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The Adventure of Living : a Subjective Autobiography

by John St. Loe Strachey · English · Gutenberg #6567 · 911,952 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Adventure of Living : a Subjective Autobiography

Author: John St. Loe Strachey


        
Release date: September 1, 2004 [eBook #6567]
                Most recently updated: December 29, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ADVENTURE OF LIVING : A SUBJECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY ***




Produced by Mark Zinthefer, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.





[Illustration: (signature of author) From a drawing by W. Rothenstein.]

THE ADVENTURE OF LIVING

A Subjective Autobiography (1860-1922)

By John St. Loe Strachey Editor of _The Spectator_

   _"We carry with us the wonders we seek without
   us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us; we
   are that bold and adventurous piece of Nature, which
   he that studies wisely learns in a compendium what
   others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume."_
       SIR THOMAS BROWNE




TO MY WIFE


You who know something of the irony of life in general, and still more
of it in the present particular, will not be surprised that, having made
two strict rules for my guidance in the writing of this book, I break
them both in the first page! Indeed, I can hear you say, though without
any touch of the satirical, that it was only natural that I should do
so.

The first of my two rules, heartily approved by you, let me add, is that
I should not mention you in my autobiography.--We both deem it foolish
as well as unseemly to violate in print the freemasonry of marriage.--
The second, not unlike the first, is not to write about living people.
And here am I hard at it in both cases!

Yet, after all, I have kept to my resolve in the spirit, if not in the
letter:--and this though it has cost me some very good "copy,"--copy,
too, which would have afforded me the pleasantest of memories. There are
things seen by us together which I much regret to leave unchronicled,
but these must wait for another occasion. Many of them are quite
suitable to be recorded in one's lifetime. For example, I should dearly
like to set forth our ride from Jerusalem to Damascus, together with
some circumstances, as an old-fashioned traveller might have said,
concerning the Garden of the Jews at Jahoni, and the strange and
beautiful creature we found therein.

I count myself happy indeed to have seen half the delightful and notable
things I have seen during my life, in your company. Do you remember the
turbulent magnificence of our winter passage of the Splügen, not in a
snowstorm, but in something much more thrilling--a fierce windstorm in a
great frost? The whirling, stinging, white dust darkened the air and
coated our sledges, our horses, and our faces. We shall neither of us
ever forget how just below the Hospice your sledge was actually blown
over by the mere fury of the blizzard; how we tramped through the
drifts, and how all ended in "the welcome of an inn" on the summit; the
hot soup and the _Côtelettes de Veau_. It was together, too, that
we watched the sunrise from the Citadel at Cairo and saw the Pyramids
tipped with rose and saffron. Ours, too, was the desert mirage that, in
spite of reason and experience, almost betrayed us in our ride to the
Fayum. You shared with me what was certainly an adventure of the spirit,
though not of the body, when for the first time we saw the fateful and
well-loved shores of America. The lights danced like fireflies in the
great towers of New York, while behind them glowed in sombre splendour
the fiery Bastions of a November sunset.

But, of course, none of all this affords the reason why I dedicate my
book to you. That reason will perhaps be fully understood only by me and
by our children. It can also be found in certain wise and cunning little
hearts, inscrutable as those of kings, in a London nursery. Susan,
Charlotte, and Christopher could tell if they would.

If that sounds inconsequent, or, at any rate, incomprehensible, may I
not plead that so do the ineffable Mysteries of Life and Death.

J. ST. LOE STRACHEY.




PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION


It is with great pleasure that I accept Major Putnam's suggestion that I
should write a special preface to the American edition of my
autobiography. Major Putnam, I, and the _Spectator_, are a
triumvirate of old friends, and I should not be likely to refuse a
request made by him, even if its fulfilment was a much less agreeable
task than that of addressing an American audience.

I was born with a mind which might well be described as _Anima
naturaliter Americana_. I have always loved America and the
Americans, and, though I cannot expect them to feel for me as I feel for
them, I cherish the belief that, at any rate, they do not dislike me
instinctively. That many of them regard me as somewhat wild and
injudicious in my praise of their country I am well aware. They hold
that I often praise America not only too much, but that I praise her for
the wrong things,--praise, indeed, where I ought to censure, and so
"spoil" their countrymen. Well, if that is a true bill, all I can say is
that it is too late to expect me to mend my ways.

During my boyhood people here understood America much less than they do
now. Though I should be exaggerating if I said that there was anything
approaching dislike of America or Americans, there were certain
intellectual people in England who were apt to parade a kind of
conscious and supercilious patronage of the wilder products of American
life and literature. I heard exaggerated stories about Americans, and
especially about the Americans of the Far West,--heard them, that is,
represented as semi-barbarians, coarse, rash, and boastful, with bad
manners and no feeling for the reticences of life. Such legends
exasperated me beyond words. I felt as did the author of _Ionica_
on re-reading the play of Ajax.

  The world may like, for all I care,
     The gentler voice, the cooler head,
   That bows a rival to despair,
     And cheaply compliments the dead.

  That smiles at all that's coarse and rash,
     Yet wins the trophies of the fight,
   Unscathed in honour's wreck and crash,
     Heartless, but always in the right.

       *       *       *       *       *

There were my superior persons drawn to the life!

When the complaisant judge would not acknowledge the rights of the noble
Ajax, but gave to another what was due to him, the poet touched me even
more nearly:--

  Thanked, and self-pleased: ay, let him wear
     What to that noble breast was due;
   And I, dear passionate Teucer, dare
     Go through the homeless world with you.

The poem I admit does not sound very apposite in the year 1922, but it
well reflected my indignation some fifty years ago. The West might then
be regarded as the Ajax of the Nations. Nowadays, not even the youngest
of enthusiasts could think it necessary to show his devotion by wanting
to "go through the homeless world" with the richest and the most
powerful community on the face of the earth.

I am not going to make any show of false modesty by suggesting that
Americans may not care to read about the intimate details of my life and
opinions, or to follow "the adventure of living" of a journalist and a
public writer whose life, judged superficially, has been quite
uneventful. I read with pleasure the lives of American men and women
when they were not people of action, and I daresay people across the
Atlantic will pay me a similar compliment.

Yet--I should like to give a word or two of explanation as to the way in
which I have treated my subject. At first sight I expect that my book
will seem chaotic and bewildering, a mighty maze and quite without a
plan. As a matter of fact, however, the work was very carefully planned.
My sins of omission and of commission were deliberate and, as our
forefathers would have said, matters of art.

My first object was a negative one; that is, to avoid the kind of
autobiography in which the author waddles painfully, diligently, and
conscientiously along an arid path, which he has strewn, not with
flowers and fruits of joy, but with the cinders of the commonplace. My
readers know such autobiographies only too well. They are usually based
upon copious diaries and letters. The author, as soon as he gets to
maturity, spares us nothing. We look down endless vistas of dinners and
luncheon parties and of stories of how he met the celebrated Mr. Jones
at the house of the hardly less celebrated Mr. Smith and how they talked
about Mr. Robinson, the most celebrated of all of them. If I have done
nothing else worthy of gratitude, I have, at any rate, avoided such
predestinated dullness.

What I have made my prime object is the description of the influences
that have affected my life and, for good or evil, made me what I am. The
interesting thing about a human being is not only what he is, but how he
came to be what he is.

The main influence of my life has been _The Spectator_, and,
therefore, as will be seen, I have made _The Spectator_ the pivot
of my book, or, shall I say, the centre from which in telling my story I
have worked backwards and forwards. But this is not all. Though I pay a
certain homage to chronology and let my chapters mainly follow the
years, I am in this matter not too strict. Throughout, I obey the
instinct of the journalist and take good copy wherever I can find it. I
follow the scent while it is hot and do not say to myself or to my
readers that this or that would be out-of-place here, and must be
deferred to such and such a chapter, or to some portion of the book
giving an account of later years, devoted to miscellaneous anecdotes! In
a word, I am discursive not by accident, but by design.

If I am asked why I make this apologia, I shall have no difficulty in
replying. I desire to leave nothing unsaid which may bring me into
intimate touch with the greatest reading public that the world has ever
seen-and, to my mind, a public as worthy as it is great.

J. ST. LOE STRACHEY.

May 5, 1922


POSTSCRIPT TO AMERICAN PREFACE

_While this book and preface is going through the press, I cannot
resist adding a Postscript on a point suggested by my publisher. It is
that I should say something which may inform the new generation as to
"The Spectator's" position during the Civil War.

"The Spectator" was as strong a friend of America in past years as it is
at present, and in those past years its friendship was the more useful
because the need for a true understanding between all parts of the
English-speaking race was not realised by nearly so many people as it is
now. That there was ever any essential bitterness of feeling here or in
America I will not admit for a moment, but that there was ignorance,
pig-headedness, and want of vision, is beyond all doubt. This want of
vision was specially illustrated during the Civil War. "The Spectator,"
however, I am proud to say, without being unjust to the South, or
failing to note its gallantry, and its noble sacrifices even in a wrong
cause, was consistently on the side of the North. Moreover, it realised
that the North was going to win, and ought to win, and so would abolish
slavery. There is a special tradition at the "Spectator" office of which
we are very proud. It is that the military critic of "The Spectator," at
that time Mr. Hooper, a civilian but with an extraordinary flair for
strategy, divined exactly what Sherman was doing when he started on his
famous march. Many years afterwards General Sherman, either in a speech
or on the written page, for I cannot now verify the fact, though I am
perfectly certain of it, said that when he started with the wires cut
behind him, there were only two people in the world who knew what his
objective was. One was himself and the other, as he said, "an anonymous
writer in the London 'Spectator.'" My American readers will understand
why I and all connected with "The Spectator" are intensely proud of this
fact. The fate, not only of America but of the whole English-speaking
race, hung upon the success of Sherman's feat of daring. In turn that
success hung upon the fact that Sherman's objective was the sea. To have
divined that was a notable achievement in the art of publicity._

J. ST. L. S.




CONTENTS


      I.--HOW I CAME TO _The Spectator_

     II.--HOW I CAME TO _The Spectator (Continued)_

    III.--MY PHYSICAL HOME, MY FAMILY, AND MY GOOD FORTUNE THEREIN

     IV.--MY FATHER

      V.--MY FATHER'S STORIES OF THE STRACHEY FAMILY

     VI.--MY CHILDHOOD AND SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL INCIDENTS

    VII.--MY CHILDHOOD (_Continued_)

   VIII.--THE FAMILY NURSE

     IX.--BOYHOOD: POETRY AND METRE

      X.--OXFORD

     XI.--A CLASSICAL EDUCATION

    XII.--AN OXFORD FRIENDSHIP

   XIII.--OXFORD MEMORIES

    XIV.--PRESS WORK IN LONDON

     XV.--THE "CORNHILL"

    XVI.--MEREDITH TOWNSEND

   XVII.--MEREDITH TOWNSEND (_Continued_)

  XVIII.--MY LIFE IN LONDON IN THE 'NINETIES

    XIX.--MY LIFE IN LONDON IN THE 'NINETIES (_Continued_)

     XX.--THE ETHICS OF JOURNALISM

    XXI.--THE PLACE OF THE JOURNALIST IN MODERN LIFE

   XXII.--A WAR EPISODE--MY AMERICAN TEA-PARTIES

  XXIII.--IDYLLS OF THE WAR

   XXIV.--FIVE GREAT MEN

    XXV.--FIVE GREAT MEN (Continued)

   XXVI.--MY POLITICAL OPINIONS

  XXVII.--MY POLITICAL OPINIONS (Continued)

 XXVIII.--UNWRITTEN CHAPTERS




INDEX



ILLUSTRATIONS


ST. LOE STRACHEY [Frontispiece] From a drawing by W. Rothenstein.

VIEW OF NORTH FRONT OF SUTTON COURT, IN THE COUNTY OF SOMERSET, THE
FAMILY HOUSE OF THE STRACHEYS

SIR EDWARD STRACHEY IN THE HALL AT SUTTON COURT, WITH HIS FAVOURITE CAT
From a picture by his son Henry Strachey.

JOHN STRACHEY, THE FRIEND OF LOCKE

THE CLOSE, SUTTON COURT, SOMERSET

SUTTON COURT, SOMERSET

SUTTON COURT, SOMERSET

MRS. SALOME LEAKER,--"THE FAMILY NURSE"

J. ST. LOE STRACHEY,--ÆTAT 16 From a photograph done at Cannes, about
1876.

J. ST. LOE STRACHEY AS AN OXFORD FRESHMAN, ÆTAT 18  MEREDITH TOWNSEND,
EDITOR OF THE "FRIEND OF INDIA," AND HIS MOONSHEE, THE PUNDIT OOMACANTO
MUKAJI, DOCTOR OF LOGIC IN THE MUDDEH UNIVERSITY Taken at Serampore,
Bengal, in 1849.

J. ST. LOE STRACHEY, ÆTAT. 32

J. ST. LOE STRACHEY AT NEWLANDS CORNER, ÆTAT. 45




THE ADVENTURE OF LIVING



CHAPTER I

HOW I CAME TO "THE SPECTATOR"


Sir Thomas Browne gave his son an admirable piece of literary advice.
The young son had been travelling in Hungary and proposed to write an
account of what he had seen. His father approved the project, but urged
him strongly not to trouble himself about the methods of extracting iron
and copper from the ores, or with a multitude of facts and statistics.
These were matters in which there was no need to be particular. But, he
added, his son must on no account forget to give a full description of
the "Roman alabaster tomb in the barber's shop at Pesth."

In writing my recollections I mean to keep always before me the
alabaster tomb in the barber's shop rather than a view of life which is
based on high politics, or even high literature. At first sight it may
seem as if the life of an editor is not likely to contain very much of
the alabaster tomb element. In truth, however, every life is an
adventure, and if a sense of this adventure cannot be communicated to
the reader, one may feel sure that it is the fault of the writer, not of
the facts. A dull man might make a dull thing of his autobiography even
if he had lived through the French Revolution; whereas a country curate
might thrill the world with his story, provided that his mind were cast
in the right mould and that he found a quickening interest in its
delineation. Barbellion's _Diary_ provides the proof. The interest
of that supremely interesting book lies in the way of telling.

But how is one to know what will interest one's readers? That is a
difficult question. Clearly it is no use to put up a man of straw, call
him the Public, and then try to play down to him or up to him and his
alleged and purely hypothetical opinions and tastes. Those who attempt
to fawn upon the puppet of their own creation are as likely as not to
end by interesting nobody. At any rate, try and please yourself, then at
least one person's liking is engaged. That is the autobiographer's
simple secret.

All the same there is a better reason than that. Pleasure is contagious.
He who writes with zest will infect his readers. The man who argues,
"This seems stupid and tedious to me, but I expect it is what the public
likes," is certain to make shipwreck of his endeavour.

The pivot of my life has been _The Spectator_, and so _The
Spectator_ must be the pivot of my book--the point upon which it and
I and all that is mine turn. I therefore make no apology for beginning
this book with the story of how I came to _The Spectator_.

My father, a friend of both the joint editors, Mr. Hutton and Mr.
Townsend, was a frequent contributor to the paper. In a sense,
therefore, I was brought up in a "Spectator" atmosphere. Indeed, the
first contributions ever made by me to the press were two sonnets which
appeared in its pages, one in the year 1875 and the other in 1876. I did
not, however, begin serious journalistic work in _The Spectator_,
but, curiously enough, in its rival, _The Saturday Review_. While I
was at Oxford I sent several middle articles to _The Saturday_, got
them accepted, and later, to my great delight, received novels and poems
for review. I also wrote occasionally in _The Pall Mall_, in the
days in which it was edited by Lord Morley, and in _The Academy_.
It was not until I settled down in London to read for the Bar, a year
and a half after I had left Oxford, that I made any attempt to write for
_The Spectator_. In the last few days of 1885 I got my father to
give me a formal introduction to the editors, and went to see them in
Wellington Street. They told me, as in my turn I have had to tell so
many would-be reviewers, what no doubt was perfectly true, namely that
they had already got more outside reviewers than they could possibly
find work for, and that they were sorry to say I must not count upon
their being able to give me books. All the same, they would like me to
take away a couple of volumes to notice,--making it clear, however, that
they did this out of friendship for my father.

I was given my choice of books, and the two I chose were a new edition
of _Gulliver's Travels_, well illustrated in colour by a French
artist, and, if I remember rightly, the _Memoirs of Henry
Greville_, the brother of the great Greville. I will not say that I
departed from the old _Spectator_ offices at 1 Wellington Street--a
building destined to play so great a part in my life--in dudgeon or even
in disappointment. I had not expected very much. Still, no man, young or
old, cares to have it made quite clear that a door at which he wishes to
enter is permanently shut against him.

However, I was not likely to be depressed for long at so small a matter
as this; I was much too full of enjoyment in my new London life. The
wide world affords nothing to equal one's first year in London--at
least, that was my feeling. My first year at Oxford had been delightful,
as were also the three following, but there was to me something in the
throb of the great pulse of London which, as a stimulant, nay, an
excitant, of the mind, even Oxford could not rival.

For once I had plenty of leisure to enjoy the thrilling drama of life--a
drama too often dimmed by the cares, the business, or even the pleasures
of the onlooker. A Bar student is not overworked, and if he is not rich,
or socially sought after, he can find, as I did, plenty of time in which
to look around him and enjoy the scene. That exhilaration, that luxury
of leisurely circumspection may never return, or only, as happily in my
own case, with the grand climacteric. Once more I see and enjoy the
gorgeous drama by the Thames.

To walk every morning to the Temple or to Lincoln's Inn, where I was
reading in Chambers, was a feast. Then there were theatres, balls,
dances, dinners, and a thousand splendid sights to be enjoyed, for I was
then, as I have always been and am now, an indefatigable sightseer. I
would, I confess, to this day go miles to see the least promising of
curiosities or antiquities. "Who knows? it may be one of the wonders of
the world" has always been my order of the day.

I was aware of my good fortune. I remember thinking how much more
delightful it must be to come fresh to London than to be like so many of
my friends, Londoners born and bred. They could not be thrilled as I was
by the sight of St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey, or by the scimitar
curve of the Thames from Blackfriars to Westminster. Through the
National Gallery or the British Museum I paced a king. The vista of the
London River as I went to Greenwich intoxicated me like heady wine. And
Hampton Court in the spring, _Ut vidi ut perii_--"How I saw, how I
perished." It was all a pageant of pure pleasure, and I walked on air,
eating the fruit of the Hesperides.

But though I was so fully convinced that the doors of _The
Spectator_ were shut against me, I was, of course, determined that my
two reviews should, if possible, make the editors feel what a huge
mistake they had made and what a loss they were incurring. But, alas!
here I encountered a great disappointment. When I had written my reviews
they appeared to me to be total failures! I was living at the time in an
"upper part" in South Molton Street, in which I, my younger brother,
Henry Strachey, and two of my greatest friends, the present Sir Bernard
Mallet and his younger brother Stephen Mallet, had set up house. I
remember to this day owning to my brother that though I had intended my
review of _Gulliver's Travels_ to be epoch-making, it had turned
out a horrible fiasco. However, I somehow felt I should only flounder
deeper into the quagmire of my own creation if I rewrote the two
reviews. Accordingly, they were sent off in the usual way. Knowing my
father's experience in such matters, I did not expect to get them back
in type for many weeks. As a matter of fact, they came back quite
quickly. I corrected the proofs and returned them. To my astonishment
the review of Swift appeared almost at once. I supposed, in the luxury
of depression, that they wished to cast the rubbish out of the way as
quickly as possible.

My first intention was not to go again to _The Spectator_ office,
the place where I was so obviously not wanted, but I remembered that my
father had told me that it was always the custom to return books as soon
as the proofs were corrected or the articles had appeared. I determined,
therefore, that I would do the proper thing, though I felt rather shy,
and feared I might be looked upon as "cadging" for work.

With my books under my arm I walked off to Wellington Street, on a
Tuesday morning, and went up to Mr. Hutton's room, where on that day the
two editors used to spend the greater part of the morning discussing the
coming issue of the paper. I had prepared a nice little impromptu
speech, which was to convey in unmistakable terms that I had not come to
ask for more books; "I fully realise and fully acquiesce in your
inability to use my work." When I went in I was most cordially received,
and almost immediately Mr. Hutton asked me to look over a pile of new
books and see if there was anything there I would like. This appeared to
be my cue, and I accordingly proceeded to explain that I had not come to
ask for more books but only to bring back the two books I had already
reviewed and to thank the editors. I quite understood that there was no
more work for me.

Then, to my amazement, Mr. Townsend, with that vividness of expression
which was his, said something to the effect that they had only said that
when they didn't know that I could write. The position, it appeared, had
been entirely changed by the review of _Gulliver's Travels_ and
they hoped very much that I should be able to do regular work for _The
Spectator_. Mr. Hutton chimed in with equally kind and appreciative
words, and I can well remember the pleasant confusion caused in my mind
by the evident satisfaction of my future chiefs. I was actually hailed
as "a writer and critic of the first force."

To say that I returned home elated would not be exactly true. Bewildered
would more accurately describe my state of mind. I had genuinely
believed that my attempt to give the final word of criticism upon
_Gulliver's Travels_--that is what a young man always thinks, and
ought to think, he is doing in the matter of literary criticism--had
been a total failure. Surely I couldn't be wrong about my own work. Yet
_The Spectator_ editors were evidently not mad or pulling my leg or
even flattering me! It was a violent mystery.

Of course I was pleased at heart, but I tried to unload some of my
liabilities to Nemesis by the thought that my new patrons would probably
get tired of my manner of writing before very long. What had captured
them for the moment was merely a certain novelty of style. They would
very soon see through it, as I had done in my poignant self-criticism.
But this prudent view was before long, in a couple of days, to be exact,
knocked on the head by a delightful letter which Mr. Townsend wrote to
my father. In it he expressed himself even more strongly in regard to
the review than he had done in speaking to me.

I honestly think that what I liked best in the whole business was the
element of adventure. There was something thrilling and, so, intensely
delightful to me in the thought, that I had walked down to Wellington
Street, like a character in a novel, prepared for a setback, only to
find that Fate was there, "hid in an auger-hole," ready to rush and
seize me. Somehow or other I felt, though I would not admit it even to
myself, that the incident had been written in the Book of Destiny, and
that it was one which was going to affect my whole life. Of course,
being, like other young men, a creature governed wholly by reason and
good sense, I scouted the notion of a destined day as sentimental and
ridiculous. Still, the facts were "as stated," and could not be
altogether denied.

Looking back at the lucky accident which brought the right book, the
right reviewer, and the properly-tuned editors together, I am bound to
say that I think that the editors were right and that I had produced
good copy. At any rate, their view being what it was, I have no sort of
doubt that they were quite right to express it as plainly and as
generously as they did to me. To have followed the conventional rule of
not puffing up a young man with praise and to have guarded their true
opinion as a kind of guilty secret would have been distinctly unfair to
me, nay, prejudicial. There are, I suppose, a certain number of young
people to whom it would be unsafe to give a full measure of eulogy. But
these are a small minority. The ordinary young man or young woman is
much more likely to be encouraged or sometimes even alarmed by unstinted
praise. Generous encouragement is the necessary mental nourishment of
youth, and those who withhold it from them are not only foolish but
cruel. They are keeping food from the hungry.

If my editors had told me that they thought the review rather a poor
piece of work, I should, by "the law of reversed effort," have been
almost certain to have taken up a combative line and have convinced
myself that it was epoch-making. When a man thinks himself overpraised,
if he has anything in him at all, he begins to get anxious about his
next step. He is put very much on his mettle not to lose what he has
gained.

It may amuse my readers, if I quote a few sentences from the article,
and allow them to see whether their judgment coincides with that of my
chiefs at _The Spectator_ on a matter which was for me fraught with
the decrees of Destiny. This is how I began my review of Swift and his
masterpiece:

"Never anyone living thought like you," said to Swift the woman who
loved him with a passion that had caught some of his own fierceness and
despair. The love which great natures inspire had endowed Vanessa with a
rare inspiration. Half-consciously she has touched the notes that help
us to resolve the discord in Swift's life. Truly, the mind of living man
never worked as Swift's worked. That this is so is visible in every
line, in every word he ever wrote. No phrase of his is like any other
man's; no conception of his is ever cast in the common mould. It is this
that lends something so dreadful and mysterious to all Swift's writings.

From this time I began to get books regularly from _The Spectator_
and to pay periodical visits to the office, where I learned to
understand and to appreciate my chiefs. But more of them later. The year
1886 was one of political convulsion, the year of the great split in the
Liberal Party; the year in which Lord Hartington and Mr. Chamberlain
finally severed themselves from Mr. Gladstone and began that co-
operation with the Conservatives which resulted in the formation of the
Unionist Party. I do not, however, want to deal here with the Unionist
crisis, except so far as it affected me and _The Spectator_. While
my father and my elder brother remained Liberals and followed Mr.
Gladstone, I followed Lord Hartington, Mr. Chamberlain, and Mr. Goschen.
My conversion was not in any way sought by my new friends and chiefs at
_The Spectator_ office, though they at once took the Unionist side.
I have no doubt, however, that my intercourse with Hutton and Townsend
had its effect, though I also think that my mind was naturally Unionist
in politics. I was already a Lincoln worshipper in American history and
desired closer union with the Dominions, not separation. I was for
concentration, not dispersion, in the Empire. In any case, I took the
plunge, one which might have been painful if my father had not been the
most just, the most fair-minded, and the most kind-hearted of men.
Although he was an intense, nay, a fierce Gladstonian, I never had the
slightest feeling of estrangement from him or he from me. It happened,
however, that the break-up of the Liberal Party affected me greatly at
_The Spectator_. When the election of 1886 took place, I was asked
by a friend and Somersetshire neighbour, Mr. Henry Hobhouse, who had
become, like me, a Liberal Unionist, to act as his election agent. This
I did, though, as a matter of fact, he was unopposed. The moment he was
declared elected I made out my return as election agent and went
straight back to my work in London. Almost at once I received a letter
which surprised me enormously. It was from Mr. Hutton, telling me that
Mr. Townsend had gone away for his usual summer holiday, and that he
wanted someone to come and help him by writing a couple of leaders a
week and some of the notes. I, of course, was delighted at the prospect,
for my mind was full of politics and I was longing to have my say. Here
again, though it did not consciously occur to me that I was in for
anything big, I seem to have had some sort of subconscious premonition.
At any rate, I accepted with delight and well remember my talk at the
office before taking up my duties. My editor explained to me that Mr.
Asquith, who had been up till the end of 1885 the writer of a weekly
leader in _The Spectator_ and also a holiday writer, had now
severed his connection with the paper, owing to his entry into active
politics. It did not occur to me, however, that I was likely to get the
post of regular leader-writer in his stead, though this was what
actually happened.

I left the office, I remember, greatly pleased with the two subjects
upon which I was to write. The first article was to be an exhortation to
the Conservative side of the Unionist Party not to be led into thinking
that they were necessarily a minority in the country and that they could
not expect any but a minute fraction of working-men to be on their side.
With all the daring of twenty-six I set out to teach the Conservative
party their business. This is how I began my article which appeared on
the 24th of July, 1886.

In their hearts the Conservatives cannot really believe that anyone with
less than £100 a year willingly votes on their side. A victory in a
popular constituency always astonishes them. They cannot restrain a
feeling that by all the rules of reason and logic they ought to have
lost. What inducement, they wonder, can the working-men have to vote for
them? Lord Beaconsfield, of course, never shared such notions as
these.... Yet his party never sincerely believed what he told them, and
only followed him because they saw no other escape from their
difficulties. The last extension of the franchise has again shown that
he was right, and that in no conditions of life do Englishmen vote as a
herd.

Here is how I ended it:

Conciliation or Coercion was the cry everywhere. And yet the majority of
the new voters, to their eternal honour, proved their political infancy
so full of sense and patriotism that they let go by unheeded the appeals
to their class-prejudices and to their emotions, and chose, instead, the
harder and seemingly less generous policy, based on reason rather than
on sentiment, on conviction rather than on despair. As the trial was
severe, so is the honour due to the new voters lasting and conspicuous.

The length of the quotation is justified by its effect on--my life. For
me it has another interest. In re-reading it, I note that, right or
wrong, it takes exactly the view of the English democracy which I have
always taken and which I hold today as strongly as I did forty years
ago.

The article had an instant reaction. It delighted Mr. Townsend, who,
though he did not _know_ it was by me, guessed that it was mine,
and wrote at once to ask me whether, when Mr. Hutton went on his
holiday, I could remain at work as his assistant. Very soon after, he
suggested, with a swift generosity that still warms my heart, that if I
liked to give up the Bar, for which I was still supposing myself to be
reading, I could have a permanent place at _The Spectator_, and
even, if I remember rightly, hinted that I might look forward to
succeeding the first of the two partners who died or retired, and so to
becoming joint editor or joint proprietor. That prospect I do admit took
away my breath. With the solemn caution of youth, or at any rate with
youth's delight in irony in action, I almost felt that I should have to
go and make representations to my chief about his juvenile impetuosity
and want of care and prudence. Surely he must see that he had not had
enough experience of me yet to make so large a proposition, that it was
absurd, and so forth. _O sancta simplicitas!_




CHAPTER II

HOW I CAME TO "THE SPECTATOR" (_Continued_)


Even the success chronicled in the preceding chapter did not exhaust the
store of good luck destined for my first appearance as a political
leader-writer. Fate again showed its determination to force me upon
_The Spectator_. When I arrived at the office on the Tuesday
morning following the publication of the number of the paper in which my
first two leaders appeared, I found that the second leader had done even
better than the first. Its title seemed appallingly dull, and, I
remember, called forth a protest from Mr. Hutton when I suggested
writing it. It was entitled "The Privy Council and the Colonies." I had
always been an ardent Imperialist, and I had taken to Constitutional Law
like a duck to the water, and felt strongly, like so many young men
before me, the intellectual attraction of legal problems and still more
the majesty and picturesqueness of our great Tribunals. Especially had I
been fascinated by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and its
world-wide jurisdiction. I had even helped to draw some pleadings in a
Judicial Committee case when in Chambers. Accordingly, though with some
difficulty, I persuaded Mr. Hutton to let me have my say and show what a
potent bond of Empire was to be found therein. I also wanted to
emphasise how further ties of Imperial unity might be developed on
similar lines--a fact, I may say, which was not discovered by the
practical politicians till about the year 1912, or twenty-seven years
later.

Now it happened that Mr. Gladstone's Ministry, though beaten at the
elections, had not yet gone out of office. It also happened that Lord
Granville, then Colonial Secretary, was to receive the Agents-General of
the self-governing Colonies, as they were then called, on the Saturday;
and finally, that Lord Granville had a fit of the gout. The result of
the last fact was that he had to put off preparing his speech till the
last possible moment. When he had been wheeled in a chair into the
reception-room--his foot was too painful to allow him to walk--he began
his address to the Deputation in these terms:

In a very remarkable article which appears in this week's
_Spectator_ it is pointed out "that people are apt to overlook the
importance of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as one of the
bonds that unite the Colonies and the Mother Country."

He then went on to use the article as the foundation for his speech. I
had talked about the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council being a
body which "binds without friction and links without strain," and Lord
Granville did the same.

But of this speech I knew nothing when I entered The _Spectator_
office on my fateful second Tuesday. I was only intent to get
instructions for new leaders. Besides, I had been away on a country-
house visit from the Saturday to the Monday, and had missed Monday's
_Times_. I was therefore immensely surprised when Mr. Hutton, from
the depths of his beard, asked me in deep tones whether I had seen
_The Times_ of Monday, and what was said therein about my Privy
Council article. I admit that for a moment I thought I had been guilty
of some appalling blunder and that, as the soldiers say, I was "for it"
However, I saw that I must face the music as best I could, and admitted
that I had not seen the paper. "Then you ought to have," was Mr.
Hutton's not very reassuring reply. He got up, went to a side-table,
and, after much digging into a huge heap of papers, extracted Monday's
_Times_ and with his usual gruff good-temper read out the opening
words of Lord Granville's speech. He was, in fact, greatly delighted,
and almost said in so many words that it wasn't every day that the
Editors of _The Spectator_ could draw Cabinet Ministers to
advertise their paper.

Certainly it was astonishingly good luck for a "commencing journalist"
to bring down two birds with two articles, _i.e._, to hit one of
his own editors with one article, and to bag a Cabinet Minister with the
other.

No doubt the perfectly cautious man would have said, "This is an
accident, a mere coincidence, it means nothing and will never happen
again." Fortunately people do not argue in that rational and statistical
spirit. All my chiefs knew or cared was that I had written good stuff
and on a very technical subject, and that I had caught the ear of the
man who, considering the subject, most mattered--the Secretary of State
for the Colonies.

Anyway, my two first trial leaders had done the trick and I was from
that moment free of _The Spectator_. Townsend's holiday succeeded
to Hutton's, and when the holidays were over, including my own, which
not unnaturally took me to Venice,--"_Italiam petimus_" should
always be the motto of an English youth,--I returned to take up the
position of a weekly leader-writer and holiday-understudy, a mixed post
which by the irony of fate, as I have already said, had just been
vacated by Mr. Asquith. Here was an adventure indeed, and I can say
again with perfect sincerity that for me the greatest delight of the
whole thing was this element of the Romantic.

I was quite sensible that I had had the devil's own luck in my capture
of a post on _The Spectator_. Indeed, I very much preferred that,
to the thought that the good fortune that was mine was the reward of a
grinding and ignoble perseverance. I was in no mood for the drab
virtues. I hugged the thought that it was not through my merits but
because I possessed a conquering star that I had got where I was.

Curiously enough, I had never dreamed of joining _The Spectator_
staff or even of becoming its Editor. I had imagined every other sort of
strange and sudden preferment, of frantic proprietors asking me at a
moment's notice to edit their papers, or of taking up some great and
responsible position, but never of carrying by assault 1 Wellington
Street. But that, of course, made it all the more delightful. No one
could have prepared me a greater or a more grateful surprise.

It is strange to look back and see how at this moment that mystery which
we barbarously call "the force of circumstances" seemed to have
determined not merely to drive in my nail but to hammer it up to the
head. It happened that both Mr. Hutton and Mr. Townsend had great belief
in the literary judgment of Canon Ainger, a man, it is to be feared, now
almost forgotten, but whose opinion was looked upon in the 'eighties and
'nineties with something approaching reverence.

In 1886--my "Spectator" year, as I may call it--when I was acting as
election-agent to Mr. Henry Hobhouse, I happened to be searching in the
old library at Hadspen House for something to read, something with which
to occupy the time of waiting between the issue of the writ and
nomination-day. If there was to be no opposition it did not seem worth
while to get too busy over the electorate. We remained, therefore, in a
kind of enchanter's circle until nomination-day was over. It was a time
in which everybody whispered mysteriously that a very strong candidate,
name unknown, would suddenly appear at Yeovil, Langport, or Chard--I
forget which of these pleasant little towns was the place of nomination
--and imperil our chances. As was natural to me then, and, I must
confess, would be natural to me now, my search for a book took me
straight to that part of the library in which the poets congregated. My
eye wandered over the shelves, and lighted upon _Poems in the
Dorsetshire Dialect_ by the Rev. William Barnes. Hadspen House was
quite close to the Dorset border. I was interested and I took down the
volume. I don't think I had ever heard of Barnes before, but being very
fond of the Somersetshire dialect and proud of my ability to speak in
it, my first impulse was rather to turn up my nose at the vernacular of
a neighbouring county. It was, then, with a decided inclination to look
a gift-horse in the mouth that I retired with Barnes to my den. Yet, as
Hafiz says, "by this a world was affected." I opened the poems at the
enchanting stanzas, "Lonesome woodlands! zunny woodlands!" and was
transported. In a moment I realised that for me a new foot was on the
earth, a new name come down from Heaven. I read and read, and can still
remember how the exquisite rhythm of "Woak Hill" was swept into my mind,
to make there an impression which will never be obliterated while life
lives in my brain. I did not know, in that delirium of exaltation which
a poetic discovery always makes in the heart of a youth, whether most to
admire the bold artifice of the man who had adapted an unrhymed Persian
metre--the Pearl--to the needs of a poem in the broadest Dorsetshire
dialect, or the deep intensity of the emotion with which he had clothed
a glorious piece of prosodiac scholarship.

I recognised at once that the poem was fraught with a pathos as
magnificent as anything in the whole range of classic literature--and
also that this pathos had that touch of stableness in sorrow which we
associate, and rightly associate, with the classics. Miserably bad
scholar as I was, and am, I knew enough to see that the Dorsetshire
schoolmaster and village parson had dared to challenge the deified
Virgil himself. The depth of feeling in the lines--

  An' took her wi' air-reachen arm
     To my zide at Woak Hill

is not exceeded even by those which tell how Æneas filled his arms with
the empty air when he stretched them to enfold the dead Creusa.

Upon the last two stanzas in "Woak Hill" I may as truly be said to have
lived for a month as Charles Lamb lived upon "Rose Aylmer."

  An' that's why folk thought, for a season,
     My mind were a-wandren
   Wi' sorrow, when I wer so sorely
     A-tried at Woak Hill.

  But no; that my Mary mid never
     Behold herzelf slighted,
   I wanted to think that I guided
     My guide from Woak Hill.

Equally potent was the spell cast by what is hardly less great a poem
than "Woak Hill," the enchanting "Evenen, an' Maids out at Door." There
the Theocritus of the West dares to use not merely the words of common
speech and primitive origin, but words drawn from Low Latin and of
administrative connotation. Barnes achieves this triumph in words with
perfect ease. He can use a word like "parish" not, as Crabbe did, for
purposes of pure narration but in a passage of heightened rhetoric:

But when you be a-lost vrom the parish, zome more Will come on in your
pleazen to bloom an' to die; An' the zummer will always have maidens
avore Their doors, vor to chatty an' zee volk goo by.

For daughters ha' mornen when mothers ha' night, An' there's beauty
alive when the fairest is dead; As when one sparklen wave do zink down
from the light, Another do come up an' catch it instead.

Rightly did the Edinburgh reviewer of the 'thirties, in noticing Barnes's
poems--the very edition from which I was reading, perfect, by the way,
in its ribbed paper and clear print--declare "there has been no such art
since Horace." And here I may interpolate that the reviewer in question
was Mr. George Venables, who was within a year to become a friend of
mine. He and his family were close friends of my wife's people, and when
after my marriage I met him, a common love of Barnes brought together
the ardent worshipper of the new schools of poetry, for such I was, and
the old and distinguished lawyer who was Thackeray's contemporary at the
Charterhouse. Barnes was for us both a sign of literary freemasonry
which at once made us recognise each other as fellow-craftsmen.

Bewildered readers will ask how my discovery of Barnes affected my
position at _The Spectator_. It happened in this way. A couple of
weeks after I had been established at _The Spectator_ as a
"_verus socius_" Barnes died, at a very great age. It was one of
those cases in which death suddenly makes a man visible to the
generation into which he has survived. Barnes had outlived not only his
contemporaries but his renown, and most of the journalists detailed to
write his obituary notice had evidently found it a hard task to say why
he should be held in remembrance.

But by a pure accident here was I, in the high tide of my enthusiasm for
my new poet. Needless to say I was only too glad to have a chance to let
myself go on Barnes, and so was entrusted with the Barnes Obituary
article for _The Spectator_.

The result was that the next week my chiefs showed me a letter one of
them had received from Canon Ainger, asking for the name of the
"evidently new hand" who had written on Barnes, and making some very
complimentary remarks on his work. It was eminently characteristic of
them that instead of being a little annoyed at being told that an
article had appeared in _The Spectator_ with an unexpected literary
charm, they were as genuinely delighted as I was.

In any case, the incident served, as I have said, to drive the nail up
to the head and to make Mr. Hutton and Mr. Townsend feel that they had
not been rash in their choice, and had got a man who could do literature
as well as politics.

Not being without a sense of superstition, at any rate where cats are
concerned, and a devout lover of "the furred serpent," I may record the
last, the complete rite of my initiation at _The Spectator_ office.
While I was one day during my novitiate talking over articles and
waiting for instructions--or, rather, finding articles for my chiefs to
write about, for that very soon became the routine--a large,
consequential, not to say stout black Tom-cat slowly entered the room,
walked round me, sniffed at my legs in a suspicious manner, and then, to
my intense amazement and amusement, hurled himself from the floor with
some difficulty and alighted upon my shoulder. Mr. Townsend, who loved
anything dramatic, though he did not love animals as Mr. Hutton did,
pointed to the cat and muttered dramatically, "Hutton, just look at
that!"

He went on to declare that the cat very seldom honoured "upstairs" with
his presence, but kept himself, as a rule, strictly to himself, in the
basement. Apparently, however, the sagacious beast had realised that
there was a new element in the office, and had come to inspect it and
see whether he could give it his approval or not. When it was given, it
was conceded by all concerned that the appointment had received its
consecration. Like "the Senior Fellow" in Sir Frederick Pollock's poem
on the College Cat, I was passed by the highest authority in the office.

  One said, "The Senior Fellow's vote!"
   The Senior Fellow, black of coat,
     Save where his front was white,
   Arose and sniffed the stranger's shoes
   With critic nose, as ancients use
     To judge mankind aright.

  I--for 'twas I who tell the tale--
   Conscious of fortune's trembling scale,
     Awaited the decree;
   But Tom had judged: "He loves our race,"
   And, as to his ancestral place,
     He leapt upon my knee.

  Thenceforth, in common-room and hall,
   A _verus socius_ known to all,
     I came and went and sat,
   Far from cross fate's or envy's reach;
   For none a title could impeach
     Accepted by the cat.

It was at this time that Mr. Townsend wrote me, on behalf of himself and
his partner, a letter stating definitely that if I would devote myself
to _The Spectator_, he and Hutton would guarantee me at once a
certain salary, though I might still take any work I liked outside. But
this was not all. The letter went on to say that the first of the
partners who died or retired would offer me a half-share of the paper.
It was pointed out that, of course, that might conceivably mean a fairly
long apprenticeship, but that it was far more likely to mean a short
one. It proved to be neither the one nor the other, but what might be
called a compromise period of some ten years.

And so in the course of a very few weeks my fate had been decided for me
and the question I had so often put to myself: Should I stick to the Bar
or throw in my lot with journalism? was answered. A great wave had
seized me and cast me up upon the shore of 1 Wellington Street. I felt
breathless but happy. Though I did not fully realise how deeply my life
had been affected by the decision or how strange in some ways was the
course that lay before me, I had an instinctive feeling that I must
follow wholeheartedly the path of Destiny. I determined to free my mind
from all thoughts of a return to the Bar. I shut my eyes for ever to the
vision of myself as Lord Chancellor or Lord Chief Justice--a vision that
has haunted every young man who has ever embarked upon the study of
English Law;--the vision of which Dr. Johnson, even at the end of his
life, could not speak without profound emotion.

I acted promptly. I at once gave up my nice little room in the Temple.
It was about eight foot square, furnished with one table, one arm-chair,
one cane chair, and a bookcase, and dignified by the name of Chambers. I
sometimes wonder now whether, if I could have looked down the long
avenue of the years and seen the crowded, turbulent series of events
which, as Professor Einstein has taught us, was rushing upon me like a
tiger on its prey, I should have been alarmed or not. I should have seen
many things exciting, many things sad, many things difficult, but above
all I should have seen what could only have been described as a
veritable snowstorm of written and printed pages.

I have sometimes, as every man will, reversed the process, looked back
and reviewed the past. On such occasions I have been half inclined to
make the reflection, common to all journalists, when they survey the
monumental works of our brethren in the superior ranks of the literary
profession: "Have I not cast my life and energy away on things ephemeral
and unworthy? Have not I preferred a kind of glorified pot-boiling to
the service of the spirit?" In the end, however, like the painter with
the journalist's heart in Robert Browning's poem, I console myself for
having enlisted among the tradesmen of literature rather than among the
artists:

  For I have done some service in my time,
   And not been paid profusely.
   Let some great soul write my six thousand leaders!

It is, I admit, an appalling thought to have covered so much paper and
used so much ink. But, after all, an apology may be made for mere volume
in journalism analogous to that made for it by Dr. Johnson when he said
that poets must to some extent be judged by their quantity as well as
their quality. Anyway, I am inclined to be proud of my output. When an
occasion like the present makes me turn back to my old articles, I am
glad to say that my attitude, far from being one of shame, is more like
that of the Duke of Wellington. When quite an old man, somebody brought
him his Indian Despatches to look over. As he read he is recorded to
have muttered: "Damned good! I don't know how the devil I ever managed
to write 'em."

The tale of how I came to _The Spectator_ is finished. I must now
describe what sort of a youth it was who got there, and what were the
influences that had gone to his making.




CHAPTER III

MY PHYSICAL HOME, MY FAMILY, AND MY GOOD FORTUNE THEREIN


The autobiographer, or at any rate the writer of the type of
autobiography on which I am engaged, need not apologise for being
egotistical. If he is not that he is nothing. He must start with the
assumption that people want to hear about him and to hear it from
himself. Further, he must be genuinely and actively interested in his
own life and therefore write about it willingly and with zest. If you
get anywhere near the position of an autobiographer, "_invitus_,"
addressing a reader, "_invitum_," the game is up.

It would, then, be an absurdity to pretend to avoid egotism.

It would be almost as futile to apologise for being trivial. All details
of human life are interesting, or can be made interesting, especially if
they can be shown to be contributory to the development of the subject
on the Anatomy-table. The elements that contributed to the building up
of the man under observation are sure to be worth recording.

The autobiographer who is going to succeed with his task must set down
whatever he believes went to the making of his mind and soul, and of
that highly composite product which constitutes a human being. Nothing
is too small or too unimportant to be worthy of record. But people to
whom criticism is a passion and who love it even more than life, and
they are often very valuable people, will say, "Are we not, then, to be
allowed to dub your book trivial, if we think so?" Of course they must
have that license, but they must make good the plea of triviality, not
in the facts but in the exposition. _There_ no man has a right to
be trivial, or empty, or commonplace. Whatever is recorded must be
recorded worthily.

Take a plain example. If I set forth to describe my crossing Waterloo
Bridge on a particular day in a particular year, I must not merely on
that ground be attacked for triviality. I may be able to show, in the
first place, that the crossing by that bridge and not, let us say, by
using Hungerford Bridge or Blackfriars Bridge, affected my life. I may
also be able to describe my walk or drive in such a way that it will
make a deep impress upon the reader's mind. In a word, to get judgment
against me, the critic must demur, not on my facts but on a point of
literature, that is, on my method of presentation.

In considering the multitude of things which have gone to make me what I
am, which have drawn into a single strand the innumerable threads that
the Fates have been spinning for me ever since they began their dread
business, what strikes me most of all and first of all is my good
fortune. I may, on a future occasion, complain that in middle life and
in later life I did not have good luck, but bad luck, but I should be an
ingrate to Destiny if I did not admit that nothing could have been more
happy than the circumstances with which I was surrounded at my birth--
the circumstances which made the boy, who made the youth, who made the
man.

Above all, I was fortunate in my father and my mother. Though I must put
them first in honour on my record, as first in time and in memory, I can
show  them best by touching in a preliminary study on those surroundings,
moral  and intellectual, into which I was born.

[Illustration: View of the North Front of Sutton Court, in the County of
Somerset, the Family House of the Stracheys.]

In the first place, I count myself specially happy in that my parents
were people of moderate fortune. They were not too poor to give me the
pleasures and the freedoms of a liberal education, and of all that used
to be included in the phrase "easy circumstances." Ours was a pleasant
and leisurely way of life, undisturbed by the major worries and
anxieties of narrow means.

On the other hand, my home surroundings were not of the pompous,
luxurious kind which makes nothing moral or physical matter very much,
which drowns a man in security. I knew what it was to want a thing, and
to be told that it was much too expensive to be thought of. I knew I
should have to make my way in life like my ancestors before me, for not
only was my family in no sense a rich one, but I was a second son, who
could only look forward to a second son's portion,--an honourable
distinction, this, and one of which my father and my mother were often
wont to speak.

I had, in a word, all the pride of a second son, a creature devoted to
carving his own way to fame and fortune. I will not say that my parents
wanted to console me for being a second son and for seeing my elder
brother inherit the estate and Sutton the beloved, for that was never
thought of or dreamt of by them, or by me. On the contrary, I was told
in all sincerity, and firmly believe now, as I did then, that though
somebody must keep the flame alight on the family altar, where it was
lighted so long ago, and though this duty fell to the eldest son, I need
not envy him. He was tied. I as a younger son was left free,
untrammelled, the world before me. If I was worthy of my fate, the ball
was at my feet. Such was the policy of younger sons, and so it was
handed on to me.

Again, I was fortunate in being brought up in the country, and not in
London or near some great town;--in being, that is, the inmate of "an
English country-house" in the accepted sense, a place to which a certain
definite way of life pertains, especially when the house is not bought,
but inherited, and is regarded with a peculiar veneration and admiration
by all who live in it.

The love of some old "house in the country" constitutes a family
freemasonry, of which those who have not actually experienced it can
form no conception. It unites those who differ in opinion, in age, in
outlook on life, and in circumstances. It is the password of the heart.

Call a dog-kennel Sutton, and I should love it. How much more so when it
stands beside its sheltering elms and limes, with its terraces looking
to the blue line of Mendip, its battlemented and flower-tufted fortress
wall, and its knightly Tower built for security and defence.

In a word, I had the supreme good-luck to be born the second son of a
Somersetshire squire and to be brought up in a Somersetshire country-
house. If the reader would know what that means to a Somersetshire man,
let him turn to Coryat's _Crudities_ and see what the Elizabethan
tourist says in his Introduction as to the possession of a Manor in the
county aforesaid.

But I must be careful not to give a false impression. Sutton is no
palace in miniature, no grandiose expression of the spacious days of
Elizabeth, no pompous outcome of Vanbrugh's magnificent mind, no piece
of reticent elegance by Adams. Instead, it may well seem to the visiting
stranger little more than a fortuitous concourse of mediaeval,
Elizabethan, Jacobean, and modern atoms, which time and the country
builder, too unlearned to be vulgar, have harmonized into a very
moderate, though admittedly attractive, "country seat," of the smaller
sort.

Just as the house had nothing grand about it, so the life lived in it
was not in the least like that described in the old-fashioned sporting
or Society novel, or in the Christmas Number of an Illustrated Paper or
Magazine. Neither my home nor my family was by any means "typical,"
which so often means very untypical. This is specially true of the
Family. They were not in my time, and, indeed, never have been, persons
"complete with" fox-hounds, racers, cellars of port, mortgages, gaming
or elections debts, obsequious tenantry, and a brutal enforcement of the
Game Laws, varied by the semi-fraudulent enclosure of the poor man's
common. With such rural magnificoes, if they ever existed in that form,
which I greatly doubt, we had nothing in common. Even when reduced to
reasonable limits, the picture will not fit the majority of English
country-houses and country gentlemen.

In the first place, the Stracheys could not afford the type of life
depicted by the novelists and satirists, and, in the second place, they
had not the opportunity. Their eldest sons always had to do something in
the world, and even when in possession of the estate were by no means
inclined to spend their lives as nothing but sportsmen. Certainly my
ancestors never showed any inclination to vegetate, or to live gun in
hand and spaniel at heel, like the squires in the old engravings and
colour-prints.

Here I may say parenthetically that we have the good luck to possess
many old family papers at Sutton. I used to read long and happily in
these as a boy, and early saw the falsehood of the conventional, feudal
view of the English squirearchy. When I worked back to the mediaeval
possessors of Sutton, I could find nothing to satisfy my youthful dreams
of knights in armour doing deeds of prowess, or even of tyranny upon
"the villagers crouching at their feet." Instead, I found, with some
disappointment, I admit, that the very first record in regard to Sutton
was that of a dispute in the law-courts with the local parson--a dispute
which is, of course, perennial in all villages and "quiet places by
rivers or among woods." It is as active now as it was in the twelfth
century.

Whether Sir Walter de Sutton, with half a knight's fee, for that,
apparently, was the proper legal description of the Sutton Court estate,
got the best of the Vicar, or the Vicar of him, does not seem to have
been recorded. Anyway, they went for each other, not with lance in rest,
on the one side, and Holy Water, bell, book, and candle on the other,
but with attorneys, and writs, and motions in arrest of judgment, and
all the formulae which can be seen at work in the Year Books of Edward
II, for that was the date of the Tower, and of the aforesaid Walter de
Sutton.

As I shall show later, when I come to deal with my ancestry, Sutton was
never a "Heartbreak House." In each succeeding generation it held the
place which it held when I was young, and which, Heaven be praised! it
still holds. A small, comfortable, yet dignified manor-house, surrounded
by farmhouses and cottages in which live still just the kind of people
who have lived there throughout the period of legal or of literary
memory--the period described as that to which "the memory of man runneth
not to the contrary."

The village people were poor, but yet not dependent; people not,
perhaps, very enterprising, and yet with a culture of their own; and
people, above all, with natural dignity and good manners shown to those
they like and respect, though often with a conventional set of bad
manners to use, if required, as armour against a rough world. These are
always produced when they are inclined to suspect strangers of regarding
them with patronage, ridicule, or contempt.

At this day I could show a rural labourer living in one of the Sutton
Court cottages, aged eighty-three or so, who lived there when I was a
boy and looked then, to my eyes, almost exactly as he does now. Tall,
distinguished, with not merely good manners but a good manner, and with
real refinement of speech, though a strong Somersetshire accent, Israel
Veal would show nothing of himself to a stranger. Probably he would
speak so little, though quite politely, that he would be put down as
"one of those muddle-headed, stupid yokels with little or no mind," who,
according to the townsman, "moulder" in country villages "till they
become demented."

Yet when, a year ago, I introduced my son to him, though my son was,
till then, unknown to him, he at once talked freely. He had got the
password and knew all was safe and well. He proceeded at once to tell
him what he had often told me--how he had "helped to put Sir Henry" (my
father's uncle, whom he succeeded) "into his coffin." He then went on to
describe how (in 1858) the coffin was carried on men's shoulders the
whole way to Chew Magna to be buried there in the Strachey Chapel. The
event set down in cold print does not sound of very great interest or
importance. It will seem, indeed, at first hearing to partake a little
too much of the countryman of the melodrama, or of the comic papers, who
always talks about funerals and corpses. As a matter of fact, however,
Israel Veal has so little self-consciousness and possesses such a gift
for dignified narration that, told by him, the story, if indeed it can
be called a story, always seems of real significance. There is something
of the air of the prophet about the narrator, though he indulge in no
prophecy. I found myself, indeed, saying to my son, "I am so glad you
have heard that as I used to hear it," quite imagining for the moment
that it was a piece of family lore of high import which was being
sacramentally passed on by the old retainer.

At Sutton, though I was not brought up in a hunting-stable, or amid a
crowd of gamekeepers, and so forth, we had the usual establishment of a
country-gentleman of moderate means in the 'seventies. My mother had a
comfortable, heavy landau, with a pair of quiet horses, still officially
and in bills called "coach-horses." My father had a small brougham of
his own for doing magistrate's work, drawn by a horse believed to be of
a very fiery disposition, and called "Black Bess." I and my brothers had
ponies on whose backs we spent many hours. My father had been an invalid
most of his life, and, owing to a stiff knee, could not ride. But,
though an anxious parent, he wisely realised that an Englishman must if
possible know how to use the back of a horse. Ours was a bad riding
country, owing to the great number of small fields, but we galloped up
and down the roads with a youthful lack of consideration for our horses'
legs. Curiously enough, there were no hounds near us, and therefore I
never actually rode to hounds till I was forty. Happily, however, I was
familiar with the saddle, and, though an exceedingly careless rider, had
not, even after nearly twenty years' intermission of riding, to re-learn
my grip.

Even now, to get on a horse and ride through woods and lanes and over
Downs and Commons is an enormous pleasure, and if a mild jump or two can
be added I am transported into the Seventh Heaven. To me the greatest of
all physical enjoyments has always been the sensation produced by a
horse with all four legs off the ground.

There was another aspect of the country-house, which I am sure was not
without its effect. My father, though he knew little or nothing about
agriculture, was to a great extent his own agent, and therefore the
farmers and the cottage tenants were constantly coming to the house to
consult him and to talk over small matters. There also came to him
pretty frequently people on police and magistrate's business, to get
warrants signed, so that the offenders could be legally held till
brought before the Petty Sessions. At these interviews, whether
economic, administrative, or constabulary, I and my brothers were
permitted to attend. While my father sat at his table in what was called
"the magistrate's room," or "Sir Edward's business room," and the other
persons of the drama either sat opposite him, if they were merely on
business, or stood if they were accompanied by a policeman, we children
sat discreetly on a sofa on my father's side of the room and listened
with all our ears.

It was always interesting and curious, and occasionally we had a real
piece of dramatic "fat," in the shape of charges of witchcraft. Assaults
or threatening language "likely to cause breaches of the Peace" were
also regarded as highly diverting. Charges of witchcraft were usually
levelled by one old lady against another. One might hear accounts of how
intrepid men and women nailed down the footsteps of the witch, of how
deadly-nightshade was grown over the porch of a cottage to keep off
witches, and how evil spirits in the shape of squeaking chickens
frequented the woman who was "overlooked." My father did his best to
make peace and subdue superstition, but it was quite easy to see that
his audiences, especially when they were women, regarded him as a victim
of ignorance. "Poor gentleman, he don't understand a word about it."
That was their attitude.

Lastly, my country home had what so many English country-houses have, a
largish library. The hoary tradition that English squires are as a class
illiterate, which they are not even when inordinately given to sport,
has no foundation. In the Great Parlour, for so it was called, there
were plenty of good books, and I was early turned loose among them. My
father would have thought it a crime to keep books from a boy on the
plea that he might injure the bindings or lose the volumes or get harm
from unlicensed reading. I did exactly what I liked in the library and
browsed about with a splendid incoherence which would have shocked a
pedant, but delighted a true man of letters. Now I would open the folio
edition of Ben Jonson, now Congreve's plays and poems printed by
Baskerville; now a volume of "Counsel's Brief delivered in the defence
of Warren Hastings Esqre. at his impeachment," which we happened to
possess; now _Travels to the Court of Ashanti_; now _Chinese
Punishments_; now Flaxman's Illustrations to the _Iliad_, the
_Odyssey_, or _Dante_.

Those were glorious days, for one had real leisure. One varied the
turning over of books in the Great Parlour with a scamper on one's pony,
with visits to the strawberry bed, and with stretching oneself full-
length on a sofa, or the hearth-rug in the Hall, reading four or five
books at a time. In such an atmosphere it was easy to forget one's
proper lessons and the abhorred dexterity of Greek and Latin
grammarians.

If the physical "aura" of Sutton Court was delightful and stimulating to
mind and body, still more stimulating and of still happier chance was
the mental atmosphere. I may class myself as thrice-blessed in being
brought up in Whig ideas, in a Whig family, with Whig traditions, for in
spite of the stones, intellectual and political, that have been thrown
at them, salvation is of the Whigs. When I speak thus of the Whigs I do
not, of course, mean Whiggism of the Whig aristocracy as represented by
modern Tory historians, or by the parasitic sycophants of a militant
Proletariat. I mean true Whig principles--the principles of Halifax, of
Somers, of Locke, of Addison, and of Steele--the principles of the Bill
of Rights and of "the Glorious Revolution of 1688";--the Whiggism which
had its origin in the party of Cromwell and of the Independents, of John
Milton and of Richard Baxter, the party which even in its decadence
flowered in England in Chatham and William Pitt, and in America in
Washington, John Adams, and the founders of the Republic. Whig
principles to me mean that the will of the majority of the nation as a
whole must prevail, and not the will of any section, even if it is a
large section and does manual work. These are the principles which are
in deadly opposition to Jacobinism and Bolshevism. Under Jacobinism and
Bolshevism, as their inventors proclaim, true policy must be made to
prevail by force, or fraud, if necessary. Privilege is claimed for the
minority. Oligarchy, and a very militant form of oligarchy, thus takes
the place of true democracy.

But though the will of the people, be it what it may be, must prevail,
the Whig claims absolute liberty in all matters of personal opinion and
of conscience, and advocates the greatest amount of liberty procurable
in social action. He will not sanction direct action in order to secure
even these things, but he asserts the right of free speech in order to
convert the majority, when it needs converting, to his views, and will
not rest till he obtains it. Never persecute a man for his opinions as
long as he does not proceed to lawless action. Maintain freedom against
a lawless crowd as steadfastly as against a lawless crown. Never refuse
a man an impartial hearing, and never judge a man guilty till he has
been proved so. These are the true Whig principles, and in these I was
brought up.

It is true that my father, yielding not unnaturally to the fashion of
his day,--the fashion of decrying the Whigs--would always call himself
a Liberal rather than a Whig, and, indeed, Whiggism in his youth was
often little better than a specially bad type of Toryism. As soon,
however, as I began to study history in any detail, that is not in
handbooks, but in the originals, I soon saw that he was one of the best
of Whigs, whether in matters of State or Church. Moderation, justice,
freedom, sympathy with suffering, tolerance, yielded not in the form of
patronage but in obedience to a claim of right which could not be
gainsaid--these were the pillars of his mind.

Who will deny that it was good fortune to be brought up in these views
and by such an expounder? As I looked at the pictures that hung on the
walls in the Great Hall (not very great, in fact, though bearing that
name), I remembered with a glow of pride that it was on these principles
that my family had been nourished. William Strachey, the first Secretary
to the Colony of Virginia, would, I felt, have been a true Whig if Whig
principles had been enunciated in his time, for the Virginia Company was
a Liberal movement. John Strachey, his son, stood at the very cradle of
Whiggism, for was he not the intimate friend of John Locke? Locke in his
letters from exile and in his formative period writes to Strachey with
affection and admiration.

To my glowing imagination John Strachey thus became the unknown inspirer
of Locke, and therefore, perhaps, the inspirer and founder of the Whig
philosophy. The son of Locke's friend, though the West Country was, as a
rule, hopelessly Tory and full of Squire Westerns, stood firm by William
and Mary and George I. As a Fellow of the Royal Society, the second John
Strachey must have been a friend of Sir Isaac Newton, the mighty Whig of
Science.

There were also Cromwellian ancestors on the distaff side. Indeed,
though once more not in the ordinary conventional sense, the aura of
Sutton was a Whig aura.

Though the aura of Sutton Court had a strong effect upon me morally and
intellectually, the emotional side of me was even more deeply touched.
The beauty and fascination of the house, its walls, its trees, and its
memories, made, as I have already said, so deep an impression upon me
that to this hour I love the place, the thought of it, and even the very
name of it, as I love no other material thing. By nature I am not among
those who become permanently attached to objects. It is true that I love
my own home in Surrey, a house which I built, as it were, with my own
hands. I love the scenery; I love it also as the place where my wife and
I went as young people, and as the place where my children were born,
but the thought of it does not touch me emotionally as does the thought
of Sutton. What I have felt about Sutton all my life, I shall feel till
I feel no more on earth. But that will not be all. I am convinced that I
shall in some sense or other feel it in some other place. The indent on
my soul will not be effaced.

I have touched on some of the chief things, natal and prenatal, which
went to the making of my mind before I began to shape that mind for
myself. Every man must do this, for whatever be the stars in his
horoscope or the good fairies who preside over his cradle, they can only
give, as it were, "useful instructions" and a good plan of the route.
They leave him also plenty of opportunities for muddling those
instructions and plunging into every kind of folly that they showed him
how to avoid. In the last resort, a man is his own star and must make
his own soul, though, of course, he has a right, nay, a duty, to give
thanks for all good chances and happy circumstances. At any rate, I must
now approach the time at which I took control of myself, and of the
magic boat that had been built and equipped for me by others. Had I been
fully conscious when I started on my own voyage, it should have been
with a devout gratitude that my ship, at any rate, had not been rigged
in the eclipse, and that I set sail under so bright a sky and with so
prosperous a gale behind me.




CHAPTER IV

MY FATHER


I delay too long the picture of my father. Perhaps unconsciously I have
been trying to avoid describing him, for I know the difficulty of the
task and dread producing something unworthy. Important as were our home
and traditions, our family, our friends, and our mode of life, they are
as nothing in my making when compared to the influence of such a man as
he was.

I shall not attempt to describe my father's physical appearance, for
that has been done with sympathy, felicity, and power of presentation in
my brother's portrait here reproduced. I will say only that he was
slight of build and short of stature. He is standing in the little Great
Hall at Sutton, in his black overcoat and hat, ready for one of those
walks on the terrace which he took from his earliest childhood. He was
born in the old house in 1812. It was not, however, till the year 1819
that he first came to live at Sutton. His earliest recollection was, as
he used to tell us, playing on the terrace with the great ginger-
coloured tom-cat, "King George." We always supposed this feline
magnifico to have derived from some stock imported by the first Sir
Henry when he was Master of the Household to George III. As my readers
will see, King George's successor, in the true "mode" of his race, sits
in a purely detached manner in the middle of the polished oak floor
near, but in no special relation to his master, or rather, dependent,
for no cat has a master though many have dependents.

But unstinted, unconditional eulogy is bound to end in flattery, and my
father was much too good a man and too simple a man to be exposed to
even the hint of such a taint. Though he would take sincere praise and
sympathy with the pleasure of a wholly unaffected nature, the best
courtier in the world would have found it impossible to flatter him.

I shall, therefore, be particular to draw clearly such faults as he had.
Also I shall tell them first, though I know they will have a tendency to
change into eulogy as I proceed. In truth, his faults, such as they
were, endeared him only the more to people who understood him.

He did not always show complete equity in judgment, though I admit, and
I think the majority of mankind would admit, that there was something
essentially noble, if unpractical, in the way in which this want of
equity was shown. So tender was his heart, so passionate his hatred of
cruelty, so profound his chivalry, that he was apt to have his
intellectual balance unduly affected by any tale of suffering inflicted
by the strong on the weak, or by any accusation of wrong done to women
or to children. When he heard such a tale he was too little inclined to
show the worldly wisdom of the man who says, "Let us wait and hear all
the facts. It may be a mere cock-and-bull story."

Instead, his attitude always reminded me of that of some eager knight-
errant, on fire to accomplish his duty and to succour helpless damsels
and all persons in distress. He always assumed that a call for succour
came from a deserving object, if only it was agonising enough. He would
post off, as it were, lance in rest and vizor down, upon the slightest
rumour of wrong or cruelty. No woman suffering, or alleged to be
suffering, from the cruelty of a husband, would ever call for his
sympathy in vain. It was, however, cases of cruelty to little children
that most tended to overwhelm his judgment. His burning horror at the
mere idea of such deeds knew no bounds. A wife might to some extent be
able to protect herself from the brutalities of her husband, but what
chance had a helpless, friendless, terrified child, incapable even of
running away from its tormentors, or of making an appeal for protection
to outsiders? Those who have lived on unkindness and terror ever since
they became conscious, cannot even console their poor little hearts with
imaginary visions of happiness.

[Illustration: Sir Edward Strachey in the Hall at Sutton Court with his
Favourite Cat. (From a picture by his son, Henry Strachey.)]

The unhappiness of a tortured child is a thing not to be thought of. It
scorches the mind like a blast of sulphur.

Not only as a magistrate was my father's voice always raised on the side
of the women and children. He would always listen to any mother who came
to protest against the cruelty of the village schoolmistress to her
offspring. The cruelty of the teacher was almost as unendurable to him
as that of a bad father or husband. He would not hear of any
justification for rapping school-children over the knuckles with a
ruler. If one ventured to say that there were such things as demon-
children and that they had a power to probe and prod even the best of
good people into a kind of frenzy in which they were hardly accountable
for their acts, the plea roused his deepest indignation. Indeed, it was
only at some sort of suggestion like this that I ever saw my father
really angry. Then, and only then, he would flare up and reply that this
was the sort of excuse that people always made to cover cruelty,
wickedness, and injustice. Grown-up people were much too ready to invent
plausible grounds for the oppression of children. "Serve you right," was
never heard to fall from his lips by any child.

That he was justified in the general, if not in the particular, case, I
fully realise. Indeed, I and all his children, I think, look back now
with the sense that even if we sometimes criticised him (I admit, only
very slightly) on this point, we were and remain proud that he was
_splendide in-judex_.

Let no one suppose that because my father was a saint, as undoubtedly he
was, his general attitude towards life was of the priggish or
puritanical kind. It was nothing of the sort. Was not one of his
favourite characters in Shakespeare the immortal Mrs. Quickly?

He was a very fastidious and reticent man in matters of the spirit,
unless you approached him definitely and in earnest on a particular
point. Then he would talk freely, and showed a marked liberality of
soul. A courtly eighteenth century divine, though probably nobody would
in reality have had less in common with my father, might have described
him as "a thoroughly well-bred man in matters of religion." In spite of
the fact that he was brought up amongst the Evangelicals and understood
them and shared their better side, nothing, I feel sure, disgusted him
more than their way of living in their spiritual shirtsleeves.

I can imagine his horror at the habit of the Clapham sect of "engaging"
(_i.e._, engaging in prayer), in season and out of season. "Shall
we engage?" the Evangelical Pietist, whether a clergyman or a layman,
would say at the end of some buttered-toast-and-pound-cake tea-party,
and then everyone would be expected to flop down on their knees and
listen to an extemporary appeal to their Maker!

My father was full of stories of the men of his own time and of the men
of former times, of historical allusions and analogies. He abounded in
pregnant sayings culled from English, from Greek and Latin, and also
from Persian, for he had learned the French of the East when he was at
Haileybury studying for the Civil Service of the Honourable East India
Company. Also he was fairly well-read in some branches of French
literature and knew enough Italian to translate a quotation from Dante
or from Tasso. He was also deeply read and deeply interested in Biblical
criticism and in the statecraft of the Old Testament. His book on
"Hebrew Politics" was hailed by theological students of liberal views as
a real contribution to Biblical exegesis.

This all sounds like the record of a scholar. Yet he was not a scholar
but a man with a most active and creative interest in his own world and
his own time. Politics was his master-passion in things secular, and he
followed every turn of the political wheel, not merely with the interest
of a spectator, but with that of a man whose heart and mind were both
deeply concerned. He was a Party Liberal, and also a liberal in the very
best sense, and full of the most earnest zeal for the people's cause. My
only quarrel with him here--if it was a quarrel--was that in his anxiety
to support what he believed to be the cause of the people he was in
effect anti-democratic.

On this point I was wont to chaff him, for there was no man with whom
you could more easily argue without hurting his feelings. I would put it
like this:

You think of the people and your duty to them in too much of a _grand
seigneur_ manner for me. You seem to want to find out what they want,
and then do it, whether it is right or wrong, out of a patronising sense
of moral benevolence. I, on the other hand, am a true democrat because I
regard myself as one of the people--a creature with just as many rights
as they have. Their opinion, if it is the opinion of the majority, will
of course prevail, and ought to prevail, and I shall loyally acquiesce
in it. But I am not going to do what I think unwise, as you appear to
think I should, because somebody has put a ticket on the back of a
certain view and declared it to be the popular view. It may quite well
turn out that the alleged popular view is not popular at all, but is
scouted by the majority.

That, of course, was, and was meant to be, a parody of his attitude, but
it was one which he never resented, though he would not admit its
nearness to the truth.

I shall not give the supreme characteristic impression of the man if I
do not tell something about his stories, and give some specimens of his
table-talk, especially as I have felt very strongly, though it may be
difficult to transfer the impression, that his general talk, quite apart
from his example and direct teaching, had a potent influence upon my
character, and so upon my life.

To begin with, he was an ideal talker to children and young people,
because, besides leisure, he had an innate kindliness and sympathy with
the young which made him always anxious to put himself and his mind and
heart at their disposal. He was in a perpetual mood to answer any
questions, however tiresome and however often repeated. As he was a man
of wide reading, of good memory, and almost an expert in many kinds of
knowledge, we as children had something of that incomparable advantage
for which I have always envied royalty. They are able to learn by the
simple process of talking to people who know. That is not only the
easiest road to knowledge, but if your teacher is no charlatan a more
vivid impression is made upon the mind than is made by books.

If you went to my father and asked him who Aurungzebe was, or Hereward
the Wake, or Masaniello, or Edward Keen, or Callimachus, or Titus Oates,
or Dr. Chalmers, or Saint Januarius, he would tell you at once something
vivid and stimulating about each of them, something which remained in
your mind. Often his answer would lead to other fascinating and
delightful discoveries for the questioner. I will take a couple of
examples at random. When I asked him about Masaniello, he not only told
the story of the insurrection among the _lazzaroni_ at Naples, but
he launched out into accounts of his own experience of Naples in the
'forties and of the crowds of picturesque and starving beggars and
banditti who in those days still infested the city and its horrible and
putrescent lanes and alleys. The Naples of the Bombas, in which he had
spent two or more winters, was always a delightful source of anecdote. I
could fill a book with his talk about Neapolitan nobles who let two
apartments in their Palaces with only one set of furniture, and of the
Neapolitan boatmen who formed the crew of the boat which he kept in the
Bay, for he was too great an invalid to walk. Especially did we love to
hear of how he was carried up Mount Vesuvius in a "litter"--a word which
he always used. It thrilled me. It seemed to make the whole scene Roman
and magnificent. One thought of Pliny going to observe the great
eruption, of Cicero, of Pompey, of Seneca, carried down to Baiæ in their
curtained chairs. My other example is Callimachus, the Greek, or rather,
Alexandrine poet of the Decadence. The mention of his name brought in
its train an excellent story derived from my father's uncle, the second
Sir Henry Strachey, the squire whom he succeeded at Sutton. The story
runs as follows. When the said great-uncle, as a boy just come out to
India, went to dine with the great Orientalist, Sir William Jones, in
his house in Calcutta (_circa_ 1793), Sir William quoted to him a
couple of lines out of Callimachus' Hymn to Apollo, which he had hurled
at the head of Burke when the great Whig tribune threatened that he
would get him (Sir William Jones) recalled if he continued to support
Warren Hastings. The lines quoted from the obscure Greek poet he
translated to the young civilian, Henry Strachey. "In reply, I reminded
Burke," he said, "of the lines in the Hymn to Apollo: '_The Euphrates
is a noble river, but it rolls down all the dead dogs of Babylon to the
sea._'"

My father was wont to point out that, as a matter of fact, Jones's
memory was not quite accurate. If you look at the Burke correspondence,
you will see the dignified letter in which Jones replied to Burke. In it
he makes no direct reference to the orator's threat, and only uses the
first line of Callimachus, which he turns into a compliment. He is sure,
he declares, that the mighty torrent of Burke's eloquence will always be
used in the defence of a friend. Perhaps he thought that, if Burke
looked up the passage, he would be snubbed as it were automatically.

When, however, Jones told the story twelve years afterwards he did what
we are all inclined to do in such circumstances. He imagined himself
much more valiant and much more ready to take a great man by the scruff
of his neck and shake him, than he really was. We are all heroes in our
memories. By the way, it was Callimachus who wrote the epigram on the
death of Heraclitus which was made immortal by the translation of the
author of "Ionica." It is, I hold, the best poetic translation in the
English tongue.

Of the distinguished people with whom my father was personally
acquainted in his earlier days, among the most memorable were Carlyle
and Edward Irving. Carlyle was tutor to my father's first cousin,
Charles Buller, later to be known as "the young Marcellus of the Whig
Party." Of Carlyle he had many stories. Curiously enough, I might have
seen Carlyle myself, for when I was about fifteen or sixteen he was
still alive, and my father offered to take me to see him in Chelsea.
With the cheery insolence of youth, I weighed the question in the
balance and decided that I did not want to trouble myself with the
generation that was passing away. I can still remember, however, that
what almost moved me to accept my father's proposal was the fact that
Carlyle was actually born in the 18th century, and before Keats. Edward
Irving had made a vivid impression upon my father, though he only saw
him, I believe, at the age of seven or eight. He could distinctly
remember Irving taking him upon his knee, holding him at arm's length,
looking into his face, and saying, in his deep, vibrant orator's voice:
"Edward, don't ye long to be a mon?" Evidently the impression made upon
my father by the words, or rather the way in which they were spoken, was
profound. The incident always reminded me of that wonderful story told
by Crabbe Robinson the Diarist. As a young man, Crabbe Robinson went to
see one of the trials in which Erskine was engaged as Counsel. All he
could remember of the speech was Erskine leaning over the jury-box and
in low tones, full of meaning and tremulous with passion, uttering the
commonplace words: "Gentlemen of the Jury, if you give a verdict against
my client I shall leave this court a miserable man!" So profound was the
influence of the orator that Crabbe Robinson tells us that for weeks
afterwards he used to wake with a start in the middle of the night,
saying over to himself the words: "I shall leave this court a miserable
man."

Another contemporary well known to my father was Peacock, the novelist,
for Peacock was also an official in the India House and so a colleague
of my grandfather, Edward Strachey.

Of my father's religious views, though they deeply affected my own, I
shall speak only very shortly. He was, above all, a devout man. Pure in
heart, he earned the promised blessing and saw God throughout his days
on earth. The fatherhood of God and the imminence of the Kingdom of
Heaven were no empty words for him. But, though he was so single-minded
a follower of Christ and His teachings, he was no Pharisee of the New
Dispensation; the sacerdotalism of the Christian Churches was as hateful
to him as the sacerdotalism of the Jews was to Christ. He was concerned
with the living spirit, not with ritual, or formularies, or doctrinal
shibboleths. His mind was open to all that was true, good, and generous.
He asked for free and full development of the soul of man. "The cry of
Ajax was for light," was one of his best-loved quotations.

He welcomed the researches of scholarship in the foundations of
religion, as he did of science in the material world, and of philosophy
in the things of the mind. Though he loved to worship with his fellows,
and was a sincere member of the Church of England, the maxim _nulla
solus extra ecclesiasm_ filled him with horror. It was the worst of
blasphemies.

His teacher was Frederick Maurice, but in certain ways he went further
than that noble-hearted, if somewhat mystical, divine. It would have
been an absurdity to ask my father whether it would not be better to
give up Christianity and try instead the faith of Christ. That was
always his faith. For him religion meant a way of life, a spiritual
exaltation--not going to church, or saying prayers, or being sedulous in
certain prescribed devotions. His creed was a communion with, and a
trust in, God, through Christ. Above all, he had an overmastering sense
of duty.

He was sensitive in body and mind to a high degree, and so may have
seemed to himself and other observers to be like Mr. Fearing in Banyan's
Dream. But I remember that when Mr. Fearing came to the Valley of the
Shadow of Death, no man was happier or braver. The river had never been
so low as when he crossed it. The Shining Ones had never made an easier
passage for a pilgrim. So it was with my father. He had all his life
dreaded the physical side of dissolution. Yet, when Death came he was
wholly calm and untroubled. It is designedly that I do not say he was
resigned. Resignation implies regret. He had none.

I do not think I can more fitly sum up the impression made by my father
than by quoting the epigram of Martial on "Felix Antonius."

  To-day, my friend is seventy-five;
     He tells his tale with no regret;
     His brave old eyes are steadfast yet,
   His heart the lightest heart alive.

  He sees behind him green and wide
     The pathway of his pilgrim years;
     He sees the shore and dreadless hears
   The whisper of the creeping tide.

  For out of all his days, not one
     Has passed and left its unlaid ghost
     To seek a light for ever lost,
   Or wail a deed for ever done.

  So for reward of life-long truth
     He lives again, as good men can,
     Redoubling his allotted span
   With memories of a stainless youth.

The version I have taken is that by Sir Henry Newbolt, and undoubtedly
it is one of the best examples extant of the transference of the spirit
of a Latin poem into English. My readers, however, will no doubt
remember that this epigram was also translated into English by Pope.
Though the modern poet's version is to be preferred, the older
translation contains one of the most felicitous lines written even by
Pope.

It is needless to say that I realise the essential inappropriateness of
joining my father's name with that of Martial. It is, indeed, a capital
example of the irony of circumstance that I am able to do so. But, after
all, why should we be annoyed instead of being thankful, when bright
flowers spring up on a dunghill? Certainly, my father would not have
felt any indignity. He was the least superstitious and also the least
sophistical of men. If a thing was worthy in itself he would never call
it common or unclean on a punctilio.

If, while dealing with my father's influence on my life, I were not to
say something about the influence of my mother, I should leave a very
false impression. My mother was a woman of a quick intelligence and of a
specially attractive personality. To her we children owed a great deal
in the matter of manners. My father gave us an excellent example in
behaviour and in that gentleness, unselfishness, and sincerity which is
the foundation of good breeding. My mother, who was never shy, and very
good at mental diagnosis, added that burnish without which good manners
often lose half their power. What she particularly insisted on was the
practice of that graciousness of which she herself afforded so admirable
an example. Naturally, like a good mother, she always reproved us for
bad manners, or for being unkind to other children, or selfish, or
affected, or oafish, or sulky. Her direst thunders, however, were kept
for anything which approached ill-breeding. Giving ourselves airs, or
"posing," or any other form of juvenile vulgarity, were well-nigh
unforgivable sins.

But she did not content herself with inculcating the positive side of
good manners. She was equally strong on the negative side. For example,
if there was a party of farm tenants, or cottagers, a school-feast, or
anything of the kind, both when we were small and half grown-up, she
insisted that we must never dream of keeping in a corner by ourselves.
We must go and do our duty in entertaining our guests. No excuses of
shyness or not liking to talk to people one didn't know, or suggestions
that they would think us putting on side if we went up to them, were
allowed for a moment. The injunctions we received were that, at a party
in our own house, we must never think of our own pleasure or enjoyment,
but must devote ourselves wholly and solely to the pleasure of our
guests. The sight of anyone sitting moping in a corner and looking bored
or unhappy was the destruction of a party. Such persons, if seen, must
be pounced upon at once, amused, and made much of, till they were
perfectly happy, as "the guests who got more attention than anybody
else." In a word, we were taught that the strength of the social chain
is its weakest link. It was quite safe to leave the big people, or the
big people's children, to look after themselves. The people to be made
much of and treated like royalty were those who looked uncomfortable or
seemed to feel out of it. The result was that my mother's parties were
never a failure. Though her ill-health never allowed her to be a hostess
on a big scale, her parties, whether in Somersetshire or at Cannes, were
always voted delightful. Everyone, from Somersetshire farmer or
clergyman, to the notables of a Riviera winter resort, owned her social
charm. As an example of it, I remember how one winter, which we spent at
Bournemouth, for my mother's health, the invalid's drawing-room became
at once the centre of a memorable little society, consisting, as far as
I remember, of people whom we had never known before. There was a
delightful old Mr. Marshall, of the Marshalls of the Lakes, who used to
come and play whist with her, and with whom we boys sometimes rode.
Though he was about eighty, he kept up his riding and liked to have a
boy to ride with him. Another old gentleman, attractive in his manner,
in his dress, and in his kindly, old-fashioned dignity, was Lord
Suffolk. He dressed like "the Squire" in the old _Punches_. He wore
a low-crowned, broadish-brimmed hat, Bedford cord breeches and gaiters,
and a light-brown or buff cloth coat and waistcoat. He had two invalid
daughters, and these, if I remember rightly, were the cause of the
family having a villa at Bournemouth.

It was, however, either at the house-parties at Chewton or at Strawberry
Hill, which were hardly considered complete by Lady Waldegrave without
my mother, or else again at Cannes in her own villa that she made her
main impression upon people of the greater world. Though of good parts,
she was not in any sense intellectual. I never heard her attempt to say
brilliant things or epigrammatic things, or to talk about books or
historic people.

She was, like so many charming women, perfectly natural and perfectly at
her ease, and full of receptive interest. When she talked it was always
to draw out her interlocutor and never to show off her own cleverness.
She was quite as popular, indeed I had almost said more popular, with
women as with men, and had as great a fascination for young people as
for old. I remember well our pleasure in being told of a letter written
by one of the big London hostesses who had come out to Cannes, made my
mother's acquaintance, and fallen a charm to her winning voice, her warm
regard, and her gracious eyes. She had written to a friend, saying, in
effect,

What on earth did you mean by not telling me more about your cousin,
Lady Strachey? She turns out to be one of the most delightful people I
have ever met, and yet you never breathed a word about her. Why did you
want to keep her to yourself? Through your selfishness I have missed
three or four weeks of her.

It is notoriously difficult to describe charm, and I shall make no
attempt, except to say that my mother's spell did not consist in good
looks in the ordinary sense of the word. She had a witching expression,
an exceedingly graceful carriage of her head and body, and a good
figure; but her face was so mobile and so entirely governed by her smile
that photographs and pictures were always pronounced as "impossible" and
"utterly unlike."

Though she was in no sense nervous, the attempt to sit for her picture
seemed at once to break the spell and destroy that "_beau regard_"
which was, I feel sure, the secret of the pleasure she spread around
her. No doubt she took trouble to please, but she had the art of
concealing her art. No one ever criticised her as "theatrical" or
"artificial."

Her children fully felt her charm. Looking back, I can now see that she,
most wisely, took as much trouble to fascinate us as she did the rest of
the world. She would not mind this remark, for she was no naturalist,
but held that you ought to take as much trouble to be polite and to give
pleasure to your nearest and dearest as to strangers. Anyway, we were
never allowed to be rude or careless to her, or to anybody else merely
because they were well-loved relations. We never failed to get up from
our chairs when she entered the room, or to open doors for her, or to
show her any other physical form of politeness. But she did not
inculcate this by anything approaching harshness, or by a sharp tongue.
All she did was to make us feel that we were uncouth bores, to be pitied
rather than condemned, if we failed in the minor politenesses.

No doubt she was assisted here by the fact of being an invalid, and also
by the good example which my father set us. He was one of the best-bred
of men as well as one of the noblest and most simple-hearted. I shall
never forget the patient courtesy with which he would treat some old
village woman who was positively storming at him in regard to alleged
grievances. His politeness, however, never had in it any studied
element. Nobody could ever have said that he was overdoing it. Again,
there was no inverted snobbishness about him. He was quite as polite to
a great lady as to a cottager's wife.

I will undertake to say that in his whole life he had never shown off--a
thing which could be said of very few men, but which, after all, is the
secret of all good breeding.

But to return to my mother. She also never showed off, though with her
the art of pleasing and being pleased was very carefully studied. She
inherited this quality from her father, Dr. Symonds. She also found in
him her example for the exact conduct of the social code. I remember her
saying that, though her father was a very hard-worked doctor, and often
had to take meals quickly and at odd times, he made it an absolute rule,
no matter how busy he was, never to get into a rush, or be fussed, or do
things in a huggermugger way. If he came in late and tired, he would eat
his dinner as quietly and decorously as if he had got several hours
before him. Everything had to be done decently and in order. He would
not dream of getting up from his chair if he wanted an extra spoon or
fork in a hurry, but would either send one of his children to get it for
him or else ring the bell for the butler.

This was not an attempt at grandeur, but due to a feeling that if he
once got into chaotic ways he would go to pieces. Probably he felt the
necessity all the more from the fact that he was a widower and might the
more easily have dropped into untidy and slovenly household ways.

I have no time to dwell on my mother's most intimate friendship with
Lady Waldegrave and with their habit of writing daily letters to each
other, and of the social and political life which my mother shared with
her friend as well as her health would permit. For my present purposes,
what matters, though it sounds abominably egotistical to say so, is the
effect of my mother upon my character and life. Unquestionably the fact
of her being an invalid was a great lesson. In the first place, it did a
great deal to educate her children to be unselfish. It was a rule of the
house that everything was to be sacrificed to my mother's comfort, for
she was often not only in great pain but dangerously ill. My father was,
in any case, the most unselfish of men, but we might have regarded that,
as children often will, as a kind of personal quality of his own, like a
lame knee, or a dislike of draughts, or a fondness for cold mutton, or
other simple forms of living. When we saw his daily and hourly sacrifice
of himself to my mother and that tenderness of heart which never failed
him, we must have been made of rock or oak not to be inspired by an
example so noble and fraught with so magnificent a pathos. We showed
badly in comparison with our father, but still we had him always before
us, and if we were ever tempted to exhibit selfishness or want of
consideration to my mother, his devotion was a standing, though never an
open, rebuke, and brought the bitterest remorse.

My mother maintained the true dignity of the sickroom. She never
complained either of the hard fate which chained one who loved the world
and its amusements so much to her bed, nor, again, did she ever cherish
or show the slightest grievance if we had seemed unkind or had not done
what she would have liked us to do. It is needless to say that the
effect of this was exactly what she would have desired, though not
admitted even to herself, for she was not a person at all self-conscious
or self-analytical in these matters.

The fact remains that people who are brought up in a house with an
invalid, where that invalid has the love, respect, and devotion of the
head of the home, get a valuable lesson. There is more than that. The
sight of pain and suffering and the imminence of sorrow and danger, if
it be not too terrifying, is good for children. It makes them early
acquainted with the realities of life and its essential sternness. Then,
when death or sorrow makes its inevitable descent, the child is prepared
to meet it, or knows, at any rate, the spirit in which it ought to be
met. Those who have never seen Death or heard the swing of his scythe,
till he suddenly bursts upon them, or upon those they love dearly, are
greatly to be pitied. They have not learnt the art of quietening the
soul in face of an inexorable command.

_Timor mortis_ is a reality, and we can be, and ought to be,
prepared for it. The sick-room, if children are made to understand its
significance in a wise and kindly spirit, and through the conduct of
such people as my father and my mother, is a teacher of no mean order.




CHAPTER V

MY FATHER'S STORIES OF THE STRACHEY FAMILY


Delightful as were my father's literary and historical stories and
observations, already described, I liked them best when they dealt with
our own family and its traditions. My father, though without a trace of
anything approaching pride of birth, knew his own family history well,
and was never tired of relating stories of "famous men and our fathers
that begat us." As a great Shakespearian devotee, he specially delighted
to tell us of our direct ancestor, William Strachey, "the friend of Ben
Jonson," for so we knew him.

The said ancestor married the Widow Baber, niece of a famous seafarer,
Sir Richard Cross, who commanded the _Bonaventura_ at the Siege of
Cadiz, and so brought Sutton into the family. This William Strachey
almost certainly knew Shakespeare. It is now generally admitted that the
storm in _The Tempest_ was based upon Strachey's account of the
shipwreck of Sir George Somers's fleet on the Bermudas--the Isle of
Devils so greatly dreaded by seamen. They provided in this case,
however, a haven of refuge. Strachey was first Secretary to the Colony
of Virginia. Thus we have an ancestor who gives us the right, as a
distinguished American scholar once said to me, to consider ourselves
"Founders' kin to the United States"--a piece of family pride which no
man can deem snobbish or ridiculous.

William Strachey wrote a very remarkable letter describing the
shipwreck, or rather tempest. The letter was addressed to the Lady
Willoughby de Broke of that day, a woman of ability and greatly
interested in the Virginia Company, as were all the liberal spirits of
the age, including Elizabeth herself. This letter was handed about in
manuscript, as was so often the case in those times, and Shakespeare, in
all human probability, must have seen it, detected good copy for the
theatre--he had a never-failing instinct in that direction--and used it
for his famous last play. Shakespeare must have met and talked with
Strachey on his return from America, for recent investigations have
shown that Shakespeare had many communications with the men who founded
the Virginia Company, and was very likely a member.

Here I may interpose that I have always been specially interested in the
fact that in the letter to Lady Willoughby de Broke, Strachey notes a
circumstance that was often observed in the war. He tells us that the
young gallants, when every hand was required to work at the pumps, had
to exert themselves to the very utmost, and to work as long and as hard
as the professional seamen. To the astonishment of himself and everyone
else, they were able to do as much work and to keep at it as strenuously
as the old mariners.

Another reason for feeling pretty sure that William Strachey must have
known Shakespeare is the fact, of which we have ample proof, that
Strachey was well known to the men of letters of the day. To begin with,
he was a friend of Ben Jonson and wrote a set of commendatory verses for
the Laureate's "Sejanus." These appear in the folio edition of Jonson's
works. Probably this sonnet--it has fourteen lines--is one of the most
cryptic things in the whole of Elizabethan literature. No member of our
family or any other family has ever been able to construe it. Yet it is
a pleasure to me to gather from the concluding couplet that the author
had sound Whig principles:

  If men would shun swol'n Fortune's ruinous blasts,
   Let them use temperance; nothing violent lasts.

[Illustration: John Strachey, the Friend of Locke.]

An even more interesting proof of William Strachey's literary
connections is to be found in the fact that when he, Strachey, went to
Venice he took with him a letter of introduction from the poet, Dr.
Donne, to the then Ambassador with the Republic, Sir Henry Wotton, also
a poet. The letter is witty and trenchant. After noting that Strachey
was "sometime secretary to Sir Thomas Gates," he adds, "I do boldly say
that the greatest folly he ever committed was to submit himself and
parts to so mean a master." The rest of the letter is pleasantly
complimentary and shows that Donne and Strachey were fast friends.

This William Strachey, as my father used to point out to us, had a very
considerable amount of book-writing to his credit. There were two or
three pamphlets written by him and published as what we should now call
Virginia Company propaganda. One of these gives a very delightful
example of the English and American habit of applying a "get-
civilisation-quick" system for the native inhabitants of any country
into which they penetrate. Strachey's book, which was reprinted by the
Hakluyt Society, was entitled "Articles, Lawes and Orders, Divine,
Politique, and Martiall, for the Colony of Virginia," and was printed in
1610.

One of these pamphlets was sold at auction in London just before the
war, and went--very naturally and, in a sense, very properly--to
America. The volume in question contained, besides the ordinary letter-
press, several poems by William Strachey and an autograph inscription
written in the most wonderfully neat and clear handwriting--a standard
in handwriting to which no member of the family before or since has ever
attained. But besides the handwriting the dedication has other claims on
our attention. It is charmingly worded. It shows, amongst other things,
how natural was the cryptic dedication to the Shakespeare Sonnets. It
runs as follows:

  To his right truly honoured, and
   best beloved friend, sometymes
   a Personall Confederat and
   Adventurer, and now a
   sincere and holy Beadsman
   for this Christian prose-
   cutiõ Thomas Lawson, Esq.
   William Strachey wisheth
   as full an accomplishment of his best Desires,
   as devoutly as becoms the Dutie of a
   Harty Freinde. January/21.

"This Christian prosecutiõ" was the Virginia Company and its system of
colonisation. There is also in one of the show-cases in the Bodleian an
interesting short dictionary of the language of the Chesapeake Indians
compiled by Strachey. In a note attached thereto Strachey says that he
thinks it will be useful to persons who wish to "trade or truck" with
the Indians.

Another memorable fact in regard to William Strachey I may mention here,
though it was not known to my father. I lately discovered that Campion,
the poet-musician, who, like Strachey, was a Member of Gray's Inn, wrote
a short Latin poem to Strachey. It is addressed "Ad Guillielmus
Strachæum." In it Campion tells Strachey that although he has very few
verses to give to his "old comrade," the man "who rejoiced in and made
many competent verses," he will always be dear to him. He ends by
calling him "summus pieridem unicusque cultor." The poem concludes
almost as it began: "Strachaeo, veteri meo sodali"--_To Strachey, my
old comrade_.

Evidently Strachey did not keep his verses entirely for dedication. As
far as I know, the best of his verses dedicatory are those addressed to
Lord Bacon in his "Historie of Travaile into Virginia." They run:--

  Wild as they are, accept them, so we're wee;
   To make them civill will our honour be;
   And if good worcks be the effects of myndes,
   Which like good angells be, let our designes,
   As we are Angli, make us Angells too;
   No better worck can state--or church-man do.

The Campion connection interests me personally because Campion was the
protagonist of unrhymed lyrical verse--my special metrical hobby. I like
to think that William Strachey may have supported Campion in his
controversy with Gabriel Harvey, who, by the way, lived at Saffron
Walden, from which town came also William Strachey. There is danger,
however, in such speculation. Before long someone may prove that it was
not Bacon who wrote Shakespeare but Strachey who wrote both Bacon and
Shakespeare.

The following example of my father's family lore was still more
interesting and exciting to us. John Strachey, son of William Strachey,
married a Miss Hodges of Wedmore, an heiress in the heraldic sense,
through whom we can proudly claim to represent the Somersetshire family
of Hodges, whose arms we have always quartered. This lady's grandfather,
or great-grandfather--I am not quite sure which--was of the very best
type of Elizabethan soldiers-errant. He was killed at the Siege of
Antwerp in 1583.

He had the good fortune to be commemorated in one of the most spirited
epitaphs of his age. On the wall of Wedmore Church in Somersetshire is a
brass tablet bearing a heart surrounded by a laurel-wreath. The
inscription of the memorial runs thus:

       *       *        *       *        *

Sacred to the memory of Captain Thomas Hodges, of the County of
Somerset, esq., who, at the siege of Antwerp, about 1583, with
unconquered courage won two ensigns from the enemy; where, receiving his
last wound, he gave three legacies: his soule to the Lord Jesus, his
body to be lodged in Flemish earth, his heart to be sent to his dear
wife in England.

  Here lies his wounded heart, for whome
   One kingdom was too small a roome;
   Two kingdoms therefore have thought good to part
   So stout a body and so brave a heart.

       *       *        *       *        *

I have often wondered how a poet could have been found in Somersetshire
in those days to produce such spirited verse. The Elizabethan age, so
splendid in great poetry, was apt to be tortured and affected in what
Dr. Johnson called "lapidary inscriptions."

Little did I think when, as a boy, I first read those lines how closely
linked England was to remain with the soil where Thomas Hodges fell, how
many thousand stout bodies and brave hearts would again be laid in
Flemish earth, and how many true soldiers would in my own day deserve my
forbear's epitaph.

It seems most likely that Thomas Hodges's armour was preserved by the
Hodges and brought to Sutton by Miss Hodges. In an old Hodges inventory
which is still among the papers at Sutton there is mentioned "an armour
of proof." My father also used to tell us how he had seen two or three
sets of armour hanging on the brackets which supported the Minstrels'
Gallery in the Hall at Sutton. My father's uncle, alas, was born in the
eighteenth century and bred in India till about 1820. He was therefore
little affected by Scott and the Gothic revival. When he came back to
England, though full of interest in his house and family, he not only
removed the Minstrels' Gallery from the Hall, but allowed the armour
that had hung on it for some hundred and fifty years to be destroyed.
The Estate mason was seen mixing mortar in the breastplate, and the
coachman washed the carriage with his legs in the Cromwellian jack-
boots. Oddly enough, when we were quite small children, my eldest
brother, by pure accident, discovered half a steel helmet behind one of
the greenhouses.

Two swords, however, were allowed to remain at Sutton, and are there to
this day. They are, however, probably Cromwellian and not Elizabethan.

We know very little of what happened to the Stracheys during the Civil
War, for at the crisis of the conflict John Strachey was only a boy. He
was born in 1634 and therefore was only twenty-six at the end of the
Commonwealth, and would have been only fifteen years old at the time of
the King's execution. That the family were good Roundheads, however,
cannot be doubted, for John Strachey when he grew up became a close
friend of John Locke. Further, Captain Thomas Hodges, whose daughter was
later married to John Strachey, raised a troop of horse to fight on the
side of the Commonwealth. My father was always very proud of the fact
that the intellectual father of the Whigs was so closely united with our
ancestor. A propos of a deferred visit to Spain, Locke says in one of
his letters that he is glad he is not going, because he will now be able
to pay his visit to Sutton Court; "a greater rarity than my travels have
afforded me, for, believe me, one may go a long way before one meets a
friend."

Of all my father's stories those which delighted and thrilled us most
were his anecdotes of Clive. Clive, one might almost say, was the patron
saint of the family, and some day I hope to make a further and better
collection of legends in regard to him and other relations and
connections of my family with India.

But first I must explain why we Stracheys regard Clive as our patron
saint. It will be remembered how, after Clive had won Plassey, he came
home full of riches and honours, obtained his peerage and bought his
unique collection of rotten boroughs. He did not, however, remain long
at home. He was soon sent out to India again to reform the Civil Service
and to place the affairs alike of the Company and of the King,
_i.e._ the British Government and Parliament, on a sound basis. The
moment Clive left India, the Company's government had begun to
degenerate on all sides, military, naval, and civilian. In two years
corruption was destroying what Clive's statesmanship and military genius
had won.

Clive, when he agreed to return to Bengal was a Member of Parliament,
and like a wise man he knew that anyone who has to deal with great
affairs must be sure of a good Private Secretary. He looked round,
therefore, for an able and trustworthy young man, and lighted upon Henry
Strachey, who had just reached years of discretion. But I had better
quote Clive's own ringing words in regard to his selection. They will
serve to show, among other things, that Clive was not the kind of
inspired savage that he is sometimes portrayed, but a man with an
extraordinary command of the English language. In the speech in
the House of Commons in which Clive flung back the accusations made
against him in regard to the grants and presents which he took from Meer
Jaffir, not only after the Battle of Plassey but in the final settlement
which concluded his Indian career, he described the members of his
official family--the men whom he had taken out to India with him on that
occasion. As Strachey had become a Member of the House of Commons he
could not refer to him by name. Here are Clive's actual words:

[Illustration: The Close, Sutton Court, Somerset]

       *       *        *       *        *

Another gentleman was my Secretary, now a Member of this House. He was
recommended to me by one of the greatest men in this Kingdom, now no
more, Mr. Grenville. Many and great are the obligations I have been
under to him (Grenville), but the greatest of all the obligations was
his having recommended to me this gentleman. Without his ability and
indefatigable industry I could never have gone through my great and
arduous undertaking, and in serving me he served the Company.

       *       *        *       *        *

Curiously enough, we have no idea how Henry Strachey came across George
Grenville, or why George Grenville was able to give him so high a
character. In any case, Clive was a shrewd judge of men, and though very
good to his subordinates, would never tolerate inefficiency. His
approval meant much.

But Clive did more for us as a family than merely appoint Henry Strachey
to be his private secretary. It happened that at the time of his
appointment Henry Strachey was very much in the position in which Clive
was when he first went out to India. Henry Strachey was the eldest son
of a hopelessly embarrassed country gentleman of old family. John
Strachey, the friend of Locke, had been very well off, and so had his
son John, the Fellow of the Royal Society. Besides Sutton and an estate
at Elm and Buckland, near Frome, he owned a considerable amount of
property in Westminster. There are many interesting and amusing things
to tell of him, but here I will only say that the said John Strachey the
second had two wives and nineteen children, consequently at his death
the family estates were heavily "dipped." His son, Hodges Strachey, who
succeeded him, added to these pecuniary troubles, and then died; the
property descended to a younger brother, Henry Strachey. Though he
married into a rich Edinburgh family, the Clerks of Pennycuick, and so
was kinsman not only of the Clerks but of the Primroses, he did nothing
to redeem the fortunes of the family. Indeed, things had gone so far by
his time that the Strachey estates had actually passed to the mortgagees
in discharge of a sum of twelve thousand pounds. A year's grace was,
however, given. If the £12,000 could not be paid within the twelve
months, Sutton, and the whole of the land, would have passed for ever
from the family.

When Clive heard of this predicament, he, with extraordinary generosity,
advanced the money in anticipation of the remuneration which Strachey
was to receive for his services in India. Thus Sutton Court was saved.
Thanks to Clive there are still Stracheys at Sutton and I am here to
tell the tale. In those days twelve thousand pounds was a very big sum
of money indeed to an impecunious country gentleman, and a considerable
sum even to a man as rich as Clive. The modern equivalent would be over
£30,000. But Clive was not a man who hesitated to do things in a big
way, and he was well repaid. Henry Strachey was not only devoted to him
throughout his life, but acted as his executor and as the guardian to
his infant son and heir.

One of three or four pictures which Dance, the portrait-painter, painted
of Clive hangs to this day in the Hall at Sutton. It always thrilled me
to look at this picture, when a boy, because of the background, where,
surrounded by the smoke of battle, a company of horsemen with drawn
swords charge an invisible Oriental foe. If I remember rightly, the
British Cavalry played no part at Plassey, but probably the artist
thought that historical accuracy might quite legitimately be
subordinated in this instance to the demands of art.

I could fill this book with stories of Clive which my father had heard
from his father and from his uncle and from other contemporaries. I will
only mention one here, however, and I choose it because it further
illustrates the wonderful power of Clive's prose style, a power which
always impressed me, even as a boy. Just before Clive died by his own
hand, he addressed a letter to Henry Strachey, who had now become a
close friend as well as an ex-secretary, and who had married Lady
Clive's first cousin. He was thus a member of the actual as well as of
the official family of his Chief. Here are the words which Clive
addressed to Strachey:--

  How miserable is my condition! I have a disease which
   makes life insupportable, but which my doctors tell me won't
   shorten it one hour.

If ever man conveyed the sense of physical suffering, deep melancholy,
and utter despair by the medium of the written word, it was Clive in
this passage. He had, it will be remembered, attempted suicide before,
as a young man. When the pistol refused to go off, he considered it an
omen that he was reserved for greater things.

My father used to tell us (whether on good medical evidence or not I do
not know) that it was supposed that Clive suffered from a very painful
form of dyspepsia accompanied by vertigo, and that when these attacks
came on they depressed him beyond measure. He lived in constant dread of
their recurrence, and it was upon a sudden sense that an attack was
impending that he cut his throat. He could not face again what might
have been an agony of three or four months' duration.

It was natural that, as boys, we liked especially to hear the story of
the suicide in Berkeley Square. There was plenty of blood and mystery in
the tale.

Some eight years before his death, I got my father, who was a very
accurate and careful man, to put down, partly from family papers and
partly from memory, as exact an account as he could of the actual
suicide. This, the authentic version of the suicide, I published in the
_Spectator_.

My father's stories of the first Sir Henry, as we were wont to call him,
Clive's Private Secretary, were many, and all of them poignant or
amazing. As a child, however, though I always delighted in them I did
not fully realise their historical interest. They gave a vivid picture
of the mind and actions of a Whig Member of Parliament from about 1770
to 1812, the period during which Henry Strachey was continuously in
Parliament. In the course of his forty years of public life, Henry
Strachey held a number of important offices, for he was a much-trusted
man. He played, indeed, a part more like that of one of the great
permanent officials of the present day than that of a politician. I take
it that he had not a powerful gift of speech and that he was not a
pushing man, otherwise, considering his brains and the way in which he
was trusted, he would have gone a good deal higher than he did. A story
which testifies to his influence is curious. When Burke began his
attacks in the Commons upon Warren Hastings, he tried to enlist support
from Henry Strachey, who does not seem to have thrown in his lot
especially with Hastings. All he would do, however, was to tell Burke
that he would be neutral--provided that, in the course of the attacks on
Hastings, Burke cast no aspersions upon the name and fame of Lord Clive.
If Clive's memory was assailed he, Strachey, would hit back. Whether it
was due to this fact or to some other, it is certain that Burke was
always careful to draw a clear distinction between the cases of Clive
and of Hastings.

Perhaps the most vivid story of all is the following. Strachey had been
in office in the ill-starred Coalition under Fox and North. When the
Ministry broke up, the King sent for Lord Shelburne, a member of the
Coalition, who, it will be remembered, at once formed a Government of
his own. While the Ministry was in the making, Henry Strachey met Fox on
Hay Hill, that minute yet "celebrated acclivity" which runs from the
corner of Berkeley Square into Dover Street. The smiling demagogue, who,
by the by, was a fellow member of Brooke's, hailed his ex-colleague with
a--

"Hullo, Strachey, what's going to happen to you?"

"Oh, Lord Shelburne says he wants me to keep my office."

"Then, by God, you're out!"  Nobody, at that time, believed in
Shelburne's good faith. He was alleged by both sides to be a man on
whose word no dependence could ever be placed--a man who would tell you
that he wanted your assistance on the very day he had struck your name
out of the list of his Cabinet.

Things, however, turned out differently in Strachey's case, and
Shelburne kept his word. In all probability, indeed, he was a man who
was very much maligned.

In any case, Shelburne trusted Strachey, and when he began the
negotiations for the Peace of Versailles which ended the war with
America, and recognised the United States, Strachey was sent as a
negotiator. Originally a Member of Parliament named Oswald had been
employed at Paris, but he had not proved to be a match for the able
American delegates, Franklin, Jay, and Adams. Accordingly Strachey was
sent over to give tone and vigour to the British Delegation. As a family
we are exceedingly proud of the account of Strachey given by that great
man, John Adams, later President of the United States. It is contained
in his secret report sent to Washington from Paris:

  Strachey is as artful and insinuating a man as they could
   send; he pushes and presses every point as far as it can possibly
   go; he has a most eager, earnest, pointed spirit.

That is a certificate of character of which any statesman or diplomat
might be proud.

But Strachey, I am glad to say, was more than a mere skilful agent. It
is now fully recognised by Canadian historians who have made a special
study of the question, that Strachey was the one man at Paris who stood
up for the United Empire Loyalists and did his very best to get for them
proper recognition and proper compensation. Unfortunately the British
Ministry was tired and callous, and Strachey's efforts did not prevail,
but he fought for the United Empire Loyalists to the end. Without his
help, things would have been worse than they were.

One thing that helped to make Strachey a good peace negotiator was the
fact that a year before he had gone to America as Secretary to Lord Howe
and Admiral Howe when they were sent out either to carry on the war by
sea and land, or else to make peace with the insurgent colonies.

As a result of this official visit to America, Strachey had a very large
number of confidential papers left in his possession, and some of these
have escaped the burning which was the fate of most of his
correspondence. He was one of the men who made it a practice to destroy
private papers as soon as they were done with. The story of these
American papers is, again, one which must be reserved for another
occasion. But, though the time has come to cut Henry Strachey off at the
main, and though I must reluctantly forego the account of his dealings
with George III, when he, Strachey, was Master of the Household, I
cannot resist giving one family document which my father was very fond
of reading to us and which was, I honestly think, regarded by the family
as the most priceless of all the papers kept in the strong-room at
Sutton Court. It went by the name of the "Head Munky" letter.

Lady Strachey, the first Sir Henry's wife, was a widow with children
when she married. She also had children by her second marriage and, as
several of these married, she had at the end of her life a large number
of grandchildren. Anyway, she was evidently a lady who thoroughly
understood what children want at a children's party. She fully
appreciated, that is, the value of bears, monkeys, crocodiles, and Punch
as entertainers of the young--witness the letter which follows:

  WATER MARK 1804.
   To Lady Strachey,
   9 hill street
   Berkeley square.

  MY LADY,

  agreebel to order James Botton and Company will attend
   Tomorrow evening at 8 But begs to inform That the Bear
   being Laim am afeard cant perform But the doggs and munkees
   is in good condishon and will I hopes be aprooved with
   the music

  my tarms is as toilers pr nite

  Bear ... ... ... ... ...  10. 6.

  8 doggs for kotillin} ... 16
   at pr dogg 2        }
   musick                    5
   Drum and orms             7
   head munky                7
   3 others                  9
   keeper                    2.  6

  Punch is a seprit Consarn and Cums high but Can order
   him at sam time though not in that line since micklemass he
   belongs to Mr valentine Burstem at the marmaid

    14 Princess Court
       holborn--
       I am
         my Lady
             your most dutiful
                   humbel servant
   tuesday            JAMES BOTTEN.

  19 Piccadilly

  P.S. Please Let the head munky Jacko Cum down The airy
   on account not making no dirt in the haul

  The Jentleman says consarning tubb for the crocodile but I
   never Lets her out nor the ostriges as I explained to him for
   your satisfaction--

My father always said, and no doubt with truth, that the "Jentleman"
alluded to at the end of the letter was the butler. He had evidently
been sent to "The Mermaid" or some other hostelry to negotiate for the
appearance of "Jacko." When I read the letter I always see a vivid
picture of "Jacko" coming over and down the area railings, hand over
hand, and wiping his paws on the doormat!

Evidently Mr. James Botten was an artist in his way and, like his
employer, understood the infant mind, for does he not put the bear at
the very top of his list and charges for him at the highest rate? Why
children so delight in bears and have such a firm belief that they are
kind, gentle, and grandfatherly animals is a piece of psychology which I
have never been able to fathom. As to the existence of the feeling,
there can be no possible doubt. My grandchildren, budding Montessorians
though they be, have the same absolute and unlimited confidence in bears
that I had at the age of three.

There is another story of this Lady Strachey which I may as well put in
here, because it is with such amazing clearness the characteristic of a
vanished age. My father used to say that when the second Sir Henry
Strachey came back from India, for he was there only ten years, his
father was still in Parliament. Henry Strachey was only just thirty, and
therefore there was the usual desire felt by his family to find
something for the young man to do--something "to prevent him idling
about in town and doing nothing or worse." In order to provide this
necessary occupation his mother offered him £4,000 with which to buy a
seat in Parliament. She thought that a seat would keep him amused and
out of mischief! In spite of the fact that he was a strenuous Radical,
Sir Henry's only remark in telling the story was: "I refused, because I
did not like the idea of always voting in the opposite lobby to my
father." The first Henry Strachey, though a staunch Whig in early life,
was a supporter of William Pitt and later, of Lord Liverpool. Therefore
the second Henry Strachey, if he had got into the House, when he first
came home, would no doubt have voted with the Radical Rump.

There are many stories I could tell of the second Sir Henry, who lived
on at Sutton till the year '58, when my father succeeded, but these
again must be kept for another book--if I ever have time to write it. I
must say the same of my own grandfather, my father's father, Edward
Strachey, and his memorable wife. Of both of them plenty is to be found
in Carlyle's account of his early years. I shall only record of Edward
Strachey here the fact that after he returned from India he became an
official at the India House on the Judicial side, and was called the
Examiner, his duties being to examine the reports of important law-cases
sent from India to the Board of Directors. When one day I asked my
father for his earliest recollection of any important event, he told me
that he could well remember his father coming back from the India House
(which was by a Thames wherry, for the Examiner lived at Shooter's Hill
and had to cross the river) and saying to his mother: "The Emperor is
dead." That was in the year 1822, and the Emperor was, of course,
Napoleon. Strachey was one of the first people to hear of the event
because St. Helena was borrowed by the Government for prison purposes
from the East India Company. The East Indiamen, however, still used it
as a house of call. Therefore it happened that the East India Company,
by the actual appearance of one of the ship's captains at the India
House, heard of the great event an hour or two before the Government to
whom the despatches were forwarded. My father must have been ten years
old at the time, as he was born in 1812.




CHAPTER VI

MY CHILDHOOD AND SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL INCIDENTS


And now for the child who was so happy in his surroundings, and, above
all, in those who were to care for him.

There were naturally certain nursery traditions about me of the
magnifying kind, but, taken as a whole, I don't think I can claim to
have been anything but a normal child, with health fair to moderate and
an intelligence which was reasonably quick and responsive. I had,
however, no educational precociousness; I did not read till I was nearly
nine, and even then did not use the power of reading. The book habit did
not come till I was twelve or thirteen-though then it came, as far as
poetry was concerned, with a rush. By fifteen I had read all the older
English poets and most of the new. In reading poetry I showed a devotion
which I am thankful to say I have always maintained. In this matter at
least I am the opposite of Darwin. He confessed that the power to read
poetry left him entirely in middle life. The older I grow, the more I
love verse.

The actual study of metre was a source of acute satisfaction. It is said
of me, indeed, that when, at a little more than two and a half years
old, we were starting for a long journey to Pau, where my mother had
been ordered to winter, I insisted on my father not packing, but taking
with him in his hand, Spenser's _Faerie Queen_. He had been reading
it to us that autumn. I did not know what a journey meant, but I was
determined the readings should not be broken. I also could not have
known what Spenser meant, but his stanza fed ear, and heart, and mind
with melody.

It was at this age, too, that I seem to have made two theological
observations which greatly amused my family. I was discovered one day
digging with tempestuous energy in the garden. When asked what I was
doing, I replied, "Digging for hell-fire!" That was especially curious
because my father, as a strong Broad Churchman and a devoted friend and
disciple of Frederick Maurice, was a wholehearted disbeliever in hell
and its flames. He had "dismissed Hell with costs," as Lord Westbury
said, ever since he came to man's estate. How I derived my knowledge on
this point was never cleared up. Demons with three-pronged forks and
curly tails are, of course, universally regarded as "the friends of
little children" by natural right, and my preference I must suppose was
transferred to their flaming home.

My other early piece of theological criticism was characteristic. Either
my father or my mother, I forget which, was explaining to me the story
of the Crucifixion and our Lord's arrest by the armed men of the High
Priest. Greatly surprised and perturbed by the fact that Christ did not
resist and make a fight of it I energetically enquired, "Hadn't He a
gun?" I was told No. "Hadn't He a sword?" No. And then: "Hadn't He even
a stick with a point?" Though not naturally combative, I have always
been a strong believer in the virtue of the counterattack as the best,
or, indeed, the only efficient form of self-defence.

I was, I believe, an easy-going, contented child, with no tendency to be
frightened either by strangers, by imaginary terrors, or by the dark. I
jogged easily along the Nursery high-road. There was, however, a family
tradition that, though as a rule I was perfectly willing to let other
children have my toys, and would not take the trouble to do what nurses
call "stand up for myself," I did occasionally astonish my playmates and
my guardians by super-passionate outbursts. These, however, were very
rare indeed, for all my life I have had a great dislike or even horror
of anything in the shape of losing my temper, an unconscious
recognition, as it were, of the wisdom of the Roman saying, "Anger is a
short madness." Instinctively I felt with Beaumont and Fletcher:

Oh, what a beast in uncollected man!

My general psychology, as far as I can tell from memory, was plain and
straightforward when a child. I have no recollection of feeling any
general depression or disappointment, of thinking that I was
misunderstood, _i.e._ of entertaining what is now called "an
inferiority complex." I never gave way to any form of childish
melancholy. I did not even have alarming, or mysterious, or metaphysical
dreams! What makes this more curious is the fact that I very much
outgrew my strength, about the age of nine or ten. I was not allowed to
play active games, or run about, or do any of the things in which I
delighted.

Though without great physical strength, I was all my life exceedingly
fond of the joys of bodily exercise, whether swimming, rowing, riding,
walking, mountaineering, skating, playing tennis or racquets or whatever
game was going.

In none of these pastimes did I reach anything approaching excellence,
but from all of them I got intense enjoyment. I tasted, indeed, almost
every form of athleticism and genuinely smacked my lips at the flavour
of each in turn, yet never bothered about the super-pleasure which
comes from doing such things as well as they can be done.

Though my bodily health did not give me an unhappy or depressed
childhood, or make me suffer from any sort of morbid reaction, I had
occasionally a very curious and somewhat rare experience--one which,
though it has been noted and discussed, has never, as far as I know,
been fully explained by physicians either of the body or of the soul.

The condition to which I refer is that which the musician Berlioz called
"_isolement_"--the sense of spiritual isolation, which seizes on
those who experience it with a poignancy amounting to awe. Wordsworth's
_Ode to Immortality_ affords the _locus classicus_ in the way
of description:

  Fallings from us, vanishings,
   Blank misgivings of a creature
   Moving about in worlds not realised.

I once amused myself by getting together a large number of descriptions
of "_isolement_" and found that, though they may differ considerably,
they have in common the characteristics enumerated by the Ode.

The first thing to be noted about the sense of _isolement_ is that
it comes, not in sleeping, but in waking hours, and that, whether truly
or not, it brings with it the feeling that it is the result of some
external impulse. The best form of explanation, however, is to describe
as exactly as I can my own sensations. Though the sense of
_isolement_ has been experienced by me as a little child, as a lad,
as a young man, and even up to the age of forty or forty-five, the
recollections of my first visitation, which occurred when I could not
have been more, at the very most, than six years of age, are very much
more vivid and keener-edged than those of the later occasions.

Outside the two doors of the nurseries at Sutton Court there is a long
passage, and in this is something unusual--a little fire-place and
grate. I was one day standing in that passage, quite close to the grate,
and expecting nothing in particular. Then suddenly there came over me a
feeling so strange and so different from anything I had ever felt before
as to be almost terrifying. It was _overwhelming_ in the true
meaning of the word. Incredible as it seems in the case of so small a
child, I had the clearest and most poignant feeling of being left
completely, utterly alone, not merely in the world, but in something
far, far bigger--in the universe, in a vastness infinite and
unutterable.

As with Wordsworth, everything seemed to vanish and fall away from me,
even my own body. I was literally "beside myself." I stood a naked soul
in the sight of what I must _now_, though of course did not then,
call for want of better explanatory expressions, the All, the Only, the
Whole, the Everlasting. It was no annihilation, no temporary absorption
into the Universal Consciousness, no ingression into the Divine Shadow,
that the child experienced. Rather it was the amplest exaltation and
magnification of the Ego which it is possible to conceive. I gained, not
lost, by discarding the "lendings" of life. Something that was from one
point of view a void, and from another a rounded completeness, hemmed me
in.

Here I should perhaps interpolate yet another caveat. I did not, of
course, as a child, use or even know of the vocabulary of the
metaphysicians. I did, however, entertain thoughts which I could not
then express, but which the words given above most nearly represent.
There is one exception. In talking about "a naked soul" I am not
_interpreting_ my childish thrill of deep emotion into a later
vocabulary. I have always remembered the emotion in those very words. It
is so recorded on my memory. Of that I am sure.

The effect on me was intensely awe-inspiring--so awe-inspiring, indeed,
as to be disturbing in a high degree. Though it did not in the least
terrify me or torture me, or make me have anything approaching a dread
of its repetition, I experienced a kind of rawness and sensitiveness of
soul such as when, to put it pathologically, a super-sensitive mucous
membrane surface is touched roughly by a hand or instrument. One is not
exactly pained, but one quivers to the impact. So quivered my soul,
though not my brain or my body, for there was no suggestion of any
bodily faintness, or of any agitation of "grey matter," in the
experience. For example, I was not in the least dizzy. I was outside my
bodily self and far away from the world of matter.

In addition to this awe and sensitiveness, and what one might call
spiritual discomfort, there was something altogether curious and
unexpected, something that still remains for me as much the most vivid
and also much the most soul-shaking part of the experience, something
which many people will regard as impossible to have occupied the mind of
a child of six. I can best describe it, though very inadequately, as a
sudden realisation of the appalling greatness of the issues of living. I
avoid saying "life and death" deliberately, for Death was nowhere in the
picture. I was confronted in an instant, and without any preparation, or
gradation of emotion, not only with the immanence but with the ineffable
greatness of that whole of which I was a part. Though it may be a little
difficult to make the distinction clear, this feeling had nothing to do
with the sense of isolation. It was an entirely separate experience. I
felt, with a conviction which I know not how to translate into words,
that what I was "in for" by being a sentient human being was
immeasurably great. It was thence that the sense of awe came, thence the
extraordinary sensitiveness, thence the painful exhilaration, the
spiritual sublimation. "Oh! what a tremendous thing it is to be a living
person! Oh, how dreadfully great!" That is the way the child felt. That
was what kept ringing in my ears.

Though I was isolated, I had no sense of smallness or of utter
insignificance in face of the Universe. I did not feel myself a
miserable, fortuitous atom, a grain of cosmic dust. I felt, though,
again, I am interpreting rather than recording, that I was fully equal
to my fate. As a human being I was not only immortal, but _capax
imperii_,--a creature worthy of a heritage so tremendous.

From that day to this, talk about the unimportance, the futility of man
and his destiny has left me quite cold.

Though, as a small child, I was by no means without religious feeling,
and had, as I have always had, a deep and instinctive sense of the
Divine existence, I had not the least desire to translate my vision of
the universal into the terms of theology.

That is a very odd fact, but a fact it is. The vision remained, and
remains, isolated, immutable, and apart. Though I had perfect confidence
in my father and mother, and often talked to them of spiritual matters,
I did not at the time feel any impulse to relate my experience either to
them or to anyone else. I had no desire to unload my mind--a remarkable
thing for so eager a talker and expounder as I have always been. This
reticence, I am sure, came not from a fear of being laughed at, or of
shocking anyone, or again from a fear of a repetition of the experience.
It simply did not occur to me to talk. The experience was solely mine, I
was satisfied and even a little perturbed by the result. Probably some
sense of the great difficulty of finding words to fit my thoughts also
held me back.

It was only after two or three similar visitations that I casually told
the story of this "ecstasy" to my younger brother. I was then about
twenty-four and he twenty. I was much surprised to find that he had
never had any experiences of this particular kind, for I supposed them
common. He, however, became much interested, and some little time after
showed me the passage to which I have referred in Berlioz'
_Memoirs_.

This set me investigating, and I soon found examples of states of
ecstasy similar to, if not exactly like, my own. Tennyson supplied one
in the visional passages in the _Princess_. Kinglake had a
visitation akin to _isolement_. Wordsworth, however, came nearest
to my sensations. Indeed, he describes them exactly.

My later manifestations of _isolement_ were similar to my first,
though not so vivid. As I write at the age of sixty-two, my impression
is that the last occasion on which I experienced the sense of
_isolement_ was about twenty years ago. How welcome would be a
repetition! I do not, however, expect another ecstasy, any more than did
Wordsworth, and for very much the same reasons. I do not think that the
vision was due to any morbid or irregular working of the brain, or to
any other pathological or corporeal mal-functioning. I believe that the
experience was purely an experience of the spirit. That is why I
attribute to it a psychological and even metaphysical value.

At any rate, it corresponds with my personal metaphysic of existence.
Further, I think with Wordsworth that in all probability the fact that
it was most vivid in early childhood and gradually ceased when I grew
up, is a proof that in some way or other it was based on a spiritual
memory. Wordsworth, after the description I have already given, goes
on:--

  High instincts, before which our mortal nature
   Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised;
     But for those first affections,
     Those shadowy recollections,
        Which, be they what they may,
   Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
   Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
     Uphold us--cherish--and have power to make
   Our noisy years seem moments in the being
   Of the eternal silence; truths that wake
        To perish never;
   Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
        Nor man nor boy,
   Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
   Can utterly abolish or destroy!

That seems to me the explanation which can most reasonably be applied to
the mental phenomena which I have described. It satisfied me completely.
Wordsworth struck the exact balance between mental exaltation and the
trembling "like a guilty thing surprised," of which I have given a more
prosaic account.

I must add here that the _Ode to Immorality_ is not a poem which my
father used to read to us as children, and as far as I can remember I
did not take to reading it, or know anything about it, till I was
seventeen or eighteen; that is, ten or twelve years later. Even when it
became a favourite with me, for some reason or other I did not dwell
upon the _isolement_ part of it, but rather upon the earlier
passages. Curiously enough, it was a quotation in Clough's _Amours de
Voyages_ which first made me realise that Wordsworth was dealing with
_isolement_.

I hope no one will think that in describing my experiences of
_isolement_ in my own mind I was exaggerating the importance of the
incident. I know that similar waking trances are very common. I also
know that modern psychology, or, I should say, certain schools of modern
psychology, regard them merely as manifestations or outcrops of the
unconscious self. If I understand the argument rightly, they hold that
just as in dreams the unconscious self gets possession of one's
personality and the consciousness is for a certain time deposed or
exiled, the same thing may happen, and does happen in our waking hours.
Therefore _isolement_ must not be regarded as anything wonderful or
mystic, but merely as a day-dream. I admit that this seems at first
sight a plausible explanation. Yet I can say with Gibbon, "this
statement is probable; but certainly false."

Anyone who has experienced the feeling as I experienced it would think
it by no means unlikely that it represented something far deeper, and
was due to some impulse external to oneself. Certainly to me the feeling
was essentially one of revelation, of being suddenly made to see and
understand things which before had been dark or unknown. I realised that
what I should now call the materialistic hypothesis would not help me to
a solution. No "fanciful shapes of a plastic earth" were in my vision.
My _Ego_, whatever it was or was to be, was, I perceived, a spirit
and not a creature of flesh-and-blood, and also not a hypothesis, but a
reality.

Since it is appropriate to my account of the phenomenon of
_isolement_, I may add a curious passage in Walt Whitman's
_Specimen Days and Collect_, which shows that the poet knew this
form of ecstasy:

Even for the treatment of the universal, in politics, metaphysics, or
anything, sooner or later we come down to our single, solitary soul.
There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises,
independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining,
eternal. This is the thought of identity--yours for you, whoever you
are, as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most
spiritual and vaguest of earth's dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and
only entrance to all facts. In such devout hours, in the midst of the
significant wonders of heaven and earth (significant only because of the
Me in the centre), creeds, conventions fall away and become of no
account before this simple idea. Under the luminousness of real vision,
it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the
fable, once liberated and look'd upon, it expands over the whole earth
and spreads to the roof of heaven. The quality of BEING, in the object's
self, according to its own central idea and purpose, and of growing
therefrom and thereto--not criticism by other standards and adjustments
thereto--is the lesson of Nature.

Who knows whether this may not be Walt Whitman's "secret," or, at any
rate, the spiritual experience of which the poet's latest biographer,
Mr. Emory Holloway, writes? His interesting account of Walt Whitman's
Manuscript Note-Books is preceded by the following statement:

The first of these (The MS. Note-Books) begins with a sense of
suppressed, half-articulate power in the language of a novel ecstasy.
Some mystical experience, some great if not sudden access of
intellectual power, some enlargement and clarifying of vision, some
selfless throb of cosmic sympathy, has come to Walt Whitman. At first he
can only ejaculate his wonder, and pray for the advent of a perfect man
who will be worthy to communicate to the world this new vision of
humanity. Then, like the prophet Isaiah, whose great book he is wont to
carry in his pocket to Coney Island, he suddenly realises that a vision
is itself a commission; and from this moment he dedicates himself to a
life task as audacious as it seems divine.

Though the subject, I admit, fascinates me, I must say no more on it,
lest my autobiography should become "a sort of a commentary" on "the
ecstasy," featuring Plotinus!

Though always intensely interested in things psychical, and a copious
reader of all the phenomena of the unseen world, I have only had one
other psychic adventure in the whole of my life, and that an
insignificant one. It is, however, worth recording shortly. It happened
that in the early autumn of the year 1920, while my son was away from
home, learning French in a family at Versailles, I went to my dressing-
room to sleep, at about three o'clock in the afternoon. I woke up at
four o'clock--an hour's sleep is my ration--with a start and the
recollection that I had just dreamt a dream of a very alarming kind. In
my dream my wife had come to me with a telegram in her hand, and had
told me that our son had been killed in a hunting accident in France.
The impression was extremely vivid, and for a moment I was greatly
perturbed. This, however, did not last. A little reflection soon made me
feel that it could be nothing but a bad dream--a nightmare. People do
not hunt in August, or at Versailles, and therefore there was no reason
whatever to regard the dream seriously. Still, as a faithful member of
the Psychical Society, I thought I must take notice of the incident,
even though it seemed ridiculous. No scientific investigator ever dares
to say that any "odd" observed fact is not worth considering.

Accordingly I sat down and wrote to my son, mentioning the dream and
asking whether between three and four on that day he was in any kind of
mental trouble or anxiety--anything that by an imperfect telephonic
message might have got through to me as a hunting accident. To my
astonishment, I received by return a letter from Versailles telling me
that about three-fifteen on the day in question he had been in a small
railway accident, which, though not resulting in any deaths, had injured
several people, and had given him a fairly severe shaking.

Considering how seldom I dream, and if I do dream, how seldom the dream
concerns anybody else, it is difficult to account for this as a mere
coincidence. My dreams, when I have them, are practically all of the
pure nightmare description and of the usual sealed-pattern. I am worried
by the sense of not being able to pack in time to catch my train, or
else I am compelled to go back to Oxford and try to pass an examination
under impossible and humiliating conditions. Indeed, I don't think I can
ever remember a dream, except this one about my son, which was of a non-
egotistical kind, that is, in which somebody else speaks, and of which I
am not the centre. In a word, it seems to me that, though my son had no
recollection of thinking of me (the accident was not important enough
for that), his unconscious self got busy and, as I was in a light sleep,
it was able to telephone an excited message to its nearest relation, my
unconscious self.




CHAPTER VII

MY CHILDHOOD (_Continued_)


It must not be supposed that either my childhood or boyhood was a
psychic or poetic affair, or that in any way I was a cranky and abnormal
child. I was nothing of the kind. In spite of what I had better call my
metrical precociousness, which I deal with in detail in a later chapter,
I was exceedingly fond of outdoor sports of all sorts. Though never a
very strong swimmer, I loved particularly what Dr. Johnson might have
called the "pleasures of immersion," whether in the icy cold of our
Somersetshire streams or in the bland waters of the Mediterranean. The
back of the horse and the buffet of the wave still remain for me the
intensest of physical delights. Next in my affections comes mountain-
climbing, though here I must not write of it. Instead, I would record
two memories--one of the very beginning, and one of the very end, of my
childhood. My very first memory is concerned with the American Civil
War--a conflict which has always exercised a great influence over my
mind. To me the struggle between the North and the South stands for one
of the pivotal facts in the history of the English-speaking race. I have
a clear recollection of my mother showing me a full-page picture,
probably in the _Illustrated London News_, entitled "The Last Shot
in the War." It was, if my memory serves, a darkish picture, with a big
piece of artillery dimly portrayed in the foreground, and a still dimmer
background, in which one seemed to catch sight of shadowy armies, warring
in the gloom. Or were they only trees and clouds? I cannot remember my
mother's words, but I have a recollection, firm though so distant, that
she told me how the great war had come about, and how this was the end of
all the misery and slaughter. The year, I think, must have been '65, that
is, when I was five years old.

[Illustration: Sutton Court, Somerset.]

As soon as my father began to talk to us of great events, which was when
I was about six, and to expound, as fathers should, the merits of the
struggle, I became an intense Northerner. All my father's sympathies
were with the North, both on the imperative duty of maintaining the
Union and on the slavery issue. He was an intense abolitionist. As a lad
of sixteen or seventeen, he had given up sugar, at the end of the
'twenties, because in those days sugar was grown by slaves on the West
Indian plantations. He would not support a slave industry, and until the
slaves were freed he did not go back to sugar.

Curiously enough, though my father greatly admired Mr. Lincoln, he did
not put into my mind that passionate devotion to the saviour of the
Union which I developed later. By this I do not mean that he was
critical of Lincoln, but merely that Lincoln was not one of his special
heroes. This fact, however, made a sounder foundation for my feelings
about America and the American people than would the mere cult of the
individual. I learned first to understand the greatness of the
separation issue, to realise the magnificence and the significance of
the American nation.

Another point of interest in the context is worth noting. My American
readers must not run away with the idea that there was anything strange
in a Somersetshire squire being on the side of the North. It is quite a
delusion to suppose that all the people of education and position in
England were Southerners. They were nothing of the kind. I cannot, of
course, remember those times myself, but I often talked them over with
men like Lord Cromer, who not only was on the Northern side, but paid a
visit to the Northern Armies as a young artillery officer, and heard the
guns at Petersburg. He pointed out how strong Conservatives such as his
uncle, Tom Baring, were convinced Northerners, as was also, of course,
Disraeli.

No doubt the man who did the harm in England and made Americans believe
that we rejoiced in the rebellion, was Mr. Gladstone. Partly through
want of information and partly through a curious mental twist, he
persuaded himself that the South was fighting for freedom like the
Italians in Naples or Lombardy. He not only believed in "the erring
sister, go in peace" policy, but considered that for "erring sister"
should be substituted "good and gallant sister." Mr. Gladstone's
influence was, unfortunately, at that time very great, and he misled an
enormous number of people on the merits of the quarrel. Happily my
father, though a keen admirer of Gladstone, did not follow him here. He
maintained the Northern view against all comers, as did the Duke of
Argyll, Lord Houghton, and dozens of other men of light and leading,
including, I am glad to say, my future chiefs, the Editors of _The
Spectator_.

Of another combative memory I can be more specific, for my recollection
of it is positively photographic. I can see myself, a little creature in
a straw hat, playing on what the nurses used to call "the libery lawn"--
a beautiful stretch of sward, upon which the Great Parlour window
opened. This lawn is half surrounded by an old red sandstone battlement
wall, with a long, terrace-like mound in front of it. Suddenly, in the
middle of our play, I saw the Great Parlour window open and my father,
with his hand held to shelter his eyes from the glare, stepping on to
the gravel path. He called to my elder brother and me that if we liked
he would read us an account of a great battle that had just been fought
in Austria. It was the Battle of Sadowa. My father held in his hand a
copy of the _Daily News_, to which he was a fairly frequent
contributor. The paper contained Forbes's vivid account of the action
which humbled the Austrian Empire before its Hohenzollern rivals. I was
always glad to hear about a fight, and was very soon tucked up at the
end of my father's green sofa. Owing to his stiff knee he always used a
sofa to rest and read on rather than sat in an armchair. He began to
read at once, for he was as eager as we were to devour the story of how
"Our Special Correspondent" climbed the church-tower and saw men and
armies battling in the plain below.

I did not, of course, understand the nature of the war, but my father
was greatly moved and read with such emotion that the encounter lived
before my eyes. Here I should note that my father, though the most
humane of men, was intensely fond of stories of war, and in a layman's
way understood a good deal about strategy. For example, he knew not
only, like Sir Thomas Browne, all the battles in Plutarch, but also all
the big Indian battles and those of the Peninsula. He was a special
student of Waterloo, for he had talked with plenty of men and officers
who had been in the Belgian Campaign.

Another recollection of my childhood will come in aptly here, for it
concerns a Waterloo veteran. He lived at Chew Magna, and kept a small
shop. Like many of the combatants on the British side, he was probably
only about fifteen or sixteen years old at Waterloo. Half the regiments
there were Militia regiments, and notoriously were composed of lads.
Therefore, in '69 or '70, when I used to ride over to see him, my
soldier was only about seventy-one or seventy-two. At his shop could be
bought pencils, pens, and little books of most attractive appearance,
sealing-wax and many other objects fascinating to the schoolboy.
However, the real attraction was the seller, and not the things sold. As
soon as I discovered that the man had been at Waterloo, I loved to go
in, pull over the old man's stock, and then gossip with him about the
Battle. Unless my recollection plays me false, he was distinctly a good
talker. This is how he told the story of the 18th of June:

Our regiment was marched out into a cornfield. The officers told us to
lie down on the ground and wait, because the enemy had got their
artillery playing on us. Cannon-balls kept coming over pretty close to
the ground. If we kept flat, however, there was not much risk. Every now
and then the artillery fire would cease entirely, and then our officers
called us to get up as quick as ever we could, and form square. The
front rank lay down, the second rank knelt, the third stooped low, and
the rear rank stood up. Our bayonets were fixed and our muskets loaded.
There was not much time. As soon as we had got into place we heard the
cavalry thundering up. Then, all of a sudden and as if they had sprung
up from the ground (there was a little hollow in front), they were
riding round us, riding like mad, cursing and swearing and shouting,
waving their swords, and trying to force their horses on to our
bayonets. We kept shooting at 'em all the time. But the bullets used to
bound off their steel coats. (They were, of course, cuirassiers.) We
soon found out, however, that if we aimed under their arm-pits, or at
their faces, or the lower part of their bodies, we could kill them, or
at least damage them. Our square was never really broken, but every now
and then one of the Frenchmen would drive his horse right through our
bayonets and into the middle, where we killed him. Of course, their idea
was that if one got in, the others could follow him, but we never let
them do that. We always closed up and held fast. Then, all of a sudden,
the cavalry would go back as quick as they came, and in a minute there
was not one of them to be seen. They had all utterly disappeared. As
soon as ever they were gone, the guns began to fire again, and down we
all went flat to the ground, and this went on all the morning, first up
and then down.

From a private soldier's point of view, this was, I expect, a very
accurate description of the battle.

I, of course, wanted to know more, and especially whether he had seen
the Duke. He declared that he had, but it was a dim picture. According
to my friend, he saw the Duke and his staff riding by at the back of the
square, and heard him say something to an officer, but what he did not
catch. If he had only known, he was describing a particular
characteristic of the Duke. Wellington, when in action, was the dumbest
of dumb things, and it would have required a moral earthquake to get
more than some curt order out of him. Even a "tinker's curse" or "a
tuppenny damn" would have seemed loquacious in him on such an occasion.
The not very sensational "_Up Guards and at 'em!_" was in later
life disputed by the Duke. Under great pressure, the most he would admit
was that he might possibly have said it, though he did not believe he
ever did.

The kind of battle remark he favoured was one which my father used to
tell me he had heard from Mountstewart Elphinstone, his father's bosom
friend. Elphinstone rode with the Duke at the Battle of Assaye. When
some hundred Mahratta guns were in full blast against the British line,
Elphinstone asked Sir Arthur Wellesley--it was Elphinstone's first
battle--whether the fire was really hot. "Well, they're making a good
deal of noise, but they don't seem to be doing much damage," was the
reply of the Duke, after he had carefully looked up and down the line.

By a curious piece of luck, we boys were in touch not only with a
Waterloo veteran, but also with a man who had been at Trafalgar. At Lady
Waldegrave's house, Strawberry Hill, one of the men in the garden had
been, as a boy, on the _Victory_. My brother Harry remembers
speaking to him, but, though I must have seen him, I have no
recollection of him, and probably did not talk to him. If I had, I am
sure I should have questioned him, and would probably have remembered
the answers.

I will end the stories of my childhood by relating an incident which
always seems to me to belong to the earlier epoch, though it really
happened when I was about thirteen, and therefore no longer a child. The
scene is Sutton, and therefore it must have been during the holidays,
for I am sure I was living at our tutor's at Chewton at the time. I had
gone out for a country walk by myself, for I was fond of roaming about
the fields, and especially of tracing to their sources the wooded
gullies abounding in our Somersetshire country. On such solitary rambles
I was always accompanied by a poet, in my pocket. On the occasion I am
going to describe, Swinburne in his _Poems and Ballads_ was my
guest of honour.

I emerged from my riverine exploration on to a hillside where the stream
rose--near a place with the delightfully rustic name of Hinton Belwit.
Here the springtime and the bright sun invited me to sit upon a stile
and to read of Dolores or Faustine, or _The Garden of Proserpine_,
--I know not which. While thus absorbed and probably muttering verses
aloud, I did not notice a typical Somersetshire farmer of the seventies
who was approaching the stile. When, therefore, I heard his voice and
looked up, it was as if the man had dropped from the clouds. What he was
saying was quite as unexpected as his appearance. It ran something like
this: "It be all craft, craft. You men be as full of craft as hell be of
tailors." Needless to say, I was enchanted. This looked like the
beginning of an adventure, for the old gentleman was puffing hard and in
the condition which Jeremy Taylor describes as "very zealously angry."

I, however, was too much interested to learn what he meant to resent his
abuse, and politely invited an explanation. He went on to declare with
great vehemence what a curse this book-learning and education were to
the working-men and how they filled them with "craft"--that was the
refrain of all his remarks. It made them unfit to work and to serve
honest men like himself, who had never had anything to do with that evil
thing--book-learning. When I gently asked why the sight of me had made
him think about it, he explained, with a look of infinite slyness, that
he saw I was reading a book. Then came an amusing disclosure. At
fourteen I was a very much overgrown lad, almost as tall as I am now,
and weighing almost as much and he had mistaken me for one of the
ordination pupils of a Roman Catholic priest who lived in the valley
close by. They were wont to walk about the country breviary in hand, not
merely reading, but actually reciting the office to themselves. My green
book was taken for a breviary, or for a book of hours, and my mouthings
of _Dolores_ or _The Garden of Proserpine_ for "the blessed
mutter of the Mass"! Assured by me that I was not a priest, he asked me
who I was. I told him my name and he instantly stretched out a huge and
grimy hand, and shook mine with a hearty violence, and insisted that I
should come home with him and drink a mug of cider. I accepted with
avidity. It was all in the adventure. Who knows? I might go to his house
and find the most delightful maiden in disguise! In fact, anything and
everything was possible. So I went, expecting and hoping for great
things, though quite willing to be content with small things and "a mug
o' zyder" if I could not get anything bigger.

As soon as we got into the farm kitchen and saw the farmer's wife, the
old gentleman began to explain his mistake. "And to think, Mother, that
this be young Mr. Strachey, after all. You can mind, carn't you, wife,
how we used to see him and his brothers riding by with their ponies and
their long hair? It is just like King Arthur and the cakes, it is." At
this his good wife, with a toss of her head, said, "Don't you be so
ignorant, maaster, talking about what you don't know. It's King Henry
you means." "That I don't. I mean King Arthur. You go down and get the
young maaster a mug o' zyder, and don't you say no more."

Then he slowly closed one pig-like eye and aimed it in my direction.
That was his idea of winking. Patting me on the knee, he added, "The
women be always like that--bain't they?--always trying to think they
know better. It was just like King Arthur and the cakes, weren't it?" I,
of course, assented and, I am sorry to say, with the magnificent
pedantry of boyhood, reflected that he was not the first person to make
the mistake. Did not Mrs. Quickly piously ejaculate that the dead
Falstaff was "in Arthur's bosom"? Besides, it was proof that the
Somersetshire people still remembered King Arthur--a point treasured by
me for my father, who was a keen student and great lover of the
Arthurian legends. It was he who edited for Macmillan the _Morte
d'Arthur_ in the Globe series. According to my father, and I expect
quite rightly, Arthur was the last of the British kings to stand up
against the Saxons, and really did inhabit that most magnificent of
ditch-defended hills, Cadbury Castle.

Cadbury, as the village at its foot, Queen's Camel, shows, is quite
possibly a broken-down form of Camelot. But there is better proof than
that. Till forty years ago, and possibly even now, the people round
Cadbury told tales of King Arthur, and firmly believed he would come
again. For example, the rector of Queen's Camel told my father that a
local girl, a housemaid in the Rectory, told him, as if it were a matter
of course, that every night of the full moon the King and his Knights
rode round the castle hall and watered their horses at the Wishing-Well.
She had seen them herself. Another man told the rector that his father
had one day seen a sort of opening in the hill, and had looked in.
"There he zeed a king sitting in a kind of a cave, with a golden crown
on his head and beautiful robes on him."

The best Arthurian story of all was the following. The rector, as an
archaeologist, did a little excavation on his own on the flat place at
the very top of the hill--a place in which there were what looked like
rough foundations. He used to take with him a local labourer to do some
of the spade-work. One day they dug up a Quern. The labourer asked what
it was. The clergyman explained that it was a form of hand-mill used in
the olden days for grinding corn. In reply he was met with one of the
most amazing remarks ever made to an antiquarian. "Oh, a little hand-
mill be it! Ah, now I understands what I never did before. That's why
they fairies take such a lot of corn up to the top of the hill. They be
taking it up for to grind."

Anticipating Kipling, the rector might well have exclaimed, "How is one
to put that into a 'Report on Excavations on Cadbury Hill submitted to
the Somersetshire Archaeological Society by the Rector of Queen's
Camel'?"

Anyway, I was delighted to have actually heard a man speak the words
"King Arthur," and also went home chuckling at the thought of being
mistaken for a Roman priest--an event which particularly amused my
mother.

Soon after I was eleven, we went to Chewton Vicarage for the first time
as "private pupils." Then my mother's health became worse, and we had to
go to Cannes more or less regularly. In order that our education should
be continued, we then reverted to the plan of tutors in the house. We
had two of these in succession, both Balliol men. Though they were able
men, they were not successes as educationalists. My father always used
to say that he thought both of them had been badly overworked at Oxford
and had been advised to take tutorial posts as a rest-cure--a very
pleasant rest-cure when it took the form of wintering in the South of
France.

But, though my brothers and I effectually resisted the efforts made to
teach us, we learnt during our winters in France a great many things
indirectly. Unfortunately, French was not one of those things. My father
would have liked us to speak and write French. He had it, however, so
strongly impressed upon him by his advisers that if we were to go to
Oxford we must above all things get a sufficient knowledge of Latin and
Greek to pass Responsions that, though we had an occasional lesson in
French, our sojourn on the Riviera, as far as learning French was
concerned, was thrown away.

We lived entirely with the boys and girls of the rest of the British
colony, and regarded the French inhabitants literally as part of the
scenery, and largely as a humorous part thereof. We got on well enough
with them, and knew enough French to buy endless sweets at Rumpelmeyer's
or _chez Nègres_, to get queer knives and "oddities" at the fairs,
or to conduct paper-chases along the course of the Canal or in Pine Woods
bordering it. We refused, however, to take the French or their language
seriously.

[Illustration: Sutton Court, Somerset]

However, my father did contrive to instil a little French politics into
us. He was a fervent admirer of Gambetta and the Third Republic, and
used to read us extracts from Gambetta's organ, _La Republique
Francaise_. It thus happened that I early became a staunch adherent
of the great Democratic leader and was full of zeal against first the
Comte de Chambord and then the Comte de Paris. I still remember the
excitement we all felt over Marshal MacMahon's rather half-hearted
efforts to play the part of a General Monk.

We had, further, the excitement of seeing a famous General immured close
to us in a fortress prison for the crime of treason. The Ile de Ste.
Marguerite, opposite Cannes, with its picturesque Vauban fortifications,
became, while we were at Cannes, the prison of Marshal Bazaine, the man
who surrendered Metz to the Germans. He occupied, besides, the very
rooms which had been occupied by "The Man with the Iron Mask." Can it be
wondered that when we had a picnic-party on the island, or rowed under
the walls of the fortress in a boat, we used to strain every muscle in
order to get a glimpse of the prisoner? On one occasion we saw
somebody's hat or head moving along a parapet, and were told it was the
Marshal taking his daily exercise on the terrace of the fort, but
whether it really was or not, who can say? At any rate, the Marshal
escaped from his imprisonment during our stay, probably to the relief of
his jailers. That was a source of great excitement in itself, and it was
heightened by rumours that an English girl had assisted the prisoner to
break out.

We were not personally in favour of Bazaine, but regarded him with
distinct repulsion for surrendering at Metz. Still, an escape was an
escape; and, besides, the fat old Marshal had let himself down by a rope
into an open boat!

The epoch of tutors came to an end soon after the birth of my sister,
which happened at Marseilles, when my mother was on her way to Cannes.
After the event, my mother was pronounced by the doctors to be able to
winter in England, and I and my two brothers, therefore, went back to
Chewton Mendip and became private pupils of Mr. Philpott, for the second
time. Here we remained till I went first to a tutor at Oxford--Mr. Bell--
and then to live with my uncle and aunt, Professor T. H. Green (Mrs.
Green was my mother's sister). There I was "coached for Balliol" by two
of the best scholars in the University. One of them was Professor
Nettleship, who a couple of years later was made Professor of Latin, and
the other is now Sir Herbert Warren, President of Magdalen. They were
both delightful expounders of the classics, and, though I was an
unaccountably bad scholar, I am proud to say that they both liked me and
liked teaching me. However, I need say no more on this point, as all
that is worth saying about it is supplied by Sir Herbert Warren in the
letter which I have included in my Oxford Chapter.




CHAPTER VIII

THE FAMILY NURSE


In the families of the well-to-do few influences have a greater effect
upon the child, and so upon the man, than that exercised by the servants
of the household in which he or she is brought up. And of those
influences, upstairs or downstairs, none, of course, is so potent as
that of the nurse. That is what Goethe would call one of the secrets
that are known to all. Why it should ever be regarded as a secret Heaven
knows; yet it must be so considered, for it is very seldom spoken of
except in the case of nurses.

Anyway, I and my brothers, and in our earlier years my sister, were
quite as fortunate in our nurse as we were in our parents and in our
home. Her name was Mrs. Leaker. She was not married, but bore the brevet
rank always accorded to upper servants of her position. She played many
parts in our family household, and always with a high distinction. She
began as nurse; she next became cook; then housekeeper; then reverted
for a time to nurse, and then became something more than housekeeper
because she ruled over the nursery as well as over the kitchen, the
store-room, and the housemaids' room. But whatever her name in the
household, and whatever her duties, she was always in fact head-nurse.
She loved children, and they loved her, though not without a certain
sense of awe. She had a fiery temper; but that fieriness was reserved
almost entirely for grown-up people. A child, if it knew the proper
moment for action, could do anything it liked with her.

Taken altogether, she was one of the most remarkable women, whether for
character or intellect, that I have ever come across. In appearance she
had, what can be best described as, the gipsy look, though she did not
believe herself to have gipsy blood. Her complexion was swarthy, her
hair was black, and her eyes dark and full of an eager and scintillating
brightness which made her face light up and change with every mood of
her mind and radiate a vivid intelligence. If anyone who knew her was
asked to state the most memorable thing about her, I am sure the answer
would be, "mobility," both of mind and body. There was a quickness as
well as a lightness in her step--I hear it as I write--in the gestures
of her hands and her head, and indeed in everything she did.

Let nobody suppose for a moment that this was a case of _paralysis
agitans_, or St. Vitus' Dance. There was nothing involuntary in her
unrest. It was all part of an intense vitality and an intense desire for
self-expression. When she was in one of her worst tempers, she would
pace up and down a room, turning at each wall like a lion in a cage, in
a way which I have only seen one other person effect with equal spirit
and unconsciousness. That was an eminent statesman, in the moment of
great political crisis. Her nature was so eager and so active, and
seemed to be so perpetually fretting her body and mind, that anyone
seeing her in middle life would have been inclined to prophesy that such
agitations must wear her out prematurely and that she had only a short
life before her, or else an imbecile's end.

Yet, as a matter of fact, she lived in good health till over eighty, and
to the last moment retained the full control of her faculties. She died,
as might any other old person, of bronchitis. In truth, she was an
example of Sir Thomas Browne's dictum that we live by an invisible flame
within us. As a matter of fact, her flame was anything but invisible. It
was remarkably visible. It leapt, and crackled, and gleamed, and took on,
like the witch's oils, every colour in the spectrum. Now crimson, now
violet, now purple, now yellow, glowed and flashed the colours of her
mind.

[Illustration: Mrs. Salome Leaker,--"The Family Nurse."]

Mrs. Leaker was brought up in a poor household, in an age when
illiteracy, alas! seemed the natural fate of the poor. But you could no
more have kept education from her than you could have kept food from a
hungry lioness. She was determined to get it somehow, and get it she
did. She taught herself to read before she had reached womanhood, and
taught herself by pure force of her will, adopting, curiously enough,
what would now be described as the Montessori method. She opened books
and read them somehow or other till she understood the meaning of the
words. Her letters her mother had taught her. She often told me that
nobody had taught her to read. When she had attained the power of
reading, self-education was easy enough. It led to results of an amazing
kind--results which at first sight seem to prove all the lore of the
educationalists at fault. People, we are told, must be trained to like
and understand good literature. Without that training they will never
know the good from the bad.

Now read this story of an innate appreciation of good literature which
she told me with her own lips. I asked her once, when I was a lad, what
she thought of "Junius," who had begun to exercise a great influence
over my rhetorical instincts. It was as natural to consult her on a
point of literature as on one of domestic surgery. Her reply was perhaps
the strangest ever made by a woman over sixty to a boy of undergraduate
age. It ran in this way, for I recall her words.

When I was a girl, and a young housemaid in my first place at Mrs.
Lloyd's, in Clifton, I used to have as part of my work to dust the
library. When I was dusting, I used to take down the books and look at
what was in them, and often got through a page or two with my duster in
my hand. Once I took down a volume marked "Junius," and read a page or
two, and as I read I began to feel as if I was drunk. In those days I
had never heard of the Duke of Grafton or Lord Sandwich, or any of the
other people he talks about, and I did not know what it all meant, but
the words went to my head like brandy.

Now, I ask anyone with a sense of literature whether it would be
possible to give a better lightning criticism of "Junius" and his style
than that conveyed in Leaker's words. She had got the exact touch.
"Junius," in truth, is not only empty for her, but empty for the whole
world except as regards his style. There he is unquestionably great.
Tumid, exaggerated, and monotonous as it often is, his style does affect
one like wine. That is certainly how it affected, and still affects, me.
Even at an age when I did not really know much more about the Duke of
Grafton than did Leaker, and probably cared less, I had got the
peroration of the first letter to the Duke of Grafton by heart. I used
to walk up and down the terrace, or across the meadows that led to the
waterfall, shouting to myself, or my bored companions, that torrent of
lucid, thrilling invective. I mean the passage in which "Junius" gives
advice to the University of Cambridge. They will, he hopes, take it to
heart when they shall be "perfectly recovered from the delirium of an
Installation," and when that learned society has become "once more a
peaceful scene of slumber and thoughtless meditation."

How the waterfall gave me back the reverberating words! How the lime
trees rocked to the final crack of the whip over the unhappy Grafton!
"The learned dullness of declamation will be silent; and even the venal
Muse, though happiest in fiction, will forget your virtues."

But that was by no means her only achievement of literary diagnosis and
the power to get hold of books somehow or other. When in the 'twenties
she came to Bristol from Dartmouth, which was her home, with her mother
and brothers (her father was dead), she travelled, as did all people
with slender means in those days, in the waggon. These vehicles
proceeded at the rate of about three or four miles an hour. All she
could tell about her journey was that she lay in the straw, in the
bottom of the waggon, and read Wordsworth's _Ruth, The White Doe of
Rylstone_. She was, throughout her life, very fond of _Ruth_ and
this was her first reading. I have often thought to myself how much the
great apostrophe must have meant to the lion-hearted, vehement,
imaginative girl:

  Before me shone a glorious world,--
   Fresh as a banner bright, unfurled
       To music suddenly.

In later life she had the poem by heart, and I venture to say that there
was not a word of it that she did not understand, both intellectually
and emotionally. But though she loved books and literature, it must not
be supposed that she was indifferent to other forms of art. Anything
beautiful in nature or art made a profound impression upon her. When
Leaker first went to Paris, on our way to Pau or Cannes, I forget which,
my mother sent her to the Louvre and told her specially to look at the
Venus of Milo. She gave her directions where to find the statue; when
she came back, she said to my mother:

I couldn't find the statue you told me about, but I saw another which is
the most lovely thing in the world. I never thought to see anything so
beautiful, and the broken arm did not matter at all, for she stood there
like a goddess.

She had found the Venus for herself, although some fault in the
directions had made her feel sure that it could not be what she had been
sent to look at. Later on, when we took to going to France regularly for
my mother's health, she every year did her homage to the Venus. What is
more, when she went for the first time to Florence, she fully realised
how poor a thing the Venus de Medici was in comparison.

But though, as I have said, all beautiful things appealed to her,
literature was her first love and the element in which she lived. But
literature did not in her case only mean Shakespeare, Milton, and the
Bible, as it does to so many English people. She cropped all the flowers
in the fields of literature, prose and verse. She was as intense an
admirer of Shakespeare as was my father, and a greater lover of Milton.
Shakespeare she lived on, including, curiously enough, _Timon of
Athens_, who was a great favourite. When any lazy member of my family
wanted to find a particular line or passage in Shakespeare, he or she
would go to Leaker rather than trouble to look up the quotation in a
concordance; Leaker was certain to find you at once what you wanted.
There was no pedantry about her and no mere _tour de force_ of the
memory. She entered into the innermost mental recesses of Shakespeare's
characters. What is more, she made us children follow her.

Though we were kept clean and well looked after, there was no nonsense
in her nursery as to over-exciting our minds or emotions, or that sort
of thing. She was quite prepared to read us to sleep with the witches in
_Macbeth_, or the death-scene in _Othello_. I can remember now
the exaltation derived, half from the mesmerism of the verse and half
from a pleasant terror, by her rendering of the lines: "Put out the
light, and then put out the light." I see her now, with her wrinkled
brown face, her cap with white streamers awry over her black hair
beginning to turn grey. In front of her was a book, propped up against
the rim of a tin candlestick shaped like a small basin. In it was a dip
candle and a pair of snuffers. That was how nursery light was provided
in the later 'sixties and even in the early 'seventies. As she sat bent
forward, declaiming the most soul-shaking things in Shakespeare between
nine and ten at night, we lay in our beds with our chins on the
counterpanes, silent, scared, but intensely happy. We loved every word,
and slept quite well when the play was finished. We were supposed to go
to sleep at nine, but if there was anything exciting in the play, very
little pressure was required to get Leaker to finish, even if it took an
extra half-hour--or a little more. In truth, she was always ready to
read to us by night or day.

Though no Sabbatarian, she had a tendency to give _Paradise Lost_ a
turn on Sundays. As far as I remember, she never read _Paradise
Regained_. _Comus_ and the short poems, especially _Lycidas_,
were great favourites with her. One might have supposed that she
would not like Wordsworth. As a matter of fact, she loved him and
thoroughly understood him and his philosophy of life. She did not
merely read the lyric and elegiac poems like _Ruth_, but had gone
through and enjoyed _The Excursion_ and many of the longer poems.
Coleridge she loved, and Southey, and Crabbe, and Gray, and Dr. Johnson,
and indeed the whole of English poetic literature. In modern poetry she
read freely Tennyson and Robert Browning, and admired them both.

Byron was a special favourite of hers, and here again she showed her
intellect and her taste, not by worshipping the Eastern Tales or the
sentimentalities of _Childe Harold_, but by a thorough appreciation
of _Don Juan_. Her taste, indeed, was almost unfailing. Take a
simple example. She used frequently to chant the delightful lines to Tom
Moore, which begin:

  My boat is on the shore,
     And my barque is on the sea,
   But ere I go, Tom Moore,
     Here's a double health to thee.

Having a great deal of sympathy for scorn and indignation, she, of
course, loved the last verse and implanted it deeply in my mind by
constant quotation in tones of scathing intensity:

  Here's a tear for those who love me,
     And a smile for those who hate,
   And whatever sky's above me,
     Here's a heart for every fate.

That was her own spirit. Truly she had a heart for every fate. She was
quite fearless.

Although she was not in the least a prejudiced person, I remember once,
in the excitement of my own discovery of Swinburne, trying to create an
equal enthusiasm in her mind. She return

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