Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography
instinctively, "That man is, or ought to be, an Oxford man." Chiefest
among the great names which Oxford ought to claim but cannot is the name
of Edmund Burke; and the "Secret" on which we have been discoursing
seems to be conveyed with luminous precision in his description of the
ideal character:--"It is our business ... to bring the dispositions that
are lovely in private life into the service and conduct of the
commonwealth; so to be patriots as not to forget we are gentlemen; to
cultivate friendships and to incur enmities; to have both strong, but
both selected--in the one to be placable, in the other immovable."
Whoso has attained to that ideal has learnt the "Secret" of Oxford.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] The Rev. J. M. Lester.
[18] Here I must depart from my rule, and mention a name--FitzRoy
Stewart.
VI
HOME
"Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam;
True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home."
WORDSWORTH, "_To a Sky-lark_."
I said good-bye to Oxford on the 17th of June, 1876. What was the next
step to be? As so often in my life, the decision came through a doctor's
lips. He spoke in a figure, and this is what he said. "When a man has
had a severe illness, he has taken a large sum out of his capital.
Unless he has the wisdom to replace it, he must be permanently poorer;
and, when the original stock was not large, the necessity of economizing
becomes more urgent. You are in that case. My advice, therefore, is--Do
nothing for the next two or three years. Concentrate all your efforts on
getting better. Live as healthy a life as you can, and give mind and
body a complete rest. If you will obey this counsel, you will find that
you have replaced the capital, or, at any rate, some of it; and you may,
in spite of all disabilities, be able to take your part in the life and
work of the world." The prescription of total abstinence from effort
exactly suited my disposition of the moment. Oxford, one way and
another, had taken more out of me than till then I had realized, and I
was only too thankful to have an opportunity of making good the loss.
It being, for the time, my prime object to recover some portion of
health and strength, I was beyond measure fortunate in the possession of
an absolutely ideal home. "'Home! Sweet Home!' Yes. That is the song
that goes straight to the heart of every English man and woman. For
forty years we never asked Madame Adelina Patti to sing anything else.
The unhappy, decadent, Latin races have not even a word in their
language by which to express it, poor things! Home is the secret of our
honest, British, Protestant virtues. It is the only nursery of our
Anglo-Saxon citizenship. Back to it our far-flung children turn, with
all their memories aflame. They may lapse into rough ways, but they keep
something sound at the core so long as they are faithful to the old
home. There is still a tenderness in the voice, and tears are in their
eyes, as they speak together of the days that can never die out of
their lives, when they were at home in the old familiar places, with
father and mother, in the healthy gladness of their childhood."[19] To
me home was all this and even more; for not only had it been my earthly
Paradise when I was a child, but now, in opening manhood, it was a
sanctuary and a resting-place, in which I could prepare myself to face
whatever lot the future might have in store for me.
That London as well as country may be, under certain conditions, Home, I
am well aware. For many natures London has an attractiveness which is
all its own. And yet to indulge one's taste for it may be a grave
dereliction of duty. The State is built upon the Home, and as a
training-place for social virtue, there can surely be no comparison
between a home in the country and a home in London. All those educating
influences which count for so much in the true home are infinitely
weaker in the town than in the country. In a London home there is
nothing to fascinate the eye. The contemplation of the mews and the
chimney-pots through the back-windows of the nursery will not elevate
even the most impressible child. There is no mystery, no dreamland, no
Enchanted Palace, no Bluebeard's Chamber, in a stucco mansion built by
Cubitt, or a palace of terra-cotta on the Cadogan estate. There can be
no traditions of the past, no inspiring memories of virtuous ancestry,
in a house which your father bought five years ago and of which the
previous owners are not known to you even by name. "The Square" or "The
Gardens" are sorry substitutes for the Park and the Pleasure-grounds,
the Common and the Downs. Crossing-sweepers are a deserving folk, but
you cannot cultivate those intimate relations with them which bind you
to the lodge-keeper at home, or to the old women in the almshouses, or
to the septuagenarian waggoner who has driven your father's team ever
since he was ten years old. Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, or All Saints,
Margaret Street, may be beautifully ornate, and the congregation what
Lord Beaconsfield called "sparkling and modish"; but they can never have
the romantic charm of the Village Church where you were confirmed side
by side with the keeper's son, or proposed to the Vicar's daughter when
you were wreathing holly round the lectern. There is a magic in the
memory of a country home with which no urban associations can compete.
Nowadays the world is perpetually on the move, but in the old days
people who possessed a country house passed nine months out of the
twelve under its sacred roof--sacred because it was inseparably
connected with memories of ancestry and parentage and early association;
with marriage and children, and pure enjoyment and active benevolence
and neighbourly goodwill. In a word, the country house was Home, and for
those who dwelt in it the interests of life were very much bound up in
the Park and the covers, the croquet-ground and the cricket-ground, the
kennel, the stable, and the garden. I remember, when I was an
undergraduate, lionizing some Yorkshire damsels on their first visit to
Oxford, then in the "high midsummer pomps" of its beauty. But all they
said was, in the pensive tone of unwilling exiles, "How beautifully the
sun must be shining on the South Walk at home!"
The Village Church was a great centre of domestic affection. All the
family had been christened in it. The eldest sister had been married in
it. Generations of ancestry mouldered under the chancel-floor. Christmas
decorations were an occasion of much innocent merriment, and a little
ditty high in favour in Tractarian homes warned the decorators to be--
"Unselfish--looking not to see
Proofs of their own dexterity;
But quite contented that 'I' should
Forgotten be in brotherhood."
Of course, whether Tractarian or Evangelical, religious people regarded
church-going as a spiritual privilege; and everyone, religious or not,
recognized it as a civil duty. "When a gentleman is _sur ses terres_,"
said Major Pendennis, "he must give an example to the country people;
and, if I could turn a tune, I even think I should sing. The Duke of St.
David's, whom I have the honour of knowing, always sings in the country,
and let me tell you it has a doosed fine effect from the Family Pew."
Before the passion for "restoration" had set in, and ere yet Sir Gilbert
Scott had transmogrified the Parish Churches of England, the Family Pew
was indeed the ark and sanctuary of the territorial system--and a very
comfortable ark too. It had a private entrance, a round table, a good
assortment of armchairs, a fire-place, and a wood-basket. And I well
remember a wash-leather glove of unusual size which was kept in the
wood-basket for the greater convenience of making up the fire during
divine service. "You may restore the church as much as you like," said
the lay-rector of our parish, to an innovating Incumbent, "but I must
insist on my Family Pew not being touched. If I had to sit in an open
seat, I should never get a wink of sleep again."
A country home left its mark for all time on those who were brought up
in it. The sons played cricket and went bat-fowling with the village
boys, and not seldom joined with them in a poaching expedition to the
paternal preserves. However popular or successful or happy a
Public-school boy might be at Eton or Harrow, he counted the days till
he could return to his pony and his gun, his ferrets and rat-trap and
fishing-rod. In after years, amid all the toil and worry of active life,
he looked back lovingly to the corner of the cover where he shot his
first pheasant, or the precise spot in the middle of the Vale where he
first saw a fox killed, and underwent the disgusting Baptism of Blood.
Girls, living more continuously at home, entered even more intimately
into the daily life of the place. Their morning rides led them across
the Village Green; their afternoon drives were often steered by the
claims of this or that cottage to a visit. They were taught as soon as
they could toddle never to enter a door without knocking, never to sit
down without being asked, and never to call at meal-time. They knew
everyone in the village--old and young; played with the babies, taught
the boys in Sunday School, carried savoury messes to the old and
impotent, read by the sick-beds, and brought flowers for the coffin.
Mamma knitted comforters and dispensed warm clothing, organized relief
in hard winters and times of epidemic, and found places for the
hobbledehoys of both sexes. The pony-boy and the scullery-maid were
pretty sure to be products of the village. Very likely the
young-ladies'-maid was a village girl whom the doctor had pronounced too
delicate for factory or farm. I have seen an excited young groom staring
his eyes out of his head at the Eton and Harrow match, and exclaiming
with rapture at a good catch, "It was my young governor as 'scouted'
that. 'E's nimble, ain't he?" And I well remember an ancient
stable-helper at a country house in Buckinghamshire who was called "Old
Bucks," because he had never slept out of his native county, and very
rarely out of his native village, and had spent his whole life in the
service of one family.
Of course, when so much of the impressionable part of life was lived
amid the "sweet, sincere surroundings of country life," there grew up,
between the family at the Hall and the families in the village, a
feeling which, in spite of our national unsentimentality, had a
chivalrous and almost feudal tone. The interest of the poor in the life
and doings of "The Family" was keen and genuine. The English peasant is
too much a gentleman to be a flatterer, and compliments were often
bestowed in very unexpected forms. "They do tell me as 'is
understanding's no worse than it always were," was a ploughman's way of
saying that an uncle of mine was in full possession of his faculties.
"We call 'im 'Lord Charles' because he's so old and so cunning," was
another's description of a pony which had belonged to my father. "Ah, I
know you're but a poor creature at the best!" was the recognized way of
complimenting a lady on what she considered her bewitching and romantic
delicacy.
But these eccentricities were merely verbal, and under them lay a deep
vein of genuine and lasting regard. "I've lived under four dukes and
four 'ousekeepers, and I'm not going to be put upon in my old age!" was
the exclamation of an ancient poultry-woman, whose dignity had been
offended by some irregularity touching her Christmas dinner. When the
daughter of the house married and went into a far country, she was sure
to find some emigrant from her old home who welcomed her with effusion,
and was full of enquiries about his Lordship and her Ladyship, and Miss