A Writer's Recollections Volume II Part 2

Oppression--tyranny--persecution--those were the things that stirred his blood. He was a Catholic, yet he fought Ultramontanism and the Papal, Curia to the end; he never lost his full communion with the Church of Rome, yet he could never forgive the Papacy for the things it had done, and suffered to be done; and he would have nothing to do with the excuse that the moral standards of one age are different from those of another, and therefore the crimes of a Borgia weigh more lightly and claim more indulgence than similar acts done in the nineteenth century.

There is one moral standard for all Christians--there has never been more than one [he would say, inexorably]. The Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount have been always there. It was the wickedness of men that ignored them in the fifteenth century--it is the wickedness of men that ignores them now. Tolerate them in the past, and you will come to tolerate them in the present and future.

It was in 1885 that Mr.--then recently made Professor--Creighton, showed me at Cambridge an extraordinarily interesting summary, in Lord Acton's handwriting, of what should be the principles--the ethical principles--of the modern historian in dealing with the past. They were, I think, afterward embodied in an introduction to a new edition of _Machiavelli_. The gist of them, however, is given in a letter written to Bishop Creighton in 1887, and printed in the biography of the Bishop.

Here we find a devout Catholic attacking an Anglican writer for applying the epithets "tolerant and enlightened" to the later medieval Papacy.

These men [i.e., the Popes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries] [he says] inst.i.tuted a system of persecution.... The person who authorizes the act shares the guilt of the person who commits it.... Now the Liberals think persecution a crime of a worse order than adultery, and the acts done by Ximenes [through the agency of the Spanish Inquisition] considerably worse than the entertainment of Roman courtesans by Alexander VIth.

These lines, of course, point to the Acton who was the lifelong friend of Dollinger and fought, side by side with the Bavarian scholar, the promulgation of the dogma of Papal Infallibility, at the Vatican Council of 1870. But while Dollinger broke with the Church, Lord Acton never did. That was what made the extraordinary interest of conversation with him. Here was a man whose denunciation of the crimes and corruption of Papal Rome--of the historic Church, indeed, and the clergy in general--was far more unsparing than that of the average educated Anglican. Yet he died a devout member of the Roman Church in which he was born; after his death it was revealed that he had never felt a serious doubt either of Catholic doctrine or of the supernatural mission of the Catholic Church; and it was to a dearly loved daughter on her death-bed that he said, with calm and tender faith, "My child, you will soon be with Jesus Christ." All his friends, except the very few who knew him most intimately, must, I think, have been perpetually puzzled by this apparent paradox in his life and thought. Take the subject of Biblical criticism. I had many talks with him while I was writing _Robert Elsmere_, and was always amazed at his knowledge of what Liddon would have called "German infidel" books. He had read them all, he possessed them all, he knew a great deal about the lives of the men who had written them, and he never spoke of them, both the books and the writers, without complete and, as it seemed to me, sympathetic tolerance. I remember, after the publication of the dialogue on "The New Reformation," in which I tried to answer Mr. Gladstone's review of _Robert Elsmere_ by giving an outline of the history of religious inquiry and Biblical criticism from Lessing to Harnack, that I met Lord Acton one evening on the platform of Bletchley station, while we were both waiting for a train. He came up to me with a word of congratulation on the article. "I only wish," I said, "I had been able to consult you more about it." "No, no," he said. "_Votre siege est faite_! But I think you should have given more weight to so-and-so, and you have omitted so-and-so." Whereupon we walked up and down in the dusk, and he poured out that learning of his, in that way he had--so courteous, modest, thought-provoking--which made one both wonder at and love him.

As to his generosity and kindness toward younger students, it was endless. I asked him once, when I was writing for _Macmillan_, to give me some suggestions for an article on Chateaubriand. The letter I received from him the following morning is a marvel of knowledge, bibliography, and kindness. And not only did he give me such a "scheme"

of reading as would have taken any ordinary person months to get through, but he arrived the following day in a hansom, with a number of the books he had named, and for a long time they lived on my shelves.

Alack! I never wrote the article, but when I came to the writing of _Eleanor_, for which certain material was drawn from the life of Chateaubriand, his advice helped me. And I don't think he would have thought it thrown away. He never despised novels!

Once on a visit to us at Stocks, there were nine books of different sorts in his room which I had chosen and placed there. By Monday morning he had read them all. His library, when he died, contained about 60,000 volumes--all read; and it will be remembered that Lord Morley, to whom Mr. Carnegie gave it, has handed it on to the University of Cambridge.

In 1884, when I first knew him, however, Lord Acton was every bit as keen a politician as he was a scholar. As is well known, he was a poor speaker, and never made any success in Parliament; and this was always, it seemed to me, the drop of gall in his otherwise happy and distinguished lot. But if he was never in an English Cabinet, his influence over Mr. Gladstone through the whole of the Home Rule struggle gave him very real political power. He and Mr. Morley were the constant friends and a.s.sociates to whom Mr. Gladstone turned through all that critical time. But the great split was rus.h.i.+ng on, and it was also in 1884 that, at Admiral Maxse's one night at dinner, I first saw Mr.

Chamberlain, who was to play so great a part in the following years. It was a memorable evening to me, for the other guest in a small party was M. Clemenceau.

M. Clemenceau was then at the height of his power as the maker and unmaker of French Ministries. It was he more than any other single man who had checkmated the Royalist reaction of 1877 and driven MacMahon from power; and in the year after we first met him he was to bring Jules Ferry to grief over _L'affaire de Tongkin_. He was then in the prime of life, and he is still (1917), thirty-three years later,[1] one of the most vigorous of French political influences. Mr. Chamberlain, in 1884, was forty-eight, five years older than the French politician, and was at that time, of course, the leader of the Radicals, as distinguished from the old Liberals, both in the House of Commons and Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet.

How many great events, in which those two men were to be concerned, were still in the "abysm of time," as we sat listening to them at Admiral Maxse's dinner-table!--Clemenceau, the younger, and the more fiery and fluent; Chamberlain, with no graces of conversation, and much less ready than the man he was talking with, but producing already the impression of a power, certain to leave its mark, if the man lived, on English history. In a letter to my father after the dinner-party, I described the interest we had both felt in M. Clemenceau. "Yet he seems to me a light weight to ride such a horse as the French democracy!"

[Footnote 1: These lines were written shortly before, on the overthrow of M. Panleve. M. Clemenceau, at the age of seventy-seven, became Prime Minister of France, at what may well be the deciding moment of French destiny (January, 1918).]

In the following year, 1885, I remember a long conversation on the Gordon catastrophe with Mr. Chamberlain at Lady Jeune's. It was evident, I thought, that his mind was greatly exercised by the whole story of that disastrous event. He went through it from step to step, ending up deliberately, but with a sigh, "I have never been able to see, from day to day, and I do not see now, how the Ministry could have taken any other course than that they did take."

Yet the recently published biography of Sir Charles Dilke shows clearly how very critical Mr. Chamberlain had already become of his great leader, Mr. Gladstone, and how many causes were already preparing the rupture of 1886.

I first met Mr. Browning in 1884 or 1885, if I remember right, at a Kensington dinner-party, where he took me down. A man who talked loud and much was discoursing on the other side of the table; and a spirit of opposition had clearly entered into Mr. Browning.

_a propos_ of some recent acting in London we began to talk of Moliere, and presently, as though to shut out the stream of words opposite, which was damping conversation, the old poet--how the splendid brow and the white hair come back to me!--fell to quoting from the famous sonnet scene in "Le Misanthrope": first of all, Alceste's rage with Phillinte's flattery of the wretched verses declaimed by Oronte--"_Morbleu! vil complaisant, vous louez des sottises_"; then the admirable fencing between Oronte and Alceste, where Alceste at first tries to convey his contempt for Oronte's sonnet indirectly, and then bursts out:

"_Ce n'est que jeu de mots, qu'affectation pure, Et ce n'est point ainsi que parle la nature_!"

breaking immediately into the _vieille chanson_, one line of which is worth all the affected stuff that Celimene and her circle admire.

Browning repeated the French in an undertone, kindling as he went, I urging him on, our two heads close together. Every now and then he would look up to see if the plague outside was done, and, finding it still went on, would plunge again into the seclusion of our tete-a-tete; till the _chanson_ itself--"_Si le roi m'avoit donne--Paris, sa grand'

ville"_--had been said, to his delight and mine.

The recitation lasted through several courses, and our hostess once or twice threw uneasy glances toward us, for Browning was the "lion" of the evening. But, once launched, he was not to be stopped; and as for me, I shall always remember that I heard Browning--spontaneously, without a moment's pause to remember or prepare--recite the whole, or almost the whole, of one of the immortal things in literature.

He was then seventy-two or seventy-three. He came to see us once or twice in Russell Square, but, alack! we arrived too late in the London world to know him well. His health began to fail just about the time when we first met, and early in 1889 he died in the Palazzo Rezzonico.

He did not like _Robert Elsmere_, which appeared the year before his death; and I was told a striking story by a common friend of his and mine, who was present at a discussion of the book at a literary house.

Browning, said my friend, was of the party. The discussion turned on the divinity of Christ. After listening awhile, Browning repeated, with some pa.s.sion, the anecdote of Charles Lamb in conversation with Leigh Hunt, on the subject of "Persons one would wish to have seen"; when, after ranging through literature and philosophy, Lamb added:

"But without mentioning a name that once put on a semblance of mortality ... there is only one other Person. If Shakespeare was to come into the room, we should rise up to meet him; but if that Person was to come into it, we should fall down and try to kiss the hem of His garment."

Some fourteen years after his death I seemed to be brought very near in spirit to this great man, and--so far as a large portion of his work is concerned--great poet. We were in Venice. I was writing the _Marriage of William Ashe_, and, being in want of a Venetian setting for some of the scenes, I asked Mr. Pen Browning, who was, I think, at Asolo, if he would allow me access to the Palazzo Rezzonico, which was then uninhabited. He kindly gave me free leave to wander about it as I liked; and I went most days to sit and write in one of the rooms of the _mezzanin_. But when all chance of a tourist had gone, and the palace was shut, I used to walk all about it in the rich May light, finding it a little creepy! but endlessly attractive and interesting. There was a bust of Mr. Browning, with an inscription, in one of the rooms, and the place was haunted for me by his great ghost. It was there he had come to die, in the palace which he had given to his only son, whom he adored.

The _concierge_ pointed out to me what he believed to be the room in which he pa.s.sed away. There was very little furniture in it. Everything was chill and deserted. I did not want to think of him there. I liked to imagine him strolling in the stately hall of the palace with its vast chandelier, its pillared sides and Tiepolo ceiling, breathing in the Italian spirit which through such long years had pa.s.sed into his, and delighting, as a poet delights--not vulgarly, but with something of a child's adventurous pleasure--in the mellow magnificence of the beautiful old place.

Mr. Lowell is another memory of these early London days. My first sight of him was at Mr. and Mrs. Westlake's house--in a temper! For some one had imprudently talked of "Yankeeisms," perhaps with some "superior"

intonation. And Mr. Lowell--the Lowell of _A Certain Condescension in Foreigners_--had flashed out: "It's you English who don't know your own language and your own literary history. Otherwise you would realize that most of what you call 'Yankeeisms' are merely good old English which you have thrown away."

Afterward, I find records of talks with him at Russell Square, then of Mrs. Lowell's death in 1885, and finally of dining with him in the spring of 1887, just before his return to America. At that dinner was also the German Amba.s.sador, Count Hatzfeldt, a handsome man, with a powerful, rather somber face. I remember some talk with him after dinner on current books and politics. Just thirty years ago! Mr. Lowell had then only four years to live. He and all other diplomats had just pa.s.sed through an anxious spring. The scare of another Franco-German war had been playing on the nerves of Europe, started by the military party in Germany, merely to insure the pa.s.sing of the famous Army law of that year--the first landmark in that huge military expansion of which we see the natural fruit in the present Armageddon.

A week or two before this dinner the German elections had given the Conservatives an enormous victory. Germany, indeed, was in the full pa.s.sion of economic and military development--all her people growing rich--intoxicated, besides, with vague dreams of coming power. Yet I have still before me the absent, indecipherable look of her Amba.s.sador--a man clearly of high intelligence--at Mr. Lowell's table.

Thirty years--and at the end of them America was to be at grips with Germany, sending armies across the Atlantic to fight in Europe. It would have been as impossible for any of us, on that May evening in Lowndes Square, even to imagine such a future, as it was for Macbeth to credit the absurdity that Birnam wood would ever come to Dunsinane!

A year later Mr. Lowell came back to London for a time in a private capacity, and I got to know him better and to like him much.... Here is a characteristic touch in a note I find among the old letters:

I am glad you found something to like in my book and much obliged to you for saying so. n.o.body but Wordsworth ever got beyond need of sympathy, and he started there!

CHAPTER III

THE PUBLICATION OF _ROBERT ELSMERE_

It was in 1885, after the completion of the Amiel translation, that I began _Robert Elsmere_, drawing the opening scenes from that expedition to Long Sleddale in the spring of that year which I have already mentioned. The book took me three years, nearly, to write. Again and again I found myself dreaming that the end was near and publication only a month or two away, only to sink back on the dismal conviction that the second, or the first, or the third volume--or some portion of each--must be rewritten, if I was to satisfy myself at all. I actually wrote the last words of the last chapter in March, 1887, and came out afterward, from my tiny writing-room at the end of the drawing-room, shaken with tears, and wondering, as I sat alone on the floor, by the fire, in the front room, what life would be like, now that the book was done! But it was nearly a year after that before it came out, a year of incessant hard work, of endless rewriting, and much nervous exhaustion. For all the work was saddened and made difficult by the fact that my mother's long illness was nearing its end and that I was torn incessantly between the claim of the book and the desire to be with her whenever I could possibly be spared from my home and children. Whenever there was a temporary improvement in her state, I would go down to Borough alone to work feverishly at revision, only to be drawn back to her side before long by worse news. And all the time London life went on as usual, and the strain at times was great.

The difficulty of finis.h.i.+ng the book arose first of all from its length.

I well remember the depressed countenance of Mr. George Smith--who was to be to me through fourteen years afterward the kindest of publishers and friends--when I called one day in Waterloo Place, bearing a basketful of typewritten sheets. "I am afraid you have brought us a perfectly unmanageable book!" he said; and I could only mournfully agree that so it was. It was far too long, and my heart sank at the thought of all there was still to do. But how patient Mr. Smith was over it! and how generous in the matter of unlimited fresh proofs and endless corrections. I am certain that he had no belief in the book's success; and yet, on the ground of his interest in _Miss Bretherton_ he had made liberal terms with me, and all through the long incubation he was always indulgent and sympathetic.

The root difficulty was of course the dealing with such a subject in a novel at all. Yet I was determined to deal with it so, in order to reach the public. There were great precedents--Froude's _Nemesis of Faith_, Newman's _Loss and Gain_, Kingsley's _Alton Locke_--for the novel of religious or social propaganda. And it seemed to me that the novel was capable of holding and shaping real experience of any kind, as it affects the lives of men and women. It is the most elastic, the most adaptable of forms. No one has a right to set limits to its range. There is only one final test. Does it interest?--does it appeal? Personally, I should add another. Does it make in the long run for _beauty_? Beauty taken in the largest and most generous sense, and especially as including discord, the harsh and jangled notes which enrich the rest--but still Beauty--as Tolstoy was a master of it?

But at any rate, no one will deny that _interest_ is the crucial matter.

There are five and twenty ways Of constructing tribal lays-- And every single one of them is right!

always supposing that the way chosen quickens the breath and stirs the heart of those who listen. But when the subject chosen has two aspects, the one intellectual and logical, the other poetic and emotional, the difficulty of holding the balance between them, so that neither overpowers the other, and interest is maintained, is admittedly great.

I wanted to show how a man of sensitive and n.o.ble character, born for religion, comes to throw off the orthodoxies of his day and moment, and to go out into the wilderness where all is experiment, and spiritual life begins again. And with him I wished to contrast a type no less fine of the traditional and guided mind, and to imagine the clash of two such tendencies of thought as it might affect all practical life, and especially the life of two people who loved each other.

Here then, to begin with, were Robert and Catharine. Yes, but Robert must be made intellectually intelligible. Closely looked at, all novel-writing is a sort of shorthand. Even the most simple and broadly human situation cannot really be told in full. Each reader in following it unconsciously supplies a vast amount himself. A great deal of the effect is owing to things quite out of the picture given--things in the reader's own mind, first and foremost. The writer is playing on common experience; and mere suggestion is often far more effective than a.n.a.lysis. Take the paragraph in Turguenieff's _Lisa_--it was pointed out to me by Henry James--where Lavretsky on the point of marriage, after much suffering, with the innocent and n.o.ble girl whom he adores, suddenly hears that his intolerable first wife, whom he had long believed dead, is alive. Turguenieff, instead of setting out the situation in detail, throws himself on the reader: "It was dark.

Lavretsky went into the garden, and walked up and down there till dawn."

That is all. And it is enough. The reader who is not capable of sharing that night walk with Lavretsky, and entering into his thoughts, has read the novel to no purpose. He would not understand, though Lavretsky or his creator were to spend pages on explaining.

But in my case, what provoked the human and emotional crisis--what produced the _story_--was an intellectual process. Now the difficulty here in using suggestion--which is the master tool of the novelist--is much greater than in the case of ordinary experience. For the conscious use of the intellect on the acc.u.mulated data of life, through history and philosophy, is not ordinary experience. In its more advanced forms, it only applies to a small minority of the human race.

Still, in every generation, while a minority is making or taking part in the intellectual process itself, there is an atmosphere, a diffusion, produced around them, which affects many thousands who have but little share--but little _conscious_ share, at any rate--in the actual process.