DURING the first year of our life in Devonshire, the ninth year
of my age, my Father's existence, and therefore mine, was almost
entirely divided between attending to the little community of
'Saints' in the village and collecting, examining and describing
marine creatures from the seashore. In the course of these twelve
months, we had scarcely any social distractions of any kind, and
I never once crossed the bounds of the parish. After the worst of
the winter was over, my Father recovered much of his spirits and
his power of work, and the earliest sunshine soothed and
refreshed us both. I was still almost always with him, but we had
now some curious companions.
The village, at the southern end of which our villa stood, was
not pretty. It had no rural picturesqueness of any kind. The only
pleasant feature of it, the handsome and ancient parish church
with its umbrageous churchyard, was then almost entirely
concealed by a congress of mean shops, which were ultimately,
before the close of my childhood, removed. The village consisted
of two parallel lines of contiguous houses, all white-washed and
most of them fronted by a trifling shop-window; for half a mile
this street ascended to the church, and then descended for
another half-mile, ending suddenly in fields, the hedges of which
displayed, at intervals, the inevitable pollard elm-tree.
The walk through the village, which we seemed make incessantly,
was very wearisome to me. I dreaded the rudeness of the children,
and there was nothing in the shops to amuse me. Walking on the
inch or two of broken pavement in front of the houses was
disagreeable and tiresome, and the odor which breathed on close
days from the open doors and windows made me feel faint. But this
walk was obligatory, since the 'Public Room', as our little
chapel was called, lay at the farther extremity of the dreary
street.
We attended this place of worship immediately on our arrival, and
my Father, uninvited but unresisted, immediately assumed the
administration of it. It was a square, empty room, built, for I
know not what purpose, over a stable. Ammoniac odours used to
rise through the floor as we sat there at our long devotions.
Before our coming, a little flock of persons met in the Room, a
community of the indefinite sort just then becoming frequent in
the West of England, pious rustics connected with no other
recognized body of Christians, and depending directly on the
independent study of the Bible. They were largely women, but
there was more than a sprinkling of men, poor, simple and
generally sickly. In later days, under my Father's ministration,
the body increased and positively flourished. It came to include
retired professional men, an admiral, nay, even the brother of a
peer. But in those earliest years the 'brethren' and 'sisters'
were all of them ordinary peasants. They were jobbing gardeners
and journeymen carpenters, masons and tailors, washerwomen and
domestic servants. I wish that I could paint, in colours so vivid
that my readers could perceive what their little society
consisted of, this quaint collection of humble, conscientious,
ignorant and gentle persons. In chronicle or fiction I have never
been fortunate enough to meet with anything which resembled them.
The caricatures of enmity and worldly scorn are as crude, to my
memory, as the unction of religious conventionality is
featureless.
The origin of the meeting had been odd. A few years before we
came, a crew of Cornish fishermen, quite unknown to the
villagers, were driven by stress of weather into the haven under
the cliff. They landed, and, instead of going to a public-house,
they looked about for a room where they could hold a prayer-
meeting. They were devout Wesleyans; they had come from the open
sea, they were far from home, and they had been starved by lack
of their customary religious privileges. As they stood about in
the street before their meeting, they challenged the respectable
girls who came out to stare at them, with the question, 'Do you
love the Lord Jesus, my maid?' Receiving dubious answers, they
pressed the inhabitants to come in and pray with them, which
several did. Ann Burmington, who long afterwards told me about
it, was one of those girls, and she repeated that the fishermen
said, 'What a dreadful thing it will be, at the Last Day, when
the Lord says, "Come, ye blessed", and says it not to you, and
then, "Depart ye cursed", and you maidens have to depart.' They
were finely-built young men, with black beards and shining eyes,
and I do not question that some flash of sex unconsciously
mingled with the curious episode, although their behaviour was in
all respects discreet. It was, perhaps, not wholly a coincidence
that almost all those particular girls remained unmarried to the
end of their lives. After two or three days, the fishermen went
off to sea again. They prayed and sailed away, and the girls, who
had not even asked their names, never heard of them again. But
several of the young women were definitely converted, and they
formed the nucleus of our little gathering.
My Father preached, standing at a desk; or celebrated the
communion in front of a deal table, with a white napkin spread
over it. Sometimes the audience was so small, generally so
unexhilarating, that he was discouraged, but he never flagged in
energy and zeal. Only those who had given evidence of intelligent
acceptance of the theory of simple faith in their atonement
through the Blood of Jesus were admitted to the communion, or, as
it was called, 'the Breaking of Bread'. It was made a very strong
point that no one should 'break bread', unless for good reason
shown--until he or she had been baptized, that is to say,
totally immersed, in solemn conclave, by the ministering brother.
This rite used, in our earliest days, to be performed, with
picturesque simplicity, in the sea on the Oddicombe beach, but to
this there were, even in those quiet years, extreme objections. A
jeering crowd could scarcely be avoided, and women, in
particular, shrank from the ordeal. This used to be a practical
difficulty, and my Father, when communicants confessed that they
had not yet been baptized, would shake his head and say gravely,
'Ah! ah! you shun the Cross of Christ!' But that baptism in the
sea on the open beach _was_ a 'cross', he would not deny, and when
we built our own little chapel, a sort of font, planked over, was
arranged in the room itself.
Among these quiet, taciturn people, there were several whom I
recall with affection. In this remote corner of Devonshire, on
the road nowhither, they had preserved much of the air of that
eighteenth century which the elders among them perfectly
remembered. There was one old man, born before the French
Revolution, whose figure often recurs to me. This was James
Petherbridge, the Nestor of our meeting, extremely tall and
attenuated; he came on Sundays in a full, white smockfrock,
smartly embroidered down the front, and when he settled himself
to listen, he would raise this smock like a skirt, and reveal a
pair of immensely long thin legs, cased in tight leggings, and
ending in shoes with buckles. As the sacred message fell from my
Father's lips the lantern jaws of Mr. Petherbridge slowly fell
apart, while his knees sloped to so immense a distance from one
another that it seemed as though they never could meet again. He
had been pious all his life, and he would tell us, in some modest
pride, that when he was a lad, the farmer's wife who was his
mistress used to say, 'I think our Jem is going to be a Methody,
he do so hanker after godly discoursings.' Mr. Petherbridge was
accustomed to pray orally at our prayer-meetings, in a funny old
voice like wind in a hollow tree, and he seldom failed to express
a hope that 'the Lord would support Miss Lafroy'-- who was the
village schoolmistress, and one of our congregation,--'in her
labour of teaching the young idea how to shoot'. I, not
understanding this literary allusion, long believed the school to
be addicted to some species of pistol-practice.
The key of the Room was kept by Richard Moxhay, the mason, who
was of a generation younger than Mr. Petherbridge, but yet
'getting on in years'. Moxhay, I cannot tell why, was always
dressed in white corduroy, on which any stain of Devonshire
scarlet mud was painfully conspicuous; when he was smartened up,
his appearance suggested that somebody had given him a coating of
that rich Western whitewash which looks like Devonshire cream.
His locks were long and sparse, and as deadly black as his
clothes were white. He was a modest, gentle man, with a wife even
more meek and gracious than himself. They never, to my
recollection, spoke unless they were spoken to, and their
melancholy impassiveness used to vex my Father, who once,
referring to the Moxhays, described them, sententiously but
justly, as being 'laborious, but it would be an exaggeration to
say happy, Christians'. Indeed, my memory pictures almost all the
'saints' of that early time as sad and humble souls, lacking
vitality, yet not complaining of anything definite. A quite
surprising number of them, it is true, male and female, suffered
from different forms of consumption, so that the Room rang in
winter evenings with a discord of hacking coughs. But it seems to
me that, when I was quite young, half the inhabitants of our
rural district were affected with phthisis. No doubt, our
peculiar religious community was more likely to attract the
feeble members of a population, than to tempt the flush and the
fair.
Miss Marks, patient pilgrim that she was, accepted this quaint
society without a murmur, although I do not think it was much to
her taste. But in a very short time it was sweetened to her by
the formation of a devoted and romantic friendship for one of the
'sisters', who was, indeed, if my childish recollection does not
fail me, a very charming person. The consequence of this
enthusiastic alliance was that I was carried into the bosom of
the family to which Miss Marks' new friend belonged, and of these
excellent people I must give what picture I can.
Almost opposite the Room, therefore at the far end of the
village, across one of the rare small gardens (in which this
first winter I discovered with rapture the magenta stars of a new
flower, hepatica)--a shop-window displayed a thin row of plates
and dishes, cups and saucers; above it was painted the name of
Burmington. This china-shop was the property of three orphan
sisters, Ann, Mary Grace, and Bess, the latter lately married to
a carpenter, who was 'elder' at our meeting; the other two,
resolute old maids. Ann, whom I have already mentioned, had been
one of the girls converted by the Cornish fishermen. She was
about ten years older than Bess, and Mary Grace came halfway
between them. Ann was a very worthy woman, but masterful and
passionate, suffering from an ungovernable temper, which at
calmer moments she used to refer to, not without complacency, as
'the sin which doth most easily beset me'. Bess was
insignificant, and vulgarized by domestic cares. But Mary Grace
was a delightful creature. The Burmingtons lived in what was
almost the only old house surviving in the village. It was an
extraordinary construction of two storeys, with vast rooms, and
winding passages, and surprising changes of level. The sisters
were poor, but very industrious, and never in anything like want;
they sold, as I have said, crockery, and they took in washing,
and did a little fine needlework, and sold the produce of a
great, vague garden at the back. In process of time, the elder
sisters took a young woman, whose name was Drusilla Elliott, to
live with them as servant and companion; she was a converted
person, worshipping with a kindred sect, the Bible Christians. I
remember being much interested in hearing how Bess, before her
marriage, became converted. Mary Grace, on account of her infirm
health, slept alone in one room; in another, of vast size, stood
a family fourposter, where Ann slept with Drusilla Elliott, and
another bed in the same room took Bess. The sisters and their
friend had been constantly praying that Bess might 'find peace',
for she was still a stranger to salvation. One night, she
suddenly called out, rather crossly, 'What are you two whispering
about? Do go to sleep,' to which Ann replied: 'We are praying for
you.' 'How do you know,' answered Bess, 'that I don't believe?' And
then she told them that, that very night, when she was sitting in
the shop, she had closed with God's offer of redemption. Late in
the night as it was, Ann and Drusilla could do no less than go in
and waken Mary Grace, whom, however, they found awake, praying,
she too, for the conversion of Bess. They told her the good news,
and all four, kneeling in the darkness, gave thanks aloud to God
for his infinite mercy.
It was Mary Grace Burmington who now became the romantic friend
of Miss Marks, and a sort of second benevolence to me. She must
have been under thirty years of age; she wax very small, and she
was distressingly deformed in the spine, but she had an animated,
almost a sparkling countenance. When we first arrived in the
village, Mary Grace was only just recovering from a gastric fever
which had taken her close to the grave. I remember hearing that
the vicar, a stout and pompous man at whom we always glared
defiance, went, in Mary Grace's supposed extremity, to the
Burmingtons' shop-door, and shouted: 'Peace be to this house,'
intending to offer his ministrations, but that Ann, who was in
one of her tantrums, positively hounded him from the doorstep and
down the garden, in her passionate nonconformity. Mary Grace,
however, recovered, and soon became, not merely Miss Marks'
inseparable friend, but my Father's spiritual factotum. He found
it irksome to visit the 'saints' from house to house, and Mary
Grace Burmington gladly assumed this labour. She proved a most
efficient coadjutor; searched out, cherished and confirmed any of
those, especially the young, who were attracted by my Father's
preaching, and for several years was a great joy and comfort to
us all. Even when her illness so increased that she could no
longer rise from her bed, she was a centre of usefulness and
cheerfulness from that retreat, where she 'received', in a kind
of rustic state, under a patchwork coverlid that was like a
basket of flowers.
My Father, ever reflecting on what could be done to confirm my
spiritual vocation, to pin me down, as it were, beyond any
possibility of escape, bethought him that it would accustom me to
what he called 'pastoral work in the Lord's service', if I
accompanied Mary Grace on her visits from house to house. If it
is remembered that I was only eight and a half when this scheme
was carried into practice, it will surprise no one to hear that
it was not crowned with success. I disliked extremely this
visitation of the poor. I felt shy, I had nothing to say, with
difficulty could I understand their soft Devonian patois, and
most of all--a signal perhaps of my neurotic condition--I dreaded
and loathed the smells of their cottages. One had to run over the
whole gamut of odours, some so faint that they embraced the
nostril with a fairy kiss, others bluntly gross, of the 'knock-
you-down' order; some sweet, with a dreadful sourness; some
bitter, with a smack of rancid hair-oil. There were fine manly
smells of the pigsty and the open drain, and these prided
themselves on being all they seemed to be; but there were also
feminine odours, masquerading as you knew not what, in which
penny whiffs, vials of balm and opoponax, seemed to have become
tainted, vaguely, with the residue of the slop-pail. It was not,
I think, that the villagers were particularly dirty, but those
were days before the invention of sanitary science, and my poor
young nose was morbidly, nay ridiculously sensitive. I often came
home from 'visiting the saints' absolutely incapable of eating
the milk-sop, with brown sugar strewn over it, which was my
evening meal.
There was one exception to my unwillingness to join in the
pastoral labours of Mary Grace. When she announced, on a fine
afternoon, that we were going to Pavor and Barton, I was always
agog to start. These were two hamlets in our parish, and, I
should suppose, the original home of its population. Pavor was,
even then, decayed almost to extinction, but Barton preserved its
desultory street of ancient, detached cottages. Each, however
poor, had a wild garden around it, and, where the inhabitants
possessed some pride in their surroundings, the roses and the
jasmines and that distinguished creeper,--which one sees nowhere
at its best but in Devonshire cottage-gardens,--the stately
cotoneaster, made the whole place a bower. Barton was in vivid
contrast to our own harsh, open, squalid village, with its mean
modern houses, its absence of all vegetation. The ancient
thatched cottages of Barton were shut in by moist hills, and
canopied by ancient trees; they were approached along a deep lane
which was all a wonder and a revelation to me that spring, since,
in the very words of Shelley:
There in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine,
Green cow-bind and the moonlight-coloured may,
And cherry blossoms, and white cups, whose wine
Was the bright dew yet drained not by the day;
And wild roses, and ivy serpentine
With its dark buds and leaves, wandering astray.
Around and beyond Barton there lay fairyland. All was mysterious,
unexplored, rich with infinite possibilities. I should one day
enter it, the sword of make-believe in my hand, the cap of
courage on my head, 'when you are a big boy', said the oracle of
Mary Grace. For the present, we had to content ourselves with
being an unadventurous couple--a little woman, bent half-double,
and a preternaturally sedate small boy--as we walked very
slowly, side by side, conversing on terms of high familiarity, in
which Biblical and colloquial phrases were quaintly jumbled,
through the sticky red mud of the Pavor lanes with Barton as a
bourne before us.
When we came home, my Father would sometimes ask me for
particulars. Where had we been, whom had we found at home, what
testimony had those visited been able to give of the Lord's
goodness to them, what had Mary Grace replied in the way of
exhortation, reproof or condolence? These questions I hated at
the time, but they were very useful to me, since they gave me the
habit of concentrating my attention on what was going on in the
course of our visits, in case I might be called upon to give a
report. My Father was very kind in the matter; he cultivated my
powers of expression, he did not snub me when I failed to be
intelligent. But I overheard Miss Marks and Mary Grace discussing
the whole question under the guise of referring to 'you know
whom, not a hundred miles hence', fancying that I could not
recognize their little ostrich because its head was in a bag of
metaphor. I understood perfectly, and gathered that they both of
them thought this business of my going into undrained cottages
injudicious. Accordingly, I was by degrees taken 'visiting' only
when Mary Grace was going into the country-hamlets, and then I
was usually left outside, to skip among the flowers and stalk the
butterflies.
I must not, however, underestimate the very prominent part taken
all through this spring and summer of 1858 by the collection of
specimens on the seashore. My Father had returned, the chagrin of
his failure in theorizing now being mitigated, to what was his
real work in life, the practical study of animal forms in detail.
He was not a biologist, in the true sense of the term. That
luminous indication which Flaubert gives of what the action of
the scientific mind should be, _affranchissant esprit et pesant
les mondes, sans haine, sans peur, sans pitie, sans amour et sans
Dieu_, was opposed in every segment to the attitude of my Father,
who, nevertheless, was a man of very high scientific attainment.
But, again I repeat, he was not a philosopher; he was incapable,
by temperament and education, of forming broad generalizations
and of escaping in a vast survey from the troublesome pettiness
of detail. He saw everything through a lens, nothing in the
immensity of nature. Certain senses were absent in him; I think
that, with all his justice, he had no conception of the
importance of liberty; with all his intelligence, the boundaries
of the atmosphere in which his mind could think at all were
always close about him; with all his faith in the Word of God, he
had no confidence in the Divine Benevolence; and with all his
passionate piety, he habitually mistook fear for love.
It was down on the shore, tramping along the pebbled terraces of
the beach, clambering over the great blocks of fallen
conglomerate which broke the white curve with rufous promontories
that jutted into the sea, or, finally, bending over those shallow
tidal pools in the limestone rocks which were our proper hunting-
ground,--it was in such circumstances as these that my Father
became most easy, most happy, most human. That hard look across
his brows, which it wearied me to see, the look that came from
sleepless anxiety of conscience, faded away, and left the dark
countenance still always stern indeed, but serene and
unupbraiding. Those pools were our mirrors, in which, reflected
in the dark hyaline and framed by the sleek and shining fronds of
oar-weed there used to appear the shapes of a middle-aged man and
a funny little boy, equally eager, and, I almost find the
presumption to say, equally well prepared fog business.
If anyone goes down to those shores now, if man or boy seeks to
follow in our traces, let him realize at once, before he takes
the trouble to roll up his sleeves, that his zeal will end in
labour lost. There is nothing, now, where in our days there was
so much. Then the rocks between tide and tide were submarine
gardens of a beauty that seemed often to be fabulous, and was
positively delusive, since, if we delicately lifted the
weedcurtains of a windless pool, though we might for a moment see
its sides and floor paven with living blossoms, ivory-white,
rosy-red, grange and amethyst, yet all that panoply would melt
away, furled into the hollow rock, if we so much as dropped a
pebble in to disturb the magic dream.
Half a century ago, in many parts of the coast of Devonshire and
Cornwall, where the limestone at the water's edge is wrought into
crevices and hollows, the tideline was, like Keats' Grecian vase,
'a still unravished bride of quietness'. These cups and basins
were always full, whether the tide was high or low, and the only
way in which they were affected was that twice in the twenty-four
hours they were replenished by cold streams from the great sea,
and then twice were left brimming to be vivified by the temperate
movement of the upper air. They were living flower-beds, so
exquisite in their perfection, that my Father, in spite of his
scientific requirements, used not seldom to pause before he began
to rifle them, ejaculating that it was indeed a pity to disturb
such congregated beauty. The antiquity of these rock-pools, and
the infinite succession of the soft and radiant forms, sea-
anemones, seaweeds, shells, fishes, which had inhabited them,
undisturbed since the creation of the world, used to occupy my
Father's fancy. We burst in, he used to say, where no one had
ever thought of intruding before; and if the Garden of Eden had
been situate in Devonshire, Adam and Eve, stepping lightly down
to bathe in the rainbow-coloured spray, would have seen the
identical sights that we now saw,--the great prawns gliding like
transparent launches, anthea waving in the twilight its thick
white waxen tentacles, and the fronds of the duke faintly
streaming on the water like huge red banners in some reverted
atmosphere.
All this is long over and done with. The ring of living beauty
drawn about our shores was a very thin and fragile one. It had
existed all those centuries solely in consequence of the
indifference, the blissful ignorance of man. These rockbasins,
fringed by corallines, filled with still water almost as pellucid
as the upper air itself, thronged with beautiful sensitive forms
of life, they exist no longer, they are all profaned, and
emptied, and vulgarized. An army of 'collectors' has passed over
them, and ravaged every corner of them. The fairy paradise has
been violated, the exquisite product of centuries of natural
selection has been crushed under the rough paw of well-meaning,
idle-minded curiosity. That my Father, himself so reverent, so
conservative, had by the popularity of his books acquired the
direct responsibility for a calamity that he had never
anticipated became clear enough to himself before many years had
passed, and cost him great chagrin. No one will see again on the
shore of England what I saw in my early childhood, the submarine
vision of dark rocks, speckled and starred with an infinite
variety of colour, and streamed over by silken flags of royal
crimson and purple.
In reviving these impressions, I am unable to give any exact
chronological sequence to them. These particular adventures began
early in 1858, they reached their greatest intensity in the
summer of 1859, and they did not altogether cease, so far as my
Father was concerned, until nearly twenty years later. But it was
while he was composing what, as I am told by scientific men of
today, continues to be his most valuable contribution to
knowledge, his _History of the British Sea-Anemones and Corals_,
that we worked together on the shore for a definite purpose, and
the last instalment of that still-classic volume was ready for
press by the close of 1859.
The way in which my Father worked, in his most desperate
escapades, was to wade breast-high into one of the huge pools,
and examine the worm-eaten surface of the rock above and below
the brim. In such remote places--spots where I could never
venture being left, a slightly timorous Andromeda, chained to a
safer level of the cliff--in these extreme basins, there used
often to lurk a marvellous profusion of animal and vegetable
forms. My Father would search for the roughest and most corroded
points of rock, those offering the best refuge for a variety of
creatures, and would then chisel off fragments as low down in the
water as he could. These pieces of rock were instantly plunged in
the saltwater of jars which we had brought with us for the
purpose. When as much had been collected as we could carry away--
my Father always dragged about an immense square basket, the
creak of whose handles I can still fancy that I hear--we turned
to trudge up the long climb home. Then all our prizes were spread
out, face upward, in shallow pans of clean sea-water.
In a few hours, when all dirt had subsided, and what living
creatures we had brought seemed to have recovered their
composure, my work began. My eyes were extremely keen and
powerful, though they were vexatiously near-sighted. Of no use in
examining objects at any distance, in investigating a minute
surface, my vision was trained to be invaluable. The shallow pan,
with our spoils, would rest on a table near the window, and I,
kneeling on a chair opposite the light, would lean over the
surface until everything was within an inch or two of my eyes.
Often I bent, in my zeal, so far forward that the water touched
the tip of my nose and gave me a little icy shock. In this
attitude, an idle spectator might have formed the impression that
I was trying to wash my head and could not quite summon up
resolution enough to plunge. In this odd pose I would remain for
a long time, holding my breath and examining with extreme care
every atom of rock, every swirl of detritus. This was a task
which my Father could only perform by the help of a lens, with
which, of course, he took care to supplement my examination. But
that my survey was of use, he has himself most handsomely
testified in his _Actinologia Britannica_, where he expresses his
debt to the 'keen and well-practised eye of my little son'. Nor,
if boasting is not to be excluded, is it every eminent biologist,
every proud and masterful F.R.S., who can lay his hand on his
heart and swear that, before reaching the age of ten years, he
had added, not merely a new species, but a new genus to the
British fauna. That however, the author of these pages can do,
who, on 29 June 1859, discovered a tiny atom,--and ran in the
greatest agitation to announce the discovery of that object 'as a
form with which he was unacquainted',--which figures since then
on all lists of sea-anemones as phellia murocincta, or the walled
corklet. Alas! that so fair a swallow should have made no
biological summer in after-life.
These delicious agitations by the edge of the salt-sea wave must
have greatly improved my health, which however was still looked
upon as fragile. I was loaded with coats and comforters, and
strolled out between Miss Marks and Mary Grace Burmington, a
muffled ball of flannel. This alone was enough to give me a look
of delicacy which the 'saints', in their blunt way, made no
scruple of commenting upon to my face. I was greatly impressed by
a conversation held over my bed one evening by the servants. Our
cook, Susan, a person of enormous size, and Kate, the tattling,
tiresome parlour-maid who waited upon us, on the summer evening I
speak of were standing--I cannot tell why--on each side of my
bed. I shut my eyes, and lay quite still, in order to escape
conversing with them, and they spoke to one another. 'Ah, poor
lamb,' Kate said trivially, '_he's_ not long for this world; going
home to Jesus, he is,--in a jiffy, I should say by the look of
'un.' But Susan answered: 'Not so. I dreamed about 'un, and I
know for sure that he is to be spared for missionary service.'
'Missionary service?' repeated Kate, impressed. 'Yes,' Susan went
on, with solemn emphasis, 'he'll bleed for his Lord in heathen
parts, that's what the future have in store for _'im_.' When they
were gone, I beat upon the coverlid with my fists, and I
determined that whatever happened, I would not, not, _not_, go out
to preach the Gospel among horrid, tropical niggers.