To Mr. Blackwood.
Wimbledon,
5th January.
I was just about to write to you on other matters when I received Emma’s letter with the news of your aunt’s death — I will not say the sad news. It is very solemnising to hear suddenly of one so long known and familiar passing into the world unseen; but you, I hope, feel as I do, that except for that shock, it is a blessing and comfort to feel that, having outlived herself so long, she has now recovered, as I hope, all that is best in life.
We all know her faults; but I am sure, from what she said to me, that she was trying very honestly and sincerely to keep God in her thoughts during those last years while she kept her intelligence still. She is the last of the old generation. I would have given a great deal that she had lived to see and understand the book which would have been so interesting to her, but I would not, God forbid, have prolonged a life that was no life, for a single day.
In Mrs. Oliphant’s younger and brighter days she had had four dear and intimate women friends — Mrs. Macpherson, Mrs. Tulloch, Miss Blackwood, and Miss Fitz-Maurice, — and with all four her friendship had been long and unbroken. Two, and those the best loved, had at this time been dead for some years; now both the others passed away in quick succession. Miss Blackwood had been lately too great a sufferer for her death to be regretted, yet it made another gap; Miss Fitz-Maurice, who lived much nearer, was the last of the four to be taken.
To Mr. Craik.
Wimbledon.
Would you kindly send a copy of the ‘Land of Darkness’ to — , an unknown correspondent of mine, to whom in great trouble these books seem to have been of some use?
I do not know if you will care to have the ‘Land of Suspense,’ to complete the series. It hurt me to publish anything so personal, but if there is any comfort in the communion of sorrowful souls, it was perhaps worth doing, and one’s personality will be so soon blotted out.
Wimbledon,
13th January.
Thank you for the kind feeling and sympathy. I don’t know very well what I have written, except that it is the overflow of a very full heart — perhaps too individual for publication; but there are always many who are desolate to whom one puts out one’s hand.
From this thought we may perhaps put it with the ‘Little Pilgrim,’ in that series, if it is not too short, sometime.
To Mr. Blackwood.
Wimbledon,
14th February.
I feel that I have behaved very badly about this article, and I almost hope you will reject it. These “Looker-on” papers become very difficult to me: I feel as if I had no longer the lightness of touch necessary for them, and there has been a want of topics to comment upon. Of the enclosed pages one should be inserted after the review of ‘Margaret Ogilvie’; the other is the conclusion of the paper.
To Mrs. Richmond Ritchie,
The Hermitage, Wimbledon Common,
16th February.
Dearest Annie, — How amusing! Laurence Oliphant said the same idea always occurred to three people.
This, dear, is my little present to you. Make exactly what you please of it: it is nothing but the roughest sketch, but it amused me in a number of those twilight hours, which are the hardest to get through.
Bon voyage and every pleasure to you. You’ll go to see George Macdonald — will you not? — at Bordighera. Tell him I am not so patient as he is, but longing very much for the new chapter of life, where I hope we shall meet and talk all things over with better light upon them than here. — Ever affectionately, M. O. W. O.
This note was sent with a dramatised copy of ‘Esmond,’ which Mrs. Oliphant had amused herself with arranging in her leisure hours. She heard, however, from Mrs. Ritchie, that already two other dramatised versions had been produced just about the same time, and it is to this she refers at the beginning of this letter.
All this time Mrs. Oliphant’s health had been slowly but very visibly giving way. She was subject to attacks of severe pain, and was unable to walk more than a few yards. Work, which had been her comfort and stimulant, was beginning to be evidently burdensome. Even the crippling of her finger, where the pen seemed to have really worn through the skin by long usage, was both a symptom and an aggravation of her depressed physical condition. Her talk, however, if less bright, was as delightful as ever, and she retained the charm, which is surely the best of all social qualities. During her short stay at Coghurst she was very weak and suffering. Her work was done almost entirely in bed or on a sofa; but she would come downstairs when the morning’s task was finished, and be ready for bright and pleasant talk, and to interest herself in all our doings. In her company and in that of her host there could be no dulness: how could any one guess that in six months both the homes they brightened would be left desolate?
To Mr. Blackwood.
Coghurst Hall, Hastings,
Feb, 19.
...I write to you at present to ask a question, for which I want a speedy answer if possible. If I am to write something for May about the Queen and her Jubilee, how would it do to throw that into a “Looker-on”? This would prevent my name being put to it, which I don’t wish — that is, I should prefer the paper to be anonymous. There will be so much flummery written everywhere on the subject that I had thought of a more serious article, noting all the important changes that had taken place in the Queen’s reign, and called “’Tis Sixty Years Since.”
I should like to know what you think of this. In the meantime I have had a letter from Dr. Macleod of ‘Good Words,’ asking me to do a short article of 4000 words on the same subject. That, of course, would have to be a mere rhapsody, and he would no doubt wish to put my name to it. I am in no way inclined towards the work, but I should like to have your opinion on the subject. If you wish me to write a signed article on the Queen’s Reign, of course I should refuse Dr. Macleod at once: if, on the other hand, you like the “Looker-on” form (which I do myself), I might consider what he proposes. If you would be so kind as to telegraph to me to-morrow, on receiving this, “No” or “Don’t,” I will write to him at once declining. He is anxious for an answer.
It was with no little dismay that Mrs. Oliphant’s friends heard of the suggestion mentioned in the next letter — that she should take the journey to Siena. These hurried journeys for the purpose of gathering materials had been formerly easy enough to her, but she was now in a condition requiring rest, care, and warmth. Most unfortunately she did go, and it was the last journey she ever made.
Wimbledon,
19th March.
...I undertook some time since to write a little book for a series, upon the subject of Siena — a place which I do not know, having only once been there, — and I shall be obliged to go there to study the place a little. It is a very long and expensive journey, and I am not perhaps in strong enough health to risk it, but I fear it is quite indispensable....
I shall go to Siena, if I find it possible, about the second week in April.
We have got Madge and her babies here, which makes the house lively....
I am by no means well, and easily worried, which is so different from all my habits; and I seem to avoid everything I can possibly leave out.
In the second week of April Mrs. Oliphant started for Siena. She had with her Miss Tulloch, who had chiefly lived with her for the last year or two, and her youngest niece. She was horribly fatigued by the journey, and had one of her frequent attacks of illness on her arrival; but she managed to do what she thought necessary for her projected book, and returned home, with her gathered materials, at the end of the month. She had been much interested and charmed by the details of St. Catherine’s life and by some other gleanings from the Sienese chronicles, and came back to Wimbledon feeling a little better, and able to set to work.
But the improvement was of the most temporary kind, and a sharp attack of illness seized her directly after. Each of these attacks left her whiter and weaker, and, in spite of considerable divergence of medical opinions, it was impossible not to feel that most serious and probably fatal mischief was going on. The next letters show how she still worked, and still kept up her interest in the affairs of those she cared for.
Grand Hotel. Siena,
Good Friday, 16th April.
I was pleased to get your letter yesterday. I send you with this a further despatch of proof, and should indeed have completed the volume, but that I have been a little upset with the long journey, which, however, I have got through better than I expected. This is a very interesting place, though there is an element of guide-book in what I am desired to do about it which does not please me much, and to which only my poverty, and not my will, consents. I will probably one day or other send you an article about Siena and its saint. I hope to get home again on or about the 24th, but may be a day or two later.
Wimbledon,
30th April.
I got home on Monday night feeling tolerably well; but over-exertion seems to have acted upon my weak point, and I have been laid up by a small bout of my last summer’s trouble since then. I am not out of bed, but I hope the worst is over....
I think your writer on fiction might have made his article more interesting if he had gone a little further. He might quite well have taken in Anthony Trollope and Charles Reade, whom I am always on fire about: they have never had justice done them, being both most admirable novelists, full of insight and power, the latter especially. And what was Dickens if not early Victorian? Besides, the writer is very unjust to Bulwer, classing him with Lady Blessington. Bulwer was of course full of sham and cheap melodrama, but he knew what he was about, and his last books (the Caxton series) are of a high order. I suppose there was no man who had a greater command of the public in his day. To be sure, one might say the same of Miss Marie Corelli, who, by the way, in the only book of hers I can read, seems to be founded upon Bulwer.
On the day following, the Princess of Wales held a Drawing-Room, and it had been arranged that a number of her friends were to meet at the house of her cousin after it. She had long promised that if possible she would be of the party, and she kept her word, really enjoying the little festivity — the last social occasion at which she was ever to assist. She was looking fairly well, and apparently moved about with less fatigue than she often did. She greatly enjoyed having both her nieces with her, and Mrs. Valentine’s two tiny children — the little Margaret especially, who was brought up to town to see the pretty dresses and play with another maiden of her own age. It was a very bright day, not presaging any evil, yet three of the most valued and beloved lives that went to make up its brightness were close to the end of their pilgrimage.
She was none the worse for this expedition, for it was the very next day that the spirited verses for the Queen’s Jubilee were written. They are given here, with the note that accompanied them to Mr. Blackwood: —
Wimbledon,
19th May.
The enclosed little rant came to me, and wasted an hour or two of good time this morning. It is not worth sending to you, but there is a sort of a lilt about it. It might go in a fly-leaf, and if some one who knows my hand well would read it carefully there would be no need of proof. In great haste....
Send it back if you don’t like it.
22nd June 1897.
The trumpeters in a row,
With a note as clear as a bell,
And all the flutes and the fifes below.
And the brazen throats, and the strings of fire.
To let the people know
That the Mother, the Queen, the heart’s desire,
From her palace forth doth go.
Princes, form in array!
Great ye are, and greater may be;
But only guards and vassals to-day
To the Lady enshrined in duty and love,
Pacing forth on her way
In weakness of age, and in power above
All words we can sing or say.
The streets that sound like the sea
When the tumult of life is high,
Now, in a murmur of voices free,
Hum and ripple and rustle and stir.
Straining each eye to see —
To gaze and to watch and to wait for Her
Whose subjects and lovers they be.
Sons and lovers and subjects all,
The high and the low together —
From Princes that ride in the festival
To us in the crowd who but shout and gaze;
Rendering, every man and all,
Thanks to our God for her lengthened days
And the nation’s festival.
Hark! what is this which hushes the crowd?
A sound of silence amid the noise;
The sweep of a pause through the plaudits loud —
A moment, a stillness, a start, a stir —
The great heart of the multitude
Holding its breath as it waits for Her,
One being in all the crowd.
She is coming, is coming! The Queen! the Queen!
Here is our moment in all the day.
One voice for all, and the air serene
Quivers, as if a storm blew by:
A little more, and there had been
Gates burst apart in the very sky.
To hear a whole nation shouting on high —
“The Queen! the Queen! the Queen!”
A week or so after this party just mentioned Mrs. Oliphant again drove up to town to her cousin’s, in order to have a fresh and careful medical opinion. This opinion, which was of the most confidently hopeful kind, proved to be entirely wrong, and early in June the doctor who attended her at Wimbledon, in answer to her questions, told her he believed her state to be hopeless. Other opinions — one that of a distinguished surgeon — showed equally that what she called “the beginning of the end” had indeed come. Her niece says: “To her this was longed-for and welcome news; and when she had ascertained that no medical help could give her any permanent relief, she made up her mind, in the greatest serenity and happiness, to await the end. After the first week or so she was able to take very little nourishment. She was daily lifted to a sofa near the window, where she lay in great peace and content, sometimes reading or being read to, herself writing some letters of farewell to friends, or dictating others; glad to have the letters read to her that came, as she said she wished to have their messages. Many times she said that she was at perfect ease in body and mind. All care and worry seemed to leave her. She said she felt as if she were lying somewhere waiting to be lifted up; or again, as if she were lying in the deep grass of some flowery meadow, near the gate, waiting for our Lord to pass by. Her sleepless nights were filled with wonderful imaginings. She spoke of thinking herself in a ship in which was our Lord, who made with His robe a great white sail to carry her across a river. She said she could not think of God as the Almighty God of all the world, but just as her Father, and that at this moment even the thought of her children seemed to cease in the thought of Him. She thought the love of God came by degrees, and was certain that the pity of God was boundless. She spoke of being always greatly helped by prayer and thought.”
In this serene atmosphere of perfect peace — satisfied that all was arranged as was best for her — she lay day after day waiting for the end. “I have no pain,” she said one day; ‘‘I am only waiting, and I hope I shall not have to wait very long, lest I should get impatient.” One of her last letters is a short one to Mr. Craik, in which she suggests the republication of some of her magazine stories, and adds, ‘‘Perhaps some one would write a small preface of my life to enable you to add £100.” “I am dying,” she concludes, “but not suffering much. Good-bye.”
When she could no longer write she dictated some notes, and on the 21st of June some verses, which, broken as their music is, are strangely touching. She desired that they should be sent to Mr. Blackwood, thinking they might be printed as a sort of Envoi to the Jubilee verses already in his hand. This was not judged possible, but the lines, as her dying voice uttered them, may be given here: —
On the edge of the world I lie, I lie,
Happy and dying, and dazed and poor,
Looking up from the vast great floor
Of the infinite world that rises above
To God, and to Faith, and to Love, Love, Love!
What words have I to that world to speak,
Old and weary, and dazed and weak,
From the very low to the very high?
Only this — and this is all:
From the fresh green soil to the wide blue sky,
From Greatness to Weariness, Life to Death,
One God have we on whom to call;
One great bond from which none can fall;
Love below, which is life and breath.
And Love above, which sustaineth all.
She liked to be read to, as it wearied her less than talking; and her little well-worn Bible, out of which all through their Eton lives her boys had daily read a verse or two to her before their terribly early start from home, lay on her bed, and was the best-loved of her books. One passage which she refers to in her Autobiography seemed to be often in her mind. It was the one in the 1st Epistle to the Corinthians beginning, “For other foundation can no man lay.” And she dwelt on the words, “If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.” The death of St. Catherine of Siena was one thing she reverted to; and another, Lockhart’s account of Sir Walter Scott’s last days. One afternoon, very near the end, she begged to have “Crossing the Bar” read; and while the reader, painfully keeping her voice steady, repeated the last lines, the listener fell suddenly into a calm sleep.
She wished at the last to live over the great day of the Queen’s Jubilee; and speaking to one of her little circle whom she was urging that “to please me” she should not disappoint her husband by staying away from the scene of the procession, she added, “I promise you shall have no bad news on the 22nd.” She bore with great patience the noise of bands and fireworks on Wimbledon Common, though her windows looked full towards the scene of the merry-making, only remarking how little we who used to enjoy the fun and noise of an Eton 4th of June had thought that there might be some poor soul lying dying close by. “Through all, her wonderful security and absolute certainty that she was so soon to recover what she had lost seemed almost to transfigure her, making her room, which she loved to have filled with flowers, the one cheerful spot in the house.”
She lived till June 25th, and then softly passed away. The names of her boys were on her lips almost at the last, though she had said repeatedly, “I seem to see nothing but God and our Lord.”