And the tempest raved in the midnight sky,
When the fisherman’s father sank to rest
And left O’Nial the last and best
Of a race of kings who once held sway
From far Fingal to dark Lough Neagh.[7]
The morning shone and the fisherman’s bark
Was wafted o’er those waters dark.
And he thought as he sailed of his father’s name
Of the kings of Erin’s ancient fame,
Of days when ‘neath those waters green
The banners of Nial were ever seen,
And where the Knights of the Blood-Red-Tree
Had held of old their revelry;
And where O’Nial’s race alone
Had sat upon the regal throne.
While the fisherman thought of the days of old
The sun had left the western sky
And the moon had risen a lamp of gold,
Ere O’Nial deemed that the eve was nigh,
He turned his boat to the mountain side
And it darted away o’er the rippling tide;
Like arrow from an Indian bow
Shot o’er the waves the glancing prow.
The fisherman saw not the point beneath
Which beckoned him on to instant death.
It struck—yet he shrieked not, although his blood
Ran chill at the thought of that fatal flood;
And the voice of O’Nial was silent that day
As he sank ‘neath the waters of dark Lough Neagh;
Like when Adam rose from the dust of earth
And felt the joy of his glorious birth,
And where’er he gazed, and where’er he trod,
He felt the presence and smile of God,—
Like the breath of morning to him who long
Has ceased to hear the warblers’ song,
And who, in the chamber of death hath lain
With a sickening heart and a burning brain;
So rushed the joy through O’Nial’s mind
When the waters dark above him joined,
And he felt that Heaven had made him be
A spirit of light and eternity.
He gazed around, but his dazzled sight
Saw not the spot from whence he fell,
For beside him rose a spire so bright
No mortal tongue could its splendours tell
Nor human eye endure its light.
And he looked and saw that pillars of gold
The crystal column did proudly hold;
And he turned and walked in the light blue sea
Upon a silver balcony,
Which rolled around the spire of light
And laid on the golden pillars bright.
Descending from the pillars high,
He passed through portals of ivory
E’en to the hall of living gold
The palace of the kings of old.
The harp of Erin sounded high
And the crotal joined the melody,
And the voice of happy spirits round
Prolonged and harmonized the sound.
“All hail, O’Nial!”—
and so on, and so on! I wrote a great deal of this sort of thing then
and for a few years afterwards; and of course, like everyone else who
has ever been given to waste paper and ink, I tried my hand on a
tragedy. I had no real power or originality, only a little Fancy
perhaps, and a dangerous facility for flowing versification. After a
time my early ambition to become a Poet died out under the terrible hard
mental strain and very serious study through which I passed in seeking
religious faith. But I have always passionately loved poetry of a
certain kind, specially that of Shelley; and perhaps some of my prose
writings have been the better for my early efforts to cultivate harmony
and for my delight in good similes. This last propensity is even now
very strong in me, and whenever I write _con amore_, comparisons and
metaphors come tumbling out of my head, till my difficulty is to exclude
mixed ones!
My education at this time was of a simple kind. After Miss Kinnear left
us to marry, I had another nursery governess, a good creature properly
entitled “Miss Daly,” but called by my profane brothers, “the Daily
Nuisance.” After her came a real governess, the daughter of a bankrupt
Liverpool merchant who made my life a burden with her strict discipline
and her “I-have-seen-better-days” airs; and who, at last, I detected in
a trick which to me appeared one of unparalleled turpitude! She had
asked me to let her read something which I had written in a copy-book
and I had peremptorily declined to obey her request, and had locked up
my papers in my beloved little writing-desk which my dear brother Tom
had bought for me out of his school-boy’s pocket-money. The keys of this
desk I kept with other things in one of the old-fashioned pockets which
everybody then wore, and which formed a separate article of under
clothing. This pocket my maid naturally placed at night on the chair
beside my little bed, and the curtains of the bed being drawn, Miss W.
no doubt after a time concluded I was asleep and cautiously approached
the chair on tiptoe. As it happened I was wide awake, having at that
time the habit of repeating certain hymns and other religious things to
myself before I went to sleep; and when I perceived through the white
curtain the shadow of my governess close outside, and then heard the
slight jingle made by my keys as she abstracted them from my pocket, I
felt as if I were witness of a crime! Anything so base I had never
dreamed as existing outside story books of wicked children. Drawing the
curtain I could see that Miss W. had gone with her candle into the inner
room (one of the old “powdering closets” attached to all the rooms in
Newbridge) and was busy with the desk which lay on the table therein.
Very shortly I heard the desk close again with an angry click,—and no
wonder! Poor Miss W., who no doubt fancied she was going to detect her
strange pupil in some particular naughtiness, found the MS. in the desk,
to consist of solemn religious “Reflections,” in the style of Mrs.
Trimmer; and of a poetical description (in round hand) of the _Last
Judgment_! My governess replaced the bunch of keys in my pocket and
noiselessly withdrew, but it was long before I could sleep for sheer
horror; and next day I, of course, confided to my mother the terrible
incident. Nothing, I think, was said to Miss W. about it, but she was
very shortly afterwards allowed to return to her beloved Liverpool,
where, for all I know, she may be living still.
My fourth and last governess was a remarkable woman, a Mdlle. Montriou,
a person of considerable force of character, and in many respects an
admirable teacher. With her I read a good deal of solid history,
beginning with Rollin and going on to Plutarch and Gibbon; also some
modern historians. She further taught me systematically a scheme of
chronology and royal successions, till I had an amount of knowledge of
such things which I afterwards found was not shared by any of my
schoolfellows. She had the excellent sense also to allow me to use a
considerable part of my lesson hours with a map book before me, asking
her endless questions on all things connected with the various
countries; and as she was extremely well and widely informed, this was
almost the best part of my instruction. I became really interested in
these studies, and also in the great poets, French and English, to whom
she introduced me. Of course my governess taught me music, including
what was then called _Thorough Bass_, and now _Harmony_; but very little
of the practical part of performance could I learn then or at any time.
Independently of her, I read every book on Astronomy which I could lay
hold of, and I well remember the excitement wherewith I waited for years
for the appearance of the Comet of 1835, which one of these books had
foretold. At last a report reached me that the village tailor had seen
the comet the previous night. Of course I scanned the sky with renewed
ardour, and thought I had discovered the desired object in a
misty-looking star of which my planisphere gave no notice. My father
however pooh-poohed this bold hypothesis, and I was fain to wait till
the next night. Then, as soon as it was dark, I ran up to a window
whence I could command the constellation wherein the comet was bound to
show itself. A small hazy star—and a _long train of light from
it_—greeted my enchanted eyes! My limbs could hardly bear me as I tore
downstairs into the drawing-room, nor my voice publish the triumphant
intelligence, “It _is_ the comet!” “It _has_ a tail!” Everybody (in far
too leisurely a way as I considered) went up and saw it, and confessed
that the comet it certainly must be, with that appendage of the tail!
Few events in my long life have caused me such delightful excitement.
This was in 1835.
[Illustration:
_Newbridge, Co. Dublin._
]
CHAPTER
III.
_SCHOOL AND AFTER._
When my father, in 1836, had decided, by my governess’s advice, to send
me to school, my dear mother, though already old and feeble, made the
journey, long as it was in those days, from Ireland to Brighton to see
for herself where I was to be placed, and to invoke the kindness of my
schoolmistresses for me. We sailed to Bristol—a 30 hours’ passage
usually, but sometimes longer,—and then travelled by postchaises to
Brighton, taking, I think, three days on the road and visiting
Stonehenge by the way, to my mother’s great delight. My eldest brother,
then at Oxford, attended her and acted courier. When we came in sight of
Brighton the lamps were lighted along the long perspective of the shore.
Gas was still sufficiently a novelty to cause this sight to be immensely
impressive to us all.
Next day my mother took me to my future tyrants, and fondly bargained
(as she was paying enormously) that I should have sundry indulgences,
and principally a bedroom to myself. A room was shown to her with only
one small bed in it, and this she was told would be mine. When I went to
it next night, heart broken after her departure, I found that another
bed had been put up, and a schoolfellow was already asleep in it. I
flung myself down on my knees by my own and cried my heart out, and was
accordingly reprimanded next morning before the whole school for having
been seen to cry at my prayers.[8]
The education of women was probably at its lowest ebb about
half-a-century ago. It was at that period more pretentious than it had
ever been before, and infinitely more costly than it is now; and it was
likewise more shallow and senseless than can easily be believed. To
inspire young women with due gratitude for their present privileges, won
for them by my contemporaries, I can think of nothing better than to
acquaint them with some of the features of school life in England in the
days of their mothers. I say advisedly the days of their mothers, for in
those of their grandmothers, things were by no means equally bad. There
was much less pretence and more genuine instruction, so far as it
extended.
For a moment let us, however, go back to these earlier grandmothers’
schools, say those of the year 1790 or thereabouts. From the reports of
my own mother, and of a friend whose mother was educated in the same
place, I can accurately describe a school which flourished at that date
in the fashionable region of Queen Square, Bloomsbury. The mistress was
a certain Mrs. Devis, who must have been a woman of ability for she
published a very good little English Grammar for the express use of her
pupils; also a Geography, and a capital book of maps, which possessed
the inestimable advantage of recording only those towns, cities, rivers,
and mountains which were mentioned in the Geography, and not confusing
the mind (as maps are too apt to do) with extraneous and superfluous
towns and hills. I speak with personal gratitude of those venerable
books, for out of them chiefly I obtained such inklings of Geography as
have sufficed generally for my wants through life; the only disadvantage
they entailed being a firm impression, still rooted in my mind, that
there is a “Kingdom of Poland” somewhere about the middle of Europe.
Beside Grammar and Geography and a very fair share of history (“Ancient”
derived from Rollin, and “Sacred” from Mrs. Trimmer), the young ladies
at Mrs. Devis’ school learned to speak and read French with a very good
accent, and to play the harpsichord with taste, if not with a very
learned appreciation of “severe” music. The “Battle of Prague” and
Hook’s Sonatas were, I believe, their culminating achievements. But it
was not considered in those times that packing the brains of girls with
facts, or even teaching their fingers to run over the keys of
instruments, or to handle pen and pencil, was the Alpha and Omega of
education. William of Wykeham’s motto, “Manners makyth Manne,” was
understood to hold good emphatically concerning the making of Woman. The
abrupt speaking, courtesy-neglecting, slouching, slangy young damsel who
may now perhaps carry off the glories of a University degree, would have
seemed to Mrs. Devis still needing to be taught the very rudiments of
feminine knowledge. “Decorum” (delightful word! the very sound of which
brings back the smell of Maréchale powder) was the imperative law of a
lady’s inner life as well as of her outward habits; and in Queen Square
nothing that was not decorous was for a moment admitted. Every movement
of the body in entering and quitting a room, in taking a seat and rising
from it, was duly criticised. There was kept, in the back premises, a
carriage taken off the wheels, and propped up _en permanence_, for the
purpose of enabling the young ladies to practise ascending and
descending with calmness and grace, and without any unnecessary display
of their ankles. Every girl was dressed in the full fashion of the day.
My mother, like all her companions, wore hair-powder and rouge on her
cheeks when she entered the school a blooming girl of fifteen; that
excellent rouge at five guineas a pot, which (as she explained to me in
later years) did not spoil the complexion like ordinary compounds, and
which I can witness really left a beautiful, clear skin when disused
thirty years afterwards.
Beyond these matters of fashion, however,—so droll now to
remember,—there must have been at Mrs. Devis’ seminary a great deal of
careful training in what may be called the great Art of Society; the art
of properly paying and receiving visits, of saluting acquaintances in
the street and drawing-room; and of writing letters of compliment. When
I recall the type of perfect womanly gentleness and high breeding which
then and there was formed, it seems to me as if, in comparison, modern
manners are all rough and brusque. We have graceful women in abundance
still, but the peculiar old-fashioned suavity, the tact which made
everybody in a company happy and at ease,—most of all the humblest
individual present,—and which at the same time effectually prevented the
most audacious from transgressing _les bienséances_ by a hair; of that
suavity and tact we seem to have lost the tradition.
The great Bloomsbury school, however, passed away at length, good Mrs.
Devis having departed to the land where I trust the Rivers of Paradise
formed part of her new study of Geography. Nearly half-a-century later,
when it came to my turn to receive education, it was not in London but
in Brighton that the ladies’ schools most in estimation were to be
found. There were even then (about 1836) not less than a hundred such
establishments in the town, but that at No. 32, Brunswick Terrace, of
which Miss Runciman and Miss Roberts were mistresses, and which had been
founded some time before by a celebrated Miss Poggi, was supposed to be
_nec pluribus impar_. It was, at all events, the most outrageously
expensive, the nominal tariff of £120 or £130 per annum representing
scarcely a fourth of the charges for “extras” which actually appeared in
the bills of many of the pupils. My own, I know, amounted to £1,000 for
two years’ schooling.
I shall write of this school quite frankly, since the two poor ladies,
well-meaning but very unwise, to whom it belonged have been dead for
nearly thirty years, and it can hurt nobody to record my conviction that
a better system than theirs could scarcely have been devised had it been
designed to attain the maximum of cost and labour and the minimum of
solid results. It was the typical Higher Education of the period,
carried out to the extreme of expenditure and high pressure.
Profane persons were apt to describe our school as a Convent, and to
refer to the back door of our garden, whence we issued on our dismal
diurnal walks, as the “postern.” If we in any degree resembled nuns,
however, it was assuredly not those of either a Contemplative or Silent
Order. The din of our large double schoolrooms was something frightful.
Sitting in either of them, four pianos might be heard going at once in
rooms above and around us, while at numerous tables scattered about the
rooms there were girls reading aloud to the governesses and reciting
lessons in English, French, German, and Italian. This hideous clatter
continued the entire day till we went to bed at night, there being no
time whatever allowed for recreation, unless the dreary hour of walking
with our teachers (when we recited our verbs), could so be described by
a fantastic imagination. In the midst of the uproar we were obliged to
write our exercises, to compose our themes, and to commit to memory
whole pages of prose. On Saturday afternoons, instead of play, there was
a terrible ordeal generally known as the “Judgment Day.” The two
schoolmistresses sat side by side, solemn and stern, at the head of the
long table. Behind them sat all the governesses as Assessors. On the
table were the books wherein our evil deeds of the week were recorded;
and round the room against the wall, seated on stools of penitential
discomfort, we sat, five-and-twenty “damosels,” anything but “Blessed,”
expecting our sentences according to our ill-deserts. It must be
explained that the fiendish ingenuity of some teacher had invented for
our torment a system of imaginary “cards,” which we were supposed to
“lose” (though we never gained any) whenever we had not finished all our
various lessons and practisings every night before bed-time, or whenever
we had been given the mark for “stooping,” or had been impertinent, or
had been “turned” in our lessons, or had been marked “P” by the music
master, or had been convicted of “disorder” (_e.g._, having our long
shoe-strings untied), or, lastly, had told lies! Any one crime in this
heterogeneous list entailed the same penalty, namely, the sentence, “You
have lost your card, Miss So and so, for such and such a thing;” and
when Saturday came round, if three cards had been lost in the week, the
law wreaked its justice on the unhappy sinner’s head! Her confession
having been wrung from her at the awful judgment-seat above described,
and the books having been consulted, she was solemnly scolded and told
to sit in the corner for the rest of the evening! Anything more
ridiculous than the scene which followed can hardly be conceived. I have
seen (after a week in which a sort of feminine barring-out had taken
place) no less than nine young ladies obliged to sit for hours in the
angles of the three rooms, like naughty babies, with their faces to the
wall; half of them being quite of marriageable age, and all dressed, as
was _de rigueur_ with us every day, in full evening attire of silk or
muslin, with gloves and kid slippers. Naturally, Saturday evenings,
instead of affording some relief to the incessant overstrain of the
week, were looked upon with terror as the worst time of all. Those who
escaped the fell destiny of the corner were allowed, if they chose to
write to their parents, but our letters were perforce committed at night
to the schoolmistress to seal, and were not as may be imagined, exactly
the natural outpouring of our sentiments as regarded those ladies and
their school.
Our household was a large one. It consisted of the two schoolmistresses
and joint proprietors, of the sister of one of them and another English
governess; of a French, an Italian, and a German lady teacher; of a
considerable staff of respectable servants; and finally of twenty-five
or twenty-six pupils, varying in age from nine to nineteen. All the
pupils were daughters of men of some standing, mostly country gentlemen,
members of Parliament, and offshoots of the peerage. There were several
heiresses amongst us, and one girl whom we all liked and recognised as
the beauty of the school, the daughter of Horace Smith, author of
_Rejected Addresses_. On the whole, looking back after the long
interval, it seems to me that the young creatures there assembled were
full of capabilities for widely extended usefulness and influence. Many
were decidedly clever and nearly all were well disposed. There was very
little malice or any other vicious ideas or feelings, and no worldliness
at all amongst us. I make this last remark because the novel of _Rose,
Blanche and Violet_, by the late Mr. G. H. Lewes, is evidently intended
in sundry details to describe this particular school, and yet most
falsely represents the girls as thinking a great deal of each other’s
wealth or comparative poverty. Nothing was further from the fact. One of
our heiresses, I well remember, and another damsel of high degree, the
granddaughter of a duke, were our constant butts for their ignorance and
stupidity, rather than the objects of any preferential flattery. Of
vulgarity of feeling of the kind imagined by Mr. Lewes, I cannot recall
a trace.
But all this fine human material was deplorably wasted. Nobody dreamed
that any one of us could in later life be more or less than an “Ornament
of Society.” That a pupil in that school should ever become an artist,
or authoress, would have been looked upon by both Miss Runciman and Miss
Roberts as a deplorable dereliction. Not that which was good in itself
or useful to the community, or even that which would be delightful to
ourselves, but that which would make us admired in society, was the
_raison d’être_ of each acquirement. Everything was taught us in the
inverse ratio of its true importance. At the bottom of the scale were
Morals and Religion, and at the top were Music and Dancing; miserably
poor music, too, of the Italian school then in vogue, and generally
performed in a showy and tasteless manner on harp or piano. I can recall
an amusing instance in which the order of precedence above described was
naïvely betrayed by one of our schoolmistresses when she was admonishing
one of the girls who had been detected in a lie. “Don’t you know, you
naughty girl,” said Miss R. impressively, before the whole school:
“don’t you know we had _almost_ rather find you have a P——” (the mark of
Pretty Well) “in your music, than tell such falsehoods?”
It mattered nothing whether we had any “music in our souls” or any
voices in our throats, equally we were driven through the dreary course
of practising daily for a couple of hours under a German teacher, and
then receiving lessons twice or three times a week from a music master
(Griesbach by name) and a singing master. Many of us, myself in
particular, in addition to these had a harp master, a Frenchman named
Labarre, who gave us lessons at a guinea apiece, while we could only
play with one hand at a time. Lastly there were a few young ladies who
took instructions in the new instruments, the concertina and the
accordion!
The waste of money involved in all this, the piles of useless music, and
songs never to be sung, for which our parents had to pay, and the loss
of priceless time for ourselves, were truly deplorable; and the result
of course in many cases (as in my own) complete failure. One day I said
to the good little German teacher, who nourished a hopeless attachment
for Schiller’s Marquis Posa, and was altogether a sympathetic person,
“My dear Fraulein, I mean to practise this piece of Beethoven’s till I
conquer it.” “My dear,” responded the honest Fraulein, “you do practice
that piece for seex hours a day, and you do live till you are seexty, at
the end you will _not_ play it!” Yet so hopeless a pupil was compelled
to learn for years, not only the piano, but the harp and singing!