Fadeth my dream—and my day is declining,
But love lifts the gloamin’ and smooths the rough way.”
Many visits were paid at this time to her son Rollo, who had bought a house near Hindhead, in Surrey. The wild scenery and the heather-covered moors reminded Lady Russell of her native country. Her interest in politics was very keen, and she supported Mr. Gladstone’s Irish policy with sympathy and approval. Her letters and journals are full of defence of Home Rule, and in 1893 she would have made short work of the House of Lords, for she writes in almost prophetic tones: “I would simply declare it, by Act of the House of Commons, injurious to the best interests of the nation and for ever dissolved. Then it may either show its attachment to the Constitution by giving its assent to its own annihilation, or oblige us to break through the worn-out Constitution and declare their assent unnecessary.”
Lady Russell’s health, never very robust, began to fail about 1892; in 1897 she had an illness from which she only partially recovered. Early in January 1898 she suffered from influenza; bronchitis supervened, and she died at the age of eighty-three on the 17th. She was buried on the 21st at Chenies, beside her husband.
A memorial to her, erected in the Free Church, Richmond, the place of worship she attended in her later years, by a few personal friends, was unveiled by Frederic Harrison on 14th July 1900.
A word may fitly be said here in regard to Lady John Russell’s religion. Brought up in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, she became in the latter part of her life a Unitarian. She disapproved of any doctrine that ascribed to the clergy spiritual functions or privileges different from those of other men. She shared her husband’s dislike of the Oxford movement. All her written and oral utterances on the subject of religion prove that for her it meant love both of God and man. Once in conversation Herbert Spencer assured her that the prospect of annihilation had no terrors for him, and Lady Russell confesses that she was thinking all the time that without immortality life was “all a cheat, and without a Father in heaven, right and wrong, love, conscience, joy, sorrow, are words without a meaning, and the Universe, if governed at all, is governed by a malignant spirit who gives us hopes and aspirations never to be fulfilled, affections to be wasted, a thirst for knowledge never to be quenched.” In those thoughts we may read her Confession of Faith.
She was always for tolerance in religion, and even encouraged independence of mind in such matters in her children, for she recognised that the voice of God might not sound the same to the child as it did to the father and mother, and that a child should never be afraid to speak freely to its parents. The only book she ever published—though her letters and journals and the occasional verses written for family events show literary aptitude and something more—was Family Worship (1876), a small volume of selections from the Bible and prayers for everyday use.
Lady John Russell used her very considerable intellectual gifts not for herself but for others, for her husband, her children, her friends. Her mind was intensely receptive and ever eager for information. Thinking always more of others than of herself, she could throw herself into their thoughts and feelings. Although her lot had been thrown in the world’s most crowded ways, she was unworldliness itself, and she seems to have had little belief in the value of experience. When her eldest son, Lord Amberley, became engaged to be married at the age of twenty-one, she owned that she might have wished him to wait till he was a little older, but she continued:
“On the other hand, there is something very delightful in his marrying while heart and mind are fresh and innocent and unworldly, and I even add inexperienced—for I am not over-fond of experience. I think it just as often makes people less wise as more wise.”
Scattered through her letters and diaries are many wise reflections, and many pointed observations on the great people she knew. Of Disraeli, when she met him in 1858, she said he was a sad flatterer, and less agreeable than so able a man of such varied pursuits ought to be. Speaking of Gladstone’s visit to Scotland in November 1879, she said: “There is always something that makes me sad in such tremendous hospitality.” Of a book by her sister-in-law, the Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, First Earl of Minto, she wrote: “There are no lies in it, and therefore you must not expect a great sale.”
She thought much of the position of women, and although as early as 1870 she earnestly wished for legal and social equality for them, she could not shut her eyes to what woman had already been, “the equal, if not the superior, of man in all that is highest and noblest and loveliest.” She strongly disapproved of setting the sexes against one another, and considered that equal justice should be done to both without any spirit of antagonism.