Anticipating Kipling, the rector might well have exclaimed, "How is one to put that into a 'Report on Excavations on Cadbury Hill submitted to the Somersetshire Archaeological Society by the Rector of Queen's Camel'?"

Anyway, I was delighted to have actually heard a man speak the words "King Arthur," and also went home chuckling at the thought of being mistaken for a Roman priest—an event which particularly amused my mother.

Soon after I was eleven, we went to Chewton Vicarage for the first time as "private pupils." Then my mother's health became worse, and we had to go to Cannes more or less regularly. In order that our education should be continued, we then reverted to the plan of tutors in the house. We had two of these in succession, both Balliol men. Though they were able men, they were not successes as educationalists. My father always used to say that he thought both of them had been badly overworked at Oxford and had been advised to take tutorial posts as a rest-cure—a very pleasant rest-cure when it took the form of wintering in the South of France.

But, though my brothers and I effectually resisted the efforts made to teach us, we learnt during our winters in France a great many things indirectly. Unfortunately, French was not one of those things. My father would have liked us to speak and write French. He had it, however, so strongly impressed upon him by his advisers that if we were to go to Oxford we must above all things get a sufficient knowledge of Latin and Greek to pass Responsions that, though we had an occasional lesson in French, our sojourn on the Riviera, as far as learning French was concerned, was thrown away.

We lived entirely with the boys and girls of the rest of the British colony, and regarded the French inhabitants literally as part of the scenery, and largely as a humorous part thereof. We got on well enough with them, and knew enough French to buy endless sweets at Rumpelmeyer's or chez Ngres, to get queer knives and "oddities" at the fairs, or to conduct paper-chases along the course of the Canal or in Pine Woods bordering it. We refused, however, to take the French or their language seriously.



However, my father did contrive to instil a little French politics into us. He was a fervent admirer of Gambetta and the Third Republic, and used to read us extracts from Gambetta's organ, La Republique Francaise. It thus happened that I early became a staunch adherent of the great Democratic leader and was full of zeal against first the Comte de Chambord and then the Comte de Paris. I still remember the excitement we all felt over Marshal MacMahon's rather half-hearted efforts to play the part of a General Monk.

We had, further, the excitement of seeing a famous General immured close to us in a fortress prison for the crime of treason. The Ile de Ste. Marguerite, opposite Cannes, with its picturesque Vauban fortifications, became, while we were at Cannes, the prison of Marshal Bazaine, the man who surrendered Metz to the Germans. He occupied, besides, the very rooms which had been occupied by "The Man with the Iron Mask." Can it be wondered that when we had a picnic-party on the island, or rowed under the walls of the fortress in a boat, we used to strain every muscle in order to get a glimpse of the prisoner? On one occasion we saw somebody's hat or head moving along a parapet, and were told it was the Marshal taking his daily exercise on the terrace of the fort, but whether it really was or not, who can say? At any rate, the Marshal escaped from his imprisonment during our stay, probably to the relief of his jailers. That was a source of great excitement in itself, and it was heightened by rumours that an English girl had assisted the prisoner to break out.

We were not personally in favour of Bazaine, but regarded him with distinct repulsion for surrendering at Metz. Still, an escape was an escape; and, besides, the fat old Marshal had let himself down by a rope into an open boat!

The epoch of tutors came to an end soon after the birth of my sister, which happened at Marseilles, when my mother was on her way to Cannes. After the event, my mother was pronounced by the doctors to be able to winter in England, and I and my two brothers, therefore, went back to Chewton Mendip and became private pupils of Mr. Philpott, for the second time. Here we remained till I went first to a tutor at Oxford—Mr. Bell— and then to live with my uncle and aunt, Professor T. H. Green (Mrs. Green was my mother's sister). There I was "coached for Balliol" by two of the best scholars in the University. One of them was Professor Nettleship, who a couple of years later was made Professor of Latin, and the other is now Sir Herbert Warren, President of Magdalen. They were both delightful expounders of the classics, and, though I was an unaccountably bad scholar, I am proud to say that they both liked me and liked teaching me. However, I need say no more on this point, as all that is worth saying about it is supplied by Sir Herbert Warren in the letter which I have included in my Oxford Chapter.



CHAPTER VIII

THE FAMILY NURSE

In the families of the well-to-do few influences have a greater effect upon the child, and so upon the man, than that exercised by the servants of the household in which he or she is brought up. And of those influences, upstairs or downstairs, none, of course, is so potent as that of the nurse. That is what Goethe would call one of the secrets that are known to all. Why it should ever be regarded as a secret Heaven knows; yet it must be so considered, for it is very seldom spoken of except in the case of nurses.

Anyway, I and my brothers, and in our earlier years my sister, were quite as fortunate in our nurse as we were in our parents and in our home. Her name was Mrs. Leaker. She was not married, but bore the brevet rank always accorded to upper servants of her position. She played many parts in our family household, and always with a high distinction. She began as nurse; she next became cook; then housekeeper; then reverted for a time to nurse, and then became something more than housekeeper because she ruled over the nursery as well as over the kitchen, the store-room, and the housemaids' room. But whatever her name in the household, and whatever her duties, she was always in fact head-nurse. She loved children, and they loved her, though not without a certain sense of awe. She had a fiery temper; but that fieriness was reserved almost entirely for grown-up people. A child, if it knew the proper moment for action, could do anything it liked with her.

Taken altogether, she was one of the most remarkable women, whether for character or intellect, that I have ever come across. In appearance she had, what can be best described as, the gipsy look, though she did not believe herself to have gipsy blood. Her complexion was swarthy, her hair was black, and her eyes dark and full of an eager and scintillating brightness which made her face light up and change with every mood of her mind and radiate a vivid intelligence. If anyone who knew her was asked to state the most memorable thing about her, I am sure the answer would be, "mobility," both of mind and body. There was a quickness as well as a lightness in her step—I hear it as I write—in the gestures of her hands and her head, and indeed in everything she did.

Let nobody suppose for a moment that this was a case of paralysis agitans, or St. Vitus' Dance. There was nothing involuntary in her unrest. It was all part of an intense vitality and an intense desire for self-expression. When she was in one of her worst tempers, she would pace up and down a room, turning at each wall like a lion in a cage, in a way which I have only seen one other person effect with equal spirit and unconsciousness. That was an eminent statesman, in the moment of great political crisis. Her nature was so eager and so active, and seemed to be so perpetually fretting her body and mind, that anyone seeing her in middle life would have been inclined to prophesy that such agitations must wear her out prematurely and that she had only a short life before her, or else an imbecile's end.

Yet, as a matter of fact, she lived in good health till over eighty, and to the last moment retained the full control of her faculties. She died, as might any other old person, of bronchitis. In truth, she was an example of Sir Thomas Browne's dictum that we live by an invisible flame within us. As a matter of fact, her flame was anything but invisible. It was remarkably visible. It leapt, and crackled, and gleamed, and took on, like the witch's oils, every colour in the spectrum. Now crimson, now violet, now purple, now yellow, glowed and flashed the colours of her mind.



Mrs. Leaker was brought up in a poor household, in an age when illiteracy, alas! seemed the natural fate of the poor. But you could no more have kept education from her than you could have kept food from a hungry lioness. She was determined to get it somehow, and get it she did. She taught herself to read before she had reached womanhood, and taught herself by pure force of her will, adopting, curiously enough, what would now be described as the Montessori method. She opened books and read them somehow or other till she understood the meaning of the words. Her letters her mother had taught her. She often told me that nobody had taught her to read. When she had attained the power of reading, self-education was easy enough. It led to results of an amazing kind—results which at first sight seem to prove all the lore of the educationalists at fault. People, we are told, must be trained to like and understand good literature. Without that training they will never know the good from the bad.

Now read this story of an innate appreciation of good literature which she told me with her own lips. I asked her once, when I was a lad, what she thought of "Junius," who had begun to exercise a great influence over my rhetorical instincts. It was as natural to consult her on a point of literature as on one of domestic surgery. Her reply was perhaps the strangest ever made by a woman over sixty to a boy of undergraduate age. It ran in this way, for I recall her words.

When I was a girl, and a young housemaid in my first place at Mrs. Lloyd's, in Clifton, I used to have as part of my work to dust the library. When I was dusting, I used to take down the books and look at what was in them, and often got through a page or two with my duster in my hand. Once I took down a volume marked "Junius," and read a page or two, and as I read I began to feel as if I was drunk. In those days I had never heard of the Duke of Grafton or Lord Sandwich, or any of the other people he talks about, and I did not know what it all meant, but the words went to my head like brandy.

Now, I ask anyone with a sense of literature whether it would be possible to give a better lightning criticism of "Junius" and his style than that conveyed in Leaker's words. She had got the exact touch. "Junius," in truth, is not only empty for her, but empty for the whole world except as regards his style. There he is unquestionably great. Tumid, exaggerated, and monotonous as it often is, his style does affect one like wine. That is certainly how it affected, and still affects, me. Even at an age when I did not really know much more about the Duke of Grafton than did Leaker, and probably cared less, I had got the peroration of the first letter to the Duke of Grafton by heart. I used to walk up and down the terrace, or across the meadows that led to the waterfall, shouting to myself, or my bored companions, that torrent of lucid, thrilling invective. I mean the passage in which "Junius" gives advice to the University of Cambridge. They will, he hopes, take it to heart when they shall be "perfectly recovered from the delirium of an Installation," and when that learned society has become "once more a peaceful scene of slumber and thoughtless meditation."

How the waterfall gave me back the reverberating words! How the lime trees rocked to the final crack of the whip over the unhappy Grafton! "The learned dullness of declamation will be silent; and even the venal Muse, though happiest in fiction, will forget your virtues."

But that was by no means her only achievement of literary diagnosis and the power to get hold of books somehow or other. When in the 'twenties she came to Bristol from Dartmouth, which was her home, with her mother and brothers (her father was dead), she travelled, as did all people with slender means in those days, in the waggon. These vehicles proceeded at the rate of about three or four miles an hour. All she could tell about her journey was that she lay in the straw, in the bottom of the waggon, and read Wordsworth's Ruth, The White Doe of Rylstone. She was, throughout her life, very fond of Ruth and this was her first reading. I have often thought to myself how much the great apostrophe must have meant to the lion-hearted, vehement, imaginative girl:

Before me shone a glorious world,— Fresh as a banner bright, unfurled To music suddenly.

In later life she had the poem by heart, and I venture to say that there was not a word of it that she did not understand, both intellectually and emotionally. But though she loved books and literature, it must not be supposed that she was indifferent to other forms of art. Anything beautiful in nature or art made a profound impression upon her. When Leaker first went to Paris, on our way to Pau or Cannes, I forget which, my mother sent her to the Louvre and told her specially to look at the Venus of Milo. She gave her directions where to find the statue; when she came back, she said to my mother:

I couldn't find the statue you told me about, but I saw another which is the most lovely thing in the world. I never thought to see anything so beautiful, and the broken arm did not matter at all, for she stood there like a goddess.

She had found the Venus for herself, although some fault in the directions had made her feel sure that it could not be what she had been sent to look at. Later on, when we took to going to France regularly for my mother's health, she every year did her homage to the Venus. What is more, when she went for the first time to Florence, she fully realised how poor a thing the Venus de Medici was in comparison.

But though, as I have said, all beautiful things appealed to her, literature was her first love and the element in which she lived. But literature did not in her case only mean Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible, as it does to so many English people. She cropped all the flowers in the fields of literature, prose and verse. She was as intense an admirer of Shakespeare as was my father, and a greater lover of Milton. Shakespeare she lived on, including, curiously enough, Timon of Athens, who was a great favourite. When any lazy member of my family wanted to find a particular line or passage in Shakespeare, he or she would go to Leaker rather than trouble to look up the quotation in a concordance; Leaker was certain to find you at once what you wanted. There was no pedantry about her and no mere tour de force of the memory. She entered into the innermost mental recesses of Shakespeare's characters. What is more, she made us children follow her.

Though we were kept clean and well looked after, there was no nonsense in her nursery as to over-exciting our minds or emotions, or that sort of thing. She was quite prepared to read us to sleep with the witches in Macbeth, or the death-scene in Othello. I can remember now the exaltation derived, half from the mesmerism of the verse and half from a pleasant terror, by her rendering of the lines: "Put out the light, and then put out the light." I see her now, with her wrinkled brown face, her cap with white streamers awry over her black hair beginning to turn grey. In front of her was a book, propped up against the rim of a tin candlestick shaped like a small basin. In it was a dip candle and a pair of snuffers. That was how nursery light was provided in the later 'sixties and even in the early 'seventies. As she sat bent forward, declaiming the most soul-shaking things in Shakespeare between nine and ten at night, we lay in our beds with our chins on the counterpanes, silent, scared, but intensely happy. We loved every word, and slept quite well when the play was finished. We were supposed to go to sleep at nine, but if there was anything exciting in the play, very little pressure was required to get Leaker to finish, even if it took an extra half-hour—or a little more. In truth, she was always ready to read to us by night or day.

Though no Sabbatarian, she had a tendency to give Paradise Lost a turn on Sundays. As far as I remember, she never read Paradise Regained. Comus and the short poems, especially Lycidas, were great favourites with her. One might have supposed that she would not like Wordsworth. As a matter of fact, she loved him and thoroughly understood him and his philosophy of life. She did not merely read the lyric and elegiac poems like Ruth, but had gone through and enjoyed The Excursion and many of the longer poems. Coleridge she loved, and Southey, and Crabbe, and Gray, and Dr. Johnson, and indeed the whole of English poetic literature. In modern poetry she read freely Tennyson and Robert Browning, and admired them both.

Byron was a special favourite of hers, and here again she showed her intellect and her taste, not by worshipping the Eastern Tales or the sentimentalities of Childe Harold, but by a thorough appreciation of Don Juan. Her taste, indeed, was almost unfailing. Take a simple example. She used frequently to chant the delightful lines to Tom Moore, which begin:

My boat is on the shore, And my barque is on the sea, But ere I go, Tom Moore, Here's a double health to thee.

Having a great deal of sympathy for scorn and indignation, she, of course, loved the last verse and implanted it deeply in my mind by constant quotation in tones of scathing intensity:

Here's a tear for those who love me, And a smile for those who hate, And whatever sky's above me, Here's a heart for every fate.

That was her own spirit. Truly she had a heart for every fate. She was quite fearless.

Although she was not in the least a prejudiced person, I remember once, in the excitement of my own discovery of Swinburne, trying to create an equal enthusiasm in her mind. She returned me the book, however, without enthusiasm and with the trenchant remark that it made her feel as if she was in an overheated conservatory, too full of highly-scented flowers to be pleasant! She was not in the least shocked by Swinburne, and if you produced a good line or two you could win her approval, but the atmosphere was not sympathetic. Of Rossetti she was a little more tolerant, but she felt, I think, that there was not enough scope and freedom.

It is unnecessary to dwell upon the educational advantages of such a nurse, and of having the very best part of English literature poured into one's mouth almost with the nursery-bottle, and certainly with the nursery mug. If my friends find me, as I fear they sometimes do, too fond of making quotations, they must blame Mrs. Leaker, for when at her best she threw quotations from the English Classics around her in a kind of hailstorm. Some of the lines that had stuck in her mind were very curious, though she had forgotten where they came from. One specially amusing piece of Eighteenth-Century satirical verse I have never been able to trace. Perhaps if I put it forth here I shall find out whence it comes—very likely from some perfectly obvious source. The lines which were used to calm us in our more grandiose and self-conceited moods ran as follows:

Similes that never hit, Vivacity that is not wit, Schemes laid this hour, the next forsaken, Advice oft asked, but never taken.

She had a couplet which she often produced when the newspapers came out with some big social scandal or the coming to financial grief of some great family name. On such occasions she would mutter to herself:

Debts and duns And nothing for my younger sons.

Another verse, though I quote it not the least to show her literary taste but because it was exceedingly characteristic of her, was in the spring-time always on her lips:

The broom, the broom, the yellow broom, The ancient poets sung it, And sweet it is on summer days To lie at ease among it.

I could fill a book, and perhaps some day I will do so, with Leaker's reflections on men and things, and her epigrammatic sayings, and still more with her wonderful old sea-stories, especially of the press-gang, which she could almost remember in operation. Her father was, as she always put it, "in the King's Navy," and he had been "bosun" to a ship's "cap'n." He was at the Mutiny of the Nore, but was not a mutineer.

She was, however, full of stories about the Mutiny, which we found extremely exciting. She used to sing, or rather "croon" to us some of the mutineers' songs. One that I specially remember began with this verse:

Parker was a gay young sailor, Fortune to him did not prove kind; He was hung for mutiny at the Nore, Worse than him were left behind.

After declaiming that verse to us, she would add in low tones that made one's blood run cold, "Men have been hung at the yardarm for singing that song. It was condemned throughout the Fleet."

That in itself seems a link with the past, but through Leaker I had a much more remarkable example of what, in spite of the smiles of the statistician, fascinated us all. Leaker, when about the age of sixty, brought her old mother, who was then ninety-four or ninety-five, to whom she was devoted, to live in one of the cottages at Sutton, the year being, as far as I can recollect, 1868 or 1869. I can distinctly recall the old lady. She was very thin and faded, but with all her wits about her, though weak and shy.

Leaker told us, with pride, that her mother, when she was a little girl, had sat upon the knee of an old soldier who had fought at Blenheim. This is quite possible. If old Mrs. Leaker was, as I think, only five years short of a hundred in 1869, she could easily have been in the world at the same time as a lad who had been at Blenheim in his eighteenth year. Old Mrs. Leaker was, I calculated, born about 1774. She would therefore have been six years old in 1780. But a man who was ninety-five in 1780 would have been born in 1685, and so twenty-nine in 1714, the year of Blenheim. Possibly some historical calculator will despoil me of this story. Meantime, I am always thrilled to think that I have seen a woman who had seen a man who had been in action with the great Marlborough at his greatest victory.

Before I leave my old nurse I must say something about a very curious and interesting attempt which, at my request, she made at the end of her life. It was to put down her recollections and reflections. Unfortunately, I made this request rather too late, and so the result, as a whole, was confused and often unintelligible. Still, the two little MS. books which she wrote contain some very remarkable and characteristic pieces of writing, and show the woman as she was. Although in her day she had read plenty of autobiographies, she makes no attempt to imitate them, or to write in a pedantic or literary style. As far as she can, she shows us what she really was. Leaker's heart beats against the sides of the little books just as I used to hear it when I was a child in her arms, either in need of consolation, with toothache or growing-pains, or else trying to give consolation, for she was often, like all fierce people, melancholy and depressed after her own fierce outbursts of anger.

Here is the very striking and characteristic exordium to her autobiography:

I have not had an unpleasant life, although I was an old maid, and was a servant for fifty years. I was a nurse and no mother could have loved her children more than I loved those I nursed. I had three dear, good mistresses, two of whom I left against their will.

The third and last was my mother, whom the old nurse outlived for many years.

Here is her account of the miseries endured by the poor after Waterloo— miseries which I often think of in these days, when I note the foolish, the demented way in which we are approaching our economic difficulties and dangers:

I am writing of the time a little after Waterloo. We were living at Dartmouth. Everything was very dear. We lived mostly on barley bread. We children were so used to it that we did not mind it, but my poor mother could never eat it without repugnance, and we always tried to make her get white bread, not knowing that she could not properly afford it. Many a time (so she told me in after-years) she made her supper off a turnip rather than let her children go hungry to bed. The cheapest sugar was then tenpence a pound, and the very cheapest tea quite as much as five shillings, but what I had to get for my mother was in very small quantities. We children never had it, nor, as far as I remember, cared for it. It was a treat when we could get milk to dip our bread in.

But though their poverty was so dire it did not kill the girl's joy in life or, wonderful to say, in literature:

Though we were very poor, my childhood seems pleasant to me as I look back, for my mother did all she could to make us happy. She went out sewing very often, and we were glad she should go, for she got better food than she could get at home, and what was, I believe, as much good to her, she sometimes got food for her mind. But, poor dear, she was always having a struggle with her conscience, and her love of what is called light reading, as being a Methodist she thought it wrong to read such books. She told me that when she was married she was given a new edition of all the Elizabethan plays, twenty-five volumes, beautifully bound. (I heard afterwards that a new edition was published at that time.) However, about the year 1818 she thought it right to burn them, although she was so fond of them. Yet when I was sitting at work with her she would tell me tales out of the plays. How vexed I used to be with her for burning them, poor dear loving mother! She taught me to read out of my father's large old Bible, and the Apocrypha was a book of wonder to me. She was fond of Young's Night Thoughts. Milton she read often; my father gave it to her; poor man, he thought it would please her. He was a sweet-tempered man, easy and kindhearted, but not clever like my mother. He once said to her when she laughed at him for some blunders, "Well, my dear, what can the woman with five talents expect from the man with one?"

Leaker had plenty of stories of the press-gang. Though she never herself saw it in operation, people not very much older told her of how they were "awakened in the night by people crying out that they had been taken."

Her mother, too, used to tell her heartrending stories about these times.

"I can hardly even now bear to think of the dreadful things done by the press-gang in the name of the law. I never hated the French as I hated them."

Needless to say, I inherited her hatred of the press-gang, and have maintained it all my life. It was the very worst and most oppressive form of national service ever invented, and I think with pride that my collateral ancestor, Captain George St. Loe (temp. William & Mary) was the first man in England who urged in his writings that the only fair way of making the nation secure was compulsory universal service.

Leaker's mother was early in her married life converted to Methodism. Some of her reflections on the smuggling that went on in and around the little Devonshire port give the lie to those foolish, ignorant, and shameless people who allege that because people are poor they cannot be expected to have any idea of what is called conventional morality in regard to "mine and thine." They will naturally and excusably, it is asserted, break any law, moral or divine.

That is not how it struck Leaker's mother:

There was a good deal of smuggling going on in the town when I was a girl, and one day a member of my mother's chapel brought some gay things for her to buy. Oh, how I did long for her to get me a pretty neckerchief, but she said, "No, my dear, I cannot buy it for you, as I do not see any difference in cheating a single man or a government of men. I believe that in the sight of God both are equally sinful."

Leaker says of her mother, "She had a large share of romance, and loved a tale of witches, or a love-story"—and so did her daughter. The supernatural gained fresh interest from her skilful story-telling, and the art of the raconteur still lives in her pages. Here is one of the best of her stories. Even now it gives a delightful sense of fear:

This story was told me by the mother of a friend of mine—Mrs. Jackson was her name, a ladylike woman, but who appeared to me to be very old when I was a girl. Her husband was sailing master on board a man-of-war, and this is what took place once when she was on board with him. They were in port, and there was a large party of friends and officers spending the evening on the ship, when a sudden storm arose, and no one could go on shore. They were going to amuse themselves with music, and a violin was brought, but a string broke before the instrument had been touched. "Never mind," said the captain, "I have a man on board who is a first-rate hand at deceiving the sight." Everyone was pleased at the idea of conjuring, and the man was sent for, and asked to show some of his tricks; but he said, "No, I can't tonight, as it is not a good time." Said the captain, "What is to hinder you?" "Well, sir, I do not like doing it this stormy weather." "That is all stuff and nonsense," replied the captain; "you must try. Come, set to work." So the man asked for a chafing dish, which was brought to him. There was a fire of charcoal in it. He said and did something (Mrs. Jackson did not tell us what), and after a while there appeared in the dish, coming out of the fire, a tiny tree, with a tiny man holding a hatchet. The tree seemed to grow from the bottom, and the little man chopped at it all the time. The performing man was greatly agitated, and asked one of the ladies to lend him her apron (ladies wore them in those days). Mrs. Jackson took off hers and handed it to him. He tied it on, and ran round the table on which the chafing-dish stood, catching the chips, and apparently in great alarm lest one of them should fall to the ground. She used to say it was painful to see the poor man's agony of fear. While this was going on the storm grew much worse, so that the people on board were afraid that the ship would be driven from her anchorage. At last the tree fell under the tiny man's hatchet, and nothing was left on the table but the chafing-dish. The conjuror gave back the apron, and then, turning to the captain, said, "Never from this night will I do what I have done tonight. You may believe me or not, but if one of those chips had fallen to the ground, nothing could have saved the ship, and everyone on board would have gone down with her."

When the old lady told this story she would say that she had distinctly seen the chips fly, and heard the noise of the chopping. She used to show the apron, which she never wore again, but kept, carefully put away, to be shown to anyone who liked to see it.

Can one wonder that the little man with his little axe and the little tree, and the unknown peril of death that came up from the sea, made a deep impression upon my mind, though not in any sense a haunting or unpleasant one? I longed to see the chips fly and the tiny tree bow to the sturdy strokes of the weird woodman.

Leaker's stories of ordinary witchcraft were many and curious, and though they cannot be set out here I must quote one or two lines in regard to them:

I do not think there was a place in the land so full of witches, white and black, as Dartmouth. My mother was, for her time and station, pretty fairly educated, yet she seemed to me to believe in them firmly.

The autobiography shows that when she was sitting alone, thinking and writing, the old nurse felt acutely the solitude and weariness of an old age that had outlived contemporaries as well as bodily faculties. When, however, the friends of another generation were with her, she never seemed too tired or too sad to enter keenly into all the interests of their lives. After a hopeful consultation with an oculist she writes:

Is it not strange, that when the most terrible trouble is a little better, what looked light in comparison with want of sight comes back as heavily as ever? How I wish I could be more thankful for the mercies I have and not be always longing for the unattainable.

Everyone who has lived through a great crisis has probably shared the old nurse's surprise at finding that smaller troubles, which for a while were reduced to nothingness, soon revive with our own return to ordinary life.

However [as she says] I will not go into reflections, but write of my young days. How all these things come back to me, a lone old woman who longs for, and yet is afraid of death. If I could only be sure, be sure! Is it possible there is no other state of being? Oh, God, it is too dreadful to think of.

Then she would turn to Paradise Lost, and how often have we not heard her repeat the lines:

And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep Still threatening to devour me, opens wide, finding, as Aristotle would have said, relief and even comfort in the "purgation" through poetry, of the passions of pity and terror.

I will end my account of Leaker with one of her memories of happier moods in which we can feel the magic of spring laying hold on the vivid imagination of the bright-eyed Devonshire girl:

One early spring day I heard my eldest brother tell my mother that he had seen a primrose. She said, "Do not tell Salome, for if she knows there will be no keeping her at home." But I had heard, and that was enough. Early next morning away I went, rambling all day from field to field, picking primroses. First a handful of the common yellow ones, then some coloured ones, and did ever a Queen prize jewels as I did those coloured flowers? But the joy in them only lasted a little while. I would next see some white ones, and then the coloured ones were thrown away, and I would set to work to gather the pale ones. Oh, how beautiful they looked! I can see them now, and almost feel the rapture I felt then. It makes me young again—almost. My dear mother used to say, "What do you do with all the flowers you pick? You never bring any home." I do not know what I did with them, but the joy of picking them was beyond expression. Have I ever felt such joy or happiness since?



CHAPTER IX

BOYHOOD: POETRY AND METRE

If I am to be exact, this chapter should have the sub-title of "Poetry and Metre," for poetry, other people's and my own, and an impassioned study of the metrical art, were the essential things about my boyhood. Between the ages of twelve and eighteen, at which time I may be said to have become grown-up, Poetry was my life.

My schoolboy period was not passed by me at school, except a term and a half at an excellent private school—one which still flourishes—the MacLaren School at Summertown. Rather reluctantly, for he was horrified by the bullying and cruelty which went on during his own day at English schools, my father consented to my mother's desire that we should go to school. After he had taken many precautions, and had ascertained that there was no bullying at Summertown, my elder brother and I were despatched to the school in question.

I was quite happy, got on well with the schoolmasters and with Mrs. MacLaren, the clever Scotswoman who ran the school, and gave satisfaction in everything except learning. In this matter I developed an extraordinary power of resistance, partly due, no doubt, to my bad eyesight. I was pronounced, in reports, to be a boy who gave no trouble and who was always happy and contented, and appeared to have good brains, and yet who, somehow or other, was easily surpassed at work by boys with inferior mental capacity.

My schoolfellows, I believe, thought me odd; but I made friends easily, and kept them. Though I could be "managed" by anyone who wanted to get something out of me, I was never put upon or bullied, because if attempts were made to coerce me, I was, like the immortal Mr. Micawber, not disinclined for a scrap. I stood erect before my fellow-boy, and when he tried to bully me I punched his head. Mr. Micawber's comment is too moving not to be recorded. "I and my fellow-man no longer meet upon those glorious terms." I and my fellow-schoolboy did occasionally meet upon those glorious terms, greatly to my enjoyment.

It happened, however, that there was an outbreak of scarlet fever in the school, and my father became anxious, and removed us at once—somewhat, I think, to my regret, but probably for my good. It was ultimately decided that my brother and I, instead of returning to MacLaren's, should, as I have already mentioned, go to the house of a clergyman, Mr. Philpott, who was the vicar of a neighbouring village, Chewton Mendip. The Vicarage was close to Chewton Priory, the house of my mother's closest friend, Lady Waldegrave.

Though Mr. Philpott was not an educational expert, in the modern sense, he was a man of good parts, fond of the arts, and something of a man of the world. His wife was a woman of great nobility of character and also of considerable mental power. She combined the qualities of a self- sacrificing and devoted mother with a certain ironic, or even sardonic, touch. She was a daughter of Mr. Tattersall, the owner of Tattersall's sale-rooms, and at her father's house she had become acquainted in the latter part of the 'fifties and the early 'sixties with all the great sporting characters of that epoch. Of these she used to tell us boys plenty of strange and curious anecdotes.

Chewton Mendip was only seven miles from Sutton, and so while there we were in constant touch with our own home life. We had also the amusement of seeing my father and mother when they went over, as they often did, to dine and sleep, or stay for longer visits, at the Priory. Lady Waldegrave was a great entertainer, and the house was thronged, not only with her country neighbours but with numbers of smart people from London—people such as Hayward, Bagehot, Lord Houghton, on the literary side, and men like Sir Walter Harcourt on the political. Again, picturesque figures in the European world, such as the Comte de Paris, the Due d'Aumale, were often guests, and there were always members of the Foreign Embassies and Legations. For example, it was at the Priory that I first saw a real alive American, in the shape of General Schenk, the United States Minister to the Court of St. James. I remember well his teaching the whole houseparty to play poker—a game till then quite unknown in England.

It was in the interval between leaving school and going to Chewton to the Philpotts that I began to read poetry for myself. Before, I had only loved it through my father's and Leaker's reading to us from Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, Spenser, Coleridge, Southey, and the old Ballads. When, however, I discovered that I could read poetry for myself, I tore the heart out of every book in the library that was in verse. Though my parents would have thought it an unforgivable crime to keep books from a child of theirs, for some reason or other I used to like in the summer-time to get up at about five or six o'clock (I was not a very good sleeper in those days, though I have been a perfect sleeper ever since), dress myself, run through the silent, sleeping house, and hide in the Great Parlour. There in absolute quietness and with a great sense of grandeur I got out my Byron or my Shelley, and raced though their pages in a delirium of delight. I can recall still, and most vividly, the sunlight streaming into the Great Parlour window, as I opened the great iron-sheathed shutters. Till breakfast-time I lolled on the big sofa, mouthing to myself explosive couplets from Don Juan. I am proud to say that, though I liked, as a boy should, the sentimentalism of the stanzas which begin

'Tis sweet to hear the watchdog's honest bark

I was equally delighted with

Sweet is a legacy, and passing sweet The unexpected death of some old lady.

The ironic mixture of emotion and sarcasm fascinated me.

No sooner were Byron, Shelley, and Keats explored than I fell tooth and nail upon Swinburne, Morris, and Rossetti, and every other possible poet of my generation. I forget the exact date on which I became enamoured of the Elizabethan dramatists, but it was some time between fourteen and sixteen, and when I did catch the fever, it was severe.

As everyone ought to do under such circumstances, I thought, or pretended to think, that Marlowe, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Webster, and Ford were the equals, if not indeed the superiors, of Shakespeare.

That was a view with which my father by no means agreed, but with his kindly wisdom he never attempted to condemn or dispute my opinions. He left me to find out the true Shakespeare for myself. This I ultimately did, and ended by being what, as a rule, is wrong in literature, but, I think, right in the case of Shakespeare, a complete idolater.

But though hand-in-hand with Charles Lamb I wandered through the Eden of the Elizabethan playwrights, I by no means neglected the Eighteenth Century. Quite early I became a wholehearted devotee of Pope and at once got the Ode to the Unfortunate Lady by heart. I dipped into The Rape of the Lock, gloried in the Moral Essays, especially in the Characters of Women and the epistle to Bathurst on the use of riches. Gray, who was a special favourite of Leaker's, soon became a favourite of mine, and I can still remember how I discovered the Ode to Poesy and how I went roaring its stanzas through the house. Such lines as

Where each old poetic mountain Inspiration breathes around

or

Hark, his hands the lyre explore,

were meat and drink to me. The Elegy in a Country Churchyard quickly seized my memory.

Nobody could avoid knowing when I had made a poetic discovery. I was as noisy as a hen that has laid an egg, or, to be more exact, I felt and behaved like a man who has come into a fortune. For me there were no coteries in Literature, or if there were, I belonged to them all. If I heard somebody say that there were good lines in the poems of some obscure author or other, I did not rest satisfied till I had got hold of his Complete Works. For example, when Crabbe was spoken of, I ran straight to The Tales of the Hall and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I even tasted The Angel in the House when I heard that Rossetti and Ruskin, and even Swinburne, admired Coventry Patmore. Though largely disappointed, I even extracted honey from The Angel, though I confess it was rather like a bee getting honey out of the artificial flowers in the case in a parlour window. Still, if I could only find two lines that satisfied me, I thought myself amply rewarded for the trouble of a search. It is still a pleasure to repeat

And o'er them blew The authentic airs of Paradise.

I felt, I remember, about the epithet "authentic" what Pinkerton in The Wrecker felt about Hebdomadary—"You're a boss word."

I have no recollection of what made me take to writing verse myself. It was the old story. "I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." My first lisp—the first poem I ever wrote—of all the odd things in the world was a diminutive satire in the style of Pope. Throughout my boyhood I was an intense romanticist, and full of Elizabethan fancies, imaginings. and even melancholies—I use the word, of course, in the sense of Burton, or of Shakespeare. Yet all the time I read masses of Pope. The occasion for my satire was one which must be described as inevitable in the case of one eager to try his hand at imitations of Pope. By this I mean that the satiric outburst was not provoked by any sort of anger. I merely found in some of the circumstances of the life around me good copy. One of the things I liked particularly in Pope was the Epistle describing the Duke of Chandos's house, the poem which begins—

At Timon's villa let us pass a day, Where all cry out what sums are thrown away.

And there, straight in front of me, was the Priory, Lady Waldegrave's grandiose country-house. I heard plenty of criticism of the house. Its nucleus was a Carpenter's Gothic villa, built originally by a Dean of Wells, bought by Lord Waldegrave in the 'thirties or 'forties, and then gradually turned by Frances, Lady Waldegrave, into a big country-house, but a house too big for the piece of ground in which it was set. The skeleton of the roadside villa was alleged by the local critics to show through the swelling flesh that overlaid it. Here was a chance for the satirist, and so I sharpened my pencil and began:

Oh, stones and mortar by a Countess laid In sloping meadows by a turnpike glade,— A Gothic mansion where all arts unite To form a home for Baron, Earl or Knight.

The rest is lost! Considering that I was only twelve, and that Pope was little read by the youth of the 'seventies, my couplets may fairly claim to be recognised as a literary curiosity.

It is hardly necessary to say that the moment I found I could write, and that metre and rhyme were no difficulty to me, I went at it tooth and nail. The more I wrote the more interested did I become in metre, and it is not too much to say that within a couple of years from my first attempt, that is by the time I was about fourteen and a half, I had experimented not only in most of the chief measures, but in almost all the chief stanzas used by the English poets. To these, indeed, I added some of my own devising. In this way Prosody early became for me what it has always been, a source of pleasure and delight in itself. I liked discovering metrical devices in the poets, analysing them, i.e. discovering the way the trick worked, and in making experiments for myself. The result of this activity was that I had soon written enough verse to make a little pamphlet. With this pamphlet in my pocket and without consultation with anybody—the young of the poets are as shy as the young of the salmon—I trudged off to Wells, the county town, five miles distant across Mendip. How I discovered the name of the local printer I do not know, but I did discover it, and with beating heart approached his doors. After swearing him to secrecy, I asked for an estimate. He was a sympathetic man, and named a price which even then seemed to me low, and which was in reality so small that it would be positively unsafe to name to a master-printer nowadays.

As far as I remember, I did not receive a proof, but my delight at seeing my verses come back in print was beyond words. I remember, too, that I received a flattering note from my first publisher, prophesying success for future poetic ventures. But, though very happy, I believe, and am indeed sure, that I did not entertain any idea that I was going to become a poet. Possibly I thought the trade was a bad one for a second son who must support himself. It is more probable that I instinctively felt that although it was so great a source of joy to me, poetry was not my true vocation. Perhaps, also, I had already begun to note the voice of pessimism raised by the poets of the 'seventies, and to feel that they did not believe in themselves. I distinctly remember that Tennyson's "Is there no hope for modern rhyme?" was often on my lips and in my mind. His question distinctly expected the answer "No." It is little wonder, then, that I did not want to be a poet, and I never envisaged myself as a Byron, a Shelley, or a Keats.

The thing that strikes me most, on looking back at my little volume of verse, is its uncanny competence, not merely from the point of view of prosody, but of phraseology and what I may almost term scholarship. The poems did not show much inspiration, but they are what 18th-century critics would have called "well-turned." That would not be astonishing, in the case of a boy who had been well-educated and had acquired the art of expression. But I had not been well-educated. Owing to my ill-health my teachers had not been allowed to press me, and I was in a sense quite illiterate. I could hardly write, I could not spell at all, and nobody had ever pruned my budding fancies or shown me how to transfer thoughts to language, as one is shown, or ought to be shown, when one learns the Greek and Latin grammars and attacks Latin prose or Latin verse. My teaching in this direction had been more than sketchy. The only schoolroom matter in which I had made any advance was mathematics. Euclid and algebra fascinated me. I felt for them exactly what I felt for poetry. Though I did not know till many years afterwards that when Pythagoras discovered the forty-seventh proposition he sacrificed a yoke of oxen, not to Pallas Athene but to the Muses, I was instinctively exactly of his opinion. I can remember to this day how I worked out the proof of the forty-seventh proposition with Mr. Battersby, a young Cambridge man who was curate to Mr. Philpott and who took us on in mathematics. The realisation of the absolute, unalterable fact that in every right-angled triangle the square of the side subtending it is equal to the squares of the sides containing it, filled me with the kind of joy and glory that one feels on reading for the first time Keats's Ode to a Nightingale or one of the great passages in Shakespeare. I saw the genius of delight unfold his purple wing. I was transfigured and seemed to tread upon air. For the first time in my life I realised the determination of an absolute relationship. A great window had been opened before my eyes. I saw all things new. My utter satisfaction could not be spoiled by feeling, as one does in the case of the earlier propositions of Euclid, that I had been proving what I knew already— something about which I could have made myself sure by the use of a foot-rule or a tape-measure. I had acquired knowledge, by an act of pure reasoning and not merely through the senses. I felt below my feet a rock-bed foundation which nothing could shake. Come what might, a^2 = b^2 + c^2. No one could ever deprive me of that priceless possession.

At that time I did not see or dream of the connection which no doubt does exist between mathematics and poetry—the connection which made the wise Dryden say that every poet ought to be something of a mathematician. Needless to say, my teachers did not see the connection. They were simply amazed that the same person should become as drunk with geometry and algebra as with poetry. Probably they consoled themselves by the thought that I was one of the people who could persuade themselves into believing anything!

It is of importance to record my precocity in the use of measured language, from the point of view of the growth of my mind. It will, I think, also amuse those of my readers who have written poetry for themselves in their youth (that, I suppose, is the case with most of us) to observe my hardihood in the way of metrical experiment. Here is the Invocation to the Muses which served as an Introduction to my little book. It will be noted that I have here tried my hand at my favourite measure, the dactylic. Towards anapaests I have always felt a certain coldness, if not indeed repulsion.

TO THE MUSES

(1874)

Come to my aid, Muses love-laden, lyrical: Come to my aid, Comic, Tragic, Satirical. Come and breathe into me Strains such as swept from Keats' heaven-strung lyre, Strains such as Shelley's, which never can tire. Come then, and sing to me, Sing me an ode such as Byron would sing, Passionate, love-stirring, quick to begin. Why come you not to me? Then must I write lyrics after vile rules Made by some idiot, used by worse fools— Then the deuce take you all!

(tat. 14.)

I have to thank Mr. Edmund Gosse for inspiring this attempt. I hope he will forgive even if he does not forget. I had made a shopping expedition into Bristol, and went to tea or luncheon at Clifton Hill House where lived my mother's brother, John Addington Symonds. It happened that Mr. Gosse was a visitor at the house on the day in question, and that to my great delight we all talked poetry. I saw my chance, and proceeded to propound to these two authorities the following question: "Why is it that nobody has ever written an English poem in pure dactyls?" Greatly to my surprise and joy, Mr. Gosse informed me that it had been done. Thereupon he quoted the first four lines of what has ever since been a favourite poem of mine, Waller's lines to Hylas:

Hylas, O Hylas! why sit we mute, Now that each bird saluteth the spring? Tie up the slackened strings of thy lute, Never may'st thou want matter to sing.

I hope I am not quoting incorrectly, but it is nearly fifty years since I saw the poem and at the moment I have not got a Waller handy. With the exactitude of youth I verified Mr. Gosse's quotation the moment I got home. I took my poetry very seriously in those days. I rushed to the Great Parlour, and though then quite indifferent to such a material thing as fine printing, I actually found the poem in one of Baskerville's exquisite productions.

The poem next to my dactylic Introduction was a dramatic lyric, partly blank verse and partly rhymed choruses, in the Swinburne manner. In my poem the virtuous and "misunderstood" Byron is pursued and persecuted by the spirits of Evil, Hypocrisy, Fraud, and Tyranny, but is finally redeemed by the Spirit of Good, whose function it is to introduce the triumphant poet to Shelley.

There follows another dramatic lyric on Shelley's death, which takes the form of the death-bed confession to his priest of an old sailor at Spezzia. The old man, according to a story published in 1875, was one of the crew of a small ship which ran down the boat containing Shelley and Williams, under the mistaken impression that the rich "milord Byron" was on board, with lots of money. Here the style is more that of Browning than of Swinburne. A few lines are quite sufficient to show the sort of progress I was making in blank verse.

What noise of feet is that? Ah, 'tis the priest. Here, priest, I have a sin hangs heavy. See There by the fishing-nets that lovely youth, I killed him—oh, 'twas fifty years ago, Only, tonight he will not let me rest, But looks with loving eyes, making me fear. Oh, Father, 'twas not him I meant to kill, 'Twas the rich lord I coveted to rob, He with the bright wild eyes and haughty mien.

Imitation of Browning was by no means a passing mood with me. A year before I tackled my Shelley and Byron poems, I had written a piece of imitation Browningese which is not without its stock of amusement, considering what was to be the fate of the versifier.

JEAN DUVAL'S LAST WORDS

Jean Duval has presented himself at a Paris newspaper office, asking for employment; this being refused him he makes a last request, offering to sell his muse, which he had hoped to keep unhired. This also being refused, his want of bread overcomes him, and he curses the Editor and dies.

A plague on all gold, say I, I who must win it, or die. Here goes, I'll sell my Muse. You may buy her for twenty sous. No, I'll write by the ream, Only give me your theme, And a sou more for a light To put in my garret at night. Garret!—ah, I was forgetting, My present's a very cheap letting Under the prison wall, Just where it grows so tall. Why don't I steal, you say? Oh, I wasn't brought up that way. Will you give me the twenty sous? Come, it isn't much to lose. You won't? Then I die. Ah, well, God will find you a lodging in hell.

(tat. 14.)

The melancholy which belongs to the young poet, a melancholy which had to be feigned in my case, was reserved for sonnets of a somewhat antinomian type. Here is an example.

SONNET

(1875)

O why so cruel, ye that have left behind Life's fears, and from draped death have drawn the veil? Oh, why so cruel? Does life or death avail? Why tell us not?—why leave us here so blind, To tread this earth, not sure that we may find Even an end beyond this worldly pale Of petty hates and loves so weak and frail? O why not speak?—is it so great a thing To cross death's stream and whisper in the ear Of us weak mortals some faint hope or cheer? Or tell us, dead ones, if the hopes that spring From joyous hours when all seems bright and clear Have any truth. O speak, ye dead, and say If that in hope of dying, live we may.

(tat. 15.)

A metrical essay of which I am more proud is a poem written at the end of 1874, or possibly at the beginning of 1875. With a daring which now seems to me incredible I undertook to write in that most difficult of measures, the Spenserian stanza. The matter of the composition is by no means memorable, but I think I have a right to congratulate myself upon the fact that I was able at that age to manage the triple rhymes and the twelve-syllable line at the end of each stanza without coming a complete cropper. I could not do it now, even if my life depended on it.

TO THE POWERS OF SONG

I

Spirit, whose harmony doth fill the mind, Deign now to hear the wailing of a song That lifts to thee its voice, and strives to find Aught that may raise it from the servile throng Who seek on earth but living to prolong. For them no goddess, no fair poets reign, They hear no singing, as the earth along They move to their dull tasks; they live, they wane, They die, and dying, not a thought of thee retain.

II

Thou art the Muse of whom the Grecian knew, The power that reigneth in each loving heart; From thee the sages their great teachings drew. Thou mak'st life tuneful by the poet's art. Without thy aid the love-god's fiery dart Wakes but a savage and a blind desire, Where nought of beauty e'er can claim a part. Without thee, all to which frail men aspire Has nothing good, is but of this poor earth, no higher.

III

Unhappy they who wander without light, And know thee not, thou goddess of sweet life; Cursed are they all that live not in thy sight, Cursed by themselves they cannot drown the strife In thee, of passion, of the ills so rife On earth; they have no star, no hope, no love, To guide them in the stormy ways of life; They are but as the beasts who slowly move On the world's face, nor care to look for light above.

IV

I am not as these men; I look for light, But none appears, no rays for me are flung. I would not be with those that sit in night; I fain would be that glorious host among, That band of poets who have greatly sung. But woe, alas, I cannot, I no power Of singing have, all my tired heart is wrung To think I might have known a happier hour, And sung myself, not let my aching spirit cower. (tat. 14.)

A bad poem, though interesting from the number of poets mentioned, is a satiric effort entitled The Examination. It supposes that all the living poets have been summoned by Apollo to undergo a competitive examination. The bards, summoned by postcards, which had just then been introduced, repair to Parnassus and are shown to the Hall. Rossetti and Morris, however, make a fuss because the paper is not to their taste. Walt Whitman, already a great favourite of mine, "though spurning a jingle," is hailed as "the singer of songs for all time." Proteus (Wilfrid Blount) is mentioned, for my cult for him was already growing. Among other poets who appear, but who have since died to fame, are Lord Lytton, Lord Southesk, Lord Lome, Mrs. Singleton, and Martin Tupper. In the end Apollo becomes "fed up" with his versifiers, and dismisses them all with the intimation that any who have passed will receive printed cards. The curtain is rung down with the gloomy couplet:

Six months have elapsed, but no poet or bard, So far as I know, has yet got a card

Another set of verses, written between the ages of fourteen and fifteen, which are worth recalling from the point of view of metre include some English hexameters. I was inspired to write them by an intense admiration of Clough's Amours de Voyage, an admiration which grows greater, not lesser, with years.

As I have started upon the subject of verse, I think I had better pursue the course of the stream until, as the old geographers used to say about the Rhine, its waters were lost in the sands, in my case not of Holland but of Prose.

From 1877 to the time when I actually entered Balliol, at eighteen and a half, I went on writing verse, and was fortunate enough to get one or two pieces published. Besides two sonnets which were accepted by The Spectator—sonnets whose only raison d'tre was a certain competence of expression—was a poem entitled Love's Arrows, which was accepted, to my great delight, by Sir George Grove, then the Editor of Macmillan's Magazine, a periodical given up to belles-lettres. The poem may be best described as in the Burne Jones manner. I shall not, however, quote any part of it, except the prose introduction, which I still regard with a certain enthusiasm as a successful fake. It ran as follows:

At a league's distance from the town of Ponteille in Provence and hard by the shrine of Our Lady of Marten, there is in the midst of verdant meadows a little pool, overshadowed on all sides by branching oak-trees, and surrounded at the water's edge by a green sward so fruitful that in spring it seemeth, for the abundance of white lilies, as covered with half-melted snow. Unto this fair place a damsel from out a near village once came to gather white flowers for the decking of Our Lady's chapel; and while so doing saw lying in the grass a naked boy; in his hair were tangled blue waterflowers, and at his side lay a bow and marvellously wrought quivers of two arrows, one tipped at the point with gold, the other with lead. These the damsel, taking up the quiver, drew out; but as she did so the gold arrow did prick her finger, and so sorely that, starting at the pain, she let fall the leaden one upon the sleeping boy. He at the touch of that arrow sprang up, and crying against her with much loathing, fled over the meadows. She followed him to overtake him, but could not, albeit she strove greatly; and soon, wearied with her running, fell upon the grass in a swoon. Here had she lain, had not a goatherd of those parts found her and brought her to the village. Thus was much woe wrought unto the damsel, for after this she never again knew any joy, nor delighted in aught, save only it were to sit waiting and watching among the lilies by the pool. By these things it seemeth that the boy was not mortal, as she supposed, but rather the Demon or Spirit of Love, whom John of Dreux for his two arrows holdeth to be that same Eros of Greece.—MSS. Mus. Aix. B. 754. Needless to say, it was a pure invention and not a copy, or travesty of an old model. I was egregiously proud of the scription at the end which, if I remember rightly, my father helped me to concoct. A certain interest has always attached in my mind to this piece of prose. To read it one would imagine that the author had closely studied the translations of Morris and other Tenderers of the French romances, but as far as I know I had not read any of them. The sole inspiration of my forgery were a few short references in Rossetti and Swinburne. This shows that in the case of literary forgeries one need not be surprised by verisimilitudes, and that it is never safe to say that a literary forger could not have done this or that. If he happens to have a certain flair for language and the tricks of the literary trade, he can do a wonderful amount of forgery upon a very small stock of knowledge. After all, George Byron forged Sonnets by Keats which took in Lord Houghton—a very good judge in the case of Keats.



CHAPTER X

OXFORD

My introduction to Oxford and its life was somewhat chaotic. Out of that chaos, as I shall show later, I achieved both good and evil. But I must first explain how the chaos arose. By the time I had reached seventeen it had become obvious to my father—or, rather, to the people at the University, who so advised him—that if I was to be able to matriculate at Balliol I must set my intellectual house in order and learn something of the things upon which alone one could matriculate. The irony of accident had designed my mental equipment to be of a kind perfectly useless for the purposes of the preliminary Oxford examinations. It was no doubt true that I knew enough poetry and general literature to confound half the Dons in Balliol. I also knew enough mathematics, as, to my astonishment, a mathematical tutor at Oxford in an unguarded hour confessed to me, to enable me to take a First in Mathematical Mods. But knowledge of literature, a power of writing, a not inconsiderable reading in modern history, and the aforesaid mathematics were no use whatever for the purposes of matriculation.

In those days Latin and Greek Grammar, Latin Prose and "Latin and Greek Unseen," and certain specially-prepared Greek and Latin Books were essentials. It is true that these alone would not have matriculated me. In addition to them the writing of a good essay and of a good general paper were required, to obtain success. Still, the sine qua non was what the representative of the old Oxford in Matthew Arnold's Friendship's Garland calls "the good old fortifying classical curriculum." I could by no possibility have reached the heights of "Hittal," who, it will be remembered, wrote "some longs and shorts about the Caledonian boar which were not bad." Though English verses came so easily, Latin verses did not come at all.

After many family councils it was decided that I should accept the invitation of my uncle and aunt (Professor T. H. Green and his wife) and take up my residence with them in their house in St. Giles's. There I read for Responsions. If it had not been for some extraordinary power of resistance in the matter of Latin and Greek I ought to have found the task easy, for, as I have said elsewhere, I had two of the most accomplished scholars in the University to teach me. One was Mr. Henry Nettleship, soon to become Regius Professor of Latin. The other was a young Balliol man who had just won a Magdalen Fellowship and who was destined to become President of that famous college over which he still presides so worthily and so wisely. But, alas! I was Greek and Latin proof, and all I really gained from my learned teachers was two very close and intimate friends, and the privilege of meeting at the house of the one and in the rooms in the College of the other, a good many of the abler Dons, young and old, and getting on good terms with them. In the same way, I used to see at my uncle's house the best of Oxford company, and also a certain number of Cambridge men.

It must not be supposed, however, that I was not learning anything. I was getting a priceless store of knowledge,

nay, wisdom from my uncle, who was kindness itself and who was, I am sure, fond of me. He was almost as ready to talk and to answer questions as my father. In him, too, I saw the working of a great and good man and of a noble character.

Though in a different, but equally true, way, Green was as religious a man as my father. If my father felt the personal relationship between God and His children more than Green did, that was chiefly because Green's mind could take nothing which had not the sanction of reason, or, to be more accurate, of an intuition guarded so closely by Reason that very little of the mystic element in Faith remained unchallenged. No one could live with Green without loving him and feeling reverence for his deep sincerity and his instinct for the good.

Though foolish people talked of him as a heretic, or even an infidel, he was in truth one of the most devout of men. That noble passage in Renan's play fits him exactly. The Almighty, conversing as in Job with one of His Heavenly Ministers as to this Planet's people, says:

Apprends, enfant fidle, ma tendresse pour ceux qui doutent ou qui nient. Ces doutes, ces ngations sont fonds en raison; ils viennent de mon obstination me cacher. Ceux qui me nient entrent dans mes vues. Ils nient l'image grotesque ou abominable que l'on a mise en ma place. Dans ce monde d'idoltres et d'hypocrites, seuls, ils me respectent rellement.

Understand, faithful child, my tenderness for those who doubt and who deny. Those doubts, those denials are founded on reason; they come from my obstinate resolve to hide myself. Those who deny me enter into my plans. They deny the grotesque or abominable image which men have set up in my place. In a world of idolators and hypocrites, they alone really respect me.

But what I gained from my uncle and his friends, from Nettleship and from Warren, and also from the people I used to meet at the house of my great-uncle, Dr. Frederick Symonds, was not all that I achieved in the year before I matriculated. The air of Oxford did not repress but greatly stimulated my love of verse and belles-lettres, and I careered over the green pastures of our poetry like the colt let loose that I was. Elizabethan plays were at the moment my pet reading, and without knowing it I emulated Charles James Fox, who is said while at Oxford to have read a play a day—no doubt out of the Doddesley collection. I even went to the Bodleian in search of the Elizabethans, and remember to this day my delight in handling the big and little books mentioned by Lamb in his Dramatic Selections. I recall how I turned over the leaves of such enchanting works as Inigo Jones's designs for The Tempest played as a Masque. Though I do not happen to have seen it since, and so speak with a forty years' interval, the pen-and-ink drawing of Ariel, portrayed exactly like a Cinquecento angel, is fixed in my mind. It has all the graciousness and gentleness of Bellini and all the robust beauty of Veronese or Palma Vecchio. To tell the truth, I was in the mood of the lady of the Island over which Prospero waved his wand. I could say with Miranda, "O brave new world, that has such men and women in it!" Indeed, though I still stood outside the gates, as it were, I had already felt the subtle intoxication of Oxford.

The result of all this was that when I at last got through Responsions and entered Balliol, with the understanding that directly I got through Pass Mods. I was to abandon the Classics and read for the History School, I knew, as it were, too much and too little. This knowledge of some things and want of knowledge of others produced a result which was highly distasteful to the normal academic mind. In a word, I was in the position of Gibbon when he went up to Magdalen. His ignorance would have astonished a schoolboy and his learning a professor, and no doubt he seemed to the greater part of the High Table an odious and forward young man.

All the same, and though no one then believed it, I was extraordinarily innocent, if not as to my ignorance, as to my learning. When I met a Don who, I was told, was "unsurpassed" in the Greek or Latin classics and could probably appreciate them as well as if he had been a Greek or Roman of the best period, I was tremendously excited. I felt sure that being so highly endowed in this direction he could not possibly have neglected English literature, and must know all about that also, and so would be of the greatest help to me. I was inclined, therefore, to rush at these scholars with the perfect assurance that I could get something from them. When, however, they either evaded my questionings or told me curtly that they had never heard of the people about whom I asked, I felt sure that this was only said to get rid of me. For some reason unknown to me I had managed, I felt, to offend them as Alice offended the creatures in Wonderland.

I can recall a specific example. I found a certain learned scholar who had never even heard of, and took no interest in, Marlowe's Dido and neas, and could not be drawn into expressing an opinion as to whether the translations were good or bad. In other cases I found that even the names of men like Burton of the Anatomy of Melancholy produced no reaction. Yet, wretched Latinist as I was, I had been thunderstruck with delight when, rummaging the Cathedral after a Sunday service, where, by the way, I heard Pusey preach his last sermon, I came upon Burton's tomb, and read for the first time the immortal epitaph which begins:

Paucis notus, paucioribus ignotus,

I can see now that what I thought was the pretended ignorance of the Dons, and their fastidious unwillingness to talk to an uneducated schoolboy, as I believed myself to be, was nothing of the kind. I have not the slightest doubt now that they regarded me as a cheeky young ass who was trying to show off in regard to things of which he was totally ignorant and of which, needless to say, they were ignorant too, for, alas! the minute study of the Classics does not appear to necessitate a general knowledge of literature. A scholar fully en rapport with Aristophanes or Juvenal and Martial may never have read Ben Jonson's Alchemist, or Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle; or studied Charles Churchill, or Green on The Spleen.

There was a mental attitude which the typical Don, full of the public- school spirit and its dislikes, could never forgive. Except for the few intimate friends who were devoted to me—Nettleship and Warren, T. H. Green and, later, curiously enough, Mr. A. L. Smith, the present Master of Balliol,—I was, I expect, universally regarded as the most intolerable undergraduate they had ever beheld.

Jowett, the Master of Balliol, evidently felt the Stracheyphobia very strongly, or perhaps I should say felt it his duty to express it very strongly. He had not, I think, a great natural instinct in regard to the characters of young men, but he was naturally anxious to improve those with whom he came in contact. His method was to apply two or three fixed rules. One of these was—and a good one in suitable cases—that if you got hold of a boy who thought too much of himself, the best thing was to stamp upon him upon every possible occasion, and so help him to reform his ways. No doubt it saved a great deal of trouble to give this rule a universal application, and it was often successful. Every now and then, however, the generalisation failed.

Fortunately for me, I was not only of a contented nature, but so happy— and also so happy-go-lucky—that I was not the very least worried by the opinion of my educational superiors. I should have been genuinely pleased to have pleased them, but as I had clearly failed in that, I did not trouble about it further. I could always console myself with the thought that schoolmasters and dons were notoriously narrow-minded people, and that when one got out into the big world their opinions would matter very little.

In a word, I accepted the situation with a cheerful and genuine acquiescence. The Master did not like me, but then, why should he? I was obviously not a model undergraduate. This acquiescence was soon buttressed by a reasoned if somewhat unfair estimate of the Master's character. I very soon began to hear plenty of Oxford gossip about him and his failings—chief among them being his supposed favouritism. He was very generally called a snob, which no doubt, in a superficial sense, he was, and I soon got my nose well in the air in regard to his worship of dukes and marquesses and even of the offscourings of Debrett and his willingness to give special privileges to their errant progeny. I had, however, to give the Master credit for the way in which he would often shower his partial favours on some boy who had climbed the ladder of learning and risen from a Board School to become a Scholar or Exhibitioner of Balliol. My general feeling, however, was that of the idealist who despises the schoolmaster or the scholar who becomes worldly in his old age, and even goes so far as to follow the shameless maxim, "Dine with the Tories and vote with the Whigs."

Of course I know now that Jowett's apparent worldliness and snobbishness were calculated. He was very anxious to get good educative influences exerted over the men who were to rule the country. This, translated into action, meant getting the big men of the day, the Optimates of British politics and commerce, to send their sons to Balliol. He also, no doubt, liked smart society for itself. Men of the world, especially when they were politicians or persons of distinction, greatly interested the translator of Plato, Thucydides, and Aristotle. Though he was not the kind of man to inflate himself with any idea that he was "Socrates redivivus" I have no doubt that he found the worldlywise malice of Lord Westbury as piquant as the Greek philosopher did the talk of Alcibiades.

Young men, however, do not make excuses, and, as I have said, I was inclined to be much scandalised, and to feel complacently self-righteous over stories of the Master's "love of a lord"

The feeling which I engendered in the minds of the rest of the Balliol Dons differed very little from that entertained by the Master. I can say truthfully that I never received a word of encouragement, of kindly direction, or of sympathy of any sort or kind from them in regard to my work or anything else. The only exception was Mr. A. L. Smith. The reason, I now feel sure, was that they believed that to take notice of me would have only made me more uppish. I daresay they imagined I should have been rude or surly, or have attempted to snub them. Still, the fact is something of a record, and so worthy of note.

If I had been at a public school and had learned there to understand the ways of teachers and masters, as the public-school boy learns to understand them, as an old fox learns to understand the cry of the hounds and of the huntsmen, I should have had no difficulty whatever in getting on good terms with the College. As it was, I misunderstood them quite as much as they misunderstood me. Each of us was unable to handle the other. Yet I think, on a balance of accounts, I had a little more excuse on my side than the Dons had. I was very young, very immature, and without any knowledge or experience of institutional social life. They, on the other hand, must have had previous knowledge of the exceptional boy who had not been at a public school. Therefore they should quite easily have been able to adjust their minds to my case. They should not have allowed themselves to assume that the "uppishness" was due to want of that humility which they rightly expected in their pupils.

Curiously enough, my undergraduate contemporaries at Balliol were far more successful in their efforts at understanding somebody who had not been at a public school. They appeared to have no prejudices against the homebred boy. I was never made in the least to feel that there was any bar or barrier between me and my fellow-freshmen. As proof of this, I may point to the fact that every one of my intimate friends at Balliol were public-school boys. I have no doubt I was considered odd by most of my contemporaries, but this oddness, and also my inability to play football or cricket, never seemed to create, as far as I could see, any prejudice. Indeed, I think that my friends were quite discerning enough and quite free enough from convention to be amused and interested by a companion who was not built up in accordance with the sealed pattern.

In spite of the Dons, about whom I troubled singularly little, in spite of my being ploughed twice for Mods., sent down from my college, made to become an unattached student, and only reinstated at Balliol after I had got through Mods, and was guaranteed to be going to do well in the History Schools, I can say with absolute truth that I was never anything but supremely happy at Oxford—I might almost say deliriously happy.

I may interpolate here that when I went back to Balliol after my year as an unattached student, the only thing that the Master said, on readmitting me, was something of this kind: "The College is only taking you back, Mr. Strachey, because your history tutor says that you are likely to get a First." I was appropriately shocked at this, for I had become well aware that Jowett was looked upon by a good many people in the University as simply a hunter for Firsts, a Head who did not care much what kind of people he had in his College, or how their minds were developed in the highest sense, so long as they came out well in the Schools List. He was alleged, that is, to take a tradesman's view of learning. These kinds of gibe I naturally found soothing, for I was able to imagine myself as a scholar, though not as a winner of a First. Incidentally, also, though I did not acknowledge it to myself, I think I was a little hurt by the Master's want of what I might call humanity, or at any rate courtesy in his treatment of the shorn lamb of Moderations. However, I have not the least doubt that he thought he was stimulating me for my good. This, indeed, was his constant mood. I remember at Collections his telling me that I should never do anything except, possibly, be able to write light trifles for the magazines. On another occasion he asked me what I was going to do in life. I told him that I wanted to go to the Bar, which was then my intention. To this he replied oracularly, "I should have thought you would have done better in diplomacy."

That tickled me. It was clearly a back-hander over an ingenious attempt which I had made a day or two before to prove how much better it would be for me to get off three days before Collections and so obtain another whole week in the bosom of my family at Cannes! No doubt Jowett's system of controlling the recalcitrant portions of the College through sarcasm was well meant and occasionally fairly successful. Taking it as a whole, however, I felt then, as I feel now, that sarcasm is the one weapon which it is never right or useful to use in the case of persons who are in the dependent position when compared with the wielder of the sarcastic rapier;—persons in statu pupillari, persons much younger than oneself, persons in one's employment, or, finally, members of one's own family. Sarcasm should be reserved for one's equals, or, still better, for one's superiors. The man who is treated with sarcasm, if he cannot answer back either because it is true, or he is stupid, or he is afraid to counter-attack a superior, is filled, and naturally filled, with a sense of burning indignation. He feels he has had a cruel wrong done to him and is in no mood to be converted to better courses. That to which his mind reacts at once is some form of vengeance, some way of getting even with his tormentor. The words that burn or rankle or corrode are not the words to stimulate. No doubt Socrates said that he was the gadfly of the State and stung that noble animal into action, but what may be good for a sluggish old coach-horse is not necessarily good for a thoroughbred colt with a thin skin.

To return to my general feeling about Oxford while I lived there. Instinctively I seem to have realised what I came to see so clearly in my post-Oxford days, that the great thing that one gets at a University is what Bagehot called the "impact of young mind upon young mind." Though there must be examinations and lectures, and discipline and hard reading, nothing of all this matters a jot in comparison with the association of youth with youth and the communion of quick and eager spirits. I have lived my life with clever people, men and women who thought themselves masters of dialectic, but I can say truthfully that I have never heard such good talk as in my own rooms and in the rooms of my contemporaries at Oxford. There, and there only, have I seen practised what Dr. Johnson believed to be an essential to good talk, the ability to stretch one's legs and have one's talk out. It may be remembered that Dr. Johnson, in praising John Wesley as a talker, sadly admitted that his great qualities in this respect were all marred because Wesley was always in a hurry, always had some pressing business in hand which cut him short when at his best.

The happy undergraduate never has to catch a train, never has an editor or a printer waiting for him, never has an appointment which he cannot cut, never, in effect, has money to make. He comes, indeed, nearer than anybody else on earth to the Hellenic ideal of the good citizen, of the free man in a free state. If he wants to talk all through the night with his friends, he talks. The idea of his sparing himself in order that he may be fresh next morning for Mr. Jones's lecture never enters his head for a moment. Rightly; he considers that to talk at large with a couple of friends is the most important thing in the world. In my day we would talk about anything, from the Greek feeling about landscape to the principles the Romans would have taken as the basis of actuarial tables, if they had had them. We unsphered Plato, we speculated as to what Euripides would have thought of Henry James, or whether Sophocles would have enjoyed Miss—-'s acting, and felt that it was of vital import to decide these matters. But I must stop, for I see I am beginning to make most dangerous admissions. If I go on, indeed, I am likely enough to become as much disliked by the readers of the present day as I was by the Oxford Dons of forty years ago.

I could fill this book with stories of my life at Oxford, of its enchantment, of my friendships, of my walks and rides and of my expeditions up the river; for, not being a professional athlete, I had time to enjoy myself. It would be a delight also to recall my associations, the first in my life, with young men who were writing verses, like myself, such men as Beeching, Mackail, Spring Rice (our Ambassador during the War, at Washington), Rennell Rodd, Nicolls, and a dozen others. But space forbids. I can only quote Shenstone's delightful verses on Oxford, in his Ode to Memory, verses which I have quoted a hundred times:

And sketch with care the Muses' bow'r, Where Isis rolls her silver tide, Nor yet omit one reed or flow'r That shines on Cherwell's verdant side, If so thou may'st those hours prolong When polish'd Lycon join'd my song.

The song it Vails not to recite— But, sure, to soothe our youthful dreams, Those banks and streams appear'd more bright Than other banks, than other streams; Or, by thy softening pencil shown, Assume they beauties not their own?

And paint that sweetly vacant scene When, all beneath the poplar bough, My spirits light, my soul serene, I breathed in verse one cordial vow That nothing should my soul inspire But friendship warm and love entire.

I do not mean to inflict upon my readers the tiresome record of my failure to pass Moderations, or the description of how I did eventually get through by a process which came very near to learning by heart English translations of Xenophon's Memorabilia, a portion of Livy's History, and Horace's Epistles. To do so would be both long and tedious. The circumstances have, however, a certain interest considered from one point of view, and that is the use and misuse of the classics for educational purposes.



CHAPTER XI

A CLASSICAL EDUCATION

Though I made such a hash of classical studies and was apparently so impermeable to Latin and Greek literature, I am not one of those people who are prepared to damn the Greek and Latin classics, either with faint praise or with a strenuous invective. I am not prepared to say with Cobden that a single copy of The Times is worth the whole of Thucydides, or to ask, as did the late Mr. Carnegie, what use Homer was either in regard to wisdom or human progress. I believe that in all the things of the soul and the mind the stimulus of the Greek spirit is of the utmost value. The Romans, no doubt, excelled the Greeks on the practical side of law—though not in the pure jurisprudential spirit. Again, the Hebrews did incomparable service to mankind in their handling of such vital matters as the family, the place of women and children in the State, and the position of the slave. On the moral issues, in fact, the Jewish prophet is far the safer teacher: