Mrs. Humphry Ward HELBECK OF BANNISDALE The coming out of Marcella, in April, 1894, will always mark for me perhaps the happiest date in my literary life. The book, for all the hard work that had gone to it, had none the less been a pleasure to write; and the good-will that greeted it made the holiday I had earned--which again was largely spent in Rome--a golden time. Not long after we left England, "Piccadilly," my sister wrote me, was "placarded with Marcella," the name appearing on the notice-boards of most of the evening papers--a thing which never happened to me before or since; and when we arrived in Rome, the content-bills of the London newspapers, displayed in the Piazza di Spagna, announced her no less flamingly. The proof-sheets of the book had been tried on various friends, as usual, with some amusing results. Bishop Creighton, with only the first two-thirds of the book before him, wrote me denunciations of Marcella. I am greatly interested in the book and pine for the dÉnoÛment. So far Marcella, though I know her quite well, does not in the least awaken my sympathy. She is an intolerable girl--but there are many of them.... I only hope that she may be made to pay for it. Mr. and Mrs. Boyce are good and original, so is Wharton. I hope that condign vengeance awaits him. He is the modern politician entirely.... I really hope Marcella may be converted. It would serve her right to marry her to Wharton; he would beat her. Another old friend, one of the industrial leaders of the north, carried off half the proofs to read on his journey to Yorkshire. I so ravened on them that I sat still at Blosworth instead of getting out! The consequence is that all my plans are disarranged. I shall not get to M---- in time for my meeting, and for all this Marcella is to blame.... The station-master assured me he called out "Change for Northampton," but I was much too deep in the scene between Marcella, Lord Maxwell, and Raeburn to heed anything belonging to the outer world. Mr. Goschen wrote: I don't know how long it is since I have enjoyed reading anything so much. I can't satisfy myself as to the physical appearance of Wharton.... I do know some men of a character not quite unlike him, but they haven't the boyish face with curls. Marcella I see before me. Mrs. Boyce and Lord Maxwell both interested me very much....Alack! I must turn from Marcella's enthusiasm and aspirations to Sir W. Harcourt's speech--a great transition. And dear Alfred Lyttelton wrote: I feel a ridiculous pride in her triumphs which I have had the joy of witnessing on every side.... At least permit an expert to tell you that his heart beat over the ferrets (in the poaching scene) and at the intense vividness and truth of the legal episodes. But there is no one letter in this old packet which moves me specially. It was on the 1st of March, 1894, that Mr. Gladstone said "Good-by" to his Cabinet in the Cabinet room at Downing Street, and a little later in the afternoon walked away for the last time from the House of Commons. No one who has read it will forget the telling of that episode, in Mr. Morley's biography, with what concentration, what dignity!--worthy alike of the subject and of the admirable man of letters--himself an eye-witness--who records it. While Lord Kimberley and Sir William Harcourt, on behalf of the rest of their colleagues, were bidding their great chief farewell, "Mr. Gladstone sat composed and still as marble, and the emotion of the Cabinet did not gain him for an instant." When the spokesmen ceased, he made his own little speech of four or five minutes in reply: "then hardly above a breath, but every accent heard, he said, 'God bless you all.' He rose slowly and went out of one door, while his colleagues with minds oppressed filed out by the other." On this moving scene there followed what Mr. Gladstone himself described as the first period of comparative leisure he had ever known, extending to four and a half months. They were marked first by increasing blindness, then by an operation for cataract, and finally by a moderate return of sight. In July he notes that "during the last months of partial incapacity I have not written with my own hand probably so much as one letter a day." In this faded packet of mine lies one of these rare letters, written with his own hand--a full sheet--from Dollis Hill, on April 27th. When Marcella arrived my thankfulness was alloyed with a feeling that the state of my eyesight made your kindness for the time a waste. But Mr. Nettleship has since then by an infusion supplied a temporary stimulus to the organ, such that I have been enabled to begin, and am reading the work with great pleasure and an agreeable sense of congeniality which I do not doubt I shall retain to the close. Then he describes a book--a novel--dealing with religious controversy, which he had lately been reading, in which every character embodying views opposed to those of the author "is exhibited as odious." With this he warmly contrasts the method and spirit of David Grieve, and then continues: Well, I have by my resignation passed into a new state of existence. And in that state I shall be very glad when our respective stars may cause our paths to meet. I am full of prospective work; but for the present a tenacious influenza greatly cripples me and prevents my making any definite arrangement for an expected operation on my eye. Eighty-five!--greatly crippled by influenza and blindness--yet "full of prospective work"! The following year, remembering Robert Elsmere days, and À propos of certain passages in his review of that book, I ventured to send him an Introduction I had contributed to my brother-in-law Leonard Huxley's translation of Hausrath's New Testament Times. This time the well-known handwriting is feebler and the old "fighter" is not roused. He puts discussion by, and turns instead to kind words about a near relative of my own who had been winning distinctions at Oxford. It is one of the most legitimate interests of the old to watch with hope and joy these opening lives, and it has the secondary effect of whispering to them that they are not yet wholly frozen up.... I am busy as far as my limited powers of exertion allow upon a new edition of Bishop Butler's Works, which costs me a good deal of labor and leaves me, after a few hours upon it, good for very little else. And my perspective, dubious as it is, is filled with other work, in the Homeric region lying beyond. I hope it will be very long before you know anything of compulsory limitations on the exercise of your powers. Believe me always, Sincerely yours, W. E. GLADSTONE. But it was not till 1897, as he himself records, that the indomitable spirit so far yielded to these limitations as to resign--or rather contemplate resigning--the second great task of which he had spoken to me at Oxford, nine years before. "I have begun seriously to ask myself whether I shall ever be able to face--The Olympian Religion." It was, I think, in the winter of 1895 that I saw him for the last time at our neighbors', the Rothschilds, at Tring Park. He was then full of animation and talk, mainly of things political, and, indeed, not long before he had addressed a meeting at Chester on the Turkish massacres in Armenia, and was still to address a large audience at Liverpool on the same subject--his last public appearance--a year later. When George Tressady appeared he sent me a message through Mrs. Drew that he feared George Tressady's Parliamentary conduct "was inconceivable in a man of honor"; and I was only comforted by the emphatic and laughing dissent of Lord Peel, to whom I repeated the verdict. "Nothing of the kind! But of course he was thinking of us--the Liberal Unionists."

Then came the last months when, amid a world's sympathy and reverence, the great life, in weariness and pain, wore to its end. The "lying in state" in Westminster Hall seemed to me ill arranged. But the burying remains with me as one of those perfect things, which only the Anglican Church at its best, in combination with the immemorial associations of English history, can achieve. After it, I wrote to my son:

I have now seen four great funerals in the Abbey--Darwin, Browning,
Tennyson, and the funeral service for Uncle Forster, which was very
striking, too. But no one above forty of those in the Abbey
yesterday will ever see the like again. It was as beautiful and
noble as the "lying in state" was disappointing and ugly. The music
was exquisite, and fitting in every respect; and when the high
sentence rang out, "and their name liveth for evermore," the effect
was marvelous. One seemed to hear the voice of the future already
pealing through the Abbey--as though the verdict were secured, the
judgment given.
We saw it all, admirably, from the Muniment Room, which is a sort of
lower Triforium above the south Transept. To me, perhaps, the most
thrilling moment was when, bending forward, one saw the
white-covered coffin disappear amid the black crowd round it, and
knew that it had sunk forever into its deep grave, amid that same
primeval clay of Thorny Island on which Edward's Minister was first
reared and the Red King built his hall of judgment and Council. The
statue of Dizzy looked down on him--"So you have come at last!"--and
all the other statues on either side seemed to welcome and receive
him.... The sloping seats for Lords and Commons filled the
transepts, a great black mass against the jeweled windows, the Lords
on one side, the Commons on the other; in front of each black
multitude was the glitter of a mace, and in the hollow between, the
whiteness of the pall--perhaps you can fancy it so.

But the impetus of memory has carried me on too fast. There are some other figures and scenes to be gathered from these years--1893-98--that may still interest this present day. Of the most varied kind! For, as I turn over letters and memoranda, a jumble of recollections passes through my mind. Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, on the one hand, a melancholy, kindly man, amid the splendors of Waddesden; a meeting of the Social Democratic Federation in a cellar in Lisson Grove; days of absorbing interest in the Jewish East End, and in sweaters' workshops, while George Tressady was in writing; a first visit to Mentmore while Lady Rosebery was alive; a talk with Lord Rosebery some time after her death, in a corner of a local ball-room, while Helbeck was shaping itself about the old Catholic families of England, which revealed to me yet another and unsuspected vein of knowledge in one of the best furnished of minds; the Asquith marriage in 1894; new acquaintances and experiences in Lancashire towns, again connected with George Tressady, and in which I was helped by that brilliant writer, worker, and fighter, Mrs. Sidney Webb; a nascent friendship with Sir William Harcourt, one of the most racy of all possible companions; happy evenings in the Tadema and Richmond studios with music and good talk; occasional meetings with and letters from "Pater," the dear and famous Professor, who, like my uncle, fought half the world and scarcely made an enemy; visits to Oxford and old friends--such are the scenes and persons that come back to me as I read old letters, while all through it ran the continual strain of hard literary work mingled with the new social and religious interests which the foundation of the Passmore Edwards Settlement had brought me.

We have been at Margot Tennant's wedding to-day [I wrote to my son
on May 10, 1894]--a great function, very tiring, but very brilliant
and amusing--occasionally dramatic, too, as, when after the service
had begun, the sound of cheering in the street outside drowned the
voice of the Bishop of Rochester, and warned us that Mr. Gladstone
was arriving. Afterward at the house we shook hands with three
Cabinet Ministers on the door-step, and there were all the rest of
them inside! The bride carried herself beautifully and was as
composed and fresh as though it were any ordinary party. From our
seat in the church one saw the interior of the vestry and Mr.
Gladstone's white head against the window as he sat to sign the
register; and the greeting between him and Mr. Balfour when he
had done.

This was written while Lord Rosebery was Prime Minister and Mr. Balfour, still free, until the following year, from the trammels of office, was finishing his brilliant Foundations of Belief, which came out in 1895. In acknowledging the copy which he sent me, I ventured to write some pages on behalf of certain arguments of the Higher Criticism which seemed to me to deserve a fuller treatment than Mr. Balfour had been willing to give them--in defense also of our English idealists, such as Green and Caird, in their relation to orthodoxy. A year or two earlier I find I had been breaking a lance on behalf of the same school of writers with a very different opponent. In the controversy between Professor Huxley and Doctor Wace, in 1889, which opened with the famous article on "The Gadarene Swine," the Professor had welcomed me as an ally, because of "The New Reformation," which appeared much about the same time; and the word of praise in which he compared my reply to Mr. Gladstone, to the work "of a strong housemaid brushing away cobwebs," gave me a fearful joy! I well remember a thrilling moment in the Russell Square drawing-room in 1889, when "Pater" and I were in full talk, he in his raciest and most amusing form, and suddenly the door opened, and "Doctor Wace" was announced--the opponent with whom at that moment he was grappling his hardest in the Nineteenth Century. Huxley gave me a merry look--and then how perfectly they both behaved! I really think the meeting was a pleasure to both of them, and when my old chief in the Dictionary of Christian Biography took his departure, Huxley found all kinds of pleasant personal things to say about him.

But the Professor and I were not always at one. Caird and Green--and, for other reasons, Martineau--were to me names "of great pith and moment," and Christian Theism was a reasonable faith. And Huxley, in controversy, was no more kind to my sacra than to other people's. Once I dared a mild remonstrance--in 1892--only to provoke one of his most vigorous replies:

MY DEAR M.--Thanks for your pleasant letter. I do not know whether I
like the praise or the scolding better. They, like pastry, need to
be done with a light hand--especially praise--and I have swallowed
all yours, and feel it thoroughly agrees with me.
As to the scolding I am going to defend myself tooth and nail. In
the first place, by all my Gods and No Gods, neither Green, nor
Martineau, nor the Cairds were in my mind when I talked of
"Sentimental Deism," but the "Vicaire Savoyard," and Charming, and
such as Voysey. There are two chapters of "Rousseauism," I have not
touched yet--Rousseauism in Theology, and Rousseauism in Education.
When I write the former I shall try to show that the people of whom
I speak as "sentimental deists" are the lineal descendants of the
Vicaire Savoyard. I was a great reader of Channing in my boyhood,
and was much taken in by his theosophic confectionery. At present I
have as much (intellectual) antipathy to him as St. John had to the
Nicolaitans.
... Green I know only from his Introduction to Hume--which reminds
me of nothing so much as a man with a hammer and chisel knocking out
bits of bad stone in the Great Pyramid, with the view of bringing it
down.... As to Caird's Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion,
I will get it and study it. But as a rule "Philosophies of Religion"
in my experience turn out to be only "Religions of
Philosophers"--quite another business, as you will admit.
And if you please, Ma'am, I wish to add that I think I am not
without sympathy for Christian feeling--or rather for what you mean
by it. Beneath the cooled logical upper strata of my microcosm there
is a fused mass of prophetism and mysticism, and the Lord knows what
might happen to me, in case a moral earthquake cracked the
superincumbent deposit, and permitted an eruption of the demonic
element below.... Luckily I am near 70, and not a G.O.M.--so the
danger is slight.
One must stick to one's trade. It is my business to the best of my
ability to fight for scientific clearness--that is what the world
lacks. Feeling Christian or other, is superabundant....
Ever yours affectionately,
T. H. HUXLEY.

A few more letters from him--racy, and living as himself--and then in 1895, just after his first article on the "Foundations of Belief," we heard with dismay of the illness which killed him. There was never a man more beloved--more deeply mourned.

The autumn of 1896 brought me a great loss in the death of an intimate friend, Lady Wemyss--as marked a personality in her own circle as was her indomitable husband, the famous Lord Elcho, of the Volunteer movement, on the bigger stage. It was at Balliol, at the Master's table, and in the early Oxford days, that we first made friends with Lord and Lady Wemyss, who were staying with the Master for the Sunday. I was sitting next to Lord Wemyss, and he presently discovered that I was absent-minded. And I found him so attractive and so human that I soon told him why. I had left a sick child at home, with a high temperature, and was fidgeting to get back to him.

"What is the matter?--Fever?--throat? Aconite, of course! You're a homeopath, aren't you? All sensible people are. Look here--I've got a servant with me. I'll send him with some aconite at once. Where do you live?--in the Parks? All right. Give me your address."

Out came an envelope and a pencil. A message was sent round the dinner-table to Lady Wemyss, whose powerful dreaming face beside the Master lit up at once. The aconite was sent; the child's temperature went down; and, if I remember right, either one or both of his new medical advisers walked up to the Parks the next day to inquire for him. So began a friendship which for just twenty years, especially from about 1885 to 1896, meant a great deal to me.

How shall I describe Lady Wemyss? An unfriendly critic has recently allowed me the power of "interesting fashionable ladies in things of the mind." Was Lady Wemyss a "fashionable lady"? She was the wife, certainly, of a man of high rank and great possessions; but I met her first as a friend--a dear and intimate friend, as may be seen from his correspondence--of Mr. Jowett's; and Mr. Jowett was not very tolerant of "fashionable ladies." She was in reality a strong and very simple person, with a natural charm working through a very reserved and often harsh manner, like the charm of mountain places in spring. She was a Conservative, and I suppose an aristocrat, whatever that word may mean. She thought the Harcourt death-duties "terrible" because they broke up old families and old estates, and she had been brought up to think that both were useful. Yet I never knew anybody with a more instinctive passion for equality. This means that she was simply and deeply interested in all sorts of human beings and all sorts of human lots; also that, although she was often self-conscious, it was the self-consciousness one sees in the thoughtful and richly natured young, whose growth in thought or character has outrun their means of expression, and never mean or egotistical. Her deep voice; her fine, marked features; and the sudden play of humor, silent, self-restrained, yet most infectious to the bystander, that would lighten through them; her stately ways; and yet, withal, her childlike love of loving and being loved by the few to whom she gave her deepest affection--in some such phrases one tries to describe her; but they go a very little way.

I can see her now at the dinner-table at Gosford, sardonically watching a real "fashionable lady" who had arrived in the afternoon and was sitting next Lord Wemyss at the farther end--with a wonderful frizzled head, an infinitesimal waist sheathed in white muslin and blue ribbons, rouged cheeks, a marvelous concatenation of jewels, and a caressing, gesticulating manner meant, at fifty, to suggest the ways of "sweet and twenty." The frizzled head drew nearer and nearer to Lord Wemyss, the fingers flourished and pointed; and suddenly I heard Lady Wemyss's deep voice, meditatively amused, beside me:

"Her fingers will be in Frank's eyes soon!" Or again, I see her, stalled beneath the drawing-room table, on all-fours, by her imperious grandchildren, patiently playing "horse" or "cow," till her scandalized daughter-in-law discovered her and ran to her release. Or in her last illness, turning her noble head and faint, welcoming smile to the few friends that were admitted; and finally, in the splendid rest after death, when those of us who had not known her in youth could guess what the beauty of her youth had been.

She was an omnivorous and most intelligent reader, and a friend that never failed. Matthew Arnold was very fond of her, and she of him; Laura Lyttelton, who was nearly forty years her junior, loved her dearly and never felt the bar of years; the Master owed much to her affection, and gratefully acknowledged it. The Commonplace Book, privately printed after her death, showed the range of interests which had played upon her fresh and energetic mind. It was untrained, I suppose, compared to the woman graduate of to-day. But it was far less tired; and all its adventures were of its own seeking.

It was in 1896, not long after the appearance of George Tressady, that a conversation in a house on the outskirts of the Lakes suggested to me the main plot of Helbeck of Bannisdale. The talk turned on the fortunes of that interesting old place, Sizergh Castle, near Kendal, and of the Catholic family to whom it then still belonged, though mortgages and lack of pence were threatening imminently to submerge an ancient stock that had held it unbrokenly, from father to son, through many generations.

The relation between such a family--pinched and obscure, yet with its own proud record, and inherited consciousness of an unbroken loyalty to a once persecuted faith--and this modern world of ours struck me as an admirable subject for a novel. I thought about it next day, all through a long railway journey from Kendal to London, and by the time I reached Euston the plot of Helbeck of Bannisdale was more or less clear to me.

I confided it to Lord Acton a little while afterward. We discussed it, and he cordially encouraged me to work it out. Then I consulted my father, my Catholic father, without whose assent I should never have written the book at all; and he raised no difficulty. So I only had to begin.

But I wanted a setting--somewhere in the border country between the Lakes mountains and Morecambe Bay. And here another piece of good luck befell, almost equal to that which had carried us to Hampden for the summer of 1889. Levens Hall, it appeared, was to be let for the spring--the famous Elizabethan house, five miles from Kendal, and about a mile from Sizergh. I had already seen Levens; and we took the chance at once.

Bannisdale in the novel is a combination, I suppose, of Sizergh and Levens. The two houses, though of much the same date, are really very different, and suggest phases of life quite distinct from each other. Levens compared to Sizergh is--or was then, before the modern restoration of Sizergh--the spoiled beauty beside the shabby ascetic. Levens has always been cared for and lived in by people who had money to spend upon the house and garden they loved, and the result is a wonderful example of Elizabethan and Jacobean decoration, mellowed by time into a perfect whole. Yet, for my purposes, there was always Sizergh, close by, with its austere suggestions of sacrifice and suffering under the penal laws, borne without flinching by a long succession of quiet, simple, undistinguished people.

We arrived there in March, 1897. The house greeted us on a clear and chilly evening under the mingled light of a frosty sunset, and the blaze of wood fires which had been lit everywhere to warm its new guests.

At last we arrived--saw the wonderful gray house rising above the
river in the evening light, found G---- waiting at the open door for
us, and plunged into the hall, the sitting-rooms, and all the
intricacies of the upper passages and turrets with the delight and
curiosity of a pack of children. Wood and peat fires were burning
everywhere; the great chimneypieces in the drawing-room, the arms of
Elizabeth over the hall fire, the stucco birds and beasts running
round the Hall, showed dimly in the scanty lamplight (we shall want
about six more lamps!)--and the beauty of the marvelous old place
took us all by storm. Then through endless passages and kitchens,
bright with long rows of copper pans and molds, we made our way out
into the gardens among the clipped yews and cedars, and had just
light enough to see that Levens apparently is like nothing else
but itself.
... The drawback of the house at present is certainly the cold!

Thus began a happy and fruitful time. We managed to get warm in spite of a treacherous and tardy spring. Guests came to stay with us--Henry James, above all; the Creightons, he then in the first months of that remarkable London episcopate, which in four short years did so much to raise the name and fame of the Anglican Church in London, at least for the lay mind; the Neville Lytteltons, who had been since 1893 our summer neighbors at Stocks; Lord Lytton, then at Cambridge; the Sydney Buxtons; old Oxford friends, and many kinsfolk. The damson blossom along the hedgerows that makes of these northern vales in April a glistening network of white and green, the daffodils and violets, the lilies-of-the-valley in the Brigsteer woods came and went, the Helbeck made steady progress.

But we left Levens in May, and it took me another eight months to finish the book. Except perhaps in the case of Bessie Costrell, I was never more possessed by a subject, more shut in by it from the outer world. And, though its contemporary success was nothing like so great as that of most of my other books, the response it evoked, as my letters show, in those to whom the book appealed, was deep and passionate.

My first anxiety was as to my father, and after we had left England for abroad I was seized with misgivings lest certain passages in the talk of Doctor Friedland, who, it will perhaps be remembered, is made the spokesman in the book of certain points in the intellectual case against Catholicism, should wound or distress him. I, therefore, no sooner reached Italy than I sent for the proofs again, and worked at them as much as fatigue would let me, softening them, and, I think, improving them, too. Then we went on to Florence, and rest, coming home for the book's publication in June.

The joy and emotion of it were great. George Meredith, J. M. Barrie, Paul Bourget, and Henry James--the men who at that time stood at the head of my own art--gave the book a welcome that I can never forget. George Meredith wrote:

Your Helbeck of Bannisdale held me firmly in the reading and
remains with me.... If I felt a monotony during the struggle, it
came of your being faithful to your theme--rapt--or you would not
have had such power over your reader. I know not another book that
shows the classic so distinctly to view.... Yet a word of thanks for
Doctor Friedland. He is the voice of spring in the book.

J.M. Barrie's generous, enthusiastic note delights and inspires me again as I read it over. Mr. Morley, my old editor and critic, wrote: "I find it intensely interesting and with all the elements of beauty, power, and pathos." For Leslie Stephen, with whom I had only lately made warm and close friends, I had a copy bound, without the final chapter, that the book might not, by its tragic close, depress one who had known so much sorrow. Sir Alfred Lyall thought--"the story reaches a higher pitch of vigor and dramatic presentation than is to be found even in your later books"; while Lord Halifax's letter--"how lovable they both are, each in his way, and how true to the ideal on both sides!"--and others, from Mr. Godkin, of the American Nation, from Frederic Harrison, Lord Goschen, Lord Dufferin, and many, many more, produced in me that curious mood which for the artist is much nearer dread than boasting--dread that the best is over and that one will never earn such sympathy again. One letter not written to myself, from Mr. George Wyndham to Mr. Wilfred Ward, I have asked leave to print as a piece of independent criticism:

On Sunday I read Helbeck of Bannisdale, and I confess that the
book moved me a great deal. It is her best book. It is a true
tragedy, because the crash is inevitable. This is not so easy to
effect in Art as many suppose. There are very few characters and
situations which lead to inevitable crashes. It is a thousand to one
that a woman who thinks she ought not to marry a man, but loves him
passionately, will, in fact, marry him. She will either discover an
ingenious way out of her woods or else just shut her eyes and "go it
blind," relying on his strength and feeling that it is really right
to relinquish to him her sense of responsibility. In choosing a girl
with nothing left her in the world but loyalty to a dead father and
memory of his attitude toward religion, without knowledge of his
arguments for that attitude, I think that Mrs. Ward has hit on the
only possible persona. Had Laura, herself, been a convinced
rationalist, or had her father been still alive, she would have
merged herself and her attitude in Helbeck's strength of character.
Being a work of art, self-consistent and inevitable, the book
becomes symbolic. It is a picture of incompatibility, but, being a
true picture, it is a symbolic index to the incompatible which plays
so large a part in the experience of man.

For the rest, I remember vividly the happy holiday of that summer at Stocks; the sense of having come through a great wrestle, and finding everything--my children, the garden, my little Huxley nephews, books and talk, the Settlement where we were just about to open our Cripple School, and all else in life, steeped in a special glamour. It faded soon, no doubt, "into the light of common day"; but if I shut my thoughts and eyes against the troubles of these dark hours of war, I can feel my way back into the "wind-warm space" and look into the faces that earth knows no more--my father, Leslie Stephen, Alfred Lyall, Mr. Goschen, Alfred Lyttelton, H. O. Arnold-Forster, my sister, Julia Huxley, my eldest brother--a vanished company!

And in the following year, to complete the story, I owed to Helbeck a striking and unexpected hour. A message reached me in November, 1898, to the effect that the Empress Frederick, who had just arrived at Windsor, admired the book and would like to see the writer of it.

A tragic figure at that moment--the Empress Frederick! That splendid Crown Prince, in his white uniform, whom we had seen at Schwalbach in 1872, had finished early in 1890 with his phantom reign and tortured life, and his son reigned in his stead. Bismarck, "the Englishwoman's" implacable enemy, had died some four months before I saw the Empress, after eight years' exclusion from power. The Empress herself was on the verge of the terrible illness which killed her two years later. To me her life and personality--or, rather, the little I knew of them--had always been very interesting. She had, of course, the reputation of being the ablest of her family, and the bitterness of her sudden and irreparable defeat at the hands of Fate and her son, in 1889-90, had often struck me as one of the grimmest stories in history. One incident in it, not, I think, very generally known, I happened to hear from an eye-witness of the scene, before 1898. It was as follows:

The Empress Frederick in the midst of the Bismarck crisis of March,
1890, when it was evident that the young Emperor William II was bent
on getting rid of his Chancellor, and so "dropping the pilot" of his
House, was sitting at home one afternoon, with the companion from
whom I heard the story, when a servant, looking a good deal scared,
announced that Prince Bismarck had called and wished to know whether
her Majesty would receive him.
"Prince Bismarck!" said the Empress, in amazement. She had probably
not seen him since the death of her husband, and relations between
herself and him had been no more than official for years. Turning to
her companion, she said, "What can he possibly want with me!"
She consented, however, to receive him, and the old Prince, agitated
and hollow-eyed, made his appearance. He had come, as a last hope of
placating the new Kaiser, to ask the Empress to use what influence
she could on his behalf with her son. The Empress listened in
growing astonishment. At the end there was a short silence. Then she
said, with emotion: "I am sorry! You, yourself, Prince Bismarck,
have destroyed all my influence with my son. I can do nothing."

In a sense, it must have been a moment of triumph. But how tragic are all the implications of the story! It was in my mind as I traveled to Windsor on November 18, 1898. The following letter was written next day to one of my children:

D---- and I met at Windsor, and we mounted into the quadrangle,
stopped at the third door on the right as Mrs. M---- had directed
us, interviewed various gorgeous footmen, and were soon in Mrs.
M---- 's little sitting-room. Then we found we should have some
little time to wait, as the Empress was just going out with the
Queen and would see me at a quarter to 1. So we waited, much amused
by the talk around us. (It turned, if I remember right, on a certain
German Princess, who had arrived a day or two before as the old
Queen's guest, and had been taken since her arrival on such a
strenuous round of tombs and mausoleums that, hearing on this
particular morning that the Queen proposed to take her in the
afternoon to see yet another mausoleum, she had stubbornly refused
to get up. She had a headache, she said, and would stay in bed. But
the ladies in waiting, with fits of laughter, described how the
Queen had at once ordered her phenacetin, and how there was really
no chance at all for the poor lady. The Queen would get her way, and
the departed would be duly honored--headache or no headache. As
indeed it turned out.)
Presently we saw the Queen's little pony-carriage pass along beyond
the windows with the Empress Frederick, and the Grand Duke and
Duchess Serge walking beside it, and the Indians behind. Then in a
little while the Empress Frederick came hurrying back alone, and
almost directly came my summons. Countess Perponcher, her lady in
waiting, took me up through the Long Corridor, past the entrance to
the Queen's rooms on one side, and Gordon's Bible, in its glass
case, on the other, till we turned to the left, and I was in a small
sitting-room, where a lady, gray-haired and in black, came forward
to meet me.... We talked for about 50 minutes:--of German books and
Universities--Harnack--Renan, for whom she had the greatest
admiration--Strauss, of whom she told me various interesting
things--German colonies, that she thought were "all
nonsense"--Dreyfus, who in her eyes is certainly innocent--reaction
in France--the difference between the Greek Church in Russia and the
Greek Church in Greece, the hopes of Greece, and the freeing of
Crete. It is evident that her whole heart is with Greece and her
daughter there [the young Queen Sophia, on whose character recently
deciphered documents have thrown so strong a light], and she spoke
bitterly, as she always does, about the English hanging-back, and
the dawdling of the European Concert. Then she described how she
read George Tressady aloud to her invalid daughter till the
daughter begged her to stop, lest she should cry over it all
night--she said charming things of Helbeck, talked of Italy,
D'Annunzio, quoted "my dear old friend Minghetti" as to the
fundamental paganism in the Italian mind, asked me to write my name
in her book, and to come and see her in Berlin--and it was time to
go.... She is a very attractive, sensitive, impulsive woman, more
charming than I had imagined, and, perhaps, less
intellectual--altogether the very woman to set up the backs of
Bismarck and his like. Never was there a more thorough Englishwoman!
I found myself constantly getting her out of focus, by that
confusion of mind which made one think of her as German.

And to my father I wrote:

The Empress began by asking after Uncle Matt, and nothing could have
been kinder and more sympathetic than her whole manner. But of
course Bismarck hated her. She is absolutely English, parliamentary,
and anti-despotic.... When I ventured to say in bidding her Good-by,
that I had often felt great admiration and deep sympathy for her,
which is true--she threw up her hands with a little sad or bitter
gesture--"Oh!--admiration!--for me!"--as if she knew very well
what it was to be conscious of the reverse. A touching, intelligent,
impulsive woman, she seemed to me--no doubt often not a wise
one--but very attractive.

Nineteen years ago! And two years later, after long suffering, like her husband, the last silence fell on this brave and stormy nature. Let us thank God for it as we look out upon Europe and see what her son has made of it.

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