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BY
(dedication)
To EDWARD BARRINGTON DE FONBLANQUE.
DEAR MR. DE FONBLANQUE--
In asking you to accept the dedication of this book, I do not wish to
make it appear that you either share its opinions or sympathize with its
aim. I merely wish to claim you as one who, like Christopher himself, loves
honesty and practises sincerity, and who will therefore forgive even his
defence of vivisection, to which you are so notoriously opposed. Neither do
I seek to entangle your assent to that profound respect for man as the
highest thing we know--that belief in his glorious future and infinite
progress,
by the law of moral evolution working from within--which is my hero's support and consolation. This optimistic belief is a matter of faith; and faith, the result of temperament, is out of the control of the individual. The Pessimists, who see only the hopelessness of man's misery and the limitation of his powers, count as many strong brains among them as the Optimists, who judge of the future by the past, and recognize no barriers which may not be overcome. Each school is as sincere as the other in its creed; and as neither can prove its doctrines, neither has the right to scorn the other for its special gospel. Wherefore I trust that, differing in certain essentials though we do, you will none the less accept this dedication as an expression of my friendship and esteem.
E. LYNN LINTON.
show the completed fabric but not the whole process of construction.
Within these limits every autobiography which is clear and symmetrical
so far as it goes, has its value. As no human being is absolutely
unparalleled, but each embodies in his degree the moral and intellectual
characteristics of certain orderly types already established, it
necessarily follows that no personal history can be without the interest
which comes from sympathy and likeness. The ways by which some have arrived
at certain landing-stages must needs be those by which others have gone or
are going; and the experience of one serves another as warning or guidance,
according to the secret bent of his nature and his dread or desire to be
led to the right or turned to the left.
For this reason, I, a pilgrim rapidly nearing the great Mecca of the
grave, write here as faithful an autobiography as I may
or can. It will not be useless to show where a man who has ardently desired to know the Truth, and who has been neither afraid of his own conclusions nor ashamed to confess his convictions, finds himself at last. The Isis at whose feet he stands will hold in her hand, or a torch to light forward or a flaming sword to stay, the advancing steps of those who read, as they may sympathize with the process or be repelled by the result.
CHRISTOPHER KIRKLAND.
the grandees who were bound to be in London for their place in Parliament or for their attendance at Court. Women of the upper middle class kept their houses and looked after their children with more vigilance of personal superintendence than now; and if there was less taste there was less finery, nor was extravagance made into an æsthetic virtue as it is in these present times. The religious revival had not begun for the nation at large; for all that Wesley and Whitfield had done good work among the rough men of the West, and had transformed a large proportion of the Cornish miners and fishermen from brutalized savages and wreckers, among whom the King's writ did not run, into God-fearing and law-abiding citizens. Education was at its lowest possible ebb--though local grammar-schools in the North were plentiful, kept up by old-time grants and bequests from former founders and benefactresses;
though Robert Raikes had established Sunday-schools here and there, where minds had begun to awaken to the need of saving souls; though Joseph Lancaster had got a fair trial for his system of teaching; and though even infant-schools, which we generally believe to be emphatically of modern establishment, languished feebly in certain populous places. Still, none of these waves of progress, as yet slow and sluggish, though gathering, as they went, the volume and power we know of, had stirred the stagnant shallows of remote country places at the time of which I write; and society, as found on the moors, in the dales, and in the villages among the mountains, was satisfied with the most elementary knowledge for the so-called educated classes and absolute ignorance for all the rest.
The Reform Bill, Catholic emancipation and the emanacipation of slaves,
the political rights of the Jews, free trade and a free
press, were all as yet the golden apples of liberty and justice held in the closed hand of Time. The press-gang was a recognised institution; felony was punishable by death--and stealing sheep, as well as any article the value of thirteen-pence halfpenny from the dwelling-house, was felony. Though Howard's remonstrances had had some effect, and Coldbath Fields prison had been built in accordance with his views, our gaols were in general a disgrace to civilization, and our laws were still justly stigmatized as 'written in blood.' Monday morning hangings were part of the week's ordinary work; and my father just remembered to have seen thirteen men hanging in a row at Tyburn, with never a murderer among them. Besides slaves in Jamaica, we had climbing-boys, who were substantially slaves, for our chimneys at home; and apprentices were still greatly needing the protection they did not get till comparatively the other day.
Gipsies and vagrants were laid by the heels at the will of the authorities; and to be homeless was of itself a qualification for the stocks. Belief in the divine right of Kings; in the saintly martyrdom of Charles I.; in the criminality of Cromwell and the hypocrisy of Puritanism; in the good cause of Charles Edward; in the diabolical origin of the French Revolution, of which the echoes still reverberated through the awakening world; in the infinite iniquity of Bonaparte; in the capacity of any one Englishman to lick three 'mounseers' single-handed; as well as belief in the damnable instincts of the 'many-headed monster,' as the people proper were generally called--formed part of every true gentleman's creed. He who thought differently was either a traitor to his order or no true gentleman at all. Party spirit in the country ran as high as it ever ran in Florence or Verona, when Guelfs and Ghibellines slew peace and humanity between them;
and no man with a soul to be saved would have consorted in friendship with a wearer of the hostile colour. As well ask Juliet for Romeo, as ask of a Tory father his daughter in marriage for the son of a Whig, when the one sported blue and the other purple and orange, while brickbats were flying and bribery stalked about the contested town with never a mask to hide its face nor a cloak to conceal its hands.
Our family house was for many years in one of the most primitive of
those untouched country districts of which I first spoke; and the
recollections of the elders of my own generation carry us back to a
wonderful state of things.
My father was a clergyman and the holder of two livings. The second, of
which I shall speak farther on, was one of the most beautiful places in
England, where the ordering of life was simple and homely, but not more
than this. The other was a
large, rambling, sparsely-populated parish, where the people were half-savages, and where the very elements of all that makes our modern civifization were wanting. Not a school of any kind was in the place, though there was one at the quaint old market-town some few miles away; but in return, for a village of about three hundred inhabitants, there were seventeen public-houses and jerry-shops; and the man who did not get drunk would have been the black swan which the white ones would soon have pecked to death. No one, however, tried the experiment of sobriety. There was no sense of public decency, no idea of civic order and as little private morality. The parish-constable would have thought twice before taking up a crony for any offence short of murder; and then he would have left the door of the lock-up ajar. Not a man would have held himself justified in marrying before the woman had
proved her capacity for becoming a mother; and when the lovers were united according to the law of the land--just in time to legitimize the child--the customs and ceremonies of the day were almost as brutal as, and certainly more drunken than, those of the North American Indians or Tierra del Fuegians. Indeed, they were evident survivals of those primitive times when the bride was taken from her tribe by force and compelled to submit to violence, before dawning civilization made the whole matrimonial transaction a matter of sale and barter. But for the most part the young people slipped by night across the border to Gretna Green, preferring, as they said, the blacksmith's forge to the joiner's shop, and liking the mock romance of a pseudo-elopement which saved the parson's fees and the wedding-dinner, and thus 'gave folk less cause for clack.'
If the people were thus uncivilized, their
appointed pastors and masters in the off-districts were very little better. About eight miles from Braeghyll, my father's parish, was a God-forsaken moorland incumbency, the 'priest' of which was in no wise beyond his flock either in refinement or morality. As Braeghyll was the mother-parish, our village was naturally the local metropolis where the inhabitants of the surrounding hamlets found their pleasures and excitements. These were for the most part 'murry-neets'--dances in barns and public-houses, where the men got drunk, the women fuddled, and the marriage ceremony was discounted all round--and the Saturday-night fights, which came as regularly as the Sunday-morning shave. To these fights the priest of Moss Moor, of whom I have spoken, came more punctually than he went to his own little chapel the next day. He was a fine, stalwart fellow, who kept up his muscle by week-day working in the fields,
like any hired herd or ploughman; and, 'stripped to buff,' as the phrase was, he took his turn like a man, did his fighting gallantly, then got drunk with the best; and so was trundled home to his stone cabin in the wilds, to sleep off his intoxication in time for his ragged duty to-morrow morning. My father's curate himself brought his unwedded wife to the parish and married her about three weeks before the child was born. No one thought the worse of them for their impatience; and, 'Nae, what!' they said with the broad charity of moral kinship, 'young folk will be young; and men and women are kittle cattle to shoe ahint!'
Accustomed to such ministers as these--men who were intellectually
in advance of their flock only in so far as they could read and write, but
whose example was a direct encouragement to both lawlessness and
vice--the people of these wild districts would
not brook interference nor admonition from such gentlemen as might be appointed to the mother-parishes. My father tried to bring about a better state of things when he first undertook the care of these shaggy souls at Braeghyll; but the men swore at him, and threatened to do him a mischief if he did not hold his noise, when he rebuked them for their intemperance or tried to stop their brutal excesses; and the women jeered him, for a Molly who put his nose where he had no concern, when he would have taught them a little modesty as maidens and decency as wives. Thus the heart was taken out of him; and, being naturally indolent, he soon dropped the reins which at first he had attempted to hold, and the parish went on as it would without let or hindrance from him. They were more respectful to my mother, who was sweet and gentle and very beautiful; and who was, moreover, assimilated to the every-
day experience of her sex by the rapid 'bairn-bearing' which never left her without a child in the cradle and another at her breast. But she had too much to do at home to carry her energies abroad; and district-visiting, mothers'-meetings, Bible-classes, and all the other modern circumstances of parochial organization, were then things unknown. Besides, there were no educated women to have 'worked the parish,' even if there had been the thought or the endeavour. There was only one gentleman's family besides our own; and as the squire's lady bore child for child with the parson's, she was naturally as much tied at home.
Things were no more satisfactory in the church than they were in the
parish. Not more than twenty people came to the service, for the fullest
attendance. The average was about fourteen. On afternoons, when folks were
late, the old clerk would
ring the bell for a short three minutes, then shut the church door in a hurry--even if he saw some one coming in at the lych gate--glad to be quit of his irksome duty for that day.
'Nay, what, i' fegs, we bain't agoing to maunder through
t' service for yon,' he said one day contemptuously to my
father, when remonstrated with for shutting the church door right in the
face of Nanny Porter.
According to old Josh, souls counted by the gross; and the parson's
own household did not count at all; and it was a wicked waste of force to
spend the means of grace on a unit. So Nanny Porter had to go home again
and leave her prayers unsaid; and old Josh took the responsibility on his
own soul, and swore a big oath that hers would be none the worse for the
lapse.
This morally unsatisfactory living was pecuniarily valuable. The rector
was Lord
of the Manor as well as rector; and heriots and fines on the death or displacement of tenants, together with tithes in kind, rent-charges and compensations, raised the income to a good round sum when all was told. There was always bad blood at tithing time, when the parson's tenth 'steuk' was sure to be the largest of the row; the parson's tithe-pig the fattest of the litter; while the geese, ducks, fowls, etc., driven into the rectory back-yard for the service of the church and in payment of these despised and neglected functions, were beyond compare the finest of their respective broods.
When I grew old enough to understand how things were, I confess I felt
both ashamed and revolted when my father, as he sometimes did, went about
the fields himself, and chose his own tenth 'steuks' in the
face of the world of reapers and before the eyes of the farmer. They
thought
nothing of it; and as my father did his doubtful work naturally, cheerily and genially, he lost no honour, but on the contrary gained in personal favour as a 'good 'un of his kind,' though his kind was bad enough. It was only my own callow sense of personal dignity and democratic justice that suffered.
Our place used to overflow with produce at tithing-times. At Easter,
eggs came in by the hundred, and at 'shearing-time' wool was by
the cartload. Everything else was in like quantity. The tithers'
supper made a supreme holiday for us young ones. They always had
hodgepodge, plum-pudding, and a glass of punch to follow; and sometimes a
cracked fiddle was put into requisition, when our maids used to dance with
the men, threesome reels or foursome, and jigs where the women held their
aprons ('brats' we called them) by the two corners, and
flourished them, thumbs up-
ward, with clumsy coquetry as they jigged. There was a grand quarrel between my father and his parishioners when the Tithe Commutation Act came in force; and the seven years' average, which had to be struck as the basis for the consolidated income, differed considerably in the estimate of the one who was to be the recipient and the others who were to be the paymasters. Things quieted down at last; and when Mr. Blamire's labours came to an end, the new system was felt all round to be better than the old, as giving less occasion for subterfuge here, suspicion there, and heartburnings on both sides alike.
kempt heads of the boys and girls who attended or played truant at their parents' pleasure and their own will. There was a great deal of honest moral courage and sturdy personal independence among the people, mainly owing to the large number of these same 'statesmen,' or peasant proprietors, who owned no master and were no man's hire. Some of them had title-deeds dating from the time of Edward VI. and were both nominally and substantially the 'kings' of their respective dales:--I say were, for now they have almost disappeared as a class; not all to the gain of the country. But, as I said, the drunkenness of the men and the lax virtue of the women kept about even step in each parish alike; and though manners were less barbarous, morals were no purer at Eden than at Braeghyll.
In those days a South-going coach ran twice a week through Eden; and the
journey to London took three days and two nights. A letter from London cost thirteen-pence halfpenny; and--as once happened to ourselves, when we were told the contents of a brother's letter as it was handed to us through the little window of the house in the square where the post office stood--if of likely interest to the public, it was quickly read by our sharp-tongued Mailsetter before delivery to those whom it concerned. As envelopes had not then been invented, and the folded sides of the sheet were always closely written over to get the whole worth of the postage, a little practice in peeping made the process of deciphering easy enough; and the main threads of all the correspondence afloat were in the hands of our Mailsetter aforesaid. The franking system mitigated the severity of these postal expenses to the rich. It was only the poor who suffered without any mitigation. They had either to pay a formidable proportion of their week's slender
earnings, or to go without hearing from the absent ones at all. For it was a legal offence, carrying large penalties, to make the carrier do duty as a postman and take, for twopence, what the Post-Office charged sixpence or eightpence to deliver at the next town, some ten or twelve miles away. People evaded the penalty by making the letter into a parcel and tying it round with string well sealed; but, if discovered, the evasion did not hold good, and the penalties were enforced as a warning to others.
All the carrying trade was done by these carriers, who were often men of
shrewd wit and keen observation, and who brought a breath of larger life
into the small places, as they passed through and told what they had seen
and heard elsewhere. A great part of the commerce too, of the time, was in
the hands of pedlers, who came at stated seasons to tempt the weak, profit
by the savings of the thrifty, and supplement
the poverty of the mouldy little shops where the shopkeeper was the tyrant and the customer was his slave. I remember to this day the kind of Arabian Nights' splendour of gems and jewellery, silks and shawls and 'farlies' of every description, which little Pedroni, the Swiss-Italian who wore huge rings in his swarthy ears, used to bring out of his cases with a certain mysterious reverence, as if each article was worth a king's ransom. What a good fight my eldest sister made for that green shawl with the kincob pattern!--and how I inwardly resolved to save up my money when I should be a man, and become the proud possessor of that monstrous silver watch, as big as a small warming-pan!
Beside our punctual pedlers with their packs, we had also our recognised
gaberlunzies--our established tramps of either sex. These also came in
their appointed seasons, and were hospitably entertained
with a bed in the outhouse, a supper at the kitchen door, and sixpence or a shilling at parting in the morning. My father always added to his generosity a little homily, for the honour of the cloth and the tradition of good things. Also we had our village idiots, who could do nothing but sit in the sun and make mouths at those who passed; and our half-witted men and women, who could scramble through a rough day's work of a purely mechanical kind, were as happy as kings and queens with sixpence for their 'darrack,' and who married, had children, and stuck peacocks' feathers in their ragged hats and bonnets. We had our poachers and suspected smugglers--generally the handsomest, strongest and swarthiest men of the district--who were looked on with profound respect by us boys, and a deadly animosity by the gentry--which to us seemed infinitely unjust. Why idealize and honour Will Watch if Black
Jack Musgrave was a scamp? And we had our scares, when the maids were hysterical and moony--scares which now meant burglars and now 'bogles,' and now again Burke and Hare, a report of whose sudden appearance in the Lime-pots ran like wild-fire among us, and made the women afraid to venture over the threshold, even so far as the stick-house, after dark.
Our church was a fine old Norman structure, choked with barbarisms. The
frescoes had been whitewashed over by successive generations of
churchwardens; so had the magnificent freestone pillars. The stained-glass
windows had been taken away and plain squares, among which were
interspersed a few bulls' eyes, had been put in their stead; the pews
were the familiar old cattle-pens of every size and shape, wherein the
congregation sat in all directions and went to sleep in the corners
comfortably. The choir was composed of a few
young men and women who practised among themselves as they liked and when they liked, and sometimes essayed elaborate anthems which resulted in vocal caricatures. The orchestra was a flageolet, on which the clerk, as the official leader and bandmaster, gave the key-note; and at the feet of the choir, in the dark at the west end, the High School boys and girls sat on benches which every now and then they tipped up or overturned, played marbles, had free fights, laughed aloud, and were dragged out by the hair, kicking and yelling, when their conduct was too obstreperous for even the lax reverence of the rest to bear. With all this we had a peal of bells which was the pride of the parish and acknowledged to be the best in the county; and our bell-ringers were renowned as past masters of their craft.
In my early youth, two families only among us kept a carriage or a
footman;
and no one thought of hiring a car, as our tubs on wheels were called, for anything short of a day's excursion to the neighbouring lakes and waterfalls. When evening parties were on hand--we never or rarely gave dinners at Eden--the ladies tucked up their skirts and the men turned up their trousers, and walked gaily through the snow in winter and the dust in summer, lighted by lanthorns when there was no moon, and wearing wooden-soled clogs shod with iron when the roads were 'clarty.' Picnics on the lake, where each family contributed its quota, were the grand summer amusements of Eden; and walking expeditions up the more practicable mountains, all returning to the proposer's house for tea and supper and a dance or a round game in the evening, took the place of modern tennis-parties. Without question, things were merrier for us than our children have known how to make them for themselves.
There was less luxury and more simplicity; people were easily amused because not worn out by premature experience; and there was a greater sense of homeliness and friendliness than can be found anywhere now.
Perhaps some among us went a little too far in the way of simplicity and
homeliness, as when the Roberts' girls--the daughters of the
great literary light who shone at Eden--took down the soiled
house-linen to mend in the drawing-room at Rydal Mount, where they were on
a visit, to give Mrs. Hemans, who was also there on a visit, a practical
lesson on the value of good house-wifery and no nonsense. Mrs. Hemans was
somewhat superfine and lackadaisical; and these girls, the youngest of whom
was famous for a certain quiet hardness which amounted to calm brutality,
thought that to darn dirty linen before her eyes would be a useful
counterpoise to her Rosa Matilda proclivities. The result was that the
poetess
fled from the room in dismay, and ever after cherished the most profound horror for the uncompromising Marthas who had so wounded her delicacy.
My father and that great literary light did not get on quite well
together. I have never understood why. There had been no quarrel that I
know of; the respective children were playfellows; and Dr. Roberts was as
orthodox as my father himself, and notoriously a dutiful son of the Church.
But they were not the friends one might have expected two cultured men
would have been; and though Dr. Roberts came regularly to church, as any
other decent body might, when the prayers were over he ostentatiously
folded his arms, shut his eyes, and sat during the sermon in a state of
frigid indifferentism, like one no more interested in the proceedings. He
had done his duty to God and the Establishment by saying his prayers and
following the ser-
vice; to the sermon, which was purely personal, he openly refused to give his attention.
At the other side of the vale, and not in our parish, was a very notable
family--incomparably the most liberal and enlightened of all we had.
Thoughtful and large-minded, they were remarkable, among other things, for
the quiet dignity of their lives; their inflexible sense of public duty;
their orderly management as proprietors and masters; their close
friendships with the best thinkers and foremost men of the time; and the
determination with which they discountenanced all local gossip and petty
scandal. The father, and his son after him, were men who make the unwritten
but vital history of England, and furnish the solid material of English
greatness. The other son, however, belongs to the written history of our
time, and has left a name and done such work in literature as will never
die out.
This family belonged, unfortunately for me, to the elder section of my
generation; so that I was not able to profit by them in the forming period
of my life, as I might have done had I been fifteen years or so older. It
was only when I was a grown man that I came to know and recognise the moral
greatness which was their inheritance. And then I was made. But to this day
I have a curious feeling of loyalty and clanship towards the survivors of
the house--especially towards one, the last of the elder generation,
whose wonderful charm can be as little described as the perfume of a flower
or the melody of a song. Indeed, she is very like a human flower or
incorporate melody--and of all emblems the Daisy and the Pearl suit
her best.
Then there was a county magnate, whose house by the Bay where the
water-lilies grew, was a kind of sentimental Paradise to my elder brothers.
Three beautiful girls
made the charm of those woods and gardens; and three of my elder brothers fell in love, as was but natural; and the tears shed in vain by these poor young erotic Tantaluses were matters of family history for many years after. Besides these, were retired officers of both services, who had come to Eden because the country was lovely and living was cheap--with here a gentleman living on his estate, and there an outsider who only rented and did not possess, and who never took quite the same place as the autochthones by inheritance, or even the naturalized by purchase. We were also in those days tremendously exclusive; and when the rich Leeds manufacturer bought the estates of our historical attainted Lord, he was considered decidedly below the salt, and there were anxious consultations among the impecunious well-born as to the propriety of visiting him and his. I have lived to see all this nonsense knocked out of
the place; which maybe has been converted to the compensating worship of wealth somewhat over zealously.
Beyond these again, were the local oddities--the old maids with
sharp tongues renowned for queer sayings; the well-endowed widows with
large hearts--'mothers in Israel,' as they were called
when the days of cant came upon us; the Will Wimbles who played the flute
were 'characters' and flighty, not to say more; the hunting
parsons who rode to hounds whenever they could, and when they could not,
did the best they could for themselves by riding into Eden, jack-booted and
spurred, to meet the coach and talk horseflesh with Tom and Arnold; the
scientific recluses who got a name of terror because of their anatomical
studies, whereby they were supposed to be too friendly with the Evil One;
the retired sea-captains, choleric and litigious; the Scotch doctors,
drunken and clever, who performed wonderful operations when half-seas over; the men-servants and maid-servants who were part of the family and called by the master's name, as Birkett Tim and Crosthwaite Molly; the maiden shopkeepers, who were the humbler members of the society, greatly respected and esteemed, with whom the aristoi would sometimes take a cup of tea and not hold themselves as condescending unduly:--these were as individualized, and some were as queer, as anything to be found in Sterne or Smollett. But the queerest of all were the incumbents of the small chapelries-of-ease made off the mother-parish--all of whom were St. Bees men, while many were as drunken as our old priest at Moss Moor, and none were men of education and refinement. I remember how, at a visitation dinner at the vicarage, one of these outlying pastors stood up in his place, and, asking the Bishop familiarly if
he would be served, carved the cabbages before him with his own knife and fork. He had already eaten generously with his knife. They all did in those days.
Our own way of living was simple in the extreme. Our servants wore short
woollen petticoats; cotton bedgowns and blue-checked aprons; huge caps with
flapping borders and flying strings; and thick-soled shoes, with which they
wore out the carpets and made a hideous clatter on the bare boards. We had
a gardener who had been a soldier, and who, in memory of his past glory,
always wore a scarlet waistcoat on Sundays; and we had a hay-field, a
farmyard, and two cows--'Cushie' and
'Hornie'--which in the summer evenings we used to go with
the cook to bring home from the field to the milking-byre. I think I could
replace every dock and ragwort and plot of nettles and mayweed in that
ragged bit of pasture-land, sloping down to the little
brook where the minnows were. Our food was oatmeal-porridge, night and morning. For dinner we were allowed meat only twice a week. On the 'banyan days' we had large tureens full of milky messes of exquisite savour, or enormous paste puddings--'roly-polys'--of fruit, jam, or undecorated suet. It was simple fare, but it made a stalwart, vigorous set of boys and girls; and out of the whole dozen, only two were relatively undersized and only one was delicate. The rest averaged six feet for the men and the full medium height for the women.
My mother, who was of higher social standing than my father--for he
was a simple vicar and she was then the Dean's daughter--had
married him against the consent of her own people. She died when my eldest
brother was fifteen years old and when I, the youngest of the brood, was
five months. Ten rapidly recurring steps
between these two limits filled the quiver to overflowing.
My grandfather, at first violently angry, at last--when he had been
made a Bishop--proved his forgiveness of his daughter's
disobedience and my father's presumption by giving him, in succession,
the best two livings in his gift; as well as certain sinecures which the
lax ecclesiastical conscience of those days made it possible for an
otherwise honest man to hold. But this liberality, added to the original
sin of the marriage, only served to alienate the rest of the family more
completely from us. For, as all my uncles were in orders, and all my aunts
had married clergymen, and plurality was then in force, and nepotism the
first duty of a patron-parent, it was but natural that they should resent
this apportionment of the big plums to the least desirable of the
sons-in-law, rather than to the more commendable who had the
better claim, or to the sons who had the most right.
This professional jealousy, backed by social disdain--for the
family, as a family, was one of the proudest, most exclusive, and most
worldly in England--and my father's total want of kindred on his
own side, explain the isolation in which we lived, and why, after my
grandfather's death, we knew none of that kindly superintendence which
the children of a dead sister so often receive from those still living.
While my grandfather lived we were taken care of at the Castle; but after
his death we were abandoned; and my father was left to bring us up as he
would, unhelped and unchecked by the influence of his wife's kinsfolk.
He chose the rough and ready way of corporal punishment for all offences.
He believed in Solomon and the rod, and put religious conviction as well as
muscular energy into his stripes. It was a brutal
system. But the times were brutal all through; and my father was neither worse nor more enlightened than his generation. He sincerely believed that he was doing his imperative duty when he thrashed us in accordance with the inspired command; and that were the rod spared the child would be indeed spoilt. And when a passionate temper takes with it divine sanction, the punishment it inflicts is softened by no misgiving as to its wisdom or its humanity.
My stately grandfather himself set an example of almost incredible
severity in his family. His sons never called him anything but
'Sir' or 'My Lord;' and he was never known to kiss
one of his daughters, save by rare grace, or on supreme occasions of
marriage or departure, coldly on the forehead. Sometimes however, he
allowed them to kiss his hand. He gave his wife half-a-crown at a time for
pocket-money;
and--like Mrs. Primrose, with the guinea she 'generously' let each of her daughters have 'to keep in their pockets'--she was exhorted not to break into it nor spend it. It always went in 'goodies' for the grandchildren. When the sons were beneficed clergymen and married men with children, they dared not have asked for a glass of wine at their father's table; and he would have been a bold man who should have addressed my Lord without first being spoken to.
A dark and terrible family tradition was whispered from each to each,
under the bond of absolute secrecy, how that once, when one of my aunts had
reached the ripe age of eighteen, my Lord Bishop had whipped her bodily
with his own august prelatic hands. He was a tall and dignified-looking
man; famed for botany and scholarship, and held to be the handsomest Bishop
on the bench; but he was a queer successor
of the Fishermen; and I doubt if the Master would have recognised him as a wholly satisfactory representative. Yet it was told of him that once, in a rare fit of humility confessing some trivial weakness of character, he said to my father with admirable condescension to the frailty of a common humanity: 'After all, Mr. Kirkland, a Bishop is only a man!'
Naturally indolent and self-indulgent in his habits, but a man of the
strictest temperance--never once in his whole life, in that drinking
age, having exceeded the bounds of absolute sobriety; fond of shining in
society, where he knew how to make his mark, but almost impossible to drag
out of his study for any form of social intercourse; flattered by the
notice of the great when it came to him, but neglecting all his
opportunities and too proud to accept patronage even when offered; a Tory
in politics and a Democrat in action; defying his diocesan
and believing in his divine ordination; contemptuous of the people as a political factor, but kind and familiar in personal intercourse with the poor; clever, well read and somewhat vain of his knowledge, but void of ambition and indifferent to the name in literature which he might undoubtedly have won with a little industry; not liberal as a home-provider, but largely and unostentatiously generous in the parish; fond like a woman of his children when infants, but unable to reconcile himself to the needs of their adolescence and refusing to recognise the rights of their maturity; thinking it derogatory to his parental dignity to discuss any matter whatsoever rationally with his sons, and believing in the awful power of a father's curse, yet caressing in manner and playful in speech even when he was an old man and we were no longer young; with a heart of gold and a temper of fire--my father was a man of strangely
complex character, not to be dismissed in a couple of phrases.
With a nature tossed and traversed by passion, and a conscience that
tortured him when his besetting sin had conquered his better resolve once
more, as so often before, he was in some things like David;--for whose
character he had the most intimate kind of personal sympathy. 'For I
acknowledge my faults, and my sin is ever before me,' was the broken
chord of his lament. But to us children, the echo of his loud midnight
prayers, waking us from our sleep and breaking the solemn stillness of the
night--the sound of his passionate weeping mingled in sobbing unison
with the moaning of the wind in the trees, or striking up in sharp accord
with the stinging of the hail against the windows--gave only an awful
kind of mystery to his character, making the deeper shadows we knew too
well all the
more terrible by these lurid lights of tragic piety.
My poor dear father! The loss of my beautiful mother, and, a year after
her death, that of the eldest girl, who seems to have been one of those
sweet mother-sisters sometimes found as the eldest of the family, had tried
him almost beyond his strength. His life henceforth was a mingled web of
passion and tears--now irritated and now despairing--with ever
that pathetic prostration at the foot of the Cross, where he sought to lay
down his burden of sorrow and to take up instead resignation to the will of
God--where he sought the peace he never found! He had lost the best
out of his life, and he could not fill up the gap with what remained.
There was one thing I have never understood:--why my father, so
well read and even learned in his own person, did not care to give his
children the education proper to
their birth and his own standing. The elders among us came off best, for the mother had had her hand on them, and the Bishop too, had had his say; but the younger ones were lamentably neglected. I do not know why. We were not poor. Certainly, we were a large tribe to provide for and my father often made a 'poor mouth;' but his income was good, the cost of living was relatively small, and things might have been better than they were. At the worst, my father might have taught us himself. He was a good classic and a sound historian; and though his mathematics did not go very deep, they were better than our ignorance. But he was both too impatient and too indolent to be able to teach, and I doubt if the experiment would have answered had he tried it.
So time went on, and he allowed neither a responsible tutor for us boys
nor a capable governess for the girls, nor would he send
us to school. He engaged, as a very perfunctory kind of crammer for two of my brothers, the son of a small hamlet hand-weaver, a young St. Bees man whose parents denied themselves almost necessaries that they might give their son a good education and see him in the ministry. This young man, who was both plain in person and ungainly in manners, fell in love with my eldest sister, and inspired her thereby with a physical horror that became almost a constitutional antipathy, such as certain people have for cats. When she was quite an old woman she used to say she should feel if Mr. Donald came into a room at her back, where she could not see him. She would feel him in a shudder down her spine and goose-flesh over her skin.
When my father had engaged this young man, he thought he had done all
for his boys that was demanded of him by duty or need. If ever the subject
was broached
to him, he used to lose his temper, and always ended by saying that self-educated people got on the best. He forgot the pithy saying that a self-taught man has had a dunce for his master.
One of our family traditions, rounded off of course by repetition and
the natural desire to make a good story, tells how that, after our
mother's death, my grandfather sent for my father and urged him to do
such and such things, whereby he might increase his income and provide for
the fitting conduct of his family. To each proposal my father found
insuperable objections. At last the Bishop, losing patience, said
angrily:
'In the name of heaven, Mr. Kirkland, what do you mean to do for
your children?'
'Sit in the study, my Lord, smoke my pipe, and commit them to the
care of Providence,' was my father's calm reply.
And he acted on his decision. He did emphatically commit us to the care
of Providence; and he was satisfied with his trustee.
Practically, this meant the control of the younger by the elder. The
eldest brother was the master of the boys, the eldest sister the mistress
of the girls; with intermediate gradations of relative supremacy according
to seniority. Hence there reigned among us the most disastrous system of
tyranny, exercised by these unfledged viceroys of Providence over their
subordinates--a tyranny for which there was no redress, however great
the wrong. It was of no use to appeal to my father. Had he sided with the
complainant, things would have been worse in the end, and there would then
have been revenge and retaliation to add to the original count. It was
better to take things as they came, or to fight it out for one's self.
And there was always some one still younger
to whom it could be passed on; which was so far a comfort! Our house, in those days, was like nothing so much as a farm-yard full of cockerels and pullets for ever spurring and pecking at one another. It was the trial of strength that always goes on among growing creatures--especially among young males; but it was bad to bear while it lasted. Add to this a still more disastrous system of favouritism, and the knowledge that no justice was to be expected, from my father downwards, if such a one were the plaintiff and such another the defendant--and the breaking up among ourselves into pairs of sworn friends and devoted allies--and this slight sketch of the moral rule that obtained during the early days of my childhood is complete.
Easily provoked and daring in reprisals, but as the youngest the least
formidable
and the most defenceless, I was too good fun to be let alone. I was like the drunken helot told off to self-degradation for the moral benefit of the young Spartans; for I was teased and bullied till I became as furious as a small wild beast, and when by my violence I had put myself in the wrong, I was held up as an example to Edwin and Ellen to avoid, and flogged as the practical corollary. I do not suppose a week passed without one of these miserable outbreaks, with the rod and that dark closet under the stairs to follow.
These repeated floggings did me no good. Physically, they certainly
hardened me to pain, but morally they roused in me that false and fatal
courage which breeds the dare-devils of society and makes its criminals die
game. But I was subdued at once when anyone, by rare chance and gleam of
common-sense, remonstrated with me lovingly or talked to me rationally. I
well remember my ambition to prove myself worthy of his trust, which was like sunlight in my tempestuous young life, when my father, instead of accusing and threatening me, relied on my promise to do what was right and to my word when I said I had not done what was wrong. Nor he, nor anyone who trusted to me, ever found me even then a defaulter. Like a faithful dog, I would have stood to have been hacked to pieces before I would have broken faith or forfeited my childish honour.
These halcyon days of moral dignity were painfully exceptional; and my
father's confidence in me was that gift of God for which I longed more
ardently than for anything in my life before or since--and how seldom
granted! I only remember two occasions--once when I was believed about
that broken drawing-room window, of which I had not been the ball-playing
cause; and once when I was allowed to pick
red currants for preserves, and my father trusted to my promise not to eat nor filch. As things were, I was always being guilty of some act of mischief, some flagrant disobedience to rules, or some outburst of temper which gave those in authority reason when they thrashed me, if they were in the wrong when they misunderstood me. So much I must say for my past turbulent self:--I never remember being flogged for an act of meanness nor for a lie; and I do remember twice taking his punishment for Edwin and not betraying him. I never told tales of the others, and I was always ready to brave danger and its consequences if asked to do a service. Thus, though I was undeniably the black sheep of the flock, I was the one trusted to when a steadfast agent was wanted.
At this moment there comes before me a little scene which must have
taken place when I was a very small boy.
I was sent to steal some sacred apples for some of them--I forget
who they were now. As I shook the tree by means of a light garden-rake
hitched up on the branches, it fell and cut open my head, covering my
neck-frill with blood. But I gathered up the apples in my pinafore, and
took them to my brothers or sisters hiding behind the wall on the little
bank which to this day is golden with the 'shoes and stockings'
I remember so well; and then I marched sturdily into the house, where Mary
the nurse cut my hair, strapped up the wound, and put me to bed. The next
day I was taken to my father and flogged. But I would not tell for whom I
had stolen the apples, nor would I plead in mitigation of my punishment
that I had had none myself.
Our then 'viceroy,' the second brother--the eldest
being away at college--was a young fellow of eighteen, with a violent
temper
and a heavy hand. He was generous and affectionate at bottom, but he was irritable, jealous and tyrannical to an overwhelming degree. One day, a Punch-and-Judy show came on the lawn before the dining-room windows. We were all there, watching the raree-show. I suppose I was excited and in one of my impudent moods, for I persisted in calling my brother 'Dicksy,' a name he disliked and specially forbade the smaller fry to use.
'If you say that again I will thrash you,' he said to me
angrily.
I looked up into his face. How clear the whole thing is before me! The
squeaking and unintelligible Punch; the sunshine on the grass; the close
throng, clustered like flies against the window; and my sense of my
brother's towering bigness and formidible ferocity. But I was a daring
young rascal, and always ready to brave the unknown.
'Dicksy!' I said defiantly.
Whereupon Richard was as good as his word, and then and there beat me
severely.
The brother who stood next to Richard, with one sister between, was
three years his junior. He was as tall, but naturally not then so strong;
as passionate in temper, but of a deeper nature and finer mental and moral
quality altogether. These two were natural foes and rivals, and were always
fighting--the one tyrannizing, the other rebelling. Before this day I
do not remember this brother Godfrey. He is lost in the crowd of the
elders, from whom we little chaps were separated as entirely as if they had
been lions or we had been mice. After this day he became one of the
enduring loves of my life. I distinctly remember how he turned upon Richard
and fought him for his cruelty to such a little fellow as I was--not
quite five years old, and still in frocks like a baby; for I can yet see
the
weals on my shoulder made by Richard's vigorous fingers. After the scuffle Godfrey took me on his knee, and kissed me to comfort me. From that moment there woke up in me a kind of worship for this brother, just ten years my senior--a worship, which, old man as I am--still older as he is--I retain to this hour. We have lived apart all our lives. In over forty years I have seen him for two at a stretch. But when I realize the ideal of knightly honour and manly nobleness--of that kind of proud incorruptibility which knows no weakness for fear nor favour--I think of my brother Godfrey far beyond the seas; he who as a boy braved his elder brother for the sake of a little fellow who could not defend himself--as a man calmly faced an excited mob yelling for their blood, to place under the shadow of the British flag two trembling wretches who had only his courage between them and death.
The early life and adventures of this
brother are a romance in themselves. Had he lived in mythic times he would have been another Amadis, a second Wallace. He is like some offshoot of heroic days, rather than a man of a commercial generation; and in him the grand old Roman spirit survives and is re-embodied.
Godfrey was my lord, but Edwin was my natural chum. Some eighteen months
younger, I was the stronger and bigger of the two. He had always been a
delicate boy; and the nursery tradition about him was that when he was born
he was the exact length of a pound of butter, was put into a quart-pot, and
dressed in my eldest sister's doll's clothes:--the ordinary
baby-clothes were too large, and her doll was a big one for those days. I
was his slave and protector in one. He had none of the emotional intensity,
none of the fierceness of temper, the foolhardy courage, the inborn
defiance, neither had he the darkness of
mood nor the volcanic kind of love which characterized me. He was sweeter in temper; more sprightly as well as more peaceful in disposition; more amenable to authority; of a lighter, gentler, more manageable and more amiable nature altogether. He was the family favourite and the family plaything. Long after my sisters had left off taking me into their laps they would let Edwin sit on their knees for hours; and when my brothers would have kissed a hedgehog as soon as me, they kissed him as they kissed Julia and Rosamond and Ellen. He was never in mischief and never in the way. He cared only to play quiet games in the garden when it was fair, or to sit in the embrasure of the window when it was wet and we were forced to keep the house. In consideration of his delicacy he had been taught wool-work and netting; and his supreme pleasure was to sit on his 'copy' (a kind of stool), in a
'cupboardy house'--that is, in the midst of a ring of chairs forming a defence-work against intruders--while I told him stories 'out of my own head' or Ellen good-naturedly read to him.
Besides this constitutional delicacy to make those in authority tender
in their dealing with him, he was the most beautiful of us all. Godfrey was
incomparably the handsomest of the grown boys--did not his beauty once
save his life?--but Edwin was the loveliest of the children. He was
like one of Sir Joshua's cherubs. His head was covered with bright
golden curls, his skin was like a pale monthly rose, and he had big soft
blue eyes which no one could resist. Everyone loved and petted him, as I
have said. Our father, who saw in him the reproduction of our dead mother,
had even a more tender feeling for him than for any of his other
favourites; my own hero, Godfrey, loved him ten thousand
times more than he loved me; and Richard, our tyrannical 'kingling,' who spared no one else, spared Edwin. But no one sacrificed to him as I did, and no one loved him with such fanatical devotion. It was but natural, then, that he should lord it over me with that tremendous force which weakness ever has over loving strength; and that I, the born rebel but the passionate lover, should give to that weakness the submission which no authority could wring from me. Also it came into the appointed order of things that I should bore him by my devotion, and that he should pain me by his indifference. It was a preface to the life that had to come--the first of the many times when I should make shipwreck of my peace through love.
Yet had it not been for this devotion to Edwin, and the feeling that I
was of use to him for all his coldness to me, my life would have been even
more painful than it was.
I was so isolated in the family, so out of harmony with them all, and by my own faults of temperament such a little Ishmaelite and outcast, that as much despair as can exist with childhood overwhelmed and possessed me. Three years after his defence of me, when he was eighteen and I eight, Godfrey left home; and I lost the Great-Heart of my loyal love--the one I always felt was somehow my own special suzerain, if I were but a despised kind of Dugald creature to him. But even at the best, the difference between our ages prevented anything like friendship or companionship. He was my lord, but he was never my familiar.
I remember how, after he had left, and though I knew that he was out of
England and countless miles away, I used to expect him to return suddenly
and by miracle; and how sometimes I used to look for him about the
place--in the cupboards and unused
lofts. And I remember, too, a strange horror that used to seize me, of expecting to find a pool of blood in the place where I looked for him.
Perhaps this odd kind of horror was due to a terrible scene which had
had a great effect on me. Our two brothers, Richard and Godfrey, were
shooting in a field not far from the vicarage, and we were watching them
from the windows. Suddenly there was a tremendous report, a large volume of
smoke, a cry and the hurrying of men together; and then we saw a body
carried on their shoulders, and brought up to the vicarage. It was Richard,
the barrel of whose gun had burst. The stock had wounded him severely in
the stomach, and covered him with blood. Godfrey was safe, but singed.
Perhaps it was some obscure association of ideas which added this ghastly
horror of expected blood to my grief for Godfrey's mysterious flight
and my insane
belief in his miraculous return--unable as I was, like all devotees, to accept the unalterable law when dealing with love.
In these outcast days I used to dream a strange dream--strange,
considering my age--how that I was not one of them--not my
father's child at all--but a foundling, some day to be reclaimed
and taken home by his own who would love and understand him. I had a
favourite hiding-place in the lime-trees at the foot of the garden, where I
used to lose my time, my strength and mental health in this fantastic idea.
Granting all the difficulties my family had to contend with in me, I do not
think the desolation of a young child could go beyond the secret hope of
one day finding himself an alien to his own--of some day being claimed
by the unknown--strangers coming out of space sure to be more gentle
and sympathetic than those others! But I always added, as a codicil to this
testament
of despair, that if ever I did find these unknown dear ones, Godfrey should still be my king and Edwin my beloved, and that no new tie should break these two golden links of the old sad heavy chain. As another proof of my childish desolation, if also of my intemperate nature, I remember how once, in a fit of mad passion for some slight put on me by my eldest sister, whereat the others had laughed and jeered me, I first fought them all round, then rushed off to a large draw-well we had in the coach-yard--we were not then at Eden, but at my father's private house in Kent--intending to throw myself down and end for ever a life which was at the moment intolerable and emphatically not worth living. The heavy cover was over the mouth, and I could not move it. While I was trying the gardener came along; and, seeing that I had been crying, he good-naturedly took me to the apple-loft, where he filled my pockets with golden russets--which
consoled me grandly, and lifted me over that little stile of sorrow into a flowery field of content. I was then ten years old.
If Edwin had died when he was a child, the spiritualists would have had
a case. He woke one night sobbing piteously, and woke me, sleeping with
him, by his crying. When I asked him what was the matter, he said that he
had just seen 'poor mamma.' He was on one side of a broad black
river, and on the other, in a garden full of flowers, stood our mother
draped in white with wings like an angel. She held out her arms and called:
'Little Edwin, come to me! Little Edwin, come!' Then he woke,
and cried because he had again lost the mother whom he, of all the
children, most desired to have had and known. For not even those who
remembered her regretted her loss so much as did Edwin, who was not quite
two years old when she died, and who did not remember her at all. He had
no illness after this, nor did he die. Thanks to the pure blood we have all inherited, notwithstanding his early delicacy he is alive and well to this day. But had he died then, this dream would have been accounted a supernatural vision, and he would have been held to have been called to death and paradise by his mother's spirit.
If all the failures in presentiments and warning dreams were recorded, I
fancy they would considerably outweigh the co-incidences.
I had not Edwin's pathetic yearning for our mother. I found her
substitute in Nurse Mary, whom I loved with overwhelming force, and got
into trouble as the result. As, once when she had been away for a
week's holiday and had returned at night, I was wakened up out of my
sleep and taken to her bed. I was so glad to see her that I cried; and
finally cried myself into what was, I suppose, a fit of hysterics;--
when they whipped me as a useful nervous counteraction.
This nurse was an undisciplined kind of woman, who now hugged us till
she nearly squeezed us to death, and now beat us black and blue. But I
suppose my own volcanic nature understood her violent one, for I could not
live out of her sight, and she was good enough to me. I am afraid she
drank, poor Mary! Things dark then are clear now; and those mysterious and
sudden illnesses which she used to have pretty often were, I fancy, due to
brandy rather than to disease. She left us when I was nine years old.
I was about eleven years of age when the first distinct stirrings of my
mental life began to make themselves felt. Godfrey's
adventures--for he had returned after two years' imprisonment in
Russia--had something to do with the new light that began to dawn in
my young brain. I had
always had a passion for books and pictures, and I knew almost by heart those few that we possessed. In contrast to the wealth of modern days, it will not be uninteresting to give the full catalogue of our special library. Mrs. Sherwood's 'Little Henry and his Bearer'; 'William and the Woodman'; 'Sandford and Merton'; 'Paul and Virginia'; 'Evenings at Home'; 'The Arabian Nights' Tales'; 'Tales of the Castle'; 'Tales of the Genii'; 'Robinson Crusoe'; 'Pilgrim's Progress'--where the occasion was generally improved for my benefit, as I was identified with Passion, while Edwin was Patience; Miss Edgeworth's 'Moral Tales'; and 'Elizabeth, or the Exiles of Siberia,' formed our whole stock of profane literature. For Sunday-reading we had 'Mrs. Barbauld's Hymns'; the 'Dairyman's Daughter'; 'Fox's Book of Martyrs'; 'The History of all Religions'; 'The Life of Christ'--
of which I remember only the pathetic pictures of the Agony in the Garden and the Crucifixion, where two little angels held up cups to catch the blood; and sometimes we were allowed to look at the coloured plates of the 'safe' volumes of the 'Encyclopædia Londinensis'--the battle-horse of the study library. When we grew older we had to read one of Sherlock's sermons--Sherlock was my father's favourite divine; or he read to us in the evening, before prayers, a chapter out of Doddridge's 'Family Expositor,' when all of us youngsters invariably fell asleep and were scolded for our irreligious drowsiness.
But, as I say, when I was about eleven years of age, almost suddenly I
seemed to leap out of this narrow circle and to demand a larger mental area
altogether. There woke up in me the most burning desire to Know. With all
the
intense physical enjoyment of life given me by my keen senses and strong animal nature--with all the delight I felt in putting out my strength and learning how to increase and sharpen my growing bodily powers--I had a dim consciousness that life meant more than mere pleasure; and that it was as important to know history and geography, and what the problems of Euclid proved, and what those unintelligible books in strange tongues said to those who could read them, as it was to know how to swarm up a smooth-boled tree, jump standing and leap running, and clamber like a goat over the crags and rocky places. All these things were necessary and delightful; but higher and beyond them all stood Knowledge.
By this time our family at home had decreased by death, marriage and
absence, to five--less than half the original number; and things
educational were worse for us,
the youngest two boys, than they had been for the elders. Edwin's health was too frail for school-life; and as he could not go, neither could I. I was wanted at home to be his companion. It was in vain that I begged my father to send me to school. He would not; and I vexed him by my entreaties. Nor would he give us masters nor a tutor at home. He promised, but he never fulfilled his promise. All the instruction I ever received was of the pot-hook-and-hanger degree--the mere elements; the rest I did for myself. And so years passed on, and still Edwin and I were kept at home to do what we liked, provided we did not get into mischief and did not bother.
Part of that liking with me went into learning for myself what there was
no one to teach me. I took up languages; beginning with French. Year after
year I attacked one after the other, till I had got
hold of a good many. But, as I learnt only to read and was not phenomenally laborious, I scamped the grammar and devoted myself to translation--that is, I neglected rules and learnt only words. This is the reason why, when I could read with ease and translate aloud rapidly while I read, French, Italian, German, Spanish, with a little Latin and less Greek, I could neither parse any of these languages correctly nor speak one fluently. I learnt without method, and I have never been able to disentangle my mind from the false order of the start.
This want of early training explains all my persistent intellectual
deficiencies--my want of dialectical skill, my want of scientific
accuracy, and how it is that I know nothing analytically, from the
foundations upward, but only synthetically, concretely, as it stands. This
must needs be, seeing that I have never built up any study brick by brick,
nor chamber by chamber, but
have only entered on the results of other men's work--inhabiting where they have created. Essentially self-educated as I am, that self-education began at an age when the elemental drudgery, which always seems useless to ignorance, is naturally shirked for the more interesting results. Learning, with me, was only a means to an end. For instance, I learnt French out of curiosity to read an old illustrated 'Telemachus' that we had, and thus to understand what the pictures meant; Italian to know about Petrarch and Dante, whose conventional portraits in our encyclopædia had fascinated me; German, for 'Faust'; Latin, to understand those brown-leather folios in the study library; Spanish for 'Don Quixote'; and Greek in the vain hope of following Homer in the original--the awakening touch here having been given by Godfrey telling me about the 'far-darting Apollo' and the 'silver-ankled Thetis.'
And being by the nature of my intellect quick to understand, and by temperament impatient to possess--'a temperament founded on ultimates,' as my friend Garth Wilkinson said of me in later times--I had not mastered the rudiments when I plunged into the middle term, and bounded on to the end. Thus, never subjected to that severe mental discipline which is but another form of moral control, I grew up in absolute mental unrestraint; and I have never been able to put myself into harness since.
This independence of thought is not presumption nor vanity, nor any of
the hard things believers in authority say of the self-reliant. It is the
result of antecedent conditions, for which a man is no more responsible
than he is for the size of his skeleton. And he can change the one as
little as the other. Those who are to be disciplined must be taught their
drill and
made to obey; and no one can be at once self-reliant and submissive.
This then, was how things stood in my early boyhood, after the stage of
childhood proper was passed--say from between eleven to seventeen. In
my mental life, undirected and unhelped, save by opposition--which has
always been a powerful stimulus to me--I strove to learn, to know, to
possess. So far I was justified by my conscience and at peace with myself;
and if I lost my time, took things by the wrong end, and amassed a world of
rubbish which did me no good then nor since, I did not know my mistakes,
and my ignorance was my bliss.
In my family I was still under the old cloud. I was snubbed by my
father, whom I constantly worried and often angered; roughly handled by my
brothers, whose authority I defied when they came home for their vacations
from college; sent to Coventry by my sisters whom I
revolted by my violence and affronted by my impertinence; made his slave by Edwin, who did not really love me in those days; but with all this I knew that I tried to do right, however poorly I succeeded, and that I would have died rather than I would have done what seemed to me mean or false, or cowardly or selfish. And ever and ever I longed with a hungry passion that ran into pain, for the love which my own turbulence of nature made it impossible for others to give me.
If our dear mother had lived, things would have been different. She
would have understood each and would have done justly by all. Under her
wise management there would have been none of that neglect in direction and
harshness of punishment when things went wrong which had been the rule of
our upbringing. And her gentle influence would have tamed the tempers and
regulated the actions of all alike. All our
troubles were due to her death; and my poor father was as much to be pitied as were we.
I have dwelt so long on the early life of my childhood because it gives
the clue to all the rest. The boy is father to the man, and the first chord
contains the key-note of the whole succeeding harmony.
Though we two were incomparably the worst off for tuition, our elder
brothers
themselves had been but slenderly furnished, all things considered. Therefore they had failed to make for themselves such positions as might have helped us youngsters against the dead weight of my father's inertia. It was as much as they could do to fend for themselves and struggle into comparatively good places. And some of them, in revolt against their difficulties, had flung up the attempt here at home, and had cast their lines in the dark but brisker waters of emigration and exile.
There never was a family with so much power left to run so cruelly to
waste for want of timely cultivation as was ours! It is no vanity to say
that we were an exceptionally fine set all through, and that, had we been
properly trained, each one of us would have made his mark. There was not a
dunce among us, nor a physical failure. All my sisters were pretty; all my
brothers were well-grown and handsome; and Edwin,
who was the least robust in person, was the most beautiful in face and the most lovely in character. I have often lamented the waste of good material in our family, and the loss to the world that it has been. When I see the elaborate education given to boys and girls with brain-power of the most ordinary calibre, and note what careful training has made of them, and then remember the large amount of mental and physical vitality among ourselves, and what ordinary care might have made of us, I confess I feel heartsick--foolish as it is to look back, like Lot's wife, over the irrecoverable past. All the same, it was a misfortune; and it has been a real loss.
It might have been so different! My father's office and position
made him an influential person in society; my mother's family kept us
abreast with the county magnates, at least in theory, if, owing to my
father's disinclination to society, scarcely in
practice; and we had friends who might have helped us if they would. There was, for one, the great Tory member whose historic name was like a battle-cry--he had power enough, if he would have used it for gratitude without being entreated. For my father would have cut off his right hand before he would have asked a favour of living man. When an election was on hand, and every vote was of consequence, Sir James used to come to our house, make much of his dear friend Mr. Kirkland, praise his Latinity and his poetry, admire the girls, kiss the children, and hint at substantial services for the boys. When he was returned he forgot all about his dear friend as cleanly as if he had never existed, and did not lift a finger to serve the sons of his faithful partisan, who were also the grandsons of his old master, the Bishop. His want of gratitude never touched my father's political fidelity; for no man was
ever less a self-seeker than he. He did his duty at a personal loss quite as stoutly as if it brought him grist and grain; though he suffered from ingratitude, as any man of sensibility would. But he never complained, even in the privacy of home. I have never known anyone more entirely free from all spite and bitterness than he.
By this time I had formed my theory of the universe. What thoughtful boy
of seventeen has not? I was firmly convinced that I held the fee-simple of
all great truths in my hands, and that no views other than those which
seemed to me right were worth consideration. All were the outcome of either
ignorance or falsehood--of either blind superstition which could not
see the light, or wilful tyranny, conscious of its iniquity but determined
to hold on for the oppression of truth. No question could have two sides;
no opponent could be an honest man; no ultimate development
of my own theories could eventuate in evil. Does not every individual, like concrete society, go through this phase of bigotry--tyrannous and unjust by its very intensity of conviction?
I was comically proud of being an Englishman. I had no doubt that we
were God's modern chosen--His eldest sons and peculiar
favourites; that the English Protestant Church was the very Delos of
Truth--the ark of the Christian covenant; that even Christian prayers
said in a foreign tongue were not heard with so much pleasure, nor answered
with so much precision, as ours--while prayers said to a Being who did
not exist--to Allah or Brahma, Vishnu or Buddha, not to speak of the
Madonna and the saints--were neither heard nor answered at all; that
we were the best gentlemen, the bravest men, the most enlightened and most
virtuous people on the face of the earth; and that every departure from our
special
ways of living and thinking was a wandering into the desert with destruction at the far end. That is, I was bounded by my own circumstances, and could not travel beyond my experience.
Also, I was an ardent Republican and a devout Christian. Indeed, I was
the one because the other; and, in spite of that injunction to pay tribute
to Cæsar, on which my father so much insisted, I could not see a
'via media.' Nor could I understand the compromise between
faith and practice, consistency and expediency, made by the believing
world; nor yet how men, who would have roasted alive an infidel had the law
permitted, could deliberately break all the commands given by the Saviour.
That fine satirical problem of how to hold together, on the principles of
the Sermon on the Mount, an empire founded on the breach of all the Ten
Commandments, had not then been formulated. But the spirit of it was
in my own young head, and the difficulty involved was one that puzzled me as it has many more than myself, and will continue to puzzle others for some time yet to come.
For my own part, full of youthful zeal and the logic of consistency, I
determined to live the Christian life so far as it was possible; helped
thereto by the influence and example of the strong old heathen times. I, at
least, in my own person would be faithful to the Lord and a man among
men.
I began by renouncing all the pleasant softnesses and flattering
vanities of my youth, and made myself a moral hybrid, half ascetic, half
stoic. I accustomed myself to privations and held luxuries as deadly sins.
Sensual by nature, I cut myself off from all sweets of which I was
inordinately fond; and because I was a heavy sleeper and fond of that warm
ener-
vating morning doze which made me always late for breakfast, for a whole year I lay on the floor and despised bed as an unrighteous effeminacy. Never cowardly to pain, I taught myself to bear mild torture without wincing--as, when I one day dug out a tooth with my knife as a good exercise of fortitude. Because I once saw myself in the glass with a strange and sudden consciousness of the beauty of my youth and personality, I turned that offending bit of blistered quicksilver to the wall, and for six months never saw my face again. During that time I had to undergo many things from my sisters because of the untidiness of my general appearance; for though I had become scrupulously clean by now, as part of the physical enjoyment of life--clean even to my long brown freckled hands, surely the test-piece of a boy!--I was but a sloven in the decorative part, and never knew the right side from the wrong, and scarcely the
back of things from the front. I gave away all the 'treasures' I had accumulated since my childhood, in imitation of the Apostles and according to Christ's injunctions to the rich young man; and no one but myself knew of that little altar which I had built up in the waste-place behind the shrubbery, where I used to carry the first of such fruit as I specially liked, to lay it thereon as my offering to God--to wither in the sun or be devoured by insects and birds. I set myself secret penance for secret sins. I prayed often and fervently, and sometimes seemed to be borne away from the things of time and space and carried into the very presence of God, as it were in a trance--a still living Gerontius. I realized my faith as positively as if it had been a thing I could see and touch. My confirmation was a consecration; and when first I received the communion, I felt as if I had tabernacled the Lord in my own
body, and that I was henceforth His, so that I could never sin again.
In these days of boyish fervour, had I fallen into the hands of a Roman
Catholic I should have become a monk of some severe disciplinary order. My
whole inner life was one of intense religious realization. God was far off,
the paternal King and inexorable Judge of all, and His 'unlidded
eye' ever watched me with awful attention. This thought was sometimes
so oppressive that I used to shrink and cower under the consciousness of
being always looked at; when I would cover my face in my hands and say
aloud:
'Oh! if I could but be sometimes alone--if I could but hide
myself and be able to think as I liked and not be watched nor
heard!'
And then I felt that I had spoken blasphemy and committed the
unpardonable sin.
My consciousness of Christ was softer. He was my gracious Prince, to
obey whom brought the joy of loyal serving. To disobey pained rather than
angered Him, and caused Him that 'crucifixion afresh' in which
I believed as firmly as I believed in Gethsemane and Golgotha. The angels
were my invisible companions, of whom I was not afraid; and I felt the grim
presence of the devil at my back and in the corners of the room, as one
feels the presence of a murderer in the dark. In a word, I lived in the
Christian's sanctified egotism--believing that all the forces of
heaven and hell were mainly occupied with the salvation or destruction of
my one poor miserable little soul; and that the most important thing
between earth and sky was, whether a hot-blooded lad with more sincerity
than judgment flew into a rage when he should have curbed his temper, or
heroically checked his impulses of sensuality in the
matter of jam-pudding and the fruit garden.
But during all this time of my faithful endeavours after a higher life I
was just as intolerable to my family as before, and my passions were still
my masters. My anger blazed out in the old fierce way at the smallest
provocation; and when the blood mounted to my head, then I was again the
helot self-degraded I had always been. Heaven was shut against me, and I
was spiritually in the Hell I was predestined to eternally inhabit.
I was vehemently penitent when the fit was over, and resolved in my wild
way of repentance to bear with Christian patience the next affront put on
my sensitive pride. Alas! nature was too strong for me, and my progress in
self-control was like nothing so much as the twirling of a squirrel in his
cage. For all my efforts to deliver myself, I was up to my neck in the
Slough; and my prayers brought
me no more spiritual grace, no more godly fruitage, than so much water poured out on sand. The boiling blood I called on God to calm boiled ever as madly as before; and with all my faith in the Divine presence and power, I was conscious that I was not answered.
What agony I went through! What an infinite sense of being fated to sin,
foredoomed to perdition, possessed me, as I felt that I was left to fight
with my wild beasts unhelped--to struggle to get free, that I might
take refuge in God, and to be hopelessly in the clutch of the devil! It was
as if some monster held me bodily, while I was striving to deliver myself
that I might rush into the outstretched, loving arms of the Saviour
opposite. But that Saviour waited for me to go to Him. He did not and would
not help me. Only those who have gone through a like period of spiritual
endeavour and frustration can realize my
sufferings at this time, which, I remember, threw an awful kind of light on the myths setting forth the endless labour of Sisyphus and the fruitless work of the Danaïdes in hell.
Clergyman though he was, all this ebullient zeal and youthful
extravagance of aspiration annoyed my father as if the translation of faith
into practice had been an impiety, and not an effort after godliness. We
will grant the clumsiness of the method--still, the effort was always
there. Logical Christianity seemed to him a dream as fanatical as it was
inconvenient. All that was necessary for our salvation was--to believe
the Bible, obey our parents, say our prayers night and morning, go to
church regularly, and keep ourselves free from forbidden sins. More than
this was to fall on the other side and go over into presumption.
He venerated the saints and martyrs of
past times; but he maintained that the past was not the present, and that the age of enthusiasm, like that of miracles, had died out. Had persecution been revived, he would have stood firm for his own part, and he would have exhorted others to a like fidelity. But as no more fires in Smithfield would be lighted, at least in our generation, and no one would now call out: 'Christianos ad leones!' he held spiritual assent more valuable than practical imitation, and quiet walking in the cleanly parts of the broad highway better than scaling eccentric heights and shouting 'Excelsior!' from the clouds.
It was useless for me to turn to him for guidance. He repulsed me with
coldness, or testily chid me with arrogance, when I carried my difficulties
between faith and practice to him. He accused me of presumption in thus
questioning the lives of men older, better, wiser than myself--such
a mere unformed lad as I was! And ever, with perfect justice and uncompromising logic, he pointed out the inconsistency of my aspirations after superior piety with my acted life of passion and misconduct. My conscience told me he was right when he thus flung me back with the argument 'ad rem.' What had I to do with good or godliness--I, the child of sin, whose very love was a tempest, whose quarrels were volcanic eruptions, whose repentance was a tropical storm, and whose virtues themselves were as unsettling and disturbing as were his faults? If I could just scrape in by conformity, that was all I need hope for. To attempt more was as irrational as if a lame man who could not walk should try to leap.
The wave of religious revivalism, just beginning to break on the arid
shores of ecclesiastical indifference, was to my father a sign of storm and
shipwreck, not of healthy
movement. He stood apart from both Evangelical enthusiasm and Tractarian authority with equal dislike for each. Through the former, moreover, he had received personal annoyance of a grave kind. During his five years' absence in Kent, his curate, one Mr. Black, had 'awakened' and 'converted' the parish of Eden to a high pitch of evangelical fervour. A schism in the place was the natural consequence. The Evangelicals said that my father had not been a faithful minister of the Word, and that the Gospel had never been preached to them before the advent of Mr. Black; and the sleepy old souls, who disliked innovations, stood by their kind-hearted vicar who did so much quiet good in the place, though he did not 'pan out' on free will and prevenient grace, baptismal regeneration and faith before works. They scouted the new order as fantastic and extreme; and thought evening parties, where prayers took the
place of the former round games, and expounding recondite doctrines that of the old forfeits, not only monstrously dull but also unseemly.
Their sheet-anchor was Conservatism and keeping things as they were.
What had done for their fathers was good enough for them, and ought to be
good enough for their children. No improvements, however much they were
needed, met with their support. They saw no good in the Sunday-schools,
which had been built and were kept up by a rich adherent of the energetic
curate; and the 'restoration' of the old church by the same
generous hand was an offence to them. Munificence had a hard fight with
chronic obstructiveness before it got leave to bestow; and every stone that
was laid and every ornament that was added was subjected to hostile
criticism and opposition.
Naturally my father was not so backward as this. He recognised the good
and beauty
of all these changes. The restored church was really magnificent; and the fine organ, with its organist and well-trained choir, was a decided advance on old Adam and his pitch-pipe. The Sunday-school teachers too, kept those unruly children in order; while the low pews, all looking one way, held the congregation together and prevented the sleepy-heads from snoring. But the finer surroundings demanded a more stately method; and in his heart my dear, indolent father, when he came back into residence, regretted the old familiar ways, and felt strange in all this new niceness, where he had to be for ever on parade and always alert and in order. If the glory of God could have been fitly set forth without so much ado, it would have been more pleasing to him. He thought it just a little in excess--as he thought my poor, purblind efforts very greatly in excess.
My father and I, not in harmony on reli-
gious matters, were at issue in politics--High Tory, according to his age and training, as he was; Republican of the crudest academic type as was I. We had many a stormy scene; for I was such an impulsive fool I could never hold my peace, and when my mind teemed with thoughts that knocked at the door of my lips, they had to come forth, for good or ill.
'I would rather see the devil himself let loose on the earth than
the Radicals get the upper hand in the country!' my father said to me
one day in a paroxysm of rage, when I had rashly introduced the subject of
the first Chartist petition, just then presented to Parliament.
'And I hold all kings and tyrants as direct emissaries of the
devil, and that "Vox populi, vox Dei,"' was my defiant
reply.
For which piece of impertinence my father called me a puppy and
incontinently knocked me down.
In those days O'Connell was my political idol; and I seriously
thought of running away from home to offer myself to him as the servant and
soldier of liberty, good for any work he might give me to do. Had not
Godfrey, that best and noblest of us all, gone to join the Poles in their
rise against Russia? and was not the freedom of a country beyond one's
own small nationality? Wherefore, for all my patriotism, I rather
inconsistently longed for the Irish to take up arms, that I might imitate
my brother's splendid example and fight their
tyrants--ourselves--for their liberties. I thought Byron's
'Irish Avatar' the finest bit of poetry the world had ever
seen--run hard, however, by Campbell's 'Song of the
Greeks;' and I used to declaim these two poems with a ferocious
energy which made my sister Ellen call me, in her quiet way, 'a
perfect monster'--while Edwin added: 'You are just a
maniac, Chris, and ought to be put into a madhouse.'
If I found in O'Connell my Leonidas, my Brutus, my Tell--any
one you like who shall best express the anax andrōn of history and
liberty--Sheil was my Demosthenes; and I used to devour his speeches
as if they had been the text of a new Gospel. In the smaller men, of whom
our own Liberal county member was the natural chief, I saw the modern
representatives of the immortal Three Hundred. The French Revolution was
the divine birthday of European liberty--I am not far from the same
belief now! Lafayette, thin and respectable mediocrity that he was, took,
in my ardent imagination, heroic proportions and colossal merits; and I
undutifully rejoiced over the discomfiture of my country in the American
War of Independence. I believed in Greece and abjured Turkey. I adored
Poland and I hated Russia. Joan of Arc, the Maid of Saragossa and Charlotte
Corday, were my feminine ideals; but the old Judaic heroines,
such as Judith and Jael, were even then abhorrent, and I marvelled much how God could have found them worthy.
I envied the dead of all times and in all places who had known how to
die for Liberty; and I held the apotheosis of humanity to have been reached
in Old Greece and Republican Rome. I burned as with fever when I read of
old-time tyrannies, and shouted to the skies when they were
avenged;--for the past was as the present to me, and my vivid
imagination bridged the gap with the living lines of sympathy. I raged
dumbly, or broke out into stormy deprecation when my father, as he often
did, read aloud the most pungent bits of the 'Anti-Jacobin' and
I held Canning as no better than Judas Iscariot. All of which means that I
was as intolerant as the men whose intolerance I reviled--as arbitrary
as the tyrants who had oppressed free thought and slaughtered independent
action.
And I tried to indoctrinate Edwin with all this burning hatred of
oppression, all this admiration for the assassins of tyrants, all this
sympathy with revolt which filled me as with a divine afflatus. But when my
proselytism was more noisy and aggressive than usual, he simply shook his
fair curly head with his favourite little action of disdain, and told me
that I was an ass for my pains--for we were a plain-spoken lot, and
did not mince our terms among ourselves. And when I bothered him too much
he lost his patience and got annoyed, telling me that I was the most
unendurable nuisance and the biggest idiot going, and that if I did not
hold my tongue he would leave the room. Then I stormed at his civic and
political indifferentism, which to me was a real crime; and probably tore
out of doors to work off my anger and cherish may sense of isolation by
long lonely rambles among the mountains, where
I felt like some exile banished for the sake of liberty--friendless among men, but supported by the immortal justice of his cause.
It was towards the beginning of this political phase in the 'Sturm
und Drang' period of my life that the Chartist riots were on hand.
With what vague dread and sympathy combined they filled me! I was quite
sure that their cause was holy and that their demands were just; but the
thought of danger, when brought home to my own people, froze the blood in
my veins with horror. I might shout 'The Song of the Greeks' to
wind and sky for as long as I liked, but I had no fancy for seeing the
beaks of our home ravens crimsoned with the precious blood of friends and
family! Still, if there were to be a general revolution, I used to assure
Edwin, I would protect them all. Of course I should join the insurgents;
but, if the worst came to the
worst, my Brothers the Chartists for my sake would hold harmless all I loved. And they would place an armed guard at our gate, who would require the password from all who came near, and allow no one to enter with evil intent. And we would receive into the rectory all our best friends, and I would be their saviour. For myself, if the royalists won, I would not take my life at their hands at a gift.
I do not think my assurance had a very tranquillizing effect on my
brother or my sisters, who somehow, with the illogicality of youth, made me
responsible for their terror. How young it all was!
I shall never forget my strange emotion when, one day, we heard the guns
over by Carlisle--we were then at Braeghyll, which was at the back of
the mountains. We were walking on the high moor which runs into the plain
where Carlisle stands. My father said it was the Chartists firing at and
being fired on by the soldiers; and he looked grave and anxious, and did not abuse the poor fellows. His kind heart carried it over his political passions, and he was sorry for the men who would have to suffer. And how vividly I too realized the fact of war being within this measurable distance of our home; but oh! how my blood leapt for hope that the cause of Liberty would prevail! But I dared not speak. When my father was in such a mood as to-day, I was awed by loving reverence into silence.
About this time a party of about thirty men one day surged in at the
rectory gates, and came up to the house, demanding bread and money. My
father chanced to be from home this day; which was as well; for the men
were at first inclined to be blustering and rude, and my father's
quick temper 'flew' at insolence as quickly as the seed-vessel
of the balsam flies at the touch. He
would have been kind enough to them had they been respectful; but he would have braved all consequences had they been brutal. The sight of my pretty sisters, however, and of us two young boys, soon soothed them into a pleasant frame of mind; and when I went out boldly among them, and fraternized with them, joining with them in their general abuse of all aristocrats and mill-owners, and talking seditious nonsense with the best, they grew quite friendly and confidential. One of them justified my former boasts by assuring me, with an oath, that when their day came we should have no cause to be 'afeard.' The rectory should be marked with white chalk, and not a hair of our heads should be harmed.
'For thy sake, my brave lad!' said the speaker, laying his
hand on my shoulder kindly.
So the adventure passed off without more
damage than that which came from a temporary domestic famine. For the men generously refused to take any money from such a young, irresponsible set as we were: 'Nay, we isn't rogues!' they said; and after their bread and cheese and beer, they left us with a ringing shout, and 'God bless the parson's childer!' flung back as their parting words, when they passed through the gate.
Another time we got into an excited crowd as we were driving back from
Carlisle. There had been a mass-meeting of the mill-hands there, and they
took my brother Godfrey for Feargus O'Connor. They swarmed over the
carriage in noisy and rather inconvenient enthusiasm, insisting on shaking
hands with us all; till Godfrey grew angry with their familiarity to our
sisters, and, knocking one drunken fellow down, drove off at a smart pace.
His ideas of fraternity did not include grimy paws thrust into Ellen's
pretty hands; and half-drunken oper-
atives claiming us all as their 'mates' was bringing the ideal down to the vulgar real with a run--making of Bellerophon carrying Theseus a cart-horse driven by a satyr.
lently miserable--always one with the gods or down among the demons who people hell. But, full of unrest and turmoil as was the present, how resolved I was that the brilliancy of the future should repay me with more than compound interest! Once give me my liberty, my majority, and my share of the small fortune left us by our grandfather, and let me go into the world for myself, and I would be happy. I always said to myself: 'I will not be like other men, miserable and discontented, because failures and weak-kneed. When I am my own master I will be happy, because I will conquer fate and compel fortune; and I will then make friends who will love and understand me.'
For I would be famous and do great things. I would cover my name with
glory, and all those who had not believed in me with confusion; and my own
should be proud of me. I used to dream of the senior wranglership at
Cambridge and of the
leadership of the House of Commons. I would go to the bar and be Lord Chancellor, or remain a free lance and be Prime Minister. I would make a name; I would be great. Whatever I did I would succeed. And I felt as if I could not fail.
I also felt as if I could not die--as if there were no forces in
nature which could destroy that strong vitality, that passionate outstretch
and possession by which I knew how the gods of old were framed and
fashioned. Belief in immortality is the correlative of strength and youth.
It is only when we are old and tired that eternal rest seems possible and
unbroken sleep desirable.
At one time I had been undecided whether I would be an artist or an
author. I was intensely fond of painting, and 'Anch'io son
pittore' was a phrase that had rung in my ears like the sound of a
golden bell. It struck a chord which has vibrated ever since in the pride
and joy I take in my profession,
and I well remember, the first time I walked to the -- office with my first commanded leader in my pocket, I said to myself aloud: 'Anch'io son pittore! I also am one of the leaders of public opinion and the makers of modern thought.' But I was very short-sighted; and when I thoroughly realized the disadvantages of this defect, I gave up the idea of being a second Raffaele and stuck to that of over-topping Gibbon or Scott instead.
Many things helped on this final decision. I had always had the power of
'telling stories out of my own head,' and I could imagine
things so vividly, I was not always sure whether I had seen or only fancied
that I had seen them. Fired by the thrilling adventures of my beloved
Godfrey, who had returned from Russia and imprisonment when I was about ten
years old, I had already begun a novel to be called 'Edith of
Poland'--the idea of which had come into
my mind during a dull sermon at our parish church of Shorne, when we were in Kent. And was not that a sign by which to steer? A book published by the Christian Knowledge Society, and I think called 'Difficulties of Genius,' had greatly influenced my mind. It had given stability to my hopes, and, as it were, a practicable backbone to my ambition, by the example of others who, as untaught as I, had yet by their own industry and resolve risen to be the shining lights of their generation. Thus directed and encouraged, after long wandering round the outer circle of possibilities, I finally gravitated to the centre, and chose the profession of literature as more within the range of my powers than any form of plastic or pictorial art. And as the most useful preparatory tools were languages, I had devoted myself to the study of tongues, with this graver end more or less consciously underlying the pure delight I felt in the
mere acquirement of words and the ability to read what else would have been so many sealed books.
It was about this time that a curious bit of hallucination came to me.
It was All Halloween, and we of the North still believed in spells and
charms. My sisters, Edwin and I were melting lead, roasting nuts and
wasting eggs--whereby the white drawn up by the heat of the hand
through water might determine our future--when I was dared to that
supreme trial:--to go upstairs into my bedroom, lock the door, and,
with the candle set on the dressing-table, deliberately pare and eat an
apple, looking at myself in the glass all the while. I would in those days
have accepted any challenge offered me--to go into a lion's den,
if need be:--this bit of fantastical bravery was easy enough! Jauntily
and defiantly I bounded up the stairs, locked the door, pared and began to
eat my apple, with my eyes fixed
on the glass. And there, suddenly out of the semi-darkness--the eyes looking into mine--peered a face from over my shoulder;--a dark, mocking, sinister face which I could draw now as I saw it then--how many years ago! Broad in the low, flat brow, with dark hair waved above the arched eyebrows--the eyes deep-set, dark, and piercing--the nose long and pointed--the thin mouth curled into a sneer--the chin narrow, but the jaw wide--it was all so vivid that I turned sharply round, saying: 'Who is there?'
No one was there, of course; and I spoke into a void more gruesome than
that grim Presence would have been.
The vision did not return, and I ate my apple to the last pip steadily;
but when I went downstairs they all laughed and said I was as white as if I
had seen a ghost; and they were sure I had; and what was it like?
'The devil,' I said gruffly; on which Ellen said mildly:
'Upon my word, Chris, you are more like a bear than a
boy.'
Long after this I had in my ears the sound of rushing wings. They were
so loud that I used to wake from my sleep with the noise as of large wings
about my bed. And with these were mingled whisperings and voices; but no
intelligible words ever came to me; though I made no doubt they were the
same voices as those which haunted Christian when passing through the
Valley of the Shadow. I was studying very hard at this time, and in the
full swing of all my private penances and eccentric self-discipline; and my
nervous system was for the moment strained, despite my powerful
constitution.
Our lives at Eden, whither we had finally returned, were not remarkable
for variety. There was little incidental amusement for
us, and we had to make our own pleasures in the best way we could. On the whole we managed pretty well, and never knew the want of artificial aids. Boating in summer; skating in winter; riding; long mountain rambles and more distant excursions; picnics in the daytime and 'tea-parties' in the evening, helped to make our young existence glad and to redeem the monotony of the hours. And as time went on, and the new influx of life and motion through railroads and the penny post stirred even our stagnant little stretch of backwater, we became more like the rest of the world. But we lost in individuality what we gained in catholicity. No longer great ladies, like the Duchess of St. Albans, travelling post with multiplied precautions, sent up a message, which was a command, requesting my father to go down and spend the evening with them at the hotel. This was to do honour to the cloth, while avoid-
ing the tedium of a lonely three hours after dinner.
No longer distinguished strangers from afar, unendorsed, came among us
as superior beings to whom the whole community was cap-in-hand. On the
contrary, we were taken up by men of authentic name and acknowledged light
and leading, and we became vastly more critical and less credulous than we
had been. Knit up into closer communion with the larger world
outside--for we had now daily coaches and a railway-station not more
than twenty miles away--we were less the countrified
'hoodie-crows' we had been; and Eden became one of the
favourite show-places of the kingdom, and as luxurious and polished as the
rest.
The most important to us of the 'strangers,' as the summer
visitors were generally called, were the reading-parties--the
collegians--who came down for the
Long, sometimes to vagabondize and get into mischief, and set the place in a flame by reason of their rowdyism--e.g., by those hot 'coppers' flung to the rabble of small boys in the street on Sunday, when the decent folk were coming home from morning church--and sometimes to read hard and walk mightily, according to their traditional intention. We used to get acquainted with them through the tutors, who generally managed to know my father; and we found them delightful variations to the main theme of our existence. My sisters had their love-affairs which began with roses and ended with thorns; and we boys had a glimpse of other lines of thought which did us infinite good. But the circumstances which most influenced my own life at this time were the creation of a new ecclesiastical district taken off the old parish and the strange influence which certain books and stories had over my thoughts.
The incumbent of this new district of St. Mark's, Henry Grahame,
was a man of wide cultivation of mind and great sweetness of manner. He was
essentially a Coleridgean, able to reconcile Faith with Reason by the
higher way of the Understanding, just as now certain of the Broad Church
reconcile Genesis and Darwin by the elastic theory of Development. He was a
'made,' as opposed to an instinctive and natural man; one who
held art to be superior to nature, and the intellect a greater thing than
emotion. Of the ancients, Plato--of the moderns, Goethe and
Coleridge--were his 'dii majores;' and the schools of
Sappho and Pindar, Schiller and Byron, he abhorred. My first introduction
to Coleridge was through him, and he made me also read Wordsworth and
Carlyle. For himself, he was eminently eclectic. What he could not
receive--as, for instance, following his friend and teacher, Maurice,
the doctrine of eternal
punishment and the personality of the devil--he rejected as mistranslations of meaning and the misdirection of mediæval ignorance. Other doctrinal difficulties he accepted, as I said, by that Understanding which Coleridge makes our spiritual Universal Expositor.
Satisfied as he was with his own interpretation, it was perhaps natural
that he should be intolerant to the mistakes of others. He was serenely
confident that he knew. Those who differed from him were therefore
ignorant. And ignorance is not a state that demands respect--pity, if
you will, and enlightenment, but not respect. Thus, those whom he undertook
to teach were bound to be humble and obedient, as their first step towards
true knowledge. They must accept without cavil such dogmas as he offered
them. He who knew, and they who were dark and dense--what else could
be demanded but hu-
mility and obedience when he gave them the living truth?
Liberal as he was, in reference to the ecclesiastical section to which
he belonged, Henry Grahame was like all other unscientific men who believe
in spiritual enlightenment, void of proof. Personal conviction stood with
him for so much tangible and ponderable reality; and that mental state to
which he had attained was therefore the absolute norm for others. He could
not tolerate divergence; for all divergence meant to him error, and error
was Apollyon. Humane, gentle, loving by temperament, this consciousness of
culture superior to the mass, and of the secure possession of Truth, made
him intellectually both exclusive and scornful. He was a moral Brahmin who
drew away his skirts from the Pariah. He despised the common run of men and
minds, and looked on the majority as his inferiors, thinking humanity but a
poor job at the
best. To be sure, Christ had died for men of all degrees--the Gurths and Wambas as well as the Platos and Aristotles of the Christian world; but Henry Grahame put aside the inferential respect which it would seem but consistent for Christians to have for the creatures who once produced their God; and, standing on the heights of his own intellectual Pisgah, judged calmly, but condemned inexorably, all who were inferior to or different from himself. He reverenced only culture, and despised ignorance as much as he shrank from vice and ugliness.
His wife was a woman of like mind to himself; but also, sweet and good
as she was, with a little more artificial stillness of manner, and a little
more conscious effort after grace. She had been born and bred a Unitarian,
but had now come into the Church; and the effects of her early training, in
its chilly æstheticism and self-subdued purity, still clung to her.
Both showed that
they felt themselves here, among us unawakened and unæsthetic creatures, like Crishnas among the cowherds. They were of another order of intelligence, another school of thought altogether; and their sense of mental isolation was manifest.
They did not like my father, nor did he like them. They found him arid,
unenlightened, fossilized--a leafless stick in a stagnant pool. He
found them unsound, fanciful, unreal--painted sparrows passing for
birds of price. There was very little intercourse between them and him; and
soon the new incumbency became as completely differentiated from the old
parish, as is the frog from the tadpole. Thoughts, doctrines, modes and
hours of conducting the service, all were different; and though St.
Mark's created no schism among us, it made a complete division between
the old and the new. Meanwhile both Mr. and Mrs. Grahame were very kind to
us young
people; and especially so to me, whose turbulent nature and now troubled thoughts they set themselves to calm and guide.
They also introduced us to some notable people. I remember once meeting
Mr. Carus at their house, and how frankly shocked I was by the joyous,
buoyant tone and manner with which he announced that he had just left the
death-bed of his dearest friend.
'I was so glad to know that he was with Jesus! It was one of the
happiest days of my life to feel that he was safe in the arms of the
Saviour!' he said, a smile of supreme satisfaction beaming over his
face.
I was too instinctive to understand this queer pleasure, which seemed to
me both false and strained; and I felt a disgust for the man I never got
over.
Another notability met at the parsonage was Whewell. This was when my
faith had begun to fall away at the base; and
I see still the satirical smile with which he accompanied this coda of a long speech setting forth the necessity of faith in the unprovable:
'"Sceptic and septic" --there is only the
difference of one letter between them.'
Also I saw Carlyle, at the house of our dear local chieftain, spoken of
before. I had then begun a classical romance--my most important book;
for I am antedating in these fragmentary recollections; and Carlyle
thundered in his deep bass against the foolishness of going back on the
past and writing about trouserless heathens, when so much work was lying to
be done in the present for honest Christians--and how young fellows
who maundered about bull-god Apis, or Pericles and his Impropriety-Aspasia,
had better be set to break stones by the road-side--which at least was
useful for the mending of the highway we all had to travel on.
Another of my almost friends at this time was poor Hartley Coleridge. I
say mine--for all that I was but a unit, a fraction, in the family
sum--because he distinguished me from among the others with special
attention, and talked to me more than to the rest. He had the habit of
gathering piles of books under his arms, walking about the room while he
declaimed on all things under heaven, or read aloud as he went. His reading
was charming. He had the Coleridgean sweetness and rotundity of voice, and
read with perfect grace--not too theatrically, and without
affectation; in both of which snares his brother Derwent ran his feet and
tripped--but with just enough artificiality to make it art, and lift
it from commonplace into beauty.
Because of his besetting sin he could never be kept long on a visit
anywhere; and his comings and goings were therefore always cometic and
unsatisfactory. But I
like to remember him and to picture him at his best, and as he always was whenever I saw him; for I loved him with a strange pride in his special notice of me and his evident affection for me, unformed, uncouth hobbledehoy as I was then. He and the Grahames were the first persons who distinguished me by their special attention, and who thus brought a certain sense of light and companionship into the dim and lonely chamber in which my soul had hitherto lived.
Now I must go back to the main thread of my story, and to the troubled
perplexity of my thoughts.
Undirected in my studies and unhelped in my thoughts, I read where I
listed and came to such conclusions as seemed good to me. In the
superstitious and pre-scientific period of life, when marvels are accepted
as of the established order of things, I was inclined to the mysterious and
the weird at all four corners of my being. Thus, I believed in magic of a
stately and learned kind; in alchemy and astrology; in the Rosicrucians and
second-sight; in fortune-
telling, magic crystals, and the Egyptian boy's power of seeing the past and future in a few drops of ink held in the hollow of the hand; in mesmerism, ghosts and spiritual visitations generally; but by some good luck of latent common-sense I did not believe in vulgar witchcraft, though I did in the Witch of Endor. But then, she was not vulgar; and she was in the Bible. The supernatural powers of such men as Cornelius Agrippa and Albertus Magnus I took to be undeniable. The charmed circle surrounded by smoke wherein the demons appeared to (I think) Benvenuto Cellini, was a fact; and I had no doubt but that Surrey did see Geraldine in the magic mirror. The Indian jugglers, of whom my eldest sister sent home such thrilling accounts, were evidently mighty magicians; and he who had the courage could, if he would, conjure up the devil even to this day. I remember how greedily I devoured,
and half-ashamedly, half-defiantly, believed in the notes to Sir Walter Scott's works, telling of the wonders that had been. Gilpin Horner the goblin, crying: 'Tint, tint!' and Thomas of Ercildoune, who lived with the fairy queen and was sent for by her again when his time had come; the 'Book of Might' and its strange glamour; the magic potency of that shadowy Virgilius whom I could never reconcile with the more solid humanity of the Virgil who wrote the 'Eclogues;' the egg on which Naples is built; the naked child running three times round the barrel; the Mauthe Doog; Sir Kenelm Digby's sympathetic ointment; the Irish banshee and the Scottish seer--all were cherished faiths with me; while the historical mysteries of the Vehmgericht and the secret worship of Bafomet seemed to put a backbone into the more purely imaginary qualities of the rest.
Other things of an unprovable nature also troubled my imagination. I was
intensely fond of mythology, in which I saw neither the sun nor the dawn,
nor yet th