Story of My Life Part 18

"'And the instant he said these words, his scarlet dress fell off, and he had beautiful white robes given him, and he felt a strange sensation in his shoulders, for little wings were growing there.

And all the little children came up and kissed him, and cried, "Hosanna! hosanna! he is good; and he has got little wings like us."

"'So Hare lived on in the island, till, one day, the angel said, "Have you ever thought what your poor mother is doing now, and would you not like to go back to her?" And Hare said, "But can I always be good and have white robes and wings if I go back to Babylon?" And the angel said, "No, but you can try," and he took Hare on his back and flew off and off till he came to Babylon, where he set Hare down in the streets: and all the people looked at him, and when they saw his white robes and his wings, they said, "Why, there is a little angel come!"

"'And Hare went to his mother when she was asleep, and when she awoke she thought it was a dream, but he said, "No, mother, it is no dream. I have been in the Happy Island all this time, and I have come back good." Then his mother, when she saw his wings, said, "Oh, go on being good, and then your wings will grow larger and larger, till at last you will not only be able to go back yourself to the Happy Isle, but to take me with you." And Hare wished to do this, but nevertheless Babylon is a bad place, and as he went out in the streets his dress became soiled with their mud, and he mingled and played with its children till his wings grew smaller and smaller, and at last they fell off altogether.

"'Still, if you were to examine Hare on the bare shoulders when he is undressed, you would see the stumps where the wings were.'"

On the 17th of November I went up to London for the funeral of the Duke of Wellington on the following day. Very late at night Arthur Stanley arrived, having travelled day and night from Rome on purpose. We had to set off at four o'clock next morning to reach our reserved seats in St.

Paul's, though I do not think the service began till twelve. We were four hours in the long chain of carriages wending at a foot's pace towards St. Paul's. A number of curious cases of robbery occurred then.

I remember one, of an old gentleman in a carriage before us, who was leaning out of the carriage window with a pair of gold spectacles on his nose. A well-dressed man approached him between the two lines of carriages and said, "Sir, don't you know that you're very imprudent in leaning out of the carriage window on this occasion with such a very valuable pair of gold spectacles upon your nose? An _ill-disposed_ person might come up and whip off your spectacles like _this_"--and, suiting the action to the word, he whipped them off, and escaped between the opposite line of carriages, leaving the old gentleman without any chance of redress.

The ceremony in St. Paul's was sublime beyond any power of words to describe. I recollect as one of the most striking features the figure of Dean Milman--bent almost double, with silver hair--who had been present at the funeral of Nelson in 1806, when he "heard, or seemed to hear, the low wail of the sailors who encircled their Admiral." My mother saw the procession from the Bunsens' house at Carlton Terrace.

In the winter of 1852-53 I pa.s.sed through one of those phases of religious conviction which ultra-Evangelicals would call a "conversion"--an awakening at a distinct time which I can remember (January 11) of the strongest feeling of repentance for past sin and desire for improvement. "O amare! O ire! O sibi perire! O ad Deum pervenire," are words of St. Augustine which expressed my whole feeling at the time. I have no doubt that this feeling--exaggerated and violent as it was--was perfectly sincere at the time, and possibly in some way may have had a wholesome influence on my life. But I am quite sure that in other ways it had a very _unwholesome_ influence, and that the habit of self-introspection and self-examination which I then felt a duty, and which many clergymen inculcate, is most injurious, as destroying simplicity of character, by leading an individual to dwell upon himself and his own doings, and thus causing him to invest that self and those doings with a most undue importance. I have always in later years, where I have had any influence, done all I could to discourage and repress these sudden religious "awakenings," producing unnatural mental sufferings at the time, and usually lapsing into an undesirable rebound.

With an imaginary reality of conviction, young people are often led into hypocrisy, from a sense of the meritoriousness of that very hypocrisy itself in the eyes of many. I am quite sure that a simple Christian life of active benevolence and exertion for others, of bearing and forbearing, is the wholesome state--a life which is freed from all thoughts of self-introspection, and from all frantic efforts (_really_ leading aside from simple faith in a Saviour) after self-salvation. I dwell upon this here for a moment, though I dislike to do so, because no narrative of my life could be true without it.

The last nine months of my stay at Southgate were less pleasant than the preceding ones, as Mr. Bradley had ceased to like me, and, though he fully did his duty by me in work-time, plainly showed, out of working hours, that he would be very glad when the time came for our final separation. This change arose entirely from my resistance, backed up by Dr. Vaughan at Harrow, to many of his absurd punishments. I was now nearly nineteen, and I offered to bear any amount of _rational_ punishment he chose, but utterly refused to wear my coat inside out, and to run with a tin kettle tied to my coattail through the village, &c., which were the punishments he liked to impose.

But our final dispute came about in this way:--

My Latin prose was always the greatest stumbling-block in my work, and I was most trying, and inveterately careless over it, making the same mistake over and over again. At last Bradley decreed publicly, that for each of my commonest blunders, one of my companions should--kiss me!

They thought it great fun, but I declared I would not submit. The decree had a good effect so far, that, for a very long time--a most unusually long time, the mistakes were evaded. At last, after about three weeks, a morning came when one of the mistakes occurred again. The fellow appointed to kiss me for this mistake was a big Scotchman named Buchan.

Immediately the whole room was in motion, and Buchan in hot pursuit. I barricaded the way with chairs, jumped on the table, splashing right and left from all the inkstands, but eventually I was caught and--kissed.

In a blind fury, scarcely knowing what I did, I knocked Buchan's head against the sharp edge of the bookcase, and, seizing a great Liddell and Scott Lexicon, rushed upon Bradley, who was seated unsuspecting in a low chair by the fire, and, taking him unawares, banged him on the bald scalp with the lexicon till I could bang no longer. Bradley, after this, naturally said I must leave. I instantly fled over hedge and ditch fourteen miles to Harrow, and took refuge with the Vaughans, and after a day or two, Dr. Vaughan, by representing the fatal injury it would do me to be left tutorless just when I was going up to Oxford, persuaded Bradley to take me back and teach me as before. But this he consented to do only on condition that he was never expected to speak to me out of work-time, and he never did. My Southgate life henceforth was full of (in many ways well-deserved) petty hardships, though they were made endurable, because the time in which they had to be endured became every day more limited.

_To_ MY MOTHER.

"_Southgate, Feb. 6, 1853._--Bradley of course keeps aloof, but is not unkind to me, and it seems nothing to come back here, with Oxford as a bright guiding-star.... I now work all day as if it were the last day of preparation, and Walker and I question each other in the evening."

"_Feb. 12._--I have been in my Southgate district all afternoon.

The wretchedness and degradation of the people is such as only sight can give an idea of. In the last house in the upper alley live the Gudgeons, where two children were born a few days ago, and died a few hours after. I found Mrs. Gudgeon downstairs, for she had brought the thing she called a bed there, because, she said, if she was upstairs the children banging the doors maddened her. Two dirty s.h.a.ggy children, never washed or combed since their mother was taken ill, were tugging at her; the eldest daughter, in tattered clothes and with dishevelled hair, was washing some rags, the fumes of which filled the room, while the floor was deep in dirt. Since the mother has been ill she has had the only blanket the family possess, so that she says the children howl with cold all night."

"_Feb. 13._--To-day I found six of the Gudgeon children sitting on three-legged stools, huddled round a miserable fire, the door locked to prevent their running out into the snow. The mother said 'the Almighty knew what was good when He took the two babies; He knew I couldn't tell what in the world I was to do with them--though they were pretty babies, they were, every bit like little waxwork dolls. I sent for the doctor, but it was a cold night, and I was a poor woman, so he wouldn't come; if he had come, I should have known they wouldn't live, and should have had them baptized, and then I should have been happier about them.' I asked where the family all contrived to sleep. 'Why, sir,' she said, 'you know we have but two beds, and I sleep in the middle of one with Martha on one side and Polly on the other, and Lisa has her head out at the bottom, and sleeps at our feet; and father sleeps in the little bed, with Emma on one side and Tom on the other, and Georgie he lies at their feet, and Lu she lies with her grandmother.'"

"In another cottage I found that a good woman, Mrs. Caius, had just taken in a dwarf child who had been much ill-treated by the woman that took care of it. It had been dashed to and fro with convulsions for three hours, and now its limbs were quite rigid and stiff. It had not been stripped or washed for days, and its face was so begrimed with dirt that the features were scarcely discernible."

"_February 19._--Aunt Kitty has done a most kind act in securing Mr. Jowett's protection for me at Oxford. I have had a kind note from him, in which his using my Christian name at once is very rea.s.suring, though the fact that the seventeenth word he ever addressed to me is a Latin one looks rather formidable for future conversations."

Unfortunately, when I was just prepared to go up to Oxford for "Matriculation," I caught a violent chill while learning to skate, and, just when I should have started, became most seriously ill with inflammation of the lungs. As soon as I was able to be moved, I went to the Vaughans at Harrow, where I soon recovered under kind care and nursing. I always feel that I owe much in every way to the kindness and hospitality of my cousin Kate during these years of my life. As the authorities at the University were induced to give me a private examination later, in place of the one I had missed, I only remained at Southgate for a few days more.

_To_ MY MOTHER.

"_March 13._--My mother will like a letter on my nineteenth birthday--so very old the _word_ makes it seem, and yet I feel just as if I were the dear mother's little child still; only now every year I may hope to be more of a comfort to her.

"Yesterday afternoon I went with Papillon to take leave of the (Epping) Forest. It was a perfect day; such picturesque lights and shades on the Edmonton levels. We went through Chingford churchyard, and then through the muddy forest to the old Hunting Lodge, which I had never reached before, and felt to be the one thing I _must_ see. It is a small, gabled, weather-beaten house, near a group of magnificent oaks on a hill-top. Inside is the staircase up which Elizabeth _rode_ to dinner in her first ecstasy over the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Afterwards, I suppose because she found it easy, she had a block put at the top from which she mounted to ride down again. To prove the tradition, a pony is now kept in the house, on which you may ride up and down the stairs in safety. The lodge is still inhabited by one of the oldest families of forest-rangers, who have been there for centuries: in a room upstairs are the portraits of their ancestors, and one bedroom is surrounded with tapestry which they declare was wrought by the Queen's own needle.

"And to-morrow I am going to Oxford--how exciting!"

VI

OXFORD LIFE

1853-1855

"When I recall my youth, what I was then, What I am now, ye beloved ones all: It seems as though these were the living men, And we the coloured shadows on the wall."

--MONCKTON MILNES.

"You are not bound to follow vulgar examples, nor to succeed--Fais ce que dois."--AMIEL.

"Study as if you would never reach the point you seek to attain, and hold on to all you have learnt as if you feared to lose it."--CONFUCIUS.

During a visit at Lime, Arthur Stanley had spent a whole evening in entertaining us with a most delightful description of the adventures of Messrs. Black, White, Blue, Green, and Yellow on their first arrival at Oxford, so that I was not wholly unprepared for what I had to encounter there. His kindness had also procured me a welcome from his most eccentric, but kind-hearted, friend Jowett, then a Fellow and tutor of Balliol,[80] which prevented any forlornness I might otherwise have experienced; but indeed so great was my longing for change and a freer life, that I had no need of consolation, even under the terrors of "Matriculation." At nineteen, I was just beginning to feel something of the self-confidence which boys usually experience at thirteen, and, as I emanc.i.p.ated myself gradually from the oppressors of my boyhood, to yearn with eager longings for and sudden inexplicable sympathies towards the friendship and confidence of companions of my own age. There was also a pleasure in feeling that henceforward, though I should always have to economise, I must have _some_ money of my own, although a regular allowance was never granted at Oxford, or at any other time. It was partially the fact that I had no money to spend in my own way, and that my bills were always overlooked and commented upon, and partly that I had known no other young men except those whom I met at my private tutor's, which made me still very peculiar in dress as in voice and manner. I can see myself now--very shy and shrinking, arriving at Oxford in a rough "bear greatcoat," with a broad stripe down my trousers, such as was worn then, and can hear the shrill high tones in which I spoke.

_To_ MY MOTHER.

"_Balliol College, Oxford, March 14, 1853._--I cannot help writing to my own mother on this my first night in Oxford. I should not seem to have got through the day without it.

"I left Southgate with all good wishes and in pouring rain. When the domes and towers of Oxford rose over the levels, I was not much agitated at seeing them, and was very much disappointed at the look of them. A number of young men were at the station, but I jumped into an omnibus, and, in a tone as unlike a Freshman's as I could make it, exclaimed 'Balliol.' Dull streets brought us to an arched gateway, where I was set down, and asked the way to Mr. Jowett's rooms. Through one court with green gra.s.s and grey arches to another modern one, and upstairs to a door with 'Mr. Jowett' upon it. Having knocked some time in vain, I went in, and found two empty rooms, an uncomfortable external one evidently for lectures, and a pleasant inner sanctuary with books and prints and warm fire.

My mother's letter was on the table, so she was the first person to welcome me to Oxford. Then Mr. Jowett came in, in cap and gown, with a pile of papers in his hand, and immediately hurried me out to visit a long succession of colleges and gardens, since which we have had dinner in his rooms and a pleasant evening. I like him thoroughly. It is a bright beginning of college life."

"_March 16._--It is a member of the University who writes to my own mother.

"It was nervous work walking in the cold morning down the High Street to University. Mr. Jowett's last advice had been, 'Don't lose your presence of mind; it will be not only weak, but wrong.'

Thus stimulated, I knocked at the Dean's (Mr. Hedley's) door. He took me to the Hall--a long hall, with long rows of men writing at a long table, at the end of which I was set down with pens, ink, and paper. Greek translation, Latin composition, and papers of arithmetic and Euclid were given me to do, and we were all locked in. I knew my work, and had done when we were let out, at half-past one, for twenty minutes. At the end of that time Mr. Hedley took me to the Master.[81] The old man sate in his study--very cold, very stern, and _very_ tall. I thought the examination was over. Not a bit of it. The Master asked what books I had ever done, and took down the names on paper. Then he chose Herodotus. I knew with that old man a mistake would be fatal, and I did not make it. Then he asked me a number of odd questions--all the princ.i.p.al rivers in France and Spain, the towns they pa.s.s through, and the points where they enter the sea; all the prophecies in the Old Testament in their order relating to the coming of Christ; all the relationships of Abraham and all the places he lived in. These things fortunately I _happened_ to know. Then the Master arose and solemnly made a little speech--'You have not read so many books, Mr. Hare, not nearly so many books as are generally required, but in consideration of the satisfactory way in which you have pa.s.sed your general examination, and in which you have answered my questions, you will be allowed to matriculate, and this, I hope, will lead you,' &c. &c. But for me the moral lesson at the end is lost in the essential, and the hitherto cold countenance of Mr.

Hedley now smiles pleasantly.

"Then a great book is brought out, and I am instructed to write--'Augustus Joannes Cuthbertus Hare, Armigeri filius.' Then there is a pause. The Master and Dean consult how 'born at Rome' is to be written. The Dean suggests, the Master does not approve; the Dean suggests again, the Master is irritated; the Dean consults a great folio volume, and I am told to write 'de urbe Roma civitate Itali?.' When this is done, Mr. Hedley stands up, the Master looks vacant, I bow, and we go out.

"At five o'clock, having got a cap and gown at the tailor's, I return to Mr. Hedley, now very affable, who walks with me to Worcester, to the Vice-Chancellor. The servant at the door says, 'A gentleman is matriculating.' Mr. Hedley says he is going to matriculate me. So we go in, and I write again in a great book and sign the Articles. I swear to abjure the Pope and be devoted to the Queen, and kiss a Testament upon it. Then the Vice-Chancellor says, 'Now attend diligently,' and makes a little speech in Latin about obedience to the inst.i.tutes of the University. Then I pay ?3, 10_s._ and am free."

On my way back through London I went to my first evening party. It was at Lambeth Palace. Well do I remember my Aunt Kitty (Mrs. Stanley) looking me over before we set out, and then saying slowly, "Yes, you will _do_." At Lambeth I first heard on this occasion the beautiful singing of Mrs. Wilson, one of the three daughters of the Archbishop (Sumner). His other daughters, Miss Sumner and Mrs. Thomas and her children lived with him, and the household of united families dwelling harmoniously together was like that of Sir Thomas More. Another evening during this visit in London I made the acquaintance of the well-known Miss Marsh, and went with her to visit a refuge for reclaimed thieves in Westminster. As we were going over one of the rooms where they were at work, she began to speak to them, and warmed with her subject into a regular address, during which her bonnet fell off upon her shoulders, and, with her sparkling eyes and rippled hair, she looked quite inspired. It was on the same day--in the morning--that, under the auspices of Lea, who was a friend of the steward, I first saw Apsley House, where the sitting-room of the great Duke was then preserved just as he left it the year before, the pen lying by the dusty inkstand, and the litter of papers remaining as he had scattered them.

When I reached Southgate, Mr. Bradley received me with "How do, Hare?

Your troubles are ended. No, perhaps they are begun." That was all, yet he had really been anxious about me. I was always so br.i.m.m.i.n.g with exaggerated sentiment myself at this time, that I had expected quite a demonstration of farewell from the poor people in the wretched Southgate district, to whom--after a sentimental fashion--I had devoted much time and trouble, and was greatly disappointed to receive little more than "Oh! be you?" when I informed them that I was going to leave them for ever. The parting with Mr. Bradley was also more than chilling, as his manner was so repellent; yet in after life I look back to him as a man to whom, with all his eccentricities, I am most deeply indebted.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LIME, APPROACH.]