I
The objects of this autobiography, written at the age of thirty-three,
are simple enough: an opportunity for a formal good-bye to you and to
you and to you and to me and to all that; forgetfulness, because once
all this has been settled in my mind and written down and published it
need never be thought about again; money. Mr. Bentley once wrote:
The science of geography
Is different from biography:
Geography is about maps,
Biography is about chaps.
The rhyme might have been taken further to show how closely,
nevertheless, these things are linked. For while maps are the
biographical treatment of geography, biography is the geographical
treatment of chaps. Chaps who are made the subjects of biography have
by effort, or by accident, put themselves on the contemporary map
as geographical features; but seldom have reality by themselves as
proper chaps. So that _Who’s Who?_ though claiming to be a dictionary
of biography, is hardly less of a geographical gazetteer than _Burke’s
Peerage_.... One of the few simple people I have known who have
had a philosophic contempt for such gazetteering was Old Joe, a
battalion quartermaster in France. He was a proper chap. When he
had won his D.S.O. for being the only quartermaster in the
Seventh Division to get up rations to his battalion in the firing line
at, I think, the Passchendaele show, he was sent a slip to complete
with biographical details for the appropriate directory. He looked
contemptuously at the various headings. Disregarding ‘date and
place of birth,’ and even ‘military campaigns,’ he filled in two items
only:
Issue . . Rum, rifles, etc.
Family seat . My khaki pants.
And yet even proper chaps have their formal geography, however
little it may mean to them. They have birth certificates, passports,
relatives, earliest recollections, and even, sometimes, degrees and
publications and campaigns to itemize, like all the irrelevant people,
the people with only geographical reality. And the less that all these
biographical items mean to them the more particularly and faithfully
can they fill them in, if ever they feel so inclined. When loyalties
have become negligible and friends have all either deserted in alarm
or died, or been dismissed, or happen to be chaps to whom geography is
also without significance, the task is easy for them. They do not have
to wait until they are at least ninety before publishing, and even then
only tell the truth about characters long dead and without influential
descendants.
* * * * *
As a proof of my readiness to accept biographical convention, let
me at once record my two earliest recollections. The first is being
held up to the window to watch a carnival procession for the Diamond
Jubilee in 1897 (this was at Wimbledon, where I had been born on 24th
July 1895). The second, an earlier recollection still, is looking up
with a sort of despondent terror at a cupboard in the nursery, which
stood accidentally open and which was filled to the ceiling with octavo
volumes of Shakespeare. My father was organiser of a Shakespeare
reading circle. I did not know until long afterwards that it
was the Shakespeare cupboard, but I, apparently, had then a strong
instinct against drawing-room activities. It is only recently that I
have overcome my education and gone back to this early intuitional
spontaneousness.
When distinguished visitors came to the house, like Sir Sidney Lee
with his Shakespearean scholarship, and Lord Ashbourne, not yet a
peer, with his loud talk of ‘Ireland for the Irish,’ and his saffron
kilt, and Mr. Eustace Miles with his samples of edible nuts, I knew
all about them in my way. I had summed up correctly and finally my
Uncle Charles of the _Spectator_ and _Punch_, and my Aunt Grace, who
came in a carriage and pair, and whose arrival always caused a flutter
because she was Lady Pontifex, and all the rest of my relations. And
I had no illusions about Algernon Charles Swinburne, who often used
to stop my perambulator when he met it on Nurses’ Walk, at the edge
of Wimbledon Common, and pat me on the head and kiss me; he was an
inveterate pram-stopper and patter and kisser. Nurses’ Walk lay between
‘The Pines,’ Putney (where he lived with Watts-Dunton) and the Rose
and Crown public-house, where he went for his daily pint of beer;
Watts-Dunton allowed him twopence for that and no more. I did not know
that Swinburne was a poet, but I knew that he was no good. Swinburne,
by the way, when a very young man, went to Walter Savage Landor, then a
very old man, and asked for and was given a poet’s blessing; and Landor
when a child had been patted on the head by Dr. Samuel Johnson; and
Johnson when a child had been taken to London to be touched by Queen
Anne for scrofula, the King’s evil; and Queen Anne when a child....
But I mentioned the Shakespeare reading circle. It went on for years,
and when I was sixteen curiosity finally sent me to one of the
meetings. I remember the vivacity with which my mother read the part
of Katherine in the _Taming of the Shrew_ to my father’s Petruchio,
and the compliments on their performance which the other members gave
me. Mr. and Mrs. Maurice Hill were two of the most popular members of
the circle. This meeting took place some years before they became Mr.
Justice Hill and Lady Hill, and some years, too, before I looked into
_The Shrew_. I remember the lemonade glasses, the cucumber sandwiches,
the _petits fours_, the drawing-room knick-knacks, the chrysanthemums
in bowls, and the semi-circle of easy chairs around the fire. The
gentle voice of Mr. Maurice Hill as Hortentio was admonishing my
father: ‘Thou go thy ways, thou hast tamed a cursed shrew.’ I myself
as Lucio was ending the performance with: ‘’Tis a wonder by your leave
she will be tamed so.’ I must go one day to hear him speak his lines as
Judge of the Divorce Courts; his admonishments have become famous.
After earliest recollections I should perhaps give a passport
description of myself and let the items enlarge themselves. Date of
birth.... Place of birth.... I have given those. Profession. In my
passport I am down as ‘university professor.’ That was a convenience
for 1926, when I first took it out. I thought of putting ‘writer,’ but
people who are concerned with passports have complicated reactions to
the word. ‘University professor’ wins a simple reaction—dull respect.
No questions asked. So also with ‘army captain (pensioned list).’
My height is given as six feet two inches, my eyes as grey, and my hair
as black. To ‘black’ should be added ‘thick and curly.’ I am described
as having no special peculiarity. This is untrue. For a start, there
is my big, once aquiline, now crooked nose. I broke it at Charterhouse
playing Rugger with Soccer players. (I broke another player’s nose
myself in the same game.) That unsteadied it, and boxing sent it askew.
Finally, it was operated on. It is very crooked. It was once useful
as a vertical line of demarcation between the left and right sides of
my face, which are naturally unassorted—my eyes, eyebrows, and ears
being all set noticeably crooked and my cheek-bones, which are rather
high, being on different levels. My mouth is what is known as ‘full’
and my smile is crooked; when I was thirteen I broke two front teeth
and became sensitive about showing them. My hands and feet are large. I
weigh about twelve-stone four. My best comic turn is a double-jointed
pelvis; I can sit on a table and rap like the Fox sisters with it.
One shoulder is distinctly lower than the other, but that is because
of a lung wound in the war. I do not carry a watch because I always
magnetize the main-spring; during the war, when there was an army order
that officers should carry watches and synchronize them daily, I had to
buy two new ones every month. Medically, I am a thoroughly ‘good life.’
My passport gives my nationality as ‘British subject.’ Here I might
parody Marcus Aurelius, who begins his Golden Book with the various
ancestors and relations to whom he owes the virtues of a worthy
Roman Emperor. Something of the sort about myself, and why I am not
a Roman Emperor or even, except on occasions, an English gentleman.
My mother’s father’s family, the von Ranke’s, was a family of Saxon
country pastors, not anciently noble. Leopold von Ranke, the first
modern historian, my great-uncle, brought the ‘von’ into the family.
To him I owe my historical method. It was he who wrote, to the scandal
of his contemporaries: ‘I am a historian before I am a Christian; my
object is simply to find out how the things actually occurred,’
and of Michelet the French historian: ‘He wrote history in a style
in which the truth could not be told.’ Thomas Carlyle decried him as
‘Dry-as-Dust’; to his credit. To Heinrich von Ranke, my grandfather,
I owe my clumsy largeness, my endurance, energy, seriousness, and my
thick hair. He was rebellious and even atheistic in his youth. As
a medical student at a Prussian university he was involved in the
political disturbances of 1848. He and a number of student friends
demonstrated in favour of Karl Marx at the time of his trial for high
treason. Like Marx, they had to leave the country. He came to London
and finished his medical course there. In 1859 he went to the Crimea
with the British forces as a regimental surgeon. All I know about this
is a chance remark that he made to me as a child: ‘It is not always
the big bodies that are the strongest. When I was at Sevastopol in the
trenches I saw the great British Guards crack up and die by the score,
while the little sappers took no harm.’ Still, his big body carried him
very well.
He married, in London, my grandmother, a Schleswig-Dane. She was
the daughter of Tiarks, the Greenwich astronomer. She was tiny,
saintly, frightened. Before her father took to astronomy the Tiarks
family had, it seems, followed the Danish country system, not at
all a bad one, of alternate professions for father and son. The odd
generations were tinsmiths and the even generations were pastors. My
gentler characteristics trace back to my grandmother. She had ten
children; the eldest of these was my mother, who was born in London.
My grandfather’s atheism and radicalism sobered down. He eventually
returned to Germany, where he became a well-known children’s doctor at
Munich. He was about the first doctor in Europe to insist on clean milk
for his child patients. When he found that he could not get clean
milk to the hospitals by ordinary means he started a model dairy-farm
himself. His agnosticism grieved my grandmother; she never ceased to
pray for him, but concentrated more particularly on saving the next
generation. She was a Lutheran. My grandfather did not die entirely
unregenerate; his last words were: ‘The God of my fathers, to Him at
least I hold.’ I do not know exactly what he meant by that, but it
was a statement consistent with his angry patriarchal moods, with his
acceptance of a prominent place in Bavarian society as Herr Geheimrat
Ritter von Ranke, and with his loyalty to the Kaiser, with whom once
or twice he went deer-shooting. It meant, practically, that he was
a good Liberal in religion as in politics, and that my grandmother
need not have worried. I prefer my German relations to my Irish
relations; they have high principles, are easy, generous, and serious.
The men have fought duels not for cheap personal honour, but in the
public interest—called out, for example, because they have protested
publicly against the scandalous behaviour of some superior officer
or official. One of them who was in the German consular service lost
seniority, just before the war, I was told, because he refused to use
the consulate as a clearing-place for secret-service reports. They are
not heavy drinkers either. My grandfather, as a student at the regular
university ‘drunks,’ was in the habit of pouring his beer down into his
eighteen-fortyish riding-boots. His children were brought up to speak
English in their home, and always looked to England as the home of
culture and progress. The women were noble and patient, and kept their
eyes on the ground when they went out walking.
At the age of eighteen my mother was sent to England as companion to
a lonely old woman who had befriended my grandmother when she was
an orphan. For seventeen years she waited hand and foot on this old
lady, who for the last few years was perfectly senile. When she finally
died, my mother determined to go to India, after a short training as a
medical missionary. This ambition was baulked by her meeting my father,
a widower with five children; it was plain to her that she could do as
good work on the home-mission field.
About the other side of my family. The Graves’ have a pedigree that
dates back to the Conquest, but is good as far as the reign of Henry
VII. Colonel Graves, the regicide, who was Ireton’s chief of horse, is
claimed as the founder of the Irish branch of the family. Limerick was
its centre. There were occasional soldiers and doctors in it, but they
were collaterals; in the direct male line was a sequence of rectors,
deans, and bishops. The Limerick Graves’ have no ‘hands’ or mechanical
sense; instead they have a wide reputation as conversationalists. In
those of my relatives who have the family characteristics most strongly
marked, unnecessary talk is a nervous disorder. Not bad talk as talk
goes; usually informative, often witty, but it goes on and on and
on and on and on. The von Ranke’s have, I think, little mechanical
aptitude either. It is most inconvenient to have been born into the
age of the internal-combustion engine and the electric dynamo and to
have no sympathy with them; a push bicycle, a primus stove, and an army
rifle mark the bounds of my mechanical capacity.
My grandfather, on this side, was Protestant Bishop of Limerick. He had
eight, or was it ten, children. He was a little man and a remarkable
mathematician; he first formulated some theory or other of spherical
conics. He was also an antiquary, and discovered the key to ancient
Irish Ogham script. He was hard and, by reputation, far from
generous. A gentleman and a scholar, and respected throughout the
countryside on that account. He and the Catholic Bishop were on the
very best terms. They cracked Latin jokes at each other, discussed fine
points of scholarship, and were unclerical enough not to take their
religious differences too seriously.
When I was in Limerick as a soldier of the garrison some twenty-five
years after my grandfather’s death, I heard a lot about Bishop Graves
from the townsfolk. The Catholic Bishop had once joked him about the
size of his family, and my grandfather had retorted warmly with the
text about the blessedness of the man who has his quiver full of
arrows, to which the Catholic answered briefly and severely: ‘The
ancient Jewish quiver only held six.’ My grandfather’s wake, they said,
was the longest ever seen in the town of Limerick; it stretched from
the cathedral right down O’Connell Street and over Sarsfield Bridge,
and I do not know how many miles Irish beyond. He blessed me when I was
a child, but I do not remember that.
Of my father’s mother, who was a Scotswoman, a Cheyne from Aberdeen, I
have been able to get no information at all beyond the fact that she
was ‘a very beautiful woman.’ I can only conclude that most of what she
said or did passed unnoticed in the rivalry of family conversations.
The Cheyne pedigree was better than the Graves’; it was flawless right
back to the medieval Scottish kings, to the two Balliols, the first
and second Davids, and the Bruce. In later times the Cheynes had been
doctors and physicians. But my father is engaged at the same time as
myself on his autobiography, and no doubt he will write at length about
all this.
My father, then, met my mother some time in the early ’nineties. He
had previously been married to one of the Irish Coopers, of Cooper’s
Hill, near Limerick. The Coopers were an even more Irish family than
the Graves’. The story is that when Cromwell came to Ireland and
ravaged the country, Moira O’Brien, the last surviving member of the
great clan O’Brien, who were the paramount chiefs of the country round
Limerick, came to him one day and said: ‘General, you have killed my
father and my uncles, my husband and my brothers. I am left as the sole
heiress of these lands. Do you intend to confiscate them?’ Cromwell
is said to have been struck by her magnificent presence and to have
answered that that certainly had been his intention. But that she could
keep her lands, or a part of them, on condition that she married one
of his officers. And so the officers of the regiment which had taken a
leading part in hunting down the O’Briens were invited to take a pack
of cards and cut for the privilege of marrying Moira and succeeding to
the estate. The winner was one Ensign Cooper. Moira, a few weeks after
her marriage, found herself pregnant. Convinced that it was a male
heir, as indeed it proved, she kicked her husband to death. It is said
that she kicked him in the pit of the stomach after making him drunk.
The Coopers have always been a haunted family and _Hibernicis ipsis
Hibernicores_. Jane Cooper, whom my father married, died of consumption.
The Graves family was thin-nosed and inclined to petulance, but never
depraved, cruel, or hysterical. A persistent literary tradition; of
Richard, a minor poet and a friend of Shenstone; and John Thomas,
who was a mathematician and jurist and contributed to Sir William
Hamilton’s discovery of quaternions; and Richard, a divine and regius
professor of Greek; and James, an archaeologist; and Robert, who
invented the disease called after him and was a friend of Turner’s;
and Robert, who was a classicist and theologian and a friend of
Wordsworth’s; and Richard, another divine; and Robert, another divine;
and other Robert’s, James’s, Thomas’s and Richard’s, and Clarissa, one
of the toasts of Ireland, who married Leopold von Ranke (at Windermere
Church) and linked the Graves and von Ranke families a couple of
generations before my father and mother married. See the British Museum
catalogue for an eighteenth and nineteenth-century record of Graves’
literary history.
It was through this Clarissa-Leopold relationship that my father met my
mother. My mother told him at once that she liked _Father O’Flynn_, for
writing which my father will be chiefly remembered. He put the words
to a traditional jig tune, _The Top of Cork Road_, which he remembered
from his boyhood. Sir Charles Stanford supplied a few chords for the
setting. My father sold the complete rights for a guinea. The publisher
made thousands. Sir Charles Stanford, who drew a royalty as the
composer, also made a very large sum. Recently my father has made a few
pounds from gramophone rights. He has never been bitter about all this,
but he has more than once impressed on me almost religiously never to
sell for a sum down the complete rights of any work of mine whatsoever.
I am glad in a way that my father was a poet. This at least saved me
from any false reverence of poets, and his work was never an oppression
to me. I am even very pleased when I meet people who know his work and
not mine. Some of his songs I sing without prejudice; when washing up
after meals or shelling peas or on similar occasions. He never once
tried to teach me how to write, or showed any understanding of my
serious work; he was always more ready to ask advice about his own
work than to offer it for mine. He never tried to stop me writing and
was glad of my first successes. His light-hearted early work is the
best. His _Invention of Wine_, for instance, which begins:
Ere Bacchus could talk
Or dacently walk,
Down Olympus he jumped
From the arms of his nurse,
And though ten years in all
Were consumed by the fall
He might have fallen further
And fared a dale worse.
After he married my mother and became a convinced teetotaller he lost
something of this easy playfulness.
He broke the ecclesiastical sequence. His great-grandfather had been a
dean, his grandfather a rector, his father a bishop, but he himself was
never more than a lay-reader. And he broke the geographical connection
with Ireland, for which I cannot be too grateful to him. I am much
harder on my relations and much more careful of associating with them
than I am with strangers. But I can in certain respects admire my
father and mother. My father for his simplicity and persistence and my
mother for her seriousness and strength. Both for their generosity.
They never bullied me or in any way exceeded their ordinary parental
rights, and were grieved rather than angered by my default from formal
religion. In physique and general characteristics my mother’s side is
stronger in me on the whole. But I am subject to many habits of speech
and movement characteristic of the Graves’, most of them eccentric.
Such as finding it difficult to walk straight down a street,
getting tired of sentences when half-way through and leaving them in
the air, walking with the hands folded in a particular way behind the
back, and being subject to sudden and most disconcerting spells of
complete amnesia. These fits, so far as I can discover, serve no useful
purpose, and the worst about them is that they tend to produce in the
subject the same sort of dishonesty that deaf people have when they
miss the thread of conversation. They dare not be left behind and rely
on their intuition and bluff to get them through. This disability is
most marked in very cold weather. I do not now talk too much except
when I have been drinking or when I meet someone who was with me in
France. The Graves’ have good minds for purposes like examinations,
writing graceful Latin verse, filling in forms, and solving puzzles
(when we children were invited to parties where guessing games and
brain-tests were played we never failed to win). They have a good eye
for ball games, and a graceful style. I inherited the eye, but not
the style; my mother’s family are entirely without style and I went
that way. I have an ugly but fairly secure seat on a horse. There
is a coldness in the Graves’ which is anti-sentimental to the point
of insolence, a necessary check to the goodness of heart from which
my mother’s family suffers. The Graves’, it is fair to generalize,
though loyal to the British governing class to which they belong, and
so to the Constitution, are individualists; the von Ranke’s regard
their membership of the corresponding class in Germany as a sacred
trust enabling them to do the more responsible work in the service of
humanity. Recently, when a von Ranke entered a film studio, the family
felt itself disgraced.
The most useful and at the same time most dangerous gift that I owe
to my father’s side of the family—probably more to the Cheynes than the
Graves’—is that I am always able, when it is a question of dealing with
officials or getting privileges from public institutions which grudge
them, to masquerade as a gentleman. Whatever I happen to be wearing;
and because the clothes I wear are not what gentlemen usually wear,
and yet I do not seem to be an artist or effeminate, and my accent and
gestures are irreproachable, I have even been ‘placed’ as the heir to
a dukedom, whose perfect confidence in his rank would explain all such
eccentricity. In this way I have been told that I seem, paradoxically,
to be more of a gentleman even than one of my elder brothers who
spent a number of years as a consular official in the Near East. His
wardrobe is almost too carefully a gentleman’s, and he does not allow
himself the pseudo-ducal privilege of having disreputable acquaintances
and saying on all occasions what he really means. About this being a
gentleman business: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my
gentleman’s education that I feel entitled occasionally to get some
sort of return.