Story of My Life Part 11

These enormities now made my monthly "reports," when they were sent home, anything but favourable; but I believe my mother was intensely diverted by them: I am sure that the Stanleys were. A worse crime, however, was our pa.s.sion for cooking, in which we became exceedingly expert. Very soon after a tremendous punishment for having been caught for the second time frying potato chips, we formed the audacious project of cooking a hare! The hare was bought, and the dreadful inside was disposed of with much the same difficulty and secrecy, and in much the same manner, in which the Richmond murderess disposed of her victims; but we had never calculated how long the creature would take to roast even with a good fire, much more by our wretched embers: and long before it was accomplished, Mrs. Collins, the matron, was down upon us, and we and the hare were taken into ignominious custody.

Another great amus.e.m.e.nt was making sulphur casts and electrotypes, and we really made some very good ones.

My great love for anything of historic romance, however, rendered the Louis Philippe revolution the overwhelming interest of this quarter, and put everything else into the shade. In the preceding autumn the murder of the d.u.c.h.esse de Praslin had occupied every one, and we boys used to lie on the floor for hours poring over the horrible map of the murder-room which appeared in the "Ill.u.s.trated," in which all the pools of blood were indicated. But that was nothing to the enthusiastic interest over the sack of the Tuileries and the escape of the Royal Family: I have never known anything like it in after life.

I have often heard since much of the immoralities of a public-school life, but I can truly say that when I was there, I saw nothing of them.

A very few boys, however, can change the whole character of a school, especially in a wrong direction. "A little worm-wood can pollute a hive of honey," was one of the wise sayings of Pius II. I do not think that my morals were a bit the worse for Harrow, but from what I have heard since of all that went on there even in my time, I can only conclude it was because--at that time certainly--"je n'avais pas le go?t du pech?,"

as I once read in a French novel.

At Easter, 1848, I left Harrow for the holidays, little imagining that I should never return there. I should have been very sorry had I known it.

On the whole, the pleasurable "adventures" of a public-school life had always outweighed its disagreeables; though I was never in strong enough health for any real benefit or enjoyment.

IV

LYNCOMBE

"Les longues maladies usent la douleur, et les longues esp?rances usent la joie."--MME. DE S?VIGN?.

"One adequate support For the calamities of mortal life Exists, one only--an a.s.sured belief That the procession of our fate, however Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being Of infinite benevolence and power, Whose everlasting purposes embrace All accidents, converting them to good."

--WORDSWORTH.

"Condemned to Hope's delusive mire, As we toil on from day to day By sudden stroke or slow decline Our means of comfort drop away."

--JOHNSON.

"It is well we cannot see into the future. There are few boys of fourteen who would not be ashamed of themselves at forty."

--JEROME K. JEROME.

Of all the unhappy summers of my boyhood, that of 1848 was the most miserable. When I left Harrow at Easter, I was very really ill. The iron frame which had been made for my back had seriously injured the spine which it was intended to cure, and a bad fall down the school steps at Harrow had increased the malady. When Sir Benjamin Brodie saw me, he said that I must lie down for at least the greater part of many months, and that a return to Harrow was quite out of the question. This, however, was concealed from me at first, and when I knew it, I was too ill to have any regrets. We went first to Torquay, stopping on the way to visit Mrs. Alexander, a person who afterwards, for some years, bore a large share in our life. In her youth, as Miss Mary Manning, she had been a governess in the family of Sir John Malcolm, and, while living with the Malcolms at Hyde Hall near Cambridge, had been the most intimate early friend of my Uncle Julius. People generally thought that he had been engaged to her, but this, I believe, was never the case. She had married a Mr. Alexander, a physician at Edinburgh, who soon left her a widow, and since that time she had possessed no settled home. She was very tall, serene, and had a beautiful countenance, and her old-fas.h.i.+oned dress was always wonderfully refined and in keeping with her appearance. She seemed to have the power of imposing her own personality upon her surroundings, and subduing the life and movement around her into an intellectual as well as a physical calm. She had a melodious low voice, a delicate Scotch accent, a perfectly self-possessed manner, and a sweet and gentle dignity. In conversation she was witty and genial, but never rude. With wonderful power of narration, she had the art of throwing unspeakable interest and charm over the most commonplace things: yet she never exaggerated. All the clever men who came in contact with her were bound under her spell.

Whewell, Worsley, Landor, Bunsen, Sedgwick adored her, and did not wonder at my uncle's adoration. Saint-Amand's description of Mme. de Maintenon might have been written for her--"Elle garda, dans sa vieillesse, cette sup?riorit? de style et de langage, cette distinction de mani?res, ce tact exquis, cette finesse, cette douceur et cette fermet? de caract?re, ce charme et cette ?l?vation d'esprit qui, ?

toutes les ?poques de son existence, lui valurent tant d'?loges et lui attir?rent tant d'amiti?."

This is one view of Mrs. Alexander, and, as far as it goes, it is perfectly true. But scarcely any characters are all of one piece. She was also boundlessly subtle, and when she had an object in view she spared no means to attain it. For her own ends, with her sweetness unruffled, she would remorselessly sacrifice her best friends. The most egotistical woman in the world, she _expected_ every one to fall under her spell, and calmly and gently but consistently hated any one who escaped. Whilst she almost imperceptibly flattered her superiors in rank and position, she ruthlessly and often heartlessly trampled upon those whom she (sometimes wrongly) considered her inferiors. She demanded sovereignty in every house she entered, and she could always find a way to punish rebellion. She made herself friends that "men might receive her into their houses," and when she had once entered them she never relaxed her foothold.

There is a description in the Life of George Sand which might be well applied to this view of Mrs. Alexander--"Elle ?tait une personne glac?e autant que glaciale.... Ce n'?tait pas qu'elle ne fut aimable, elle ?tait gracieuse ? la surface, un grand savoir-vivre lui tenant lieu de grace v?ritable. Mais elle n'aimait r?ellement personne et ne s'int?ressait ? rien qu'? elle-m?me."

When we first saw Mrs. Alexander, she was living in a small lodging at Heavitree near Exeter. In the following year she came to Hurstmonceaux Rectory for three days and stayed three weeks. The year after she came for three weeks and stayed five years. From the first she was supreme at the Rectory, ruling even Aunt Esther with unswerving and ever-increasing power; but on the whole her presence was an advantage. Her education and strong understanding enabled her to enter into all my uncle's pursuits and interests as his wife could never have done, and to outsiders she was usually suave, courteous, and full of agreeable conversation.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TOWER AT ROCKEND, TORQUAY.]

Uncle Julius and Aunt Esther visited Rockend when we were there, and as my aunts when together generally acted as foils to each other, I should have been at liberty to enjoy the really beautiful place--its delightful gardens, storm-beaten rocks, and the tower where Aunt Lucy "made her meditations"--if I had been well enough; but I had generally to spend the greater part of the day lying upon the floor on a hard backboard and in a state of great suffering. It was often an interest at this time to listen to Uncle Julius as he read aloud in the family circle pa.s.sages connected with the French Revolution, Kingsley's "Saint's Tragedy,"

which had then recently appeared, or the papers which my uncle and his friends were then contributing to the Magazine for the People which Kingsley was getting up. No one read so well as Uncle Julius--a whole whirlwind of tragedy, an unutterable depth of anguish and pathos could be expressed in the mere tone of his voice; and it was not merely tone; he really thus _felt_ what he read, and so carried away his listeners, that all their actual surroundings were invisible or forgotten. Those who never heard Julius Hare read the Communion Service can have no idea of the depths of humility and pa.s.sion in those sublime prayers.

In everything Uncle Julius was as unsuited to the nineteenth century as he well could be. He used to declare that he never would read a book which he knew would interest him, till the exact mood of his mind was fitted for it, till the sun happened to be s.h.i.+ning where it ought, and till weather and time and situation all combined to suit the subject and give its full effect, and he usually had numbers of books by him waiting for this happy conjunction, but, when it arrived, he did the books full justice.

I never saw any one so violent, so unmitigated in his likes and dislikes as Uncle Julius, so furious in his approval or condemnation. "Il avait une grande hardiesse, pour ne pas dire effronterie," as Ba.s.sompierre wrote of the Duke of Buckingham. In his despotic imperiousness he had no sympathy with the feelings and weaknesses of others, though inexpressible pity for all their greater misfortunes or sorrows.

Another person of whom we saw much at this time was the really saint-like Harry Grey, my mother's first cousin, who was living at Babbicombe. He was heir to the Earldom of Stamford (to which his son afterwards succeeded), but a clergyman, and very poor.

I was so ill when we returned home, almost everything I ate producing violent sickness, that it is astonis.h.i.+ng my health should not have been considered a primary object. A few weeks of healthy life on moors or by the sea-side, with freedom from the gnawing mental misery and depression under which I suffered, would probably have restored me; a visit to German baths might have cured me, and saved years of ill-health. Had the family only had any practical common-sense! But, on religious grounds, it was thought wrong to contend against "the wonderful leadings of G.o.d's Providence"--pain was "sent" to be endured, sickness as a tractor to draw its victims to heaven; and all simple and rational means of restoration to a healthy and healthful life were disregarded. Sago with brandy in it was provided instead of meat for my physical, and an inexhaustible supply of tracts, hymns, and little sermons for my mental digestion. Patient endurance of suffering, the following of the most unpleasant path which duty could be thought to point out, and that without hope of either reward or release, were the virtues which even my mother most inculcated at this time.

Then a private tutor was sought for--not by knowledge, not by inquiry at the Universities, not by careful investigation of attainments for teaching, but by an advertis.e.m.e.nt. The inquiry as to all the letters which answered it was whether they appeared to be "those of truly pious men"--_i.e._, whether they were written in the peculiar phraseology then supposed to denote such a character. At last one was accepted, and a tutor arrived, who was--well, I will not describe him further than as certainly the most unprepossessing of human beings: Nature had been so terribly hard upon him.

With this truly unfortunate man I was shut up every morning in the hope that he would teach me something, a task he was wholly unequal to; and then I had to walk out with him. Naturally there were scenes and recriminations on both sides, in which I was by no means blameless. But daily my health grew worse, and scarcely a morning pa.s.sed without my having an agonising fit of suffocation, from contraction of the muscles of the throat, gasping for breath in misery unutterable. The aunts said it was all nervous. I have no doubt it was: I have had plenty of experience of hysteria since, and it is the most dreadful disorder that exists.

At last my sufferings were such, from the relaxing air of Hurstmonceaux, that I was taken to Eastbourne, but an attempt was still made to chain me down for six or eight hours a day in a stuffy lodging at lessons with my tutor, who had not an idea of teaching and knew nothing to teach.

Poor man! he was at least quite as wretched as I was, and I know that he thirsted quite as much for the fresh air of the downs. Aunt Esther came over, and used cruelly to talk, in my presence, of the fatigue and trouble which my ill-health caused my mother, and of the burden which she had thus brought upon herself by adopting me. It is only by G.o.d's mercy that I did not commit suicide. I was often on the point of throwing myself over the cliffs, when all would have been over in an instant, and was _only_ restrained by my intense love for my mother, and the feeling that her apparently dormant affection would be awakened by such a catastrophe, and that she would always be miserable in such an event. Twenty-two years afterwards, when we were as closely united as it was possible for any mother and son to be, my darling mother reverted of her own accord to this terrible time: she could never die happy, she said, unless she knew that her after love had quite effaced the recollection of it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WILMINGTON PRIORY.]

Yet, even in these wretched months at Eastbourne there were oases of comfort--days when my "Aunt Kitty and Lou Clinton" came down, and, with "le c?ur haut plac?" and sound common-sense, seemed to set everything right; and other days when I made excursions alone with my mother to Jevington in the Downs, or to Wilmington with its old ruin and yew-tree, where we used to be kindly entertained by the primitive old Rector, Mr.

Cooper, and his wife.

When I went, in 1877, to visit Alfred Tennyson the poet, he asked me to give him a subject for "A Domestic Village Tragedy." The story which I told him occurred at Hurstmonceaux this summer. Mrs. Coleman, who kept the "dame's school" at Flowers Green, had a niece, Caroline Crowhurst, a very pretty girl, the belle of the parish, and as amiable and good as she was pretty, so that every one was friends with her. She became engaged, rather against the will of her family, to a commercial traveller from a distance. He wrote to her, and she wrote to him, maidenly letters, but full of deep affection. One day they had a little quarrel, and the man, the fiend, took the most intimate, the most caressing of these letters and nailed it up against the Brewery in the centre of Gardner Street, where all the village might read it and scoff at it. As the people knew Caroline, no one scoffed, and all pitied her.

But Caroline herself came to the village shop that afternoon; she saw her letter hanging there, and it broke her heart. She said nothing about it to any one, and she did not shed a tear, but she went home and kissed her aunt and her mother more tenderly than usual; she gathered the prettiest flowers in her little garden and put them in her bosom, and then she opened the lid of the draw-well close to her home and let herself in. The lid closed upon her.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FLOWERS GREEN, HURSTMONCEAUX.]

I remember the news coming to Lime one evening that Caroline Crowhurst was missing, and the dreadful shock the next morning when we heard that the poor girl had been found in the well. My mother, who had known her from her birth, felt it very deeply, for at Hurstmonceaux we were on the most intimate terms with the poor people, and Philadelphia Isted, Mercy Butler, dear old Mrs. Piper the schoolmistress, Ansley Vine of the shop, grumbling old Mrs. Holloway (who always said she should be so glad when she was dead because then people would believe she had been ill), the crippled Louisa Wood, the saint-like bedridden Mrs. Wisham, and gentle Mrs. Medhurst, who lived amongst the primroses of "the lower road"--all these, and many more, were as familiar to me as my own nearest relations. To many of them, when well enough, I went regularly, and to Mrs. Piper, who had lived in the time of the castle, and known my father and his brothers from babyhood, almost every day. Her death was a real affliction. My mother walked behind her coffin at her funeral. In her will she left me a box which had belonged to my unhappy little ancestress, Grace Naylor.

At the end of July my real mother, "Italima," with my sister, came to stay at the Rectory. The visit was arranged to last a month, but unhappily on the second day of her stay, Italima went out with Aunt Esther. They came home walking on different sides of the road, and as soon as she entered the house Italima sent for post-horses to her carriage and drove away. I have never heard what happened, but Italima never came to the Rectory again. Soon afterwards she fixed her residence at Rome, in the Palazzo Parisani, which then occupied two sides of the Piazza S. Claudio.

In August it was decided to send me away to a private tutor's, and my mother and Uncle Julius went with me to Lyncombe, near Bath. My tutor was the Rev. H. S. R., son of a well-known evangelical writer, but by no means of the same spiritual grace: indeed I never could discover that he had any grace whatever; neither had he any mental acquirements, or the slightest power of teaching. He was "un homme absolument nul," and though paid a very large salary, he grossly and systematically neglected all his duties as a tutor. Uncle Julius must have been perfectly aware how inefficient the education at Lyncombe would be, but he was probably not to blame for sending me there. Because I did not "get on" (really because I was never taught), he regarded me as the slave of indolence--"putrescent indolence" he would have called it, like Mr.

Carlyle. He considered me, however, to be harmless, though fit for nothing, and therefore one to be sent where I should probably get no harm, though certainly no good either. It was the system he went upon with my brothers also, and in their case he had all the responsibility, being their guardian. But, indeed, Uncle Julius's view was always much that of Rogers--"G.o.d sends sons, but the devil sends nephews," and he shunted them accordingly.

"Les grands esprits, d'ailleurs tr?s estimables, Ont tr?s peu de talent pour former leurs semblables."

I went to Lyncombe with the utmost curiosity. The house was a large villa, oddly built upon arches in the hollow of a wooded valley about a mile from Bath, behind the well-known Beechen Cliff. At the back of it was a lawn with very steep wooded banks at the sides, and a fountain and pool, showing that the place had once been of some importance, and behind the lawn, meadows with steep banks led towards the heights of Combe Down. We all had rooms to ourselves at Lyncombe, scantily furnished, and with barely a strip of carpet, but we could decorate them with pictures, &c., if we liked. We did our lessons, when we were supposed to do them, at regular hours, in the dining-room, where we had our meals, and after work was finished in the evening, and eight o'clock tea, we were expected to sit with Mrs. R. in the drawing-room.

But we had an immense deal of time to ourselves--the whole afternoon we were free to go where we liked; we were not expected to give any account of what we did, and might get into as much mischief as we chose. Also, we too frequently had whole holidays, which Mr. R.'s idle habits made him only too glad to bestow, but which I often did not in the least know what to do with.

Eagerly did I survey my new companions, who were much older than myself, and with whom I was likely to live exclusively, with none of the chances of making other friends.h.i.+ps which a public school affords. Three of them were quiet youths of no especial character: the fourth was Temple Harris,[49] at once the friend, enlivener, and torment of the following year.

On the whole, at first I was not unhappy at Lyncombe. I liked the almost unlimited time for roaming over the country, and the fresh air did much to strengthen me. But gradually, when I had seen all the places within reach, this freedom palled, and I felt with disgust that, terribly ignorant as I was, I was learning nothing, and that I had no chance of learning anything except what I could teach myself. Whilst Temple Harris stayed at Lyncombe, we spent a great deal of time in writing stories, ballads, &c., for a MS. magazine which we used to produce once a week; and this was not wholly useless, from the facility of composition which it gave me. But after Temple Harris left, the utter waste of life at Lyncombe palled upon me terribly, and I made, in desperation, great efforts to instruct myself, which, with no books and with every possible hindrance from without, was difficult enough. After a fas.h.i.+on, however, I succeeded in teaching myself French, stumbling through an interesting story-book with Grammar and Dictionary, till I had learnt to read with ease; of the p.r.o.nunciation I naturally knew nothing. Two miserable years and a half of life were utterly wasted at Lyncombe, before Arthur Stanley came to visit me there, and rescued me by his representation of the utter neglect and stagnation in which I was living. It had been so hammered into my mind by my aunts that I was a burden to my mother, and that she was worn out with the trouble I had given her in finding my first private tutor, that I should never of myself have ventured to try to persuade her to look out for a second.

My earlier letters to my mother from Lyncombe are filled with nothing but descriptions of the scenery round Bath, of which I formed a most exaggerated estimate, as I had seen so little with which I could compare it. Once a week at least I used to go into Bath itself, to dine with my father's old friend Walter Savage Landor, who had been driven away from his Florentine home by his wife's violent temper. Mr. Landor's rooms (in Catherine Place, and afterwards at 2 Rivers Street) were entirely covered with pictures, the frames fitting close to one another, leaving not the smallest s.p.a.ce of wall visible. One or two of these pictures were real works of art, but as a rule he had bought them at Bath, quite willing to imagine that the little shops of the Bath dealers could be storehouses of t.i.tians, Giorgiones, and Vandycks. The Bath picture-dealers never had such a time; for some years almost all their wares made their way to Mr. Landor's walls. Mr. Landor lived alone with his beautiful white Spitz dog Pomero, which he allowed to do whatever it liked, and frequently to sit in the oddest way on the bald top of his head. He would talk to Pomero by the hour together, poetry, philosophy, whatever he was thinking of, all of it imbued with his own powerful personality, and would often roar with laughter till the whole house seemed to shake. I have never heard a laugh like that of Mr.

Landor--"deep-mouthed Beotian Savage Landor," as Byron called him--such a regular cannonade.[50] He was "the sanest madman and the maddest reasonable man in the world," as Cervantes says of Don Quixote. In the evenings he would sit for hours in impa.s.sioned contemplation: in the mornings he wrote incessantly, to fling off sheet after sheet for the _Examiner_, seldom looking them over afterwards. He scarcely ever read, for he only possessed one shelf of books. If any one gave him a volume, he mastered it and gave it away, and this he did because he believed that if he knew he was to keep the book and be able to refer to it, he should not be able to absorb its contents so as to retain them. When he left Florence, he had made over all he possessed to his wife, retaining only ?200 a year--afterwards increased to ?400--for himself, and this sufficed for his simple needs. He never bought any new clothes, and a chimney-sweep would have been ashamed to wear his coat, which was always the same as long as I knew him, though it in no way detracted from his majestic and lion-like appearance. But he was very particular about his little dinners, and it was about these that his violent explosions of pa.s.sion usually took place. I have seen him take a pheasant up by the legs when it was brought to table and throw it into the back of the fire over the head of the servant in attendance. This was always a failing, and, in later days, I have heard Mr. Browning describe how in his fury at being kept waiting for dinner at Siena, he shouted: "I will not eat it now, I will not eat it if it comes," and, when it came, threw it all out of the window.

At the same time nothing could be more n.o.bly courteous than his manner to his guests, and this was as marked towards an ignorant schoolboy as towards his most distinguished visitor; and his conversation, whilst calculated to put all his visitors at their ease and draw out their best points, was always wise, chivalrous, pure, and witty.

At one time Mr. Landor's son Walter came to stay with him, but he was an ignorant rough youth, and never got on well with his father. I believe Mr. Landor preferred me at this time to any of his own children, and liked better to have me with him; yet he must often have been grievously disappointed that I could so little reciprocate about the Latin verses of which he so constantly talked to me, and that indeed I could seldom understand them, though he was so generous and high-bred that he never would allow me to feel mortified. Mrs. Lynn Linton, then Miss Lynn, was by her almost filial attentions a great comfort to Landor during the earlier years of his exile at Bath. Another person, whom he liked, was a pretty young Bath lady, Miss Fray, who often came to dine with him when I was there. After dinner Mr. Landor generally had a nap, and would say, "Now, Augustus, I'm going to sleep, so make love to Miss Fray"--which was rather awkward.[51]