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 finishing 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 noble 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 analysis. Take the paragraph in TurguÉnieff'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 noble girl whom he adores, suddenly hears that his intolerable first wife, whom he had long believed dead, is alive. TurguÉnieff, 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 accumulated 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.

Here, then, is the opening for suggestion--in connection with the various forms of imagination which enter into Literature; with poetry, and fiction, which, as Goethe saw, is really a form of poetry. And a quite legitimate opening. For to use it is to quicken the intellectual process itself, and to induce a larger number of minds to take part in it.

The problem, then, in intellectual poetry or fiction, is so to suggest the argument, that both the expert and the popular consciousness may feel its force, and to do this without overstepping the bounds of poetry or fiction; without turning either into mere ratiocination, and so losing the "simple, sensuous, passionate" element which is their true life.

It was this problem which made Robert Elsmere take three years to write, instead of one. Mr. Gladstone complained, in his famous review of it, that a majestic system which had taken centuries to elaborate, and gathered into itself the wisest brains of the ages, had gone down in a few weeks or months before the onslaught of the Squire's arguments; and that if the Squire's arguments were few, the orthodox arguments were fewer! The answer to the first part of the charge is that the well-taught schoolboy of to-day is necessarily wiser in a hundred respects than Sophocles or Plato, since he represents not himself, but the brainwork of a hundred generations since those great men lived. And as to the second, if Mr. Gladstone had seen the first redactions of the book--only if he had, I fear he would never have read it!--he would hardly have complained of lack of argument on either side, whatever he might have thought of its quality. Again and again I went on writing for hours, satisfying the logical sense in oneself, trying to put the arguments on both sides as fairly as possible, only to feel despairingly at the end that it must all come out. It might be decent controversy; but life, feeling, charm, humanity, had gone out of it; it had ceased, therefore, to be "making," to be literature.

So that in the long run there was no other method possible than suggestion--and, of course, selection!--as with all the rest of one's material. That being understood, what one had to aim at was so to use suggestion as to touch the two zones of thought--that of the scholar and that of what one may call the educated populace; who, without being scholars, were yet aware, more or less clearly, of what the scholars were doing. It is from these last that "atmosphere" and "diffusion" come; the atmosphere and diffusion which alone make wide penetration for a book illustrating an intellectual motive possible. I had to learn that, having read a great deal, I must as far as possible wipe out the traces of reading. All that could be done was to leave a few sign-posts as firmly planted as one could, so as to recall the real journey to those who already knew it, and, for the rest, to trust to the floating interest and passion surrounding a great controversy--the second religious battle of the nineteenth century--with which it had seemed to me, both in Oxford and in London, that the intellectual air was charged.

I grew very weary in the course of the long effort, and often very despairing. But there were omens of hope now and then; first, a letter from my dear eldest brother, the late W.T. Arnold, who died in 1904, leaving a record as journalist and scholar which has been admirably told by his intimate friend and colleague, Mr. (now Captain) C.E. Montague. He and I had shared many intellectual interests connected with the history of the Empire. His monograph on Roman Provincial Administration, first written as an Arnold Essay, still holds the field; and in the realm of pure literature his one-volume edition of Keats is there to show his eagerness for beauty and his love of English verse. I sent him the first volume in proof, about a year before the book came out, and awaited his verdict with much anxiety. It came one May day in 1889. I happened to be very tired and depressed at the moment, and I remember sitting alone for a little while with the letter in my hand, without courage to open it. Then at last I opened it.

Warm congratulation--Admirable!--Full of character and color....
Miss Bretherton was an intellectual exercise. This is quite a
different affair, and has interested and touched me deeply, as I
feel sure it will all the world. The biggest thing that--with a few
other things of the same kind--has been done for years.

Well!--that was enough to go on with, to carry me through the last wrestle with proofs and revision. But by the following November nervous fatigue made me put work aside for a few weeks, and we went abroad for rest, only to be abruptly summoned home by my mother's state. Thenceforward I lived a double life--the one overshadowed by my mother's approaching death, the other amid the agitation of the book's appearance and all the incidents of its rapid success.

I have already told the story in the Introduction to the Library Edition of Robert Elsmere, and I will only run through it here as rapidly as possible, with a few fresh incidents and quotations. There was never any doubt at all of the book's fate, and I may repeat again that, before Mr. Gladstone's review of it, the three volumes were already in a third edition, the rush at all the libraries was in full course, and Matthew Arnold--so gay and kind, in those March weeks before his own sudden death!--had clearly foreseen the rising boom. "I shall take it with me to Bristol next week and get through it there, I hope [but he didn't achieve it!]. It is one of my regrets not to have known the Green of your dedication." And a week or two later he wrote an amusing letter to his sister, describing a country-house party at beautiful Wilton, Lord Pembroke's home near Salisbury, and the various stages in the book reached by the members of the party, including Mr. Goschen, who were all reading it, and all talking of it. I never, however, had any criticism of it from him, except of the first volume, which he liked. I doubt very much whether the second and third volumes would have appealed to him. My uncle was a Modernist long before the time. In Literature and Dogma he threw out in detail much of the argument suggested in Robert Elsmere, but to the end of his life he was a contented member of the Anglican Church, so far as attendance at her services was concerned, and belief in her mission of "edification" to the English people. He had little sympathy with people who "went out." Like Mr. Jowett, he would have liked to see the Church slowly reformed and "modernized" from within. So that with the main theme of my book--that a priest who doubts must depart--he could never have had full sympathy. And in the course of years--as I showed in a later novel written twenty-four years after Robert Elsmere--I feel that I have very much come to agree with him! These great national structures that we call churches are too precious for iconoclast handling, if any other method is possible. The strong assertion of individual liberty within them, as opposed to the attempt to break them down from without; that seems to me now the hopeful course. A few more heresy trials like those which sprang out of Essays and Reviews, or the persecution of Bishop Colenso, would let in fresh life and healing nowadays, as did those old stirrings of the waters. The first Modernist bishop who stays in his place forms a Modernist chapter and diocese around him, and fights the fight where he stands, will do more for liberty and faith in the Church, I now sadly believe, than those scores of brave "forgotten dead" who have gone out of her for conscience' sake, all these years.

But to return to the book. All through March the tide of success was rapidly rising; and when I was able to think of it I was naturally carried away by the excitement and astonishment of it. But with the later days of March a veil dropped between me and the book. My mother's suffering and storm-beaten life was coming rapidly to its close, and I could think of nothing else. In an interval of slight improvement, indeed, when it seemed as though she might rally for a time, I heard Mr. Gladstone's name quoted for the first time in connection with the book. It will be remembered that he was then out of office, having been overthrown on the Home Rule Question in 1886, and he happened to be staying for an Easter visit with the Warden of Keble, and Mrs. Talbot, who was his niece by marriage. I was with my mother, about a mile away, and Mrs. Talbot, who came to ask for news of her, reported to me that Mr. Gladstone was deep in the book. He was reading it, pencil in hand, marking all the passages he disliked or quarreled with, with the Italian "Ma!"--and those he approved of with mysterious signs which she who followed him through the volumes could not always decipher. Mr. Knowles, she reported, the busy editor of the Nineteenth Century, was trying to persuade the great man to review it. But "Mr. G." had not made up his mind.

Then all was shut out again. Through many days my mother asked constantly for news of the book, and smiled with a flicker of her old brightness when anything pleased her in a letter or review. But finally there came long hours when to think or speak of it seemed sacrilege. And on April 7th she died.

---

The day after her death I saw Mr. Gladstone at Keble. We talked for a couple of hours, and then when I rose to go he asked if I would come again on the following morning before he went back to town. I had been deeply interested and touched, and I went again for another long visit. My account, written down at the time, of the first day's talk, has been printed as an appendix to the Library Edition of the book. Of the second conversation, which was the more interesting of the two since we came to much closer quarters in it, my only record is the following letter to my husband:

I have certainly had a wonderful experience last night and this
morning! Last night two hours' talk with Gladstone, this morning,
again an hour and a half's strenuous argument, during which the
great man got quite white sometimes and tremulous with interest and
excitement.... The talk this morning was a battle royal over the
book and Christian evidences. He was very charming personally,
though at times he looked stern and angry and white to a degree, so
that I wondered sometimes how I had the courage to go on--the drawn
brows were so formidable! There was one moment when he talked of
"trumpery objections," in his most House of Commons manner. It was
as I thought. The new lines of criticism are not familiar to him,
and they really press him hard. He meets them out of Bishop Butler,
and things analogous. But there is a sense, I think, that question
and answer don't fit, and with it ever-increasing interest
and--sometimes--irritation. His own autobiographical reminiscences
were wonderfully interesting, and his repetition of the 42d
psalm--"Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks"--grand!
He said that he had never read any book on the hostile side written
in such a spirit of, "generous appreciation" of the Christian side.

Yes, those were hours to which I shall always look back with gratitude and emotion. Wonderful old man! I see him still standing, as I took leave of him, one hand leaning on the table beside him, his lined, pallid face and eagle eyes framed in his noble white hair, shining amid the dusk of the room. "There are still two things left for me to do!" he said, finally, in answer to some remark of mine. "One is to carry Home Rule; the other is to prove the intimate connection between the Hebrew and Olympian revelations!"

Could any remark have been more characteristic of that double life of his--the life of the politician and the life of the student--which kept him fresh and eager to the end of his days? Characteristic, too, of the amateurish element in all his historical and literary thinking. In dealing "with early Greek mythology, genealogy, and religion," says his old friend, Lord Bryce, Mr. Gladstone's theories "have been condemned by the unanimous voice of scholars as fantastic." Like his great contemporary, Newman--on whom a good deal of our conversation turned--he had no critical sense of evidence; and when he was writing on The Impregnable Rock of Scripture Lord Acton, who was staying at Hawarden at the time, ran after him in vain, with Welhausen or Kuenen under his arm, if haply he might persuade his host to read them.

But it was not for that he was born; and those who look back to the mighty work he did for his country in the forty years preceding the Home Rule split can only thank the Powers "that hold the broad Heaven" for the part which the passion of his Christian faith, the eagerness of his love for letters--for the Homer and the Dante he knew by heart--played in refreshing and sustaining so great a soul. I remember returning, shaken and uplifted, through the April air, to the house where my mother lay in death; and among my old papers lies a torn fragment of a letter thirty years old, which I began to write to Mr. Gladstone a few days later, and was too shy to send.

This morning [says the letter, written from Fox How, on the day of
my mother's funeral] we laid my dear Mother to rest in her grave
among the mountains, and this afternoon I am free to think a little
over what has befallen me personally and separately during this past
week. It is not that I wish to continue our argument--quite the
contrary. As I walked home from Keble on Monday morning, I felt it a
hard fate that I should have been arguing, rather than listening....
Argument, perhaps, was inevitable, but none the less I felt
afterward as though there were something incongruous and unfitting
in it. In a serious discussion it seemed to me right to say plainly
what I felt and believed; but if in doing so I have given pain, or
expressed myself on any point with a too great trenchancy and
confidence, please believe that I regret it very sincerely. I shall
always remember our talks. If consciousness lasts "beyond these
voices"--my inmost hope as well as yours--we shall know of all these
things. Till then I cherish the belief that we are not so far apart
as we seem.

But there the letter abruptly ended, and was never sent. I probably shrank from the added emotion of sending it, and I found it again the other day in a packet that had not been looked at for many years. I print it now as evidence of the effect that Mr. Gladstone's personality could produce on one forty years younger than himself, and in sharp rebellion at that time against his opinions and influence in two main fields--religion and politics.

---

Four days later, Monday, April 16th, my husband came into my room with the face of one bringing ill tidings. "Matthew Arnold is dead!" My uncle, as many will remember, had fallen suddenly in a Liverpool street while walking with his wife to meet his daughter, expected that day from America, and without a sound or movement had passed away. The heart disease which killed so many of his family was his fate also. A merciful one it always seemed to me, which took him thus suddenly and without pain from the life in which he had played so fruitful and blameless a part. That word "blameless" has always seemed to me particularly to fit him. And the quality to which it points was what made his humor so sharp-tipped and so harmless. He had no hidden interest to serve--no malice--not a touch, not a trace of cruelty--so that men allowed him to jest about their most sacred idols and superstitions and bore him no grudge.

To me his death at that moment was an irreparable personal loss. For it was only since our migration to London that we had been near enough to him to see much of him. My husband and he had become fast friends, and his visits to Russell Square, and our expeditions to Cobham, where he lived, in the pretty cottage beside the Mole, are marked in memory with a very white stone. The only drawback to the Cobham visits were the "dear, dear boys!"--i.e., the dachshunds, Max and Geist, who, however adorable in themselves, had no taste for visitors and no intention of letting such intruding creatures interfere with their possession of their master. One would go down to Cobham, eager to talk to "Uncle Matt" about a book or an article--covetous, at any rate, of some talk with him undisturbed. And it would all end in a breathless chase after Max, through field after field where the little wretch was harrying either sheep or cows, with the dear poet, hoarse with shouting, at his heels. The dogs were always in the party, talked to, caressed, or scolded exactly like spoiled children; and the cat of the house was almost equally dear. Once, at Harrow, the then ruling cat--a tom--broke his leg, and the house was in lamentation. The vet was called in, and hurt him horribly. Then Uncle Matt ran up to town, met Professor Huxley at the Athenaeum, and anxiously consulted him. "I'll go down with you," said Huxley. The two traveled back instanter to Harrow, and, while Uncle Matt held the cat, Huxley--who had begun life, let it be remembered, as surgeon to the Rattlesnake!--examined him, the two black heads together. There is a rumor that Charles Kingsley was included in the consultation. Finally the limb was put in splints and left to nature. All went well.

Nobody who knew the modest Cobham cottage while its master lived will ever forget it; the garden beside the Mole, where every bush and flower-bed had its history; and that little study-dressing-room where some of the best work in nineteenth-century letters was done. Not a great multitude of books, but all cherished, all read, each one the friend of its owner. No untidiness anywhere; the ordinary litter of an author's room was quite absent. For long after his death the room remained just as he had left it, his coat hanging behind the door, his slippers beside his chair, the last letters he had received, and all the small and simple equipment of his writing-table ready to his hand, waiting for the master who would never know "a day of return." In that room--during fifteen years, he wrote God and the Bible, the many suggestive and fruitful Essays, including the American addresses, of his later years--seeds, almost all of them, dropped into the mind of his generation for a future harvesting; a certain number of poems, including the noble elegiac poem on Arthur Stanley's death, "Geist's Grave" and "Poor Matthias"; a mass of writing on education which is only now, helped by the war, beginning to tell on the English mind; and the endlessly kind and gracious letters to all sorts and conditions of men--and women--the literary beginner, the young teacher wanting advice, even the stranger greedy for an autograph. Every little playful note to friends or kinsfolk he ever wrote was dear to those who received it; but he--the most fastidious of men--would have much disliked to see them all printed at length in Mr. Russell's indiscriminate volumes. He talked to me once of his wish to make a small volume--"such a little one!"--of George Sand's best letters. And that is just what he would have wished for himself.

Among the letters that reached me on my uncle's death was one from Mr. Andrew Lang denouncing almost all the obituary notices of him. "Nobody seems to know that he was a poet!" cries Mr. Lang. But his poetic blossoming was really over with the 'sixties, and in the hubbub that arose round his critical and religious work--his attempts to drive "ideas" into the English mind, in the 'sixties and 'seventies--the main fact that he, with Browning and Tennyson, stood for English poetry, in the mid-nineteenth century, was often obscured and only slowly recognized. But it was recognized, and he himself had never any real doubt of it, from the moment when he sent the "Strayed Reveller" to my father in New Zealand in 1849, to those later times when his growing fame was in all men's ears. He writes to his sister in 1878:

It is curious how the public is beginning to take my poems to its
bosom after long years of comparative neglect. The wave of thought
and change has rolled on until people begin to find a significance
and an attraction in what had none for them formerly.

But he had put it himself in poetry long before--this slow emergence above the tumult and the shouting of the stars that are to shine upon the next generation. Mr. Garnett, in the careful and learned notice of my uncle's life and work in the Dictionary of National Biography, says of his poetry that "most of it" is "immortal." This, indeed, is the great, the mystic word that rings in every poet's ear from the beginning. And there is scarcely any true poet who is not certain that sooner or later his work will "put on immortality." Matthew Arnold expressed, I think, his own secret faith, in the beautiful lines of his early poem, "The Bacchanalia--or the New Age":

The epoch ends, the world is still.
The age has talk'd and work'd its fill--

---

And in the after-silence sweet,
Now strife is hush'd, our ears doth meet,
Ascending pure, the bell-like fame
Of this or that down-trodden name,
Delicate spirits, push'd away
In the hot press of the noonday.
And o'er the plain, where the dead age
Did its now silent warfare wage--
O'er that wide plain, now wrapt in gloom,
Where many a splendor finds its tomb,
Many spent fames and fallen nights--
The one or two immortal lights
Rise slowly up into the sky
To shine there everlastingly,
Like stars over the bounding hill.
The epoch ends, the world is still.

---

It was on the way home from Laleham, after my uncle's burial there, that Mr. George Smith gave me fresh and astonishing news of Robert Elsmere's success. The circulating libraries were being fretted to death for copies, and the whirlwind of talk was constantly rising. A little later in the same month of April, if I remember right, I was going from Waterloo to Godalming and Borough Farm, when, just as the train was starting, a lady rushed along the platform, waving a book aloft and signaling to another lady who was evidently waiting to see her off. "I've got it--I've got it!" she said, triumphantly. "Get in, ma-am--get in!" said the porter, bundling her into the compartment where I sat alone. Then she hung out of the window, breathlessly talking. "They told me no chance for weeks--not the slightest! Then--just as I was standing at the counter, who should come up but somebody bringing back the first volume. Of course it was promised to somebody else; but as I was there, I laid hands on it, and here it is!" The train went off, my companion plunged into her book, and I watched her as she turned the pages of the familiar green volume. We were quite alone. I had half a mind to say something revealing; but on the whole it was more amusing to sit still!

And meanwhile letters poured in.

"I try to write upon you," wrote Mr. Gladstone; "wholly despair of satisfying myself--cannot quite tell whether to persevere or desist." Mr. Pater let me know that he was writing on it for the Guardian. "It is a chef d'oeuvre after its kind, and justifies the care you have devoted to it." "I see," said Andrew Lang, on April 30th, "that R.E. is running into as many editions as The Rights of Man by Tom Paine.... You know he is not my sort (at least unless you have a ghost, a murder, a duel, and some savages)." Burne-Jones wrote, with the fun and sweetness that made his letters a delight:

Not one least bitter word in it!--threading your way through
intricacies of parsons so finely and justly.... As each new one came
on the scene, I wondered if you would fall upon him and rend
him--but you never do.... Certainly I never thought I should devour
a book about parsons--my desires lying toward--"time upon once there
was a dreadful pirate"--but I am back again five and thirty years
and feeling softened and subdued with memories you have wakened up
so piercingly--and I wanted to tell you this.

And in the same packet lie letters from the honored and beloved Edward Talbot, now Bishop of Winchester, Stopford Brooke--the Master of Balliol--Lord Justice Bowen--Professor Huxley--and so many, many more. Best of all, Henry James! His two long letters I have already printed, naturally with his full leave and blessing, in the Library Edition of the novel. Not his the grudging and faultfinding temper that besets the lesser man when he comes to write of his contemporaries! Full of generous honor for what he thought good and honest work, however faulty, his praise kindled--and his blame no less. He appreciated so fully your way of doing it; and his suggestion, alongside, of what would have been his way of doing it, was so stimulating--touched one with so light a Socratean sting, and set a hundred thoughts on the alert. Of this delightful critical art of his his letters to myself over many years are one long illustration.

And now--"There is none like him--none!" The honeyed lips are silent and the helping hand at rest.

With May appeared Mr. Gladstone's review--"the refined criticism of Robert Elsmere"--"typical of his strong points," as Lord Bryce describes it--certainly one of the best things he ever wrote. I had no sooner read it than, after admiring it, I felt it must be answered. But it was desirable to take time to think how best to do it. At the moment my one desire was for rest and escape. At the beginning of June we took our eldest two children, aged eleven and thirteen, to Switzerland for the first time. Oh! the delight of Glion! with its hay-fields thick with miraculous spring flowers, the "peak of Jaman delicately tall," and that gorgeous pile of the Dent du Midi, bearing up the June heaven, to the east!--the joy of seeing the children's pleasure, and the relief of the mere physical rebound in the Swiss air, after the long months of strain and sorrow! My son, a slip of a person in knickerbockers, walked over the Simplon as though Alps were only made to be climbed by boys of eleven; and the Defile of Gondo, Domo d'Ossola, and beautiful Maggiore--they were all new and heavenly to each member of the party. Every year now there was growing on me the spell of Italy, the historic, the Saturnian land; and short as this wandering was, I remember, after it was over, and we turned homeward across the St. Gothard, leaving Italy behind us, a new sense as of a hidden treasure in life--of something sweet and inexhaustible always waiting for one's return; like a child's cake in a cupboard, or the gold and silver hoard of Odysseus that Athene helped him to hide in the Ithacan cave.

Then one day toward the end of June or the beginning of July my husband put down beside me a great brown paper package which the post had just brought. "There's America beginning!" he said, and we turned over the contents of the parcel in bewilderment. A kind American friend had made a collection for me of the reviews, sermons, and pamphlets that had been published so far about the book in the States, the correspondences, the odds and ends of all kinds, grave and gay. Every mail, moreover, began to bring me American letters from all parts of the States. "No book since Uncle Tom's Cabin has had so sudden and wide a diffusion among all classes of readers," wrote an American man of letters, "and I believe that no other book of equal seriousness ever had so quick a hearing. I have seen it in the hands of nursery-maids and of shopgirls behind the counters; of frivolous young women who read every novel that is talked about; of business men, professors, and students.... The proprietors of those large shops where anything--from a pin to a piano--can be bought, vie with each other in selling the cheapest edition. One pirate put his price even so low as four cents--two pence!" (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 titillated 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 retard 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.

Goldwin Smith

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 MÜllers. 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 passionate 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.

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. BrunetiÈre, 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'UniversitÉ), "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. BrunetiÈre] 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.

---