Danube to Vienna and thence by the railway to Adelsberg and Trieste, but
a cold, stormy March morning rendered that excursion far less tempting
than a return to the sunny waters of Greece; and, as I had nobody to
consult, I simply embarked on a different steamer from the one I had
designed to take. At Syra (I think) I changed to the most luxurious and
delightful vessel on which I have ever sailed—the Austrian Lloyd’s
_Neptune_, Captain Braun. It was splendidly equipped, even to a _camera
obscura_ on deck; and every arrangement for luxurious baths and good
food was perfect, and the old Captain’s attention and kindness to
everyone extreme. I have still the picture of the _Neptune_, which he
drew in my little sketch book for me. There were several very pleasant
passengers on board, among others the Marquis of Headfort (nephew of our
old neighbour at Newbridge, Mr. Taylor of Ardgillan) and Lady Headfort,
who had gone through awful experiences in India, when married to her
first husband, Sir William Macnaghten. It was said that when Sir William
was cut to pieces, she offered large rewards for the poor relics and
received them all, _except his head_. Months afterwards when she had
returned to Calcutta and was expecting some ordinary box of clothes, or
the like, she opened a parcel hastily, and was suddenly confronted with
a frightful spectacle of her husband’s half-preserved head!
Whether this story be true I cannot say, but Lady Headfort made herself
a most agreeable fellow passenger, and we sat up every night till the
small hours telling ghost stories. At Corfu I paid a visit to my
father’s cousin, Lady Emily Kozzaris (_née_ Trench) whom I had known at
Newbridge and who welcomed me as a bit of Ireland, fallen on her
“Isle under Ionian skies
Beautiful as a wreck of paradise.”
I seemed to be _en pays de connaissance_ once more. After two days in
Trieste I went up by rail to Adelsberg through the extraordinary
district (geologically speaking) of Carniola, where the whole
superficial area of the ground is perfectly barren but honey-combed with
circular holes of varying depths and size and of the shape of inverted
truncated cones; the bottoms of each being highly fertile and cultivated
like gardens.
The cavern of Adelsberg was to me one of the most fearsome places in the
world. I cannot give any accurate description of it for the sense of awe
which always seizes me in the darkness and foul air of caverns and
tunnels and pyramids, renders me incapable of listening to details of
heights and lengths. I wrote my recollections not long afterwards.
“There were long, long galleries, and chambers, and domes succeeding
one another, as it seemed, for ever. Sometimes narrow and low,
compelling the visitor to bend and climb; sometimes so wide and lofty
that the eye vainly sought to pierce the expanse. And through all the
endless labyrinth appeared vaguely in the gloom the forms taken by the
stalactites, now white as salt, now yellow and stained as if with
age,—representing to the fancy all conceivable objects of earth and
sea, piled up in this cave as if in some vast lumberhouse of creation.
It was Chaos, when yet all things slept in darkness waiting the fiat
of existence. It was the final Ruin when all things shall return to
everlasting night, and man and all his works grow into stone and lie
buried beside the mammoth and the ichthyosaur. Here were temples and
tombs, and vast dim faces, and giant forms lying prone and headless,
and huge lions sleeping in dark dens, and white ghosts with phantom
raiment flickering in the gloom. And through the caverns, amid all the
forms of awe and wonder, rolled a river black as midnight; a deep and
rapid river which broke here and there over the rocks as in mockery of
the sunny waterfalls of the woods, and gleamed for a moment, white and
ghastly, then plunged lower under the black arch into
‘Caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.’
“It is in this deadly river, which never reflects the light of day,
that live those strange fleshy lizards without eyes, and seemingly
without natural skin, hideous reptiles which have dwelt in darkness
from unknown ages, till the organs of sight are effaced.[15]
“Over this dismal Styx the traveller passes on further and further
into the cavern, through seemingly endless corridors and vast
cathedral aisles and halls without number. One of these large spaces
is so enormous that it seemed as if St. Peter’s whole church and dome
could lie beneath it. The men who were with us scaled the walls, threw
coloured lights around and rockets up to the roof and dimly revealed
the stupendous expanse; an underground hall, where Eblis and all his
peers might hold the councils of hell. Further, on yet, through more
corridors, more chambers and aisles and domes, with the couchant lions
and the altar-tombs and the ghosts and the great white faces all
around; and then into a cavern, more lately found than the rest, where
the white and yellow marble took forms of screens and organ pipes and
richest Gothic tracery of windows,—the region where the Genius of the
Cavern had made his royal Oratory. It was all a great, dim, uneasy
dream. Things were, and were not. As in dreams we picture places and
identify them with those of waking life in some strange unreal
identity, while in every particular they vary from the actual place;
and as also in dreams we think we have beheld the same objects over
and over again, while we only dream we see them, and go on wandering
further and further, seeking for some unknown thing, and finding, not
that which we seek, but every other thing in existence, and pass
through all manner of narrow doors and impenetrable screens, and men
speak to us and we cannot hear them, and show us open graves holding
dead corpses whose features we cannot discern, and all the world is
dim and dark and full of doubt and dread—even so is the Cavern of
Adelsberg.”
Returning to Trieste I passed on to Venice, the beauty of which I
_learned_ (rather slowly perhaps), to feel by degrees as I rowed in my
gondola from church to church and from gallery to palace. The Austrians
were then masters of the city, and it was no doubt German music which I
heard for the first time at the church of the Scalzi, very finely
performed. It was not seldom in the usual English style of sacred music;
(I dare say it was not strictly _sacred_ music at all, perhaps quite a
profane opera!) but, in the mood I was in, it seemed to me to have a
great sanctity of its own; to be a _Week-day Song of Heaven_. This was
one of the rare occasions in my life in which music has reached the
deeper springs in me, and it affected me very much. I suppose as the
daffodils did Wordsworth.
Naturally being again in a town and at a good hotel, I resumed better
clothes than I had worn in my rough rides, and they were, of course that
year, deep mourning with much crape on them. I imagine it must have been
this English mourning apparel which provoked among the colour-loving
Venetians a strange display of _Heteropathy_,—that deep-seated animal
instinct of hatred and anger against grief and suffering, the exact
reverse of _sympathy_, which causes brutes and birds to gore and peck
and slay their diseased and dying companions and brutal men to trample
on their weeping, starving wives. I was walking alone rather sadly, bent
down over the shells on the beach of the Lido, comparing them in my mind
to the old venuses and pectens and beautiful pholases which I used to
collect on my father’s long stretch of sandy shore in Ireland,—when
suddenly I found myself assailed with a shower of stones. Looking up, I
saw a little crowd of women and boys jeering at me and pelting me with
whatever they could pick up. Of course they could not really hurt me,
but after an effort or two at remonstrance, I was fain to give up my
walk and return to my gondola and to Venice. Years afterwards, speaking
of this incident to Gibson, he told me he had seen at Venice a much
worse scene, for the victim was a poor helpless dog which had somehow
got into a position from whence it could not escape, and the miserable,
hooting, laughing crowd deliberately _stoned it to death_. The dog
looked from one to another of its persecutors as if appealing for mercy
and saying, “What have I done to deserve this?” But there was no mercy
in those hard hearts.
Ever since I sat on the spot where St. Stephen was stoned, I have felt
that that particular form of death must have been one of the most
_morally_ trying and dreadful to the sufferer, and the most utterly
destructive of the finer instincts in those who inflicted it. If Jews
be, as alleged, more prone to cruelty than other nations, the fact seems
to me almost explained by the “set of the brains” of a race accustomed
to account it a duty to join in stoning an offender to death and
watching pitilessly his agonies when mangled, blinded, deafened and
bleeding he lies crushed on the ground.
From Venice I travelled very pleasantly in a returning vettura which I
was fortunate enough to engage, by Padua and Ferrara over the Apennines
to Florence. One day I walked a long way in front during my vetturino’s
dinner-hour, and made friends with some poor peasants who welcomed me to
their house and to a share of their meal of Polenta and wine. The
Polenta was much inferior to Irish oatmeal stirabout or Scotch porridge;
and the black wine was like the coarsest vinegar. I tried in vain, out
of good manners to drink it. The lives of these poor _contadini_ are
obviously in all ways cruelly hard.
Spending one night in a desolate “ramshackle” inn on the road high up on
the Apennines, I sat up late writing a description of the place (as
“creepy” as I could make it!) to amuse my mother’s dear old servant
“Joney,” who possessed a volume of Washington Irving’s stories wherein
that of the “_Inn at Terracina_” had served constantly to excite
delightful awe in her breast and in my own as a child. I took my letter
next day with me to post in Florence, but alas! found there waiting for
me one from my brother announcing that our dear old servant was dead.
She had never held up her head after I had left Newbridge, and had cease
to drop into her cottage for tea.
At Florence I remained many months (or rather on the hill of
Bellosguardo above the city) and made some of the most precious
friendships of my life; Mrs. Somerville’s first of all, I also had the
privilege to know at that time both Mr. and Mrs. Browning, Adolphus
Trollope, Walter Savage Landor, Isa Blagden, Miss White (now Madame
Villari), and many other very interesting men and women. I shall,
however, write a separate chapter combining this and my subsequent
visits to Italy.
Late in the summer I travelled with a party through Milan over St.
Gothard to Lucerne, and thence to the Pays de Vaud, where I joined a
very pleasant couple,—Rev. W. and Mrs. Biedermann,—in taking the
_Château du Grand Clos_, in the Valley of the Rhone; a curious miniature
French country house, built some years before by the man who called
himself Louis XVII., or Duc de Normandie; and who had collected (as we
found) a considerable library of books, all relating to the French
Revolution.
From Switzerland I travelled back to England viâ the Rhine with my dear
American friends, the Apthorps, who had joined me at Montreux. The
perils and fatigues of my eleven months of solitary wanderings were
over. I was stronger and more active in body than I had ever been, and
so enriched in mind and heart by the things I had seen and the people I
had known, that I could afford to smile at the depression and loneliness
of my departure.
As we approached the Black Forest I had a fancy to quit my kind
companions for a few days; and leaving them to explore Strasburg, and
some other places, I went on to Heidelberg and thence made my way into
the beautiful woods. The following lines were written there, September
23rd, 1858:—
ALONE IN THE SCHWARZWALD.
Lord of the Forest Sanctuary! Thou
By the grey fathers of the world in these
Thine own self-fashioned shrines dimly adored,
“All-Father Odin,” “Mover” of the spheres;
Zeus! Brahm! Ormusd! Lord of Light Divine!
GOD, blessed God! the Good One! Best of names,
By noblest Saxon race found Thee at last,—
O Father! when the slow revolving years
Bring forth the day when men shall see Thy face
Unveiled from superstition’s web of errors old,
Shall they not seek Thee here amid the woods,
Rather than in the pillared aisle, or dome
By loftiest genius reared?
Six months have rolled
Since I stood solitary in the fane
Of desolate Baalbec. The huge walls closed
Round me sublime as when millenniums past
Lost nations worshipped there. I sate beside
The altar stone o’erthrown. For hours I sate
Until the homeward-winging hawk at even
Shrieked when he saw me there, a human form
Where human feet tread once perchance a year,
Then the moon slowly rose above the walls
And then I knelt. It was a glorious fane
All, all my own.
But not that grand Baalbec,
Nor Parthenon, nor Rome’s stupendous pile,
Nor lovelier Milan, nor the Sepulchre
So dark and solemn where the Christ was laid,
Nor even yet that dreadful field of death
At Ghizeh where the eternal Pyramids
Have, from a world of graves, pointed to Heav’n
For fifty ages past,—not all these shrines
Are holy to my soul as are the woods.
Lo! how God Himself has planned this place
So that all sweet and calm and solemn thoughts
Should have their nests amid the shadowy trees!
How the rude work-day world is all closed out
By the thick curtained foliage, and the sky
Alone revealed, a deep zenith heaven,
Fitly beheld through clasped and upraised arms
Of prayer-like trees. There is no sound more loud
Than the low insect hum, the chirp of birds,
The rustling murmur of embracing boughs,
The gentle dropping of the autumn leaves.
The wood’s sweet breath is incense. From the pines
And larch and chestnut come rich odours pure;
All things are pure and sweet and holy here.
I lie down underneath the firs. The moss
Makes richest cushion for my weary limbs!
Long I gaze upward while the dark green boughs
Moveless project against the azure sky,
Fringed with their russet cones. My satiate eyes
Sink down at length. I turn my cheek to earth.
What may this be, this sense of youth restored,
My happy childhood with its sunbright hours,
Returning once again as in a dream?
’Tis but the odour of the mossy ground,
The “field-smells known in infancy,” when yet,
Our childish sports were near to mother Earth,
Our child-like hearts near to the God in Heaven.
CHAPTER
X.
_BRISTOL._
_REFORMATORIES AND RAGGED SCHOOLS._
After I had spent two or three weeks once again at my old home after my
long journey to visit my eldest brother and his wife, and also had seen
my two other dear brothers, then married and settled in England with
their children; the time came for me to begin my independent life as I
had long planned it. I had taken my year’s pilgrimage as a sort of
conclusion to my self-education, and also because, at the beginning of
it, I was in no state of health or spirits to throw myself into new work
of any kind. Now I was well and strong, and full of hope of being of
some little use in the world. I was at a very good age for making a
fresh start; just 36; and I had my little independence of £200 a year
which, though small, was enough to allow me to work how and where I
pleased without need to earn anything. I may boast that I never got into
debt in my life; never borrowed money from anybody; never even asked my
brother for the advance of a week on the interest on my patrimony.
It had been somewhat of a difficulty to me after my home duties ended at
my father’s death, to decide where, with my heretical opinions, I could
find a field for any kind of usefulness to my fellow-creatures, but I
fortunately heard through Harriet St. Leger and Lady Byron, that Miss
Carpenter, of Bristol, was seeking for some lady to help in her
Reformatory and Ragged School work. Miss Bathurst, who had joined her
for the purpose, had died the previous year. The arrangement was, that
we paid Miss Carpenter a moderate sum (30s.) a week for board and
lodging in her house adjoining Red Lodge, and she provided us all day
long with abundant occupation. I had by mere chance read her “_Juvenile
Delinquents_,” and had admired the spirit of the book; but my special
attraction to Miss Carpenter was the belief that I should find in her at
once a very religious woman, and one so completely outside the pale of
orthodoxy that I should be sure to meet from her the sympathy I had
never yet been privileged to enjoy; and at all events be able to assist
her labours with freedom of conscience.
My first interview with Miss Carpenter (in November, 1858) was in the
doorway of my bedroom after my arrival at Red Lodge House; a small house
in the same street as Red Lodge. She had been absent from home on
business, and hastened upstairs to welcome me. It was rather a critical
moment, for I had been asking myself anxiously—“What manner of woman
shall I behold?” I knew I should see an able and an excellent person;
but it is quite possible for able and excellent women to be far from
agreeable companions for a _tête-à-tête_ of years; and nothing short of
this had I in contemplation. The first glimpse in that doorway set my
fears at rest! The plain and careworn face, the figure which, Dr.
Martineau says, had been “columnar” in youth, but which at fifty-two was
angular and stooping, were yet all alive with feeling and power. Her
large, light blue eyes, with their peculiar trick of showing the white
beneath the iris, had an extraordinary faculty of taking possession of
the person on whom they were fixed, like those of an amiable _Ancient
Mariner_ who only wanted to talk philanthropy, and not to tell stories
of weird voyages and murdered albatrosses. There was humour, also, in
every line of her face, and a readiness to catch the first gleam of a
joke. But the prevailing characteristic of Mary Carpenter, as I came
subsequently more perfectly to recognise, was a high and strong
Resolution, which made her whole path much like that of a plough in a
well-drawn furrow, which goes straight on in its own beneficent way, and
gently pushes aside into little ridges all intervening people and
things.
Long after this first interview, Miss Elliot showed Miss Carpenter’s
photograph to the Master of Balliol, without telling him whom it
represented. After looking at it carefully, he remarked, “This is the
portrait of a person who lives _under high moral excitement_.” There
could not be a truer summary of her habitual state.
Our days were very much alike, and “Sunday shone no Sabbath-day” for us.
Our little household consisted of one honest girl (a certain excellent
Marianne, who I often see now in her respectable widowhood and who well
deserves commemoration) and two little convicted thieves from the Red
Lodge. We assembled for prayers very early in the morning; and
breakfast, during the winter months, was got over before daylight; Miss
Carpenter always remarking brightly as she sat down, “How cheerful!” was
the gas. After this there were classes at the different schools, endless
arrangements and organisations, the looking-up of little truants from
the Ragged Schools, and a good deal of business in the way of writing
reports and so on. Altogether, nearly every hour of the day and week was
pretty well mapped out, leaving only space for the brief dinner and tea;
and at nine or ten o’clock at night, when we met at last, Miss Carpenter
was often so exhausted that I have seen her fall asleep with the spoon
half-way between her mouth and the cup of gruel which she ate for
supper. Her habits were all of the simplest and most self-denying kind.
Both by temperament and on principle she was essentially a Stoic. She
had no sympathy at all with Asceticism (which is a very different thing,
and implies a vivid sense of the attractiveness of luxury), and she
strongly condemned fasting, and all such practices on the Zoroastrian
principle, that they involve a culpable weakening of powers which are
intrusted to us for good use. But she was an ingrained Stoic, to whom
all the minor comforts of life are simply indifferent, and who can
scarcely even recognise the fact that other people take heed of them.
She once, with great simplicity, made to me the grave observation that
at a country house where she had just passed two or three days, “the
ladies and gentlemen all came down dressed for dinner, and evidently
thought the meal rather a pleasant part of the day!” For herself (as I
often told her) she had no idea of any Feast except that of the
Passover, and always ate with her loins girded and her umbrella at hand,
ready to rush off to the Red Lodge, if not to the Red Sea. In vain I
remonstrated on the unwholesomeness of the practice, and entreated on my
own behalf to be allowed time to swallow my food, and also some food (in
the shape of vegetables) to swallow, as well as the perpetual, too
easily ordered, salt beef and ham. Next day after an appeal of this kind
(made serious on my part by threats of gout), good Miss Carpenter
greeted me with a complacent smile on my entry into our little
dining-room. “You see I have not forgotten your wish for a dish of
vegetables!” There, surely enough, on a cheeseplate, stood six little
round radishes! Her special chair was a horsehair one with wooden arms,
and on the seat she had placed a small square cushion, as hard as a
board, likewise covered with horsehair. I took this up one day, and
taunted her with the _Sybaritism_ it betrayed; but she replied, with
infinite simplicity, “Yes, indeed! I am sorry to say that since my
illness I have been obliged to have recourse to these indulgencies (!).
I used to try, like St. Paul, to ‘endure hardness.’”
Her standard of conscientious rigour was even, it would appear,
applicable to animals. I never saw a more ludicrous little scene than
when she one day found my poor dog Hajjin, a splendid grey Pomeranian,
lying on the broad of her very broad back, luxuriating on the rug before
a good fire. After gravely inspecting her for some moments, Miss
Carpenter turned solemnly away, observing, in a tone of deep moral
disapprobation, “Self-indulgent dog!”
Much of our work lay in a certain Ragged School in a filthy lane named
St. James’ Back, now happily swept from the face of the earth. The long
line of Lewin’s Mead beyond the chapel was bad enough, especially at
nine or ten o’clock of a winter’s night, when half the gas lamps were
extinguished, and groups of drunken men and miserable women were to be
found shouting, screaming and fighting before the dens of drink and
infamy of which the street consisted. Miss Carpenter told me that a
short time previously some Bow Street constables had been sent down to
this place to ferret out a crime which had been committed there, and
that they reported there was not in all London such a nest of wickedness
as they had explored. The ordinary Bristol policemen were never to be
seen at night in Lewin’s Mead, and it was said they were afraid to show
themselves in the place. But St. James’ Back was a shade, I think, lower
than Lewin’s Mead; at all events it was further from the upper air of
decent life; and in these horrid slums that dauntless woman had bought
some tumble-down old buildings and turned them into schools—day-schools
for girls and night-schools for boys, all the very sweepings of those
wretched streets.
It was a wonderful spectacle to see Mary Carpenter sitting patiently
before the large school-gallery in this place, teaching, singing, and
praying with the wild street boys, in spite of endless interruptions
caused by such proceedings as shooting marbles into hats on the table
behind her, whistling, stamping, fighting, shrieking out “Amen” in the
middle of the prayer, and sometimes rising _en masse_ and tearing, like
a troop of bisons in hob-nailed shoes, down from the gallery, round the
great schoolroom and down the stairs, out into the street. These
irrepressible outbreaks she bore with infinite good humour and, what
seemed to me more marvellous still, she heeded, apparently, not at all
the indescribable abomination of the odours of a tripe-and-trotter shop
next door, wherein operations were frequently carried on which, together
with the _bouquet du peuple_ of the poor little unkempt scholars,
rendered the school of a hot summer’s evening little better than the
ill-smelling _giro_ of Dante’s “Inferno.” These trifles, however,
scarcely even attracted Mary Carpenter’s attention, fixed as it was on
the possibility of “taking hold” (as she used to say) of one little
urchin or another, on whom, for the moment her hopes were fixed.
The droll things which daily occurred in these schools, and the
wonderful replies received from the scholars to questions testing their
information, amused her intensely, and the more unruly were the young
scamps, the more, I think, in her secret heart, she liked them, and
gloried in taming them. She used to say, “Only to get them to use the
_school comb_ is something!” There was the boy who defined Conscience to
me as “a thing a gen’elman hasn’t got, who, when a boy finds his purse
and gives it back to him, doesn’t give the boy sixpence.” There was the
boy who, sharing in my Sunday evening lecture on “Thankfulness,”—wherein
I had pointed out the grass and blossoming trees on the Downs as
subjects for praise,—was interrogated as to which pleasure he enjoyed
most in the course of the year? replied candidly, “Cock-fightin’, ma’am.
There’s a pit up by the ‘Black Boy’ as is worth anythink in Brissel!”