A Writer's Recollections Volume I Part 5

"Aunt Mary," Arnold's second daughter, I have already spoken of. When my father and mother reached England from Tasmania, she had just married again, a Leicesters.h.i.+re clergyman, with a house and small estate near Loughborough. Her home--Woodhouse--on the borders of Charnwood Forest, and the beautiful Beaumanoir Park, was another fairyland to me and to my cousins. Its ponds and woods and reed-beds; its distant summer-house between two waters, where one might live and read and dream through long summer hours, undisturbed; its pleasant rooms, above all the "tapestry room" where I generally slept, and which I always connected with the description of the huntsman on the "arras," in "Tristram and Iseult"; the Scott novels I devoured there, and the "Court" nights at Beaumanoir, where some feudal customs were still kept up, and its beautiful mistress, Mrs. Herrick, the young wife of an old man, queened it very graciously over neighbors and tenants--all these are among the lasting memories of life. Mrs. Herrick became identified in my imagination with each successive Scott heroine,--Rowena, Isabella, Rose Bradwardine, the White Lady of Avenel, and the rest. But it was Aunt Mary herself, after all, who held the scene. In that Leicesters.h.i.+re world of High Toryism, she raised the Liberal flag--her father's flag--with indomitable courage, but also with a humor which, after the tragic hours of her youth, flowered out in her like something new and unexpectedly delightful. It must have been always there, but not till marriage and motherhood, and F.D. Maurice's influence, had given her peace of soul does it seem to have shown itself as I remember it--a golden and pervading quality, which made life unfailingly pleasant beside her. Her clear, dark eyes, with their sweet sincerity, and the touch in them of a quiet laughter, of which the causes were not always clear to the bystanders, her strong face with its points of likeness to her father's, and all her warm and most human personality--they are still vividly present to me, though it is nearly thirty years since, after an hour or two's pain, she died suddenly and unexpectedly, of the same malady that killed her father. Consumed in her youth by a pa.s.sionate idealism, she had accepted at the hands of life, and by the age of four and twenty, a lot by no means ideal--a home in the depths of the country, among neighbors often uncongenial, and far from the intellectual pleasures she had tasted during her young widowhood in London. But out of this lot she made something beautiful, and all her own--by sheer goodness, conscience, intelligence. She had her angles and inconsistencies; she often puzzled those who loved her; but she had a large brain and a large heart; and for us colonial children, conscious of many disadvantages beside our English-born cousins, she had a peculiar tenderness, a peculiar laughing sympathy, that led us to feel in "Aunt Maria" one of our best friends.

Susan Arnold, the Doctor's fourth daughter, married Mr. John Cropper in 1858, and here, too, in her house beside the Mersey, among fields and trees that still maintain a green though bes.m.u.tted oasis in the busy heart of Liverpool, that girdles them now on all sides, and will soon engulf them, there were kindness and welcome for the little Tasmanians.

She died a few years ago, mourned and missed by her own people--those lifelong neighbors who know truly what we are. Of the fifth daughter, Frances, "Aunt Fan," I may not speak, because she is still with us in the old house--alive to every political and intellectual interest of these darkened days, beloved by innumerable friends in many worlds, and making suns.h.i.+ne still for Arnold's grandchildren and their children's children. But it was to her that my own stormy childhood was chiefly confided, at Fox How; it was she who taught the Tasmanian child to read, and grappled with her tempers; and while she is there the same magic as of old clings about Fox How for those of us who have loved it, and all it stands for, so long.

CHAPTER V

THE FRIENDS OF FOX HOW

It remains for me now to say something of those friends of Fox How and my father whose influence, or whose living presence, made the atmosphere in which the second generation of children who loved Fox How grew up.

Wordsworth died in 1850, the year before I was born. He and my grandfather were much attached to each other--"old Coleridge," says my grandfather, "inoculated a little knot of us with the love of Wordsworth"--though their politics were widely different, and the poet sometimes found it hard to put up with the reforming views of the younger man. In a letter printed in Stanley's _Life_ my grandfather mentions "a good fight" with Wordsworth over the Reform Bill of 1832, on a walk to Greenhead Ghyll. And there is a story told of a girl friend of the family who, once when Wordsworth had been paying a visit at Fox How, accompanied him and the Doctor part of the way home to Rydal Mount.

Something was inadvertently said to stir the old man's Toryism, and he broke out in indignant denunciation of some views expressed by Arnold.

The storm lasted all the way to Pelter Bridge, and the girl on Arnold's left stole various alarmed glances at him to see how he was taking it.

He said little or nothing, and at Pelter Bridge they all parted, Wordsworth going on to Rydal Mount, and the other two turning back toward Fox How. Arnold paced along, his hands behind his back, his eyes on the ground, and his companion watched him, till he suddenly threw back his head with a laugh of enjoyment.--"What _beautiful_ English the old man talks!"

The poet complained sometimes--as I find from an amusing pa.s.sage in the letter to Mr. Howson quoted below, that he could not see enough of his neighbor, the Doctor, on a mountain walk, because Arnold was always so surrounded with children and pupils, "like little dogs" running round and after him. But no differences, great or small, interfered with his constant friends.h.i.+p to Fox How. The garden there was largely planned by him during the family absences at Rugby; the round chimneys of the house are said to be of his design; and it was for Fox How, which still possesses the MS., that the fine sonnet was written, beginning--

Wansfell, this household has a favored lot Living with liberty on thee to gaze--

a sonnet which contains, surely, two or three of the most magical lines that Wordsworth ever wrote.

It is of course no purpose of these notes to give any fresh account of Wordsworth at Rydal, or any exhaustive record of the relations between the Wordsworths and Fox How, especially after the recent publication of Professor Harper's fresh, interesting, though debatable biography. But from the letters in my hands I glean a few things worth recording. Here, for instance, is a pa.s.sing picture of Matthew Arnold and Wordsworth in the Fox How drawing-room together, in January, 1848, which I find in a letter from my grandmother to my father:

Matt has been very much pleased, I think, by what he has seen of dear old Wordsworth since he has been at home, and certainly he manages to draw him out very well. The old man was here yesterday, and as he sat on the stool in the corner beside the fire which you knew so well, he talked of various subjects of interest, of Italian poetry, of Coleridge, etc., etc.; and he looked and spoke with more vigor than he has often done lately.

But the poet's health was failing. His daughter Dora's death in 1847 had hit him terribly hard, and his sister's state--the helpless though gentle insanity of the unique, the beloved Dorothy--weighed heavily on his weakening strength. I find a touching picture of him in the unpublished letter referred to on a previous page, written in this very year--1848--to Dean Howson, as a young man, by his former pupil, the late Duke of Argyll, the distinguished author of _The Reign of Law_--which Dean Howson's son and the Duke's grandson allow me to print.

The Rev. J.S. Howson, afterward Dean of Chester, married a sister of the John Cropper who married Susan Arnold, and was thus a few years later brought into connection with the Arnolds and Fox How. The Duke and d.u.c.h.ess had set out to visit both the Lakes and the Lakes "celebrities," advised, evidently, as to their tour, by the Duke's old tutor, who was already familiar with the valleys and some of their inmates. Their visit to Fox How is only briefly mentioned, but of Wordsworth and Rydal Mount the Duke gives a long account. The picture, first, of drooping health and spirits, and then of the flaming out of the old poetic fire, will, I think, interest any true Wordsworthian.

On Sat.u.r.day [writes the Duke] we reached Ambleside and soon after drove to Rydal Mount. We found the Poet seated at his fireside, and a little languid in manner. He became less so as he talked.

... He talked incessantly, but not generally interestingly.... I looked at him often and asked myself if that was the man who had stamped the impress of his own mind so decidedly on a great part of the literature of his age! He took us to see a waterfall near his house, and talked and chattered, but said nothing remarkable or even thoughtful. Yet I could see that all this was only that we were on the surface, and did not indicate any decay of mental powers. [Still] we went away with no other impression than the vaguest of having seen the man, whose writings we knew so well-- and with no feeling that we had seen anything of the mind which spoke through them.

On the following day, Sunday, the Duke with a friend walked over to Rydal, but found no one at the Mount but an invalid lady, very old, and apparently paralyzed, "drawn in a bath chair by a servant." They did not realize that the poor sufferer, with her wandering speech and looks, was Dorothy Wordsworth, whose share in her great brother's fame will never be forgotten while literature lasts.

In the evening, however--

... after visiting Mrs. Arnold we drove together to bid Wordsworth good-by, as we were to go next morning. We found the old man as before, seated by the fireside and languid and sleepy in manner.

Again he awakened as conversation went on, and, a stranger coming in, we rose to go away. He seemed unwilling that we should go so soon, and said he would walk out with us. We went to the mound in front, and the d.u.c.h.ess then asked if he would repeat some of his own lines to us. He said he hardly thought he could do that, but that he would have been glad to read some to us. We stood looking at the view for some time, when Mrs. Wordsworth came out and asked us back to the house to take some tea. This was just what we wanted. We sat for about half an hour at tea, during which I tried to direct the conversation to interesting subjects--Coleridge, Southey, etc. He gave a very different impression from the preceding evening. His memory seemed clear and unclouded--his remarks forcible and decided--with some tendency to run off to irrelevant anecdote.

When tea was over, we renewed our request that he should read to us.

He said, "Oh dear, that is terrible!" but consented, asking what we chose. He jumped at "Tintern Abbey" in preference to any part of the "Excursion."

He told us he had written "Tintern Abbey" in 1798, taking four days to compose it; the last twenty lines or so being composed as he walked down the hill from Clifton to Bristol. It was curious to feel that we were to hear a Poet read his own verses composed fifty years before.

He read the introductory lines descriptive of the scenery in a low, clear voice. But when he came to the thoughtful and reflective lines, his tones deepened and he poured them forth with a fervor and almost pa.s.sion of delivery which was very striking and beautiful. I observed that Mrs. Wordsworth was strongly affected during the reading. The strong emphasis that he put on the words addressed to the person to whom the poem is written struck me as almost unnatural at the time. "My DEAR, DEAR friend!"--and on the words, "In thy wild eyes." It was not till after the reading was over that we found out that the poor paralytic invalid we had seen in the morning was the _sister_ to whom "Tintern Abbey" was addressed, and her condition, now, accounted for the fervor with which the old Poet read lines which reminded him of their better days. But it was melancholy to think that the vacant gaze we had seen in the morning was from the "wild eyes" of 1798.

... We could not have had a better opportunity of bringing out in his reading the source of the inspiration of his poetry, which it was impossible not to feel was the poetry of the heart. Mrs.

Wordsworth told me it was the first time he had read since his daughter's death, and that she was thankful to us for having made him do it, as he was apt to fall into a listless, languid state. We asked him to come to Inverary. He said he had not courage; as he had last gone through that country with his daughter, and he feared it would be too much for him.

Less than two years after this visit, on April 23, 1850, the deathday of Shakespeare and Cervantes, Arnold's youngest daughter, now Miss Arnold of Fox How, was walking with her sister Susan on the side of Loughrigg which overlooks Rydal Mount. They knew that the last hour of a great poet was near--to my aunts, not only a great poet, but the familiar friend of their dead father and all their kindred. They moved through the April day, along the mountainside, under the shadow of death; and, suddenly, as they looked at the old house opposite, unseen hands drew down the blinds; and by the darkened windows they knew that the life of Wordsworth had gone out.

Henceforward, in the family letters to my father, it is Mrs. Wordsworth who comes into the foreground. The old age prophesied for her by her poet bridegroom in the early Grasmere days was about her for the nine years of her widowhood, "lovely as a Lapland night"; or rather like one of her own Rydal evenings when the sky is clear over the perfect little lake, and the reflections of island and wood and fell go down and down, unearthly far into the quiet depths, and Wansfell still "parleys with the setting sun." My grandmother writes of her--of "her sweet grace and dignity," and the little friendly acts she is always doing for this person and that, gentle or simple, in the valley--with a tender enthusiasm. She is "dear Mrs. Wordsworth" always, for them all. And it is my joy that in the year 1856 or 1857 my grandmother took me to Rydal Mount, and that I can vividly recollect sitting on a footstool at Mrs.

Wordsworth's feet. I see still the little room, with its plain furniture, the chair beside the fire, and the old lady in it. I can still recall the childish feeling that this was no common visit, and the house no common house--that a presence still haunted it. Instinctively the childish mind said to itself, "Remember!"--and I have always remembered.

A few years later I was again, as a child of eight, in Rydal Mount. Mrs.

Wordsworth was dead, and there was a sale in the house. From far and near the neighbors came, very curious, very full of real regret, and a little awe-stricken. They streamed through the rooms where the furniture was arranged in lots. I wandered about by myself, and presently came upon something which absorbed me so that I forgot everything else--a store of Easter eggs, with wonderful drawings and devices, made by "James," the Rydal Mount factotum, in the poet's day. I recollect sitting down with them in a nearly empty room, dreaming over them in a kind of ecstasy, because of their pretty, strange colors and pictures.

Fifty-two years pa.s.sed, and I found myself, in September, 1911, the tenant of a renovated and rebuilt Rydal Mount, for a few autumn weeks.

The house was occupied then, and is still occupied by Wordsworth's great-granddaughter and her husband--Mr. and Mrs. Fisher Wordsworth. My eldest daughter was with me, and a strange thing happened to us. I arrived at the Mount before my husband and daughter. She joined me there on September 13th. I remember how eagerly I showed her the many Wordsworthiana in the house, collected by the piety of its mistress--the Haydon portrait on the stairs, and the books, in the small low-ceiled room to the right of the hall, which is still just as it was in Wordsworth's day; the garden, too, and the poet's walk. All my own early recollections were alive; we chattered long and late. And now let the account of what happened afterward be given in my daughter's words as she wrote it down for me the following morning.

RYDAL MOUNT, _September 14, 1911._

Last night, my first at Rydal Mount, I slept in the corner room, over the small sitting-room. I had drawn up the blind about half-way up the window before going to bed, and had drawn the curtain aside, over the back of a wooden arm-chair that stood against the window.

The window, a cas.e.m.e.nt, was wide open. I slept soundly, but woke quite suddenly, at what hour I do not know, and found myself sitting bolt upright in bed, looking toward the window. Very bright moonlight was s.h.i.+ning into the room and I could just see the corner of Loughrigg out in the distance. My first impression was of bright moonlight, but then I became strongly conscious of the moonlight striking on something, and I saw perfectly clearly the figure of an old man sitting in the arm-chair by the window. I said to myself, "That's Wordsworth!" He was sitting with either hand resting on the arms of the chair, leaning back, his head rather bent, and he seemed to be looking down straight in front of him with a rapt expression.

He was not looking at me, nor out of the window. The moonlight lit up the top of his head and the silvery hair and I noticed that the hair was very thin. The whole impression was of something solemn and beautiful, and I was not in the very least frightened. As I looked-- I cannot say, when I looked again, for I have no recollection of ceasing to look, or looking away--the figure disappeared and I became aware of the empty chair.--I lay back again, and thought for a moment in a pleased and contented way, "That was Wordsworth." And almost immediately I must have fallen asleep again. I had not, to my knowledge, been dreaming about Wordsworth before I awoke; but I had been reading Hutton's essay on "Wordsworth's Two Styles" out of Knight's _Wordsworthiana_, before I fell asleep.

I should add that I had a distinct impression of the high collar and stock, the same as in the picture on the stairs in this house.

Neither the seer of this striking vision--unique in her experience--nor I, to whom she told it within eight hours, make any claim for it to a supernatural origin. It seemed to us an interesting example of the influence of mind and a.s.sociation on the visualizing power of the brain.

A member of the Psychical Society, to whom I sent the contemporary record, cla.s.sified it as "a visual hallucination," and I don't know that there is anything more to be said about it. But the pathetic coincidence remains still to be noted--we did not know it till afterward--that the seer of the vision was sleeping in Dorothy Wordsworth's room, where Dorothy spent so many sad years of death-in-life; and that in that very corner by the window Wordsworth must have sat, day after day, when he came to visit what remained to him of that creature of fire and dew, that child of genius, who had been the inspiration and support of his poetic youth.

In these rapid sketches of the surroundings and personal influences amid which my own childhood was pa.s.sed I have already said something of my father's intimate friend Arthur Hugh Clough. Clough was, of course, a Rugbeian, and one of Arnold's ablest and most devoted pupils. He was about three years older than my father, and was already a Fellow of Oriel when Thomas Arnold, the younger, was reading for his First. But the difference of age made no difference to the friends.h.i.+p which grew up between them in Oxford, a friends.h.i.+p only less enduring and close than that between Clough and Matthew Arnold, which has been "eternized," to use a word of Fulke Greville's, by the n.o.ble dirge of "Thyrsis." Not many years before his own death, in 1895, my father wrote of the friend of his youth:

I loved him, oh, so well: and also respected him more profoundly than any man, anywhere near my own age, whom I ever met. His pure soul was without stain: he seemed incapable of being inflamed by wrath, or tempted to vice, or enslaved by any unworthy pa.s.sion of any sort. As to "Philip," something that he saw in me helped to suggest the character--that was all. There is much in Philip that is Clough himself, and there is a dialectic force in him that certainly was never in me. A great yearning for possessing one's soul in freedom--for trampling on ceremony and palaver, for trying experiments in equality, being common to me and Philip, sent me out to New Zealand; and in the two years before I sailed (December, 1847) Clough and I were a great deal together.

It was partly also the visit paid by my father and his friend, John Campbell Shairp, afterward Princ.i.p.al Shairp of St. Andrew's, to Clough's reading party at Drumnadrochit in 1845, and their report of incidents which had happened to them on their way along the sh.o.r.es of Loch Ericht, which suggested the scheme of the "Bothie." One of the half-dozen short poems of Clough which have entered permanently into literature--_Qui laborat oral_--was found by my father one morning on the table of his bachelor rooms in Mount Street, after Clough had spent the night on a shake-up in his sitting-room, and on his early departure had left the poem behind him as payment for his night's lodging. In one of Clough's letters to New Zealand I find, "Say not the struggle nought availeth"--another of the half-dozen--written out by him; and the original copy--_tibi primo confisum_, of the pretty, though unequal verses, "A London Idyll." The little volume of miscellaneous poems, called _Ambarvalia,_ and the "Bothie of Tober-na-Vuo-lich" were sent out to New Zealand by Clough, at the same moment that Matt was sending his brother the _Poems by A_.

Clough writes from Liverpool in February, 1849--having just received Matt's volume:

At last our own Matt's book! Read mine first, my child, if our volumes go forth together. Otherwise you won't read mine--_Ambarvalia_, at any rate--at all. Froude also has published a new book of religious biography, auto or otherwise (_The Nemesis of Faith_), and therewithal resigns his Fellows.h.i.+p. But the Rector (of Exeter) talks of not accepting the resignation, but having an expulsion--fire and f.a.got fas.h.i.+on. _Quo usque_?

But when the books arrive, my father writes to his sister with affectionate welcome indeed of the _Poems by A_, but with enthusiasm of the "Bothie."

It greatly surpa.s.ses my expectations! It is on the whole a n.o.ble poem, well held together, clear, full of purpose, and full of promise. With joy I see the old fellow bestiring himself, "awakening like a strong man out of sleep and shaking his invincible locks"; and if he remains true and works, I think there is nothing too high or too great to be expected from him.

"True," and a worker, Clough remained to the last hours of his short life. But in spite of a happy marriage, the burden and perplexity of philosophic thought, together with the strain of failing health, checked, before long, the strong poetic impulse shown in the "Bothie,"

its buoyant delight in natural beauty, and in the simplicities of human feeling and pa.s.sion. The "music" of his "rustic flute".

Kept not for long its happy, country tone; Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note Of men contention-tost, of men who groan.

The poet of the "Bothie" becomes the poet of "Dipsychus," "Easter Day,"

and the "Amours de Voyage"; and the young republican who writes in triumph--all humorous joy and animation--to my father, from the Paris of 1848, which has just seen the overthrow of Louis Philippe, says, a year later--February 24, 1849:

To-day, my dear brother republican, is the glorious anniversary of '48, whereof what shall I now say? Put not your trust in republics, nor in any const.i.tution of man! G.o.d be praised for the downfall of Louis Philippe. This with a faint feeble echo of that loud last year's scream of "_a bas Guizot_!" seems to be the sum total. Or are we to salute the rising sun, with "_Vive l'Empereur!"_ and the green liveries? President for life I think they'll make him, and then begin to tire of him. Meanwhile the Great Powers are to restore the Pope and crush the renascent Roman Republic, of which Joseph Mazzini has just been declared a citizen!