Lady John Russell Part 38

[96] They named it Dunrozel after Rozel in Normandy, supposed to be the original home of the Russells.

In 1885 the marriage of her son Rollo to Miss Alice G.o.dfrey was a great happiness to her. But in little more than a year, soon after the birth of a son, Mrs. Rollo Russell died, and again Lady Russell suffered deeply, for she always found the sorrows of her children harder to bear than her own.

To retire more and more from the world of many engagements and important affairs was easy to her, easier than it proves to many who have figured there with less distinction. Playing a prominent part in that world does not make people happy; but, as a rule, it prevents them from being contented with anything else. It was not so with her; in the days most crowded with successes and excitements her thoughts kept flying home. She had always felt that a quiet, busy family life was the one most natural to her. When she was a girl at Minto, helping to educate her younger brothers and sisters, she had written in her diary:

_August_ 26, 1836

Chiefly unto children, O Lord, do I feel myself called; in them I see Thy image reflected more pure than in anything else in this sinful though beautiful world, and in serving them my love to Thee increases.

Her wish was fulfilled to an unusual degree. One of a large family of brothers and sisters, she was still helping in the education of the younger ones when she married, and her marriage at once brought her the care of a young family; soon, too, children of her own; while her old age brought her the charge of successive grandchildren. During the lifetime of Lord and Lady Amberley their children often spent many months at Pembroke Lodge while their parents were abroad, and when both father and mother had died the two boys came to live with their grandparents. Ten years later her youngest son's boy was brought to her on the day of his mother's death, when he was two months old, and remained with her till her son's second marriage in 1891. The children of her stepdaughters were also loving grandchildren to her, and often came for long visits to Pembroke Lodge.

Lady Russell had sometimes thought that when days of leisure came, she would give some of her time to literary work, and write reminiscences of the many interesting men and women she had known and the stirring events she had lived through; but the unexpected and daily cares and duties which came upon her made this impossible. [97] She was one who would never neglect the living needs of those around her, and she gave her time and thoughts to the care of her grandchildren with glad and loving devotion.

[97] The only book Lady Russell published was "Family Worship"; a small volume of selections from the Bible and prayers for daily use. It was first published in 1876.

One of her greatest pleasures was to see her own ideals and enthusiasms reflected in the young; and next to the care of her family the prosperity of the village school at Petersham was perhaps nearest her heart. It grew and flourished through her devotion. In 1891 it was generously taken over by the British and Foreign School Society, but the change made no difference to her interest nor to the time she gave to it. The warm affection of the people of Petersham was a great happiness to her; after long illness and enforced absence from the village she wrote to her daughter: "You can't think what good it did me to see a village friend again."

The feeling among the villagers may be gathered from two brief pa.s.sages in letters written after her death: a gardener in Petersham alluded to her as "our much-loved friend, Countess Russell," and another man--who had been educated at Petersham School--wrote: "She was really like a mother to many of we 'Old Scholars.'"

Lady Russell's letters will show that her interest in politics remained as keen as ever to the end; and she eagerly watched the changes which affected Ireland. To the end of her life she retained the fervour of her youthful Radicalism, and with advancing years her religious opinions became more and more broad. To her there was no infallibility in any Bible, any prophet, any Church. With an ever-deepening reverence for the life and teaching of Jesus, she yet felt that "The highest Revelation is not made by Christ, but comes directly from the Universal Mind to our minds." [98] Her last public appearance in Richmond was at the opening of the new Free Church, on April 16, 1896, which she had joined some years before as being the community holding views nearer to her own than any other.

[98] Rev. F.W. Robertson, of Brighton. Sermons, 1st Series.

There is a side of Lady Russell's mind which her letters do not adequately represent. She was a great reader, and in her letters (written off with surprising rapidity) she does not often say much about the books she was so fond of discussing in talk. Among novelists, Sir Walter Scott was perhaps the one she read most often; Jane Austen too was a favourite; but she also much enjoyed many of the later novelists, especially Charles d.i.c.kens and George Eliot.

In poetry her taste was in some respects the taste of an earlier generation; she could not join, for instance, in the depreciation of Byron, nor could she sympathize with the unbounded admiration for Keats which she met with among the young. Milton, Cowper, Burns, Byron, and Longfellow were among those oftenest read, but Shakespeare always remained supreme, and as the years went by her wonder and admiration seemed only to grow stronger and deeper with every fresh reading of his greatest plays; and the intervals without some Shakespeare reading, either aloud or to herself, were short and rare. She had not an intimate knowledge of Sh.e.l.ley, but in the later years of her life she became deeply impressed by the beauty and music of his poetry, which she liked best to hear read aloud.

Tennyson she loved, and latterly also Browning, with protests against his obscurity and his occasionally most unmusical English. The inspiration of his brave and optimistic philosophy she felt strongly. She was extremely fond of reading Dante, and she was better acquainted with German and Italian poetry than most cultivated women. But though she read much and often in the works of famous writers, this did not prevent her keeping abreast with the literature of the day. She was strongly attracted by speculative books, not too technical, and by the works of theologians whose views were broad and tolerant of doubt. In 1847 she mentions reading some of Dr. Channing's writings "with the greatest delight"; and some years afterwards she wrote: "Began 'Life of Channing'; interesting in the highest degree--an echo of all those high and n.o.ble thoughts of which this earth is not yet worthy, but which I firmly believe will one day reign on it supreme." In later years she was deeply impressed by the writings of Dr.

Martineau, and read many of his books. But she was not interested in philosophical inquiry for its own sake; it was the importance of the moral and religious issues at stake in such discussions that attracted her.

History and biography it was natural she should read eagerly, and it was characteristic of her to praise and condemn actions long past with an intensity such as is usually excited by contemporary events. Until a few years before her death she rose early to secure a s.p.a.ce of time for reading and meditation before the duties of the day began. Unless ill-health could be pleaded, fiction and light reading were banished from the morning hours.

She believed in strict adherence to such self-imposed sumptuary regulations, whether they applied to the body or to the pleasures of the mind.

In the course of her long life she became personally acquainted with nearly all the princ.i.p.al writers of the Victorian era, and some of them she knew well.

Among the earliest friends of Lord and Lady John Russell were Sydney Smith, Thomas Moore, and Macaulay. There is a note in verse written by Lady John to Samuel Rogers, which will serve at least to suggest how readily her fancy and good spirits might run into rhyme on the occasion of some family rejoicing or for a children's play.

_To Mr. Rogers, who was expected to breakfast and forgot to come_

CHESHAM PLACE, 1843

When a poet a lady offends Is it prose her forgiveness obtains?

And from Rogers can less make amends Than the humblest and sweetest of strains?

In glad expectation our board With roses and lilies we graced; But alas! the bard kept not his word, He came not for whom they were placed.

Sad and silent our toast we bespread, At the empty chair looked we and sighed; All insipid tea, b.u.t.ter, and bread, For the salt of his wit was denied.

Now in wrath we acknowledge how well He the "Pleasures of Memory" who drew, For mankind from his magical sh.e.l.l Gives the "Pains of Forgetfulness" too.

Rogers wrote in answer:--

CARA, CARISSIMA, CRUDELISSIMA,--If such is to be the reward for my transgressions, what crimes shall I not commit before I die? I shall shoot Victoria to-day, and Louis Philippe to-morrow.

But to be serious, I am at a loss how to thank you as I ought. How I lament that I have hung my harp upon the willow!

Yours ever,

S.R.

In later years Thackeray and Charles d.i.c.kens were welcome guests, and the cordial friendship between Lord and Lady John and d.i.c.kens lasted till his death in 1870. d.i.c.kens said in a speech at Liverpool in 1869 that "there was no man in England whom he respected more in his public capacity, loved more in his private capacity, or from whom he had received more remarkable proofs of his honour and love of literature than Lord John Russell."

Among poets, Tennyson and Browning were true friends; Longfellow also visited Pembroke Lodge, and impressed Lady Russell by his gentle and spiritual nature; and Lowell was one of her most agreeable guests. With Sir Henry Taylor, whose "Philip van Artevelde" she admired, the intercourse was, from her youth to old age, intimate and affectionate.

Mr. Lecky, a faithful friend, gave a picture of the society at Pembroke Lodge, which may be quoted here:

For some years after Lord Russell's retirement from ministerial life he gathered around him at Pembroke Lodge a society that could hardly be equalled--certainly not surpa.s.sed--in England. In the summer Sunday afternoons there might be seen beneath the shade of those majestic oaks nearly all that was distinguished in English politics, and much that was distinguished in English literature, and few eminent foreigners visited England without making a pilgrimage to the old statesman. [99]

[99] "Life of Lord John Russell," by Stuart J. Reid, p. 351.

Mr. Frederic Harrison was one of Lady Russell's best friends in the last years of her life, and her keen interest in the Irish Question brought her into close and intimate intercourse with Mr. Justin McCarthy, who knew her so well in these days of busy and sequestered old age that his recollections, given in the last chapter of this volume, are valuable.

Among the men of science she knew best were Sir Richard Owen, a near neighbour in Richmond Park, Sir Joseph Hooker, and Professor Tyndall, one of the most genial and delightful of her guests.

There is a pa.s.sage in Sir Henry Taylor's autobiography which speaks of her in earlier times, but it expresses an impression she made till her death on many who met her:

I have been rather social lately, ... and went to a party at Lord John Russell's, where I met the Archbishop of York.... A better meeting was with Lady Lotty Elliot, the one of the Minto Elliots who is now about the age that her elder sisters were when I first knew them some sixteen or eighteen years ago.... They are a fine set of girls and women, those Minto Elliots, full of literature and poetry and nature; and Lady John, whom I knew best in former days, is still very attractive to me; and now that she is relieved from the social toils of a First Minister's wife, I mean to renew and improve my relations with her, if she has no objection.... She is very interesting to me, as having kept herself pure from the world with a fresh and natural and not ungifted mind in the world's most crowded ways. I recollect some years ago going through the heart of the City, somewhere behind Cheapside, to have come upon a courtyard of an antique house, with gra.s.s and flowers and green trees growing as quietly as if it was the garden of a farm-house in Northumberland. Lady John reminds me of it.

The charm of her company, apart from the kindliness of her manner, lay in an immediate responsiveness to all that was going on around her, and the sense her talk and presence conveyed of a life controlled by a homely, dignified, strenuous tradition. It was the spontaneity of her sympathy which all her life long drew to her defenders, dispirited or hopeful, of struggling causes, and so many idealists, confident or resigned, shabby or admired. Any with a cause at heart, an end to aim at beyond personal ends, found in her a companion who seemed at once to understand how bitter were the checks or how important the triumphs they had met, and to them her company was a singular refreshment and inspiration, amid the polite or undisguised indifference of the world. She could listen with ardour; and if this sympathy was there for comparative strangers, still more was it at the service of those who possessed her affection. She reflected instantaneously their joys and troubles; indeed, she made both so much her own that those she loved were often tempted at first to hide their troubles from her. Such natures cannot usually disguise their emotions, and though she could conceal her own physical sufferings so as almost to mislead those with whom she lived, her feelings were plainly legible. If anything was said in her presence which pained her, her distress was visible in a moment; and as a beautiful consequence of this transparent expressiveness, her gaiety was infectious and her affection shone out upon those she loved with tenderest radiance.

After Lord Russell's death political events can no longer be used as a thread to connect her letters and other writings together; but the following pa.s.sages, chosen over many years, will, it is hoped, give to those who never knew her some idea of her as she is remembered by those who did.

On Lady Georgiana Peel's first birthday after the death of her father Lady Russell sent her the following verses:

To GEORGY

_For her Birthday, February 6, 1879._

TUNE: _"Lochnagar."_

What music so early, so gently awakes me, And why as I listen these fast falling tears; And what is the magic that so swiftly takes me Far back on my road, o'er the dust of dead years?

Voice of the past, in thy sweetness and sadness Thy magic enthralling, thy beauty and power, Oh voice of the past! in thy deep holy sadness, I know thee and yield to thee one little hour.

Once more rings the birthday with merry young laughter, Our bairnies once more are around us at play; Their little hearts reck not of what may come after, As lightly they weave the fresh flowers of to-day.

Now to thy father's loved hand gaily clinging, To ask for the kiss he stoops fondly to gi'e; To his care-laden spirit once more thou art bringing The freshness of thine, bonny winsome wee Gee![100]