Story of My Life Part 19

During the greater part of the Easter vacation, my Uncle Penrhyn and his daughter Emmie were with us,--still filled with the first sorrow caused by Aunt Penrhyn's death a few weeks before. To me personally the death of this aunt made little difference, though she had always been kind to me--she had so long been ill, never recovering the birth of her immense number of children, chiefly still-born, and wornout besides with asthma.

My uncle used to obtain for her a reprieve of sleep by mesmerising her, but in this state, though immovable and taking rest, she could be talked to, understood all that was said, and recollected it afterwards. I remember on one occasion her describing her agony when, in a mesmeric state, she knew a wasp had settled on her nose, and yet was unable to move. It was partly distress for her sorrowing relations acting on one in whom the mind so acutely affected the body, which made my dear mother very ill this spring, with the usual trying symptoms of trembling, confusion, giddiness, and sleeplessness. On such occasions I sincerely believe I never had _any_ thought but for her. Not only for hours, but for weeks I would sit constantly beside her, chafing her cold hands and feet, watching every symptom, ready to read if she could bear it, or to bring my thoughts and words into almost baby-language, if--as was sometimes the case--she could bear nothing else. But when she was ill, the dead silence at Lime or the uncongenial society from the Rectory was certainly more than usually depressing, and I was glad when, as at this Easter, her doctor sent her to Hastings. Here, in her rare better moments, I had great enjoyment in beginning to colour from nature on the rocks. On the day before I returned to Oxford, we received the Sacrament kneeling by the sick-bed of Priscilla Maurice,[82] whose sick-room, which she then never left, was facing the sea in White Rock Place. At this time I had not only an _enthusiasm_ for religion, which in itself was worth very little, but was just beginning to be filled with a steady anxiety to fulfil all the n.o.bler aims of life; and to have a contempt for that life of much preaching and little practice in which I had latterly lived at Southgate, teaching others while I made no effort to improve myself. In going to Oxford, from the set I lived in, the so-called moral temptations of Oxford life not only did not a.s.sail, but were invisible to me. I believe the very fact that I was always ready--far too ready--to speak my mind, made base men avoid me. My chief difficulty was to do any work; not to see my acquaintance at all hours of the day; not to shut up Sophocles in utter weariness of what I had so often read before, that I might go out to talk and laugh with those I liked. In fact, probably I should have done little or nothing at first, if the Schools, like the sword of Damocles, had not been hanging over my head--the Schools, which, as I wrote in my journal-book, had, for hundreds of years, probably seen more continuous trouble and misery than any other rooms in the world.

On my way to Oxford, I paid a first visit to Hugh Pearson,[83]

afterwards my very dear friend, at Sonning Rectory near Reading, and also visited the old Maria Josepha, Lady Stanley of Alderley,[84] at Holmwood. Old Lady Stanley was then, as always, most formidable; but her daughters Rianette and Louisa were not afraid of her, and in the one afternoon I was there they had a violent dispute and quarrel, with very high words, over which of their dogs barked loudest.

_To_ MY MOTHER.

"_University College, Oxford, April 9, 1853._--It is from my own rooms, 'No. 2, Kitchen Staircase,' that I write to my mother--in a room long and narrow, with yellow beams across the ceiling, and a tall window at one end admitting dingy light, with a view of straight gravel-walks, and beds of cabbages and rhubarb in the Master's kitchen-garden. Here, for ?32, 16_s._ 6_d._ I have been forced to become the owner of the last proprietor's furniture--curtains which drip with dirt, a bed with a ragged counterpane, a bleared mirror in a gilt frame, and some ugly mahogany chairs and tables. 'Your rooms might be worse, but your servant could not,' said Mr. Hedley when he brought me here.... How shy I have just felt in Hall, sitting through a dinner with a whole set of men I did not know and who never spoke to me."

"_March 10._--The chapel-clock is _in_ my bedroom, and woke me with its vibration every time it struck the hour. However, I suppose I shall get used to it. But I was up long before the scout came to call me at seven, and was in such fear of being late for chapel, that I was ten minutes too early, and had to walk about in the cold and stare at the extraordinary stained windows--Jonah and the whale swimming about side by side; Abraham dragging Isaac to the sacrifice by his hair; Mary and Martha attending upon Christ, each with a bra.s.s ladle in her hand, only that Mary holds hers suspended, and Martha goes on dipping hers in the pot while He is talking. At last the Master entered statelily, and the troop of undergraduates in black gowns and scholars in white ones came clattering in; and Mr. Hedley read the service, and we all responded, and a scholar read the lessons; and then there was a general rush into Quad, and a great shaking of hands, at which I, having no hand to shake, felt very blank, and escaped to my rooms, and afterwards to breakfast with Mr. Jowett.... I am to go to him every night with a hundred lines of Sophocles, some Latin composition, and a piece of Cicero by heart--a great addition to my eighteen lectures a week, but the greatest advantage; and really he could not have done a more true kindness: I do not know how to say enough of it.

"I wish I knew some one in this college. It is most disagreeable being stared at wherever one goes, and having no one to speak to, and though the Hall, with its high roof and pictures, may seem picturesque at first, solitude in society becomes a bore. Expenses appear to be endless. This morning I held a lev?e. First a sooty man with a black face poked his head in at the door with 'Coalman's fee, if you please, sir,--half-a-crown.' The b.u.t.tery, represented by a boy in a white ap.r.o.n, came up next, and then the college porter and scouts, though as yet all these officials have done for me--nothing! A man who declared himself sole agent of an important magazine, and also a vendor of flannels and 'dressing-robes,' has also just called--'supposed he had the honour of addressing Mr.

Hare, and would I for a moment favour him with my approval,' which I declined to do, when he thanked me for 'my great condescension'

and departed."

"_March 17._--I have now been a whole week here. It seems a life to look back upon, and I am becoming quite used to it. My first visitor was a man called Troutbeck. This was our conversation:--

"'I suppose you're fond of boating: we must have you down to the river and see what you're made of.'

"'But I don't boat: you would find me utterly inefficient.'

"'Then you ride?'

"'No.'

"'Do you sing, then?'

"'No, not at all.'

"'Do you play rackets?'

"'No, I neither boat, nor ride, nor sing, nor play rackets; so you will never have been to call upon a more hopelessly stupid Freshman.'

"However, I have made plenty of acquaintances already, and I do not see much of either the temptations or difficulties of college life.

In some ways a college repeats a public school. For instance, I have made rather friends with a Canadian called Hamilton, who all dinner-time has to answer, and does answer most good-naturedly, such questions as--'Pray, are you going to Canada for the long?--When did you hear last from the Bishop of the Red River?'

&c."

"_April 23._--Having been induced, or rather compelled, to give a two-guinea subscription to the cricket club, I have just been asked to a great wine given to show that Coleridge the undergraduate is not the same as Coleridge the cricket collector. I have now to prepare Latin prose for the cynical Goldwin Smith, but my princ.i.p.al lectures are with Mr. Shadforth, a man who has the character of being universally beloved and having no authority at all. The undergraduates knock at his door and walk in. He sits at a table in the middle, they on cane-chairs all round the room, and his lecture is a desultory conversation--questions addressed to each individual in turn. But he dawdles and twaddles so much over details, we have generally done very little before the hour ends, when he says, 'I will not detain you any longer.' I doubt if there is much good in any of the lectures one attends, or anything to be learnt from them except what one teaches oneself; still they are part of the college routine, and so have to be pottered through.

"There is a high Romanistic club here, called the Alfred, whose members spend their time in pa.s.sing ridiculous votes of censure on different individuals. They are much tormented, but have a pleasant imagination of martyrdom, and believe they are suffering for their faith. When they met at Merton, the men of the college put slates on the top of the chimney of the room where they were, and they were almost suffocated with smoke. Here they met to pa.s.s a vote of censure on--St. Augustine, and the whole time of their sitting in conclave cayenne-pepper was burnt through the keyhole; and when it was over, every window in the Quad along which they pa.s.sed was occupied by a man with a jug of water; so you may imagine they were well soused before they got out.

"The Schools are going on now. They seem less alarming since I have heard that the man pa.s.sed satisfactorily who construed ??????

???????--Julius C?sar, and also the man who, when asked why they broke the legs of the two thieves, said he supposed it was to prevent their running away. It was all put down to nervousness.

Christ Church walks are now green with chestnut buds, and a pear-tree is putting out some blossoms in the Master's arid garden under my windows."

"_May 1._--I am writing at half-past six A.M., for at four o'clock I got up, roused Milligan[85] (now my chief friend and companion), and we went off to Magdalen. A number of undergraduates were already a.s.sembled, and when the door was opened, we were all let through one by one, and up the steep winding staircase to the platform amid the pinnacles on the top of the tower. Here stood the choristers and chaplains in a s.p.a.ce railed off, with bare heads, and white surplices waving in the wind. It was a clear morning, and every spire in Oxford stood out against the sky, the bright young green of the trees mingling with them. Below was a vast crowd, but in the high air the silence seemed unbroken, till the clock struck five, and then, as every one took off their caps, the choristers began to sing the Latin hymn, a few voices softly at first, and then a full chorus bursting in. It was really beautiful, raised above the world on that great height, in the clear atmosphere of the sky. As the voices ceased, the bells began, and the tower rocked so that you could _see_ it swaying backwards and forwards.

Milligan and I walked round Magdalen walks afterwards, and when my scout found me dressed on coming to call me, he asked if I had been 'out a-Maying.' Yesterday afternoon I rowed with Milligan on the river to G.o.dstowe. It was so shallow, that if we had upset, which was exceedingly probable, we could have walked to sh.o.r.e."

"_May 4._--I have now become a regular visitor at the lodging-house of the Mendicity Society, which means taking my turn in going every evening for a week to receive the beggars who come with tickets, and reading prayers to them, besides giving them their supper, and noting any remarkable cases which need help. It is a strange congregation of wild haggard people, chiefly Irish, probably meeting for that one evening only on earth, and one feels anxious to do them some good.

"I went the other day with Troutbeck[86]--a friend of whom I see much--to Bagley Wood, where he sang old ballads under the trees upon a bank of bluebells and primroses. I have many friends now, and I never was happier in my life."

"_May 22._--I am in the Schools to-morrow for Little-go, having insisted on going in, in spite of my tutors. I do not feel as if I minded much, but some of my friends are so alarmed about themselves that they can scarcely eat."

"_May 23._--This morning the School-yard was full of men in white ties and Masters in hoods, friends catching friends for last words of advice, &c. Then the doors of the four Schools opened, and we poured in. The room where I was was full of little tables, and we each had one to ourselves. Then a Don walked about distributing the long printed papers to be filled up--arithmetic, chiefly decimals.

At first I felt as if I understood nothing, and I saw several of my neighbours wringing their hands in the same despair which overwhelmed myself, but gradually ideas dawned upon me, and I wrote as fast as any one, and had only one question unanswered when we went out at twelve. In the afternoon was the Euclid school--very horrid, but I am certainly not plucked by to-day's work."

"_May 30._--You will rejoice to hear I am safe. Just as I was preparing to decamp this morning, to be out of the way of the authorities, I was caught by the Dean's messenger, and was obliged to go to him. He began by saying he could not allow me to go into the Schools, both my friends and the college would suffer; but I so entreated, and declared, and exclaimed that I must go in, that I would be careful, &c., that at last, as his breakfast was getting quite cold, he gave in.

"I had translations of Sophocles and Virgil to do on paper, but it was not till the afternoon that 'Mr. Hare' was called for _viva voce_. I really did pretty well, and as one of the examiners considerately growled whenever I was turning down a wrong path, I was able to catch up my faults. Mr. Jowett was present amongst my friends, and as soon as all was over, carried me off to walk in New College Gardens; and when we came back, it was he who went in to ask my fate. He came back to me radiant with my _testamur_, and I am very happy in the restful feeling of its being over, and no other examination for so long.

"I have just been electro-biologised in the most marvellous manner by the power of Troutbeck's left eye! by which he is able to mesmerise friends far away in their own rooms, and can make a fellow called Barrow[87] clairvoyant, in which state he travels to Rugby, and other places where he has never been, and accurately describes all that is going on there."

"_June 6._--Commemoration has been most amusing--concerts, flower-shows, &c. The procession of boats was really a beautiful sight--all the college boats, with their different flags and uniforms, moving slowly up between the banks crowded with people, and saluting the University barge by raising their oars and holding them straight up in the air as they pa.s.sed."

All through my first year at Oxford, Mr. Jowett (afterwards Master of Balliol) continued to show me the utmost kindness, giving me extra work, and allowing me to bring the result to him in the evening. I had been so much neglected at Lyncombe, and so ill-grounded altogether in my boyhood, that my pa.s.sing all my examinations successfully was probably owing to this generous action of his. Honours at Oxford, even in the History School, I never thought of. My mother would only have wondered what on earth I wanted them for, and, had I gained them, would have lamented them as terribly ensnaring. I was profoundly grateful to Mr.

Jowett, but being constantly asked to breakfast alone with him was a terrible ordeal. Sometimes he never spoke at all, and would only walk round the room looking at me with unperceiving, absent eyes as I ate my bread and b.u.t.ter, in a way that, for a very nervous boy, was utterly terrific. Walking with this kind and silent friend was even worse: he scarcely ever spoke, and if, in my shyness, I said something at one milestone, he would make no response at all till we reached the next, when he would say abruptly, "Your last observation was singularly commonplace," and relapse into silence again. He was indeed truly "intermittent," as Swinburne has called him. His quaint brevity of speech was never more remarkable than when the Council, met in solemn conclave, summoned "the little heretic," as he used to be called, into its awful presence. Then, being asked, "Now, Mr. Jowett, answer the truth; _can_ you sign the Thirty-nine Articles?" he dumbfoundered them with--"If you've a little ink!" He could be very satirical. I remember, in after years, when Jex Blake, afterwards Dean of Wells, had been talking very prosily, he said, "I have long known that Law comes from Lex, but I never knew till now that Jaw comes from Jex."

On looking back through the mists of years, I am often surprised at the acquaintance whose society I sought during my first terms at Oxford, few of whom, except my dear friends Willie Milligan and George Sheffield,[88] have had any share in my after life. This was partly owing to the fact that the men who were at University in my time for the most part belonged to so entirely different a station in life, that our after paths were not likely to cross; and partly to the fact that those who had _any_ mental gifts--for most of my companions had none--were repulsive or disagreeable in their habits.

Milligan was the first real friend I had ever had; before that, if I had liked any one, they had never liked me, and _vice versa_. It was always "l'un qui baisse, et l'autre qui tend la joue."

Very odd and far less satisfactory were others of my early Oxford friends.h.i.+ps. One was for a man who imposed upon those younger than himself by a sort of apathetic high-handed manner of his own, and whom, when he professed a great preference for me, I used to look up to as a sort of divinity. Many were the almost volumes of sentimental twaddle I wrote both to and about him, and I used to listen for his footstep on my staircase as the great event of the evening. But all this soon wore off, and when my idol was once dethroned from its pedestal, it became a contemptible object.

An odder friends.h.i.+p still, made in my early Oxford life, was that for a good-looking, sentimental, would-be poet. Of him I wrote home with heartfelt enthusiasm, and at length, though I had never before asked anything at home, took courage to persuade my mother to let me go abroad with him to Bohemia for part of the long vacation. Before we set out he came to stay with us at Hurstmonceaux, and greatly astonished my relations must have been to find my charming young man so utterly unlike what I had described him. But we had scarcely set out on our travels before I found it out for myself--the first discovery being made when he p.r.o.nounced Cologne Cathedral "very pretty" and S. Aposteln "very nice."

_To_ MY MOTHER.

"_Andernach am Rhein, June 30, 1853._--I was delighted when we rounded the corner of the river below Rheinach, and the old tower of Andernach came in sight, with the cathedral, and the vineyard-clad hills behind. The whole place is delightful. In the evening we rambled up the rocks over carpets of thyme and stonecrop, and saw the last tinge of yellow pa.s.s away from the sky behind the cathedral and the light fade out of the river. All along the road are stone niches with sculptures of the 'Sept Douleurs,'

and as we came in through the dark orchards a number of children were chaunting with lighted tapers before a gaudy image of a saint in a solitary place overshadowed by trees."

"_July 2._--This morning we went out at five, meeting crowds of peasants coming in to market with their cheerful 'Guten Tag.' I sate to draw at the Convent of St. Thomas in a rose-garden, while A. read Hallam. At twelve, we drove through the volcanic hills, covered with the loveliest flowers--blue larkspur, marigolds, asphodels, campanulas, and great tufts of crimson pinks--to the Laacher See, a deep blue lake, once the crater of a volcano, in a wooded basin of the hills. It still sends forth such noxious vapours that no bird can fly across it and live, and dead bodies of small animals are constantly found along its sh.o.r.es. At one end of the lake, Kloster Laach rises out of the woods, with a little inn nestling in an orchard close under the walls of the church. The exterior of that old Norman church is most beautiful, mellowed with every tint of age, but internally it is disfigured by whitewash; only the canopied tomb of the Phaltzgraf Henry II. is very curious.

We were so delighted with the place, that we sent away the carriage and spent the evening by the lake, which was all alive with fireflies, darting in and out with their little burdens of light amongst the trees. In the morning we walked back to Andernach, which was quite possible, as I had no luggage but a comb and a pair of scissors."

"_Limbourg on Lahn, July 3._--What a tiresome diligence-drive we have had from Coblentz here through endless forests, but we were well repaid as we descended upon Limbourg. Our apathetic German fellow-travellers were roused to 'wundersch?n,' 'wunderliebliche,'