CHAPTER III

GREECE AND RUSSIA

All through my London life (fifteen years) I lectured there and in the provinces. Being one of a family of twelve, my fortune was slender, and social life is costly. I regret those lecturing years. I was voluble and had instant success, but it was mentally demoralising and very exhausting. Though I was almost fatally fluent, I could never face a big audience without a sinking in the pit of what is now called the _solar plexus_. Moreover, I was lecturing on art, a subject for which I had no natural gifts. My reactions to art are, I think, always second-hand; hence, about art, I am docile and open to persuasion. In literature I am absolutely sure of my own tastes, and a whole Bench of Bishops could not alter my convictions. Happily, however, bit by bit, art and archæology led to mythology, mythology merged in religion; there I was at home. All through my London life I worked very hard--but, no! I remember that Professor Gilbert Murray once told me that I had never done an hour’s really hard work in my life. I think he forgets that I have learnt the Russian declensions, which is more than he ever did. But I believe he is right. He mostly is. I never work in the sense of attacking a subject against the grain, tooth and nail. The kingdom of heaven from me “suffereth no violence”. The Russian verb “to learn” takes the dative, which seems odd till you find out that it is from the same root as “to get used to”. When you learn you “get yourself used to” a thing. That is worth a whole treatise of pedagogy. And it explained to me my own processes. One reads round a subject, soaks oneself in it, and then one’s personal responsibility is over; something stirs and ferments, swims up into your consciousness, and you know you have to write a book. That may not be “hard work”, but let me tell Professor Murray it is painfully and pleasantly like it in its results; it leaves you spent, washed out, a rag, but an exultant rag.

* * * * *

My London life was happily broken by much going abroad. All my archæology was taught me by Germans. The great Ernst Curtius, of Olympian fame, took me round the museums of Berlin. Heinrich Brunn came to see me in my lodgings at Munich, where I was thriftily living on four marks a day. I remember his first visit--a knock, a huge figure looming in the doorway, a benevolent, bearded, spectacled face, and he presented himself with the words, “Brunn bin Ich”. Dörpfeld was my most honoured master--we always called him “Avtos”. He let me go with him on his _Peloponnesos Reise_ and his _Insel Reise_. They were marvels of organisation, and the man himself was a miracle. He would hold us spellbound for a six hours’ peripatetic lecture, only broken by an interval of ten minutes to partake of a goat’s-flesh sandwich and _etwas frisches Bier_. Once I saw, to my sorrow, three Englishmen tailing away after the _frisches Bier_. I was more grieved than surprised. They were Oxford men--the (then) Provost of Oriel, the Principal of Brasenose and an eminent fellow of Balliol. It was worth many hardships to see forty German professors try to mount forty recalcitrant mules. My own horsemanship, as already hinted, is nothing to “write home about”, but compared to those German professors I am a centaur. How it all comes back to me, for only last month, to my great joy, I met the grandson of Ernst Curtius, Professor Robert Ernst Curtius, a worthy descendant.

Greece in those days held many adventures. To one of these I still look back with poignant shame for my own bad manners. We arrived at Vurkano, just as the monastery gates were closing, and were hospitably received. The Hegoumenos led me into supper, placed me by his side, and fed me with titbits from his own plate. The Greek clergy, even the monks who may not marry, are quite simple and friendly to women. After the Roman attitude, it is refreshing to be accepted as a man and a brother--if a weaker one--and not looked at with sour eyes as an incarnate snare. I remember at Tinos I was watching the procession of the miraculous Eikon; the priest carrying the Eikon saw that I was the only West-European woman struggling in a throng of men, and sent a young priest to fetch me to walk by his side. There I could safely watch all that went on, the bowings, the kissings of the Eikon, and the priests’ splendid vestments, the cures. But to return to my Hegoumenos. After supper he said he had a question to ask me. He had heard that rich Englishmen had in their mouths “stranger” (or “guest”) teeth made of gold, and which moved. Was it true? It was. Had I in my mouth by any chance a stranger tooth? I had, I owned, one, but in the best Oriental fashion I deprecated any mention of it. It was but a poor thing, made not of gold, but of an elephant’s tusk. Did I ever take it out? Yes. When? “Oh,” nervously, “only very early in the morning.” After a short sleep--sleep in a Greek monastery is rarely for long--I woke. The Hegoumenos was seated at my bed-head telling his beads and ... watching. Oh, why, why did I not take out that “stranger” tooth? I might so easily have made a good man happy. The Graiæ themselves pointed the way. But I was young, and youth is vain and cruel. He was too polite to press the matter, and withdrew himself, slowly and sadly. In about ten minutes he was back, his face dark with anger. A terrible scandal had arisen in the monastery, its sanctity was outraged; we must leave at once. For one bad moment I feared that the scandal was my wholly unchaperoned state. No such thing. With a Greek _the_ great impropriety for a woman is to travel alone and unprotected. What had happened was this. The friend with whom I was travelling, after a feverish night spent in wrestling with the hosts of Midian, had gone out to get cool, seen a pump in the monastery courtyard, and incontinently proceeded to have a much-needed shower-bath. The news flew like wildfire through the Brotherhood, and the Hegoumenos was summoned to purge the outrage. I ruthlessly sacrificed my kind protector. The “Lord”, I said, was young and ignorant; he knew no Greek letters (a gross libel); he had been born and reared not in Christian England, but in a strange barbarian hyperborean land, where raiment was scanty and Christian modesty unknown. Would His Reverence pardon the young man and teach him better? Fired with missionary zeal, the Hegoumenos sent for the “Lord”, and finding him dumb, pointed to a place about an inch above his wrists, told him that thus far, without danger to his soul, could a Christian man wash himself. The “Lord” was heard to mutter to himself words to the effect that he would “jolly well like to put the Hegoumenos under his own pump”. This I hastily translated into a solemn promise that while life lasted the “Lord”, by the heads of his fathers, would never exceed the limit. The crisis passed. When we left next morning we gave more than the wonted largesse in the hope of atoning for the bath. But the outraged saint was far too fine a Christian and a gentleman to be won by money. The adieus were frigid. We left under a cloud. At parting I gave him my photograph. He placed it below the Eikon of the Virgin and solemnly commended me to her protection against the spiritual dangers to which I was so obviously exposed.

Long after, I visited Mount Athos. Of course, as a woman I could not set foot on the sacred promontory. My friends started off elate in the early morning, to visit the monasteries. Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith, I remember, proudly led the way. We mere women were left behind on the yacht disconsolate. They came back in the evening after the usual Pauline adventures in baskets, and with them came some Mount Athos monks to see the ship and the women, and sell rosaries, etc. One of the monks--a Russian, I think, for I could not understand his Greek, gave me a sheet of letter-paper with, for heading, a brightly coloured picture of the Mountain Mother issuing from Mount Athos. He pointed to the picture and then to me, and then to the mountain, as though he would say: Well, we’ve smuggled in one woman anyhow. It was wonderful to find the Great Mother here in her own Thrace, and worshipped still not by women but by her own celibate priests, the Kouretes.

The British Legation, at Athens, kept open house, and in those days the cheery young men who dwelt there made it a pleasant place. It was the proud boast of some of them that they had never been up to the Acropolis, and that they only knew one word of modern Greek and that was _sitheróthromos_, the Greek for railway station, by means of which they hoped shortly to make their escape. They pretended, of course, that they were frightened to death of me because of my Greek, and that they dare not ask me to dance. They maligned themselves; they feared nothing in the world except that they might have to apply their minds to something sometime. They might have said with Punch’s malingering marine, “Well sir, it’s this way with me. I eats well and I sleeps well, but when I sees a bit o’ work, I’s all of a tremble.”

At Athens I met Samuel Butler. We were in the same hotel; he saw me dining alone and kindly crossed over to ask if he might join me. Of course I was delighted and looked forward to pleasant talks, but, alas! he wanted me only as a safety-valve for his theory on the woman-authorship of the Odyssey, and the buzzing of that crazy bee drowned all rational conversation.

The first time I went to Athens I had the luck to make a small archæological discovery. I was turning over the fragments in the Acropolis Museum, then little more than a lumber-room. In a rubbish pile in the corner, to my great happiness, I lighted on the small stone figure of a bear. The furry hind paw was sticking out and caught my eye. I immediately had her--it was manifestly a she-bear--brought out and honourably placed. She must have been set up originally in the precinct of Artemis Brauronia. Within this precinct, year by year, went on the _arkteia_ or bear-service. No well-born Athenian would marry a girl unless she had accomplished her _bear-service_, unless she was, in a word, _confirmed_ to Artemis. In the _Lysistrata_ of Aristophanes the chorus of women chant of the benefits they have received from the state, and the sacred acts they had accomplished before they came to maturity, and say, “I, wearing a saffron robe, was a bear at the Brauronian festival.” Always these well-born, well-bred little Athenian girls must, to the end of their days, have thought reverently of the Great She-Bear. Among the Apaches to-day, we are told, only ill-bred Americans or Europeans who have never had any “raising” would think of speaking of the Bear without his reverential prefix of “Ostin”, meaning “Old One”, the equivalent of the Roman senator.

* * * * *

Crete I visited again and again, and to Crete I owe the impulse to my two most serious books, the _Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion_ and _Themis_. Somewhere about the turn of the century there had come to light in the palace of Cnossos a clay sealing which was a veritable little manual of primitive Cretan faith and ritual. I shall never forget the moment when Mr. Arthur Evans first showed it me. It seemed too good to be true. It represented the Great Mother standing on her own mountain with her attendant lions, and before her a worshipper in ecstasy. At her side, a shrine with “horns of consecration”. And another sealing read the riddle of the horns. The Minotaur is seated on the royal throne, and the Minotaur is none other than the human King--God wearing the mask of a bull. Here was this ancient ritual of the Mother and the Son which long preceded the worship of the Olympians: here were the true _Prolegomena_. Then when, some years later, I again visited Crete, I met with the sequel that gave me the impulse to _Themis_, the _Hymn of the Kouretes_ found in the temple of Diktaean Zeus. Here we have embodied the magical rite of the Mother and the Son, the induction of the Year-Spirit who long preceded the worship of the Father. My third book on Greek religion, the _Epilegomena_, is, in the main, a résumé of the two first, and an attempt to relate them to our modern religious outlook. I should like to apologise here for the clumsy and pedantic titles _Prolegomena_ and _Epilegomena_, but they really express the relation of the two books to my central work--_Themis_.

* * * * *

Copenhagen possesses a small but valuable collection of vases, and I had long planned to go there. I was delighted when a friend offered to take me in his yacht. My childhood having been passed between sea and moor, I have always had a passion for the sea and for sailing; but I am a wretched sailor, and the friends who are kind enough to take me on their yachts have always cause for repentance. The voyage began with disaster. In the North Sea we met bad weather, and the vessel, a yawl of only 20 tons, was in some danger. When she got back to dock at Cowes, they told us it was a wonder we had not all gone to the bottom. The last thing I remember was crawling on deck and seeing above me waves mountain high that seemed as if they must fall and swallow us. Then I suppose I lost consciousness, for I woke--as I thought--in heaven, in utter bliss. Round me were kneeling angels in blue gowns and white caps with streamers. Under stress of weather we had put in at Heligoland, and they had landed me in a boat and, every hand being needed aboard, had left me lying on the shore, and the women of Heligoland crowded to see me. I suppose it was the relief from the heaving sea, but I knew then the extreme of physical rapture after physical anguish. We were weather-bound for a couple of days and then made our way into the Eider Canal, where all was peace. Arguing on philosophy all day long, for my host was a hard thinker as well as a bold and skilful seaman, we drifted through long lines of one-legged storks and into the Baltic, with its fiords and its beech trees, with their branches dipping into the water. The Baltic is a “short” unpleasant sea, but I remember with pride that I recovered sufficiently to steer the yacht into Copenhagen. There I learnt what honesty is. The keeper of the Museum met me the first day, but the second he was engaged. He left me a huge bunch of keys and the freedom of the place. I had the yacht’s boat in the canal at the Museum door and could easily have looted the whole place. But it seems, among the hardy Norsemen, these things simply are not done. Yet in my own England, at the British Museum, when I am at work a member of the staff never leaves me. Ostensibly he is there to help me, but really as policeman. I remember Sir Francis Darwin telling me that in Stockholm he and a Swedish friend were crossing a bridge and they saw a gold watch lying on the pavement. Sir Francis stooped to pick it up and said: “I suppose we must take it to the police.” “Oh no,” said the Swede, “just put it on the parapet, where it will be safe; the man who lost it is sure to come back.” I fancy if you left a gold watch on the parapet of London Bridge it would not wait long for its owner; yet we English are supposed to be an honest people.

[Illustration: JANE HARRISON AND HOPE MIRRLEES.

_To face page 90._ ]

Stockholm, whither I went to see the great prehistoric museum, was a sad disappointment. I had heard it called the “Venice of the North”. It is common to the verge of squalor. It contains one beautiful building, the architect of which was a Frenchman. I have come to realise that many people, if they see water and some islands or a lake, feel that it must be beautiful. In the same way they find mountains always beautiful and inspiring. The Matterhorn is, to me, one of the ugliest objects in all nature, like nothing on earth but a colossal extracted fang turned upside down, but all the same, every night during the season, the terrace of the Riffel Alp’s Hotel is crowded with archdeacons gazing raptly at the Matterhorn and praising God for the beauties of His handiwork.

To Petersburg I journeyed solely and simply to study the Kertsch antiquities in the Hermitage. I knew no word of Russian, and cared nothing then for Russia; my eyes were blinded for the moment by the “glory that was Greece”. I had taken letters from the British Museum, and was at once shown into a gorgeous room in which sat a still more gorgeous official, smoking cigarettes. He was all courtesy and kindness--what could he do for me? Did I know So-and-so? Had I seen this and that?--but no mention of Kertsch. I am now convinced that, though he must have known the name, he had no notion of its archæological significance, nor even that it had been an Athenian colony. At last, timidly, I tried to state my business. Could I have the vases out of their cases, and was there yet any material unpublished by Stephani that I could have access to? He looked rather blank, and then with a sort of twinkle in his deep-set eyes said if there was anything about social matters or the court in which he could help me, would I command him; but as for these learned matters, would I pardon him if he referred me to the gentleman who was good enough to act as his brains. Here he significantly touched his handsome empty head. He took me to a distant room where a shabby German Pole was at work, surrounded by papers and potsherds. He proved an efficient specialist. I saw my noble backwoodsman no more--no doubt he was gladly rid of the “mad Englishwoman”. I couldn’t help liking the friendly creature; he had the simple, perfect manners of which Russians hold the secret. But in those days I was a ferocious moralist, and his quite open and shameless inadequacy made a premature Bolshevist of me. But oh, what a fool, what an idiot I was to leave Russia without knowing it! I might so easily have made the pilgrimage to Tolstoy; I might even have seen Dostoevsky. It has been all my life my besetting sin that I could only see one thing at a time. I was blinded by over-focus. I am bitterly, eternally punished. Never now shall I see Moscow and Kiev, cities of my dreams.

Literally of my dreams. Twice only in my life have I dreamt a significant dream. This is one. One night soon after the Russian revolution I dreamt I was in a great, ancient forest--what in Russian would be called “a dreaming wood”. In it was cleared a round space, and the space was crowded with huge bears softly dancing. I somehow knew that I had come to teach them to dance the Grand Chain in the Lancers, a square dance now obsolete. I was not the least afraid, only very glad and proud. I went up and began trying to make them join hands and form a circle. It was no good. I tried and tried, but they only shuffled away, courteously waving their paws, intent on their own mysterious doings. Suddenly I knew that these doings were more wonderful and beautiful than any Grand Chain (as, indeed, they might well be!). It was for me to learn, not to teach. I woke up crying, in an ecstasy of humility.

That may stand for what Russia has meant to me. And let there be no misunderstanding. It is not “the Slav soul” that drew me. Not even, indeed, Russian literature. Of course, years before I had read and admired Turgenev and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but at least by the two last I was more frightened than allured. I half resented their probing poignancy, and some passages, like the end of the _Idiot_ and the scene between Dimitri Karamasov and Grushenka, seemed to me in their poignancy to pass the limits of the permissible in art. They hurt too badly and too inwardly. No, it was not these portentous things that laid a spell upon me. It was just the Russian language. If I could have my life over again, I would devote it not to art or literature, but to language. Life itself may hit one hard, but always, always one can take sanctuary in language. Language is as much an art and as sure a refuge as painting or music or literature. It reflects and interprets and makes bearable life; only it is a wider, because more subconscious, life.

CONCLUSION

I have spoken much of people, nothing of books--yet the influence of books on my life has been intimate and incessant. When I first came to London I became a Life Member of the London Library. London life was costly, but I felt that, if the worst came to the worst, with a constant supply of books and a small dole for tobacco, I could cheerfully face the Workhouse. Three books stand out as making three stages in my thinking: Aristotle’s _Ethics_, Bergson’s _L’Évolution créatrice_ and Freud’s _Totemism and Taboo_. By nature I was a Platonist, but Aristotle, I think, helped me more than Plato. It happened that the _Ethics_ was among the set books for my year at Cambridge. To realise the release that Aristotle brought, you must have been reared as I was in a narrow school of Evangelicalism--reared with sin always present, with death and judgement before you, Hell and Heaven to either hand. It was like coming out of a madhouse into a quiet college quadrangle where all was liberty and sanity, and you became a law to yourself. The doctrine of virtue as the Mean--what an uplift and revelation to one “born in sin”! The notion of the _summum bonum_ as an “energy”, as an exercise of personal faculty, to one who had been taught that God claimed all, and the notion of the “perfect life” that was to include as a matter of course friendship. I remember walking up and down in the College garden, thinking could it possibly be true, were the chains really broken and the prison doors open.

In 1907 came _L’Évolution créatrice_. Off and on I had read philosophy all my life, from Heracleitos to William James, but of late years I had read it less and less, feeling that I got nothing new, only a ceaseless shuffling of the cards, a juggling with the same glass balls, and then suddenly it seemed this new Moses struck the rock and streams gushed forth in the desert. But I need not tell of an experience shared in those happy years by every thinking man in Europe.

With Freud it was quite different. By temperament I am, if not a prude, at least a Puritan, and at first the ugliness of it all sickened me. I hate a sick-room, and have a physical fear of all obsessions and insanity. Still I struggled on, feeling somehow that behind and below all this sexual mud was something big and real. Then fortunately I lighted on _Totemism and Taboo_, and at once the light broke and I felt again the sense of release. Here was a big constructive imagination; here was a mere doctor laying bare the origins of Greek drama as no classical scholar had ever done, teaching the anthropologist what was really meant by his _totem and taboo_, probing the mysteries of sin, of sanctity, of sacrament--a man who, because he understood, purged the human spirit from fear. I have no confidence in psycho-analysis as a method of therapeutics. I am sure that Mr. Roger Fry is right and Freud quite wrong as to the psychology of art, but I am equally sure that for generations almost every branch of human knowledge will be enriched and illumined by the imagination of Freud.

* * * * *

Looking back over my own life, I see with what halting and stumbling steps I made my way to my own special subject. Greek literature as a specialism I early felt was barred to me. The only field of research that the Cambridge of my day knew of was textual criticism, and for fruitful work in that my scholarship was never adequate. We Hellenists were, in truth, at that time a “people who sat in darkness”, but we were soon to see a great light, two great lights--archæology, anthropology. Classics were turning in their long sleep. Old men began to see visions, young men to dream dreams. I had just left Cambridge when Schliemann began to dig at Troy. Among my own contemporaries was J. G. Frazer, who was soon to light the dark wood of savage superstition with a gleam from _The Golden Bough_. The happy title of that book--Sir James Frazer has a veritable genius for titles--made it arrest the attention of scholars. They saw in comparative anthropology a serious subject actually capable of elucidating a Greek or Latin text. Tylor had written and spoken; Robertson Smith, exiled for heresy, had seen the Star in the East; in vain; we classical deaf-adders stopped our ears and closed our eyes; but at the mere sound of the magical words “Golden Bough” the scales fell--we heard and understood. Then Arthur Evans set sail for his new Atlantis and telegraphed news of the Minotaur from his own labyrinth; perforce we saw this was a serious matter, it affected the “Homeric Question”.

By nature, I am sure, I am not an archæologist--still less an anthropologist--the “beastly devices of the heathen” weary and disgust me. But, borne along by the irresistible tide of adventure, I dabbled in both archæology and anthropology, and I am glad I did, for both were needful for my real subject--religion. When I say “religion”, I am instantly obliged to correct myself; it is not religion, it is ritual that absorbs me. I have elsewhere[2] tried to show that Art is not the handmaid of Religion, but that Art in some sense springs out of Religion, and that between them is a connecting link, a bridge, and that bridge is Ritual. On that bridge, emotionally, I halt. It satisfies something within me that is appeased by neither Religion nor Art. A ritual dance, a ritual procession with vestments and lights and banners, move me as no sermon, no hymn, no picture, no poem has ever moved me; perhaps it is because a procession seems to me like life, like _durée_ itself, caught and fixed before me. Only twice have I seen a ritual dance, and first the dance of the Seises before the high altar in the Cathedral at Seville. It was at Carnival time I saw it. I felt instantly that it was frankly Pagan. Its origin is, as the Roman Church frankly owns, “perdue dans la nuit des temps”--we can but conjecture that it took its rise in the dances of the Kouretes of Crete to Mother and Son. The dance was accompanied by a prayer to the setting sun, a prayer for light and healing. The movements executed by six choristers are attenuated to a single formal step. It is decorous, even prim, like some stiff stylised shadow. But it is strangely moving in the fading light with the wondrous setting of the high altar and the golden grille, and above all the sound of the harsh, plangent Spanish voices. Great Pan, indeed, is dead--his ghost still dances.

[2] _Art and Ritual_ (Home University Library).

Only last year I saw a wondrous ritual procession, a marked contrast to the Seville dance. It is held at Echternach each year, on the Tuesday after Pentecost. It is, I think, the most living survival of the ritual dance to be seen in Europe. Thanks to the kindness of a Luxembourgoise lady, Madame Emil Mayerisch de Saint Hubert, I was able to observe it in every detail. The dancing procession is held now in honour of our Saxon saint, St. Willibrord, but obviously it goes back to magical days. The dancers muster at the bridge below the little town and, gathering numbers as they go, dance through the streets, halting here and there and ending in the Basilica. As the dance is magical, it is essential that the whole town should be traversed. The clergy are in attendance, any one and every one dances or rather leaps, for it is a jumping step; like the Cretan Kouretes they “leap for health and wealth”. I saw an old, old woman, scarcely able to walk, but she “lifted her foot in the dance”. I saw a woman with a sick baby in her arms, and she danced for healing; but most of all it was the young men, the Kouretes, who danced.

The ritual dance is all but dead, but the ritual drama, the death and the resurrection of the Year-Spirit, still goes on. I realised this when I first heard Mass celebrated according to the Russian, that is substantially the Greek rite. There you have the real enacting of a mystery--the mystery of the death and resurrection of the Year-Spirit which preceded drama. It is hidden, out of sight; the priest comes out from behind the golden gate to announce the accomplishment. It is the coming out of the Messenger in a Greek play to announce the Death and the Resurrection. The Roman Church has sadly marred its mystery. The rite of consecration is performed in public before the altar and loses thereby half its significance.

I mention these ritual dances, this ritual drama, this bridge between art and life, because it is things like these that I was all my life blindly seeking. A thing has little charm for me unless it has on it the patina of age. Great things in literature, Greek plays for example, I most enjoy when behind their bright splendours I see moving darker and older shapes. That must be my _apologia pro vita mea_.

* * * * *

At the close of one’s reminiscences it is fitting that one should say something as to how life looks at the approach of Death. As to Death, when I was young, personal immortality seemed to me axiomatic. The mere thought of Death made me furious. I was so intensely alive I felt I could defy any one, anything--God, or demon, or Fate herself--to put me out. All that is changed now. If I think of Death at all it is merely as a negation of life, a close, a last and necessary chord. What I dread is disease, that is, bad, disordered life, not Death, and disease, so far, I have escaped. I have no hope whatever of personal immortality, no desire even for a future life. My consciousness began in a very humble fashion with my body; with my body, very quietly, I hope it will end.

Nox est perpetua una dormienda.

And then there is another thought. We are told now that we bear within us the seeds, not of one, but of two lives--the life of the race and the life of the individual. The life of the race makes for racial immortality; the life of the individual suffers _l’attirance de la mort_, the lure of death; and this from the outset. The unicellular animals are practically immortal; the complexity of the individual spells death. The unmarried and the childless cut themselves loose from racial immortality, and are dedicate to individual life--a side track, a blind alley, yet surely a supreme end in itself. By what miracle I escaped marriage I do not know, for all my life long I fell in love. But, on the whole, I am glad. I do not doubt that I lost much, but I am quite sure I gained more. Marriage, for a woman at least, hampers the two things that made life to me glorious--friendship and learning. In man it was always the friend, not the husband, that I wanted. Family life has never attracted me. At its best it seems to me rather narrow and selfish; at its worst, a private hell. The rôle of wife and mother is no easy one; with my head full of other things I might have dismally failed. On the other hand, I have a natural gift for community life. It seems to me sane and civilised and economically right. I like to live spaciously, but rather plainly, in large halls with great spaces and quiet libraries. I like to wake in the morning with the sense of a great, silent garden round me. These things are, or should be, and soon will be, forbidden to the private family; they are right and good for the community. If I had been rich I should have founded a learned community for women, with vows of consecration and a beautiful rule and habit; as it is, I am content to have lived many years of my life in a college. I think, as civilisation advances, family life will become, if not extinct, at least much modified and curtailed.

* * * * *

Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator, and, if you have really played your part, you are more than content to sit down and watch. All life has become a thing less strenuous, softer and warmer. You are allowed all sorts of comfortable little physical licences; you may doze through dull lectures, you may go to bed early when you are bored. The young all pay you a sort of tender deference to which you know you have no real claim. Every one is solicitous to help you; it seems the whole world offers you a kind, protecting arm. Life does not cease when you are old, it only suffers a rich change. You go on loving, only your love, instead of a burning, fiery furnace, is the mellow glow of an autumn sun. You even go on falling in love, and for the same foolish reasons--the tone of a voice, the glint of a strangely set eye--only you fall so gently; and in old age you may even show a man that you like to be with him without his wanting to marry you or thinking you want to marry him.

But then “old age is lonely”. Not if you follow my example! My friends, men and women, are most of them some twenty years younger than I am. I have only one friend made in my ’seventies, Mr. Guy le Strange, if he will let me so account him. He taught me, with infinite patience and kindness, when I was over seventy the elements of Persian, a sure road to my heart. And, I admit, Fate has been very kind to me. In my old age she has sent me, to comfort me, a ghostly daughter, dearer than any child after the flesh, more gifted than any possible offspring of Aunt Glegg.

* * * * *

I should like to run on and tell of my life since I left Cambridge. For leave Cambridge, with measureless regret, I did. I began to feel that I had lived too long the strait Academic life with my mind intently focussed on the solution of a few problems. I wanted before the end came to see things more freely and more widely, and, above all, to get the new focus of another civilisation. Russia, my “Land of Heart’s Desire”, was closed to me. France and America in France have received me with a kindness I can neither repay nor forget.

If only I might tell of the wonderful new friends, French and Russian, I have made in Paris and at Pontigny! But these things are too present, too intimate--so my tale must end.

AMERICAN WOMEN’S UNIVERSITY CLUB,

4 RUE DE CHEVREUSE, PARIS.