A Writers Recollections, vol 2

A Writer's Recollections, vol 2
[with accents]

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Title: A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II
Author: Mrs. Humphry Ward
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WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS (IN TWO VOLUMES), VOLUME II
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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