CHAPTER II

CAMBRIDGE AND LONDON

At Cambridge great men and women began to come into my life. Women’s colleges were a novelty, and distinguished visitors were brought to see us as one of the sights. Turgenev came, and I was told off to show him round. It was a golden opportunity. Dare I ask him to speak just a word or two of Russian? He looked such a kind old snow-white Lion. Alas! he spoke fluent English; it was a grievous disappointment. Then Ruskin came. I showed him our small library. He looked at it with disapproving eyes. “Each book”, he said gravely, “that a young girl touches should be bound in white vellum.” I thought with horror of the red moroccos and Spanish leather that had been my choice. A few weeks later the old humbug sent us his own works bound in dark blue calf! Then came Mr. Gladstone. His daughter Helen was a college friend of mine, or rather, more exactly, a friendly enemy. We fought about everything, and had not an idea in common. She was the most breezy, boisterous creature possible; we called her Boreas, for she had a habit of picking her friends up and running with them the length of the corridors. She was a thorough Lyttelton, without a trace of her father, whom she adored. I was a rigid Tory in those days, and I resolutely refused to join the mob of students in cheering and clapping the Grand Old Man on his arrival. I shut myself up in my room. Thither--to tease me--she brought him. He sat down and asked me who was my favourite Greek author. Tact counselled Homer, but I was perverse and not quite truthful, so I said “Euripides.” Æschylus would have been creditable, Sophocles respectable, but the sceptic Euripides! It was too much, and with a few words of warning he withdrew. And then last, but oh, so utterly first, came George Eliot. It was in the days when her cult was at its height--thank heaven I never left her shrine!--and we used to wait outside Macmillan’s shop to seize the new instalments of _Daniel Deronda_. She came for a few minutes to my room, and I was almost senseless with excitement. I had just repapered my room with the newest thing in dolorous Morris papers. Some one must have called her attention to it, for I remember that she said in her shy, impressive way, “Your paper makes a beautiful background for your face.” The ecstasy was too much, and I knew no more. Later, in London, I met, of course, many eminent men, but there never came again a moment like that. Browning was only to me a cheerful, amusing gossip. Herbert Spencer took me in to dinner once, but he would discuss the Athenæum cook, and on that subject he found me ill-informed. Pater and his sisters were good, and opened their house to me; I always think of him as a soft, kind cat; he purred so persuasively that I lost the sense of what he was saying. At his house I often met Henry James. I liked to watch that ingenious spider weaving his webs, but to me he had no appeal. Miss Bosanquet’s recent delightful _Henry James at Work_ has made me realise what I lost.

[Illustration: JANE HARRISON (aged twenty-five).

_To face page 45._ ]

Tennyson’s daughter-in-law, Mrs. Lionel Tennyson, later Mrs. Augustine Birrell, was among my closest friends. She took me to stay with the great man. He met us at the station, grunting fiercely that he “was not going to dress for dinner because I had come.” It was rather frightening, but absurd. The vain old thing (he was the most openly vain man I ever met) knew quite well that he looked his best in his ample poet’s cloak. It is a rare and austere charm that gains by evening dress. He was very kind to me according to his rather fierce lights; he took me a long, memorable Sunday morning walk, recited “Maud” to me, and countless other things. It was an anxious joy; he often forgot his own poems and was obviously annoyed if I could not supply the words. He would stop suddenly and ask angrily: “Do you think Browning could have written that line? Do you think Swinburne could?” I could truthfully answer, “Impossible.” If he posed a good deal, he was scarcely to blame; the house was so charged with an atmosphere of hero-worship that free breathing was difficult. Tennyson remains to me a great poet, and I am proud to have known him. When I hear young reactionaries say he is no poet at all, I think them simply silly. He was intensely English, and therefore not at his best as a conscious thinker; but he felt soundly, and his mastery of language was superb. While the English language is, such poems as “In Memoriam”, “The Lotus-Eaters”, “Ulysses”, “Crossing the Bar” must live. Of very great artists there were, in England, none to know. But I learnt much from the young school of Impressionists then fighting their way to recognition. Burne-Jones too was kind to me; he used often to come and sit with me, turning over drawings of Greek vases with eager, delighted fingers. Sometimes I sat with him as he drew his strange visions; often a silent, decorative cat sat on his shoulder. He wrote me many letters with whimsical illustrative drawings. I am sorry now that I tore them up. The people I most longed after, Christina Rossetti and Swinburne, were not diners-out, and I never knew them. The men and women who influenced me most--my real friends--are living still. Of them I may not write.

One dear, dead woman remains--Miss Thackeray, who later married Richmond Ritchie, the brother of a college friend. I met her first at Eton, and I like to think she took a fancy to me, for she asked me down to Chiswick to see her. She suggested an afternoon, at five, and at five I presented myself. She received me with open arms, and hospitably put her hand on a small black satin bag in which I carried my book for the train. “Let Susan take your luggage upstairs,” she said. “Come and have tea.” I clung to the said “luggage”, and explained that she had not asked me to stay the night. “Oh, but I want you to stay a long, long time.” Why, oh why, did I not stay? Was it that I shrank from breaking a dinner engagement, or was it a snobbish fear that Susan, as she unpacked my “luggage”, might think a copy of Christina Rossetti’s poems inadequate night-gear? I lost my opportunity, she never asked me again. I met her soon after, crossing Kensington Square; she shook hands, but seemed excited and _affairée_. “I mustn’t stop; some friends--some dear, dear friends--are coming to dinner, and I have promised to get them an egg.” And she was gone to the High Street. She never, I think, had her delicate feet quite on the ground. I have often been sorry that I did not keep _Punch’s_ fine parody of her novels. It ended thus: “A kind hand was outstretched to help me. Two kind hands. I never knew which I took.”

* * * * *

Walter Raleigh was an early friend, he and his delightful mother and sisters. I remember we were all sitting round the fire after dinner one night, and Walter was reading out some of his verses. One poem was about the on-coming of Night and contained the line:

And God leads round His starry Bear.

“How beautiful!” I murmured fatuously (my friends tell me that at any mention of a bear I am apt to get maudlin). “Walter,” said his mother fiercely, “how dare you be so blasphemous! God doesn’t lead round bears.” “Well, mother,” said Walter, “it’s your fault; you always used to tell us when we were children that God guided the stars in their paths, and”, looking at me, “I learnt it all at my mother’s knee.” “I am sure your father wouldn’t have liked it,” continued his mother. At this appeal to his filial piety Walter, of course, collapsed, but he told me afterwards, in private, that he was sure his father would have liked the line about the Bear, and that he should keep it in. Dr. Raleigh, it seems, held unusually wide views for a Congregationalist minister. Mrs. Raleigh was always called in her family “Mrs. Fox”, because of the unexpected whiskings of her mind. When the British Government broke out into a sort of epidemic of title-giving, confounding gentlemen and scholars with lord mayors and profiteers, Walter was of course knighted. I had scarcely a friend left who was not so mishandled. His family were amused and rather disgusted, but Walter himself was simply delighted and played with his absurd title like a toy. Smart ladies began to take him up and pet him, and his sisters called him “the duchesses’ darling”, but he just genuinely enjoyed it all. He was the one plain son in a family of extraordinarily handsome daughters, all “variations”, as some one said, “of a beautiful theme”. But though he was plain to uncouthness as a young man, all through his life some unseen inner spirit was at work, chiselling his face, and, before he died, he was beautiful. He was the best talker I ever knew, and a quite inspired lecturer. The views he tenaciously held were reactionary and, to my mind, preposterous. We wrangled ceaselessly. He paid, alas, for his fantastic militarism with his life.

* * * * *

In those days I met many specimens of a class of Victorian who, if not exactly distinguished, were at least distinctive and are, I think, all but extinct--British Lions and Lionesses. The Lionesses first--that was the name we gave them at Newnham. They were all spinsters, well-born, well-bred, well-educated and well off. They attended my lectures on Greek Art. Greek Art was at that time booming and was eminently respectable. At home they gardened a great deal; they, most of them, had country houses. Their gardens were a terror to me, for I never could remember the names of the plants with slips attached to them, and to blunder over a plant’s name was as bad to a Lioness as a false quantity. They kept diaries in which they entered accurately the state of the weather on each day. If they lived in London they promoted Friendly Girls and Workhouse Nursing. Above all, they kept a vigilant eye on the shortcomings of local officials; they frequently wrote to the _Times_, heading their letters: “_Re_ Mud and Slush”. In the spring and early summer they went to Italy, accompanied usually by “a young relative”, whose expenses they paid; they voyaged mainly to Rome and Florence, but the more adventurous went to Assisi. Attired in mushroom hats, veils and dust cloaks, they sketched a great deal. The subject of their sketches was always recognisable--ruined towers and church porches. The ordinary man was to them negligible, but they spoke of their own male relatives with respect and frequently quoted the opinions of “my uncle, the Dean”, or “my cousin, the Archdeacon”. They were a fine upstanding breed, and I miss them. They had no unsatisfied longings, had never heard of “suppressed complexes”, and lived happily their vigorous, if somewhat angular, lives.

Their counterparts were the British Lions. Of them, naturally, I knew less. Real intimacy between the two genders was not in those days usual, but I watched them with delight from afar. You could always count on them to roar suitably. I worked for some time on the Council of the Girls’ Public Day School Company, which was largely manned by British Lions, and I was privileged to go with them to preside at local prize-givings. They made speeches and I held a large and agonising bouquet. The sentiments of these speeches were on well-established lines, and always, always, at the end came the inevitable:

A perfect woman, nobly planned To warn, to comfort, and command.

I thought at one time of offering a small prize of half-a-crown to any Lion who would resist that temptation. A little later I worked on the Council of the Classical Association. There I might safely have raised the prize to five shillings. There lived no Lion who could end his address without telling you that it was the writing of Latin Prose that had made him what he was! Am I indiscreet if I mention that I was yachting once with a British Lion? He was oldish and had a deck-cabin. I happened to look in in passing. On the table lay a Bible, on the Bible a tooth-brush. Cleanliness was “next to godliness”. Oh England--my England!

* * * * *

It was about then that I began lecturing on Greek Art at boys’ schools. Archdeacon Wilson first asked me to Clifton; he told me afterwards that he had not dared to tell his Council that the lecturer was a woman till all was over. Later I learnt that among my audience had been no less persons than Dr. MacTaggart and Roger Fry, and that they had deigned to discuss my lecture. Then Mr. Warre Cornish, always the kindest of friends, asked me to Eton. I do not suppose the lectures did any good, but they amused the boys. One of the masters asked a very small Winchester “man” if he had liked the lecture. “Not the lecture,” he said candidly, “but I liked the lady; she was like a beautiful green beetle.” In those days one’s evening gowns were apt to be covered with spangles, and mine of blue-green satin had caught the light of the magic-lantern. A young prig, who bore an honoured name, was introduced to me at Eton; he wrote me next day a patronising letter of thanks, in which he said he hoped to go on with archæology, as he was going up to Oxford to “do Grates”. Alas! he never _did_ anything half so useful. My youngest brother was at Harrow; he wrote to me to say he had heard I was lecturing at Eton. It didn’t matter, apparently, what I did at that benighted place, but he “did hope I wasn’t coming lecturing at Harrow, as it would make it very awkward for him with the other fellows.” I saw his position and respected it.

[Illustration: JANE HARRISON (aged thirty-three).

_To face page 54._ ]

* * * * *

Then there was the actual Cambridge Academic circle--a brilliant circle, it seems to me, looking back. Cambridge society was then small enough to be one, and there were endless small, but not informal, dinner-parties. The order of University precedence was always strictly observed. Henry Sidgwick was the centre, and with him his two most intimate friends, Frederick Myers and Edmund Gurney. Frederick Myers rang, perhaps, the most sonorously of all, but to me he always rang a little false. Edmund Gurney was, I think, the most lovable and beautiful human being I ever met. This was the Psychical Research circle; their quest, scientific proof of immortality. To put it thus seems almost grotesque now; then it was inspiring. About this nucleus from a wider world ranged Balfours, Jebbs, and later rose a younger generation--the three Darwin sons, the Verralls, husband and wife, both my closest friends; Robert Neil of Pembroke, whose sympathetic Scotch silences made the dreariest gathering burn and glow; the George Protheros, Frederick Maitland, whose daughter, Fredegond Shove, is now the sweetest of our lyrical singers. And in the midst of them Mrs. Henry Sidgwick (the younger Miss Balfour) shone like a star. She had none of her husband’s or her brother’s social gifts, yet in any society she shone with a sort of lambent light. When we took her for our Principal, I am afraid science lost a fine researcher. Still, she had a perfect passion for accounts. “Why need I dress for dinner,” she said to me plaintively, “when I might be getting on with these?” touching her account-books tenderly. She was meticulously true. We were talking once in Hall of the odd lingo that shops and business invent, “haberdashery”, “hosiery”, etc.--words unknown to the outside world. I cited, “_Alight_ here for the Albert Memorial”. Whoever says “alight”? “I always say ‘alight’,” remarked Mrs. Sidgwick; “it’s a very good word.” “Forgive me,” said I “I’m quite sure you don’t.” A few minutes later she joined me in the corridor. “You are quite right,” she said; “I find I don’t say ‘alight’ but”, cautiously, “I think I always shall now.” I do hope she does! Another time I was holding forth on the supreme importance of classics in education. “Don’t you think”, she said, “you a little confuse between the importance of your subject and the extraordinary delight you manage to extract from it?” That was well observed. Her great truthfulness made her very naïve; she walked through a vulgar and wicked world in perpetual blinkers. Though her austerity of dress and manners always made me feel a vulgarian, how I adored her! how she made me laugh! I never told my love, and, alas! on college politics I had almost always to oppose her. Sheltered by the publicity of _The Nation_ I tell it now. Why is it that those we most adore most move us to mirth? As soon as we laugh at a person we begin a little to love them.

One scientific friend, Francis Darwin, had lasting influence on me. Classics he regarded with a suspicious eye, but he was kind to me. One day he found me busy writing an article on the “Mystica vannus Iacchi”. “I must get it off to-night,” I said industriously. “What is a _vannus_?” he asked. “Oh, a ‘fan’,” I said; “it was a mystical object used in ceremonies of initiation.” “Yes, but Virgil says it is an agricultural implement. Have you ever seen one?” “No,” I confessed. “_And you are writing about a thing you have never seen_,” groaned my friend. “Oh, you classical people!” It did not end there. He interviewed farmers--no result; he wrote to agricultural institutes abroad, and, finally, in remote provincial France, unearthed a mystic “fan” still in use, and had it despatched to Cambridge. Luckily he also found that his old gardener was perhaps the last man in England who could use the obsolete implement. On his lawn were to be seen a gathering of learned scholars trying, and failing, to winnow with the _vannus_. Its odd shape explained all its uses, mystic and otherwise. Three months later I despatched a paper to the _Hellenic Journal_ on what I _had_ seen and _did_ understand. It was a lifelong lesson to me. It was not quite all my fault. I had been reared in a school that thought it was far more important to parse a word than to understand it. I had myself, as a student, eagerly asked why the _vannus_ was mystic, and the answer had been, “You have construed the passage correctly; that will do for the present.” And as my “coach” closed his Virgil, he remarked sadly, “Bad sport in subjunctives to-day.” Such training was perhaps the best possible for my always flighty mind.

* * * * *

The last distinguished person whom I helped to entertain years later, at Newnham, was the Crown Prince of Japan. If you must curtsey to a man young enough to be your grandson, it is at least some consolation to know that he believes himself to be God. It was that which interested me. I found in the Prince a strange charm. He was intensely quiet and had about him a sort of serenity and security that really seemed divine. Japanese is one of the few languages which contain the hard _i_. All Indo-European languages have lost it, except Russian, though a Russian told me that he had heard the exact sound from the lips of a cockney newspaper boy pronouncing “Piccad_i_lly”. The Prince was good enough to say his own royal name to me two or three times, but alas! I forgot it.

My lot has not lain in the courts of kings, but one royal lady, the Empress Frederick, was very gracious to me, and I am proud to remember her goodness. The Empress sent for me to tell her about some German excavations of Greek theatres, and to explain the new theory started by Dörpfeld as to the Greek stage. Hers was almost the saddest face I have ever seen, but she had the real sacred hunger for knowledge, and I am sure, had fate not broken her wings and caged her in a palace, she would have flown high. We were in the middle of eager talk when a servant came in and said the Prince of Wales (King Edward) wanted to see her. So little was I used to royal etiquette (which for the subject is simply the etiquette of servants) that I all but committed a _gaffe_ by getting up to release her;--she saved me by shaking her head impatiently at the servant and saying “No, no,” and turning to me, “Go on, go on, I must know.” My future King had a good long wait. I saw the Empress again and again, and learnt to love her. But, oh how glad I was when I heard she was safely dead, dead and, though I could not know that then, spared the torture of the war. She bade me, when I next went to Greece, go and see her daughter, the Crown Princess of Greece. Of course I had to go, but I was sorry I went. The daughter was as common as the mother was distinguished. She had a bad Board-School accent and used slang. She did not really care about Greek things at all, but talked loudly about “our Waldstein who has made awfully jolly excavations”. She bored me as much as I bored her. Every one ought to see a little of royalties. It is so humbling and at first irritating to have to behave like a servant, and it makes you understand how servants really must feel.

* * * * *

Interviewers--after the first moment of excited importance--are not an interesting tribe, but one of them comes back to me with a whiff of fragrance, an American lady from the Middle West. A little old lady she was, with white curls and a Quaker bonnet, and romance in her heart. She brought a letter of introduction and asked if I would visit her in her Bloomsbury lodgings. I found her there at eleven in the morning with a dainty tea-tray before her; she must have spread it with her own hands; no Bloomsbury landlady was capable of it. She had heard, she said, that we English ladies liked to drink a cup of tea at eleven. She must have heard it below stairs. And then began the interview. She had been told that I was a great authority on Greek vases, would I give her my idea on “their place in modern education”. I began to stumble out a few platitudes. She interrupted me with, “You’ll excuse me, Miss Harrison, but you’re dropping pearls and diamonds from your mouth, and I must get out my pencil and notebook.” Then, then at last, out came the romance; she herself was a “school teacher”; she had saved up her money to come to Europe, not to see Europe but to--write a book on Greek Art! Of Greek and Greek Art she knew nothing, but, pencil in hand, she was travelling round to the museums of Europe to learn, and then, O joy! to write: the gallantry and the innocence of it! I don’t know if that strangely compounded book ever saw the light. It may be death found her before she reached her Happy Isles, but she had the spirit of Ulysses. Before she left she asked, “Did I know Mr. Andrew Lang?” She had a letter to him. “But”, she said sadly, “my mind misgives me, Miss Harrison, that Mr. Andrew Lang is not an earnest seeker after truth.”

And that reminds me of my first meeting with “Andrew of the brindled hair”, at a dinner-party. Our hostess brought him up to me and, with a misguided desire to be pleasant, said, “You know Miss Harrison, and I am sure you have read her delightful books.” “Don’t know Miss Harrison,” muttered Andrew, “never read her delightful books, don’t want to,” etc. (Oh, Andrew, and you had reviewed those “delightful books” not too delightedly!) “Come, Mr. Lang,” I said, “we’re both hungry, and I promise not to say a single word to you. Be a man.” Alas! I broke my word. It was an enchanting dinner.