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Title: The Early Life of Mark Rutherford (W. Hale White)
Author: White, William Hale
Language: English
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RUTHERFORD***
Transcribed from the 1913 Oxford University Press by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
[Picture: Mark Rutherford, aged about twelve, and his Father]
THE EARLY LIFE
OF
MARK RUTHERFORD
(W. HALE WHITE)
BY HIMSELF
* * * * *
HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON EDINBURGH NEW YORK TORONTO
MELBOURNE AND BOMBAY
1913
* * * * *
OXFORD: HORACE HART
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
Forward
A FEW years ago I asked my father to put down some facts of his life for
those of his family who are too young to remember his early years. In
his will he bequeathed these “Notes” to my only sister, Mary Theodora,
who has lived with him all her life, but she hesitated, in face of the
last sentence, to publish them. Although it is true they were not
written with a view to publication, it is evident, from a conversation my
father had with his wife about them, that he had no objection to their
being made public.
My sister therefore prints them now, in the hope that they may interest a
few beyond the “two or three persons” for whom they were intended.
W. HALE WHITE.
_June_ 1913.
List of Illustrations
MARK RUTHERFORD, AGED ABOUT 12, AND HIS FATHER _Frontispiece_
BEDFORD BRIDGE _Facing p._ 13
‘THE BEDFORD TIMES’ COACH _Facing p._ 15
THE OLD MEETING-HOUSE _Facing p._ 16
MARK RUTHERFORD’S FATHER _Facing p._ 38
THE SCHOOL, BEDFORD, IN 1831 _Facing p._ 47
OLD HORNE LANE, BEDFORD, IN 1835 _Facing p._ 50
MARK RUTHERFORD AT THE AGE OF 24 _Facing p._ 88
Autobiographical Notes
I HAVE been asked at 78 years old to set down what I remember of my early
life. A good deal of it has been told before under a semi-transparent
disguise, with much added which is entirely fictitious. What I now set
down is fact.
I was born in Bedford High Street, on December 22, 1831. I had two
sisters and a brother, besides an elder sister who died in infancy. My
brother, a painter of much promise, died young. Ruskin and Rossetti
thought much of him. He was altogether unlike the rest of us, in face,
in temper, and in quality of mind. He was very passionate, and at times
beyond control. None of us understood how to manage him. What would I
not give to have my time with him over again! Two letters to my father
about him are copied below:
(185—)
“MY DEAR SIR,
“I am much vexed with myself for not having written this letter
sooner. There were several things I wanted to say respecting the
need of perseverance in painting as well as in other businesses,
which it would take me too long to say in the time I have at
command—so I must just answer the main question. Your son has very
singular gifts for painting. I think the work he has done at the
College nearly the most promising of any that has yet been done
there, and I sincerely trust the apparent want of perseverance has
hitherto been only the disgust of a creature of strong instincts who
has not got into its own element—he seems to me a fine fellow—and I
hope you will be very proud of him some day—but I very seriously
think you must let him have his bent in this matter—and then—if he
does not work steadily—take him to task to purpose. I think the
whole gist of education is to let the boy take his own shape and
element—and then to help—discipline and urge him _in_ that, but not
to force him on work entirely painful to him.
“Very truly yours,
(Signed) J. RUSKIN.”
“NATIONAL GALLERY, 3_rd_ _April_.
(185—)
“MY DEAR SIR,
“Do not send your son to Mr. Leigh: his school is wholly inefficient.
Your son should go through the usual course of instruction given at
the Royal Academy, which, with a good deal that is wrong, gives
something that is necessary and right, and which cannot be otherwise
obtained. Mr. Rossetti and I will take care—(in fact your son’s
judgement is I believe formed enough to enable him to take care
himself) that he gets no mistaken bias in those schools. A ‘studio’
is not necessary for him—but a little room with a cupboard in it, and
a chair—and nothing else—_is_. I am very sanguine respecting him, I
like both his face and his work.
“Thank you for telling me that about my books. I am happy in seeing
much more of the springing of the green than most sowers of seed are
allowed to see, until very late in their lives—but it is always a
great help to me to hear of any, for I never write with pleasure to
myself, nor with purpose of getting praise to myself. I hate
writing, and know that what I do does not deserve high praise, as
literature; but I write to tell truths which I can’t help crying out
about, and I _do_ enjoy being believed and being of use.
“Very faithfully yours,
(Signed) J. RUSKIN.
W. White, Esq.”
My mother, whose maiden name was Chignell, came from Colchester. What
her father and mother were I never heard. I will say all I have to say
about Colchester, and then go back to my native town. My maternal
grandmother was a little, round, old lady, with a ruddy, healthy tinge on
her face. She lived in Queen Street in a house dated 1619 over the
doorway. There was a pleasant garden at the back, and the scent of a
privet hedge in it has never to this day left me. In one of the rooms
was a spinet. The strings were struck with quills, and gave a thin,
twangling, or rather twingling sound. In that house I was taught by a
stupid servant to be frightened at gipsies. She threatened me with them
after I was in bed. My grandmother was a most pious woman. Every
morning and night we had family prayer. It was difficult for her to
stoop, but she always took the great quarto book of Devotions off the
table and laid it on a chair, put on her spectacles, and went through the
portion for the day. I had an uncle who was also pious, but sleepy. One
night he stopped dead in the middle of his prayer. I was present and
awake. I was much frightened, but my aunt, who was praying by his side,
poked him, and he went on all right.
We children were taken to Colchester every summer by my mother, and we
generally spent half our holiday at Walton-on-the-Naze, then a fishing
village with only four or five houses in it besides a few cottages. No
living creature could be more excitedly joyous than I was when I
journeyed to Walton in the tilted carrier’s cart. How I envied the
carrier! Happy man! All the year round he went to the seaside three
times a week!
I had an aunt in Colchester, a woman of singular originality, which none
of her neighbours could interpret, and consequently they misliked it, and
ventured upon distant insinuations against her. She had married a baker,
a good kind of man, but tame. In summer-time she not infrequently walked
at five o’clock in the morning to a pretty church about a mile and a half
away, and read _George Herbert_ in the porch. She was no relation of
mine, except by marriage to my uncle, but she was most affectionate to
me, and always loaded me with nice things whenever I went to see her.
The survival in my memory of her cakes, gingerbread, and kisses; has done
me more good, moral good—if you have a fancy for this word—than sermons
or punishment.
My christian name of “Hale” comes from my grandmother, whose maiden name
was Hale. At the beginning of last century she and her two brothers,
William and Robert Hale, were living in Colchester. William Hale moved
to Homerton, and became a silk manufacturer in Spitalfields. Homerton
was then a favourite suburb for rich City people. My great-uncle’s
beautiful Georgian house had a marble bath and a Grecian temple in the
big garden. Of Robert Hale and my grandfather I know nothing. The
supposed connexion with the Carolean Chief Justice is more than doubtful.
[Picture: Bedford Bridge, at the foot of which stood the house in which
‘Mark Rutherford’ was born]
To return to Bedford. In my boyhood it differed, excepting an addition
northwards a few years before, much less from Speed’s map of 1609 than
the Bedford of 1910 differs from the Bedford of 1831. There was but one
bridge, but it was not Bunyan’s bridge, and many of the gabled houses
still remained. To our house, much like the others in the High Street,
there was no real drainage, and our drinking-water came from a shallow
well sunk in the gravelly soil of the back yard. A sewer, it is true,
ran down the High Street, but it discharged itself at the bridge-foot, in
the middle of the town, which was full of cesspools. Every now and then
the river was drawn off and the thick masses of poisonous filth which
formed its bed were dug out and carted away. In consequence of the
imperfect outfall we were liable to tremendous floods. At such times a
torrent roared under the bridge, bringing down haystacks, dead bullocks,
cows, and sheep. Men with long poles were employed to fend the abutments
from the heavy blows by which they were struck. A flood in 1823 was not
forgotten for many years. One Saturday night in November a man rode into
the town, post-haste from Olney, warning all inhabitants of the valley of
the Ouse that the “Buckinghamshire water” was coming down with alarming
force, and would soon be upon them. It arrived almost as soon as the
messenger, and invaded my uncle Lovell’s dining-room, reaching nearly as
high as the top of the table.
[Picture: ‘The Bedford Times’ Coach, which made its last journey to
London on November 21, 1846]
The goods traffic to and from London was carried on by an enormous
waggon, which made the journey once or twice a week. Passengers
generally travelled by the _Times_ coach, a hobby of Mr. Whitbread’s. It
was horsed with four magnificent cream-coloured horses, and did the fifty
miles from Bedford to London at very nearly ten miles an hour, or twelve
miles actual speed, excluding stoppages for change. Barring accidents,
it was always punctual to a minute, and every evening, excepting Sundays,
exactly as the clock of St. Paul’s struck eight, it crossed the bridge.
I have known it wait before entering the town if it was five or six
minutes too soon, a kind of polish or artistic completeness being thereby
given to a performance in which much pride was taken.
The Bedford Charity was as yet hardly awake. No part of the funds was
devoted to the education of girls, but a very large part went in
almsgiving. The education of boys was almost worthless. The
head-mastership of the Grammar School was in the gift of New College,
Oxford, who of course always appointed one of their Fellows. Including
the income from boarders, it was worth about £3,000 a year.
[Picture: The Old Meeting-house]
Dissent had been strong throughout the whole county ever since the
Commonwealth. The old meeting-house held about 700 people, and was
filled every Sunday. It was not the gifts of the minister, certainly
after the days of my early childhood, which kept such a congregation
steady. The reason why it held together was the simple loyalty which
prevents a soldier or a sailor from mutinying, although the commanding
officer may deserve no respect. Most of the well-to-do tradesfolk were
Dissenters. They were taught what was called a “moderate Calvinism”, a
phrase not easy to understand. If it had any meaning, it was that
predestination, election, and reprobation, were unquestionably true, but
they were dogmas about which it was not prudent to say much, for some of
the congregation were a little Arminian, and St. James could not be
totally neglected. The worst of St. James was that when a sermon was
preached from his Epistle, there was always a danger lest somebody in the
congregation should think that it was against him it was levelled. There
was no such danger, at any rate not so much, if the text was taken from
the Epistle to the Romans.
In the “singing-pew” sat a clarionet, a double bass, a bassoon, and a
flute: also a tenor voice which “set the tune”. The carpenter, to whom
the tenor voice belonged, had a tuning-fork which he struck on his desk
and applied to his ear. He then hummed the tuning-fork note, and the
octave below, the double bass screwed up and responded, the leader with
the tuning-fork boldly struck out, everybody following, including the
orchestra, and those of the congregation who had bass or tenor voices
sang the air. Each of the instruments demanded a fair share of solos.
The institution strangest to me now was the Lord’s Supper. Once a month
the members of the church, while they were seated in the pews, received
the bread and wine at the hands of the deacons, the minister reciting
meanwhile passages from Scripture. Those of the congregation who had not
been converted, and who consequently did not belong to the church and
were not communicants, watched the rite from the gallery. What the
reflective unconverted, who were upstairs, thought I cannot say. The
master might with varying emotions survey the man who cleaned his knives
and boots. The wife might sit beneath and the husband above, or, more
difficult still, the mistress might be seated aloft while her husband and
her conceited maid-of-all-work, Tabitha, enjoyed full gospel privileges
below.
Dependent on the mother “cause” were chapels in the outlying villages.
They were served by lay preachers, and occasionally by the minister from
the old meeting-house. One village, Stagsden, had attained to the
dignity of a wind and a stringed instrument.
The elders of the church at Bedford belonged mostly to the middle class
in the town, but some of them were farmers. Ignorant they were to a
degree which would shock the most superficial young person of the present
day; and yet, if the farmer’s ignorance and the ignorance of the young
person could be reduced to the same denomination, I doubt whether it
would not be found that the farmer knew more than the other. The farmer
could not discuss Coleridge’s metres or the validity of the maxim, “Art
for Art’s sake”, but he understood a good deal about the men around him,
about his fields, about the face of the sky, and he had found it out all
by himself, a fact of more importance than we suppose. He understood
also that he must be honest; he had learnt how to be honest, and
everything about him, house, clothes, was a reality and not a sham. One
of these elders I knew well. He was perfectly straightforward,
God-fearing also, and therefore wise. Yet he once said to my father, “I
ain’t got no patience with men who talk pōtry (poetry) in the pulpit. If
you hear that, how can you wonder at your children wanting to go to
thēatres and cathredrals?”
Of my father’s family, beyond my grandfather, I know nothing. His
forefathers had lived in Bedfordshire beyond memory, and sleep
indistinguishable, I am told, in Wilstead churchyard. He was Radical,
and almost Republican. With two of his neighbours he refused to
illuminate for our victories over the French, and he had his windows
smashed by a Tory mob. One night he and a friend were riding home on
horseback, and at the entrance of the town they came upon somebody lying
in the road, who had been thrown from his horse and was unconscious. My
grandfather galloped forwards for a doctor, and went back at once before
the doctor could start. On his way, and probably riding hard, he also
was thrown and was killed. He was found by those who had followed him,
and in the darkness and confusion they did not recognize him. They
picked him up, thinking he was the man for whom they had been sent. When
they reached the Swan Inn they found out their mistake, and returned to
the other man. He recovered.
I had only one set of relations in Bedford, my aunt, who was my father’s
sister, her husband, Samuel Lovell, and their children, my cousins. My
uncle was a maltster and coal merchant. Although he was slender and
graceful when he was young, he was portly when I first knew him. He
always wore, even in his counting-house and on his wharf, a spotless
shirt—seven a week—elaborately frilled in front. He was clean-shaven,
and his face was refined and gentle. To me he was kindness itself. He
was in the habit of driving two or three times a year to villages and
solitary farm-houses to collect his debts, and, to my great delight, he
used to take me with him. We were out all day. His creditors were by no
means punctual: they reckoned on him with assurance. This is what
generally happened. Uncle draws up at the front garden gate and gets
out: I hold the reins. Blacksmith, in debt something like £15 for
smithery coal, comes from his forge at the side of the house to meet him.
“Ah, Mr. Lovell, I’m glad to see you: how’s the missus and the children?
What weather it is!”
“I suppose you guess, Master Fitchew, what I’ve come about: you’ve had
this bill twice—I send my bills out only once a year—and you’ve not paid
a penny.”
Fitchew looks on the ground, and gives his head a shake on one side as if
he were mortified beyond measure.
“I know it, Mr. Lovell, nobody can be more vexed than I am, but I can’t
get nothing out of the farmers. Last year was an awful year for them.”
Uncle tries with all his might to look severe, but does not succeed.
“You’ve told me that tale every time I’ve called for twenty years past:
now mind, I’m not going to be humbugged any longer. I must have half of
that £15 this month, or not another ounce of smithery coal do you get out
of me. You may try Warden if you like, and maybe he’ll treat you better
than I do.”
“Mr. Lovell, £10 you shall have next Saturday fortnight as sure as my
name’s Bill Fitchew.”
A little girl, about eight years old, who was hurried into her white,
Sunday frock with red ribbons, as soon as her mother saw my uncle at the
gate, runs up towards him according to secret instructions, but stops
short by about a yard, puts her forefinger on her lip and looks at him.
“Hullo, my pretty dear, what’s your name? Dear, what’s your name?”
“Say Keziah Fitchew, sir,” prompts Mrs. Fitchew, appearing suddenly at
the side door as if she had come to fetch her child who had run out
unawares.
After much hesitation: “Keziah Fitchew, sir.”
“Are you a good little girl? Do you say your prayers every morning and
every evening?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Would you know what to do with sixpence if I gave it you? You’d put it
in the missionary box, wouldn’t you?”
Keziah thinks, but does not reply. It is a problem of immense
importance. Uncle turns to Bill, so that Keziah cannot see him, puts up
his left hand to the side of his face and winks violently.
“I suppose it’s one o’clock as usual, Mr. Lovell, at the Red Lion?” My
uncle laughs as he moves to the gate.
“I tell you what it is, Mr. Fitchew, you’re a precious rascal; that’s
what you are.”
At one o’clock an immense dinner is provided at the Red Lion, and thither
the debtors come, no matter what may be the state of their accounts, and
drink my uncle’s health. Such was Uncle Lovell. My father and mother
often had supper with him and my aunt. After I was ten years old I was
permitted to go. It was a solid, hot meal at nine o’clock. It was
followed by pipes and brandy and water, never more than one glass; and
when this was finished, at about half-past ten, there was the walk home
across the silent bridge, with a glimpse downward of the dark river
slowly flowing through the stone arches.
I now come to my father. My object is not to write his life. I have not
sufficient materials, nor would it be worth recording at any length, but
I should like to preserve the memory of a few facts which are significant
of him, and may explain his influence upon me.
He was born in 1807, and was eight years old when his father died: his
mother died seven years earlier. He had a cruel step-mother, who gave to
her own child everything she had to give. He was educated at the Grammar
School, but the teaching there, as I have said, was very poor. The
step-mother used to send messages to the head master begging him soundly
to thrash her step-son, for he was sure to deserve it, and school
thrashing in those days was no joke. She also compelled my father to
clean boots, knives and forks, and do other dirty work.
I do not know when he opened the shop in Bedford as a printer and
bookseller, but it must have been about 1830. He dealt in old books, the
works of the English divines of all parties, both in the Anglican Church
and outside it. The clergy, who then read more than they read or can
read now, were his principal customers. From the time when he began
business as a young man in the town he had much to do with its affairs.
He was a Whig in politics, and amongst the foremost at elections,
specially at the election in 1832, when he and the Whig Committee were
besieged in the Swan Inn by the mob. He soon became a trustee of the
Bedford Charity, and did good service for the schools. In September
1843, the Rev. Edward Isaac Lockwood, rector of St. John’s, in the town,
and trustee of the schools, carried a motion at a board meeting declaring
that all the masters under the Charity should be members of the Church of
England. The Charity maintained one or two schools besides the Grammar
School. The Act of Parliament, under which it was administered, provided
that the masters and ushers of the Grammar School should be members of
the Church of England, but said nothing about the creed of the masters of
the other schools. The consternation in the town was great. It was
evident that the next step would be to close the schools to Dissenters.
Public meetings were held, and at the annual election of trustees, Mr.
Lockwood was at the bottom of the poll. At the next meeting of the
board, after the election, my father carried a resolution which rescinded
Mr. Lockwood’s. The rector’s defeat was followed by a series of
newspaper letters in his defence from the Rev. Edward Swann, mathematical
master in the Grammar School. My father replied in a pamphlet, published
in 1844.
There was one endowment for which he was remarkable, the purity of the
English he spoke and wrote. He used to say he owed it to Cobbett, whose
style he certainly admired, but this is but partly true. It was rather a
natural consequence of the clearness of his own mind and of his desire to
make himself wholly understood, both demanding the simplest and most
forcible expression. If the truth is of serious importance to us we dare
not obstruct it by phrase-making: we are compelled to be as direct as our
inherited feebleness will permit. The cannon ball’s path is near to a
straight line in proportion to its velocity. “My boy,” my father once
said to me, “if you write anything you consider particularly fine, strike
it out.”
The _Reply_ is an admirable specimen of the way in which a controversy
should be conducted; without heat, the writer uniformly mindful of his
object, which is not personal distinction, but the conviction of his
neighbour, poor as well as rich, all the facts in order, every point
answered, and not one evaded. At the opening of the first letter, a
saying of Burkitt’s is quoted with approval. “Painted glass is very
beautiful, but plain glass is the most useful as it lets through the most
light.” A word, by the way, on Burkitt. He was born in 1650, went to
Cambridge, and became rector, first of Milden, and then of Dedham, both
in Suffolk. As rector of Dedham he died. There he wrote the _Poor Man’s
Help and Young Man’s Guide_, which went through more than thirty editions
in fifty years. There he wrestled with the Baptists, and produced his
_Argumentative and Practical Discourse on Infant Baptism_. I have
wandered through these Dedham fields by the banks of the Stour. It is
Constable’s country, and in its way is not to be matched in England.
Although there is nothing striking in it, its influence, at least upon
me, is greater than that of celebrated mountains and waterfalls. What a
power there is to subdue and calm in those low hills, overtopped, as you
see it from East Bergholt, by the magnificent Dedham half-cathedral
church! It is very probable that Burkitt, as he took his walks by the
Stour, and struggled with his _Argument_, never saw the placid, winding
stream; nor is it likely that anybody in Bedford, except my father, had
heard of him. For his defence of the schools my father was presented at
a town’s meeting with a silver tea-service.
By degrees, when the battle was over, the bookselling business very much
fell off, and after a short partnership with his brother-in-law in a
tannery, my father was appointed assistant door-keeper of the House of
Commons by Lord Charles Russell. He soon became door-keeper. While he
was at the door he wrote for a weekly paper his _Inner Life of the House
of Commons_, afterwards collected and published in book form. He held
office for twenty-one years, and on his retirement, in 1875, 160 members
of the House testified in a very substantial manner their regard for him.
He died at Carshalton on February 11, 1882. There were many obituary
notices of him. One was from Lord Charles Russell, who, as
Serjeant-at-Arms, had full opportunities of knowing him well. Lord
Charles recalled a meeting at Woburn, a quarter of a century before, in
honour of Lord John Russell. Lord John spoke then, and so did Sir David
Dundas, then Solicitor-General, Lord Charles, and my father. “His,” said
Lord Charles, “was the finest speech, and Sir David Dundas remarked to
me, as Mr. White concluded, ‘Why that is old Cobbett again _minus_ his
vulgarity.’” He became acquainted with a good many members during his
stay at the House. New members sought his advice and initiation into its
ways. Some of his friends were also mine. Amongst these were Sir John
Trelawney and his gifted wife. Sir John belonged to the scholarly
Radical party, which included John Stuart Mill and Roebuck. The visits
to Sir John and Lady Trelawney will never be forgotten, not so much
because I was taught what to think about certain political questions, but
because I was supplied with a standard by which all political questions
were judged, and this standard was fixed by reason. Looking at the
methods and the procedure of that little republic and at the anarchy of
to-day, with no prospect of the renewal of allegiance to principles, my
heart sinks. It was through one of the Russells, with whom my father was
acquainted, that I was permitted with him to call on Carlyle, an event
amongst the greatest in my life, and all the happier for me because I did
not ask to go.
What I am going to say now I hardly like to mention, because of its
privacy, but it is so much to my father’s honour that I cannot omit it.
Besides, almost everybody concerned is now dead. When he left Bedford he
was considerably in debt, through the falling off in his bookselling
business which I have just mentioned, caused mainly by his courageous
partisanship. His official salary was not sufficient to keep him, and in
order to increase it, he began to write for the newspapers. During the
session this was very hard work. He could not leave the House till it
rose, and was often not at home till two o’clock in the morning or later,
too tired to sleep. He was never able to see a single revise of what he
wrote. In the end he paid his debts in full.
My father was a perfectly honest man, and hated shiftiness even worse
than downright lying. The only time he gave me a thrashing was for
prevarication. He had a plain, but not a dull mind, and loved poetry of
a sublime cast, especially Milton. I can hear him even now repeat
passages from the _Comus_, which was a special favourite. Elsewhere I
have told how when he was young and stood at the composing desk in his
printing office, he used to declaim Byron by heart. That a Puritan
printer, one of the last men in the world to be carried away by a
fashion, should be vanquished by Byron, is as genuine a testimony as any
I know to the reality of his greatness. Up to 1849 or thereabouts, my
father in religion was Independent and Calvinist, the creed which, as he
thought then, best suited him. But a change was at hand. His political
opinions remained unaltered to his death, but in 1851 he had completed
his discovery that the “simple gospel” which Calvinism preached was by no
means simple, but remarkably abstruse. It was the _Heroes and Hero
Worship_ and the _Sartor Resartus_ which drew him away from the
meeting-house. There is nothing in these two books directly hostile
either to church or dissent, but they laid hold on him as no books had
ever held, and the expansion they wrought in him could not possibly
tolerate the limitations of orthodoxy. He was not converted to any other
religion. He did not run for help to those who he knew could not give
it. His portrait; erect, straightforward-looking, firmly standing, one
foot a little in advance, helps me and decides me when I look at it. Of
all types of humanity the one which he represents would be the most
serviceable to the world at the present day. He was generous,
open-hearted, and if he had a temper, a trifle explosive at times, nobody
for whom he cared ever really suffered from it, and occasionally it did
him good service. The chief obituary notice of him declared with truth
that he was the best public speaker Bedford ever had, and the committee
of the well-known public library resolved unanimously “That this
institution records with regret the death of Mr. W. White, formerly and
for many years an active and most valuable member of the committee, whose
special and extensive knowledge of books was always at its service, and
to whom the library is indebted for the acquisition of its most rare and
valuable books.” The first event in my own life is the attack by the mob
upon our house, at the general election in 1832, to which I have
referred. My cradle—as I have been told—had to be carried from the front
bedroom into the back, so that my head might not be broken by the stones
which smashed the windows.
[Picture: Mark Rutherford’s Father]
The first thing I can really see is the coronation of Queen Victoria and
a town’s dinner in St. Paul’s Square. About this time, or soon after, I
was placed in a “young ladies’” school. At the front door of this polite
seminary I appeared one morning in a wheelbarrow. I had persuaded a shop
boy to give me a lift.
It was when I was about ten years old—surely it must have been very early
on some cloudless summer morning—that Nurse Jane came to us. She was a
faithful servant and a dear friend for many years—I cannot say how many.
Till her death, not so long ago, I was always her “dear boy”. She was as
familiar with me as if I were her own child. She left us when she
married, but came back on her husband’s death. Her father and mother
lived in a little thatched cottage at Oakley. They were very poor, but
her mother was a Scotch girl, and knew how to make a little go a long
way. Jane had not infrequent holidays, and she almost always took my
sister and myself to spend them at Oakley. This was a delight as keen as
any which could be given me. No entertainment, no special food was
provided. As to entertainment there was just the escape to a freer life,
to a room in which we cooked our food, ate it, and altogether lived
during waking hours when we were indoors. Oh, for a house with this one
room, a Homeric house! How much easier and how much more natural should
we be if we watched the pot or peeled the potatoes as we talked, than it
is now in a drawing-room, where we do not know what chair to choose
amongst a dozen scattered about aimlessly; where there is no table to
hide the legs or support the arms; a room which compels an uncomfortable
awkwardness, and forced conversation. Would it not be more sincere if a
saucepan took part in it than it is now, when, in evening clothes,
tea-cup in hand, we discuss the show at the Royal Academy, while a lady
at the piano sings a song from _Aida_?
As to the food at Oakley, it was certainly rough, and included dishes not
often seen at home, but I liked it all the better. My mother was by no
means democratic. In fact she had a slight weakness in favour of rank.
Somehow or other she had managed to know some people who lived in a
“park” about five or six miles from Bedford. It was called a “park”, but
in reality it was a big garden, with a meadow beyond. However, and this
was the great point, none of my mother’s town friends were callers at the
Park. But, notwithstanding her little affectations, she was always glad
to let us go to Oakley with Jane, not that she wanted to get rid of us,
but because she loved her. Nothing but good did I get from my wholly
unlearned nurse and Oakley. Never a coarse word, unbounded generosity,
and an unreasoning spontaneity, which I do think one of the most blessed
of virtues, suddenly making us glad when nothing is expected. A child
knows, no one so well, whereabouts in the scale of goodness to place
generosity. Nobody can estimate its true value so accurately. Keeping
the Sabbath, no swearing, very right and proper, but generosity is first,
although it is not in the Decalogue. There was not much in my nurse’s
cottage with which to prove her liberality, but a quart of damsons for my
mother was enough. Going home from Oakley one summer’s night I saw some
magnificent apples in a window; I had a penny in my pocket, and I asked
how many I could have for that sum. “Twenty.” How we got them home I do
not know. The price I dare say has gone up since that evening. Talking
about damsons and apples, I call to mind a friend in Potter Street, whose
name I am sorry to say I have forgotten. He was a miller, tall, thin,
slightly stooping, wore a pepper-and-salt suit of clothes, and might have
been about sixty years old when I was ten or twelve. He lived in an
ancient house, the first floor of which overhung the street; the rooms
were low-pitched and dark. How Bedford folk managed to sleep in them,
windows all shut, is incomprehensible. At the back of the house was a
royal garden stretching down to the lane which led to the mill. My
memory especially dwells on the currants, strawberries, and gooseberries.
When we went to “uncle’s”, as we called him, we were turned out
unattended into the middle of the fruit beds if the fruit was ripe, and
we could gather and eat what we liked. I am proud to say that this
Potter Street gentleman, a nobleman if ever there was one, although not
really an uncle, was in some way related to my father.
The recollections of boyhood, so far as week-days go, are very happy.
Sunday, however, was not happy. I was taken to a religious service,
morning and evening, and understood nothing. The evening was
particularly trying. The windows of the meeting-house streamed inside
with condensed breath, and the air we took into our lungs was poisonous.
Almost every Sunday some woman was carried out fainting. Do what I could
it was impossible to keep awake. When I was quite little I was made to
stand on the seat, a spectacle, with other children in the like case, to
the whole congregation, and I often nearly fell down, overcome with
drowsiness. My weakness much troubled me, because, although it might not
be a heinous sin, such as bathing on Sunday, it showed that I was not one
of God’s children, like Samuel, who ministered before the Lord girded
with a linen ephod. Bathing on Sunday, as the river was always before
me, was particularly prominent as a type of wickedness, and I read in
some book for children, by a certain divine named Todd, how a wicked boy,
bathing on the Sabbath, was drawn under a mill-wheel, was drowned, and
went to hell. I wish I could find that book, for there was also in it a
most conclusive argument intended for a child’s mind against the
doctrine, propounded by people called philosophers, that the world was
created by chance. The refutation was in the shape of a dream by a
certain sage representing a world made by Chance and not by God.
Unhappily all that I recollect of the remarkable universe thus produced
is that the geese had hoofs, and “clamped about like horses”. Such was
the awful consequence of creation by a No-God or nothing.
[Picture: The School, Bedford, as it was in 1831]
In 1841 or 1842—I forget exactly the date—I was sent to what is now the
Modern School. My father would not let me go to the Grammar School,
partly because he had such dreadful recollections of his treatment there,
and partly because in those days the universities were closed to
Dissenters. The Latin and Greek in the upper school were not good for
much, but Latin in the lower school—Greek was not taught—consisted almost
entirely in learning the Eton Latin grammar by heart, and construing
Cornelius Nepos. The boys in the lower school were a very rough set.
About a dozen were better than the others, and kept themselves apart.
The recollections of school are not interesting to me in any way, but it
is altogether otherwise with playtime and holidays. School began at
seven in the morning during half the year, but later in winter. At
half-past eight or nine there was an interval of an hour for breakfast.
It was over when I got home, and I had mine in the kitchen. It was
dispatched in ten minutes, and my delight in cold weather then was to lie
in front of the fire and read _Chambers’ Journal_. Blessings on the
brothers Chambers for that magazine and for the _Miscellany_, which came
later! Then there was Charles and Mary Lamb’s _Tales of Ulysses_. It
was on a top shelf in the shop, and I studied it whilst perched on the
shop ladder. Another memorable volume was a huge atlas-folio, which my
sister and I called the Battle Book. It contained coloured prints, with
descriptions of famous battles of the British Army. We used to lug it
into the dining-room in the evening, and were never tired of looking at
it. A little later I managed to make an electrical machine out of a wine
bottle, and to produce sparks three-quarters of an inch long. I had
learned the words “positive” and “negative”, and was satisfied with them
as an explanation, although I had not the least notion what they meant,
but I got together a few friends and gave them a demonstration on
electricity.
Never was there a town better suited to a boy than Bedford at that time
for out-of-door amusements. It was not too big—its population was about
10,000—so that the fields were then close at hand. The Ouse—immortal
stream—runs through the middle of the High Street. To the east towards
fenland, the country is flat, and the river is broad, slow, and deep.
Towards the west it is quicker, involved, fold doubling almost completely
on fold, so that it takes sixty miles to accomplish thirteen as the crow
flies. Beginning at Kempston, and on towards Clapham, Oakley, Milton,
Harrold, it is bordered by the gentlest of hills or rather undulations.
At Bedford the navigation for barges stopped, and there were very few
pleasure boats, one of which was mine. The water above the bridge was
strictly preserved, and the fishing was good. My father could generally
get leave for me, and more delightful days than those spent at Kempston
Mill and Oakley Mill cannot be imagined. The morning generally began, if
I may be excused the bull, on the evening before, when we walked about
four miles to bait a celebrated roach and bream hole. After I got home,
and just as I was going to bed, I tied a long string round one toe, and
threw the other end of the string out of window, so that it reached the
ground, having bargained with a boy to pull this end, not too violently,
at daybreak, about three-quarters of an hour before the time when the
fish would begin to bite well. At noon we slept for a couple of hours on
the bank. In the evening we had two hours more sport, and then marched
back to town. Once, in order to make a short cut, we determined to swim
the river, which, at the point where we were, was about sixty feet wide,
deep, and what was of more consequence, bordered with weeds. We
stripped, tied our clothes on the top of our heads and our boots to one
end of our fishing lines, carrying the other end with us. When we got
across we pulled our boots through mud and water after us. Alas! to our
grief we found we could not get them on, and we were obliged to walk
without them. Swimming we had been taught by an old sailor, who gave
lessons to the school, and at last I could pick up an egg from the bottom
of the overfall, a depth of about ten feet. I have also been upset from
my boat, and had to lie stark naked on the grass in the sun till my
clothes were dry. Twice I have been nearly drowned, once when I wandered
away from the swimming class, and once when I could swim well. This
later peril is worth a word or two, and I may as well say them now. I
was staying by the sea-side, and noticed as I was lying on the beach
about a couple of hundred yards from the shore a small vessel at anchor.
I thought I should like to swim round her. I reached her without any
difficulty, in perfect peace, luxuriously, I may say, and had just begun
to turn when I was suddenly overtaken by a mad conviction that I should
never get home. There was no real danger of failure of strength, but my
heart began to beat furiously, the shore became dim, and I gave myself up
for lost. “This then is dying,” I said to myself, but I also said—I
remember how vividly—“There shall be a struggle before I go down—one
desperate effort”—and I strove, in a way I cannot describe, to bring my
will to bear directly on my terror. In an instant the horrible
excitement was at an end, and _there was a great calm_. I stretched my
limbs leisurely, rejoicing in the sea and the sunshine. This story is
worth telling because it shows that a person with tremulous nerves, such
as mine, never ought to say that he has done all that he can do. Notice
also it was not nature or passion which carried me through, but a
conviction wrought by the reason. The next time I was in extremity
victory was tenfold easier.
[Picture: Old Horne Lane, Bedford, in 1835]
In the winter, fishing and boating and swimming gave way to skating. The
meadows for miles were a great lake, and there was no need to take off
skates in order to get past mills and weirs. The bare, flat Bedfordshire
fields had also their pleasures. I had an old flint musket which I found
in an outhouse. I loaded it with hard peas, and once killed a sparrow.
The fieldfares, or felts, as we called them, were in flocks in winter,
but with them I never succeeded. On the dark November Wednesday and
Saturday afternoons, when there was not a breath of wind, and the fog
hung heavily over the brown, ploughed furrows, we gathered sticks,
lighted a fire, and roasted potatoes. They were sweet as peaches. After
dark we would “go a bat-fowling”, with lanterns, some of us on one side
of the hedge and some on the other. I left school when I was between
fourteen and fifteen, and then came the great event and the great blunder
of my life, the mistake which well-nigh ruined it altogether. My
mother’s brother had a son about five years older than myself, who was
being trained as an Independent minister. To him I owe much. It was he
who introduced me to Goethe. Some time after he was ordained, he became
heterodox, and was obliged to separate himself from the Independents to
whom he belonged. My mother, as I have already said, was a little weak
in her preference for people who did not stand behind counters, and she
desired equality with her sister-in-law. Besides, I can honestly declare
that to her an Evangelical ministry was a sacred calling, and the thought
that I might be the means of saving souls made her happy. Finally, it
was not possible now to get a living in Bedford as a bookseller. The
drawing class in the school was fairly good, and I believe I had profited
by it. Anyhow, I loved drawing, and wished I might be an artist. The
decision was against me, and I was handed over to a private tutor to
prepare for the Countess of Huntingdon’s College at Cheshunt, which
admitted students other than those which belonged to the Connexion,
provided their creed did not materially differ from that which governed
the Connexion trusts.
Before I went to college I had to be “admitted”. In most Dissenting
communities there is a singular ceremony called “admission”, through
which members of the congregation have to pass before they become members
of the church. It is a declaration that a certain change called
conversion has taken place in the soul. Two deacons are appointed to
examine the candidate privately, and their report is submitted to a
church-meeting. If it is satisfactory, he is summoned before the whole
church, and has to make a confession of his faith, and give an account of
his spiritual history. As may be expected, it is very often inaccurately
picturesque, and is framed after the model of the journey to Damascus. A
sinner, for example, who swears at his pious wife, and threatens to beat
her, is suddenly smitten with giddiness and awful pains. He throws
himself on his knees before her, and thenceforward he is a “changed
character”. I had to tell the church that my experience had not been
eventful. I was young, and had enjoyed the privilege of godly parents.
What was conversion? It meant not only that the novice unhesitatingly
avowed his belief in certain articles of faith, but it meant something
much more, and much more difficult to explain. I was guilty of original
sin, and also of sins actually committed. For these two classes of sin I
deserved eternal punishment. Christ became my substitute, and His death
was the payment for my transgression. I had to feel that His life and
death were appropriated by me. This word “appropriated” is the most
orthodox I can find, but it is almost unintelligible. I might perhaps
say that I had to feel assured that I, personally, was in God’s mind, and
was included in the atonement.
This creed had as evil consequences that it concentrated my thoughts upon
myself, and made me of great importance. God had been anxious about me
from all eternity, and had been scheming to save me. Another bad result
was that I was satisfied I understood what I did not in the least
understand. This is very near lying. I can see myself now—I was no more
than seventeen—stepping out of our pew, standing in the aisle at the
pew-door, and protesting to their content before the minister of the
church, father and mother protesting also to my own complete content,
that the witness of God in me to my own salvation was as clear as
noonday. Poor little mortal, a twelvemonth out of round jackets, I did
not in the least know who God was, or what was salvation.
On entering the college I signed the Thirty-nine Articles, excepting two
or three at most; for the Countess, so far as her theology went, was
always Anglican. One of her chaplains was William Romaine, the famous
incumbent of St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, who on his first Good Friday in
that church administered to five hundred communicants. The book I was
directed to study by the theological professor after admission, was a
book on the Atonement, by somebody named Williams. He justified the
election of a minority to heaven and a majority to hell on the ground
that God owed us nothing, and being our Maker, might do with us what He
pleased. This struck me as original, but I had forgotten that it is the
doctrine of the Epistle to the Romans. It is almost incredible to me
now, although I was hardly nineteen, that I should have accepted without
question such a terrible invention, and the only approach to explanation
I can give is that all this belonged to a world totally disconnected from
my own, and that I never thought of making real to myself anything which
this supernatural world contained.
The most important changes in life are not those of one belief for
another, but of growth, in which nothing preceding is directly
contradicted, but something unexpected nevertheless makes its appearance.
On the bookshelf in our dining-room lay a volume of Wordsworth. One day,
when I was about eighteen, I took it out, and fell upon the lines—
“Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her.”
What they meant was not clear to me, but they were a signal of the
approach of something which turned out to be of the greatest importance,
and altered my history.
It was a new capacity. There woke in me an aptness for the love of
natural beauty, a possibility of being excited to enthusiasm by it, and
of deriving a secret joy from it sufficiently strong to make me careless
of the world and its pleasures. Another effect which Wordsworth had upon
me, and has had on other people, was the modification, altogether
unintentional on his part, of religious belief. He never dreams of
attacking anybody for his creed, and yet it often becomes impossible for
those who study him and care for him to be members of any orthodox
religious community. At any rate it would have been impossible in the
town of Bedford. His poems imply a living God, different from the
artificial God of the churches. The revolution wrought by him goes far
deeper, and is far more permanent than any which is the work of Biblical
critics, and it was Wordsworth and not German research which caused my
expulsion from New College, of which a page or two further on. For some
time I had no thought of heresy, but the seed was there, and was alive
just as much as the seed-corn is alive all the time it lies in the earth
apparently dead.
I have nothing particular to record of Cheshunt, the secluded
Hertfordshire village, where the Countess of Huntingdon’s College then
was. It stood in a delightful little half park, half garden, through
which ran the New River: the country round was quiet, and not then
suburban, but here and there was a large handsome Georgian house. I
learnt nothing at Cheshunt, and did not make a single friend.
In 1851 or 1852 I was transferred, with two other students, to New
College, St. John’s Wood. On February 3, 1852, the Principal examined
our theological class on an inaugural lecture delivered at the opening of
the college. The subject of the lecture was the inspiration of the
Bible. The two students before mentioned were members of this class, and
asked some questions about the formation of the canon and the
authenticity of the separate books. They were immediately stopped by the
Principal in summary style. “I must inform you that this is not an open
question within these walls. There is a great body of truth received as
orthodoxy by the great majority of Christians, the explanation of which
is one thing, but to doubt it is another, and the foundation must not be
questioned.” How well I recollect the face of the Principal! He looked
like a man who would write an invitation to afternoon tea “within these
walls”. He consulted the senate, and the senate consulted the council,
which consisted of the senate and some well-known ministers. We were
ordered to be present at a special council meeting, and each one was
called up separately before it and catechized. Here are two or three of
the questions, put, it will be remembered, without notice, to a youth a
little over twenty, confronted by a number of solemn divines in white
neckerchiefs.
“Will you explain the mode in which you conceive the sacred writers to
have been influenced?”
“Do you believe a statement because it is in the Bible, or merely because
it is true?”
“You are aware that there are two great parties on this question, one of
which maintains that the inspiration of the Scriptures differs in kind
from that of other books: the other that the difference is one only of
degree. To which of these parties do you attach yourself?”
“Are you conscious of any divergence from the views expounded by the
Principal in this introductory lecture?”
At a meeting of the council, on the 13th February, 1852, it was resolved
that our opinions were “incompatible” with the “retention of our position
as students”. This resolution was sent to us with another to the effect
that at the next meeting of the council “such measures” would be taken
“as may be thought advisable”. At this meeting my father, together with
the father of one of my colleagues attended, and asked that our moral
character should be placed above suspicion; that the opinions for which
we had been condemned should be explicitly stated, and that we should be
furnished with a copy of the creed by which we were judged. The next
step on the part of the council was the appointment of a committee to
interview us, and “prevent the possibility of a misapprehension of our
views”. We attended, underwent examination once more, and once more
repeated the three requests. No notice was taken of them, but on 3rd
March we were asked if we would withdraw from the college for three
months in order that we might “reconsider our opinions”, so that possibly
we might “be led by Divine guidance to such views as would be compatible
with the retention of our present position”. Idiomatic English was
clearly not a strong point with the council. Of course we refused. If
we had consented it might have been reasonably concluded that we had
taken very little trouble with our “views”. Again we asked for
compliance with our requests, but the only answer we got was that our
“connexion with New College must cease”, and that with regard to the
three requests, the council “having duly weighed them, consider that they
have already sufficiently complied with them”.
It is not now my purpose to discuss the doctrine of Biblical Inspiration.
It has gone the way of many other theological dogmas. It has not been
settled by a yea or nay, but by indifference, and because yea or nay are
both inapplicable. The manner in which the trial was conducted was
certainly singular, and is worth a word or two. The Holy Office was
never more scandalously indifferent to any pretence of justice or
legality in its proceedings. We were not told what was the charge
against us, nor what were the terms of the trust deed of the college, if
such a document existed; neither were we informed what was the meaning of
the indictment, and yet the council must have been aware that nothing
less than our ruin would probably be the result of our condemnation.
My father wrote and published a defence of us, entitled _To Think or not
to Think_, with two noble mottoes, one from Milton’s _Areopagitica_ and
the other some lines from _In Memoriam_, which was read in those days by
people who were not sentimental fools, and who, strange to say, got out
of it something solid which was worth having. The days may return when
something worth having will be got out of it again. To the question,
“Will you explain the mode in which you conceive the sacred writers to
have been influenced?” my father replied—“Rather a profound question,
that. A profounder, I venture to say, never agitated the mind of a
German metaphysician. If the query had been put to me, I should have
taken the liberty to question the questioner thus: ‘Can you explain to me
the growth of a tree? Can you explain how the will of man influences the
material muscles?—In fact the universe is full of forces or influences.
Can you trace whence it came and how it came? Can’st thou by searching
find out God? Can’st thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?—it is
high as heaven; what can’st thou do? deeper than hell; what can’st thou
know?’” To the council’s inquiry whether we believed a statement because
it was in the Bible or because it was true, my father replied partly with
a quotation from the celebrated Platonist divine, John Smith, of
Cambridge—“All that knowledge which is separate from an inward
acquaintance with virtue and goodness is of a far different nature from
that which ariseth out of a living sense of them which is the best
discerner thereof, and by which alone we know the true perfection,
sweetness, energy, and loveliness of them, and all that which is οὔτε
ῥητόν, οὔτε yραπτόν, that which can no more be known by a naked
demonstration than colours can be perceived of a blind man by any
definition or description which he can hear of them.”
This pamphlet was written in 1852, three years after I entered Cheshunt
College, when my father declared to me that “a moderate Calvinism suited
him best”. In 1852 he was forty-five years old. He had not hardened: he
was alive, rejecting what was dead, laying hold of what was true to him,
and living by it. Nor was the change hurried or ill-considered which
took place in him between 1849 and 1852. What he became in 1852 he was
substantially to the end of his days.
The expulsion excited some notice in the world then, although, as I have
said, the controversy was without much significance. The “views” of Dr.
Harris and the rest of the council were already condemned. Here are some
letters, not before printed, from Maurice and Kingsley on the case. The
closing paragraph of Maurice’s letter is remarkable because in about a
twelvemonth he himself was expelled from King’s College.
“MY DEAR SIR,
“I beg to thank you for your very able and interesting pamphlet. I
know one of the expelled students, and have every reason to think
highly of his earnestness and truthfulness.
“I feel a delicacy in pronouncing any judgement upon the conduct of
the Heads of the College, as I belong to another, and I might seem to
be biased by feelings of Sectarianism and of rivalship. But there
are many of your thoughts by which we may all equally profit, and
which I hope to lay to heart in case I should be brought into
circumstances like those of the judges or of the criminals.
“Faithfully yrs,
“F. D. MAURICE.
“_July_ 27, 1852.
21 Queen’s Square,
Bloomsbury.”
* * * * *
“EVERSLEY. _Saturday_.
“DEAR SIR,
“I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your very clever and
well-written pamphlet, which I have read with no surprise but with
most painful interest; and I beg to thank you for the compliment
implied in your sending it to me. Your son ought to thank God for
having a father who will stand by him in trouble so manfully and
wisely: and as you say, this may be of the very greatest benefit to
him: but it may also do him much harm, if it makes him fancy that
such men as have expelled him are the real supporters of the Canon
and inspiration of Scripture, and of Orthodoxy in general.
“I said that I read your pamphlet without surprise. I must explain
my words. This is only one symptom of a great and growing movement,
which must end in the absolute destruction of ‘Orthodox dissent’
among the educated classes, and leave the lower, if unchecked, to
“Mormonism, Popery, and every kind of Fetîche-worship. The
Unitarians have first felt the tide-wave: but all other sects will
follow; and after them will follow members of the Established Church
in proportion as they have been believing, not in the Catholic and
Apostolic Faith, as it is in the Bible, but in some compound or other
of Calvinist doctrine with Rabbinical theories of magical
inspiration, such as are to be found in Gaussen’s _Theopneustic_—a
work of which I cannot speak in terms of sufficient abhorrence,
however well meaning the writer may have been. Onward to Strauss,
_Transcendentalism_—and Mr. John Chapman’s _Catholic Series_ is the
appointed path, and God help them!—I speak as one who has been
through, already, much which I see with the deepest sympathy
perplexing others round me; and you write as a man who has had the
same experience. Whether or not we agree in our conclusions at
present, you will forgive me for saying, that every week shows me
more and more that the ‘Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Faith’, so
far from being incompatible with the most daring science, both
physical, metaphysical, and philological, or with the most extended
notions of inspiration, or with continual inrushes of new light from
above, assumes them, asserts them, and cannot be kept Catholic, or
true to itself, without the fullest submission to them. I speak as a
heartily orthodox priest of the Church of England; you will excuse my
putting my thoughts in a general and abstract form in so short a
letter. But if your son—(I will not say you—for your age must be,
and your acquirements evidently are—greater than my own) if your son
would like to write to me about these matters, I do believe before
God, who sees me write, that as one who has been through what he has,
and more, I may have something to tell him, or at least to set him
thinking over. I speak frankly. If I am taking a liberty, you will
pardon the act for the sake of the motive.
“I am, dear Sir,
“Your obedient and faithful servant,
C. KINGSLEY.”
It would be a mistake to suppose that the creed in which I had been
brought up was or could be for ever cast away like an old garment. The
beliefs of childhood and youth cannot be thus dismissed. I know that in
after years I found that in a way they revived under new forms, and that
I sympathized more with the Calvinistic Independency of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries than with the modern Christianity of church or
chapel. At first, after the abandonment of orthodoxy, I naturally
thought nothing in the old religion worth retaining, but this temper did
not last long. Many mistakes may be pardoned in Puritanism in view of
the earnestness with which it insists on the distinction between right
and wrong. This is vital. In modern religion the path is flowery. The
absence of difficulty is a sure sign that no good is being done. How far
we are from the strait gate, from the way that is narrow which leadeth
unto life, the way which is found only by few! The great doctrines of
Puritanism are also much nearer to the facts of actual experience than we
suppose.
After the expulsion I was adrift, knowing no craft, belonging to no
religious body, and without social or political interest. I engaged
myself to a schoolmaster. The story of my very brief stay with him has
been elsewhere told with some variation, but I may as well relate it here
so as to make my little history complete. The school was somewhere in
Stoke Newington. I got there in the evening when it was quite dark.
After a word or two with my chief I was shown into a large school-room.
Two candles were placed on a raised desk, and this was all the light
permitted for the illumination of the great empty space round me. The
walls were hung with maps, and the place of honour on the end wall was
occupied by a huge drawing of the globe, in perspective, carefully
coloured. This masterpiece was the work of the proprietor, an example of
the precious learning which might be acquired at his “establishment”.
After I had sat down for a few minutes a servant brought me my supper,
placed it on a desk, and showed me my bedroom. I ate my meal, and after
some time, as nobody came to see me, I thought I had better go to bed. I
had to ascend a ladder, which I pulled up after me. When I had shut the
door I looked out of window. Before me lay London and the dull glare of
its lights. There was no distinct noise perceptible; but a deadened roar
came up to me. Over in the south-west was the house of the friend I had
left, always a warm home for me when I was in town. Then there fell upon
me what was the beginning of a trouble which has lasted all my life. The
next afternoon I went to the proprietor and told him I could not stay.
He was greatly amazed, and still more so because I could give him no
reason for leaving. He protested very reasonably that I could not break
my engagement at the beginning of term, but he gave me permission to look
for a substitute. I found a Scotch graduate who, like myself, had been
accused of heresy, and had nothing to do. He came the same day, and I
went back to — Terrace, somewhere out by Haverstock Hill. I forget its
name; it was a dull row of stuccoed ugliness. But to me that day
Grasmere, the Quantocks, or the Cornish sea-coast would have been nothing
compared with that stucco line. When I knocked at the door the horrible
choking fog had rolled away: I rushed inside; there was a hearty embrace,
and the sun shone gloriously. Still, I had nothing to do.
At this point I had intended to stop. A good part of my life
henceforward has appeared under disguise in one of my books, but I think
on reconsideration it will be better to record here also what little
remains to be told about myself, and to narrate it as history. I called
on several publishers and asked for employment, but could get none till I
came to John Chapman, editor and proprietor of the _Westminster Review_,
as well as publisher, mainly of books which were theologically heretical,
and, I am sorry to say, did not pay. He lived at 142 Strand.
As the New College council had tested my orthodoxy, so Chapman tested my
heresy and found that I was fit for the propagandist work in No. 142 and
for its society. He asked me if I believed in miracles. I said “Yes and
no”. I did not believe that an actual Curtius leaped into the gulf in
the Forum and saved Rome, but I did believe in the spiritual truth set
forth in the legend. This reply was allowed to pass, although my
scepticism would have been more satisfactory and more useful if it had
been a little more thorough.
I was soon taken off the _Westminster_, and my occupation now was to
write Chapman’s letters, to keep his accounts, and, most disagreeable, to
“subscribe” his publications, that is to say, to call on booksellers and
ask how many copies they would take. Of George Eliot, who lodged at No.
142, I have often spoken, and have nothing to add. It is a lasting
sorrow to me that I allowed my friendship with her to drop, and that
after I left Chapman I never called on her. She was then unknown, except
to a few friends, but I did know what she was worth. I knew that she was
not only endowed with extraordinary genius, but with human qualities even
more precious. She took the kindest notice of me, an awkward creature
not accustomed to society. It is sad that youth should be so confident
in its own resources that it will not close its hand upon the treasure
which is placed inside it. It was not only George Eliot by whom I
neglected to profit. I might have seen Rachel. I recollect the evening,
and I believe I was offered a ticket. It was not worth while to walk a
couple of hundred yards to enrich myself for ever! I knew intimate
friends of Caroline Fox, but I made no effort to become acquainted with
her. What a difference it would make to me now, living so much in the
past, if Penjerrick, with a dream of its lawn sloping southward and
seaward, and its society of all the most interesting people in England,
should be amongst my possessions, thrusting out and replacing much that
is ugly, monotonous, and depressing. I would earnestly, so earnestly,
implore every boy and girl religiously to grasp their chances. Lay up
for yourselves treasure in heaven.
There was one opportunity, however, I did not miss, and this was Caleb
Morris. About him also I have written, but for the sake of continuity I
will repeat some of it. He had singular influence, not only over me, but
over nearly every young man whom he met. He was originally an
Independent minister in Wales, where the people are mostly Dissenters,
but he came to London when he had not passed middle life, and took charge
of the church in Fetter Lane. He was tall, broad-shouldered, handsome,
erect, but was partly disabled by a strangely nervous temperament which,
with an obscure bodily trouble, frequently prevented him from keeping his
engagements. Often and often messengers had to be dispatched late on
Sunday morning to find a substitute for him at Fetter Lane, and people
used to wait in the portico of the chapel until the service had well
begun, and then peep through the door to see who was in the pulpit. He
was the most eloquent speaker I ever heard. I never shall forget his
picture of the father, in the parable of the prodigal son, watching for
his child’s return, all his thoughts swallowed up in one—_Will he come
back to-day_? When he did come—no word of rebuke. The hardest thing in
the world is to be completely generous in forgiveness. The most
magnanimous of men cannot resist the temptation—_but at the same time you
must see_, _my dearest_, _don’t you_? Almost equally difficult, but not
quite, is the simple confession without an extenuating word, _I have
sinned against Heaven_. The father does not hear. _Bring forth the best
robe and put it on him_, _and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his
feet_. A ring on his hand! Shoes on his feet we can understand, but
there is to be a ring, honour, ennoblement! . . . The first movement of
repentance was—_I will arise and go to my father_. The omissions in
Morris’s comment were striking. There was no word of the orthodox
machinery of forgiveness. It was through Morris that the Bible became
what it always has been to me. It has not solved directly any of the
great problems which disturb my peace, and Morris seldom touched them
controversially, but he uncovered such a wealth of wonder and beauty in
it that the problems were forgotten.
Lord Bacon was Morris’s hero, both for his method and his personal
character. These were the days before the researches of Spedding, when
Bacon was supposed to be a mass of those impossible paradoxes in which
Macaulay delighted. To Morris, Bacon’s _Submission_ and his renunciation
of all defence were sufficient. With what pathos he repeated Bacon’s
words when the Lords asked him whether the subscription to the
_Submission_ was in his own hand. “My Lords, it is my act, my hand, my
heart. I beseech your Lordships, be merciful to a broken reed.”
[Picture: Portrait of Mark Rutherford at the age of twenty-four]
There is nothing more to be said about Chapman’s. I left after an offer
of partnership, which, it is needless to say, I did not accept. Mr.
Whitbread obtained for me a clerkship in the Registrar-General’s office,
Somerset House. I was there two or three years, and was then transferred
to the Admiralty. Meanwhile I had married.
The greater part of my life has been passed in what it is now usual to
contemn as the Victorian age. Whatever may be the justice of the scorn
poured out upon it by the superior persons of the present generation,
this Victorian age was distinguished by an enthusiasm which can only be
compared to a religious revival. _Maud_ was read at six in the morning
as I walked along Holborn; _Pippa Passes_ late at night in my dark little
room in Serle Street, although of course it was a long while after the
poem made its appearance. Wonderful! What did I see as I stood at my
desk in my Serle Street bedroom?
“Day!
Faster and more fast,
O’er night’s brim, day boils at last;
Boils, pure gold, o’er the cloud-cup’s brim
Where spurting and suppresst it lay—”
There on the horizon lies the cloud cup. Over the brim boils, pure gold,
the day! The day which is before me is Pippa’s day, and not a day in the
Strand: it is a “twelve-hours treasure”: I am as eager as Pippa “not to
squander a wavelet of thee”. The vision still lives. The friend who
stood by my side is still with me, although he died years and years ago.
What was true of me was true of half a score of my friends. If it is
true that the Victorian time was ugly and vulgar, it was the time of the
_Virginians_, of _David Copperfield_, of Tennyson’s _Poems_, of
Cromwell’s _Letters and Speeches_, of the _Letters and Life of Lord
Bacon_, of Emerson’s _Essays_, of _Festus_, of the _Dramatis Personæ_,
and of the _Apologia_. We were at the Academy at eight o’clock on a May
morning to see, at the very earliest moment, the Ophelia, the Order for
Release, the Claudio and Isabella, Seddon’s Jerusalem, Lewis’s Arab
Scribe and his Frank Encampment in the Desert. The last two, though, I
think, were in the exhibition of the Old Water Colour Society. The
excitement of those years between 1848 and 1890 was, as I have said,
something like that of a religious revival, but it was reasonable.
These notes are not written for publication, but to please two or three
persons related to me by affection.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Early Life of Mark Rutherford (W. Hale White)" ***
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