here? And as for Turner, the man who dares to say that he "painted English
life as it was," dares much. It is the chiefest glory of Turner that he
painted or drew or etched things, not as they were, but as they might,
could, should, or would be under an artist's direction. He was, in short,
an idealist, and cared nothing for "actuality," and perhaps even less for
the "struggle of the poor." It is possible to read anything you please
into Turner's work, for it is chiefly of the frankest impressionism; but
to say that _he_ felt and did all these things is criticism of the most
inept Penny Reading order. Turner was an artist of the rarest and most
generous equipment, and he _had_ to do what he did, and never reasoned
_why_ he did it. Ruskin surprised him with what he read into his work; how
much more, then, would he have been astonished at Mr. Stopford Brooke's
"Notes on the _Liber Studiorum_," had he lived to read them! But angels
and ministers of grace defend us from ministers of religion who essay art
criticism!
And now, having descanted upon the wisdom of the cobbler sticking to his
last, or of the clergyman adhering rigorously to his spiritual functions,
let us proceed to Godalming on foot.
"Everybody that has been from Godalming to Guildford knows," says Cobbett,
"that there is hardly another such a pretty four miles in all England. The
road is good; the soil is good; the houses are neat; the people are
neat; the hills, the woods, the meadows, all are beautiful. Nothing wild
and bold, to be sure, but exceedingly pretty; and it is almost impossible
to ride along these four miles without feelings of pleasure, though you
have rain for your companion, as it happened to be with me."
[Illustration: ST CATHERINE'S CHAPEL. _After J. M. W. Turner._]
There! is that not a pretty testimony in favour of this stretch of road?
And it is all the prettier, seeing from what source it comes; a source, to
be sure, whence proceeded cursings and revilings, depreciations, and a
thorough belittling of most things. Cobbett, you see, was a man with an
infinite capacity for scorn and indignation, and that bias very frequently
led him to take no account of things that a more evenly-balanced temper
would have found delight in. But here is an altogether exceptional
passage, and therefore let us treasure it.
[Sidenote: _GODALMING DERIVATIVES_]
When within sight of Godalming, the road descends suddenly and proceeds
along level lands through which runs the winding Wey. All around, a bold
amphitheatre of hills closes the view, and the queer little town is set
down by the meadows beside the river in the most moist and damp situation
imaginable. It is among the smallest and least progressive of townships;
with narrow streets, the most tortuous and deceptive, paved with granite
setts and cobble-stones in varied patches. Godalming is a town as old as
the Kingdom of the South Saxons, and indeed derives its name from some
seventh-century Godhelm, to whom this fair meadowland (or "ing") then
belonged. Godhelm's Ing remains in, probably, almost the same condition
now as when, a thousand years and more ago, the Saxon chieftain squatted
down beside the Wey in this break of the hills and reared his flocks and
herds, and was, in the fashion of those remote times, the father of his
people. The little river runs its immemorial course, gnawed by winter
flood and summer spate, through the alluvial soil of the valley; the grass
grows green as ever, and the kine thrive as they have always done upon its
succulent fare; the hoary hills look down upon the lowlands in these days,
when agitators would restore the Heptarchy, just as they did when the
strife of the Eight Kingdoms watered the island with blood. Only Godhelm
and his contemporaries, with his descendants and many succeeding
generations, are gone and have left no trace, save perhaps in the ancient
divisions and hedges of the fields, like those of the greater part of
England, old beyond the memory of man, or the evidence of engrossed
parchments. Where the Saxon chieftain's primitive village arose, on a spot
ever so little elevated above the grazing grounds beside the river, there
run Godalming streets to-day; their plan, if not so old as the days of
this patriarch farmer, at least as ancient as the Norman Conquest, when
the invaders dispossessed his descendants and kept them overawed by the
strong castle of Guildford, perched in a strategic position, four miles up
the road.
Not that those stolid agriculturists required much repression. Malcontents
there might be elsewhere, but here, upon the borders of the great
Andredwald--the dense forest that stretched almost continuously from the
Thames to the South Coast--the peaceful herdsmen were content to
acknowledge their new masters, so only they might be left undisturbed.
[Sidenote: _GODALMING_]
And respectable obscurity has ever been the distinguishing characteristic
of Godalming. At intervals, indeed, we hear of it as the site of a
hunting-lodge of the Merry Monarch; and once, in 1726, "Godliman" (as the
vulgar tongue had it then)[3] was the scene of a most remarkable
imposture; but, generally speaking, the town lived on, the world
forgetting and by the world forgot, saving only those whose business
carried them here by coach on their way to or from Portsmouth; and
Godalming remained in their memories chiefly, no doubt, by reason of the
excellent fare dispensed at the "King's Arms," where the coaches stopped.
The "King's Arms" is there to this day, in one of the passage-like streets
by the Market House; this last quite a curiosity in its way. The "King's
Arms," doubtless so called from the frequent visits of Charles II. and his
Court on their hunting expeditions, has a quite wonderful range of stables
and outhouses, reached through a great doorway from the street, through
which the mails and stages passed in days when road-travel was your only
choice who journeyed to and fro in the land. It is a matter of sixty years
since those capacious stalls and broad-paved yards witnessed the stir and
bustle of the stablemen, coachmen, post-boys, and all the horsey creatures
who found employment in the care of coach and horses, and they are so many
lumber-rooms to-day.
[Illustration: MARKET-HOUSE, GODALMING.]
But Godalming was a place notorious in the eighteenth century as the scene
of one of the most impudent frauds ever practised upon the credulity of
mankind. There have been those who have said that such trickery as that to
which Mary Tofts, the "rabbit-breeder" of Godalming, lent herself, would
meet with no success in so enlightened an age as this; but in so saying
those folk have done a little less than justice to the eighteenth
century, and have been particularly lenient to the nineteenth, which has
proved itself, in the matter of Mahatmas, at least as credulous as by-gone
ages were.
[Sidenote: _MARY TOFTS_]
The story of Mary Tofts, if not edifying, is at least interesting. She was
the wife of Joshua Tofts, a poor journeyman cloth-worker of this little
town, and was described as of "a healthy, strong constitution, small size,
fair complexion, a very stupid and sullen temper, and unable to write or
read." Stupid or not, she possessed sufficient cunning to maintain her
fraud for some time, and even to delude some eminent surgeons of the day
into a firm belief in her pretended births of rabbits. For this was the
preposterous nature of the imposition, and she claimed to have given birth
to no less than eighteen of them. She attempted to account for this
remarkable progeny by recounting how, "when she was weeding a field, she
saw a rabbit spring up near her, after which she ran, with another woman
that was at work just by her: this set her a-longing for rabbits.... Soon
after, another rabbit sprang up near the same place, which she likewise
endeavoured to catch. The same night she dreamt that she was in a field
with those two rabbits in her lap, and awoke with a sick fit, which lasted
till morning; from that time, for above three months, she had a constant
and strong desire to eat rabbits, but being very poor and indigent, could
not procure any." A Mr. Howard, a medical man of Guildford, who claimed to
have assisted Mary Tofts in giving birth to eighteen rabbits, seems, from
the voluminous literature on this subject, to have been something of a
party to the cheat; and even if we did not find him a guilty accomplice,
there would remain the scarce more flattering designation of egregious
dupe. But Mr. Howard, dupe or rogue, was extremely busy in publishing to
the world the particulars of this extraordinary case. The woman was
brought over from Godalming to Guildford, so that she might be under his
more immediate care, and he wrote a letter to Dr. St. Andre, George I.'s
surgeon and anatomist, asking him to come and satisfy himself of the truth
of this marvel. St. Andre went to Guildford post-haste, and returned to
London afterwards with portions of these miraculous rabbits, and with so
firm a belief in the story that he wrote and published a pamphlet setting
forth full details of these wonders--the first of a long series of tracts,
serious and humorous, for and against the good faith of this story.
Public attention was now roused in the most extraordinary degree, and the
subject of Mary Tofts and her rabbits was in every one's mouth. The
caricaturists took the matter up, and Hogarth has left two engravings
referring to it: a small plate entitled "Cunicularii, or the Wise Men of
Godliman," and another, a very large and most elaborate print, full of
symbolism and cryptic allusions, entitled "Credulity, Superstition, and
Fanaticism."
Even the clergymen of the time rushed into the fray, and one went so far
as to assert that Mary Tofts was the fulfilment of a prophecy in Esdras.
[Sidenote: _DUPE OR ROGUE?_]
The King, too, was numbered among the believers, and things came to such a
pass that ladies began to be alarmed with apprehensions of bringing
into the world some unnatural progeny. "No one presumed to eat a rabbit,"
and the rent of rabbit-warrens sank to nothing. But a German Court
physician--a Dr. Ahlers--who had proceeded to Guildford in order to report
upon the matter to his Majesty, was rendered sceptical as much by the
behaviour of Mr. Howard as by that of his interesting patient. He returned
to town, convinced of trickery, and finally Mary Tofts and her medical
adviser were brought to London and lodged in the Bagnio, Leicester Fields,
where, in fear of combined threats of punishment and an artfully-pictured
operation darkly hinted at by Sir Richard Manningham, she confessed that
the fraud had been suggested to her by a woman, a neighbour at Godalming,
who, with the showman's instinct of Barnum, told her that here was a way
to a good livelihood without the necessity of working for it. The part
taken by Mr. Howard has never been satisfactorily explained, but as he was
particularly insistent that Mary Tofts deserved a pension from the King on
account of her rabbits, his part in the affair has, naturally, been looked
upon with considerable suspicion. Doctor and patient were, however,
committed to Tothill Fields, Bridewell.
[Illustration: MARY TOFTS.]
Mary Tofts died many years later, in 1763, but a considerable time elapsed
before she was forgotten, and portraits and pamphlets relating to her
imposition found a ready sale. A rare tract, in which she is supposed to
state her own case, still affords amusement to those who care to dig it up
from the dusty accumulations of the British Museum. In it the interviewer
of that age says, "It was thought fit to print her opinions _in puris
naturalibus_, (_i. e._) in her own Stile and Spelling"; and a taste of her
"stile" may be had from the following elegant extract:--
"Thof I be ripurzentid as an ignirunt littirat Wuman, as can nethur
rite nor rede, yet I thank God I can do both; and thof mahaps I cant
spel as well as sum peple as set up for authurs, yet I can rite
trooth, and plane _Inglish_, wich is mor nor ani of um all has dun. As
for settin my Mark to a papur, it was wen I wont well, and wos for
goin the shortist wa to work: if tha had axt me to rite my name, I
wood hav dun it; but tha onli bid me set my mark, as kunclooding I
cood not rite my nam, but tha was mistakn."
And here is emphasis indeed!--
"All as has bin sad, except what I have here written, is a damd
kunfounded ly.
"MERRY TUFT."
Mary Tofts made one more public appearance before she joined the great
majority, and that was an occasion as little to her credit as the other.
Thus we read that, in 1740, she was committed to Guildford Gaol for
receiving stolen goods!
XIX
[Sidenote: _VICARS VIGOROUS AND VARIOUS_]
In a more than usually quiet street, upon the edge of the town, stands the
old church of Godalming, dedicated to SS. Peter and Paul, whose tall
leaden spire rises with happy effect above the roofs, and gives distant
views of Godalming a quiet and impressive dignity all its own among
country towns. Vicars of Godalming have not infrequently distinguished
themselves; some for piety, one for piety combined with pugnacity, two for
literature and learning, and at least one for "pride, idleness,
affectation of Popery," and for refusing to preach. This last-named
divine, Dr. Nicholas Andrews, had the misfortune to have been born out of
due time, for had he but held the living in the sceptical eighteenth
century instead of exactly a hundred years earlier, when piety was
particularly aggressive, his passion for fishing on Sunday would have done
him no harm. As it happened, however, his era fell in the midst of Puritan
times, and the Godalming people of that day were at once godly and
vindictive: a combination not at all uncommon even now. At any rate, they
petitioned Parliament for the removal of this too ardent fisherman, and he
was sequestered accordingly.
The times were altered when the Rev. Samuel Speed, grandson of Speed the
historian, held the living. He was, according to Aubrey, a "famous and
valiant sea-chaplain and sailor," whose deeds are handed down to us in the
stirring lines of a song "made by Sir John Birkenhead on the sea-fight
with the Dutch"; in which we hear of this doughty cleric praying and
fighting at one and the same time:--
"His chaplain, he plied his wonted work,
He prayed like a Christian and fought like a Turk;
Crying, 'Now for the King and the Duke of York,'
With a thump, a thump, thump," &c.
This worthy was at one time a buccaneer in the West Indies, and later,
while he held the living of Godalming, was imprisoned several times for
debt. He died, indeed, in gaol, and was buried in London, in the old City
church, since demolished, of St. Michael, Queenhithe, in 1682.
Manning, scholar and historian of Surrey, was vicar here, and also the
Rev. Antony Warton. Their virtues and their attainments are duly set forth
upon cenotaphs within the church, as also is the discovery of a certain
cure for consumption by
"Nathaniel Godbold Esqr.
Inventor and Proprietor
of that Excellent Medicine
The Vegetable Balsam
For the cure of Consumption and Asthmas."
He died in December 1799, aged sixty-nine, and his appreciative relatives
caused to be engraved on his epitaph, _Hic cineres, ubique Fama_; which
really is very amusing, because his fame is now-a-days as decayed as are
his ashes.
And yet they say these latter days of ours are distinguished above all
else by shameless puffery! At least we spare the churches and do not use
their walls as advertisement hoardings. And, despite Godbold and his
Balsam, consumption still takes heavy toll, and not all the innumerable
remedies nor all the Kochs in creation seem able to prevail in any degree
against the disease.
[Illustration: NEW GODALMING STATION.]
[Sidenote: _OGLETHORPE_]
At a short distance from the church, on the edge of a thickly-wooded hill
overlooking New Godalming station, stands the house and small estate of
Westbrook, once belonging to the Oglethorpes, who settled here from
Yorkshire in the seventeenth century. Of this family was that notable
octogenarian, General Oglethorpe, the literary discoverer of Dr.
Johnson, friend of Whitefield and founder of Georgia. During a long and
active life that extended from 1698 to 1785, Oglethorpe had many
experiences. He warred with the Indians who threatened the North American
Colonies; he was secretary and aide-de-camp to Prince Eugene, when,
according to the alliterative poet, that "good prince" bade
"An Austrian army, awfully arrayed,
Boldly by battery bombard Belgrade."
He was suspected of Jacobite leanings, and was court-martialled for want
of diligence in following up the Pretender's forces in their retreat from
Derby; but he is memorable from a Londoner's point of view chiefly because
he claimed to have, when a young man, shot woodcock on the spot where in
his old age rose the fashionable lounge of Regent Street.
Westbrook, too, has some slight connection with the Stuart legend; for
General Oglethorpe's father--Sir Theophilus Oglethorpe--was a devoted
partisan of that unlucky House, and it was whispered that one of his sons
was the famous child smuggled into Whitehall Palace in a warming-pan, and
known afterwards as the Old Pretender.
One of the most pleasing views of Godalming is that from the grounds of
Westbrook, above the railway-station, and the station of New Godalming
itself and its situation are distinctly picturesque, composing finely with
the Frith Hill and the uplands away in the direction of Charterhouse.
And Godalming is celebrated in modern times on two distinct counts:
firstly for having been a pioneer in lighting street-lamps by electricity,
and secondly for being the new home of Charterhouse School, removed from
London in 1870, under the care of the Rev. W. Haig Brown, who still
remains head-master of Thomas Sutton's old foundation. The
school-buildings stand on the plateau of a down, at a distance of about a
mile from Godalming, and occupy a site of about eighty acres.
Here the Carthusians carry on the traditions of their old home in London,
and some of the stones of the old school, deeply carved with the names of
by-gone scholars, have been removed from old Charterhouse to the new
building, where they are to be seen built into an archway. Charterhouse
School numbers five hundred scholars, and its lovely situation, amid the
Surrey Hills, together with its finely-planned buildings and spreading
grounds, render this amongst the foremost public schools of the time.
One of the most interesting features of the school is its museum, housed
in a building of semi-ecclesiastical aspect, built recently in the
grounds. Here are many relics of old times and old scholars, together with
the more usual collections of a country museum: stuffed birds, chipped
flints, and miscellaneous antiquities; or, to quote the sarcastic Peter
Pindar:--
"More broken pans, more gods, more mugs;
Old snivel-bottles, jordans, and old jugs;
More saucepans, lamps, and candlesticks, and kettles;
In short, all sorts of culinary metals!"
[Sidenote: _CHARTERHOUSE_]
Among the _alumni_ of Charterhouse were Addison and Steele; John Wesley,
the founder of Methodism; Chief Justice Blackstone, Sir Henry Havelock,
Grote, Thackeray, and John Leech. Several of these distinguished
Carthusians are represented here, in a fine collection of autographs and
manuscripts. First, in point of view of general interest, is a collection
of drawings and poems in their original MS. by Thackeray. Some thirty of
his weird sketches are here, with the manuscript of "The Newcomes," bound
up in five volumes. Here also is Thackeray's Greek Lexicon, covered
thickly with school-boy scrawls and scribbles.
[Illustration: CHARTERHOUSE RELICS.]
Leech, the caricaturist,--one of the most absurdly over-rated men of this
century,--was at Charterhouse from 1825 to 1831. Here are two letters from
him, written, it would seem, when he was ten years of age, and apparently
before he had been taught the use of capital letters. In one to "my dear
mama," he seems to have been in a far from happy frame of mind. His
"mama" had been to the school, but had not seen him, "me being in the
grounds," "That," he adds, "made me still more unhappy." Writing to "my
dear papa," young Leech is "happy to say I am promoted, because I know it
pleases you very much. allow me to come out to see you on saturday because
I have a great deal to tell you, and I want some one to assist me in the
exercises because they are a great deal harder."
[Illustration: GOWSER JUG.]
[Sidenote: _'MORTIFYING NEGLECT'_]
There is a very characteristic letter by John Wesley, and close by it a
letter by Blackstone, part of which is worth reproducing. Writing on
August 28, 1744, Blackstone, then a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, says: "We
were last Friday entertained at St. Mary's by a curious sermon from Wesley
ye Methodist. Among other equally modest particulars, he informed us (1)
that there was not one Christian among all ye heads of houses; (2) that
pride, gluttony, avarice, luxury, sensuality, and drunkenness were ye
whole characteristics of all Fellows of Colleges, who were useless to
proverbial uselessness; lastly, that ye younger part of ye University were
a generation of triflers, all of them perjured, and not one of them of any
religion at all. His notes were demanded by ye Vice-Chancellor, but on
mature deliberation it has been thought better to punish him by mortifying
neglect." Which is all very humorous, and the phrase "mortifying neglect"
distinctly good, as showing that the authorities had taken Wesley's
measure to a nicety, and were maliciously aware that neglect _would_
mortify a person of his essential vanity a great deal more than
persecution.
[Illustration: WESLEY.]
A striking bust of Wesley stands beside a statuette of Thackeray; but
among the chiefest articles of interest in the School Museum are the
curious objects illustrating the rural life of Surrey in the olden times:
a primitive hand cider-press, from Bramley, a "pot-hook hanger" from
Shamley Green, and a "baby-runner" from Aldfold. Other curiosities are a
bust of Nelson, cut by a figure-head carver from the main-beam of the
"Victory"; "Gowser" jugs and cups, formerly used by gown boys of
Charterhouse, and decorated with the arms and crest of Thomas Sutton,
together with his pious motto, _Deo dante dedi_; and an Irish blunderbuss
of the most murderous and forbidding aspect.
[Illustration: BUST OF NELSON, CARVED FROM MAIN-BEAM OF THE "VICTORY."]
[Sidenote: _'YE GODS! WHAT GLORIOUS TWISTS'_]
So much for Godalming, its sights and its memories. But we have halted
here longer than the most dilatory coach that ever rumbled into the
"King's Arms" Hotel, that house of good food and plenty in days when men
had robust appetites, fit to vie with that of Milo the Cretonian. What
glorious twists (for instance) must Peter the Great and his suite have
possessed when they lodged here, twenty-one of them, all told, on their
way from Portsmouth to London;--that is to say, if we are to take this
breakfast and this dinner as sample meals:--
_Breakfast._
Half a sheep.
A quarter of lamb.
10 pullets.
12 chickens.
3 quarts of brandy.
6 quarts of mulled wine.
7 dozen of eggs,
with salad in proportion.
_Dinner._
5 ribs of beef, weighing 3 stone.
1 sheep.
56-3/4 lbs. of lamb.
1 shoulder of veal, boiled.
1 loin " "
8 rabbits.
2 dozen-and-a-half of sack.
1 " claret.
These details are from a bill now in the Bodleian Library, at Oxford, and
are earnest of Gargantuan appetites that have had their day. If only we
could compare this fare with the provand supplied to the Allied Sovereigns
at the same house by Host Moon when those crowned heads and their suites
were travelling to Portsmouth for the rejoicings over the final overthrow
of the Corsican Ogre! Their Majesties must have had a zest for their
banquets that had been a stranger to them all too long in the terrible
years when Napoleon was hunting their armies all over Europe, from Madrid
to Moscow.
XX