“The evening shadows are beginning to fall as we see Christ raised on the cross. He hangs there for twenty minutes, and most indescribably sublime are the words given from thence. When all is over, it is so real, you think that this time death must really have taken place. The three crosses, the bound thieves, the fainting women, the mounted centurion, the soldiers drawing lots, all seem to belong to real events, enacted, not acted. The deposition of the dead Christ on the white sheet is a vast Rubens picture.[491]
“The resurrection is more theatrical, but in the final scene, where the perfect figure of the spiritual Christ is seen for the last time, he goes far away with his disciples and the Marys, and then, upon Olivet, in the midst of the group relieved against the golden sunset, he solemnly blesses his beloved ones, and whilst you gaze rapt, seems to be raised a little, and then you look for him and he is not.
“Each one of the four thousand spectators then sits in a vast sense of loneliness amid the silent Bavarian hills. The long tension is over. The day is lived out. The Master we have followed we can follow no longer with material sight. He has suffered, died, and risen from the grave, and is no longer with us: in the heavens alone can we hope to behold Him as He is.”
After leaving Ober-Ammergau, Hugh Bryans and I went with the Lowthers and Mrs. Ridley to Rothenburg, still an unaltered diminutive mediaeval city, and the most interesting place in Germany. Then I paid a delightful visit to my dear Bunsen friends at Carlsruhe and Herrenalb, and on our way back to England we saw the marvellous Schloss Eltz, going thither in a bullock-cart up the bed of the river from the attractive little inn at Moselkern, kept by a very old man and woman, sitting upon the very border-land of heaven.
During the varied occupations of this summer of 1890 I was asked to write biographies of several members of my family for the “Dictionary of National Biography,” and did so. My articles appeared, but greatly altered. The editor had a perfect right to condense them at his pleasure, but I was astonished to find additions. Bishop Hare was saddled with a third son, Richard Hare, “an apothecary of Winchester,” who was the father of James Hare, afterwards called the “Hare with many friends.” This son of my great-great-grandfather is entirely imaginary; our family was never in the remotest degree related to Richard or James Hare. It gave one a terrible impression of how the veracity and usefulness of a work of really national importance might be spoilt by the conceited ignorance of an editor; and to add such trash to an article published with the signature of another was as unjustifiable as it was abominable.
To Miss Leycester.
“Woodbastwick Hall, August 6, 1890.—I have enjoyed a visit at Cobham very much. We had only the usual circle of guests, but summer days in that beautiful place are a delicious halt in life. Thence I went to Osterley, which looked bewitching, with its swans floating in sunshine beyond the shade of the old cedars. Those radiant gardens will now bloom through five years unseen, for Lord Jersey has accepted the Governorship of New South Wales, which can only be from a sense of duty, as it is an immense self-sacrifice, though he and Lady Jersey can never fail anywhere to be a centre of all that is most interesting and useful. To English society her absence will be a terrible loss, as, with the utmost simplicity of high breeding, she is the one person left in England who is capable of holding a salon and keeping it filled, to the advantage—in every best sense—of all who enter it. Nothing can be more charming than the relation of Lord and Lady Jersey to their children, and the fact that the latter were always of the party, yet never in its way, was the greatest testimony to their up-bringing. The weather was really hot enough for the luxury of open windows everywhere and for sitting out all day. The party was a most pleasant one—M. de Staël, the Russian Ambassador; Lady Crawford, still lovely as daylight, and her nice daughter Lady Evelyn; Lady Galloway, brimming with cleverness; M. de Montholon, French Minister at Athens; Mr. and Mrs. Frank Parker, most amusing and cheery; Sir Philip Currie, General Fielding, &c. Everything was most unostentatiously sumptuous and most enjoyable. On Monday we were sent in three carriages to Richmond, where we saw Sir Francis Cooke’s collections, very curious and worth seeing as it is, but which, if his pictures deserved the names they bear, would be one of the finest galleries in the world. Then, after a luxurious luncheon at the ‘Star and Garter,’ we went on to Ham House, where Lady Huntingtower showed the curiosities, including all the old dresses kept in a chest in the long gallery. Finally, I told the Jersey children—splendid audience—a long story in a glade of the Osterley garden, where the scene might have recalled the ‘Decameron.’ I was very sorry to leave these kind friends, and to know it would be so long before I saw them again.
“I came here with the Lowthers, finding kind Mrs. Cator surrounded by three sons and eight daughters. This is a luxurious modern house, replacing one which was burnt. Only a lawn and trees separate it from the Norfolk Broads, and we have floated down the Bere in a delightful sailing-boat, through the huge thirsty water-plants, to the weird remains of St. Benet in the Holme, of which the Bishops of Norwich are still titular Abbots.”
“Sept. 6.—I have enjoyed a visit to Holmbury (Mr. Leveson Gower’s), now let to Mr. Knowles of the Nineteenth Century—a lovely place with a delightful view over Surrey plains. I like its homelike character better than the larger place of Mr. Ralli, whither we went yesterday to a garden-party. Mr. Knowles is most delightful company, full of pertinent and never impertinent questions. He has talked much of Tennyson, with whom his family are very intimate, and who used often to stay with him when he first married and lived on Clapham Common. Tennyson speaks every thought without respect of persons. ‘What fish is this?’ (at dinner).—‘Whiting.’—‘Yes, the meanest fish there is.’ Yet his kindness of heart is such, that when his partridge was afterwards given him almost raw, he ate steadily through it, for fear his hostess might be vexed.
“After dinner Tennyson will sit smoking his pipe by the chimney-corner. That is his great time for inspiration, but he will seldom write anything down. ‘Thousands of lines just float up this chimney,’ he said one day. Sometimes he will go into the drawing-room and recite something he has just composed. Some of these poems Mr. Knowles has written down. If asked to repeat them again, Tennyson can never do it in the same way, something is always altered or forgotten: so hundreds of his poems are lost. One day lately, when he was unusually melancholy, his nurse, whom he greatly likes (he always has a nurse now), took him to task. ‘Mr. Tennyson, you ought to be ashamed of yourself for grumbling in this way: you ought to be expressing your gratitude for your recovery from your bad illness by giving us something—by giving it to the world.’ And he took her reproof very well, and went away to his own room, and in half-an-hour had written his lines ‘Crossing the Bar,’ which he gave to her.