VIEW ACROSS WREY VALLEY
VIEW ACROSS WREY VALLEY
VIEW ACROSS WREY VALLEY
at all that you can do for me?” I said, “I’m awfully sorry, but I’m afraid there isn’t.” And the rat went slowly downstairs, out of doors, and away along the Pixey Garden.
The rat had come in through an open door; and this is the only way that a rat should be allowed to come into a house—the walls should be made rat-proof with cement. No doubt, rats climb up ivy and other creepers on the walls, and sometimes reach the thatch that way; but I have never known one come in at a window.
These rats, of course, are brown rats, the black rats being quite extinct now, although old men have told me they have seen some, years ago, both in London and down here. In hisHistory of Devonshire,I.129, ed. 1797, Polwhele quotes a man who was born in 1723 and said that, when he was a lad, there were only black rats until a ship called the Elizabeth was brought into Plymouth and broken up on the Devonshire side of the Plym; and this ship’s rats were brown.
We ought really to be grateful to the browns for killing off the blacks, as the blacks were much worse than the browns for carrying the Plague about. We have not heard much of the Plague in Western Europe since the brown rats arrived—the last great outbreak was in 1720 at Marseilles. The first outbreak in England began with the arrival of some ships at Weymouth in July or August 1348, and it very soon reached Devon and then spread over the whole country, killing more than half the population. So far as we know now, the Plague began in the Crimea. The black rats must have come down there in hordes, like the hordes of brown rats that were seen swimming across the Volga in 1727. It was brought by ships from the Crimea to Constantinople, and thence to Messina and Genoa; and a Genoese ship brought it to Marseilles about Christmas 1347. It spread all over France up to the Channel coast; but if it had come here that way, it would probably have reached Dover first, as Calais was then an English town with much traffic across the Straits: so I imagine that the ships at Weymouth had come up from the Mediterranean, and brought black rats with the pestiferous fleas.
That outbreak of the Plague reduced the population of these islands to half or perhaps a third of what it was before; and one may speculate about what might have happened, if the outbreak had been more severe and swept the population off without a remnant. In the absence of statistics one may estimate the death-rate from the number of new appointments to livings in the diocese of Exeter, as set down in bishop Grandisson’s register of Institutions. During February 1349 there were institutions to five parishes in the next valley to this: Chudleigh, Trusham, Ashton, Doddiscombsleigh, Dunsford. Those parishes are all on the left bank of the Teign; and there are no institutions to parishes on the right bank until June. If rats could swim the Volga, they could swim the Teign, but probably would not take the trouble if they were happy where they were; so I presume the river checked them, and they came up here another way. During March and April there were institutions to Lustleigh, Bovey, North Bovey, Manaton, Ilsington, Widdicombe: six parishes forming a solid block of sixty-four square miles. In the first six months of 1349 there were altogether 269 institutions, and 394 in the whole year. Even in 1348 there had been only 52, and the average number was 37 in the seven previous years, 1341 to 1347. There were not priests enough to fill up all the vacancies in 1349; and on 20 September bishop Grandisson obtained two Faculties from the Pope, one for ordaining a hundred young men who had not yet attained the age of twenty-three, and the other for ordaining fifty men who were born out of wedlock and therefore were ineligible without a Dispensation.
This kind of evidence needs more careful handling than Cardinal Gasquet has given it in his book onThe Black Death of 1348 and 1349. Amongst other things he says there, page 102, “An examination of the institutions of the diocese, in relation to the time when the plague visited the various parts of it, appears to show that it commenced almost simultaneously in north and south. In North Devon it is found at both Northam and Alverdiscott on the 7th of November, at Fremington in the same district on the 8th, and at Barnstaple on December 23rd.... The early outbreak in the coast villages at the mouth of the estuary leading to Barnstaple points to the conclusion that the infection was brought by a ship passing up the Bristol Channel.” He assumes here that the Plague will be ‘found’ at a place on the very day on which a new incumbent has been instituted; and this assumption is quite unfounded unless he also assumes that the previous incumbent must have died of Plague there. But in two of these four places the previous incumbents could not possibly have died of Plague, as they had not died of anything at all: the register says distinctly that these vacancies were caused by resignation, not by death.
In a letter of 30 October 1348 bishop Grandisson cites a letter from the prior of Christchurch, Canterbury, written after the Archbishop’s death, and giving his instructions for processions and other rites to stay the Plague. According to the Prior’s letter (28 September) England was exhausted and impoverished by the War, “guerrarum discriminibus, que ipsius regni diviciarum substanciam exhaurunt et consumunt ... regnum Anglie desolatum extitit et afflictum.” That was the opinion of a man living at the time: yet there are books on history assuring us that England had never been so prosperous before, the country being then enriched with all the spoils of France.
In that letter of 30 October bishop Grandisson ordered solemn public processions in his diocese every Wednesday and Friday up to Christmas. He was living at Chudleigh Manor all the time, about six miles from here; so I imagine that there were processions all around. He also ordered masses, psalms and prayers. These were then the proper weapons for combatting the Plague: nobody smelled Rats. So also at Rhodes in October 1498 the Grand Master of the Knights ordered fasting and prayer, and the people all sang Alleluia. Columbus had brought a new disease from the New World, and it had just reached Rhodes; but these good people had not yet found out how it was propagated. The local poet, Emmanuel Georgillas, wrote a poem on it in medieval Greek,Thanaticon tês Rhodou. He says that the disease claimed victims from amongst them all, old men and matrons, boys and unwedded girls, the Knights themselves, and even the Archbishop. At last John Baptist triumphed over Charon—that is what the poet says—but the Grand Master of the Knights had not relied exclusively upon their patron saint: he had locked the ladies up.
Providence helps those who help themselves, and leaves whole generations to their fate unless they take the trouble to find out how diseases come and how they can be kept away. Plague is carried by rats’ fleas, just as typhus is carried by lice and malaria by mosquitos; the rats themselves are victims. Trichinosis is caused by pigs, and leprosy by fish; but the rats invade us of their own free will, and it is no fault of the pigs or fish that people sometimes eat them ‘cured,’ not cooked.
When the chieftains of the Delta of the Nile went to King Pianchi to tender their submission to him, about 750B.C., he would not let them come inside the palace, as they were people who ate fish—see lines 149 to 151 of his inscription—and Jews were just as hard on people who ate pigs. Had the Jews abstained from eating fish, they might have been immune from leprosy, which is a worse disease than any they could have caught by eating pigs; and with proper cooking they might have eaten both. All those ancient prohibitions were too wide, like this modern prohibition of strong drink on the mere chance that it may make men drunk.
I doubt the Totem theory of abstinence from certain foods, and fancy somebody had noticed that certain diseases went with certain kinds of food, and had prohibited those foods accordingly. There have been men whose precepts we all follow without quite understanding why, and we say these men were “in advance of their generation” or “born before their time”; and yet the truth may be the other way—they were of their generation and their time, but mankind has deteriorated since.
Whenever I look at bees, I feel misgivings about the future of mankind. Think of the bees that invented the hexagonal cells, and the bees that go on building these cells and yet go buzzing against glass panes in one half of a window when the other half is open. The bees that could invent such cells, would surely have ability enough to find their way round glass. But bees are socialists; and socialism means that individuals of great ability will be kept down, and all ability will gradually be atrophied for want of use. I rather think that this is what has happened to the bees, and may be happening to mankind.
Collingwood ate rats. He said ships’ rats were very clean feeders, and he always had a dish of them at dinner when he was at sea; and I have heard that many officers fought shy of invitations to the Admiral’s table. No doubt his dish of rats was properly cooked; but rat may be as dangerous as pig, considered as diet, since rats are also liable to trichinosis. Amongst human beings the disease is very rare in England as compared with Germany: they eat a great deal of smoked ham there, and mere smoking does not kill trichinæ.
In former ages leprosy was common here. There was a hospital for lepers this side of Newton, founded by John Gilberd, 4 October 1538, “for the releff of powre lazar people wherof grete nomber with that diseas be now infectid in that partis to the grete daunger of infection of moche people to whom they use to resort and be conversant withal for lacke of convenyent hospitals in the county of Devon for them.” There were much older hospitals for lepers outside Exeter and Barnstaple and Tavistock and other towns; but these were more or less monastic, and had suffered from the dissolution of the monasteries. This hospital was then a quarter of a mile outside Newton Bushell; but the town has spread beyond it, and the old buildings have long since been replaced by alms-houses. Leprosy is quite extinct; but I fear that people hereabouts are careless in the cooking of cured food.
Leprosy would naturally be commoner before the Reformation, as so much fish was eaten during fasts; and the fasts themselves made people weaker and less able to resist disease. I agree with old folks here who say that fasts should be a time of feasting for the poor. “Rich folk have money to buy butcher’s meat in Lent as well as other times; and if they will not eat’n, they should give’n to they as cannot buy.” However, fasting was enjoined on rich and poor alike, and was deemed of more importance than almost anything else. Machiavelli was not easily shocked, but he drew the line at Sforza’s coming to Florence and eating meat in Lent,Istorie Fiorentine,VII, anno 1471, “cosa in quel tempo nella nostra città ancora non veduta.” I can myself remember how frightfully Prince Napoleon shocked the pious French by eating beef-steak on Good Friday.
Nobody thought of fasting here on any day except Good Friday; and fasting meant no more than eating hot-cross-buns in addition to the usual food. But whether it came as early as March 20 or as late as April 23, Good Friday was the great day for potato-planting. Whatever the season was, potatoes planted on Good Friday came up better than potatoes planted any other day—at least, that was the common belief here. There must have been a religious or superstitious base for this, and perhaps also for the custom of kicking a football round when the planting had been done. (In my early years a football was hardly ever seen here except on a Good Friday.) I have seen the sailors flogging Judas Iscariot on Good Fridays in Mediterranean ports, and I hear it may be seen on foreign ships in English ports. Judas Iscariot is there a dummy like Guy Fawkes and here, I think, he had become a football. But it is always hard to judge the meaning of such things. Some fifty years ago an acquaintance of mine, a midshipman, went up to Jerusalem with a lot of other midshipmen when the Mediterranean squadron was cruising off that coast; and they marched into Jerusalem singing a song (which then was popular) of Kafoosalum, ... the barber of Jerusalem, ... the daughter of the barber. And good Mahommedans were much impressed, thinking it was a holy song that these young angels sang so fervently.
There is now a service of Three Hours at Lustleigh on Good Friday. I inquired what authority there was for this, and was informed (officially) that it was a service licensed by the Bishop under the Shortened Services Act. That was quite good as a bit of cynicism or a joke, but rather past a joke if one remembers how that Act was passed through Parliament. Its promoters said that it was only to be used for shortening the old services, not for introducing anything new.
On the coronation of Queen Victoria there was a service in Exeter Cathedral and ‘rejoicings’ in the town; and my father’s diary finds fault—“the stupid dun of cannon, which even fired during the anthem, shaking the edifice and distracting everyone’s attention”—and so on for a couple of pages, finishing, “it seemed somewhat like a Good Friday: by no means a favourite day of mine.”
There is no desire here for more Good Fridays or Ash Wednesdays, but only for Shrove Tuesdays at all seasons of the year; and these Carnivals are not followed by Lenten fasts. Carnivals are superseding Fêtes and Galas, here called Feets and Gaylers; but knowing that a Swarry (or a Soirée) consisted of a leg of mutton, I should say that every Carnival or Feet or Gayler consists of a brass band ‘with the usual trimmings’ like the leg. It seems perverse of people to speak of fêtes as feets when they invariably speak of beans as banes, and even more perverse to want these foreign words at all. This coast is getting known as a Riviera, which they pronounce Riveerer as if it were a German word.
I have got a bill here for ‘mendin gardin oz’—hose—and I have seen a bill in Bedfordshire for ‘hoke’ and ‘hellum’ and ‘hash.’ With phonetic spelling there would be as many written languages as there are dialects now—water would be ‘warter’ in the Eastern counties, and ‘watter’ or ‘wetter’ here—but fonetic fanatics would take the cockney dialect and foist it on us all. On looking at an Elementary English Grammar, of which 350,000 have been sold, I found it said—“Take c out of the alphabet, and we could write, kat, sity, speshal, instead of cat, city, special, and in thus writing those words, we should be writing them according to their pronunciation.” No doubt, the cockney news-boys screech out ‘Extra Speshal’; but if we are to get pronunciation down from town, we might get it from the West End rather than the East.
Sometimes people make mistakes here about the origin of words—Reformatory is not Reform-a-Tory, as ardent Liberals said—and sometimes they make mistakes about the words themselves. During the War there was an entertainment for wounded soldiers at a house not far from here; and they came up in chars-à-banc with bagpipes playing all the way. I heard a small boy calling out, “Hearken to that music there,” and another one snubbing him, “Bain’t music, ‘tbe the magpies.” On first hearing of a Turkish bath, a girl assumed that it must be a turkeys’ bath. I picture an old turkey-cock jerking his head about and gobbling while he was screwing up his courage for a header into the cold plunge.
A cockney was greeted by a man down here with courteous inquiries about her health, “And how be you now? Be you all right?” The reply was, “No, half right, half left, like you”; and he told me that he had to do a bit of thinking afore he saw the sense of it. An old lady here surprised me just as much in town. She had not been there before, though well advanced in years; and I took her up in the Great Wheel at Earl’s Court to get a good look round. She told me afterwards, “I were a-thinkin’ all the time how Satan took our Lord up into an exceedin’ high place a-seein’ all the kingdoms of the world.”
I once heard a cockney expressing her contempt for everybody born elsewhere. She said with pride, “I was born and bred where I stand,” and she was standing in a gutter in a slum. Londoners do not often give themselves away like that: they usually are people of resource. I complained to an umbrella-maker that a new umbrella kept turning inside-out, and with a jerk I turned it inside out at once. He took the umbrella, jerked it the other way and said, “You see, sir, it comes back again quite easily.” I complained to a stationer that his envelopes did not stick. He replied with dignity, “No, sir, they do not: we use only the purest gum.”
On a spring morning I was coming out of Charing Cross station on my way back from Algeria with a very sun-burnt face, about the colour of a red geranium; and while my hansom was going slowly through the gates, I heard a loafer say, “Look, Bill, ee’s come into bloom early this year.” People are more courteous here. At a harvest supper there was a general desire to sing, “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” but also a general feeling that it would not be quite respectful: so they softened the familiar term and sang without restraint, “For he’s a jolly good gentleman.” And this version suits the tune so well that anyone would think the tune was written for it.—I am told that when I go to sleep, I snore. One afternoon I asked why the letters had not been brought in to me as soon as they arrived; and the answer was, “I was afraid I might disturb you, sir, I thought I heard you sleeping.”
There is a House of Mercy at Bovey, a Gothic Revival building designed by Woodyer about 1865. Its inmates come from every part of England, not especially from Devon; and they have been described to me as “Maidens as hath gotten babies without ever goin’ nigh a church,” in other words, unmarried mothers. But less courteous terms were used when laundry-work was started there. One old lady gave me her whole mind—not merely a bit of it—about “they paltry gentry as took their washin’ away from honest folk to give it to they hussies.” The practical mind thought it a waste of money to have such institutions: the inmates could be married off, at much less cost, by giving them dowers. And really there is just as much marrying for money among the poorer classes as among the rich, though the amount of money may be smaller and sometimes very small indeed.
Under a farmer’s will his farm went to his only son, but nearly all the stock was sold for paying the daughters’ legacies, as he had not reckoned on a fall in prices. The young man only got an unstocked farm and had no money for stocking it; but an aged relative of his made light of that. She said to me, “I tell’n he must marry one that hath some hornéd cattle,” and he chafed at such restriction of his choice. Another old lady, a relative of hers, was asking after a friend of mine who had been badly wounded in the War. I told her that he had quite recovered, and added that he had married his nurse: whereat she threw up her hands, exclaiming, “Oh, that War, it hath been a terrible thing for some of’n.”
There was an old saying here, “I would rather go to the funeral of a daughter than to her wedding of a doctor.” My grandfather quotes it in a letter of 30 November 1865 as if he quite agreed with it, and adds, “Strange, those doctors are always poor, and a miserable affair of it generally.” He did not much approve of marrying for love, or anything else, unless there were sufficient means. I remember that he thought the answer insufficient when somebody had cried out, “There she is, marrying him all in the depths of poverty,” and another person answered, “He hath blood.”
In his letters to my father on the death of relatives or friends, he enumerates all possible grounds of consolation. Thus, 30 June 1854, “Therefore on reflection I say we ought to be very thankful he was taken off as he was without pain or suffering.” He says this of a friend who had been staying with him a week before in full vigour of body and mind, and died just after leaving here from unsuspected weakness of the heart. In most cases he finds so many grounds for consolation that he comes very near saying it is really a good riddance. Thus, 18 September 1853, “On the whole, taking everything into consideration, I say there is nothing to grieve about, but all his friends ought to be thankful he is taken.” Again on 6 October 1853, “I should say a happy release for his mother,” and on 10 January 1855, “A happy release, I say, for himself and all about him,” and on 16 January 1855, “I say we ought all to be thankful he is taken before his sister, for what he would have done, had she been taken first, I cannot tell.”
This practical or utilitarian view was not uncommon here. He writes about a death at Lustleigh, 7 September 1845, “She died last evening. What will the old man do now. When his wife was very ill, I inquired for her. He said she was not likely to live, but then (he said) we can do without her. This is his son’s wife, a clever woman; and what they will do now, I am at a loss to say, for they have neither wife nor daughter, and of course must trust to a housekeeper.”
My grandmother generally saw things in another light. She writes to my father on 19 February 1845, “Report says we are to have Jane for a neighbour. It appears she has captivated Mr*****and in due time, I suppose, will become his wife. It will be an excellent match for Jane. He is considered very wealthy and I believe a very nice man. He has called here several times and repeatedly requested your father to visit him: your father calls on no person, I am sorry to say.” Writing on 23 February, my grandfather just mentions the report and adds, “Depend on it, Jane will soon turn things upside down there.”
On another marriage he writes, 16 November 1851, “Your mother had a full and particular account of the wedding the day after.... I have often heard of throwing an old shoe after a new married couple to wish them good luck. I never knew it practised in Moreton but once, and then [the bride’s father] ran out in the street and threw an old shoe after the carriage. It did not carry luck with it, for that was an unfortunate marriage, so the story was he ought to have thrown more. To obviate all that, they threw shoes by the dozen: all the old shoes were looked up and thrown after and about the carriage like grape shot. Well, I hope they will be happy.”
As he thought all this worth mentioning, he might as well have gone to see it for himself, and also gone to see much else; but that was not his way. He writes on 9 June 1862, “This is Whitmonday, and the bells are ringing for two weddings that are solemnized today, so Lustleigh will be gay in addition to the usual holyday for the labourers and the children. I see nothing of it, but generally hear a squall of children and the hoarse voice of the men at the skittle playing. I give something to set the children a-running and something for the fiddler.” A younger man, of great ability, told my sister what he thought about it all, 11 October 1870, “He thought living in this remote part enough to rust the brains of any clever man, as you might pass a month without meeting anyone who could talk on any subject above pigs and cows.”
Flocks and herds, or pigs and cows, are not bad themes for talk, if anyone can handle themes judiciously and keep them in their place—flocks and herds are not like golf. But in reality they may be burdensome. My grandfather notes with pleasure, 13 December 1841, “My cows are regularly fed, three times a day, unlike farmer’s cows which catch what they can,” and then rather wearily, 10 August 1869, “My farm is a trouble and expense.” And the lesson is, never have a hobby that you cannot cast aside. You want no needless worries at a time when you have one foot in the grave and then get the gout in the other one.
In my father’s diary of his first visit to London he speaks of pictures at the Royal Academy and National Gallery and elsewhere, but the only artist whom he mentions by name is Benjamin West. This was in 1832, and West had died in 1820; he had been President of the Academy for nearly thirty years and was still in high repute. There are two wash drawings here signed, ‘B. West, 1785’ and ‘B. West, Windsor, 1788.’ The latter is one of his designs for the friezes at the Queen’s Lodge, built by George the Third and since destroyed. It is four feet long and seven inches high, with thirty-three figures personifying arts and sciences; the fine arts in the middle, the peaceful arts and sciences on one side and the warlike on the other. The earlier drawing is of Segestes giving his daughter to Germanicus as a hostage for Arminius. This was a favourite subject then, and West painted several pictures of it, the earliest in 1772.
West’s drawings are generally a great deal better than his paintings, and Galt gives the reason in hisLife of West,II. 204.—In drawing and colouring he was one of the greatest artists of his age, but his powers of conception were far higher; “and it is this wonderful force of conception which renders his sketches so much more extraordinary than his finished pictures.” West is in oblivion now with most of the Academicians of his time, except the portrait painters. (There is a picture by one of those Academicians in Teign Grace church, a Madonna by James Barry, quite unnoticed now.) But repute depends on fashion, not on merit; and many artists of less merit are extolled.
Rustic critics judge things in a different way. Two large oil paintings here were praised—“There bain’t no other’n like’n in this parish, no, nor yet the next: look at their size and finish.” A portrait was praised also as a speaking likeness—“Why, any blind man could tell ‘twere he.” (Portraits, I may note, are known as photos here, even portraits of old ancestors; and ‘photos’ is coming to include all kinds of pictures, as ‘pictures’ now means movies.) I brought a very good Persian carpet down from London, and the criticism was—“Well, and if you’d got that old bit by you, I d’esay it were all so well as buyin’ a new’n.”
A friend of my mother’s writes to her from Brighton, 28 October 1841, “I have been twice to be charmed though not mesmerized by that delightful pet of yours Jullien and his helps (at the Town Hall) and a very grand affair they made of it. After beautiful Overtures, Waltzes and a capital set of Irish Quadrilles by Jullien, they gave us the Storming of St Jean d’Acre in perfection. The piece commenced with a slow movement of ‘God save the Queen,’ and after sundry descriptive morceaux the attack began and Jullien was in all his glory. Bombs, cannon, musquetry, bells tolling, shouts of victory, etc., and lots of blue lights, Roman Candles and last (though not least in effect) that beautiful rich crimson light that you saw last year.” And one of my great-aunts who liked all that, complained in later years that Wagner was so noisy.
Jullien brought Berlioz to England. My father was at the Opera, 25 June 1853, for the first night ofBenvenuto Cellini, and was impressed by it, or rather by the final scene, the casting of the statue. And it might be more impressive now with better stage machinery for it—the furnace, the molten metal running down into the mould, and then the breaking of the mould revealing the great figure of Perseus still aglow with heat.—The real statue is said to be Cellini’s masterpiece; but I do not agree. I think myself that he surpassed it in the relief of Perseus and Andromeda on the pedestal below.
On first hearing Boito’sMefistofeleI recognized the chirruping of the angels as a familiar sound, but could not recollect where I had heard it. I had really heard it in expresses between Paris and Marseilles. Some of the P.L.M. carriages had wheels, or springs, or something, which gave forth just that sound when they were running fast; and it may be heard on some of the G.W.R. carriages, but with a different rhythm and pitch. A railwayman assures me that the English engines talk and (being foul-mouthed creatures) use unseemly words. Since learning this from him, I have distinctly heard an engine saying, “blów and blást it, fétch anóther,” when sent off up these gradients here with load enough for two; and then, quite cheerfully, “nów I’ve dóne it, nów I’ve dóne it,” when it has reached the top.
Writing from Teignmouth on 3 August 1854, my grandfather says, “There is nothing new here, but a ship of this place has just arrived literally gutted by the Greek pirates. She was laden with raisins. The crew were obliged to beg for their lives, they had but three biscuits left on coming to Falmouth. That must be put stop to somehow.” Greece was a nuisance then: the coast had been blockaded by the English fleet, and French and English troops were landed at the Piræus in May to stop the Greeks from siding with the Russians in the Crimean war. He writes on 2 April, “As war is declared, the papers will be interesting. I fancy people have been too sanguine.”
After the Coup d’état he writes from here, 7 December 1851, “Well, the President is taking very high ground, and no doubt he will make himself Emperor, if he can keep the Army on his side,” and further on 26 January, “What a scoundrel that President is.” But he went astray in saying that the President would not become Emperor “without a desperate struggle,” and still further astray on 12 October 1851 in generalizing from some undesirables whom he had seen, “America must now be made up of outcasts and rogues of all nations.”
In one of his letters—it looks just like the rest—he says on 17 December 1843, “I can scarcely tell if I am not writing plainer and more legibly than usual, as it is by candle, but I fancy so. I am writing with a metal pen. When at Moreton last, I bought some and am much pleased with them, for my sight is so bad that even with the assistance of glasses I cannot make a pen by candle light and very badly by daylight.” Twenty years after that, I was taught to make a pen (that is, to cut a quill into a point) as one of the things that every child must learn. Metal pens did not come into common use until after 1840, though introduced some years before, and many people still despised them. A friend of my father’s writes to him, 13 September 1856, “I hope you will be able to read my letter, but as I write with a steel pen, I am not quite certain of it.” Few people now could write so neatly with a quill; and his writing here is just as neat as ever.
Old letters and diaries can be trusted when they are recording facts; but they have never been revised, and may contain opinions which the writers would have modified on second thoughts. My father writes to my sister from Perugia, 17 September 1876, “This is the most curious and romantic place I ever saw: Laon is nothing to it.” Curious and romantic places generally had bad hotels, and Perugia had a good one; and I suspect this made him view the place benignantly and give it this excessive praise. He notes in his diary, 24 August 1874, “Elbe scenery rather fine, tho’ not equal to the Danube, Rhine or Moselle, but better than the Meuse or Loire.” He wrote this at Dresden, just after coming down the Elbe from Schandau; and I imagine he was thinking of the scenery there, forgetting other parts.
I have a letter of 14 February 1911 from Henry Montagu Butler, then Master of Trinity, but headmaster at Harrow at the time when I was there; and in this letter he says, “You and Arthur Evans are, I think, the chief antiquarians of our Harrow generation, Hastings Rashdall and Charles Gore our most learned and original theologians, Walter Sichel and George Russell our most fertile writers in general literature.” I do not know whether that was a considered opinion or only a passing thought: in either case I offer Sir Arthur my condolences on being mentioned in the same breath with me. As for the two theologians, here is something that Dean Rashdall lately wrote—“I am sure that on no subject but theology could Bishop Gore have been so blind to the requirement of ordinary fairness and straight dealing between man and man.” I suggested that he could have put it better in schoolboy diction with words like liar and sneak, but he informs me that he thinks those terms too strong.
It was rather a shock to me when a former fag of mine was made a Bishop—not Gore, of course—but you can never tell how fellows will turn out. Another fellow, in the same house, was sacked for getting drunk and disorderly in Harrow town. He succeeded to a Peerage and was a huge success as a Colonial Governor; and I believe his secret of success was giving the Colonials a finer Cognac, and more of it, than any Governor had given them before.
In his Harrow holidays down here my brother was telling one of my great-aunts such yarns that my sister wrote off to my father, 12 August 1862, “He teazes her dreadfully, and tells her the most extraordinary things about the Exhibition. When she asked him if all the boys dined together at school, he told her that half dined at the King’s Head and the other half at the Turk’s, and those that were not hungry could have a chop and bottle of stout in their rooms.” It was not so: at any rate, in my time.
He usually was very accurate, feeling that exaggeration spoiled a narrative of facts. Keep strictly to the facts, or launch out boldly into fiction. On the same principle he would not give a sixpence to relieve a case of destitution; but if the case was put before him and he was asked for twenty pounds, he might perhaps give the twenty, feeling that it might do good where sixpences were wasted. He did not often waste his money; but one evening on coming out of a theatre he meant to throw a sixpence to a man who found a hansom for us, and threw him a half-sovereign by mistake, and I heard the man say fervently, “Thank God, all the Gentlemen aren’t dead.”
With his prodigious memory my brother could have written books of this sort far better than I have written these; and I am sorry I did not oftener make sure of things by asking him. (He died five-and-twenty years ago.) As it is, I have left out things of which I am not sure; and some of these things were quite worth saying, if true; but I wished to keep as closely as I could to facts.
I once was telling a man a thing I thought would interest him; and he stopped me short—“I heard that from your brother, and shan’t forget it. I was out in Kensington Gardens with my wife, before we married, and he came up and told us that; and I didn’t want it then. I had just that moment proposed to her, and she had not had time to reply.” I hope I have not said anything here that has been heard before, like that.