa.s.sion of the writer and the student can read without tears the record of his last months? He was already doomed when I first saw him in 1871, for signs of tuberculosis had been discovered in 1869, and all through the "seventies and till he died, in 1883, while he was writing the _Short History_, the expanded Library Edition in four volumes, and the two brilliant monographs on _The Making of England_ and _The Conquest of England_, the last of which was put together from his notes, and finished by his devoted wife and secretary after his death, he was fighting for his life, in order that he might finish his work. He was a dying man from January, 1881, but he finished and published _The Making of England_ in 1882, and began _The Conquest of England_. On February 25th, ten days before his death, his wife told him that the end was near. He thought a little, and said that he had still something to say in his book "which is worth saying. I will make a fight for it. I will do what I can, and I must have sleeping-draughts for a week. After that it will not matter if they lose their effect." He worked on a little longer---but on March 7th all was over. My husband had gone out to see him in February, and came home marveling at the miracle of such life in death.
I have spoken of the wonderful stimulus and encouragement he could give to the young student. But he was no flatterer. No one could strike harder or swifter than he, when he chose.
It was to me--in his eager friendship for "Humphry"s" young wife--he first intrusted the task of that primer of English literature which afterward Mr. Stopford Brooke carried out with such astonishing success.
But I was far too young for such a piece of work, and knew far too little. I wrote a beginning, however, and took it up to him when he was in rooms in Beaumont Street. He was entirely dissatisfied with it, and as gently and kindly as possible told me it wouldn"t do and that I must give it up.[1] Then throwing it aside, he began to walk up and down his room, sketching out how such a general outline of English literature might be written and should be written. I sat by enchanted, all my natural disappointment charmed away. The knowledge, the enthusiasm, the _shaping_ power of the frail human being moving there before me--with the slight, emaciated figure, the great brow, the bright eyes; all the physical presence instinct, aflame, with the intellectual and poetic pa.s.sion which grew upon him as he traced the mighty stream of England"s thought and song--it was an experience never forgotten, one of those by which mind teaches mind, and the endless succession is carried on.
[Footnote 1: Since writing these lines, I have been amused to discover the following reference in the brilliant biography of Stopford Brooke, by his son-in-law, Princ.i.p.al Jacks, to my unlucky attempt. "The only advantage," says Mr. Brooke in his diary for May 8, 1899, "the older writer has over the younger is that he knows what to leave out and has a juster sense of proportion. I remember that when Green wanted the Primer of English Literature to be done, Mrs. ---- asked if she might try her hand at it. He said "Yes," and she set to work. She took a fancy to _Beowulf_, and wrote twenty pages on it! At this rate the book would have run to more than a thousand pages."]
There is another memory from the early time, which comes back to me--of J.R.G. in Notre Dame. We were on our honeymoon journey, and we came across him in Paris. We went together to Notre Dame, and there, as we all lingered at the western end, looking up to the gleaming color of the distant apse, the spirit came upon him. He began to describe what the Church had seen, coming down through the generations, from vision to vision. He spoke in a low voice, but without a pause or break, standing in deep shadow close to the western door. One scarcely saw him, and I almost lost the sense of his individuality. It seemed to be the very voice of History--Life telling of itself.
Liberty and the pa.s.sion for liberty were the very breath of his being.
In 1871, just after the Commune, I wrote him a cry of pity and horror about the execution of Rossel, the "heroic young Protestant who had fought the Versaillais because they had made peace, and prevented him from fighting the Prussians." J.R.G. replied that the only defense of a man who fought for the Commune was that he believed in it, while Rossel, by his own statement, did not.
People like old Delescluze are more to my mind, men who believe, rightly or wrongly (in the ideas of "93), and cling to their faith through thirteen years of the hulks and of Cayenne, who get their chance at last, fight, work, and then when all is over know how to die--as Delescluze, with that gray head bared and the old threadbare coat thrown open, walked quietly and without a word up to the fatal barricade.
His place in the ranks of history is high and safe. That was abundantly shown by the testimony of the large gathering of English scholars and historians at the memorial meeting held in his own college some years ago. He remains as one of the leaders of that school (there is, of course, another and a strong one!) which holds that without imagination and personality a man had better not write history at all; since no recreation of the past is really possible without the kindling and welding force that a man draws from his own spirit.
But it is as a friend that I desire--with undying love and grat.i.tude--to commemorate him here. To my husband, to all the motherless family he had taken to his heart, he was affection and constancy itself. And as for me, just before the last visit that we paid him at Mentone in 1882, a year before he died, he was actually thinking out schemes for that history of early Spain which it seemed, both to him and me, I must at last begin, and was inquiring what help I could get from libraries on the Riviera during our stay with him. Then, when we came, I remember our talks in the little Villa St. Nicholas--his sympathy, his enthusiasm, his unselfish help; while all the time he was wrestling with death for just a few more months in which to finish his own work. Both Lord Bryce and Sir Leslie Stephen have paid their tribute to this wonderful talk of his later years. "No such talk," says Lord Bryce, "has been heard in our generation." Of Madame de Stael it was said that she wrote her books out of the talk of the distinguished men who frequented her _salon_. Her own conversation was directed to evoking from the brains of others what she afterward, as an artist, knew how to use better than they. Her talk-- small blame to her!--was plundering and acquisitive. But J.R.G."s talk _gave_ perpetually, admirable listener though he was. All that he had he gave; so that our final thought of him is not that of the suffering invalid, the thwarted workman, the life cut short, but rather that of one who had richly done his part and left in his friends" memories no mere pathetic appeal, but much more a bracing message for their own easier and longer lives.
Of the two other historians with whom my youth threw me into contact, Mr. Freeman and Bishop Stubbs, I have some lively memories. Mr. Freeman was first known to me, I think, through "Johnny," as he was wont to call J.R.G., whom he adored. Both he and J.R.G. were admirable letter- writers, and a volume of their correspondence--much of it already published separately--if it could be put together--like that of Flaubert and George Sand--would make excellent reading for a future generation.
In 1877 and 1878, when I was plunged in the history of West-Gothic Kings, I had many letters from Mr. Freeman, and never were letters about grave matters less grave. Take this outburst about a lady who had sent him some historical work to look at. He greatly liked and admired the lady; but her work drove him wild. "I never saw anything like it for missing the point of everything.... Then she has no notion of putting a sentence together, so that she said some things which I fancy she did not mean to say--as that "the beloved Queen Louisa of Prussia" was the mother of M. Thiers. When she said that the Duke of Orleans"s horses ran away, "leaving two infant sons," it may have been so: I have no evidence either way."
Again, "I am going to send you the Spanish part of my Historical Geography. It will be very bad, but--when I don"t know a thing I believe I generally know that I don"t know it, and so manage to wrap it up in some vague phrase which, if not right, may at least not be wrong. Thus I have always held that the nursery account of Henry VIII--
""And Henry the Eighth was as fat as a pig--"
"is to be preferred to Froude"s version. For, though certainly an inadequate account of the reign, it is true as far as it goes."
Once, certainly, we stayed at Somerleaze, and I retain the impression of a very busy, human, energetic man of letters, a good Churchman, and a good citizen, brimful of likes and dislikes, and waving his red beard often as a flag of battle in many a hot skirmish, especially with J.R.G., but always warm-hearted and generally placable--except in the case of James Anthony Froude. The feud between Freeman and Froude was, of course, a standing dish in the educated world of half a century ago.
It may be argued that the Muse of History has not decided the quarrel quite according to justice; that Clio has shown herself something of a jade in the matter, as easily influenced by fair externals as a certain Helen was long ago. How many people now read the _Norman Conquest_-- except the few scholars who devote themselves to the same period?
Whereas Froude"s History, with all its sins, lives, and in my belief will long live, because the man who wrote it was a _writer_ and understood his art.
Of Bishop Stubbs, the greatest historical name surely in the England of the last half of the nineteenth century, I did not personally see much while we lived in Oxford and he was Regius Professor. He had no gifts-- it was his chief weakness as a teacher--for creating a young school around him, setting one man to work on this job, and another on that, as has been done with great success in many instances abroad. He was too reserved, too critical, perhaps too sensitive. But he stood as a great influence in the background, felt if not seen. A word of praise from him meant everything; a word of condemnation, in his own subjects, settled the matter. I remember well, after I had written a number of articles on early Spanish Kings and Bishops, for a historical Dictionary, and they were already in proof, how on my daily visits to the Bodleian I began to be puzzled by the fact that some of the very obscure books I had been using were "out" when I wanted them, or had been abstracted from my table by one of the sub-librarians. _Joannes Biclarensis_--he was missing! Who in the world could want that obscure chronicle of an obscure period but myself? I began to envisage some hungry German _Privatdozent_, on his holiday, raiding my poor little subject, and my books, with a view to his Doctor"s thesis. Then one morning, as I went in, I came across Doctor Stubbs, with an ancient and portly volume under his arm. _Joannes Biclarensis_ himself!--I knew it at once. The Professor gave me a friendly nod, and I saw a twinkle in his eye as we pa.s.sed. Going to my desk, I found another volume gone--this time the _Acts of the Councils of Toledo_. So far as I knew, not the most ardent Churchman in Oxford felt at that time any absorbing interest in the Councils of Toledo. At any rate, I had been left in undisturbed possession of them for months. Evidently something was happening, and I sat down to my work in bewilderment.
Then, on my way home, I ran into a fellow-worker for the Dictionary--a well-known don and history tutor. "Do you know what"s happened?" he said, in excitement. "_Stubbs_ has been going through our work! The Editor wanted his imprimatur before the final printing. Can"t expect anybody but Stubbs to know all these things! My books are gone, too." We walked up to the Parks together in a common anxiety, like a couple of school-boys in for Smalls. Then in a few days the tension was over; my books were on my desk again; the Professor stopped me in the Broad with a smile, and the remark that Joannes Biclarensis was really quite an interesting fellow, and I received a very friendly letter from the Editor of the Dictionary.
And perhaps I may be allowed, after these forty years, one more recollection, though I am afraid a proper reticence would suppress it! A little later "Mr. Creighton" came to visit us, after his immigration to Embleton and the north; and I timidly gave him some lives of West-Gothic Kings and Bishops to read. He read them--they were very long and terribly minute--and put down the proofs, without saying much. Then he walked down to Oxford with my husband, and sent me back a message by him: "Tell M. to go on. There is n.o.body but Stubbs doing such work in Oxford now." The thrill of pride and delight such words gave me may be imagined. But there were already causes at work why I should not "go on."
I shall have more to say presently about the work on the origins of modern Spain. It was the only thorough "discipline" I ever had; it lasted about two years--years of incessant, arduous work, and it led directly to the writing of _Robert Elsmere_. But before and after, how full life was of other things! The joys of one"s new home, of the children that began to patter about it, of every bit of furniture and blue pot it contained, each representing some happy _cha.s.se_ or special earning--of its garden of half an acre, where I used to feel as Hawthorne felt in the garden of the Concord Manse--amazement that Nature should take the trouble to produce things as big as vegetable marrows, or as surprising as scarlet runners that topped one"s head, just that we might own and eat them. Then the life of the University town, with all those marked antagonisms I have described, those intellectual and religious movements, that were like the meeting currents of rivers in a lake; and the pleasure of new friendships, where everybody was equal, n.o.body was rich, and the intellectual average was naturally high. In those days, too, a small group of women of whom I was one were laying the foundations of the whole system of women"s education in Oxford. Mrs.
Creighton and I, with Mrs. Max Muller, were the secretaries and founders of the first organized series of lectures for women in the University town; I was the first secretary of Somerville Hall, and it fell to me, by chance, to suggest the name of the future college. My friends and I were all on fire for women"s education, including women"s medical education, and very emulous of Cambridge, where the movement was already far advanced.
But hardly any of us were at all on fire for woman suffrage, wherein the Oxford educational movement differed greatly from the Cambridge movement. The majority, certainly, of the group to which I belonged at Oxford were at that time persuaded that the development of women"s power in the State--or rather, in such a state as England, with its far- reaching and Imperial obligations, resting ultimately on the sanction of war--should be on lines of its own. We believed that growth through Local Government, and perhaps through some special machinery for bringing the wishes and influence of women of all cla.s.ses to bear on Parliament, other than the Parliamentary vote, was the real line of progress. However, I shall return to this subject on some future occasion, in connection with the intensified suffragist campaign which began about ten years ago (1907-08) and in which I took some part. I will only note here my first acquaintance with Mrs. Fawcett. I see her so clearly as a fresh, picturesque figure--in a green silk dress and a necklace of amber beads, when she came down to Oxford in the mid-"seventies to give a course of lectures in the series that Mrs.
Creighton and I were organizing, and I remember well the atmosphere of sympathy and admiration which surrounded her as she spoke to an audience in which many of us were well acquainted with the heroic story of Mr.
Fawcett"s blindness, and of the part played by his wife in enabling him to continue his economic and Parliamentary work.
But life then was not all lectures!--nor was it all Oxford. There were vacations, and vacations generally meant for us some weeks, at least, of travel, even when pence were fewest. The Christmas vacation of 1874 we were in Paris. The weather was bitter, and we were lodged, for cheapness" sake, in an old-fashioned hotel, where the high canopied beds with their mountainous duvets were very difficult to wake up in on a cold morning. But in spite of snow and sleet we filled our days to the brim. We took with us some introductions from Oxford--to Madame Mohl, the Renans, the Gaston Parises, the Boutmys, the Ribots, and, from my Uncle Matthew, to the Scherers at Versailles. Monsieur Taine was already known to us, and it was at their house, on one of Madame Taine"s Thursdays, that I first heard French conversation at its best. There was a young man there, dark-eyed, dark-haired, to whom I listened--not always able to follow the rapid French in which he and two other men were discussing some literary matter of the moment, but conscious, for the first time, of what the conversation of intellectual equals might be, if it were always practised as the French are trained to practise it from their mother"s milk, by the influence of a long tradition. The young man was M. Paul Bourget, who had not yet begun to write novels, while his literary and philosophical essays seemed rather to mark him out as the disciple of M. Taine than as the Catholic protagonist he was soon to become. M. Bourget did not then speak English, and my French conversation, which had been wholly learned from books, had a way at that time--and, alack! has still--of breaking down under me, just as one reached the thing one really wanted to say. So that I did not attempt to do more than listen. But I seem to remember that those with whom he talked were M. Francis Charmes, then a writer on the staff of the _Debats_, and afterward the editor of the _Revue des deux Mondes_ in succession to M. Brunetiere; and M. Gaston Paris, the brilliant head of French philology at the College de France. What struck me then, and through all the new experiences and new acquaintanceships of our Christmas fortnight, was that strenuous and pa.s.sionate intensity of the French temper, which foreign nations so easily lose sight of, but which, in truth, is as much part of the French nature as their gaiety, or as what seems to us their frivolity. The war of 1870, the Commune, were but three years behind them. Germany had torn from them Alsace-Lorraine; she had occupied Paris; and their own Jacobins had ruined and burned what even Germany had spared. In the minds of the intellectual cla.s.s there lay deep, on the one hand, a determination to rebuild France; on the other, to avenge her defeat. The blackened ruins of the Tuileries and of the Cour des Comptes still disfigured a city which grimly kept them there as a warning against anarchy; while the statue of the Ville de Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde had worn for three years the funeral garlands, which, as France confidently hopes, the peace that will end this war will, after nearly half a century, give way once more to the rejoicing tricolor. At the same time reconstruction was everywhere beginning--especially in the field of education. The corrupt, political influence of the Empire, which had used the whole educational system of the country for the purpose of keeping itself and its supporters in power, was at an end. The recognized "ecole Normale" was becoming a source of moral and mental strength among thousands of young men and women; and the "ecole des Sciences politiques," the joint work of Taine, Renan, and M. Boutmy, its first director, was laying foundations whereof the results are to be seen conspicuously to-day, in French character, French resource, French patience, French science, as this hideous war has revealed them.
I remember an illuminating talk with M. Renan himself on this subject during our visit. We had never yet seen him, and we carried an introduction to him from Max Muller, our neighbor and friend in Oxford.
We found him alone, in a small working-room crowded with books, at the College de France. Madame Renan was away, and he had abandoned his large library for something more easily warmed. My first sight of him was something of a shock--of the large, ungainly figure, the genial face with its spreading cheeks and humorous eyes, the big head with its scanty locks of hair. I think he felt an amused and kindly interest in the two young folk from Oxford who had come as pilgrims to his shrine, and, realizing that our French was not fluent and our shyness great, he filled up the time--and the gaps--by a monologue, lit up by many touches of Renanesque humor, on the situation in France.
First, as to literature--"No, we have no genius, no poets or writers of the first rank just now--at least so it seems to me. But we _work--nous travaillons beaucoup! Ce sera noire salut_." It was the same as to politics. He had no illusions and few admirations. "The Chamber is full of mediocrities. We are governed by _avocats_ and _pharmaciens_. But at least _Ils ne feront pas la guerre_!"