When Robert and Catherine were married, they went to live at the Rectory of Murewell, in Surrey. This old house is at Peper Harow, three miles west of Godalming and a mile or so from Borough Farm. It was leased for one summer by Mrs. Ward. A plain, square house of stone, much discolored by the weather, it could hardly be called attractive in itself. But stepping back to the road, with its picturesque stone wall surmounted by foliage, and viewing the house as it appears from there, flanked on the left by a fine spreading elm and on the right by a tall, pointed fir and a cluster of oaks, with a little flower garden under the windows and the gracefully curving walk leading past the door in a semicircle stretching from gate to gate, the ugly house is transformed into a home of beauty, where Robert and Catherine, one can well imagine, might have been quite happy and contented with their surroundings.
In the rear of the house is the garden, famous for its phloxes, the scene of many walks and family confidences. At the farther end is the gate where Langham poured out the story of his life in passionate speech, impelled by the equally passionate sympathy of Rose, only to recall himself a moment later, “the critic in him making the most bitter, remorseless mock of all these heroics and despairs the other self had been indulging in.”
Only a short walk from the Rectory is the little church of Peper Harow, the scene of Robert’s early clerical labors, and further on is the large and beautiful Peper Harow Park, the present home of Lord Middleton. This attractive park is the original of Squire Wendover’s, but the house itself is not described. The fine library owned by the Squire, which so delighted Robert Elsmere with its many rare books, was in reality the famous Bodleian Library of Oxford, with which the author became familiar very early in life.
Three characters from real life, each a man of marked individuality, stand out prominently in the pages of “Robert Elsmere.” These are Professor Mark Pattison, whose strong personality and scholarly attainments suggested Squire Wendover; Professor Thomas H. Green, the original of Mr. Grey; and the melancholy Swiss philosopher, poet, and dreamer Amiel, who was the prototype of Langham.
The theme of the novel is the development of Robert Elsmere’s character and the gradual change of his religious views, brought about through many a bitter struggle. In this the principal influence was that of Roger Wendover, a typical English squire of large possessions, but, in addition, a scholar of the first rank, the possessor of a large library filled with rare and important volumes of history, philosophy, science, and religion, with the contents of which he was thoroughly familiar, and an author of two great books, one of which had stirred up a tremendous excitement in the circles of English religious thought.
The Pentateuch, the Prophets, the Gospels, St. Paul, Tradition, the Fathers, Protestantism and Justification by Faith, the Eighteenth Century, the Broad Church Movement, Anglican Theology—the Squire had his say about them all. And while the coolness and frankness of the method sent a shock of indignation and horror through the religious public, the subtle and caustic style, and the epigrams with which the book was strewn, forced both the religious and the irreligious public to read, whether they would or no. A storm of controversy rose round the volumes, and some of the keenest observers of English life had said at the time, and maintained since, that the publication of the book had made or marked an epoch.
| THE RECTORY OF PEPER HAROW |
Against the influence of such a book, and more particularly against a growing intimacy with its author, Robert Elsmere felt himself as helpless as a child. The squire’s talk “was simply the outpouring of one of the richest, most skeptical, and most highly trained of minds on the subject of Christian origins.” His two books were, he said, merely an interlude in his life-work, which had been devoted to an “exhaustive examination of human records” in the preparation of a great History of Testimony which had required learning the Oriental languages and sifting and comparing the entire mass of existing records of classical antiquity—India, Persia, Egypt, and Judea—down to the Renaissance.
Reference has already been made to the influence of Professor Mark Pattison upon the early life of Mrs. Ward. To create the Squire she had only to imagine the house in the great park of Peper Harow, equipped with a library like the Bodleian, and inhabited by a person who might be otherwise like any English squire, but in mental equipment a duplicate to some extent of the Rector of Lincoln. Professor Pattison’s father was a strict evangelical. He gave his son a good education, and the boy early manifested a delight in literature and learning. He soon developed an independence of character, and, refusing to confine his reading to the prescribed books of orthodoxy, delved into the classics extensively as well as the English literature of Pope, Addison, and Swift. He was graduated at Oxford in 1836, and took his M.A. degree in 1840. By this time he had abandoned the evangelical teachings of his youth, and with other young men came under the influence of Newman, in whose house he went to live. When Newman went into the Roman Catholic Church in 1845, Pattison was not so much shocked as others. Indeed, he confessed that he “might have dropped off to Rome himself in some moment of mental and physical depression or under pressure of some arguing convert.” But Pattison, who was now a Fellow at Lincoln College, was thoroughly devoted to his work and was fast gaining a great reputation, not only for his magnetic influence upon young men, but as one of the ablest of college tutors and lecturers. In 1861 he became Rector of Lincoln. He was an indefatigable writer, contributing to many magazines and to the “Encyclopædia Britannica.” An article on “Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750” aroused widespread comment. His literary work was marked by evidences of most painstaking research coupled with a profound scholarship and excellent judgment in the arrangement of his material. He devoted a lifetime to the preparation of a history of learning—a stupendous undertaking of which only a portion was ever completed. He possessed a library said to be the largest private collection of his time in Oxford. It numbered fourteen thousand volumes, and was extraordinarily complete in books on the history of learning and philosophy in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Of Professor Pattison’s personality his biographer says:—