A Writers Recollections, vol 2 | Page 4

look back, to put any order into the
crowding memories of those early years in London. They were
extraordinarily stimulating to us both, and years of great happiness. At
home our children were growing up; our own lives were branching out
into new activities and bringing us always new friends, and a more
interesting share in that "great mundane movement" which Mr. Bottles
believed would perish without him. Our connection with the Times and
with the Forsters, and the many new acquaintances and friends we
made at this time in that happy meeting-ground of men and
causes--Mrs. Jeune's drawing-room--opened to us the world of
politicians; while my husband's four volumes on _The English Poets_,
published just as we left Oxford, volumes to which all the most
prominent writers of the day had contributed, together with the
ever-delightful fact that Matthew Arnold was my uncle, brought us the
welcome of those of our own _métier_ and way of life; and when in
1884 my husband became art critic of the paper, a function which he

filled for more than five and twenty years, fresh doors opened on the
already crowded scene, and fresh figures stepped in.
The setting of it all was twofold--in the first place, our dear old house
in Russell Square, and, in the next, the farm on Rodborough Common,
four miles from Godalming, where, amid a beauty of gorse and heather
that filled every sense on a summer day with the mere joy of breathing
and looking, our children and we spent the holiday hours of seven
goodly years. The Russell Square house has been, so to speak, twice
demolished and twice buried, since we lived in it. Some of its stones
must still lie deep under the big hotel which now towers on its site.
That it does not still exist somewhere, I can hardly believe. The
westerly sun seems to me still to be pouring into the beautiful little hall,
built and decorated about 1750, with its panels of free scrollwork in
blue and white, and to be still glancing through the drawing-rooms to
the little powder-closet at the end, my tiny workroom, where I first
sketched the plan of Robert Elsmere for my sister Julia Huxley, and
where, after three years, I wrote the last words. If I open the door of the
back drawing-room, there, to the right, is the children's school-room. I
see them at their lessons, and the fine plane-trees that look in at the
window. And up-stairs there are the pleasant bedrooms and the
nurseries. It was born, the old house, in the year of the Young Pretender,
and, after serving six generations, perhaps as faithfully as it served us,
it "fell on sleep." There should be a special Elysium, surely, for the
houses where the fates have been kind and where people have been
happy; and a special Tartarus for those--of Oedipus or Atreus--in which
"old, unhappy, far-off things" seem to be always poisoning the present.
As to Borough Farm--now the head-quarters of the vast camp which
stretches to Hindhead--it stood then in an unspoiled wilderness of
common and wood, approached only by what we called "the sandy
track" from the main Portsmouth Road, with no neighbors for miles but
a few scattered cottages. Its fate had been harder than that of 61 Russell
Square. The old London house has gone clean out of sight, translated,
whole and fair, into a world of memory. But Borough and the common
are still here--as war has made them. Only--may I never see them
again!

It was in 1882, the year of Tel-el-Kebir, when we took Peperharrow
Rectory (the Murewell Vicarage of _Robert Elsmere_) for the summer,
that we first came across Borough Farm. We left it in 1889. I did a
great deal of work, there and in London, in those seven years. The
Macmillan papers I have already spoken of. They were on many
subjects--Tennyson's "Becket," Mr. Pater's "Marius," "The Literature of
Introspection," Jane Austen, Keats, Gustavo Becquer, and various
others. I still kept up my Spanish to some extent, and I twice
examined--in 1882 and 1888--for the Taylorian scholarship in Spanish
at Oxford, our old friend, Doctor Kitchin, afterward Dean of Durham,
writing to me with glee that I should be "making history" as "the first
woman examiner of men at either University." My colleague on the
first occasion was the old Spanish scholar, Don Pascual de Gayangos,
to whom the calendaring of the Spanish MSS. in the British Museum
had been largely intrusted; and the second time, Mr. York Powell of
Christ Church--I suppose one of the most admirable Romance scholars
of the time--was associated with me. But if I remember right, I set the
papers almost entirely, and wrote the report on both occasions. It gave
me a feeling of