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TITLE: A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS (IN TWO VOLUMES), VOLUME II
AUTHOR: MRS. HUMPHRY WARD
EBOOK: E06393 (O'Briens Book Cellar)
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS (IN TWO VOLUMES), VOLUME II

BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

Published November, 1918

[Illustration: HENRY JAMES]

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

   I. LONDON IN THE 'EIGHTIES

  II. LONDON FRIENDS

 III. THE PUBLICATION OF "ROBERT ELSMERE"

  IV. FIRST VISITS TO ITALY

   V. AMALFI AND ROME. HAMPDEN AND "MARCELLA"

  VI. "HELBECK OF BANNISDALE"

 VII. THE VILLA BARBERINI. HENRY JAMES

VIII. ROMAN FRIENDS. "ELEANOR"

EPILOGUE

ILLUSTRATIONS

HENRY JAMES

ARTHUR BALFOUR

GOLDWIN SMITH

M. JUSSERAND

CHAPTER I

LONDON IN THE 'EIGHTIES

The few recollections of William Forster that I have put together in the
preceding volume lead naturally, perhaps, to some account of my
friendship and working relations at this time with Forster's most
formidable critic in the political press--Mr. John Morley, now Lord
Morley. It was in the late 'seventies, I think, that I first saw Mr.
Morley. I sat next him at the Master's dinner-table, and the impression
he made upon me was immediate and lasting. I trust that a great man, to
whom I owed much, will forgive me for dwelling on some of the incidents
of literary comradeship which followed!

My husband and I, on the way home, compared notes. We felt that we had
just been in contact with a singular personal power combined with a
moral atmosphere which had in it both the bracing and the charm that,
physically, are the gift of the heights. The "austere" Radical, indeed,
was there. With regard to certain vices and corruptions of our life and
politics, my uncle might as well have used Mr. Morley's name as that of
Mr. Frederick Harrison, when he presented us, in "Friendship's Garland,"
with Mr. Harrison setting up a guillotine in his back garden. There was
something--there always has been something--of the somber intensity of
the prophet in Mr. Morley. Burke drew, as we all remember, an
ineffaceable picture of Marie Antoinette's young beauty as he saw it in
1774, contrasting it with the "abominable scenes" amid which she
perished. Mr. Morley's comment is:

    But did not the protracted agonies of a nation deserve the tribute
    of a tear? As Paine asked, were men to weep over the plumage and
    forget the dying bird? ... It was no idle abstraction, no
    metaphysical right of man for which the French cried, but only the
    practical right of being permitted, by their own toil, to save
    themselves and the little ones about their knees from hunger and
    cruel death.

The cry of the poor, indeed, against the rich and tyrannous, the cry of
the persecuted Liberal, whether in politics or religion, against his
oppressors--it used to seem to me, in the 'eighties, when, to my
pleasure and profit, I was often associated with Mr. Morley, that in his
passionate response to this double appeal lay the driving impulse of his
life and the secret of his power over others. While we were still at
Oxford he had brought out most of his books: _On Compromise_--the fierce
and famous manifesto of 1874--and the well-known volumes on the
Encyclopedists, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot. It was not for nothing that
he had been a member of Pattison's college; and a follower of John
Stuart Mill. The will to look the grimmest facts of life and destiny in
the face, without flinching, and the resolve to accept no "anodyne" from
religion or philosophy, combined with a ceaseless interest in the human
fate and the human story, and a natural, inbred sympathy for the many
against the few, for the unfortunate against the prosperous; it was
these ardors and the burning sincerity with which he felt them, that
made him so great a power among us, his juniors by half a generation. I
shall never lose the impression that _Compromise_, with its almost
savage appeal for sincerity in word and deed, made upon me--an
impression which had its share in _Robert Elsmere_.

But together with this tragic strenuousness there was always the
personal magic which winged it and gave it power. Mr. Morley has known
all through his life what it was to be courted, by men and women alike,
for the mere pleasure of his company; in which he resembled another man
whom both he and I knew well--Sir Alfred Lyall. It is well known that
Mr. Gladstone was fascinated by the combination in his future biographer
of the Puritan, the man of iron conviction, and the delightful man of
letters. And in my own small sphere I realized both aspects of Mr.
Morley during the 'eighties. Just before we left Oxford I had begun to
write reviews and occasional notes for the _Pall Mall_, which he was
then editing; after we settled in London, and he had become also editor
of _Macmillan_, he asked me, to my no little conceit, to write a monthly
_causerie_ on a book or books for that magazine. I never succeeded in
writing nearly so many; but in two years I contributed perhaps eight or
ten papers--until I became absorbed in _Robert Elsmere_ and Mr. Morley
gave up journalism for politics. During that time my pleasant task
brought me into frequent contact with my editor. Nothing could have been
kinder than his letters; at the same time there was scarcely one of them
that did not convey some hint, some touch of the critical goad,
invaluable to the recipient. I wrote him a letter of wailing when he
gave up the editorship and literature and became Member for Newcastle.
Such a fall it seemed to me then! But Mr. Morley took it patiently. "Do
not lament over your friend, but pray for him!" As, indeed, one might
well do, in the case of one who for a few brief months--in 1886--was to
be Chief Secretary for Ireland, and again in 1892-95.

It was, indeed, in connection with Ireland that I became keenly and
personally aware of that other side of Mr. Morley's character--the side
which showed him the intransigent supporter of liberty at all costs and
all hazards. It was, I suppose, the brilliant and pitiless attacks in
the _Pall Mall_ on Mr. Forster's Chief-Secretaryship, which, as much as
anything else, and together with what they reflected in the Cabinet,
weakened my uncle's position and ultimately led to his resignation in
the spring of 1882. Many of Mr. Forster's friends and kinsfolk resented
them bitterly; and among the kinsfolk, one of them, I have reason to
know, made a strong private protest. Mr. Morley's attitude in reply
could only have been that which is well expressed by a sentence of
Darmesteter's about Renan: "So pliant in appearance, so courteous in
manner, he became a bar of iron as soon as one sought to wrest from him
an act or word contrary to the intimate sense of his conscience."

But no man has a monopoly of conscience. The tragedy was that here were
two men, both democrats, both humanitarians, but that an executive
office, in a time of hideous difficulty, had been imposed upon the one,
from which the other--his critic--was free. Ten years later, when Mr.
Morley was Chief Secretary, it was pointed out that the same statesman
who had so sincerely and vehemently protested in the case of William
Forster and Mr. Balfour against the revival of "obsolete" statutes, and
the suppression of public meetings, had himself been obliged to put
obsolete statutes in operation sixteen times, and to prohibit twenty-six
public meetings. These, however, are the whirligigs of politics, and no
politician escapes them.

In my eyes Lord Morley's crowning achievement in literature is his
biography of Mr. Gladstone. How easy it would have been to smother Mr.
Gladstone in stale politics!--and how stale politics may become in that
intermediate stage before they pass finally into history! English
political literature is full of biography of this kind. The three
notable exceptions of recent years which occur to me are Mr. Churchill's
_Life_ of his father, the Disraeli biography still in progress, and the
_Gladstone_. But it would be difficult indeed to "stale" the story of
either Lord Randolph or Dizzy. A biographer would have to set about it
of malice prepense. In the case, however, of Mr. Gladstone, the danger
was more real. Anglican orthodoxy, eminent virtue, unfailing decorum; a
comparatively weak sense of humor, and a literary gift much inferior to
his oratorical gift, so that the most famous of his speeches are but
cold reading now; interminable sentences, and an unfailing relish for
detail all important in its day, but long since dead and buried; the
kind of biography that, with this material, half a dozen of Mr.
Gladstone's colleagues might have written of him, for all his greatness,
rises formidably on the inward eye. The younger generation waiting for
the historian to come--except in the case of those whose professional
duty as politicians it would have been to read it--might quite well have
yawned and passed by.

But Mr. Morley's literary instinct, which is the artistic instinct,
solved the problem. The most interesting half of the book will always, I
think, be the later half. In the great matters of his hero's earlier
career--Free Trade, the Crimean War, the early budgets, the slow
development of the Liberal leader from the Church and State Conservative
of 1832, down to the franchise battle of the 'sixties and the "great
Ministry," as Mr. Morley calls it, of 1868, the story is told, indeed,
perhaps here and there at too great length, yet with unfailing ease and
lucidity. The teller, however, is one who, till the late 'seventies, was
only a spectator, and, on the whole, from a distance, of what he is
describing, who was indeed most of the time pursuing his own special
aims--i.e., the hewing down of orthodoxy and tradition, together with
the preaching of a frank and uncompromising agnosticism, in the
_Fortnightly Review_; aims which were, of all others, most opposed to
Mr. Gladstone's. But with the 'eighties everything changes. Mr. Morley
becomes a great part of what he tells. During the intermediate
stage--marked by his editorship of the _Pall Mall Gazette_--the tone of
the biography grows sensibly warmer and more vivid, as the writer draws
nearer and nearer to the central scene; and with Mr. Morley's election
to Newcastle and his acceptance of the Chief-Secretaryship in 1885, the
book becomes the fascinating record of not one man, but two, and that
without any intrusion whatever on the rights of the main figure. The
dreariness of the Irish struggle is lightened by touch after touch that
only Mr. Morley could have given. Take that picture of the somber,

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