And now for the child who was so happy in his surroundings, and, above all, in those who were to care for him.
There were naturally certain nursery traditions about me of the magnifying kind, but, taken as a whole, I don't think I can claim to have been anything but a normal child, with health fair to moderate and an intelligence which was reasonably quick and responsive. I had, however, no educational precociousness; I did not read till I was nearly nine, and even then did not use the power of reading. The book habit did not come till I was twelve or thirteen-though then it came, as far as poetry was concerned, with a rush. By fifteen I had read all the older English poets and most of the new. In reading poetry I showed a devotion which I am thankful to say I have always maintained. In this matter at least I am the opposite of Darwin. He confessed that the power to read poetry left him entirely in middle life. The older I grow, the more I love verse.
The actual study of metre was a source of acute satisfaction. It is said of me, indeed, that when, at a little more than two and a half years old, we were starting for a long journey to Pau, where my mother had been ordered to winter, I insisted on my father not packing, but taking with him in his hand, Spenser'sFaerie Queen. He had been reading it to us that autumn. I did not know what a journey meant, but I was determined the readings should not be broken. I also could not have known what Spenser meant, but his stanza fed ear, and heart, and mind with melody.
It was at this age, too, that I seem to have made two theological observations which greatly amused my family. I was discovered one day digging with tempestuous energy in the garden. When asked what I was doing, I replied, "Digging for hell-fire!" That was especially curious because my father, as a strong Broad Churchman and a devoted friend and disciple of Frederick Maurice, was a wholehearted disbeliever in hell and its flames. He had "dismissed Hell with costs," as Lord Westbury said, ever since he came to man's estate. How I derived my knowledge on this point was never cleared up. Demons with three-pronged forks and curly tails are, of course, universally regarded as "the friends of little children" by natural right, and my preference I must suppose was transferred to their flaming home.
My other early piece of theological criticism was characteristic. Either my father or my mother, I forget which, was explaining to me the story of the Crucifixion and our Lord's arrest by the armed men of the High Priest. Greatly surprised and perturbed by the fact that Christ did not resist and make a fight of it I energetically enquired, "Hadn't He a gun?" I was told No. "Hadn't He a sword?" No. And then: "Hadn't He even a stick with a point?" Though not naturally combative, I have always been a strong believer in the virtue of the counterattack as the best, or, indeed, the only efficient form of self-defence.
I was, I believe, an easy-going, contented child, with no tendency to be frightened either by strangers, by imaginary terrors, or by the dark. I jogged easily along the Nursery high-road. There was, however, a family tradition that, though as a rule I was perfectly willing to let other children have my toys, and would not take the trouble to do what nurses call "stand up for myself," I did occasionally astonish my playmates and my guardians by super-passionate outbursts. These, however, were very rare indeed, for all my life I have had a great dislike or even horror of anything in the shape of losing my temper, an unconscious recognition, as it were, of the wisdom of the Roman saying, "Anger is a short madness." Instinctively I felt with Beaumont and Fletcher:
Oh, what a beast in uncollected man!
My general psychology, as far as I can tell from memory, was plain and straightforward when a child. I have no recollection of feeling any general depression or disappointment, of thinking that I was misunderstood,i.e.of entertaining what is now called "an inferiority complex." I never gave way to any form of childish melancholy. I did not even have alarming, or mysterious, or metaphysical dreams! What makes this more curious is the fact that I very much outgrew my strength, about the age of nine or ten. I was not allowed to play active games, or run about, or do any of the things in which I delighted.
Though without great physical strength, I was all my life exceedingly fond of the joys of bodily exercise, whether swimming, rowing, riding, walking, mountaineering, skating, playing tennis or racquets or whatever game was going.
In none of these pastimes did I reach anything approaching excellence, but from all of them I got intense enjoyment. I tasted, indeed, almost every form of athleticism and genuinely smacked my lips at the flavour of each in turn, yet never bothered about the super-pleasure which comes from doing such things as well as they can be done.
Though my bodily health did not give me an unhappy or depressed childhood, or make me suffer from any sort of morbid reaction, I had occasionally a very curious and somewhat rare experience—one which, though it has been noted and discussed, has never, as far as I know, been fully explained by physicians either of the body or of the soul.
The condition to which I refer is that which the musician Berlioz called "isolement"—the sense of spiritual isolation, which seizes on those who experience it with a poignancy amounting to awe. Wordsworth'sOde to Immortalityaffords thelocus classicusin the way of description:
Fallings from us, vanishings,Blank misgivings of a creatureMoving about in worlds not realised.
I once amused myself by getting together a large number of descriptions of "isolement" and found that, though they may differ considerably, they have in common the characteristics enumerated by the Ode.
The first thing to be noted about the sense ofisolementis that it comes, not in sleeping, but in waking hours, and that, whether truly or not, it brings with it the feeling that it is the result of some external impulse. The best form of explanation, however, is to describe as exactly as I can my own sensations. Though the sense ofisolementhas been experienced by me as a little child, as a lad, as a young man, and even up to the age of forty or forty-five, the recollections of my first visitation, which occurred when I could not have been more, at the very most, than six years of age, are very much more vivid and keener-edged than those of the later occasions.
Outside the two doors of the nurseries at Sutton Court there is a long passage, and in this is something unusual—a little fire-place and grate. I was one day standing in that passage, quite close to the grate, and expecting nothing in particular. Then suddenly there came over me a feeling so strange and so different from anything I had ever felt before as to be almost terrifying. It wasoverwhelmingin the true meaning of the word. Incredible as it seems in the case of so small a child, I had the clearest and most poignant feeling of being left completely, utterly alone, not merely in the world, but in something far, far bigger—in the universe, in a vastness infinite and unutterable.
As with Wordsworth, everything seemed to vanish and fall away from me, even my own body. I was literally "beside myself." I stood a naked soul in the sight of what I mustnow, though of course did not then, call for want of better explanatory expressions, the All, the Only, the Whole, the Everlasting. It was no annihilation, no temporary absorption into the Universal Consciousness, no ingression into the Divine Shadow, that the child experienced. Rather it was the amplest exaltation and magnification of the Ego which it is possible to conceive. I gained, not lost, by discarding the "lendings" of life. Something that was from one point of view a void, and from another a rounded completeness, hemmed me in.
Here I should perhaps interpolate yet another caveat. I did not, of course, as a child, use or even know of the vocabulary of the metaphysicians. I did, however, entertain thoughts which I could not then express, but which the words given above most nearly represent. There is one exception. In talking about "a naked soul" I am notinterpretingmy childish thrill of deep emotion into a later vocabulary. I have always remembered the emotion in those very words. It is so recorded on my memory. Of that I am sure.
The effect on me was intensely awe-inspiring—so awe-inspiring, indeed, as to be disturbing in a high degree. Though it did not in the least terrify me or torture me, or make me have anything approaching a dread of its repetition, I experienced a kind of rawness and sensitiveness of soul such as when, to put it pathologically, a super-sensitive mucous membrane surface is touched roughly by a hand or instrument. One is not exactly pained, but one quivers to the impact. So quivered my soul, though not my brain or my body, for there was no suggestion of any bodily faintness, or of any agitation of "grey matter," in the experience. For example, I was not in the least dizzy. I was outside my bodily self and far away from the world of matter.
In addition to this awe and sensitiveness, and what one might call spiritual discomfort, there was something altogether curious and unexpected, something that still remains for me as much the most vivid and also much the most soul-shaking part of the experience, something which many people will regard as impossible to have occupied the mind of a child of six. I can best describe it, though very inadequately, as a sudden realisation of the appalling greatness of the issues of living. I avoid saying "life and death" deliberately, for Death was nowhere in the picture. I was confronted in an instant, and without any preparation, or gradation of emotion, not only with the immanence but with the ineffable greatness of that whole of which I was a part. Though it may be a little difficult to make the distinction clear, this feeling had nothing to do with the sense of isolation. It was an entirely separate experience. I felt, with a conviction which I know not how to translate into words, that what I was "in for" by being a sentient human being was immeasurably great. It was thence that the sense of awe came, thence the extraordinary sensitiveness, thence the painful exhilaration, the spiritual sublimation. "Oh! what a tremendous thing it is to be a living person! Oh, how dreadfully great!" That is the way the child felt. That was what kept ringing in my ears.
Though I was isolated, I had no sense of smallness or of utter insignificance in face of the Universe. I did not feel myself a miserable, fortuitous atom, a grain of cosmic dust. I felt, though, again, I am interpreting rather than recording, that I was fully equal to my fate. As a human being I was not only immortal, butcapax imperii,—a creature worthy of a heritage so tremendous.
From that day to this, talk about the unimportance, the futility of man and his destiny has left me quite cold.
Though, as a small child, I was by no means without religious feeling, and had, as I have always had, a deep and instinctive sense of the Divine existence, I had not the least desire to translate my vision of the universal into the terms of theology.
That is a very odd fact, but a fact it is. The vision remained, and remains, isolated, immutable, and apart. Though I had perfect confidence in my father and mother, and often talked to them of spiritual matters, I did not at the time feel any impulse to relate my experience either to them or to anyone else. I had no desire to unload my mind—a remarkable thing for so eager a talker and expounder as I have always been. This reticence, I am sure, came not from a fear of being laughed at, or of shocking anyone, or again from a fear of a repetition of the experience. It simply did not occur to me to talk. The experience was solely mine, I was satisfied and even a little perturbed by the result. Probably some sense of the great difficulty of finding words to fit my thoughts also held me back.
It was only after two or three similar visitations that I casually told the story of this "ecstasy" to my younger brother. I was then about twenty-four and he twenty. I was much surprised to find that he had never had any experiences of this particular kind, for I supposed them common. He, however, became much interested, and some little time after showed me the passage to which I have referred in Berlioz'Memoirs.
This set me investigating, and I soon found examples of states of ecstasy similar to, if not exactly like, my own. Tennyson supplied one in the visional passages in thePrincess. Kinglake had a visitation akin toisolement. Wordsworth, however, came nearest to my sensations. Indeed, he describes them exactly.
My later manifestations ofisolementwere similar to my first, though not so vivid. As I write at the age of sixty-two, my impression is that the last occasion on which I experienced the sense ofisolementwas about twenty years ago. How welcome would be a repetition! I do not, however, expect another ecstasy, any more than did Wordsworth, and for very much the same reasons. I do not think that the vision was due to any morbid or irregular working of the brain, or to any other pathological or corporeal mal-functioning. I believe that the experience was purely an experience of the spirit. That is why I attribute to it a psychological and even metaphysical value.
At any rate, it corresponds with my personal metaphysic of existence. Further, I think with Wordsworth that in all probability the fact that it was most vivid in early childhood and gradually ceased when I grew up, is a proof that in some way or other it was based on a spiritual memory. Wordsworth, after the description I have already given, goes on:—
High instincts, before which our mortal natureDid tremble like a guilty thing surprised;But for those first affections,Those shadowy recollections,Which, be they what they may,Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;Uphold us—cherish—and have power to makeOur noisy years seem moments in the beingOf the eternal silence; truths that wakeTo perish never;Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,Nor man nor boy,Nor all that is at enmity with joy,Can utterly abolish or destroy!
That seems to me the explanation which can most reasonably be applied to the mental phenomena which I have described. It satisfied me completely. Wordsworth struck the exact balance between mental exaltation and the trembling "like a guilty thing surprised," of which I have given a more prosaic account.
I must add here that theOde to Immoralityis not a poem which my father used to read to us as children, and as far as I can remember I did not take to reading it, or know anything about it, till I was seventeen or eighteen; that is, ten or twelve years later. Even when it became a favourite with me, for some reason or other I did not dwell upon theisolementpart of it, but rather upon the earlier passages. Curiously enough, it was a quotation in Clough'sAmours de Voyageswhich first made me realise that Wordsworth was dealing withisolement.
I hope no one will think that in describing my experiences ofisolementin my own mind I was exaggerating the importance of the incident. I know that similar waking trances are very common. I also know that modern psychology, or, I should say, certain schools of modern psychology, regard them merely as manifestations or outcrops of the unconscious self. If I understand the argument rightly, they hold that just as in dreams the unconscious self gets possession of one's personality and the consciousness is for a certain time deposed or exiled, the same thing may happen, and does happen in our waking hours. Thereforeisolementmust not be regarded as anything wonderful or mystic, but merely as a day-dream. I admit that this seems at first sight a plausible explanation. Yet I can say with Gibbon, "this statement is probable; but certainly false."
Anyone who has experienced the feeling as I experienced it would think it by no means unlikely that it represented something far deeper, and was due to some impulse external to oneself. Certainly to me the feeling was essentially one of revelation, of being suddenly made to see and understand things which before had been dark or unknown. I realised that what I should now call the materialistic hypothesis would not help me to a solution. No "fanciful shapes of a plastic earth" were in my vision. MyEgo, whatever it was or was to be, was, I perceived, a spirit and not a creature of flesh-and-blood, and also not a hypothesis, but a reality.
Since it is appropriate to my account of the phenomenon ofisolement, I may add a curious passage in Walt Whitman'sSpecimen Days and Collect, which shows that the poet knew this form of ecstasy:
Even for the treatment of the universal, in politics, metaphysics, or anything, sooner or later we come down to our single, solitary soul. There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining, eternal. This is the thought of identity—yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual and vaguest of earth's dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only entrance to all facts. In such devout hours, in the midst of the significant wonders of heaven and earth (significant only because of the Me in the centre), creeds, conventions fall away and become of no account before this simple idea. Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable, once liberated and look'd upon, it expands over the whole earth and spreads to the roof of heaven. The quality of BEING, in the object's self, according to its own central idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom and thereto—not criticism by other standards and adjustments thereto—is the lesson of Nature.
Who knows whether this may not be Walt Whitman's "secret," or, at anyrate, the spiritual experience of which the poet's latest biographer,Mr. Emory Holloway, writes? His interesting account of Walt Whitman'sManuscript Note-Books is preceded by the following statement:
The first of these (The MS. Note-Books) begins with a sense of suppressed, half-articulate power in the language of a novel ecstasy. Some mystical experience, some great if not sudden access of intellectual power, some enlargement and clarifying of vision, some selfless throb of cosmic sympathy, has come to Walt Whitman. At first he can only ejaculate his wonder, and pray for the advent of a perfect man who will be worthy to communicate to the world this new vision of humanity. Then, like the prophet Isaiah, whose great book he is wont to carry in his pocket to Coney Island, he suddenly realises that a vision is itself a commission; and from this moment he dedicates himself to a life task as audacious as it seems divine.
Though the subject, I admit, fascinates me, I must say no more on it, lest my autobiography should become "a sort of a commentary" on "the ecstasy," featuring Plotinus!
Though always intensely interested in things psychical, and a copious reader of all the phenomena of the unseen world, I have only had one other psychic adventure in the whole of my life, and that an insignificant one. It is, however, worth recording shortly. It happened that in the early autumn of the year 1920, while my son was away from home, learning French in a family at Versailles, I went to my dressing- room to sleep, at about three o'clock in the afternoon. I woke up at four o'clock—an hour's sleep is my ration—with a start and the recollection that I had just dreamt a dream of a very alarming kind. In my dream my wife had come to me with a telegram in her hand, and had told me that our son had been killed in a hunting accident in France. The impression was extremely vivid, and for a moment I was greatly perturbed. This, however, did not last. A little reflection soon made me feel that it could be nothing but a bad dream—a nightmare. People do not hunt in August, or at Versailles, and therefore there was no reason whatever to regard the dream seriously. Still, as a faithful member of the Psychical Society, I thought I must take notice of the incident, even though it seemed ridiculous. No scientific investigator ever dares to say that any "odd" observed fact is not worth considering.
Accordingly I sat down and wrote to my son, mentioning the dream and asking whether between three and four on that day he was in any kind of mental trouble or anxiety—anything that by an imperfect telephonic message might have got through to me as a hunting accident. To my astonishment, I received by return a letter from Versailles telling me that about three-fifteen on the day in question he had been in a small railway accident, which, though not resulting in any deaths, had injured several people, and had given him a fairly severe shaking.
Considering how seldom I dream, and if I do dream, how seldom the dream concerns anybody else, it is difficult to account for this as a mere coincidence. My dreams, when I have them, are practically all of the pure nightmare description and of the usual sealed-pattern. I am worried by the sense of not being able to pack in time to catch my train, or else I am compelled to go back to Oxford and try to pass an examination under impossible and humiliating conditions. Indeed, I don't think I can ever remember a dream, except this one about my son, which was of a non- egotistical kind, that is, in which somebody else speaks, and of which I am not the centre. In a word, it seems to me that, though my son had no recollection of thinking of me (the accident was not important enough for that), his unconscious self got busy and, as I was in a light sleep, it was able to telephone an excited message to its nearest relation, my unconscious self.
MY CHILDHOOD (Continued)
It must not be supposed that either my childhood or boyhood was a psychic or poetic affair, or that in any way I was a cranky and abnormal child. I was nothing of the kind. In spite of what I had better call my metrical precociousness, which I deal with in detail in a later chapter, I was exceedingly fond of outdoor sports of all sorts. Though never a very strong swimmer, I loved particularly what Dr. Johnson might have called the "pleasures of immersion," whether in the icy cold of our Somersetshire streams or in the bland waters of the Mediterranean. The back of the horse and the buffet of the wave still remain for me the intensest of physical delights. Next in my affections comes mountain- climbing, though here I must not write of it. Instead, I would record two memories—one of the very beginning, and one of the very end, of my childhood. My very first memory is concerned with the American Civil War—a conflict which has always exercised a great influence over my mind. To me the struggle between the North and the South stands for one of the pivotal facts in the history of the English-speaking race. I have a clear recollection of my mother showing me a full-page picture, probably in theIllustrated London News, entitled "The Last Shot in the War." It was, if my memory serves, a darkish picture, with a big piece of artillery dimly portrayed in the foreground, and a still dimmer background, in which one seemed to catch sight of shadowy armies, warring in the gloom. Or were they only trees and clouds? I cannot remember my mother's words, but I have a recollection, firm though so distant, that she told me how the great war had come about, and how this was the end of all the misery and slaughter. The year, I think, must have been '65, that is, when I was five years old.
[Illustration: Sutton Court, Somerset.]
As soon as my father began to talk to us of great events, which was when I was about six, and to expound, as fathers should, the merits of the struggle, I became an intense Northerner. All my father's sympathies were with the North, both on the imperative duty of maintaining the Union and on the slavery issue. He was an intense abolitionist. As a lad of sixteen or seventeen, he had given up sugar, at the end of the 'twenties, because in those days sugar was grown by slaves on the West Indian plantations. He would not support a slave industry, and until the slaves were freed he did not go back to sugar.
Curiously enough, though my father greatly admired Mr. Lincoln, he did not put into my mind that passionate devotion to the saviour of the Union which I developed later. By this I do not mean that he was critical of Lincoln, but merely that Lincoln was not one of his special heroes. This fact, however, made a sounder foundation for my feelings about America and the American people than would the mere cult of the individual. I learned first to understand the greatness of the separation issue, to realise the magnificence and the significance of the American nation.
Another point of interest in the context is worth noting. My American readers must not run away with the idea that there was anything strange in a Somersetshire squire being on the side of the North. It is quite a delusion to suppose that all the people of education and position in England were Southerners. They were nothing of the kind. I cannot, of course, remember those times myself, but I often talked them over with men like Lord Cromer, who not only was on the Northern side, but paid a visit to the Northern Armies as a young artillery officer, and heard the guns at Petersburg. He pointed out how strong Conservatives such as his uncle, Tom Baring, were convinced Northerners, as was also, of course, Disraeli.
No doubt the man who did the harm in England and made Americans believe that we rejoiced in the rebellion, was Mr. Gladstone. Partly through want of information and partly through a curious mental twist, he persuaded himself that the South was fighting for freedom like the Italians in Naples or Lombardy. He not only believed in "the erring sister, go in peace" policy, but considered that for "erring sister" should be substituted "good and gallant sister." Mr. Gladstone's influence was, unfortunately, at that time very great, and he misled an enormous number of people on the merits of the quarrel. Happily my father, though a keen admirer of Gladstone, did not follow him here. He maintained the Northern view against all comers, as did the Duke of Argyll, Lord Houghton, and dozens of other men of light and leading, including, I am glad to say, my future chiefs, the Editors ofThe Spectator.
Of another combative memory I can be more specific, for my recollection of it is positively photographic. I can see myself, a little creature in a straw hat, playing on what the nurses used to call "the libery lawn"— a beautiful stretch of sward, upon which the Great Parlour window opened. This lawn is half surrounded by an old red sandstone battlement wall, with a long, terrace-like mound in front of it. Suddenly, in the middle of our play, I saw the Great Parlour window open and my father, with his hand held to shelter his eyes from the glare, stepping on to the gravel path. He called to my elder brother and me that if we liked he would read us an account of a great battle that had just been fought in Austria. It was the Battle of Sadowa. My father held in his hand a copy of theDaily News, to which he was a fairly frequent contributor. The paper contained Forbes's vivid account of the action which humbled the Austrian Empire before its Hohenzollern rivals. I was always glad to hear about a fight, and was very soon tucked up at the end of my father's green sofa. Owing to his stiff knee he always used a sofa to rest and read on rather than sat in an armchair. He began to read at once, for he was as eager as we were to devour the story of how "Our Special Correspondent" climbed the church-tower and saw men and armies battling in the plain below.
I did not, of course, understand the nature of the war, but my father was greatly moved and read with such emotion that the encounter lived before my eyes. Here I should note that my father, though the most humane of men, was intensely fond of stories of war, and in a layman's way understood a good deal about strategy. For example, he knew not only, like Sir Thomas Browne, all the battles in Plutarch, but also all the big Indian battles and those of the Peninsula. He was a special student of Waterloo, for he had talked with plenty of men and officers who had been in the Belgian Campaign.
Another recollection of my childhood will come in aptly here, for it concerns a Waterloo veteran. He lived at Chew Magna, and kept a small shop. Like many of the combatants on the British side, he was probably only about fifteen or sixteen years old at Waterloo. Half the regiments there were Militia regiments, and notoriously were composed of lads. Therefore, in '69 or '70, when I used to ride over to see him, my soldier was only about seventy-one or seventy-two. At his shop could be bought pencils, pens, and little books of most attractive appearance, sealing-wax and many other objects fascinating to the schoolboy. However, the real attraction was the seller, and not the things sold. As soon as I discovered that the man had been at Waterloo, I loved to go in, pull over the old man's stock, and then gossip with him about the Battle. Unless my recollection plays me false, he was distinctly a good talker. This is how he told the story of the 18th of June:
Our regiment was marched out into a cornfield. The officers told us to lie down on the ground and wait, because the enemy had got their artillery playing on us. Cannon-balls kept coming over pretty close to the ground. If we kept flat, however, there was not much risk. Every now and then the artillery fire would cease entirely, and then our officers called us to get up as quick as ever we could, and form square. The front rank lay down, the second rank knelt, the third stooped low, and the rear rank stood up. Our bayonets were fixed and our muskets loaded. There was not much time. As soon as we had got into place we heard the cavalry thundering up. Then, all of a sudden and as if they had sprung up from the ground (there was a little hollow in front), they were riding round us, riding like mad, cursing and swearing and shouting, waving their swords, and trying to force their horses on to our bayonets. We kept shooting at 'em all the time. But the bullets used to bound off their steel coats. (They were, of course, cuirassiers.) We soon found out, however, that if we aimed under their arm-pits, or at their faces, or the lower part of their bodies, we could kill them, or at least damage them. Our square was never really broken, but every now and then one of the Frenchmen would drive his horse right through our bayonets and into the middle, where we killed him. Of course, their idea was that if one got in, the others could follow him, but we never let them do that. We always closed up and held fast. Then, all of a sudden, the cavalry would go back as quick as they came, and in a minute there was not one of them to be seen. They had all utterly disappeared. As soon as ever they were gone, the guns began to fire again, and down we all went flat to the ground, and this went on all the morning, first up and then down.
From a private soldier's point of view, this was, I expect, a very accurate description of the battle.
I, of course, wanted to know more, and especially whether he had seen the Duke. He declared that he had, but it was a dim picture. According to my friend, he saw the Duke and his staff riding by at the back of the square, and heard him say something to an officer, but what he did not catch. If he had only known, he was describing a particular characteristic of the Duke. Wellington, when in action, was the dumbest of dumb things, and it would have required a moral earthquake to get more than some curt order out of him. Even a "tinker's curse" or "a tuppenny damn" would have seemed loquacious in him on such an occasion. The not very sensational "Up Guards and at 'em!" was in later life disputed by the Duke. Under great pressure, the most he would admit was that he might possibly have said it, though he did not believe he ever did.
The kind of battle remark he favoured was one which my father used to tell me he had heard from Mountstewart Elphinstone, his father's bosom friend. Elphinstone rode with the Duke at the Battle of Assaye. When some hundred Mahratta guns were in full blast against the British line, Elphinstone asked Sir Arthur Wellesley—it was Elphinstone's first battle—whether the fire was really hot. "Well, they're making a good deal of noise, but they don't seem to be doing much damage," was the reply of the Duke, after he had carefully looked up and down the line.
By a curious piece of luck, we boys were in touch not only with a Waterloo veteran, but also with a man who had been at Trafalgar. At Lady Waldegrave's house, Strawberry Hill, one of the men in the garden had been, as a boy, on theVictory. My brother Harry remembers speaking to him, but, though I must have seen him, I have no recollection of him, and probably did not talk to him. If I had, I am sure I should have questioned him, and would probably have remembered the answers.
I will end the stories of my childhood by relating an incident which always seems to me to belong to the earlier epoch, though it really happened when I was about thirteen, and therefore no longer a child. The scene is Sutton, and therefore it must have been during the holidays, for I am sure I was living at our tutor's at Chewton at the time. I had gone out for a country walk by myself, for I was fond of roaming about the fields, and especially of tracing to their sources the wooded gullies abounding in our Somersetshire country. On such solitary rambles I was always accompanied by a poet, in my pocket. On the occasion I am going to describe, Swinburne in hisPoems and Balladswas my guest of honour.
I emerged from my riverine exploration on to a hillside where the stream rose—near a place with the delightfully rustic name of Hinton Belwit. Here the springtime and the bright sun invited me to sit upon a stile and to read of Dolores or Faustine, orThe Garden of Proserpine, —I know not which. While thus absorbed and probably muttering verses aloud, I did not notice a typical Somersetshire farmer of the seventies who was approaching the stile. When, therefore, I heard his voice and looked up, it was as if the man had dropped from the clouds. What he was saying was quite as unexpected as his appearance. It ran something like this: "It be all craft, craft. You men be as full of craft as hell be of tailors." Needless to say, I was enchanted. This looked like the beginning of an adventure, for the old gentleman was puffing hard and in the condition which Jeremy Taylor describes as "very zealously angry."
I, however, was too much interested to learn what he meant to resent his abuse, and politely invited an explanation. He went on to declare with great vehemence what a curse this book-learning and education were to the working-men and how they filled them with "craft"—that was the refrain of all his remarks. It made them unfit to work and to serve honest men like himself, who had never had anything to do with that evil thing—book-learning. When I gently asked why the sight of me had made him think about it, he explained, with a look of infinite slyness, that he saw I was reading a book. Then came an amusing disclosure. At fourteen I was a very much overgrown lad, almost as tall as I am now, and weighing almost as much and he had mistaken me for one of the ordination pupils of a Roman Catholic priest who lived in the valley close by. They were wont to walk about the country breviary in hand, not merely reading, but actually reciting the office to themselves. My green book was taken for a breviary, or for a book of hours, and my mouthings ofDoloresorThe Garden of Proserpinefor "the blessed mutter of the Mass"! Assured by me that I was not a priest, he asked me who I was. I told him my name and he instantly stretched out a huge and grimy hand, and shook mine with a hearty violence, and insisted that I should come home with him and drink a mug of cider. I accepted with avidity. It was all in the adventure. Who knows? I might go to his house and find the most delightful maiden in disguise! In fact, anything and everything was possible. So I went, expecting and hoping for great things, though quite willing to be content with small things and "a mug o' zyder" if I could not get anything bigger.
As soon as we got into the farm kitchen and saw the farmer's wife, the old gentleman began to explain his mistake. "And to think, Mother, that this be young Mr. Strachey, after all. You can mind, carn't you, wife, how we used to see him and his brothers riding by with their ponies and their long hair? It is just like King Arthur and the cakes, it is." At this his good wife, with a toss of her head, said, "Don't you be so ignorant, maaster, talking about what you don't know. It's King Henry you means." "That I don't. I mean King Arthur. You go down and get the young maaster a mug o' zyder, and don't you say no more."
Then he slowly closed one pig-like eye and aimed it in my direction. That was his idea of winking. Patting me on the knee, he added, "The women be always like that—bain't they?—always trying to think they know better. It was just like King Arthur and the cakes, weren't it?" I, of course, assented and, I am sorry to say, with the magnificent pedantry of boyhood, reflected that he was not the first person to make the mistake. Did not Mrs. Quickly piously ejaculate that the dead Falstaff was "in Arthur's bosom"? Besides, it was proof that the Somersetshire people still remembered King Arthur—a point treasured by me for my father, who was a keen student and great lover of the Arthurian legends. It was he who edited for Macmillan theMorte d'Arthurin the Globe series. According to my father, and I expect quite rightly, Arthur was the last of the British kings to stand up against the Saxons, and really did inhabit that most magnificent of ditch-defended hills, Cadbury Castle.
Cadbury, as the village at its foot, Queen's Camel, shows, is quite possibly a broken-down form of Camelot. But there is better proof than that. Till forty years ago, and possibly even now, the people round Cadbury told tales of King Arthur, and firmly believed he would come again. For example, the rector of Queen's Camel told my father that a local girl, a housemaid in the Rectory, told him, as if it were a matter of course, that every night of the full moon the King and his Knights rode round the castle hall and watered their horses at the Wishing-Well. She had seen them herself. Another man told the rector that his father had one day seen a sort of opening in the hill, and had looked in. "There he zeed a king sitting in a kind of a cave, with a golden crown on his head and beautiful robes on him."
The best Arthurian story of all was the following. The rector, as an archaeologist, did a little excavation on his own on the flat place at the very top of the hill—a place in which there were what looked like rough foundations. He used to take with him a local labourer to do some of the spade-work. One day they dug up a Quern. The labourer asked what it was. The clergyman explained that it was a form of hand-mill used in the olden days for grinding corn. In reply he was met with one of the most amazing remarks ever made to an antiquarian. "Oh, a little hand- mill be it! Ah, now I understands what I never did before. That's why they fairies take such a lot of corn up to the top of the hill. They be taking it up for to grind."
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 orchez Nègres, 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.
[Illustration: Sutton Court, Somerset]
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.
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 ofparalysis 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.
[Illustration: Mrs. Salome Leaker,—"The Family Nurse."]
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 limetrees rocked to the final crack of the whip over the unhappy Grafton!"The learned dullness of declamation will be silent; and even the venalMuse, 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'sRuth, The White Doe of Rylstone. She was, throughout her life, very fond ofRuthand 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, unfurledTo 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 meretour de forceof 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 inMacbeth, or the death-scene inOthello. 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 giveParadise Losta turn on Sundays. As far as I remember, she never readParadise Regained.Comusand the short poems, especiallyLycidas, 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 likeRuth, but had gone through and enjoyedThe Excursionand 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 ofChilde Harold, but by a thorough appreciation ofDon 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 dunsAnd 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 daysTo 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'sNight 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 theraconteurstill 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: