A Writers Recollections, vol 2 | Page 4

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 safety in 1888, when my knowledge, such as it was, had grown very rusty, that Mr. York Powell overlooked the papers, seeing that to set Scholarship questions for postgraduate candidates is not easy for one who has never been through any proper "mill"! But they passed his scrutiny satisfactorily,