Outlines (1925)
I
MISS MITFORD
Speaking truthfully, _Mary Russell Mitford and Her Surroundings_ is not
a good book. It neither enlarges the mind nor purifies the heart. There
is nothing in it about Prime Ministers and not very much about Miss
Mitford. Yet, as one is setting out to speak the truth, one must own
that there are certain books which can be read without the mind and
without the heart, but still with considerable enjoyment. To come to the
point, the great merit of these scrapbooks, for they can scarcely be
called biographies, is that they license mendacity. One cannot believe
what Miss Hill says about Miss Mitford, and thus one is free to invent
Miss Mitford for oneself. Not for a second do we accuse Miss Hill of
telling lies. That infirmity is entirely ours. For example: “Alresford
was the birthplace of one who loved nature as few have loved her, and
whose writings ‘breathe the air of the hayfields and the scent of the
hawthorn boughs’, and seem to waft to us ‘the sweet breezes that blow
over ripened cornfields and daisied meadows’.” It is perfectly true that
Miss Mitford was born at Alresford, and yet, when it is put like that,
we doubt whether she was ever born at all. Indeed she was, says Miss
Hill; she was born “on the 16th December, 1787. ‘A pleasant house in
truth it was,’ Miss Mitford writes. ‘The breakfast-room . . . was a
lofty and spacious apartment.’” So Miss Mitford was born in the
breakfast-room about eight-thirty on a snowy morning between the
Doctor’s second and third cups of tea. “Pardon me,” said Mrs. Mitford,
turning a little pale, but not omitting to add the right quantity of
cream to her husband’s tea, “I feel . . .” That is the way in which
Mendacity begins. There is something plausible and even ingenious in her
approaches. The touch about the cream, for instance, might be called
historical, for it is well known that when Mary won £20,000 in the
Irish lottery, the Doctor spent it all upon Wedgwood china, the winning
number being stamped upon the soup plates in the middle of an Irish
harp, the whole being surmounted by the Mitford arms, and encircled by
the motto of Sir John Bertram, one of William the Conqueror’s knights,
from whom the Mitfords claimed descent. “Observe,” says Mendacity, “with
what an air the Doctor drinks his tea, and how she, poor lady, contrives
to curtsey as she leaves the room.” Tea? I inquire, for the Doctor,
though a fine figure of a man, is already purple and profuse, and foams
like a crimson cock over the frill of his fine laced shirt. “Since the
ladies have left the room,” Mendacity begins, and goes on to make up a
pack of lies with the sole object of proving that Dr. Mitford kept a
mistress in the purlieus of Reading and paid her money on the pretence
that he was investing it in a new method of lighting and heating houses
invented by the Marquis de Chavannes. It came to the same thing in the
end—to the King’s Bench Prison, that is to say; but instead of allowing
us to recall the literary and historical associations of the place,
Mendacity wanders off to the window and distracts us again by the
platitudinous remark that it is still snowing. There is something very
charming in an ancient snowstorm. The weather has varied almost as much
in the course of generations as mankind. The snow of those days was more
formally shaped and a good deal softer than the snow of ours, just as an
eighteenth-century cow was no more like our cows than she was like the
florid and fiery cows of Elizabethan pastures. Sufficient attention has
scarcely been paid to this aspect of literature, which, it cannot be
denied, has its importance.
Our brilliant young men might do worse, when in search of a subject,
than devote a year or two to cows in literature, snow in literature, the
daisy in Chaucer and in Coventry Patmore. At any rate, the snow falls
heavily. The Portsmouth mail-coach has already lost its way; several
ships have foundered, and Margate pier has been totally destroyed. At
Hatfield Peveral twenty sheep have been buried, and though one supports
itself by gnawing wurzels which it has found near it, there is grave
reason to fear that the French king’s coach has been blocked on the road
to Colchester. It is now the 16th of February, 1808.
Poor Mrs. Mitford! Twenty-one years ago she left the breakfast-room, and
no news has yet been received of her child. Even Mendacity is a little
ashamed of itself, and, picking up _Mary Russell Mitford and Her
Surroundings_, assures us that everything will come right if we possess
ourselves in patience. The French king’s coach was on its way to
Bocking; at Bocking lived Lord and Lady Charles Murray-Aynsley; and Lord
Charles was shy. Lord Charles had always been shy. Once when Mary
Mitford was five years old—sixteen years, that is, before the sheep
were lost and the French king went to Bocking—Mary “threw him into an
agony of blushing by running up to his chair in mistake for that of my
papa”. He had indeed to leave the room. Miss Hill, who, somewhat
strangely, finds the society of Lord and Lady Charles pleasant, does not
wish to quit it without “introducing an incident in connection with them
which took place in the month of February, 1808”. But is Miss Mitford
concerned in it? we ask, for there must be an end of trifling. To some
extent, that is to say, Lady Charles was a cousin of the Mitfords, and
Lord Charles was shy. Mendacity is quite ready to deal with “the
incident” even on these terms; but, we repeat, we have had enough of
trifling. Miss Mitford may not be a great woman; for all we know she was
not even a good one; but we have certain responsibilities as a reviewer
which we are not going to evade.
There is, to begin with, English literature. A sense of the beauty of
nature has never been altogether absent, however much the cow may change
from age to age, from English poetry. Nevertheless, the difference
between Pope and Wordsworth in this respect is very considerable.
_Lyrical Ballads_ was published in 1798; _Our Village_ in 1824. One
being in verse and the other in prose, it is not necessary to labour a
comparison which contains, however, not only the elements of justice,
but the seeds of many volumes. Like her great predecessor, Miss Mitford
much preferred the country to the town; and thus, perhaps, it may not be
inopportune to dwell for a moment upon the King of Saxony, Mary Anning,
and the ichthyosaurus. Let alone the fact that Mary Anning and Mary
Mitford had a Christian name in common, they are further connected by
what can scarcely be called a fact, but may, without hazard, be called a
probability. Miss Mitford was looking for fossils at Lyme Regis only
fifteen years before Mary Anning found one. The King of Saxony visited
Lyme in 1844, and seeing the head of an ichthyosaurus in Mary Anning’s
window, asked her to drive to Pinny and explore the rocks. While they
were looking for fossils, an old woman seated herself in the King’s
coach—was she Mary Mitford? Truth compels us to say that she was not;
but there is no doubt, and we are not trifling when we say it, that Mary
Mitford often expressed a wish that she had known Mary Anning, and it is
singularly unfortunate to have to state that she never did. For we have
reached the year 1844; Mary Mitford is fifty-seven years of age, and so
far, thanks to Mendacity and its trifling ways, all we know of her is
that she did not know Mary Anning, had not found an ichthyosaurus, had
not been out in a snowstorm, and had not seen the King of France.
It is time to wring the creature’s neck, and begin again at the very
beginning.
What considerations, then, had weight with Miss Hill when she decided to
write _Mary Russell Mitford and Her Surroundings_? Three emerge from the
rest, and may be held of paramount importance. In the first place. Miss
Mitford was a lady; in the second, she was born in the year 1787; and in
the third, the stock of female characters who lend themselves to
biographic treatment by their own sex is, for one reason or another,
running short. For instance, little is known of Sappho, and that little
is not wholly to her credit. Lady Jane Grey has merit, but is undeniably
obscure. Of George Sand, the more we know the less we approve. George
Eliot was led into evil ways which not all her philosophy can excuse.
The Brontës, however highly we rate their genius, lacked that
indefinable something which marks the lady; Harriet Martineau was an
atheist; Mrs. Browning was a married woman; Jane Austen, Fanny Burney,
and Maria Edgeworth have been done already; so that, what with one thing
and another, Mary Russell Mitford is the only woman left.
There is no need to labour the extreme importance of the date when we
see the word “surroundings” on the back, of a book. Surroundings, as
they are called, are invariably eighteenth-century surroundings. When we
come, as of course we do, to that phrase which relates how “as we looked
upon the steps leading down from the upper room, we fancied we saw the
tiny figure jumping from step to step”, it would be the grossest outrage
upon our sensibilities to be told that those steps were Athenian,
Elizabethan, or Parisian. They were, of course, eighteenth-century
steps, leading down from the old panelled room into the shady garden,
where, tradition has it, William Pitt played marbles, or, if we like to
be bold, where on still summer days we can almost fancy that we hear the
drums of Bonaparte on the coast of France. Bonaparte is the limit of the
imagination on one side, as Monmouth is on the other; it would be fatal
if the imagination took to toying with Prince Albert or sporting with
King John. But fancy knows her place, and there is no need to labour the
point that her place is the eighteenth-century. The other point is more
obscure. One must be a lady. Yet what that means, and whether we like
what it means, may both be doubtful. If we say that Jane Austen was a
lady and that Charlotte Brontë was not one, we do as much as need be
done in the way of definition, and commit ourselves to neither side.
It is undoubtedly because of their reticence that Miss Hill is on the
side of the ladies. They sigh things off and they smile things off, but
they never seize the silver table by the legs or dash the teacups on the
floor. It is in many ways a great convenience to have a subject who can
be trusted to live a long life without once raising her voice. Sixteen
years is a considerable stretch of time, but of a lady it is enough to
say, “Here Mary Mitford passed sixteen years of her life and here she
got to know and love not only their own beautiful grounds but also every
turn of the surrounding shady lanes.” Her loves were vegetable, and her
lanes were shady. Then, of course, she was educated at the school where
Jane Austen and Mrs. Sherwood had been educated. She visited Lyme Regis,
and there is mention of the Cobb. She saw London from the top of St.
Paul’s, and London was much smaller then than it is now. She changed
from one charming house to another, and several distinguished literary
gentlemen paid her compliments and came to tea. When the dining-room
ceiling fell down it did not fall on her head, and when she took a
ticket in a lottery she did win the prize. If in the foregoing sentences
there are any words of more than two syllables, it is our fault and not
Miss Hill’s; and to do that writer justice, there are not many whole
sentences in the book which are neither quoted from Miss Mitford nor
supported by the authority of Mr. Crissy.
But how dangerous a thing is life! Can one be sure that anything not
wholly made of mahogany will to the very end stand empty in the sun?
Even cupboards have their secret springs, and when, inadvertently we are
sure, Miss Hill touches this one, out, terrible to relate, topples a
stout old gentleman. In plain English, Miss Mitford had a father. There
is nothing actually improper in that. Many women have had fathers. But
Miss Mitford’s father was kept in a cupboard; that is to say, he was not
a nice father. Miss Hill even goes so far as to conjecture that when “an
imposing procession of neighbours and friends” followed him to the
grave, “we cannot help thinking that this was more to show sympathy and
respect for Miss Mitford than from special respect for him”. Severe as
the judgement is, the gluttonous, bibulous, amorous old man did
something to deserve it. The less said about him the better. Only, if
from your earliest childhood your father has gambled and speculated,
first with your mother’s fortune, then with your own, spent your
earnings, driven you to earn more, and spent that too; if in old age he
has lain upon a sofa and insisted that fresh air is bad for daughters,
if, dying at length, he has left debts that can only be paid by selling
everything you have or sponging upon the charity of friends—then even a
lady sometimes raises her voice. Miss Mitford herself spoke out once.
“It was grief to go; there I had toiled and striven and tasted as deeply
of bitter anxiety, of fear, and of hope as often falls to the lot of
woman.” What language for a lady to use! for a lady, too, who owns a
teapot. There is a drawing of the teapot at the bottom of the page. But
it is now of no avail; Miss Mitford has smashed it to smithereens. That
is the worst of writing about ladies; they have fathers as well as
teapots. On the other hand, some pieces of Dr. Mitford’s Wedgwood dinner
service are still in existence, and a copy of Adam’s Geography, which
Mary won as a prize at school, is “in our temporary possession”. If
there is nothing improper in the suggestion, might not the next book be
devoted entirely to them?
II
DR. BENTLEY
As we saunter through those famous courts where Dr. Bentley once reigned
supreme we sometimes catch sight of a figure hurrying on its way to
Chapel or Hall which, as it disappears, draws our thoughts
enthusiastically after it. For that man, we are told, has the whole of
Sophocles at his finger-ends; knows Homer by heart; reads Pindar as we
read the _Times_; and spends his life, save for these short excursions
to eat and pray, wholly in the company of the Greeks. It is true that
the infirmities of our education prevent us from appreciating his
emendations as they deserve; his life’s work is a sealed book to us;
none the less, we treasure up the last flicker of his black gown, and
feel as if a bird of Paradise had flashed by us, so bright is his
spirit’s raiment, and in the murk of a November evening we had been
privileged to see it winging its way to roost in fields of amaranth and
beds of moly. Of all men, great scholars are the most mysterious, the
most august. Since it is unlikely that we shall ever be admitted to
their intimacy, or see much more of them than a black gown crossing a
court at dusk, the best we can do is to read their lives—for example,
the _Life of Dr. Bentley_ by Bishop Monk.
There we shall find much that is odd and little that is reassuring. The
greatest of our scholars, the man who read Greek as the most expert of
us read English not merely with an accurate sense of meaning and grammar
but with a sensibility so subtle and widespread that he perceived
relations and suggestions of language which enabled him to fetch up from
oblivion lost lines and inspire new life into the little fragments that
remained, the man who should have been steeped in beauty (if what they
say of the Classics is true) as a honey-pot is ingrained with sweetness
was, on the contrary, the most quarrelsome of mankind.
“I presume that there are not many examples of an individual who has
been a party in six distinct suits before the Court of King’s Bench
within the space of three years”, his biographer remarks; and adds that
Bentley won them all. It is difficult to deny his conclusion that though
Dr. Bentley might have been a first-rate lawyer or a great soldier “such
a display suited any character rather than that of a learned and
dignified clergyman”. Not all these disputes, however, sprung from his
love of literature. The charges against which he had to defend himself
were directed against him as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He
was habitually absent from chapel; his expenditure upon building and
upon his household was excessive; he used the college seal at meetings
which did not consist of the statutable number of sixteen, and so on. In
short, the career of the Master of Trinity was one continuous series of
acts of aggression and defiance, in which Dr. Bentley treated the
Society of Trinity College as a grown man might treat an importunate
rabble of street boys. Did they dare to hint that the staircase at the
Lodge which admitted four persons abreast was quite wide enough?—did
they refuse to sanction his expenditure upon a new one? Meeting them in
the Great Court one evening after chapel he proceeded urbanely to
question them. They refused to budge. Whereupon, with a sudden
alteration of colour and voice, Bentley demanded whether “they had
forgotten his rusty sword?” Mr. Michael Hutchinson and some others, upon
whose backs the weight of that weapon would have first descended,
brought pressure upon their seniors. The bill for £350 was paid and
their preferment secured. But Bentley did not wait for this act of
submission to finish his staircase.
So it went on, year after year. Nor was the arrogance of his behaviour
always justified by the splendour or utility of the objects he had in
view—the creation of the Backs, the erection of an observatory, the
foundation of a laboratory. More trivial desires were gratified with the
same tyranny. Sometimes he wanted coal; sometimes bread and ale; and
then Madame Bentley, sending her servant with a snuff-box in token of
authority, got from the butteries at the expense of the college a great
deal more of these commodities than the college thought that Dr. Bentley
ought to require. Again, when he had four pupils to lodge with him who
paid him handsomely for their board, it was drawn from the College, at
the command of the snuff-box, for nothing. The principles of “delicacy
and good feeling” which the Master might have been expected to observe
(great scholar as he was, steeped in the wine of the classics) went for
nothing. His argument that the “few College loaves” upon which the four
young patricians were nourished were amply repaid by the three sash
windows which he had put into their rooms at his own expense failed to
convince the Fellows. And when, on Trinity Sunday 1719, the Fellows
found the famous College ale not to their liking, they were scarcely
satisfied when the butler told them that it had been brewed by the
Master’s orders, from the Master’s malt, which was stored in the
Master’s granary, and though damaged by “an insect called the weevil”
had been paid for at the very high rates which the Master demanded.
Still these battles over bread and beer are trifles and domestic trifles
at that. His conduct in his profession will throw more light upon our
inquiry. For, released from brick and building, bread and beer,
patricians and their windows, it may be found that he expanded in the
atmosphere of Homer, Horace, and Manilius, and proved in his study the
benign nature of those influences which have been wafted down to us
through the ages. But there the evidence is even less to the credit of
the dead languages. He acquitted himself magnificently, all agree, in
the great controversy about the letters of Phalaris. His temper was
excellent and his learning prodigious. But that triumph was succeeded by
a series of disputes which force upon us the extraordinary spectacle of
men of learning and genius, of authority and divinity, brawling about
Greek and Latin texts, and calling each other names for all the world
like bookies on a racecourse or washerwomen in a back street. For this
vehemence of temper and virulence of language were not confined to
Bentley alone; they appear unhappily characteristic of the profession as
a whole. Early in life, in the year 1691, a quarrel was fastened upon
him by his brother chaplain Hody for writing Malelas, not as Hody
preferred, Malela. A controversy in which Bentley displayed learning and
wit, and Hody accumulated endless pages of bitter argument against the
letter _s_ ensued. Hody was worsted, and “there is too much reason to
believe, that the offence given by this trivial cause was never
afterwards healed”. Indeed, to mend a line was to break a friendship.
James Gronovius of Leyden—“homunculus eruditione mediocri, ingenio
nullo”, as Bentley called him—attacked Bentley for ten years because
Bentley had succeeded in correcting a fragment of Callimachus where he
had failed.
But Gronovius was by no means the only scholar who resented the success
of a rival with a rancour that grey hairs and forty years spent in
editing the classics failed to subdue. In all the chief towns of Europe
lived men like the notorious de Pauw of Utrecht, “a person who has
justly been considered the pest and disgrace of letters”, who, when a
new theory or new edition appeared, banded themselves together to deride
and humiliate the scholar. . . all his writings. Bishop Monk remarks of
de Pauw, “prove him to be devoid of candour, good faith, good manners,
and every gentlemanly feeling: and while he unites all the defects and
bad qualities that were ever found in a critic or commentator, he adds
one peculiar to himself, an incessant propensity to indecent allusions.”
With such tempers and such habits it is not strange that the scholars of
those days sometimes ended lives made intolerable by bitterness,
poverty, and neglect by their own hands, like Johnson, who after a
lifetime spent in the detection of minute errors of construction, went
mad and drowned himself in the meadows near Nottingham. On May 20, 1712,
Trinity College was shocked to find that the professor of Hebrew, Dr.
Sike, had hanged himself “some time this evening, before candlelight, in
his sash”. When Kuster died, it was reported that he, too, had killed
himself. And so, in a sense, he had. For when his body was opened “there
was found a cake of sand along the lower region of his belly. This, I
take it, was occasioned by his sitting nearly double, and writing on a
very low table, surrounded with three or four circles of books placed on
the ground, which was the situation we usually found him in.” The minds
of poor schoolmasters, like John Ker of the dissenting Academy, who had
had the high gratification of dining with Dr. Bentley at the Lodge, when
the talk fell upon the use of the word _equidem_, were so distorted by a
lifetime of neglect and study that they went home, collected all uses of
the word _equidem_ which contradicted the Doctor’s opinion, returned to
the Lodge, anticipating in their simplicity a warm welcome, met the
Doctor issuing to dine with the Archbishop of Canterbury, followed him
down the street in spite of his indifference and annoyance, and, being
refused even a word of farewell, went home to brood over their injuries
and wait the day of revenge.
But the bickerings and animosities of the smaller fry were magnified,
not obliterated, by the Doctor himself in the conduct of his own
affairs. The courtesy and good temper which he had shown in his early
controversies had worn away. “. . . a course of violent animosities and
the indulgence of unrestrained indignation for many years had impaired
both his taste and judgement in controversy”, and he condescended,
though the subject in dispute was the Greek Testament, to call his
antagonist “maggot”, “vermin”, “gnawing rat”, and “cabbage head”, to
refer to the darkness of his complexion, and to insinuate that his wits
were crazed, which charge he supported by dwelling on the fact that his
brother, a clergyman, wore a beard to his girdle.
Violent, pugnacious, and unscrupulous. Dr. Bentley survived these storms
and agitations, and remained, though suspended from his degrees and
deprived of his mastership, seated at the Lodge imperturbably. Wearing a
broad-brimmed hat indoors to protect his eyes, smoking his pipe,
enjoying his port, and expounding to his friends his doctrine of the
digamma, Bentley lived those eighty years which, he said, were long
enough “to read everything which was worth reading”, “Et tunc”, he
added, in his peculiar manner.
Et tunc magna mei sub terris ibit imago.
A small square stone marked his grave in Trinity College, but the
Fellows refused to record upon it the fact that he had been their
Master.
But the strangest sentence in this strange story has yet to be written,
and Bishop Monk writes it as if it were a commonplace requiring no
comment. “For a person who was neither a poet, nor possessed of poetical
taste to venture upon such a task was no common presumption.” The task
was to detect every slip of language in _Paradise Lost_, and all
instances of bad taste and incorrect imagery. The result was notoriously
lamentable. Yet in what, we may ask, did it differ from those in which
Bentley was held to have acquitted himself magnificently? And if Bentley
was incapable of appreciating the poetry of Milton, how can we accept
his verdict upon Horace and Homer? And if we cannot trust implicitly to
scholars, and if the study of Greek is supposed to refine the manners
and purify the soul—but enough. Our scholar has returned from Hall; his
lamp is lit; his studies are resumed; and it is time that our profane
speculations should have an end. Besides, all this happened many, many
years ago.
III
LADY DOROTHY NEVILL
She had stayed, in a humble capacity, for a week in the ducal household.
She had seen the troops of highly decorated human beings descending in
couples to eat, and ascending in couples to bed. She had,
surreptitiously, from a gallery, observed the Duke himself dusting the
miniatures in the glass cases, while the Duchess let her crochet fall
from her hands as if in utter disbelief that the world had need of
crochet. From an upper window she had seen, as far as eye could reach,
gravel paths swerving round isles of greenery and losing themselves in
little woods designed to shed the shade without the severity of forests;
she had watched the ducal carriage bowling in and out of the prospect,
and returning a different way from the way it went. And what was her
verdict? “A lunatic asylum.”
It is true that she was a lady’s-maid, and that Lady Dorothy Nevill, had
she encountered her on the stairs, would have made an opportunity to
point out that that is a very different thing from being a lady.
My mother never failed to point out the folly of work-women, shop-girls,
and the like calling each other “Ladies”. All this sort of thing seemed
to her to be mere vulgar humbug, and she did not fail to say so.
What can we point out to Lady Dorothy Nevill? that with all her
advantages she had never learned to spell? that she could not write a
grammatical sentence? that she lived for eighty-seven years and did
nothing but put food into her mouth and slip gold through her fingers?
But delightful though it is to indulge in righteous indignation, it is
misplaced if we agree with the lady’s-maid that high birth is a form of
congenital insanity, that the sufferer merely inherits the diseases of
his ancestors, and endures them, for the most part very stoically, in
one of those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known,
euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.
Moreover, the Walpoles are not ducal. Horace Walpole’s mother was a Miss
Shorter; there is no mention of Lady Dorothy’s mother in the present
volume, but her great-grandmother was Mrs. Oldfield the actress, and, to
her credit, Lady Dorothy was “exceedingly proud” of the fact. Thus she
was not an extreme case of aristocracy; she was confined rather to a
bird-cage than to an asylum; through the bars she saw people walking at
large, and once or twice she made a surprising little flight into the
open air. A gayer, brighter, more vivacious specimen of the caged tribe
can seldom have existed; so that one is forced at times to ask whether
what we call living in a cage is not the fate that wise people,
condemned to a single sojourn upon earth, would choose. To be at large
is, after all, to be shut out; to waste most of life in accumulating the
money to buy and the time to enjoy what the Lady Dorothys find
clustering and glowing about their cradles when their eyes first
open—as hers opened in the year 1826 at number eleven Berkeley Square.
Horace Walpole had lived there. Her father, Lord Orford, gambled it away
in one night’s play the year after she was born. But Wolterton Hall, in
Norfolk, was full of carving and mantelpieces, and there were rare trees
in the garden, and a large and famous lawn. No novelist could wish a
more charming and even romantic environment in which to set the story of
two little girls, growing up, wild yet secluded, reading Bossuet with
their governess, and riding out on their ponies at the head of the
tenantry on polling day. Nor can one deny that to have had the author of
the following letter among one’s ancestors would have been a source of
inordinate pride. It is addressed to the Norwich Bible Society, which
had invited Lord Orford to become its president:
I have long been addicted to the Gaming Table. I have lately taken to
the Turf. I fear I frequently blaspheme. But I have never distributed
religious tracts. All this was known to you and your Society.
Notwithstanding which you think me a fit person to be your president.
God forgive your hypocrisy.
It was not Lord Orford who was in the cage on that occasion. But, alas!
Lord Orford owned another country house, Ilsington Hall, in Dorsetshire,
and there Lady Dorothy came in contact first with the mulberry tree, and
later with Mr. Thomas Hardy; and we get our first glimpse of the bars.
We do not pretend to the ghost of an enthusiasm for Sailors’ Homes in
general; no doubt mulberry trees are much nicer to look at; but when it
comes to calling people “vandals” who cut them down to build houses, and
to having footstools made from the wood, and to carving upon those
footstools inscriptions which testify that “often and often has King
George III. taken his tea” under this very footstool, then we want to
protest—“Surely you must mean Shakespeare?” But as her subsequent
remarks upon Mr. Hardy tend to prove, Lady Dorothy does not mean
Shakespeare. She “warmly appreciated” the works of Mr. Hardy, and used
to complain “that the county families were too stupid to appreciate his
genius at its proper worth”. George the Third drinking his tea; the
county families failing to appreciate Mr. Hardy: Lady Dorothy is
undoubtedly behind the bars.
Yet no story more aptly illustrates the barrier which we perceive
hereafter between Lady Dorothy and the outer world than the story of
Charles Darwin and the blankets. Among her recreations Lady Dorothy made
a hobby of growing orchids, and thus got into touch with “the great
naturalist”. Mrs. Darwin, inviting her to stay with them, remarked with
apparent simplicity that she had heard that people who moved much in
London society were fond of being tossed in blankets. “I am afraid,” her
letter ended, “we should hardly be able to offer you anything of that
sort.” Whether in fact the necessity of tossing Lady Dorothy in a
blanket had been seriously debated at Down, or whether Mrs. Darwin
obscurely hinted her sense of some incongruity between her husband and
the lady of the orchids, we do not know. But we have a sense of two
worlds in collision; and it is not the Darwin world that emerges in
fragments. More and more do we see Lady Dorothy hopping from perch to
perch, picking at groundsel here, and at hempseed there, indulging in
exquisite trills and roulades, and sharpening her beak against a lump of
sugar in a large, airy, magnificently equipped bird-cage. The cage was
full of charming diversions. Now she illuminated leaves which had been
macerated to skeletons; now she interested herself in improving the
breed of donkeys; next she took up the cause of silkworms, almost
threatened Australia with a plague of them, and “actually succeeded in
obtaining enough silk to make a dress”; again she was the first to
discover that wood, gone green with decay, can be made, at some expense,
into little boxes; she went into the question of funguses and
established the virtues of the neglected English truffle; she imported
rare fish; spent a great deal of energy in vainly trying to induce
storks and Cornish choughs to breed in Sussex; painted on china;
emblazoned heraldic arms, and, attaching whistles to the tails of
pigeons, produced wonderful effects “as of an aerial orchestra” when
they flew through the air. To the Duchess of Somerset belongs the credit
of investigating the proper way of cooking guinea-pigs; but Lady Dorothy
was one of the first to serve up a dish of these little creatures at
luncheon in Charles Street.
But all the time the door of the cage was ajar. Raids were made into
what Mr. Nevill calls “Upper Bohemia”; from which Lady Dorothy returned
with “authors, journalists, actors, actresses, or other agreeable and
amusing people”. Lady Dorothy’s judgement is proved by the fact that
they seldom misbehaved, and some indeed became quite domesticated, and
wrote her “very gracefully turned letters”. But once or twice she made a
flight beyond the cage herself. “These horrors”, she said, alluding to
the middle class, “are so clever and we are so stupid; but then look how
well they are educated, while our children learn nothing but how to
spend their parents’ money!” She brooded over the fact. Something was
going wrong. She was too shrewd and too honest not to lay the blame
partly at least upon her own class. “I suppose she can just about read?”
she said of one lady calling herself cultured; and of another, “She is
indeed curious and well adapted to open bazaars.” But to our thinking
her most remarkable flight took place a year or two before her death, in
the Victoria and Albert Museum:
I do so agree with you, she wrote—though I ought not to say so—that
the upper class are very—I don’t know what to say—but they seem to
take no interest in anything—but golfing, etc. One day I was at the
Victoria and Albert Museum, just a few sprinkles of legs, for I am sure
they looked too frivolous to have bodies and souls attached to them—but
what softened the sight to my eyes were 2 little Japs poring over each
article with a handbook . . . our bodies, of course, giggling and
looking at nothing. Still worse, not one soul of the higher class
visible: in fact I never heard of any one of them knowing of the place,
and for this we are spending millions—it is all too painful.
It was all too painful, and the guillotine, she felt, loomed ahead. That
catastrophe she was spared, for who could wish to cut off the head of a
pigeon with a whistle attached to its tail? But if the whole bird-cage
had been overturned and the aerial orchestra sent screaming and
fluttering through the air, we can be sure, as Mr. Joseph Chamberlain
told her, that her conduct would have been “a credit to the British
aristocracy”.
IV
ARCHBISHOP THOMSON
The origin of Archbishop Thomson was obscure. His great-uncle “may
reasonably be supposed” to have been “an ornament to the middle
classes”. His aunt married a gentleman who was present at the murder of
Gustavus III. of Sweden; and his father met his death at the age of
eighty-seven by treading on a cat in the early hours of the morning. The
physical vigour which this anecdote implies was combined in the
Archbishop with powers of intellect which promised success in whatever
profession he adopted. At Oxford it seemed likely that he would devote
himself to philosophy or science. While reading for his degree he found
time to write the _Outlines of the Laws of Thought_, which “immediately
became a recognised text-book for Oxford classes”. But though poetry,
philosophy, medicine, and the law held out their temptations he put such
thoughts aside, or never entertained them, having made up his mind from
the first to dedicate himself to Divine service. The measure of his
success in the more exalted sphere is attested by the following facts:
Ordained deacon in 1842 at the age of twenty-three, he became Dean and
Bursar of Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1845; Provost in 1855, Bishop of
Gloucester and Bristol in 1861, and Archbishop of York in 1862. Thus at
the early age of forty-three he stood next in rank to the Archbishop of
Canterbury himself; and it was commonly though erroneously expected that
he would in the end attain to that dignity also.
It is a matter of temperament and belief whether you read this list with
respect or with boredom; whether you look upon an archbishop’s hat as a
crown or as an extinguisher. If, like the present reviewer, you are
ready to hold the simple faith that the outer order corresponds to the
inner—that a vicar is a good man, a canon a better man, and an
archbishop the best man of all—you will find the study of the
Archbishop’s life one of extreme fascination. He has turned aside from
poetry and philosophy and law, and specialised in virtue. He has
dedicated himself to the service of the Divine. His spiritual
proficiency has been such that he has developed from deacon to dean,
from dean to bishop, and from bishop to archbishop in the short space of
twenty years. As there are only two archbishops in the whole of England
the inference seems to be that he is the second best man in England; his
hat is the proof of it. Even in a material sense his hat was one of the
largest; it was larger than Mr. Gladstone’s; larger than Thackeray’s;
larger than Dickens’; it was in fact, so his hatter told him and we are
inclined to agree, an “eight full”. Yet he began much as other men
begin. He struck an undergraduate in a fit of temper and was rusticated;
he wrote a text-book of logic and rowed a very good oar. But after he
was ordained his diary shows that the specialising process had begun. He
thought a great deal about the state of his soul; about “the monstrous
tumour of Simony”; about Church reform; and about the meaning of
Christianity. “Self-renunciation,” he came to the conclusion, “is the
foundation of Christian Religion and Christian Morals. . . . The highest
wisdom is that which can enforce and cultivate this self-renunciation.
Hence (against Cousin) I hold that religion is higher far than
philosophy.” There is one mention of chemists and capillarity, but
science and philosophy were, even at this early stage, in danger of
being crowded out. Soon the diary takes a different tone. “He seems,”
says his biographer, “to have had no time for committing his thoughts to
paper”; he records his engagements only, and he dines out almost every
night. Sir Henry Taylor, whom he met at one of these parties, described
him as “simple, solid, good, capable, and pleasing”. Perhaps it was his
solidity combined with his “eminently scientific” turn of mind, his
blandness as well as his bulk, that impressed some of these great people
with the confidence that in him the Church had found a very necessary
champion. His “brawny logic” and massive frame seemed to fit him to
grapple with a task that taxed the strongest—how, that is, to reconcile
the scientific discoveries of the age with religion, and even prove them
“some of its strongest witnesses for the truth”. If any one could do
this Thomson could; his practical ability, unhampered by any mystical or
dreaming tendency, had already proved itself in the conduct of the
business affairs of his College. From Bishop he became almost instantly
Archbishop; and in becoming Archbishop he became Primate of England,
Governor of the Charterhouse and King’s College, London, patron of one
hundred and twenty livings, with the Archdeaconries of York, Cleveland,
and the East Riding in his gift, and the Canonries and Prebends in York
Minster. Bishopthorpe itself was an enormous palace; he was
immediately faced by the “knotty question” of whether to buy all the
furniture—“much of it only poor stuff”—or to furnish the house anew,
which would cost a fortune. Moreover there were seven cows in the park;
but these, perhaps, were counterbalanced by nine children in the
nursery. Then the Prince and Princess of Wales came to stay, and the
Archbishop took upon himself the task of furnishing the Princess’s
apartments. He went up to London and bought eight Moderator lamps, two
Spanish figures holding candles, and reminded himself of the necessity
of buying “soap for Princess”. But meanwhile far more serious matters
claimed every ounce of his strength. Already he had been exhorted to
“wield the sure lance of your brawny logic against the sophistries” of
the authors of _Essays and Reviews_, and had responded in a work called
_Aids to Faith_. Near at hand the town of Sheffield, with its large
population of imperfectly educated working men, was a breeding ground of
scepticism and discontent. The Archbishop made it his special charge. He
was fond of watching the rolling of armour plate, and constantly
addressed meetings of working men. “Now what are these Nihilisms, and
Socialisms, and Communisms, and Fenianisms, and Secret Societies—what
do they all mean?” he asked. “Selfishness,” he replied, and “assertion
of one class against the rest is at the bottom of them all.” There was a
law of nature, he said, by which wages went up and wages went down. “You
must accept the declivity as well as the ascent. . . . If we could only
get people to learn that, then things would go on a great deal better
and smoother.” And the working men of Sheffield responded by giving him
five hundred pieces of cutlery mounted in sterling silver. But
presumably there were a certain number of knives among the spoons and
the forks.
Bishop Colenso, however, was far more troublesome than the working men
of Sheffield; and the Ritualists vexed him so persistently that even his
vast strength felt the strain. The questions which were referred to him
for decision were peculiarly fitted to tease and annoy even a man of his
bulk and his blandness. Shall a drunkard found dead in a ditch, or a
burglar who has fallen through a skylight, be given the benefit of the
Burial Service? he was asked. The question of lighted candles was “most
difficult”; the wearing of coloured stoles and the administration of the
mixed chalice taxed him considerably; and finally there was the Rev.
John Purchas, who, dressed in cope, alb, biretta and stole “cross-wise”,
lit candles and extinguished them “for no special reason”; filled a
vessel with black powder and rubbed it into the foreheads of his
congregation; and hung over the Holy Table “a figure, image, or stuffed
skin of a dove, in a flying attitude”. The Archbishop’s temper, usually
so positive and imperturbable, was gravely ruffled. “Will there ever
come a time when it will be thought a crime to have striven to keep the
Church of England as representing the common sense of the Nation?” he
asked. “I suppose it may, but I shall not see it. I have gone through a
good deal, but I do not repent of having done my best.” If, for a
moment, the Archbishop himself could ask such a question, we must
confess to a state of complete bewilderment. What has become of our
superlatively good man? He is harassed and cumbered; spends his time
settling questions about stuffed pigeons and coloured petticoats; writes
over eighty letters before breakfast sometimes; scarcely has time to run
over to Paris and buy his daughter a bonnet; and in the end has to ask
himself whether one of these days his conduct will not be considered a
crime.
Was it a crime? And if so, was it his fault? Did he not start out in the
belief that Christianity had something to do with renunciation and was
not entirely a matter of common sense? If honours and obligations, pomps
and possessions, accumulated and encrusted him, how, being an
Archbishop, could he refuse to accept them? Princesses must have their
soap; palaces must have their furniture; children must have their cows.
And, pathetic though it seems, he never completely lost his interest in
science. He wore a pedometer; he was one of the first to use a camera;
he believed in the future of the typewriter; and in his last years he
tried to mend a broken clock. He was a delightful father too; he wrote
witty, terse, sensible letters; his good stories were much to the point;
and he died in harness. Certainly he was a very able man, but if we
insist upon goodness—is it easy, is it possible, for a good man to be
an Archbishop?