Autobiography
believe that fear, as an element in education, can be dispensed with;
but I am sure that it ought not to be the main element; and when it
predominates so much as to preclude love and confidence on the part of
the child to those who should be the unreservedly trusted advisers of
after years, and perhaps to seal up the fountains of frank and
spontaneous communicativeness in the child's nature, it is an evil for
which a large abatement must be made from the benefits, moral and
intellectual, which may flow from any other part of the education.
During this first period of my life, the habitual frequenters of my
father's house were limited to a very few persons, most of them little
known to the world, but whom personal worth, and more or less of
congeniality with at least his political opinions (not so frequently
to be met with then as since), inclined him to cultivate; and his
conversations with them I listened to with interest and instruction.
My being an habitual inmate of my father's study made me acquainted
with the dearest of his friends, David Ricardo, who by his benevolent
countenance, and kindliness of manner, was very attractive to young
persons, and who, after I became a student of political economy,
invited me to his house and to walk with him in order to converse on
the subject. I was a more frequent visitor (from about 1817 or 1818)
to Mr. Hume, who, born in the same part of Scotland as my father, and
having been, I rather think, a younger schoolfellow or college
companion of his, had on returning from India renewed their youthful
acquaintance, and who--coming, like many others, greatly under the
influence of my father's intellect and energy of character--was
induced partly by that influence to go into Parliament, and there
adopt the line of conduct which has given him an honourable place in
the history of his country. Of Mr. Bentham I saw much more, owing to
the close intimacy which existed between him and my father. I do not
know how soon after my father's first arrival in England they became
acquainted. But my father was the earliest Englishman of any great
mark, who thoroughly understood, and in the main adopted, Bentham's
general views of ethics, government and law: and this was a natural
foundation for sympathy between them, and made them familiar
companions in a period of Bentham's life during which he admitted much
fewer visitors than was the case subsequently. At this time Mr.
Bentham passed some part of every year at Barrow Green House, in a
beautiful part of the Surrey Hills, a few miles from Godstone, and
there I each summer accompanied my father in a long visit. In 1813 Mr.
Bentham, my father, and I made an excursion, which included Oxford,
Bath and Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth, and Portsmouth. In this journey I
saw many things which were instructive to me, and acquired my first
taste for natural scenery, in the elementary form of fondness for a
"view." In the succeeding winter we moved into a house very near Mr.
Bentham's, which my father rented from him, in Queen Square,
Westminster. From 1814 to 1817 Mr. Bentham lived during half of each
year at Ford Abbey, in Somersetshire (or rather in a part of
Devonshire surrounded by Somersetshire), which intervals I had the
advantage of passing at that place. This sojourn was, I think, an
important circumstance in my education. Nothing contributes more to
nourish elevation of sentiments in a people, than the large and free
character of their habitations. The middle-age architecture, the
baronial hall, and the spacious and lofty rooms, of this fine old
place, so unlike the mean and cramped externals of English
middle-class life, gave the sentiment of a larger and freer existence,
and were to me a sort of poetic cultivation, aided also by the
character of the grounds in which the Abbey stood; which were _riant_
and secluded, umbrageous, and full of the sound of falling waters.
I owed another of the fortunate circumstances in my education, a
year's residence in France, to Mr. Bentham's brother, General Sir
Samuel Bentham. I had seen Sir Samuel Bentham and his family at their
house near Gosport in the course of the tour already mentioned (he
being then Superintendent of the Dockyard at Portsmouth), and during a
stay of a few days which they made at Ford Abbey shortly after the
Peace, before going to live on the Continent. In 1820 they invited me
for a six months' visit to them in the South of France, which their
kindness ultimately prolonged to nearly a twelvemonth. Sir Samuel
Bentham, though of a character of mind different from that of his
illustrious brother, was a man of very considerable attainments and
general powers, with a decided genius for mechanical art. His wife, a
daughter of the celebrated chemist, Dr. Fordyce, was a woman of strong
will and decided character, much general knowledge, and great
practical good sense of the Edgeworth kind: she was the ruling spirit
of the household, as she deserved, and was well qualified, to be.
Their family consisted of one son (the eminent botanist) and three
daughters, the youngest about two years my senior. I am indebted to
them for much and various instruction, and for an almost parental
interest in my welfare. When I first joined them, in May, 1820, they
occupied the Château of Pompignan (still belonging to a descendant of
Voltaire's enemy) on the heights overlooking the plain of the Garonne
between Montauban and Toulouse. I accompanied them in an excursion to
the Pyrenees, including a stay of some duration at Bagnères de
Bigorre, a journey to Pau, Bayonne, and Bagnères de Luchon, and an
ascent of the Pic du Midi de Bigorre.
This first introduction to the highest order of mountain scenery made
the deepest impression on me, and gave a colour to my tastes through
life. In October we proceeded by the beautiful mountain route of
Castres and St. Pons, from Toulouse to Montpellier, in which last
neighbourhood Sir Samuel had just bought the estate of Restinclière,
near the foot of the singular mountain of St. Loup. During this
residence in France I acquired a familiar knowledge of the French
language, and acquaintance with the ordinary French literature; I took
lessons in various bodily exercises, in none of which, however, I made
any proficiency; and at Montpellier I attended the excellent winter
courses of lectures at the Faculté des Sciences, those of M. Anglada
on chemistry, of M. Provençal on zoology, and of a very accomplished
representative of the eighteenth century metaphysics, M. Gergonne, on
logic, under the name of Philosophy of the Sciences. I also went
through a course of the higher mathematics under the private tuition
of M. Lenthéric, a professor at the Lycée of Montpellier. But the
greatest, perhaps, of the many advantages which I owed to this episode
in my education, was that of having breathed for a whole year, the
free and genial atmosphere of Continental life. This advantage was not
the less real though I could not then estimate, nor even consciously
feel it. Having so little experience of English life, and the few
people I knew being mostly such as had public objects, of a large and
personally disinterested kind, at heart, I was ignorant of the low
moral tone of what, in England, is called society; the habit of, not
indeed professing, but taking for granted in every mode of
implication, that conduct is of course always directed towards low and
petty objects; the absence of high feelings which manifests itself by
sneering depreciation of all demonstrations of them, and by general
abstinence (except among a few of the stricter religionists) from
professing any high principles of action at all, except in those
preordained cases in which such profession is put on as part of the
costume and formalities of the occasion. I could not then know or
estimate the difference between this manner of existence, and that of
a people like the French, whose faults, if equally real, are at all
events different; among whom sentiments, which by comparison at least
may be called elevated, are the current coin of human intercourse,
both in books and in private life; and though often evaporating in
profession, are yet kept alive in the nation at large by constant
exercise, and stimulated by sympathy, so as to form a living and
active part of the existence of great numbers of persons, and to be
recognised and understood by all. Neither could I then appreciate the
general culture of the understanding, which results from the habitual
exercise of the feelings, and is thus carried down into the most
uneducated classes of several countries on the Continent, in a degree
not equalled in England among the so-called educated, except where an
unusual tenderness of conscience leads to a habitual exercise of the
intellect on questions of right and wrong. I did not know the way in
which, among the ordinary English, the absence of interest in things
of an unselfish kind, except occasionally in a special thing here and
there, and the habit of not speaking to others, nor much even to
themselves, about the things in which they do feel interest, causes
both their feelings and their intellectual faculties to remain
undeveloped, or to develop themselves only in some single and very
limited direction; reducing them, considered as spiritual beings, to
a kind of negative existence. All these things I did not perceive till
long afterwards; but I even then felt, though without stating it
clearly to myself, the contrast between the frank sociability and
amiability of French personal intercourse, and the English mode of
existence, in which everybody acts as if everybody else (with few, or
no exceptions) was either an enemy or a bore. In France, it is true,
the bad as well as the good points, both of individual and of national
character, come more to the surface, and break out more fearlessly in
ordinary intercourse, than in England: but the general habit of the
people is to show, as well as to expect, friendly feeling in every one
towards every other, wherever there is not some positive cause for the
opposite. In England it is only of the best bred people, in the upper
or upper middle ranks, that anything like this can be said.
In my way through Paris, both going and returning, I passed some time
in the house of M. Say, the eminent political economist, who was a
friend and correspondent of my father, having become acquainted with
him on a visit to England a year or two after the Peace. He was a man
of the later period of the French Revolution, a fine specimen of the
best kind of French Republican, one of those who had never bent the
knee to Bonaparte though courted by him to do so; a truly upright,
brave, and enlightened man. He lived a quiet and studious life, made
happy by warm affections, public and private. He was acquainted with
many of the chiefs of the Liberal party, and I saw various noteworthy
persons while staying at this house; among whom I have pleasure in the
recollection of having once seen Saint-Simon, not yet the founder
either of a philosophy or a religion, and considered only as a clever
original. The chief fruit which I carried away from the society I saw,
was a strong and permanent interest in Continental Liberalism, of
which I ever afterwards kept myself _au courant_, as much as of
English politics: a thing not at all usual in those days with
Englishmen, and which had a very salutary influence on my development,
keeping me free from the error always prevalent in England--and from
which even my father, with all his superiority to prejudice, was not
exempt--of judging universal questions by a merely English standard.
After passing a few weeks at Caen with an old friend of my father's,
I returned to England in July, 1821 and my education resumed its
ordinary course.
CHAPTER III