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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,
Page v
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.
IT is impossible to write an absolutely candid autobiography.
Our relations with others, and the artistic proportions of events,
forbid that completeness which, to be perfect, should include every
circumstance of the life. For just as plants and organisms are built
up and developed by microscopic cells, so are our characters and minds
formed by all the circumstances which surround us, how minute soever
each may be in itself. At the best then, no more can be given than
those salient points of thought and action which furnish an
intelligible outline but do not include fractional details—which
Page vi
show the completed fabric but not the whole process of
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
Page vii
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.
I WAS born before the age of railroads, steamboats, electric
telegraphs, or the penny post; and when society in the remote country
districts of England was very little changed from what it had been a
hundred years before. In those days living was simple, locomotion both
difficult and restricted, and absence from home a rare event, save for
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
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
EDEN, the second living to which my father had been presented,
just before I was born, was by no means so rough and riotous a place
as Braeghyll. It was as drunken and immoral, but it was less ferocious
and uncouth. There were more resident gentry to keep civic order and
restrain the lawless impulses natural to strong-bodied and uneducated
men. There was too, a tolerably fair High School under the management
of twelve 'statesmen,' which knocked the rudiments of knowledge and
some small sense of discipline into the un- 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
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
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
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
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
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
WE all suffered much from the want of intelligent supervision,
but I, by the inherent defects of my character, as well as by my place
as youngest, suffered most. Quick to resent and sensitive to kindness,
rebellious and affectionate, wilful and soft-hearted, I was ever in
tumult and turmoil, followed by disgrace, punishment and repentance.
But I must say in self-exculpation, that, tiresome as I must have
been, I was as much sinned against as sinning.
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
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
'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
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
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
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.
AT seventeen my future profession was undetermined and my real
education had never been begun. My father's constitutional indolence
had greatly increased of late years, and nothing was so difficult to
him as to take a resolution, excepting to act on it when taken. Hence,
Edwin and I were still hanging about at home, doing nothing that
should in any way equip us for the life in which we had to take our
place and pull our pound with the rest.
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
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
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
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
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
'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
If I found in O'Connell my Leonidas, my Brutus, my Tell—any one
you like who shall best express the anax andrn 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.
HOW bitter-sweet life was to me in this forming-time of my
character! and how violent the contrast between my mental troubles and
the keenness of my physical enjoyments! No one who drew in the sweet
breath of flowers or stood against the storm-winds, glad in his youth
and rejoicing in his strength, enjoyed the great gift of Life more
than I. And no one suffered more. My recollection of all my young life
is that of a tempest. I never knew rest, never compassed the outermost
circle of serenity. I was always either violently elated or as vio-
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
I WILL give, so far as I can, the genesis of my first change in
speculative thought.
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 the ark, but simply the divine and the human.
How dear that little idyl of Philemon and Baucis was to me! Its
simplicity and realism made it almost Scriptural; and though I did not
dare to bracket it with the visit of those three divine beings to
Abraham and Sara, still, I thought the one account as true as the
other. No poem ever written equalled in my eyes the loveliness of that
sweet picture where Endymion lies asleep on the heights of Mount Ida,
and the virgin goddess leans over him lovingly; and the majesty of
Minerva was equalled only by the beauty of Apollo. Aurora and her
dappled steeds surrounded by the Hours casting flowers as they fly;
rash Icarus and rasher Phaethon; the deluge of Deucalion and the
dragon's teeth which Cadmus sowed—they were all products of the
border-land lying between romance and reality, and I was never quite
sure of the line of division.
The stories also of the Greek maidens who met the Gods among the
reeds, in the court of the temple, in the woods, gave me cause for
much crude speculation. Like our own sacred mystery of how the Sons of
God came down and loved the daughters of men, they woke up in me
incessant wonder at the difference between those old times and the
present day, and made me ask myself: 'Where are the Sons of God now?'
and with more faith than critical faculty: 'Why should not be again
that which his already been?' I remember when I first read Byron's
'Heaven and Earth,' how the characters of Anah and Aholibamah, and
the superhuman yet manlike beauty of Samiasa and Azaziel struck me with
living force, and coloured my dreams for many nights. But the story
which impressed me most was that wild and weird account of
Gilli-Doir-Magrevollich, the Black Child, Son to the Bones, found in
the notes to the 'Lady of the Lake.'
I cannot say why this strange unwholesome legend took such hold of
me. Perhaps because it was unwholesome. I could not shake myself clear
from it; and I had a haunting kind of prevision that more hung on it
than its own superstitious fancy. I had just heard, too, of Joanna
Southcote; and altogether my mind was, as it were, fascinated by this
subject of virgin births—their possibility now as their certainty in
times past—and by the whole range, indeed, of divine interposition in
the works and ways of man—whether it were in the assumption of the
human form or in the gift of prophetic insight, or inversely in the
darker mysteries of magic and the power of conjuring up the devil.
This was a different thing from belief in spiritual communion. It was
what one may call the materialistic form of supernaturalism—belief in
which belongs to all unscientific and uncultured minds, and the
abandonment of which is the first step outward towards enlightenment.
One early summer's day, I was sitting where I had no business to
be, under the hedge of the as yet unmown hayfield at the foot of the
garden. I had taken with me to read in quietness, Ovid's
'Metamorphoses.' If my father had seen it in my hands he would have
forbidden it to me; which was why I went where I was not likely to be
found even if looked for. I was digging away at the myth of Nisus and
Scylla, and the purple lock wherein the old king's strength lay, when,
for the first time, I was struck by the likeness of this story to that
of Samson and Delilah. Hitherto all the Bible stories had been on a
raised platform apart, and there was no analogy with them to be found
elsewhere. I knew my Ovid pretty well by now; and immediately, on the
discovery of this point of resemblance, there flashed across me also
the likeness between the story of Myrrha and that of Lot's
daughters—of Iphigenia and Isaac for the one part, in the
substitution of a doe for the one, of a ram for the other; and of
Iphigenia and Jephthah's daughter for the other, where the human
element is alone retained. With this my mind went off on the now
familiar track of the virgin births, when suddenly—in that strangely
rapid and vivid manner in which such things come to me, as if it were
really the quick opening of a closed door and the headlong rush into a
newly-furnished and brilliantly-lighted chamber—there shot through my
brain these words which seemed to run along the page in a line of
light: 'What difference is there between any of these stories and
those like to them in the Bible?—between the loves of the Sons of God
for the daughters of men, and those of the gods of Greece for the
girls of Athens and Sparta?—between the women made mothers by
mysterious influences, and those made mothers by divine
favour?—between the legends of old times and the stories of Sara,
Hannah, Elizabeth,—and the Virgin Mary?'
When this last name came, a terrible faintness took hold of me. The
perspiration streamed over my face like rain, and I trembled like a
frightened horse. My heart, which for a few seconds had beaten like a
hammer, now seemed to cease altogether. The light grew dim; the earth
was vapoury and unstable; and, overpowered by an awful dread, I fell
back among the long grass where I was sitting as if I had been struck
down by at unseen hand. But this physical faintness soon passed, and
my mind went on following the line of thought I had begun, as if I
were talking aloud to some one at hand.
'No one at the time knew anything about the miraculous conception
of Mary's child. Joseph himself was only warned in a dream not to
doubt her, for that she was with child by the Holy Ghost, as announced
to her by the Angel Gabriel. Does any one know more now than was known
then? If this Christian marvel is true, why not all the rest? Why
should we say that Mary alone spoke the truth and that every one else
has lied? But spirits do not come to women; there were no such beings
as those old gods who were said to have come down from Olympus to
mingle in the affairs of mortals; that passage in Genesis about the
Sons of God is a mystery we cannot fathom. And we know that there is
such a being as the Angel Gabriel—such a Divine person as the Holy
Ghost. Do we know this? Have we more certainty than had the old Greeks
when they believed in the power of Jupiter and the divine manhood of
Apollo, and in the celestial origin of those fatherless sons brought
into the world by maiden mothers, who swore to their womanly innocence
for the one part and their human exaltation by divine favour for the
other? Surely yes! The Miraculous Incarnation has been affirmed by all
the churches; and the proofs are—the star which guided the Magi, and
the song of the angels in the sky to the shepherds watching their
flocks. But who can certify to these proofs? Why did not others see
that star as well as the Magi?—and who knows whether the shepherds
heard the song, or only imagined it?'
These thoughts clung to and left me no peace night nor day. Ever and
ever the Mystery of the Incarnation became more and more a subject of
perplexity and doubt, and of dread lest that doubt should broaden into
denial. Brought into line with these legends of former
times—contrasted with the old classic myths and the stories in the
very Bible itself—it suddenly seemed to lose its special character
and to be merely one like others. It was no longer exceptional and
divine—it had become historic and human. Therefore, it fell within
the range of criticism and might be judged of according to its merits
and the weight of evidence at its back. What was that weight? Outside
its own assertion—absolutely nil. No contemporaneous testimony
vouched for the story of the Virgin Birth—for the Annunciation of the
Angel Gabriel—for the Star or the Song; and Mary herself alone knew
the truth of things. All therefore rested on her word only. Sweet,
beautiful and pure as was her personality—Godlike as was that Christ
she bore—was that word of more intrinsic value than that of the
Greek girl who told how she had met the god in the reeds by the river
side?—or than that of the nameless mother of the Black Child, Son to
the Bones, denying human knowledge and accusing the unseen? Was it?
Had there been more miraculous births than one?—or no miraculous
birth at all, and the laws of nature interrupted for no one—for one
no more than for another?
While my mind was torn and tossed by these terrible questions, I was
one night looking at the stars from my bedroom-window, wondering at
the mystery and glory of creation and speculating on our relations
with the universe—when again in that same sudden way these words came
to me as distinctly as if I were reading them in a printed page:
'Has God in very truth ever become man? We, the inhabitants of only
one out of such countless millions of worlds—our world of a lower
order of cosmic splendour than so many, and ourselves of conscious
mental deficiency—why were we singled out for such a transcendent act
of mercy? Why should God have cared so much for us, vile and
troublesome as we have always been? Was it true? Has the great
Incommunicable First Cause ever clothed Himself with flesh—born,
living, suffering, dying as a mortal man, and all the time very God?'
Then, as vividly as if I had seen Him in the body and spoken with
Him face to face, I saw Christ as a peasant translated to our own
time. I realized the minutest circumstances of His humanity; when a
loud voice, like the rushing wind, seemed to echo from earth to
sky—to fill all space and to command all time, till I was conscious
of nothing but these words: 'Man—not God; man—not God!'
The voice was so loud, the words were so clear, I wondered the whole
house did not wake to listen. And how bright the stars were! Each
star grew to be like a sun which changed the darkness of the night to
almost overpowering glory; and I seemed to hear the weaving of the
great web and to understand the complexity, but the unity, the
universality, the rush and pressure and stream of life—everywhere
life, even as here!
Why did they not all hear and see as I did? But no one moved. I
turned to look at Edwin. He was tranquilly asleep in bed at the other
end of the room—a beautiful child rather than a youth of
nineteen—innocent, troubled by spiritual doubts no more than his
favourite cat which was curled up on the pillow beside him, and
desiring to learn no more of the great mysteries than he had been
taught in his childhood. No! he saw and heard nothing. The voice and
the glory and the great weaving of the web of life did not exist for
him. It was only I who heard and saw and knew.
But now, coming up from the study, over which our bedroom
immediately was, my father's voice broke out in prayer; of which I
heard these words: 'O Thou, who came into the world to save sinners,
have mercy on me!'
Then all my exaltation passed, and I was once more alone in the
dimness of the starry night—alone, in the dark, and ignorant.
I flung myself on my knees and asked pardon of Him whom I had
crucified afresh by my doubts—longing only to die and to have done
with all this ignorance—longing to die, that I might then Know and
sin no more.
The light under the door betrayed me. My father, passing along the
passage, saw it and came in—to find me in this state of spiritual
anguish and contrition.
When he asked why I was not in bed? and what ailed me? I could not
confess to him. I knew of old how unsympathetic he was with this part
of my life; and my wound was too sacred to lay bare to eyes which
could not understand and would probably rasp it afresh.
My silence, which looked like sullenness, angered him.
'Why was I ever cursed with such a son!' he said vehemently. 'Look
at your brother there—why cannot you be like him—a reasonable
creature who gives no trouble to anyone? Why are you so foolish, so
irritating? Not Job himself could have patience with you,
He went up to Edwin's bed, leaned over him and kissed him fondly;
and my brother, roused by the light and the action, opened his eyes
and smiled, putting up his hand to our father's face with the
caressing gesture of a child.
I was too much moved to resent or defy, as I should have done in my
ordinary mood. I only longed to receive the same love as that which
was given to others—to be included—to be taken out of the solitude
and banishment in which I lived.
'Kiss me, too!' I said, holding out my hands. 'Father, dear! kiss
me too!'
'No,' he said coldly; 'I cannot kiss you, for I neither believe in
you nor respect you.'
So there it was again!—the old bitter contrast—Esau and Jacob;
Ishmael and Isaac; Cain and Abel; and the poor goat, laden with sins,
sent into the wilderness, while the sheep fed about the Master's feet
and the lambs were carried in His bosom!
For all this I could not stop my thoughts. They came as of their own
will, and I was forced to listen to them.
Bracketed with the more human difficulty of the Divine Incarnation
came one yet more mysterious. Christ, to whom we pray under the name
and form of; and as actuated to pity by His experience as, a man—was
He always Jesus Christ—the Divine Man from all eternity? Was then the
Godhead always tripartite? The Jews were taught the unity of the
Divine Essence in the one supreme Jehovah, and knew nothing of this
division. When did it come about?—when Mary conceived? Did that which
had been from the beginning take a new form at a moment of time?—and
was heaven, in point of fact, acted on by earth, and God determined by
humanity? If not, why then was Christ hidden so long behind the
overwhelming personality of the Father?—His very name and being
concealed until He had taken the form of man? Was He powerless till
then? and did God, the great Spirit, need to become flesh before He
could save flesh? Was the Athanasian Creed wrong, and were the
Persons unequal?
Again, was the grace which lies in Christ Jesus, the crucified
Saviour, dormant for all these countless generations? But why? Why
should not the world have been redeemed before? There was no manifest
historic reason why that special moment should have been chosen; and
for the worth of the men saved—surely Plato and Aristotle, Socrates
and Aristides, Buddha, Confucius, Marcus Aurelius—and how many
more!—were as worthy of redemption from the eternal doom meted out to
ignorance as those nameless lepers and minor disciples who had neither
commanding intellect nor enduring influence!
I carried my troubles to Mr. Grahame, and he set himself to resolve
them. He took the last first, but refused to admit that this was a
subject which fell within the range of discussion.
'The reason for that moment When is hidden with Christ in God.
Why, Wherefore, How, and the need which God in Christ has of the love
of man, are of the mysteries whereof no man knoweth,' he said
reverently 'It is a waste of time, and the encouragement of spiritual
presumption, to speculate on them.'
'Would you have said that to a Greek wanting to know why Chronos
devoured his own children?' I asked.
'The cases are not parallel,' he answered.
'Parallel in so far that we are the children of God, and He let us
be lost for all eternity because He delayed His salvation,' I
answered. 'The only difference is that which lies between the active
and the passive.'
'Things which are beyond reason are beyond dialectics,' he
returned. 'We have to deal with completed facts, not with energizing
causes nor yet with reasons why. The fact of the Miraculous
Conception is all that concerns us.'
'How do we know that it is a fact?' I asked; and again went over my
roll-call of analogies.
'To compare the Divine Child and His Mother to the absurd legends
of a rude people in a rude age, when the most monstrous myths were
accepted without examination, and the laws neither of nature nor of
evidence were understood, or to the patent falsehoods of a few
unfortunate girls!' said Mr. Grahame with gentle contempt. 'Have you
so little sense of proportion—beauty—verisimilitude? But we need not
go farther on this line. It pains and revolts me. So far then, I take
it that the ground is clear. The Mystery of the Trinity is beyond our
comprehension; the virgin mothers of men are myths; but the
Incarnation of the Divine in Jesus of Nazareth stands four-square to
all the winds of doctrine. It is the one Great Fact on which humanity
can rely and by which it is saved.'
'Why this more than those others?' I asked. 'To assert is not to
prove—is it?' I added hurriedly, a little frightened by my own
audacity in standing up against one so infinitely my superior.
He was sweet and gentle and mild.
'By its own internal evidence,' he said. 'I disregard the external,
about which you trouble yourself so much, and take my stand on the
character and life of Christ alone; and on the results of Christianity
in history. We want nothing more to prove the divine origin of our
faith. Such a being as Jesus of Nazareth must have been divine, seeing
how far He was beyond humanity, both in His life and teaching. And the
work which Christianity has done in the world could only have come
through a God-given revelation. I ask you to look at nothing else but
the life of our Lord, and the influence of Christianity on society.'
'Yet Buddha's life was pure and holy, and Mohammed redeemed the
Arabs from gross idolatry to the spiritual worship of the One God,' I
'And Buddha and Mohammed were both divinely inspired and divinely
led,' was his reply. 'Rivers are fed by many streams, and the river
of righteousness with the rest. Buddha, Mohammed, Luther, Cromwell,
Savonarola, Galileo, Newton—all the great men who have taught great
truths of any kind, have had their portion of inspiration, the perfect
fulness of which is found only in our Lord. The instruments of God are
many—the melody from each is the same—and the Hand which masters
all is the Only One. Study the character of Christ. Trace the
influence of His teaching on the morality, the history, of mankind,
and then you will realize for yourself the Divinity which needs no
circumstantial evidence to substantiate it.'
This argument did not satisfy me for long. At first I thought I had
found in its deeper insight and wider outlines the resolution of all
my difficulties and a sure harbour of glad refuge. But after a time I
slipped back into my painful groove of doubt, and, with doubt, of
There were certain things in the character and doings of
Christ—beautiful as was the one, benign and loving as were the
others—which seemed to me simply and purely human: as, His wholesale
denunciations of the Pharisees and Sadducees; His cursing the fig-tree
for its natural and normal barrenness; His sending the devils into a
herd of swine, so that the innocent brutes were all drowned, while the
devils were presumably not damaged, being of the nature of immortal
spirits; and a few more of those elementary difficulties over which
all inquirers stumble. And as for the effects of Christianity on
society—divorced from civilization, surely these have been more
disastrous than beneficent! Religious zeal has only added another and
still more pungent ingredient to the fierce compound of the natural
man, by adding fanaticism to cruelty. It has made of a peaceful
paradise a reeking hell in South America; devastated the Low
Countries; set Catholics to shoot down Huguenots, Episcopalians to
massacre Covenanters, and all dominant sects to destroy all nascent
ones; it has deluged the earth with blood wherever the Cross has been
raised and the Beatitudes have been preached in the name of the Prince
of Peace and the God of Love.
And then the popes and bishops, the cardinals and abbots, the
Roderick Borgias and Balfours of Burley—men who have wallowed in
sensuality or waded through blood—where was the Sign of the Lamb on
them? Were popes like Hildebrand and Innocent III. true Vicars of
Christ? Was Thomas à Becket or was Wolsey a fit successor to the sweet
St. John or the humble-minded St. Andrew? And was our own prelatic
Church, with its worldly wealth, political influence and social
dignity, the same Church as that which the Twelve Apostles planted
when they went forth without scrip or purse to preach the poverty they
practised? 'Le grand sansculotte!' Was my grandfather, the Bishop, a
Christian after the Archetype? Indeed, were any of us who lived
daintily and fared sumptuously, while our brothers wept and starved,
Christians such as Christ would own?
I said all this in my headlong way, vehement in manner, crude in
method. And to Mr. Grahame I must have seemed as unphilosophic as the
chalk scrawl on a barn-door would have been inartistic to Etty or
Maclise. I had no logical method; no reserve force; no critical
discrimination of values. I flung my bricks on the ground without
order or constructive endeavour, unskilfully, rudely, where he pieced
his mosaic bit by bit and line by line, till the pavement was smooth,
compact and without a flaw.
Still, he was very kind to me, and let me talk myself out; sitting
with his eyes half-closed, his white hands touching each other by the
finger-tips, and a serene smile just lighting the curved corner of his
bland mouth; while I, heated, excited, my rough hair tossed and
tumbled, my lank face crimson with emotion, stood before him pouring
out my fiery thoughts like lava that scorches as it flows.
Yes, he was very kind. For a fastidious scholar as he was, to whom
method was as valuable as matter; for a philosopher who had overcome
all dialectic difficulties and supplemented the darkness of Reason by
the light of Understanding; for a theoso- phist, sure that he knew
the mind of God, and could map out, as it were a chart, the whole plan
and order of divine dealing with man through Christ and the Church;
for an intellectual master where I was but a hodman, he was
marvellously patient. It fills me with wonder now, when I remember how
long-suffering he was, as I can measure the provocation I must have
given him both by my want of scholarly finish and by my
intractability. For neither his eclecticism, urging me to put aside as
non-essential all those points which troubled me, nor Maurice's books
which he lent me, removed the doubts by which I was harassed. And the
internal evidence on which he dwelt so much was no more convincing
than the external.
And now another thought came to me. Like the running loops of a
chain, whereof the first has broken, my doubts were multiplying and
these unanswerable questions were increasing. This was my new
difficulty: If Christ were God—that is, Omniscient as well as
Omnipotent—why did He not teach things that could be tested by man
and proved by experiment, rather than those which are assertions only?
Why, for instance, instead of telling us about Lazarus in heaven,
leaning on Abraham's bosom and separated by a great gulf from Dives in
hell, did He not give us a form of political government whereby men
might have been made happy, with equal justice to all? Why did He not
tell us that the earth is not the centre of our system, and that our
system itself is not the all-important part of creation we have
imagined it to be? Galileo would not then have been subjected to the
Inquisition, and Giordano Bruno would not have been burned. Why did He
not tell us about electricity and steam; and reveal the law of
gravitation and that of optics and of dynamics; and show us at least
the way to the great chemical discoveries that have since been made?
How many crimes would have been prevented, and how many falsehoods
would never have been believed, if He had!
To say that man has to find these things out for himself, and that
to reveal would be to destroy endeavour, seemed to me but a weak
argument. For, at the best, only one man finds out, while all the
world—after they have persecuted him and perhaps put him to death as
a blasphemer—quietly accept his discovery without any endeavour at
all. And was it worth while to leave the whole human race in
ignorance, that Copernicus should centralize the sun or Newton
formulate the law of gravitation, when Christ could have done both?
Surely, in view of a Divine Teacher who might have told us in one
moment of time what it has taken so many generations to learn, the
argument for the necessity of search—which only means isolated
teachers and delayed discoveries—is an excuse rather than an
argument! And, on the plea of help to the race to be saved—is not
intellectual truth as necessary for the right-mindedness of a man as
the spiritual is for the salvation of his soul?
I said all this to Mr. Grahame—each question a doubt—but his
answer was:
'All this is immaterial. Christ came to teach us only spiritual
truth; His kingdom is not of this world.'
And I was to him as dense-witted as a buffalo, when I answered as
'But the spiritual life is not divorced from the intellectual. The
crimes committed by superstition and ignorance—witness the crime of
witchcraft—might have been prevented by a little timely
enlightenment. Would not that have been more to our good than telling
us about the turning of the moon into blood, and the falling of the
stars from the sky? Yet the very Apostles themselves believed in
witchcraft, and their words gave an impetus to the terrible
persecution which disgraced our humanity and only proved our hideous
I did not say this with irreverence. It was simply because the
present and material good of man seemed to me more important than
something to happen in the far-off, undated future. And also because I
was beginning to think that the Teacher was not divinely omniscient,
and knew no more than His epoch.
One day the fragmentary benevolence of the miracle of healing
wrought on the blind man suddenly struck me with a sense of
incompleteness and partiality—and therefore not as divine, but purely
human. By my reading I knew that ophthalmia is, and always has been,
one of the physical curses of the East; and: 'Surely,' I thought, 'it
would have been more like the act of an impartially benevolent Deity,
had Christ taught how this evil might have been removed for all time,
rather than simply opening the eyes of this one man. Why did He cure
only that one? To set forth His power by a miracle, and thus compel
the halting faith of those who would not receive Him? Would not a
universal remedy have done that as well as this one event only,
besides benefiting the whole human race?'
Reminded that I, a young creature with a finite intellect—and even
what I had of intelligence neither well-trained nor
well-developed—had no right to question the modus operandi of
Divinity, I could only answer by my one cuckoo-note of evidence:
'This modus operandi has been manifested to us by human media. We
therefore have the right to examine into the credentials of these
media—and part of these credentials lies in the moral harmony of the
account. If things are said of God which shock our own conceptions of
justice and generosity, we are not blasphemous in refusing to believe
that they are true.'
Reminded again that some of the greatest minds and acutest
intellects have believed implicitly both the Old Testament and the
New, I answered, as others have answered before me:
'What men have believed is no measure of external truth, however
great the individual intellect. Plato and Socrates believed in the
Gods of Olympus—would you support yourself on their authority?'
'In the confession of the Divine Life within man?—Yes,' he said.
'No; in the special manifestation,' I answered; 'in the then
mystery of the armed Minerva springing from the head of her father,
Jove—in the unborn Bacchus carried about in the great God's thigh.'
'Your parallels, my dear boy, never run on all fours,' said Mr.
Grahame mildly.
'Why not these manifestations of divine power as well as our own?'
I asked.
'The world has settled that long ago,' he answered.
'So perhaps, the world of the future will settle our questions,' I
said. 'In their day the doubters of Jupiter and Bacchus and the whole
hierarchy of Mount Olympus were held as infidels and treated as
'And justly; if they had no better faith to put in the place of the
old!' he flashed out quickly.
'We must destroy before we can rebuild,' I said.
'Meanwhile the unhoused souls starve,' was his reply. 'Man must
have a faith—that is incontestable; and no man has a right to destroy
before providing a substitute. Your substitute for the Chris- tianity
you would uproot?—the living affirmation in place of your death of
'Monotheism,' I answered.
He did not answer for a moment. Then he said:
'But Unitarianism—which is our modern Monotheism—confesses the
divine life in man.'
'Inspiration—not incorporate Godhead,' I replied.
'We must judge by the Understanding,' he said. 'The Hidden Wisdom
is felt, not demonstrated. You have it, or you have it not. You cannot
argue about it as you might argue about a philosophic theorem or a
painted picture. It is a thing which the Best have agreed to accept as
final and fixed.'
'No question can be called final, Mr. Grahame, while there are
dissidents and doubters. We do not deny that two and two make four,
nor do we question the laws of gravitation. While two opinions exist
on a subject it cannot be called proved—granting these two opinions
to be held by men of the same calibre of intellect and the same degree
of education.'
When I said this, Mr. Grahame, smiling softly, first shut his eyes,
and then opening them full in my face, asked mildly, as if seriously
demanding information:
'My dear boy, are you one of those men of intellect and education
qualified to judge for yourself on these abstruse points, and to argue
with me?'
'No,' I said, 'not if I stood alone. But others think as I do. It
is a question of schools, not individuals.'
'There have always been schools,' he answered, still smiling. 'One
of these schools once believed in Simon Magus; one gave glory to
Cagliostro; and one denied the Copernican theory.'
'That was the Church,' I said, yielding to the temptation.
'Of Rome? Yes. That was the Church of Rome,' was his calm reply.
'But Rome is Christian,' I said.
'And Sir Matthew Hale was a Christian, too. Christianity has never
assumed to include scientific illumination.'
'No; and that is just my point,' I said. 'If it had! If it had
given us a test by which we could judge of the unknown by the proved!'
'In which case there would have been no room for faith. And without
faith there is no religion.'
'Is there no religion in heaven, where we are to know even as we
are known?' I returned. 'The ultimate of religious enlightenment
precludes the necessity of faith according to the conditions of our
'Precisely. Then we shall have know- ledge, which is the fruition
of faith,' he answered, with a certain kind of compassionate disdain
for my ignorance. 'It is the seed and the flower—the root and the
tree; the one cannot exist without the other. Here we have faith and
the higher series of religious research—there we shall have love and
knowledge. The two are different notes on the same string—a simple
question of vibration.'
'And for those who have not faith?' I asked.
'The loss of time consequent on straying on wrong roads—the
condemnation due to wilful ignorance.'
'Is any ignorance wilful, Mr. Grahame?' I asked. 'Do we not all do
the best we can?'
'No; some do the worst, and some ignorance is wilful,' he
answered. 'As with you now. You have the truth offered you and the
light is all around you. You will not accept the one nor open your
eyes to the other.'
'Will not or cannot?'
'The one is only a mask to hide the other. "Velle est agere." You
say that you cannot, and I, that you will not. You might if you chose.
It is because you will not choose that you do not, You are not the
first half-educated youth who has fallen into the sin of unbelief
through presumption—who has lost his better reason through the pride
which accompanies ignorance so dense as to mistake itself for
knowledge. And I suppose you will not be the last. It is a spiritual
disease which has to be gone through, like measles or small-pox. Pity
that sometimes the eyesight goes for ever and the scars remain
ineffaceable to the day of death! Absit omen! Be wise in time and heal
yourself while you can. I fear, however, you will not. I know your
kind; and your training has been too disastrous.'
This was the first time that Mr. Grahame had spoken to me with
harshness. In general he had dealt with me tenderly, as one in error
truly—but, though erring, one sincerely desirous of knowing the
truth, and therefore to be in a certain sense respected. And this
sudden dogmatic condemnation wounded me to the quick. For I could not
feel that I was wilfully wicked. I was merely conscious of a desire to
know the truth and the corresponding dread of believing a lie. If I
were in the wrong, might God forgive me and lead me aright! I had not
intentionally gone astray. And if it is part of the function of Divine
Grace to keep souls straight, why had mine been abandoned?
There was no more impiety in asking this question than there was in
acknowledging the fact. If faith comes by grace, and divine
illumination is necessary for salvation—is it the wilful fault of the
individual when this grace is withheld, this illumina- tion denied?
Is not God more powerful than the thoughts of man?
I was far as yet from the materialism which makes certain thoughts
the necessary results of certain conditions of the brain. I believed
in mind as a thing apart from and uninfluenced by matter—the soul as
something that both controlled and was determined by thought. And the
shape of my head, the depth of the convolutions, the arrangement of
the molecules and the quality of the grey matter, together with the
state of my blood and nerves, had no part in that which I held to be
essentially spiritual and super-sensual—inspired by heaven or dating
from hell.
Hell? Was there such a place as hell?—such a being as the devil? I
began to doubt even these two points, cardinal as they had hitherto
been. The Incarnation, the Atonement, Eternal Punishment and
Satan—these four corner-stones of the Christian Church had loosened
so much that the slightest movement more would shake them down
altogether. And then—what would be my state?
ABOUT this time, however, came a lull in my speculative
troubles, for trouble of another kind began to possess me. There had
lately settled among us a certain Mr. and Mrs. Dalrymple, who had
already won the goodwill of the neighbourhood by their charm of manner
and general delightfulness. They had established themselves on a scale
of what was to us rather unusual luxury; and, as Mr. Dalrymple was
known to one of our magnates, there was no cause to doubt the solidity
of their condition. We had had before now our jackdaws pranked in
peacocks' feathers, and we had been punished pretty severely for our
want of discrimination; but here we stood on safe ground, and no one
hung back because no one was afraid.
It may be that the idealizing power of youth created more than
existed, and that the golden mists of time have added their magic to
that idealization; but even now, with my imagination sobered by age
and chastened by experience, Mrs. Dalrymple stands in my memory as
something unapproachable and supreme. Her image is that of the most
exquisite creature under heaven—of a woman more like an impersonate
poem, or embodied music, or a spirit half-transparently incarnate,
than a living, solid flesh-and-blood reality. She was about
twenty-seven—tall, slender, with a cream-white skin, and dark eyes
full of inconceivable pathos and a kind of far-away spiritualized
listening look, as if she saw what we did not. Her eyelashes were the
longest I have ever seen, and she had a fabulous abundance of
jet-black hair. She dressed, too, as no one dressed in Eden; with more
elegance and refinement than that to which we were accustomed from
even our grandest ladies. She had lived much abroad; and from her
Polish mother she had inherited the subtle charm which is given by the
foreign element, as well as having that which comes from home
good-birth and perfect breeding.
She was in delicate health; languid in her movements; indolent in
her habits; but she had an almost feverish activity of mind, an almost
dangerous energy of thought. She could do everything. She was an
admirable linguist, and spoke the principal four Continental languages
as well as she spoke English itself—which, by the way, was coloured
with the daintiest little dash of foreign accent—a certain
Italianized lingering on the letters that was like a caress. She was
a musician of rare force and an artist far beyond the average. She
could talk of men, books, places, things, ideas. She knew all that
others knew and worlds beyond. She was the most graciously-educated
and the most gracefully-minded woman I have ever seen—I use the terms
advisedly—and from my father to myself we all yielded to her charm
and adored her.
From the first the Dalrymples were very friendly with us. We saw a
good deal of them; and the more we saw them, the more we loved them
and the more they seemed to like us. For myself, it soon came to be
that the day when I was not with them seemed to be blank and
colourless—a day of deadly dulness, to be lived through only for the
sake of the morrow, when I should go up to Windy Brow, where they
lived, as a half-frozen creature creeps to the fire to be warmed back
into life. Gradually these new arrivals became the world to me. When I
was not with them, I was thinking of them—longing, pining, restless,
dissatisfied; oppressed with untranslatable sorrow; burning with
hidden fever; finding no pleasure save in the books which Mrs.
Dalrymple had lent me, whereof I learnt all the marked passages, and
repeated them to myself with somewhat the same reverence as that with
which I said my prayers. Or I made Edwin or Ellen play again and again
the music she played and had given them—certain pieces of Mendelssohn
and Beethoven which were to me like poems or pictures—as full of
thought and dramatic fervour as the one, and of visible beauty as the
other. Or I begged for that long-drawn sigh of Pestel's prison-hymn,
which I cannot hear even now without a swelling at my heart and
something that feels like tears behind my eyes.
When they played these things to me I used often to find, to my own
surprise, my eyes wet with real tears as I sat, my elbows on my knees,
my face buried in my hands, lost in a dream of nameless yearning—a
kind of nebulous haze of formless sadness, where nothing was distinct
save sorrow—which yet was also beauty.
Then I used to dash out of the room, generally leaping through the
window into the garden, to hide from my brother and sisters the
strange effeminacy that had overtaken me. My abrupt departure
naturally enough offended them, and was counted to me for ingratitude,
after they had done something to please me; so that when I returned I
received a lesson on my sin of rudeness and bearishness in general,
which, with my fiery temper, was sure to involve me in a quarrel.
I was both too intense and too inexperienced in those days to
realize how things must necessarily look from the outside. I was only
conscious of what I felt. And when looks and feelings were at
variance, I took my stand on the latter, and held myself unjustly
treated when condemned for the former. Were more allowance made for
this inability to realize the world outside one's self—this inability
to understand that we are not so transparent as we imagine ourselves
to be, and that what we do and not what we feel is the rule by which
we are measured—life would be far better for us all, and especially
for such young creatures as I was;—young creatures of impulse and
sincerity, as yet incapable of that ethical diagnosis which can
criticize self.
Our new friends did us all good. Mrs. Dalrymple helped Edwin and my
sisters with their music and lifted their taste into a higher sphere;
and Mr. Dalrymple led them to practise drawing on a better method than
they had done before. He taught them to sketch from nature and to draw
from the round, and he gave them hints about their colours and
perspective; so that their efforts grew to be of better quality all
through than when they had been content to reproduce in pencil, with
smooth and servile fidelity, this stag's head from a wood-cut by
Bewick, or that child and dog from a steel engraving after Corbauld.
To me, neither a musician nor an artist, they lent books—chiefly
the poets in various tongues—which widened my horizon and added to my
knowledge. I had always been passionately fond of poetry, so that I
had felt as if our common possessions had belonged by right of
appreciation to me alone; but it seemed to me that I had never
understood the true meaning of even those I had loved best until now.
Shakespeare and Schiller and Goethe, Shelley and Byron, Dante and
Tasso—all took a different meaning and gained an added value after
Mrs. Dalrymple had repeated such and such pas sages, or given a new
interpretation to such and such thoughts. And whatever I read now, it
was with her voice, her inflection sounding in my ears, and her divine
eyes following mine on the page. Her mental influence was about me
like the sunlight, and there was no hour of the day when I forgot
her—no occupation which made me unconscious of her. She was the soul
of all things to me; and I felt like that picture of the half-uprising
man in whose nostrils she was gently breathing the breath of
life—like the dumb Memnon when the first rays of the sun touched the
soulless stone.
All the thoughts which had hitherto held me, and which I had
elaborated for myself, seemed to me crude, unformed, unbeautiful;
without life or artistry—all but my love of Liberty, and that I think
must come from the formation of my brain from birth. I had been such a
rude clod up to now; and now I was fining down, like Dryden's
Cymon—was I becoming the inversion of Pygmalion's statue?
Again another help onward. Mrs. Dalrymple taught the rest new steps
and new dances. I say the rest, for though she tried to teach me as
one of them, I could not learn. Yet she took as much trouble with me
as with them, and I did my best to do as she told me. But something
held me. 'A spirit in my feet' kept me stupid and clumsy.
I could have walked safely over a foot-wide ledge with a precipice
on each side of me, but my head swam when Adeline Dalrymple laid her
long white hand on my shoulder and I put my arm round her supple
stayless waist; and I was faint and giddy before I had made a couple
of turns round the room. What anguish it was to stop, and yet how
impossible to go on! Why was I so weak? I, the strong one, par
excellence, of the family—the young lion of the brood—the Esau, the
Nimrod, the savage—to be unable to waltz twice round a room not more
than twenty-four feet square! It was inconceivable and humiliating;
but also it was unalterable; and I never conquered the strange
physical weakness which touched me only when waltzing with Mrs.
Dalrymple, but which overpowered me then.
She too was sorry. True to her Polish blood, for all her delicacy of
health and general indolence of habit she was enthusiastically fond of
dancing; and she would have liked me for a partner, she said with her
faint sweet tremulous smile, and that look in her eyes which was like
the very glory of the heavens opening.
If, however, I could not waltz, I could talk and listen. And in our
little evenings together, when I was finally pronounced hopeless, not
to let me feel neglected and shut out, Mrs. Dalrymple generously
forbore to dance with the others, so that she might sit and talk to me
on the window-seat. And on the whole I felt that I had the best of it.
Up to now I had never known the sentiment of jealousy against Edwin.
He was the family favourite, caressed by all where I had ever been
cold-shouldered and repulsed. At an age when education was the one
essential of my life, and idleness the ruin of my whole future, I had
been sacrificed in my best interests and denied my natural rights
simply to be kept as his companion at home. Yet I had neither grudged
him myself nor been jealous of what the others had given him. I had
sometimes broken my young heart over the difference made between
us—that was only natural; but I had never carried the blame to him,
nor made him suffer because I was wronged and he was favoured.
Now there were times when I almost hated him for what he was;
though I hated myself much more in that I was not like him. I was
furious against myself because I was tall and lean and strong,
large-boned, and with a shock of thick brown hair disturbed by that
unmanageable wave which broke it in heavy flocks that never would lie
straight; while he was slenderly framed and almost as round-limbed as
a girl—his head a nest of close-growing golden curls—his skin like
a child's—and his blue eyes like limpid lakes beneath the long fine
arch of his narrow brows. He was of the Cherubino type, and women
treated him pretty much as they would have treated one of themselves.
And when I saw Mrs. Dalrymple let him put his arms round her waist
while she kissed him as if he had been a child, I confess I was
sometimes more really mad than sane. If I could have changed my
physique for his, I would at this time. I, who had always gloried in
my strength, would have made myself now a weakling, if Adeline
Dalrymple would have treated me as she treated my brother. And there
were times when, as I say, I hated him; and felt that I could have
struck him like a second Cain.
I did my best to conceal this jealous rage against the one whom
hitherto I had loved best of all in the world. But people who live
together, especially young people, are quick to note differences of
feeling; and Edwin saw the change in me and taxed me with it. Of
course I denied that there was any change at all; and, because his
charge was true, I grew irritable and sullen under the accusation. But
once, when the tears sprang to his eyes, and his small mouth quivered
as he said: 'I never thought, Chris, that you would have behaved like
this to me: and what have I done to deserve it?' I was conquered.
After all, he was my first care, and I would give him even Mrs.
Dalrymple's preference. I would give him, if need be, my life!
For all answer to his reproaches, which meant affection, I threw my
arms round his neck, and bursting into one of those violent floods of
tears which used to characterize me as a child, I kissed him, as also
I used to kiss him when we were children together, and dashed out of
the house in a tumult of emotion which made me feel as if I had been
caught in a typhoon.
I was in that stage of feeling which makes fetishes of inanimate
objects and carries into things the divinity centred in persons; which
energizes symbols and vivifies relics, which then it adores. I
remember pushing this fetishism so far as to envy the very clothes
that Mrs. Dalrymple wore—which clothes also had a special character
of their own to help on my folly. That old wish of being the glove on
her hand was no mere literary conceit to me; it was what I myself
realized. I endued with a kind of consciousness all that belonged to
this divinest woman; and consciousness included love. She had a
certain ermine cloak, lined with pale pink satin through which ran
gold and silver threads. If I had made a new religion, with her for
the Paraclete, I would have taken that cloak for my standard, as
Mohammed took the blacksmith's apron—I would have venerated it as
Catholics venerate the handkerchief of St. Veronica.
When I look back on the passionate idealism, the unreasoning
sentiment of this time, and test it by scientific principles, I can
understand how myths crystallize and religions are made. I dreamt of
Mrs. Dalrymple night after night; but never as an ordinary
woman—always with a halo of divinity about her which took her out of
the ranks of common humanity and lifted her heaven-high above the
rest. She was to me what the Madonna is to the Neapolitan— what his
guardian angel is to the young seminarist. She was the divine part of
humanity; the incarnation of all its beauty; the last expression of all
its poetry and purity and inner wisdom. She was the seraph of the
hierarchy; and to worship her as a goddess was the necessary corollary
of knowing her as a woman. For her sake I loved the meanest creature
that belonged to her; and to meet and speak to one of the servants of
the house, to caress one of the dogs in her absence, made me
comparatively content. That 'rose and pot'—how true all real poetry
Her husband, Mr. Dalrymple, was in his way a clever as well as an
eccentric man, at once charming and less than charming. He had a
passion for little dogs, which he called his children and made his
idols. He had exactly twenty; all of rare kinds and of perfect breeds.
It was one of the sights of the place to see this elegant, aristo-
cratic-looking man, dressed in the latest fashion—light trousers
buttoned round his ankles, light kid gloves, coloured under-waistcoat
showing a narrow band of rose or blue, gorgeous stock, white hat, hair
and whiskers artificially curled and highly perfumed, scented
handkerchief and superb jewellery, as if he were in Bond Street, not
among the Cumberland mountains—daintily picking his way on the rough
roads, with his twenty little dogs, all in pairs, streaming behind him
like a herd of miniature wild beasts. He had the most extraordinary
names for them all; of which I only remember Zamiel and Lilith for the
barking Pomeros; Puck and Ariel for the graceful Italian greyhounds;
Sambo and Sally for the pugs; the little female truffle-hunter was
Queen Mab, but I forget the name of her husband; and the toy-terriers
were Oberon and Titania.
Mr. Dalrymple was his wife's husband, and therefore I held him
sacred; he was also a man of cultivated intellect, perfect manners,
refined tastes, wide experience, and therefore I respected him. But
naturally for himself, in view of the man he was and the boy I was, I
should not have liked him. He was too effeminate for my taste—and he
did not admire his wife as she deserved to be admired. He was
essentially a dilettante—just touching the borders of excellence and
never attaining it. He drew well, played the guitar well, wrote pretty
music and pretty poetry; but he failed in the full grasp and
completion of any of these things. Strange stories of his personal
habits, and his devotion to certain occult studies, which terrified
the weaker minds among us, crept about the vale; but we were a
scandalmongering set at Eden, and we had those in our midst who would
have criticized and plucked out the feathers of the angel Gabriel's
wings, had he alighted at the Town-hall. All the same, Mr. Dalrymple
openly confessed to a belief in magic, ghosts, and all the higher
phenomena of mesmerism. According to him, both the witches of old and
the Indian jugglers of the present time, had and have mysterious
powers extra to those of the common run of men; and he lost his time
and strength in experiments where he was now the deceiver and now the
He was never with his wife, save on state occasions of formal visits
and dinners; and they lived two entirely different lives under the
same roof. He was a vegetarian and a Rechabite; but he drank a great
deal of strong coffee and smoked incessantly; and though by no means a
confirmed opium-eater, like De Quincey, he was not innocent of that
strange man's vice, nor of that other, corresponding, of smoking
If his wife did not complain of his neglect, who else had the right?
Though I some- times felt I should like to kill him when I saw her
sweet, pale face grow paler than before, her pathetic eyes more
mournful, as she had to confess that she had not seen her husband for
perhaps three days—though we might have seen him, and he had
certainly been out and about in the interval—I calmed myself by
remembering that I had no right to thrust myself into her affairs,
even by my sympathy; and that what she kept secret, I and all ought to
hold sacred.
My worship for her was too exalted to be intrusive, too humble to
take the initiative. It was she who set the rule and measure of our
intercourse; and I should as little have dreamed of going beyond her
allowance—of asking a question on things which she had not already
explained—as I should have spoken with levity of my dead mother. But
I was unhappy all the same, in more ways than one; and, what with my
jealous fear of her liking Edwin too much, my in- dignation because
Mr. Dalrymple did not like her enough, and my dread lest she did not
like me at all, I was for the most part in a state of torment which
nothing soothed but her voice and presence, and nothing effectually
charmed away but some signal act of gracious kindness and special
In the midst of all this feverish unrest I had some divinely happy
hours. As time went on, and our intimacy increased, not a day passed
when we were not with the Dalrymples—with her more often than with
him, and seldom with both together. We used to row across the lake and
land at some favourite spot where there was a fine view, or a
waterfall, or perhaps a rare fern or orchid to look for and never
find; and where there was sure to be one of those wide wet tracts
which require some amount of courage and activity to pass dryshod. At
such places Mr. Dalrymple, if he came at all, had enough to do to take
care of himself, having the most extraordinary horror of dirt and
damp. My sisters were mountaineers born and bred, and needed as little
help as a triad of goats; but Adeline Dalrymple was different. She was
like a hot-house flower where they were field daisies; and what was
child's play to them was an insurmountable difficulty to her. Such a
feat as springing from one loose stone to another over a mountain
ghyll, or picking her way from tussock to tussock through a bog, was
simply impossible. And I was glad that it was so. For then I used to
take her in my strong young arms and carry her safely across and far on
to the dry ground. I could not dance with her, but I could bear her
through difficulties such as these, and feel as if I had the very
universe in my arms. It was the epitome of all divinity—the
possession of all humanity. It did not make me faint nor giddy, but
strong, invul- nerable, unconquerable—like an old Israelite to whom
had been given the sacred ark to defend—the very essence of God made
helpless to guard.
I used to want to kneel to her, to kiss the hem of her garment, to
make myself her footstool, her slave, so that I could be of use to
her. I would have liked to have spent my life in ministering to her,
as if she had been a living goddess in a temple and I her sole
servitor. Sometimes I had the criminally selfish half-wish that some
great loss should befall her, when the world would desert her—all but
I—and I would carry to her the same homage, the same reverent worship
as before. Discrowned by evil hands, she should ever be sole queen to
me! And sometimes I had a morbid kind of wonder, if she would be sorry
were I to die, and if she would ever come to look at my grave and lay
flowers on the turf. If she did, I knew that down there beneath dead
and dumb as I might be, I should know the touch of her hand, hear the
tread of her feet, and feel on my face the quick-drawn breath of her
parted lips. I could never die so that I should not be conscious of
her; and I could only die in her service. To know her, to love her,
was of itself the warranty of immortality. She was already, herself,
immortal; for the body which held her spirit was emphatically only a
veil, a shell, a medium of communication. The true reality was the
angel within her form.
The strange deifying reverence that I felt for Mrs. Dalrymple was
due partly to my age and temperament, and partly to her own
philosophy. She belonged to a school of thought quite unlike any I had
ever met with. And, as she interested herself in my religious
difficulties, she naturally gave me her own views to help my cruder
thoughts. She was emphatically a transcendentalist, and in a certain
sense a pantheist. To her the things of the spirit—the unseen world
of the souls that had once been men, and of the angels who had neither
been born nor had died—spiritual experiences and realizations, and
the all-pervading presence of God, were more real than those things we
call time and space. She believed in the interfusion of souls—soul
with soul in spiritual blending more lasting than any earthly tie,
more potent than any physical circumstance of disruption or removal.
She believed in the oneness of God with life, of God with matter, with
thought, with emotion, with the cosmic forces of the universe. Like
the atmosphere which surrounds us, like the ether which
interpenetrates all space, God is the universal medium, the spiritual
ether in which we float, the energizing sense by which we recognise
and love each other. Soul interfused with soul, and both lying cradled
in the Heart of God—minds touching each other in the dark, and
seeking each other through long ages and across interminable
distances, welded together for all time and through all
eternity—welded together by and with and in the very substance of
She was also in a sense a metempsychosist, and believed that we had
all known each other in another life—all of us who loved in this. For
she maintained the absolute indestructibility of love, and the
impossibility of sundering those whose spirits had once met each other
and been united by love. Her beautiful face took the rapt look of a
sibyl when she spoke to me, as she often did, of the glorious joy and
sense of freedom and invulnerability contained in this conviction; and
how it dwarfed all the pains of life, and life itself to a mere short
day's dream not worth lamenting while it was passing. Eternity was
behind and before us. Why fix our minds only on the one troubled hour?
'Those who believe as I do,' she said one evening to me, when we
were sitting in the twilight, watching the last of the day fading from
the sky and the first of the stars coming out; 'no—not who believe,
but who know—are never really separated from the beings they love.
Time and space may divide us from each other, and circumstances may be
stronger than our will; but thought overrides matter, our souls are
ever one and inseparable, and the bond of the spirit once made is
indissoluble. Love is in itself immortality. It cannot die; it cannot
change; and no force in nature can kill it.'
She laid her white and scented hand on mine, so brown and large and
bony—and bent her head till she looked full and straight in my eyes.
I was sitting on a low stool by her side; she was on the window-seat
made in the embrasure.
'You, dear boy, will go into the world far away from all of us
here,' she said; and—was it my fancy? or did that sweet voice which
always reminded me of pearls tremble, and something as tender as tears
come into her glorious eyes?—'but, wherever you go, my spirit will
go with you, surrounding you, guarding you, one with your very breath,
your very life. Never forget that, my child. I am with you
always—like God and with God—in the future always, as I have ever
been in the past.'
Her hand closed on mine with an almost convulsive grasp. It burnt
like fire, and the diamonds on her fingers and at her throat flashed
as if by their own internal light. Her voice had sunk almost to a
whisper, and something seemed to pass from her to me which thrilled me
like electricity. I could not speak. My heart suddenly swelled so that
it strangled my voice and cut short my breath. I only felt a dumb kind
of desire to carry my life to her hands and worship her as I would
have worshipped the Eternal Mother of men and things. She was beyond
womanhood to me—she was the casket that embodied and enclosed the
As I looked at her, she still bending down her head and looking into
my eyes, I felt a strange rapture and loss of myself in her
personality. Her eyes were as mysterious as those stars
overhead—worlds where I was, as it were, engulfed, but wherein was
contained all the beauty, the love, the secrets of the universe. It
was the unveiling of Isis to her priest—the goddess revealing herself
to man. I scarcely lived; I did not breathe; I was as if spiritually
carried away into another sphere; and for the moment I was not human
but immortal. It was a sensation beyond mere physical excitement; and
it would have been appalling from its intensity, had I had enough
consciousness left to examine or reflect.
What was in my face I do not know, but there must have been
something which did not displease Mrs. Dalrymple. One hand still
clasped mine, the other she laid on my forehead, pushing back my hair
and bending my head a little backward.
'Dearest child,' she said, 'God has given you to me. You are mine
in spirit now and for ever. Never forget this moment, Christopher,
when our souls have met and recognised each other once again across
the long ages which have separated them.'
She stooped her gracious face to mine, and lightly kissed me on the
eyes and forehead.
It was the first kiss any woman, other than my sisters, had given me
since I was a child; and it was the birth-hour of a new life to me.
Henceforth all things were transformed for me, and life meant a new
existence as it had a new message. The sunrises and the sunsets, the
song of the birds, the flowers in the fields, the shadows of the
clouds on the mountains, the reflections in the lake and the ripple
of the blue waves, the voice of the waters making music in cascades,
the budding and the fall of the leaves of the trees—all were the
circumstances of a more beautiful world than that in which I had
hitherto lived. Nature had a secret language which was revealed to me,
and I understood the hidden meaning of things which hitherto had had
no meaning at all. I, like Adeline Dalrymple, felt and saw God
everywhere—but when I thought of God, she stood ever foremost at His
How I lived then, I do not know. I remember nothing very distinctly
outside my being with Mrs. Dalrymple—our sunlit noonday walks in her
garden—our speculations beneath the stars—her eyes, which looked
more eloquently than words—her words, of which I sometimes lost the
meaning because her voice filled my ears with too much music. When I
was not with her, I was away in the lonely mountains, where I could
think of her without interruption and associate her with the beauty of
all about me. I carried my secret joy like a bird in my bosom, hidden
from the eyes of all; and not even to Edwin did I reveal what was in
my heart.
Of him I was no longer jealous. I had no cause. For I noticed that
of late Mrs. Dalrymple had ceased to treat him so familiarly as she
used to do in the early days; and on this side I was at peace. I lived
in my enchanted island, so far as I knew alone and undiscovered. And
if any one suspected my state, no one spoke to me about it. But indeed
I have forgotten all the details of my family life at this time. I
suppose I ate and drank and slept and lived among them as usual; but I
do not remember the fact nor feeling of a day, save once, when I
looked at Edwin and thought: 'How much I know that you do not—and
how different the world is to you and me!'
The strain at this moment must have been severe. I had not done
growing, though I was six feet as it was—but I am six feet two now;
and my big bony frame took a great deal of rest and nourishment to
keep it in serviceable condition then and to make a strong man of me
in the future. Under the excitement of my present rapturous life I
lost both my sleep and my appetite, and became as thin as a
grasshopper. It was impossible not to see that I was changing; and my
sisters were always commenting on my eyes, which they said looked as
if they had been picked out by hawks and put in again by a
chimney-sweep; while my face was whiter and leaner than ever, and I
was altogether uglier and even more like Don Quixote than I used to
be. But as I was certainly less violent and less irascible, they were
too glad of a change which was a respite to fall foul of the cause,
whatever it might have been.
By degrees the rapture of my first content faded and the old unrest
took possession of me and ruined all. To be with Mrs. Dalrymple was
ecstasy, but to be away from her was torture and despair. And how
could I be always with her? Still, absence from her was like passing
into the darkness of the grave; and my old impatience of sorrow made
me furious and wild against the obstructions which kept us apart. I
used to get out of our house at night by a side door that no one ever
looked after, and wander about her garden on the chance of seeing her
at the bedroom window, or perhaps of seeing only her light, burning
far into the dawning day. There was no danger of being discovered. Mr.
Dalrymple slept at the other side of the house altogether, and the big
watch-dog knew me. I used to stand among the laurestinus bushes,
looking up at her window; and I was grandly rewarded when, as she
sometimes did, she came all in white and drew back the blinds, opening
the window, and sometimes stepping out on the balcony and looking at
the sky. I never let her know that I was there. That too was my secret
which I kept sacred; till one night, as if attracted by some magnetic
influence, she came down the outside steps which led from her bedroom
to the garden, and walked straight to where I was standing in the
shadow of the bushes.
'I knew you were here,' she said, as she came up to me. 'I was
conscious of you, and could not sleep. Child! what have you done to me
to draw me to you? What strange power have you over me?'
I trembled as if in fever.
'Have I any power over you?' I said.
'You see it,' she answered simply.
I cannot describe the curious sense of in- version which these
words created. I, who had been the slave, the worshipper, the
subordinate, to be suddenly invested with power—to be even so
prepotent as to compel obedience from the one who had hitherto been
supreme—it was a change of parts which for the moment overwhelmed me
with a sense of universal instability; and to the end of my life I
shall never forget the strange confusion of pride and pleasure, of
pain in loss yet joy in the sensation of a newborn power which
possessed me, as the goddess thus became a woman, and made of me, who
had been her slave, her master and a man.
I did not speak, nor did she. It was like an enchanted spell which
words would have broken; and we walked in the dark alleys of the
shrubbery in a silence that was at once divine in its blessedness and
painful in its vagueness, and more like a dream than a fact. I did not
know what it meant, and yet I dared not break it; and she did not. We
went into a small summer-house at the end of the garden, and sat there
hand in hand, till the morning broke. Then the faint flush on the
mountain-top and the first stirring of the birds told us it was time
to part.
'See how I have trusted you!' she said as she stood up to go. She
laid both her hands on my shoulders, then drew my face forward and
kissed me as she had done once before, on the forehead and the eyes.
'Your consecration,' she said; 'the seal of our eternal oneness.'
Overpowered by an emotion so powerful as to be physical pain, I
knelt on the ground at her feet; and I think that for a moment I died.
This was the first and only time we met thus by night in the garden.
But after this I passed the best half of every night in the shadow of
the laurestinus bushes, praying for her to come down to me as she had
done on that night of ecstasy and silence. And as the hours passed and
she gave no sign, I used to feel as if I must inevitably die as I
stood there—as if this agony of vain longing and ruthless
disappointment took from me my very heart's blood.
At last the strain grew too intense, and nature gave way. I had a
sharp attack of brain-fever, when I was for many days in danger.
Through the dark tempestuous trouble of the time, I vaguely remember a
sudden influx of peace and rest when there came to my bedside some one
who spoke to me softly, in what seemed to me a language I had once
learned and now vainly tried to remember; bending over me and
breathing on me. I remember how my face was cooled and refreshed by
what I thought was water from a Greek fountain, and how, with a subtle
scent of roses, it was softly dried. I thought it was my mother who
had come out of heaven, or poor Nurse Mary who had returned; then that
it was the Divine Virgin who had made me her second Christ; then that
it was the goddess Isis, she whose awful beauty no man had unveiled;
and then I had a confused dream of Diana and Endymion, which changed
into that of Juno and Ixion, as the vision faded and the form melted
away into mist.
It was none of all these. It was Adeline Dalrymlple; and the tears
on my face, which seemed to have fallen from some divine source, were
those shed because of the sorrow which had no healing—because of the
love which had had no past and could have no future.
When I recovered I found that the Dalrymples had left Windy Brow,
and no one at Eden knew where they had gone. Years after I heard of
them as living at Venice, where Mrs. Dalrymple was a confirmed invalid
and never seen, and Mr. Dalrymple was wholly given up to mesmerism,
opium and poetry.
Thus then, began and ended the first love of my life; and in this
manner the Great Book was opened and the page turned down—half-read
but ineffaceable. And ever and ever a fragrance steals from that
closed page which neither length of time nor deeper knowledge of life
can destroy. Adeline Dalrymple remains in my memory as the
impersonation of all beauty and all delight—a woman more heavenly
than human—ever the saint in her shrine, the goddess in her temple,
her white robes unstained and her divine glory undiminished through
all time and for all eternity.
WHEN I had fully recovered, it seemed to me impossible to go on
living at home. I had lost all that made life sweet on the outside,
and the monotony of existence within was intolerable. If I had had the
hope of a settled future and the occupation of preparing for it,
things might have been better; but even such lame endeavours after
self-education as I had made now failed me, and I seemed to have lost
the key to all the holy places of the past, and to have let the fire
on the sacred altar burn out.
I was listless, inert, uninterested. All hope, all joy, all secret
ambition of future success, all passionate thrill of living, all
delight in books, all intellectual vitality, had gone from me. I
wanted but to be left alone, not spoken to and not noticed. Even the
companionship of Edwin was distasteful to me; and their cheerfulness
under what I felt to be our irreparable loss made my sisters seem the
very incarnations of ingratitude.
Everything had gone from me. I could have shrieked for the torture
given me by music. I dared not read a poem which was associated with
Mrs. Dalrymple—and all were associated with her—and the zeal with
which I had dug down into the arid wells of the 'Encyclopædia
Londinensis' for that fantastic learning with which I had crammed my
brain, had gone with the rest.
What a wretched time this was to me! I had recovered my life and
lost that which had made it beautiful. It was the husk without the
kernel, the shell without the pearl; and I was like the Garden when
the Lady who had been its Soul had died. I have gone through the fire
more than once since then, but I have never had a more painful period
than this of that drear dead winter, down among the mountains, after
Adeline Dalrymple had left.
The Grahames did what they could to help me. I think they saw what
was amiss and were sorry for me. But I had lost all interest in those
subjects which had been common to us, and cared nothing for the
theological difficulties which, a year ago, had so much disturbed me.
Things might be, or might not. What mattered it to me? I went back to
that languid acquiescence in doctrines as they are taught, which is
neither faith nor voluntary acceptance. It is simply letting things
slip and taking no trouble. I had lost, too, my political ardour; and
from passion and enthusiasm and turbulence all round had passed into
the silence of indifference, the quietude of death.
Thus I droned through the days, dreaming rather than doing;
sheltering myself behind the false plea of study, because I wanted to
be left alone, but, destitute of either purpose or vigour, in reality
doing nothing. My books lay open before me, but I, with my face in my
hands, was thinking of all that Adeline Dalrymple had ever said to
me—recalling all that she had ever done—remembering her eyes, her
voice, her hair, her hands—till I broke down into such tempests of
despair as frightened even myself. The consciousness of her was my
universe, my inseparable second self—like another soul possessing me.
I carried her always with me; and my heart was like a perfumed vase
filled with the ashes of the dead.
She was the spirit that animated Nature —Nature, who had always
been my Divine Mother, my Eternal Friend. I saw her in the stars and
found her in the skies; I heard her in the voice of the waters and
traced her outline in the misty foldings of the silent hills. She was
as beautiful as the snow-crystals on the window-pane, as pure as the
frost that fringed the dead leaves of the trees. She was
everywhere—everywhere; the one unchangeable circumstance traceable
behind all different forms. In the night and in the morning and
through out the day, she was my ever-present thought—sometimes strong
and vivid as a solid fact, sometimes pale and vaporous as a distant
cloud, but always there—always!—always! She held me and possessed
me—as she had said she ever would. She stole between me and heaven,
and when I prayed to God I thought of her. She was fire in my veins
and ice in my heart; but I should have been poorer through life had I
not known her. I can see now the good of the pain she brought me.
'When winter went and spring came back'—how I love that beautiful
copy of Shelley which she gave me! I have it yet, and can still repeat
almost all the minor poems I learnt as a lad, blistering the pages
where I learnt!—my blood once more began to stir in my veins and my
natural energy to re-assert itself. I gradually got back my old
feeling of power and invulnerability—my old sense of certainty in the
future and my ability to conquer circumstances and compel happiness,
no matter what the obstacles to be overcome. Heart-broken though I
might be, I was still master of fate; and I had always the fee-simple
of the future.
Yet, as this sense of power returned, so grew ever more masterful
that which was its reflex—repugnance to my home-life, and desire to
go out into the world on my own account, to work for myself and be
But how? What could I do? I had learnt nothing thoroughly and
nothing useful. Even my languages, which were my battle-horses, were
merely so much literary furniture, and were useless for the more
practical purposes of either writing or speaking. I had amassed
cart-loads of useless knowledge—including heraldry and prescientific
mythology—but I knew nothing that represented money-power—nothing
which touched the fringe of any professional robe, or included the
price of a plate of meat at a chop-house.
It had been intended that I, like my brothers, should go to
Cambridge when I should come of age. My father would have given me a
reading-tutor for the year previous to matriculation; and after that
he would have held me responsible for my future, and himself acquitted
of all obliga- tion. But I was too impatient to wait even the short
two years that stood between me and my majority. I was now past
nineteen; and those two years seemed to me an eternity of ennui.
Besides, what could I do after I had taken my degree? I could not take
Orders; and the Bar was beyond my means. Where was the good, then, of
widening foundations over which I could never build? and why delay the
more restricted building which should be begun now at once?
Then it was that I returned to my old love, Literature—that
waste-pipe of unspecialized powers, which no one thinks demands an
apprenticeship, and wherein all believe that fame and success are to
be caught like wild goats, at a bound! Besides—it would be my means
of communication with Mrs. Dalrymple. If I could but write things
which she would repeat, as she repeated that poem of Shelley's, that
sweet music of Heine's—if I could make those beautiful eyes moist and
stir that lofty soul with generous emotion, she remembering the boy
who through her had become great!—if I could! Yes: I would be a
literary man, pure and simple; and I would leave home.
Of late I had blossomed into poetry. It is the natural expression of
love and sorrow, and minds, like all other things, obey fixed laws and
exhibit the same phenomena under the same conditions. And being only a
Philistine, without real insight into the true meaning of the gift of
Song, I thought that, because I had been able to set down a few
passionate couplets with tolerable flow of rhythm and harmony of
rhyme, my path was clear before me, my tools were sharpened to my
hand, and my chaplet of bays was already sprouting on the tree. I
wrote a short poem, which I resolved should determine my future. If
accepted, I would at once take up my parable and begin my career; if
rejected, I would accept the verdict as final, and go to the colonies
as a sheep-farmer, or I would go to sea as a sailor before the mast,
or enlist as a private in the army—trusting to myself to be
recognised as a gentleman, raised from the ranks in less than a year,
and made an admiral or a general while still young. I was such a mere
child in some things, even yet!—and in nothing more than in my
ignorance of the ways of the world, and the impotence of the
individual when brought into contact with systems. Meanwhile, I would
try my fate with literature; poetry and literature being to me, in
those days of darkness, interchangeable terms meaning the same thing.
At that time the two magazines in greatest favour among us
youngsters at the vicarage were 'Ainsworth's Miscellany' and 'Douglas
Jerrold's Shilling Magazine.' My father patronized Blackwood, of which
some articles were delightful to me and others made me rageful. With
the superstition of youthful hope and fear, I determined to do a
little bit of private vaticination for my better guidance; and to make
the best of a certain number of catches on the point of cup-and-ball
determine the magazine to which I should send my poem. I caught
forty-nine out of the fifty for Ainsworth, and only forty-seven for
Jerrold. To the former then I posted my rhymes, with a boyish letter
of entreaty which must have amused him by its fervour.
To my joy he accepted my poem, and sent me an honorarium of two
guineas; together with a kind and encouraging letter, assuring me of
success if I would persevere, and promising to accept all such work as
would suit the 'Miscellany.' So now things were plainly ordered, and
my future was fair before me.
Literature, as a profession, was a thing which went dead against
our family traditions—our inherited ideas of respectability and what
was due to our gentle birth. To write in the quiet dignity of home a
learned book like Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy,' or a profound one
like Locke 'On the Understanding,' was one thing; to depend for bread
on one's pen was another. The one shed increased lustre on the noblest
name; the other was no better than fiddling in an orchestra, acting in
a barn, or selling yards of silk across the counter, all of which were
allied disreputabilities. It was a low-class métier, let who
would follow it; but for a gentleman and the grandson of a Bishop, it
was degradation.
So at least my father said when I opened fire on him one day, and
propounded to him my notable scheme for leaving home, going to London,
and supporting myself by literature. He was opposed to the scheme from
first to last, and tried to deter me from it by sarcasm.
'I thought, with your fine ideas, you had more ambition than to
make yourself a mere newspaper hack, a mere Grub Street poet,' he
said, throwing into his words that galling emphasis which impetuous
youth finds so hard to bear. 'Do you think you can do nothing better
for yourself than write poems for Warren's blacking, or scratch up Bow
Street details for a dinner?'
'I do not intend to write poems for Warren's blacking, nor to
scratch up Bow Street details for a dinner,' I answered—I honestly
confess it—insolently; for my father had the fatal power, as some
others have also had, of rousing the worst passions in my nature. 'And
if to be a literary hack now is the way to literary fame hereafter,' I
continued, 'I will serve my apprenticeship as others have done. Sir
Walter Scott was not a literary hack!'
'There is no good in talking to such an obstinate young puppy as
you,' said my father angrily. 'I am sick to death of your whims and
affectations! The best thing for you would be a good thrashing to knock
some of the conceit and wilfulness out of you. If you go to London, as
you propose, you go without my consent—do you hear?—and the curse
of God rests on disobedient children to the end of their lives. Now
leave the room, Christopher, and never let me hear of this ridiculous
rubbish again.'
Here then I was at the junction of those two roads of which either
determines the whole after-life. Opposition of my father's unreasoning
kind was naturally, to a boy of my violent temper, so much oil on
flame and so much strengthening of resolve. All the same, obedience to
parents is a duty; so also is the perfecting of one's own powers and
leading the life for which one is best fitted—for we all have duties
to ourselves as well as to others. At this moment the two clashed and
made my choice very difficult. For underneath the fierce temper which
I could not deny, was always conscience and the desire to know the
right;—and to do it when known.
Finally, my personal ambition conquered. I reasoned the thing out in
my own way, and came to the conclusion that, although self-sacrifice
for the good of others is absolute and imperative, the sacrifice of a
real vocation for no one's good and simply because of the arbitrary
opposition of a parent, is not; and that in my case self-assertion was
not selfishness. The permission then, which my father would not give
me, I prepared myself to take; and I was on the point of running away
from home, as my grandfather, uncle, and brother had done—keeping
quiet for the moment only because Edwin was not well—when,
fortunately for us, Mr. King, our family solicitor, came down from
London to pay us a visit, and proved the 'deux ex machinâ' by whom all
difficulties were arranged.
Mr. King took a fancy to me. A sharp practitioner in his office,
outside his profession he was a kind-hearted man enough, fond of young
people, and always ready to assist undeveloped talent and help on the
schemes of honourable ambition. He thought that I was fit for
something better than a parson's petticoat, he said with his cynical
contempt for all forms of faith; and, as it was not possible to send
me to the Bar, the next best thing was to give me the run of the
British Museum, and leave to prove of what stuff I was made. He would
help me with his advice; and he promised my father that he would look
after my health and morals.
But, first of all, he said to me: 'Could he see what I had already
done, beside that prancing poem in "Ainsworth's Miscel- lany," which
was—well—which was pretty fair, but vastly young?'
Full of the pride of ignorance and the confidence of youth, I gave
him some of the things I thought my best; and never doubted of his
verdict. Poor Mr. King! Such a turgid, upheaped, colossally clumsy
style as mine was in those early days!—'like a wood where you could
not see the trees for the leaves'—like a confused mass of
ornamentation, where not a figure was detached nor a volute truly
drawn. But to me they were all monumental—chaos, encumbrances, bad
drawing and all.
Mr. King told me quite candidly what he thought of my productions.
In consequence, he went near to drive me mad by what I took to be his
prosaic aridity and deadness of touch. He cut out all my finest
passages; ridiculed all my best descriptions; gravely demanded what I
meant by my sublimest ideas; put my most high-flown phrases into flat
prose, and then asked me if that was not much better?—certainly it
was more intellegible!—and reduced the whole thing to pulp.
But it was protoplastic pulp, after all his hacking and
pounding—pulp with the germ of life and the potentiality of
development in it—pulp out of which, with care, might be evolved some
kind of vertebrate organism—for, though he edited me severely, he
ended by saying he thought I had 'stuff' in me; at all events, enough
to justify me in my choice of literature as a profession and him in
his advocacy with my father. And after he had thus waded through my
literary Niagaras, he addressed himself again to my father and
discussed the matter with him philosophically.
It was evident I was doing no good at home, he said. I was too big
for the house; too vigorous for such a life as we led down here. It
was power wasted—vitality run- ning to seed—and it would be far
better to send me up to London, as I wished. Let me have a year's
grace to see what I could do. The question of permanent settlement
might come after. When I should come of age my small fortune would
simplify matters—until then, could I not have an allowance?
Mr. King was one of the few people who had a decided influence over
my father. His sharp, brisk energy; the trenchant audacity of his
theories; his worldly knowledge and business capacity; his respect for
society, appearances, success; his absolute self-confidence—all
naturally impressed a man whose indolence was his bane, and who had to
be stirred up if he were to be made to move. And as Mr. King swore by
all his gods that his sisters—he was not married—should look after
me and keep me out of the destruction into which my father made sure I
should run, the thing was at last arranged. My father gave his formal
consent to my going up to London for a year for the purpose of
studying at the British Museum, and writing the book on which I had
set my heart. And he agreed to furnish me with the funds necessary for
that year's experience.
'After that,' he said kindly, and yet severely; 'you sink or swim
on your own account. If you fail, as I fear you will, you have your
home to come back to. It will never be shut against you, unless you
disgrace yourself so that you are unfit to enter it. If you
succeed—my blessing be with you! It will be a pleasant surprise if
you do—but all things are possible to God; and to His care I commend
My leaving home in this sudden and erratic manner created a
tremendous stir among us. Poor dear Edwin cried like a girl, and said
that he did not know what he should do without me, and that it was
hard, after I had accustomed him to lean on me all his life, for me
now to leave him alone.
And when he said this, for a brief instant I felt the joints of my
resolve give way, and I thought I would throw it all up and be content
with him and home. But, like another Pharaoh, I hardened myself
afresh, and, instead of yielding to him, did what I could to comfort
him—especially promising to return before long, and to write to him
every day, faithfully.
As for my sisters, they were half-relieved and half-sorry, as now
the prospect of greater peace by the withdrawal of my turbulent
personality, and now the loss of a useful kind of servant, was
uppermost. As pretty Ellen drawled out in that quiet naïve way of
hers, by which she was able to say the most wounding things with the
greatest serenity, and not get into a quarrel as the price to be paid
for her frankness:
'We shall have no one now to do things for us; and I think, Chris,
you are very selfish indeed to go away. Who is to go down for the
letters on the wet days? and how dull it will be for Julia and me to
walk out by ourselves when Edwin has a cough and cannot come! How can
we go up the mountains alone? Who is to drive away the bulls? and how
can we sail without you to manage the boat? And what is Edwin to do
without you?—you, who have always pretended to be so fond of him too!
I must say I think you are very wicked and selfish for leaving us all
like this, just to go and amuse yourself in London. But you always
were a selfish and ungrateful boy; and it is not to be wondered at.'
'Am I really selfish, Nell?' I asked.
'Of course you are,' she answered, lifting her soft eyes to mine
with her candid look. 'You were never anything else.'
Well, perhaps. Still, I thought that to give up such a chance as I
had now, that I might go to the post on the wet days, take care of my
sisters in their mountain walks and amuse my brother when he was not
well, would be a disproportionate expenditure of my own life in view
of the gain to theirs.
And more. With the return of the old strength and hope had come back
the old theological troubles: and my 'unsoundness' had by now become
so patent as to make things less than ever harmonious between my
father and myself. His method of reconversion was not of a kind to
bring us into closer union. Leland's 'Short Method with the Deists,'
which he insisted on my reading, only made me angry; and his unstinted
abuse of all Unitarianism, Deism, and even Dissent, made me angrier
When the 'Vestiges of Creation' came out, our fight was serious.
Giving, as it did the first idea of cosmic continuity, and the
consequent destruction of the bit by bit creation of Genesis, it was a
priceless treasure to me, to him a deadly and diabolical sin. And in
the controversy between Whewell and Sir David Brewster, we of course
took opposite sides—and mine was not that which adduced as the
convincing proof of the centralization of intelligent life on the
earth alone, the astounding argument that Christ had died for man
only, and that no other world could, therefore, be peopled with
creatures of intelligence, soul, or spirit like ours.
For all these reasons then, I felt that it was best to go. I had
outgrown the dimen- sions of the old home; and fission is the law of
families as well as of animalculæ. I was the one inharmonious
circumstance within the vicarage walls, and all would be better
without me. The die was cast. My choice was made. Selfish, or only
self-respecting, I took my place with Mr. King in the coach which was
to carry us to the railway station; and thus and for ever broke down
my dependence on the old home and set my face towards the Promised
Land—the land where I was to find work, fame, liberty and happiness.
MY first year in London was one of strange alternation of
feeling. Sometimes I longed for the old place—the lake, the
mountains, the rivers, the woods, the faces I knew when passing up the
street, and my own people—with that sickness of desire which grows
into a real malady, culminating in death if continued long enough. And
then again I was in a world of enchantment as my mind opened to new
impressions and my heart warmed to new affections.
This total change of scene, and the influx of fresh interests
included, did for me what nothing else would have done. My certainty
of endless heart-break for the loss of my first love began to be as a
grave-mound which gently covers itself with moss and flowers as it
sinks down almost on a level with the plain, while sweet birds come to
sing, above the dead.
I read daily at the British Museum, gathering material for my magnum
opus, and making raids into all manner of strange regions—according
to my old habit of amassing unusable cartloads of perfectly worthless
learning. Among other things, I remember how nearly I made shipwreck
of myself in the fascinating whirlpool of Analogy. I improved my
knowledge of classical times and circumstances, and blessed Becker and
Winckelmann; and I lost myself in the mazes of comparative mythology
and Higgins's 'Anacalypsis.' Turned loose in this rich pasturage, with
only the limitation of subject which came from the main lines of my
book, I ran great risk of losing my time by the very fact of
over-filling it.
The consciousness of living in the midst of such boundless stores,
and of being the potential possessor of all this wealth, acted on my
brain as a stimulant—sometimes as an intoxicant. I was never weary of
that badly-lighted, ill-ventilated and queerly tenanted old room, with
its legendary flea and uncleansed corners. The first to come, the last
to leave, and always surrounded by a pile of books, of which the
number brought down on my young head many a good-natured sarcasm from
the attendants, I soon became known to the officials and habitués,
whom my youth interested and my enthusiasm amused. All were kind to
me; but one attendant was especially my friend. The habitual readers
of the Museum from some forty to a few years ago will recognise my
With his heart in the country, and his hope of leaving his hated
service in the reading-room to once more establish himself as a
gentleman-farmer in Norfolk ever flitting, like a Will-o'-the-wisp,
before him, he had to live on those narrow lines for the remainder of
his life. The post which had been accepted as a temporary stop-gap
when he was ruined by that unlucky speculation of his had to be his
permanent office; and the discomfort of a few months crystallized into
the discontent of a life. Honest as the day, true as steel,
tender-hearted as a woman, he was gruff in manner and of superficial
surliness of temper to men; to women he was always both courteous and
considerate, so that he grew to be the recognised ladies' attendant of
the room. His delicate little wife, for whom he had the most
chivalrous devotion, knew his real worth; and I too learnt the
intrinsic value of his nature. He and his wife were my good friends,
and I used often to go and see them on the Sun- day afternoons, when
they lived out by Stoke Newington.
From the first—partly owing to the habit of mixing with all
classes, proper to a clergyman's family, and to the familiarity
natural in a small country place towards the children whom the elders
had seen grow up in their midst; partly to my own nature—I have been
as democratic in my ways as in my principles. I have ever chosen my
friends for their worth and not for their station; and, taking society
vertically as I have done, I have counted friends in all the strata,
from those born in the purple down to fishermen and servants. And I
began as I have gone on—starting off with this real friendship made
with the family of a simple attendant in a public library.
In those days Mr. Panizzi—not yet Sir Antonio—was our Deus
Maximus; and on more than one occasion he showed how far ahead Italian
astuteness looks, and how wise it is to have your traps in order when
you suspect that vermin may be about. He caught and caged one of these
vermin in the most masterly way in the world. The thing was done as
neatly as a conjuror's trick, and has left on me the impression of a
nightmare. It was my first introduction to the Italian character,
whereof I have had wide experience since.
Mr. Panizzi took great notice of me. He had a watchful eye over his
small world both of readers and officials, and not so much as a mouse
squeaked behind the skirting-board but he heard it and tracked the run
from end to end. Who did his work of espionage no one ever knew; but
some one must have been his 'mouse-trap'—for this accurate knowledge
of all things within the domain of the Printed Book Department could
not have been had by direct personal observation, even granting those
'eye-holes' of which there was a dark tradition and unpleasant
One day he gave me a little wise advice about my friendliness with
this good attendant, of whom I have spoken. He had seen me shake hands
with him on coming into the reading-room, and he knew that I visited
him and his wife at their own home. And as he knew from Mr. King
something of my inherited social position, and saw for himself how
young and unformed and impulsive I was, he thought himself justified
in warning and reproving me. As a reader, I was so far under his
jurisdiction; and his position gave him seigneurial rights.
'You are a gentleman,' he said; 'he is only a servant. Make him
keep his place, and do you maintain your position. These familiarities
with low people always end badly.' Then he bent his head and levelled
his eyes at me from under his broad bushy brows. 'You are very young,'
he said with a peculiar smile; 'and you think that you can
revolutionize society. You will find that you cannot; and that if you
knock your head against stone walls, you will only make it ache and
alter nothing.'
But he talked to the winds. What can heady youth do, when
temperament and principles combine to push it in one direction, but
stick to its own sense of right and earn its own experience?—with
bitter weeping, if need be, but always earned through constancy and
conscientiousness. The young fellow whose course of action or mode of
thought can be changed or modified by the first dissident he comes
across will never be a man, morally, but will remain a bit of jelly to
the end. For weakness of will and plasticity of conviction, however
pleasant they may be to live with, make but a poor job of life on the
whole; and while one is young, moral steadiness is more honourable
than intellectual amiability. Wherefore, acting more or less
consciously on these ideas, I gave no heed to Mr. Panizzi's counsel,
and continued my friendship with these good people as I maintained it
to the end.
My chief friends however, at this time, were naturally Mr. King and
his family, and their house was like my home. I have often wondered
since, how they could have been bothered with me as they were; but
they were wonderfully kind to me—at least, some among them. There
were two sisters who did not like me; so we will let them pass. It is
not in human nature to speak very enthusiastically of those who
dislike one and make no secret of their feelings; and I wish to
remember only things pleasant and of good repute in connection with my
old friends and quasi-guardians.
They were a strangely united family; not so much in personal
affection as by the feeling of family solidarity. When I first knew
them they were five in all; and all were unmarried. The eldest brother
was the master; the eldest sister was the mistress. The youngest two
sisters were respectively the beauty and the invalid; and the younger
brother was the family pet and subordinate. He was one of the best
fellows that ever lived—kind, unselfish, devoted, faithful; but he
hated his profession, and he was emphatically a round man in a square
hole. He was a great athlete and fond of all country exercises. He had
wanted to go to sea, but had been prevented for reasons of family
ambition never fulfilled; so he had to sit at his desk instead of
climbing up shrouds and handling stays; and his brother found, when
too late, that to coerce a life out of its natural direction does not
always ensure a successful settling in another form.
This brother, George, and I were great friends; and for years we
spent every Sunday together. We used to take long walks into the
country, about London, and through the parks and public gardens; and,
utterly unlike in every thought, feeling and instinct, we were
nevertheless chums as close as if we had been brothers together.
The eldest sister was the great feature of the family. She was a
tall, large, strikingly handsome woman, almost stone deaf, and of a
singular mixture of qualities. With certain virile
characteristics—witness her personal courage and her constancy; her
strong sense of family duty, which led her to self-sacrifice for the
sake of her own; her self-respect, which ran into queenliness of pride
and dignity; her power to command and her ability to obey—she had the
most ultra-feminine notions of propriety, and for certain
transgressions felt a loathing amounting to horror. She, as well as my
special chum, were curiously conservative; and it was impossible to
make them believe that anything which had not been in their
forming-time of youth was valuable or respectable. I was devotedly
attached to this noble creature—'Queen Betty' we used to call her;
and she made a kind of pet of me, and protected me against the
animosity of her sisters.
For Mr. King himself I have only kindly tender recollections; and I
will not dwell on the clouds which came over the future.
In these days I lived at a small private boarding-house kept by a
dear, good woman with a magnificent contralto voice, formidable
eyebrows, a decided beard and moustache, and hands as large and strong
as a man's. In spite of these masculine accompaniments, Miss Smith had
a heart as soft as swansdown and as large as an elephant's. She was
totally unfit for any undertaking in which she had to resist
encroachments and defend her own rights. Anyone could talk her over.
She was influenced by her affections more than by her interests; and
where she took a liking she would sacrifice her gains to please the
favoured him or her by extra liberalities. She had generous instincts,
refined tastes, indolent habits; and she kept a loose hand on the
domestic reins. Hence she made the most comfortable home possible for
those who lived under her hospitable roof. But our comfort was her
loss; and, when Christmas brought its bills, the two ends gaped ever
wider and wider and were less and less able to be strained together.
I knew all this only afterwards. At the time everything seemed to
stand on velvet.
This house was a queer experience to me. The tremendous love-affairs
which budded and blossomed, but never set into the permanent fruit of
matrimony; the friendships which began, continued, and then suddenly
one day went pouf! in the smoke of a blazing quarrel; the fights of
the old ladies for the footstools, the favourite easy-chair, the best
place by the fire, and the stratagems and wiles put in force for
victory and prior possession—how odd it all was! And what
extraordinary people came and went like shadows, or stayed as if they
were coeval with the foundations of the house, and as little to be
moved as these!
There was the bull-necked, bullet-headed bon vivant who kept the
bill-of-fare up to the mark, was inexorable on the subject of
breakfast-bacon and soft-roed herrings, and allowed of no stint in
quantity nor scamping of quality.
There was the dissipated young clerk who did nothing but count
returned notes at the Bank of England, and had no intellect for higher
work had he been put to it. He had a private income in excess of his
salary; was given over to music-halls and late hours; spent his money
as if it were water running through his fingers; dressed gorgeously
and wore a small counter-full of jewellery; and, among other things,
bought a fine carved mahogany bookcase, which he stocked with novels,
all in showy bindings, uncut and never read.
There was the well-conducted young solicitor, silent, reserved,
methodical—the best of them all; and the loose-lipped young fellow,
who spluttered when he spoke, and asked counsel of unmarried girls
whether he should put on his thick trousers or his thinner.
There was the uxorious couple who made embarrassing love in public,
and the quarrelsome couple who were just as embarrassing in their
fierce disputes; the maiden lady of good family, whose feature was
eyebrows, and who would have sniffed at Venus herself as plebeian, had
she not had the exact arch held by her as a sign of birth and
breeding; and there was the mincing prude who objected to Cromwell
'because he was not a gentleman,' kept a sharp look-out on the young
men and was a very Cerberus to the girls.
There were the girls themselves—the pretty, touzled, mop-headed
ones, who turned the heads of all the men, and had their own loves out
of doors; the earnest ones who had something in them, and the
frivolous ones who had nothing in them; and one—that girl who was my
special friend and studied with me at the British Museum. She was one
of the vanguard of the independent women; but she did her life's work
without blare or bluster, or help from the outside; and without that
weakness of her sex which makes them cry out when they are hustled in
the crowd they have voluntarily joined—which makes them think
themselves aggrieved because they are not aided by the men to whom
they have placed themselves in opposition and rivalry.
Then there were the women of sixty and upwards, who chirped like
birds and dressed like brides; the mother and daughter, who came no
one knew whence, did no one knew what, were pleasant companions and
charming entertainers—but kept at a distance; the buxom widows of
forty, smiling, debonnaire and ready for their second bridal; and the
sad-eyed ones of the same age, whose weepers were as big as sails, and
their crape of phenomenal depth and blackness. There were the
half-crazed members of well-known families planted out to insure that
peace at home which their odd ways disturbed; and sometimes there were
people whose antecedents would not bear scrutiny, and whose dismissal
had to be summarily given. Like the shadows of a magic lantern these
memories pass before me, and I ask myself: Was it really I, the man I
am now, who lived there as one of this strange menagerie—myself,
perhaps one of the strangest of them all?
Impulsive, shy, eager, enthusiastic, sensitive at all points,
revelling in my sense of liberty but scarcely knowing how to use it, I
was like some big bird as yet unfledged—some huge puppy as yet
untrained. My kind landlady, however, liked me, and did her best to
warn and direct me as to my conduct in the house and the intimacies to
be formed or avoided among her people.
'It is a pity you should be spoilt too soon,' she said to me one
day with a sigh. 'Boys are so nice, and men are such wretches! I wish
you could be a boy for ever, then you might be worth something.'
'I shall be worth more when I am a man,' I laughed. 'You shall be
proud of me then, Smithy. Wait till my book is published, and then you
will see.'
'I would rather keep you as you are,' she answered. 'When you are a
man I shall have lost you. Now you are like my own boy.'
'You shall never lose me, Smithy,' I said. 'I am not of the kind to
Dear, good, generous Miss Smith! She was only a boarding-house
keeper; but she was the most of a mother to me of any woman I have
known—save poor Nurse Mary. I got to like her and confide in her so
intimately that it seemed strange I had not known her all my life; and
to the end we remained the perfectly good friends we were now, when
she 'mothered' me and looked after me, and kept me, so far as she
could, from making mistakes and falling into mischief. If I have
seemed to give too much weight to this comparatively unimportant tract
in my life's journey, it is because it was my first field of personal
freedom; and like all first things it has left an indelible impression
on my mind.
BY the end of the covenanted term I had accomplished my purpose
and written my novel. It was an ambitious undertaking for a 'prentice
hand, but it met with that kind of reception which means promise and
opens the door to better things. It gave me no money. On the contrary,
the publication cost me fifty pounds, which sum, advanced by Mr. King
on the faith of my majority, was Mr. N—'s standing price for first
books by young authors.
I shall never forget the day when I read the first favourable notice
of my book, which, strangely enough, was in the Times. I
seemed to tread on air, to walk in a cloud of light, to bear on me a
sign of strange and glorious significance. I felt as if I must have
stopped the passers-by to shake hands with them and tell them it was I
who had written the novel which the Times had reviewed so
well that morning. I thought all the world must be talking of it, and
wondering who was the unknown Christopher Kirkland who, yesterday
obscure, to-day famous, had so suddenly flashed into the world of
letters; and I longed to say that this veiled prophet, this successful
aspirant, was I! I remember the sunset as I went up Oxford Street, to
what was not yet the Marble Arch. For I could not rest in the house. I
could not even go home to dinner. I felt compelled to walk as if for
ever—not like that poor wretch, for penance, over a dreary and
interminable plain, but through an enchanted garden of infinite beauty
—to damp down the glad fever in my veins. I could only breathe out in
the open. I should have been stifled within the four walls of that
house in Montague Place.
Since then I have watched with breathless emotion the opalescent
skies of Venice; the westering light which streams like visible prayer
through the windows of St. Peter's as you stand on the Pincio; the
gorgeous sunsets of Naples, with that burning bar drawn all across the
horizon, stretching from Vesuvius to infinitude; but I have never seen
one to match the splendour of that sunset in London, on the evening of
the day when I first achieved success. For the moment I was as a god
among gods. My veins were filled with celestial ichor, not human
blood; and my mind saw what it brought—the infinity of glory because
of that intensity of joy.
I turned into the Park and sat down on a bench, looking at this
resplendence which was to me like a message—a symbol of my own
strength and future lustre. Suddenly, as distinctly as if she had been
there in the body, I felt the presence of Adeline Dalrymple. It seemed
to me as if she stood before me, enveloping me in her personality as
in the old days. I seemed to feel her arms about me—as if she drew me
gently to her bosom; and I felt again her lips on my forehead and my
eyes. Then she seemed to sit down on the seat beside me, and I heard
the murmur of that marvellous voice, saying softly: 'By the power of
Love you have come to the possession of Fame!'
The full chord of divinest harmony was now complete. All my life and
being were swept away as by one great rush and flood of rapture,
unfathomable, irresistible. It was as if I heard the primal harmony
whence all other music flows—as if I saw the archetype of all beauty,
and felt the essence of all love and joy. For that brief moment I was
in what we mean by heaven; when a heavy hand was laid a little roughly
on my shoulder, and a harsh voice said rudely:
'Come, none of this now! You mustn't sleep here, you know. Or is it
drunk you are?'
The angel with the flaming sword who turned me so unceremoniously
out of Paradise was a park-keeper; and poor Icarus, my spirit, had a
headlong tumble from the empyrean to the dust!
When the agreement between us came to an end, my father again wanted
me to give up my present life, go to Cambridge, put away my foolish
doubts and take Orders like a rational being. He ought to have known
this last was impossible, granting me the very elements of honesty.
But he was so convinced, for his own part, of the truth of
Christianity and the perfectness of Anglican Protestantism, that he
felt sure if I read in the orthodox direction I should be also
convinced. Thus he hoped that, by studying for the ministry, I should
by force of better reasoning abandon my errors, and at one and the
same time redeem my worldly position and save my soul.
Naturally I resisted this plan; for I was more than ever in love
with liberty and literature. And as there was really nothing in my
choice injurious to my family nor derogatory to myself, I at last bore
down my father's opposition and won his consent:—I am bound by truth
to add, never his cordial approval. Still, he consented; and I was
thus saved from the pain, as well as the disgrace and wrong-doing, of
flat disobedience to his will; and my home-ties remained intact. And
after my people had got rid of the daily irritation of my presence,
and I myself had learned more self-control by contact with the world,
and had also become less sore, because not so often wounded, we were
better friends than we had ever been before. My bi-annual visits to
the dear old place were purely harmonious; which my life there had not
been; and our mutual affection was strengthened, not weakened, by the
loosening of the links and the lengthening of the chain.
My life, then, was finally arranged on the lines I had so long
marked out for myself. Now I had only to show of what stuff I was
made. For the rest, my future was in my own keeping.
The first necessity was to get steady employment outside my
novel-writing, which was to be the sweet after the meat; and my
ambition was that of most young writers not specialists—to get work
on the press. This gradation of aim was the natural result of
experience. From poetry to novel-writing, and thence to newspaper
work—what an epitome of young ambition is here! I could not begin by
reporting, as Dickens and Beard and Kent and Hunt and, if my memory
serves me, George Henry Lewes, had begun. I did not know
shorthand—which yet was easily learned. But I was too ambitious to
like the idea of work so unindividualized and a position so
subordinate as are the work and position of a reporter. I wanted to be
a full-fledged leader-writer at once. Wherefore I tried my hand at
what was really a social essay rather than a leader, on the wrongs of
all savage aborigines. This I sent down to the office of the —, with
a letter stating the full presumption of my desires; and waited for
the result.
Poor dear 'Smithy' had a bad time of it for the next few days. For
that fatal quality of concentration which has intensified every
feeling and action of my life was then more potent than it is even
now; and there was nothing in heaven nor earth, the past, the present,
nor the future, save the acceptance or rejection of that essay. The
four days which intervened between my letter and the answer were four
days of restlessness amounting to agony—of alternate hope and fear
rising into insanity. There was no treading on air nor walking in a
cloud of light now! It was going through the Valley of the Shadow;
with perhaps that fatal abyss at the end!
On the fifth day I had wrestled through my torment and come out into
the upper air once more. My proof lay on my plate at breakfast; and
with it was a letter from the editor, bidding me go down to the —
office to-day, at four o'clock precisely.
I was punctual to the moment; and with a beating heart but very high
head, went swinging up the narrow, dingy court into which the
'editor's entrance' gave; and then up the still narrower and still
dingier stairs to a room whence I could not see the street for the
dirt which made the windows as opaque as ground-glass. Here I was told
to wait till Mr. Dundas could see me. In about half an hour the
messenger returned, and ushered me into the awful presence.
For in truth it was an awful presence, in more ways than one. It was
not only my hope and present fortune, but of itself, personally, it
was formidable.
A tall, cleanly-shaved, powerfully-built man—with a smooth head of
scanty red hair; a mobile face instinct with passion; fiery,
reddish-hazel eyes; a look of supreme command; an air of
ever-vibrating impatience and irascibility, and an abrupt but not
unkindly manner, standing with his back to the fire-place—made half a
step forward and held out his hand to me as I went into the room.
'So! you are the little boy who has written that queer book and
want to be one of the press-gang, are you?' he said half-smiling, and
speaking in a jerky and un- prepared manner, both singular and
The little boy, by the way, was as tall as he—and that was two
inches over six feet.
I took him in his humour and smiled too.
'Yes, I am the man,' I said.
'Man, you call yourself? I call you a whipper-snapper,' he
answered, always good-humouredly. 'But you seem to have something in
you. We'll soon find it out if you have. I say though, youngster, you
never wrote all that rubbish yourself! Some of your elder brothers
helped you. You never scratched all these queer classics and mythology
into your own numskull without help. At your age it is impossible.'
'It may be impossible,' I laughed; 'at the same time it is true. I
give you my word, no one helped me. No one even saw the manuscript or
the proofs,' I added eagerly.
On which my new friend and potential master startled me as much as
if he had fired off a pistol in my ear, first by his laughter, and
then by the volley of oaths which he rolled out—oaths of the
strangest compounds and oddest meanings to be heard anywhere—oaths
which he himself made at the moment, having a speciality that way
unsurpassed, unsurpassable and inimitable. But as he laughed while he
blasphemed, and called me 'good boy' in the midst of his wonderful
expletives, he evidently did not mean mischief. And I had fortunately
enough sense to understand his want of malice, and to accept his
manner as of the ordinary course of things.
This pleased him; and after he had exhausted his momentary stock of
oaths, he clapped me on the back with the force of a friendly
sledge-hammer, and said:
'You are a nice kind of little beggar, and I think you'll do.'
Then he told me to go into the next room to write a leader on a
Blue Book which he would send in to me. It was the report of the
Parliamentary Commission on the condition of the miners relative to
the 'truck' system.
'I give you three hours and a half,' he said, taking out his watch.
'Not a minute longer, by —. By that time your work must be done, or
you'll have no supper to-night! You must take the side of the men;
but—d'ye hear?—you are not to assassinate the masters. Leave them a
leg to stand on, and don't make Adam Smith turn in his grave by any
cursed theories smacking of socialism and the devil knows what. Do you
understand, youngster? I have had the passages marked which you are to
notice, and so you need not bother that silly cocoanut of yours with
any others. Keep to the text; write with strength; don't talk
nonsense, and do your work like a man. And now be off.'
To my great joy and supreme good luck, I seized the spirit of my
instructions, and wrote a rattling, vigorous kind of paper, which
pleased Mr. Dundas so much that he called me a good boy twenty times
with as many different oaths, and took me home to dine with him. And
from that day he put me on the staff of the paper, and my
bread-and-butter was secure.
The next two years followed without any change in outward
circumstances. I worked hard for very moderate pay; but I was young,
strong, energetic, and temperate in my habits. To live was of itself
good enough for me. I did not want the adventitious excitement of
dissipation nor luxury. My work was my pleasure, and to do well was
its own reward. I had that appetite for work which is the essential of
success on a newspaper; and I was to be relied on at a pinch as well
as for the day's steady routine. I filled the office of handy- man
about the paper—was now sent down to describe a fête; now given a
pile of books to review; sometimes set to do the work of the
theatrical critic when this gentleman was away; and given certain
social leaders to write—but never the political.
For a young fellow as I was then, unfit for responsibility because
wanting in experience, this was all that I could expect. And
occasionally it was more than I was fit for. Twice I got the paper
into trouble because of my unsound political economy, and the trail of
the socialistic serpent, which made itself too visible for even the
—; for all that this was one of our then most advanced Liberal
journals. But, as I was a favourite with the irascible editor—to whom
also I was sincerely attached, though I stood in wholesome awe of him
into the bargain—my sins were forgiven. A sounder man than I was told
off to reply to the attacks I had drawn down on our heads; to explain
away what could not be retracted; and to carry the — out of the fire.
And I had nothing worse to bear than an outburst of imprecations which
let off the steam and broke no one's bones.
All the employés of the journal did not come off so well when hot
water was about; and some ran rough risks:—as, for instance, that
poor fellow who brought in either a wrong or an unpleasant message—I
forget which—at whose head Mr. Dundas hurled his heavy metal
office-inkstand. The man ducked in time; but the door was cut and
indented where the sharp edge had struck, and blackened by a stream of
ink from the centre panel to the floor. Mr. Dundas showed me the place
with a peal of laughter and a volley of oaths, in no wise disconcerted
by this narrow escape from committing murder. He made it up to the man
with a couple of sovereigns; and when the door had been scraped and
re-varnished, no more was heard of the matter. The men in the office
were used to his ways, and dodged him when he let fly—waiting till
the dangerous fit was over. All forgave his violence—some because
they really loved him, and some because he paid them handsomely for
their bruises.
Mr. Dundas was a bad writer and a poor classic, and not especially
well-informed on any subject; but after Delane he was the best
constructive as well as administrative editor of his time, and knew
how to choose his staff and apportion his material with a
discrimination that was almost like another sense. He was
indefatigable in his office, and finally broke down his iron
constitution by sheer hard work. What made the pity of it was, that
this hard work was often more superfluous than necessary. But this
minute attention to details was his point of honour, and he would not
be beaten off it. He used to wait at the — office till the first
sheet was printed off—till five in the morning—and often he was so
exhausted that he had to be almost carried down the stairs.
For all his violent temper and frightful language, he was able to
dominate himself with certain of his staff—two of whom are especially
in my mind. They were men of very different calibre and standing. One
was the publisher of the paper—an extremely timid man, who looked as
if he would have died outright had he been brutalized in any way; but
he remained in absolute peace with Mr. Dundas all the time the —
lasted, and moved with him to those other offices where the great
weekly paper was established; and the other was his co-editor—a
sensitive, refined, cultured scholar, whose pride of gentlehood would
not have brooked affront nor submitted to insolence. To neither of
these, so different as they were but each so valuable, did Mr. Dundas
ever go beyond the nicest line of moderation; and the last, like the
first, held with him to the end, and finally took the sole charge of
that sharp-tongued Weekly, when the fiery spirit which had first ruled
it was laid to rest under that melancholy monument on the Cornish
coast he loved so well.
To me, younger and in some sort defenceless, I confess he was at
times exceedingly brutal, though he was substantially kind and did
what he could to give me work. But his oaths used to curdle my blood;
his violence was at times appalling; and once he forgot himself so
far as to shake his fist in my face. That was when trouble had come
between us; and it may be easily understood that this day saw my last
visit to the office. It was the rift which was never mended.
But this furiousness was his habit. He forgot himself in the same
way even with ladies—witness that well-known scene, when he ran
along the platform as the train was moving out of the station, cursing
and swearing with all his might at the women he then loved best in the
world, because they would not do something he wished.
All the same, he had his grand good points. He was generous and
affectionate; utterly devoid of all treacherous instincts; and he bore
no malice. He was brutal, if you will; but the core of him was sound;
and his fidelity to his friends was very beautiful. With so much that
can be said less than laudatory of this fierce Boanerges of the press,
it is pleasant to record that which makes for his renown and claims
our more tender memories.
I remember two notable crowds in which I found myself in these early
days. One was when my old friends the Chartists marched through London
twenty thousand strong, and I followed—not as a special constable.
And the other was when Baron Rothschild addressed the people from the
balcony on the day of his futile election. He began his speech by
these words:
'I stand here by the will of the people.'
From the dead silence of the dense throng rose a voice clear and
'So stood Barabbas!'
But, Barabbas notwithstanding, after a fight of years the Jews won
the day; as the Roman Catholics had won theirs before them; and as
Agnosticism will also win in the near future.
At this time I went much into society. My social place was that
which naturally belongs to a youngster of good birth, who, if he has
not quite won his spurs, may yet some day do great things—who
knows?—and who has good names at his back. The tower of strength my
grandfather the Bishop and my uncle the Dean were to me! What
humiliating snobs we are! I became ac- quainted with a few of the
leaders of thought already established, and some who were still
preparing for the time when they too should lead and no longer follow.
Among others, I fell in with that notorious group of Free-lovers,
whose ultimate transaction was the most notable example of matrimony
void of contract of our day. But though those who floated on the crest
of the wave, and whose informal union came to be regarded as a moral
merit even by the strait-laced, had the more genius and the better
luck, he who made personal shipwreck, and from whose permitted
trespass the whole thing started, had the nobler nature, the more
faithful heart, the more constant mind, and was in every way the
braver and the truer man. The one whom society set itself to honour,
partly because of the transcendent genius of his companion, partly
because of his own brilliancy and facility, was less solid than
specious. The other whom all men, not knowing him, reviled, was a
moral hero. The former betrayed his own principles when he made
capital out of his 'desecrated hearth' and bewildered society by
setting afloat ingenious stories of impossible ceremonies which had
made his informal union in a certain sense sacramental, so that he
might fill his rooms with 'names' and make his Sundays days of
illustrious reception. The latter accepted his position without
explanation or complaint, and was faithful to his flag, indifferent to
selfish gain or social loss. And whether that flag embodied a right
principle or a wrong, his steadfastness was equally admirable, and the
constancy which could not be warped for loss or gain was equally
It must never be forgotten too that he who afterwards posed as the
fond husband betrayed by the trusted friend, was, in the days when I
first knew them all, the most pronounced Free-lover of the group, and
openly took for himself the liberty he expressly sanctioned in his
wife. As little as he could go into the Divorce Court for his personal
relief, because of that condonation and his own unclean hands, so
little did he deserve the sympathy of society for the transfer which
afterwards he put forward as his own justification and that friend's
This I say with absolute knowledge of the whole series of facts,
from the beginning. And I say it for sake of the truth and in the
interests of justice—though it be but justice to the dead.
At the time when I first knew these people they were living in a
kind of family communion that was very remarkable. Sisters and cousins
and brothers—some of the women married and with yearly increasing
families, to which they devoted themselves; others single, and of
general domestic utility all round—clubbed together their
individually thin resources, and made a kind of family Agapemone which
had its charm and its romance. Among them were some who practised no
divergence in their own lives, and allowed of none in theory:—such as
Samuel Lawrence, who was then vainly giving his strength to discover
the Venetian method of colouring; and that handsome Egyptologist,
George Gliddon, who might have thrown his handkerchief where he would,
but who was true to his first love, and married her when her youth and
beauty had long since gone, and only her truth and her lovely nature
remained. These and some others went with the broad current of
ordinary morality. But also there were, as I have said, certain
Free-lovers mingled with the orthodox rest; and of these the most
remarkable was that faithful and lovable man, that generous and
patient, loyal and devoted friend, of whom I have just spoken, and
whose individuality many still living will recognise.
I also became as intimate as a son with a father with the most
famous poet-scholar of our generation; the 'old man eloquent,' whose
mind was more Greek than English, and whose hatred of political
tyranny on the one side, was balanced by his aristocratic
exclusiveness and personal pride on the other. He was of some use to
me in helping me to polish my style; and he indoctrinated me with an
enduring horror of slang. But the crowning misfortune of my character,
intractibility, which has marred so much of my life, prevented my
gaining as much as I might by his lessons. I could accept only such
things as commended themselves to my own judgment. I could not accept
them simply on authority—even his. I therefore profited
intellectually by this friendship less than I should have done had my
mind been more plastic and more apt to subordination. But I gained all
the same.
I always look back to the times when I visited Mr. Landor as the
most valuable for lessons in self-control. I reverenced him so deeply
and loved him so tenderly, and the difference between our ages was so
great, that I should as little have thought of contradicting him as I
should have thought of irritating a lion. If I did not accept all he
said, I never presumed to oppose him; and his fiery temper subdued
mine by the very force of my own love and respect. Had he declared
that the stars shone at mid-day, I would have answered: 'Yes, dear
father, they do;' and he would have returned, with his sweet smile:
'My good Christopher!—my good son!' Thus his temper, notoriously
short in tether and leonine in its wrath as it was, was never once
ruffled during the whole of our thirteen years of close and constant
friendship; and the self-control I was obliged to exercise was of
incalculable service to me.
The affection between Mr. Landor and myself was very true and deep,
and it began at first sight and through my own enthusiasm. His
'Imaginary Conversations' was one of my most cherished books. Edwin
gave it to me when he came of age, and I loved it better than all else
I had—save Adeline Dalrymple's 'Shelley.' When I was introduced to
an ill-dressed and yet striking-looking old man—with unbrushed
apple-pie boots; a plain shirt-front, like a night-gown, not a shirt;
a wisp of faded blue for all kerchief round his neck; his
snuff-coloured clothes rumpled and dusty—but an old man with a face
full of the majesty of thought, with a compressed mouth capable of the
sweetest tenderness, and an air of mental grandeur all through, and
was told that he was Mr. Landor—WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR—I
broke out into an ardent exclamation of joy, and showed such boyish
delight as pleased him, and, in a sense, took his heart by storm.
'And who is this young fellow, who cares so much for an old man?'
he said, holding my hand, and perhaps not understanding what joy it
was to me to see in the flesh one of the great gods of my intellectual
From that hour the thing was done. I became to him like his own son,
and he was my father. And as he loved me in that I was his child as
well as his scholar—and loved my love for him as much as he took
interest in my professional career—and as we agreed in our abstract
politics, and harmonized in our hatred of tyrants—we got on together,
as I say, with perfect accord—to the surprise of everyone who knew my
dear father-friend's peculiarities of impatience and my own natural
If some marvelled, others envied. Among these latter was John
Forster—that literary Ghebir who worshipped all the suns that shone,
and grudged that any but himself should bask in their rays. He never
forgave me my intimacy with the Samson who had already generously
endowed him with the copyright of his books, and whose kindness, he
was afraid, would be diverted to me. Probably he thought I was as
self-seeking as himself. In the days to come he made me feel his
enmity; and of all the queer things in my strange life, one of the
queerest is the determination with which he, first, and then
subsequent biographers of Mr. Landor, have agreed to ignore my
friendship with him. This grudgingness has gone on to the end; and I
was deprived of his bequest to me on a plea which was either a false
pretence, or an act of selfishness.
In this fair city of palaces, where my dear 'father-friend' had
made his home, lived a clever old lady who had once been a
schoolmistress and had written a very pretty little story. She was
cleverer than her works; seeming to need the friction of conversation
to bring out her own latent fire. She was a picturesque old lady, and
always dressed in very light, soft grey with a profusion of white
lace. After seventy, she said, all women should dress in light grey
and wear much white lace; so, giving the sense of freshness and
cleanliness. After fifty and before seventy they ought to wear black.
She was a great friend of Mr. Landor's; but she one day offended his
susceptibilities, and he broke with her, never to renew his
acquaintance. Courteous as he was to women—taking them downstairs and
standing bareheaded by the door of their carriages, according to the
manners of the old school, and of Italy—he could be as vehement to
them as to men when he was offended; and to affront him once was to
lose him for ever.
My first friend in the city was that learned and fastidious Dr.
Devise, who had read too much for any good work of his own to be
possible. He had, as it were, smothered his originality by the
enormous mass of other men's thoughts with which he had loaded his
brain. He was intent on writing a book which should demolish all
religious superstition; and he had already been many years about it.
The first chapter only was finished. This he had had printed as a
'brick,' for private circulation. I cannot say that I was impressed by
it. Seeking to be comprehensive, it was wire-drawn and diluted. It
read like a list of synonyms, or a catalogue of intellectual processes
and in the matter of literary style it was singularly poor.
Dr. Devise was a man who had extreme fascination for some people.
One of our greatest celebrities, when in the Ugly Duck stage of her
existence and before she had joined her kindred Swans, had wanted to
dedicate her life to him. But too many other feminine interests were
already established to allow of the introduction of an outsider; and
the friendship came to a stormy end, after a more than ordinarily
ardent beginning. His house was my first sojourning place in Bath; but
I annoyed him too, by my confessed preference for the 'Father'; and I
fear he thought me both ungrateful and a fool.
Anyhow, he gave me one of those moral shocks which are the
birth-hours of new experience to youth, when, one day, he gently chid
me for loving Mr. Landor better than I loved him. Still gentle, but
cynical as well as half-compassionate, he went on to remind me that
Mr. Landor had no money to leave; that he had even given the copyright
of his works to John Forster—as I already knew—and that his very
pictures, of which he was so proud, were for the most part rubbish.
I never forgave this insinuation. And it did not mend matters when
he spoke of his own ampler means, and how he was able both to leave
his family well provided for and to remember congenial outsiders into
the bargain. I never cared for him after this. At no time of my life
have I been self-seeking in friendship; and legacies have come into my
calculations as little as the chance of a peerage or an offer of the
Garter. And if this be so now, when I have learned the value of money,
what was it then, when I was still too young and impulsive to
calculate or foresee anything whatever? For all his learning and
hospitality and undoubted qualities, there was ever in my mind after
this a repugnance to Dr. Devise which lasted to the end.
But I liked his cheerful, patient, blind wife, with her graceful
little courtesies, pretty flatteries, and craving for sympathy. And
her energetic sister-in-law, with her strong brain and heart of
purest gold, was 'Aunt Susan' to me, as she was to some others. She
was a passionate propagandist of freethought, and was never so happy
as when giving away the small tracts and bigger books which were her
artillery against the strongholds of superstition. Mr. Scott, of
Ramsgate, found her a valuable auxiliary; and she welcomed every new
light with almost youthful enthusiasm. She was one of the bravest of
the morally brave; for she suffered keenly from that kind of local
ostracism, consequent on her unorthodox opinions, which in a manner
isolated her and reduced her society to a few—fit, if you will, but
few all the same. Yet she never relaxed her propagandism, which was as
much part of her philanthropy as was her more direct benevolence in
the matters of food and flannel; and she dug her own social grave
unflinchingly, if with some sighs and not a few heart-aches.
Dr. Devise's soft-voiced, fair-skinned daughter was also one of my
chosen friends at this time. Her charm lay in her marvellous power of
sympathy and almost godlike strength of consolation. She was like a
younger daughter of Demeter, in whose soft white arms the troubled
might lie and be at rest. In my own dark hour, which came upon me a
little later, she was of divine and infinite consolation. And others
found in her the exquisite charm that was so patent and potent to me.
A kind of outlying member of this remarkable group was a certain
refined and thoughtful man who was in those days the ideal poet and
student—as he is now the ideal scholar and philosopher. He was of all
the men known to me one of the most graceful in mind, most cultivated
in intellect, most modest in bearing, most accurate in learning, and
of the purest kind of morale incarnate in human form. He was then in
Orders. Subsequently he broke his chains and came out into freedom and
the light.
There were also two learned sisters who lived near my doctor friend,
and carried to him a chilly worship like incense smouldering in a
censer of ice. They awed me by their fearful superiority. They were
women who had the most extraordinary power of dwarfing all other
pretensions and degrading you both in your own esteem and in the eyes
of others. And they used this power unsparingly. They had not lived
down the softer follies and tender frailties of youth, for they had
never had any to live down, being of the tribe of the 'unco'
guid'—the 'prigs in petticoats'—from the beginning. Self-centred,
bloodless, intellectual, sarcastic, unemotional, they had no sympathy
with the sorrows which sprung from passion and no compassion for
failure. They were like a couple of old Egyptian goddesses shot
through with Voltaire—Pasht for the one, the Sphinx for the
other—while behind the mask of each peered the keen satirical and
mocking face of the author of 'Candide.' They thought me abominable,
and I thought them dreadful; and there was always war between us, such
as Tieck or Hoffmann would have made between a couple of Ice-maidens
and the Fire-king.
Here, I made the acquaintance of Mr. Empson, that pre-historic
æsthete who did his best to create a taste for minor ornamentation by
skilfully combined and original adaptations, and whose bric-à-brac
shop was a favourite lounge with the best people in Bath. My dear old
'father' was frequently there, and I with him. Mr. Empson was eager
for lengths of old brocades with which to line the covers of his more
valuable books, or to drape as curtains about his statuettes. He was
wonderfully sleek and silky in his manners; but I saw the reverse of
the polished medal when, one day, he turned on me with a sudden
outburst of astounding ferocity, because I compassionated him for some
rheumatic ailment of which he complained.
'How can you, a strong young fellow in the beautiful morning of
life, care for what an old man like me suffers? I hate humbug!' he
said savagely.
On which I fired up and told him that he was both impolite and
inhuman, and that he had no right to question my sincerity unless he
had found me already less than honest. But these sleek, silky,
smooth-mannered people are so often savage when touched beneath the
Then I knew the charming family of that delightful Irish actor who
went down in the ill-fated President. The mother had a mania
for birds and small dogs, and the girls were among the prettiest in
Bath. They were of three distinct types—'petillante,' statuesque,
elfin—Rosina, Galatea, Fenella; and each was perfect in her kind.
There was also one man of whom I will only say that I thought him
then, and I think him now, one of the Best I have ever known—one of
those who make the honour of their generation, and who help to keep
society sweet and pure, because entirely governed by principle. With
him it was religious principle, which he translated into practical and
vital morals. He and my brother Godfrey stand side by side under the
measuring standard of human worth. The one has touched the heights by
faith, the other by honour. The one has learned self-command by
obedience, the other by self-respect. Neither could commit a
dishonourable action, were the noose knotted and life to be the
forfeit; but the one would gather his strength from religion, the
other from heroism—the one would die with the fervour of a martyr,
the other with the fortitude of a Stoic.
All the same, differences of method notwithstanding, they stand
shoulder to shoulder on the green plot of human nobleness; and no one
can say that the one is higher than the other—the one better or
braver or stronger than the other. They have come to the same point by
different roads; and the modes of faith for which graceless zealots
fight are emphatically of no account with such as these, whose lives
are so eminently in the right.
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