leave to her children and to her people a name that will be remembered
and honoured as long as the German Empire lasts. Her tomb at
Charlottenburg is one of the most beautiful monuments to the memory of
the dead, which the world contains. The pure white marble statue of the
Queen is by the sculptor Rauch, who knew her well, and honoured her as
she deserved. Everything about the building is designed with loving
care. The words chosen by the King, and placed over the entrance of the
temple where the monument lies, are: “I am he that liveth, and was dead;
and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen: and have the keys of hell
and of death.”
XVIII
DOROTHY WORDSWORTH
“And were another childhood world my share,
I would be born a little sister there.”—GEORGE ELIOT.
A HUNDRED years ago England was particularly rich in great brothers and
sisters. There were William and Caroline Herschel, Charles and Mary
Lamb, and, perhaps, chief of all, William and Dorothy Wordsworth. These
last were certainly the greatest as tested by the position of the
brother in the world of literature. He won and maintained a place among
the greatest of English poets; but the very greatness of the brother was
the cause why the sister is known only as a tributary to his genius. It
is not that his achievements dwarf hers by comparison; she made no
conscious contribution to literature; she felt from the outset of their
life together that he was capable of giving to his countrymen thoughts
which the world would not willingly let die, and she deliberately
suppressed in herself all cultivation of her own powers, save such as
should contribute to support, sustain, and promote his. As Charles Lamb
said of his own sister, “If the balance has been against her, it was a
noble trade.” There is, however, much evidence that the balance was not
against Dorothy Wordsworth. She did not sacrifice herself in vain. She
chose to give up all independent cultivation of her own considerable
poetic gifts, and also to renounce all hopes of love and marriage, for
the sake of devoting her whole life to her brother, and of helping to a
freer and nobler utterance the poet who has given us “The Ode on the
Intimations of Immortality,” “The Ode to Duty,” “The Happy Warrior,” and
a host of songs and sonnets among the most beautiful in our language.
The sister freely and generously gave, the brother freely and generously
received, and freely and generously acknowledged the value of the gift.
Over and over again, in prose and verse, Wordsworth acknowledges all
that he owes to his sister; never more warmly than when, on the approach
of old age, disease had laid its hand upon her, and the long accustomed
support seemed likely to be withdrawn. When Coleridge and Dorothy lay
prostrate under the stroke of sickness, Wordsworth wrote at the age of
sixty-two: “He and my beloved sister are the two beings to whom my
intellect is most indebted, and they are now proceeding, as it were,
with equal steps, along the path of sickness, I will not say towards the
grave; but I trust towards a blessed immortality.” If Wordsworth,
reviewing the past, could speak thus of his sister, it must be of
interest to us to endeavour to discern what her influence over him was,
and how their life together was passed.
William Wordsworth was born in 1770, at Cockermouth, in Cumberland, the
second son of John Wordsworth, a lawyer and land-agent to the Earls of
Lonsdale. Dorothy, her parents’ only girl, was twenty months younger
than William, and the two children very early showed that close sympathy
and tender affection for one another which is often the precious
possession of happy family life. Only a few years were spent together by
the brother and sister in this joyous playtime of life; but the
happiness of this early time is recorded in several of Wordsworth’s
poems, especially in the one where he speaks of his sister and their
visit together to see the sparrow’s nest—
She looked at it and seemed to fear it;
Dreading, tho’ wishing, to be near it:
Such heart was in her, being then
A little Prattler among men.
The Blessing of my later years
Was with me when a boy:
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;
And humble cares, and delicate fears;
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;
And love, and thought, and joy.
William and Dorothy were less than nine and seven respectively when
these happy days of childish companionship were closed by the death of
their mother in 1778. William was then sent to school, and Dorothy went
to live with her maternal grandparents at Penrith. The children were
doubly orphaned five years later by the death of their father, in 1783.
William and his brothers then passed to the guardianship of their
uncles, Richard and Christopher Wordsworth, while Dorothy was made over
to the care of other relatives, and spent her time partly at Halifax and
partly with her mother’s cousin, Dr. Cookson, Canon of Windsor. She and
William, however, by no means forgot their childish affection or let it
grow cold. They rarely met at this time, but their meetings were looked
forward to by both with ardent and intense pleasure. Each continued to
be to the other the dearest and most beloved of friends.
Wordsworth, like most generous young people of his day, was deeply
stirred by sympathy with the French Revolution. At its outset he
believed it would bring immeasurable blessings to mankind; tyranny,
cruelty, and vice were, he believed, to be dismissed from the high
places of the earth, and in their stead would reign justice, mercy,
peace, and love. It is therefore not difficult to imagine with what
agony of disappointment he saw, as he thought, all these high hopes
falsified, and the light that had been lit by the Revolution quenched in
blood and in a series of massacres more cruel and remorseless than any
that had disgraced previous forms of government. For a time the belief
in goodness and righteousness seemed shaken in him. To disbelieve in the
power of goodness is infidelity; and from this gulf of infidelity
Wordsworth was saved by his sister’s influence. This was the first
memorable service she rendered to his moral nature. He was saved from
becoming permanently soured and narrowed by the sunny radiance of his
sister’s sympathy and by her unshaken faith that good is stronger than
evil. The brother and sister now resolved to live together; and from
that hour Dorothy’s whole life was given to enrich and solace that of
her brother, and to help him to give utterance to those great thoughts
and words which at last made the whole of England aware that the nation
was possessed of another poet.
Wordsworth was now twenty-five years of age; he had passed through his
college career at Cambridge and had travelled abroad, and the time had
come when it was not unnaturally expected of him that he should settle
down to some business or profession that would provide him with an
income. Very little had come to the family from inheritance, and parents
and guardians are not generally disposed to look with lenient indulgence
on a penniless young man of twenty-five who shows a disinclination to
any steady work, and is suspected of an ambition to become a poet.
Wordsworth’s uncles had been kind and generous guardians, but they could
not have been pleased at what must have seemed to them at this time the
dilatory, desultory life of their nephew. His sister, however, all the
while gave him her warmest sympathy and support. Before any one else had
dreamed of it, she recognised her brother’s genius; she not only
believed that he would be a poet, but _knew_ that he _was_ a poet. She
did not urge him, as a well-intentioned but less perceptive friend might
have done, to become a lawyer, or a doctor, or what not; she made it
possible, by joining her life to his, and nourishing his genius by the
tribute she poured into it from her own, that he should have the quiet
sympathetic surroundings without which his poetic imagination could not
work.
Their slender means were augmented about this time by a legacy which
rendered it possible for the brother and sister to have a little cottage
home together. Here, at Racedown, in Dorsetshire, Wordsworth first began
seriously to devote himself to poetry. Their means were so small that
the utmost economy was necessary; but Dorothy cheerfully undertook all
the household work of cleaning, cooking, making, and mending. She was
not one of those who think there is any degradation, either to man or
woman, in manual labour. While she was busied with household cares, her
brother often worked in their garden; when their digging and cooking
were accomplished, they read Italian authors together, or took long
walks through the beautiful country in which they had fixed their abode.
It must not be thought that Miss Wordsworth was nothing more to her
brother than an energetic, economical housekeeper; she was in feeling
almost as much a poet as he was. She had the same intense sympathy with
nature, the same observant eye and loving heart for all the various
moods of the beautiful outside world. She had also much of her brother’s
power of expression, and the same felicity in description. It has been
said of her, “Her journals are Wordsworth in prose, just as his poems
are Dorothy in verse.” Wordsworth said of his brother John that he was
“a silent poet,” and “a poet in everything but words,” meaning that he
was a poet in feeling and sympathy; but something more than this can be
said of Dorothy; she was a prose poet, who might have become a true
poet, if she had not felt that she had another vocation. She was her
brother’s inspirer and critic, and what she wrote herself proves that
she was worthy to be both. Some passages of her diary are almost
identical in thought and observation with subjects that Wordsworth has
crystallised in immortal verse. On 30th July 1802 we have, for example,
in the prose of Dorothy’s journal, part of what Wordsworth has given to
us in the sonnets on Westminster Bridge and Calais sands. “Left London
between five and six o’clock of the morning, outside the Dover coach. A
beautiful morning. The City, St. Paul’s, with the river, a multitude of
little boats, made a beautiful sight as we crossed Westminster Bridge;
the houses not overhung by their clouds of smoke, were spread out
endlessly; yet the sun shone so brightly, with such a pure light, that
there was something like the purity of one of Nature’s own grand
spectacles. Arrived at Calais at four in the morning of 31st July.
Delightful walks in the evenings, seeing far off in the west the coast
of England like a cloud, crested with Dover Castle, the evening star,
and the glory of the sky. The reflections in the water were more
beautiful than the sky itself; purple waves brighter than precious
stones for ever melting away on the sands.” Whoever will compare this
with the two sonnets beginning “Earth has not anything to show more
fair,” and “Fair star of evening, splendour of the West,” will see how
far it is just to say that Dorothy has given us in prose what Wordsworth
has given us in verse. There is a deeper human passion in Wordsworth’s
verse than Dorothy ever reached in her prose. He would not stand to-day
the third in the noble group where Shakespeare and Milton are first and
second, if he had not possessed, over and above his subtle sympathy with
Nature, sympathy also with the greatest of Nature’s works, “man, the
heart of man, and human life.” In the “Lines composed a few miles above
Tintern Abbey,” and again in the “Ode on the Intimations of
Immortality,” Wordsworth speaks of the change which had gradually come
in himself from the days when the worship of external nature, “meadow,
grove, and stream, the earth and every common sight,” was all in all to
him, to the time when—
I have learn’d
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.
It was here, as it seems, that his sister could not follow him. Perhaps
her self-suppression, the very concentration of her devotion to her
brother, closed her powers of receptive sympathy for the wider issues of
human destiny which inspires the most precious of Wordsworth’s verse.
Whether this be so or not, he saw in her what he once had been and had
ceased to be.
I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm.
... That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures.
· · · · · ·
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend, and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister!
After Racedown the next residence of Wordsworth and his sister was
(1797) at Alfoxden, in Somersetshire. Here they were visited by
Coleridge and Lamb, and here the “Ancient Mariner” was composed, chiefly
by Coleridge, but with the help and by the stimulus of Wordsworth and
Dorothy. It was during their residence here that the “Lines written
above Tintern Abbey” were composed and published. Racedown and Alfoxden
were temporary resting-places only; Wordsworth and his sister did not
make a real home for themselves till they settled in the beautiful lake
country of Westmoreland, in 1799. At first they lived in a small
cottage, where Dorothy, with the help of one feeble old woman, whom they
employed partly out of charity, did all the domestic work. A few years
later they removed to the house at Rydal Mount, Grasmere, which will
always be associated with their memory, and where the rest of their
lives was passed. It has been pointed out by Mr. Matthew Arnold that
almost all Wordsworth’s best work was produced in the ten years between
1798 and 1808. During this time he had achieved no fame; he had gained
no audience, as it were, save the very select group of whom the chief
members were his sister, Coleridge, and Charles and Mary Lamb. All
through this time of the production of Wordsworth’s best work, Dorothy
continued to devote herself to him by the cheerful performance of the
double duties of domestic drudge and literary companion and critic. She
was also his comrade in many long mountain excursions, in which they
both delighted. Miss Wordsworth had extraordinary physical strength,
which many persons believe she overtaxed by her long walks over moor and
mountain. It is certain, however, that her brother delighted in her
physical vigour no less than in her mental gifts. He speaks in lines
addressed to her of her being “healthy as a shepherd boy,” and in other
places he often shows that physical feebleness formed no part of his
conception of feminine grace. His ideal woman
is ruddy, fleet and strong,
And down the rocks can leap along
Like rivulets in May.
Or again—
She shall be sportive as the fawn,
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs.
In 1802 the poet married his cousin, Mary Hutchinson, and nothing is
more characteristic of Dorothy’s sweet and generous nature than the
warm, loving welcome which she gave to her brother’s wife. She did not
know jealousy in love; her love was so perfect that she rejoiced in
every addition to her brother’s happiness, and did not, as a meaner
woman might have done, wish his heart to be vacant of all affection save
what he felt for herself. The poet’s wife was worthy of such a husband
and sister-in-law, and the family life went on in perfect love and
harmony, that were only strengthened by the new ties and interests that
marriage brought. Wordsworth’s children became as dear to Dorothy as if
they had been her own, and she devoted herself to them so that they
learnt to feel that they had in her almost a second mother.
In 1832, Wordsworth then being sixty-two years old and his sister over
sixty, Dorothy’s health seriously broke down. So much has been said in
some of the books about the poet and his sister of the harm resulting to
Miss Wordsworth’s health from her long walks, that it might have been
imagined that she had been the victim of a very premature decline of
physical powers. Considering, however, that she was descended from
parents both of whom had died young, it is at least doubtful whether her
failure of health at the age of sixty can be fairly attributed to her
pedestrian feats. Her illness in 1832 culminated in a dangerous attack
of brain fever, from which she recovered, but with mental and physical
powers permanently enfeebled. Her memory was darkened, and her spirits,
once so blithe and gay, became clouded and dull. Wordsworth and his wife
tended her with unceasing devotion. One who knew them well wrote of
Wordsworth at this time that “There is always something very touching in
his way of speaking of his sister. The tones of his voice become very
gentle and solemn, and he ceases to have that flow of expression which
is so remarkable in him on all other subjects.” The same friend wrote,
“Those who know what they (William and Dorothy Wordsworth) were to each
other can well understand what it must have been to him to see that soul
of life and light obscured.”
Notwithstanding the delicate health from which she suffered before the
close of her life, she outlived her brother for five years. He died on
23d April 1850, the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth and death. His
sister at first could hardly comprehend her loss; but when at last she
understood that her heart’s best treasure was no more, she exclaimed
that there was nothing left worth living for. It was hardly life to live
without him to whom her own life had been devoted. The friends
surrounding her dreaded the shock which this great loss would be to her,
but she bore it with unexpected calmness. A friend wrote, “She is drawn
about as usual in her chair. She was heard to say as she passed the door
where the body lay, ‘O Death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy
victory?’” She died in January 1855, and was buried by her brother’s
side in Grasmere Churchyard.
XIX
SISTER DORA
ONE of the most remarkable women who, in recent times, have devoted
themselves to nursing and to the service of the sick poor, was Dorothy
Wyndlaw Pattison, more generally known by the name of Sister Dora. She
was a lady born and bred, well-educated, high-spirited, sweet-tempered,
and handsome; full of fun and sense of humour, fond of hunting and other
athletic exercises, and remarkably fond of her own way. As her own way
was generally a good way, she was probably right in preferring it to the
ways of other people. Strong determination, when it does not degenerate
into stupid obstinacy, is one of the most useful qualities any human
being can have. In Sister Dora’s case her strong will was a great secret
of her success, but it also, in a few instances, led her into errors,
which will easily be seen as the story of her life is told.
She was born, in 1832, at Hauxwell, in Yorkshire, a small village on the
slope of a hill, looking towards the moors and Wensleydale. Her father
was the clergyman of the village, and one of her brothers was the Rev.
Mark Pattison, the well-known scholar and the Rector of Lincoln College,
Oxford. Dorothy Pattison was first roused to wish for something more
than the ordinary occupations of a young lady’s life by the enthusiasm
felt throughout England in 1856 for Miss Florence Nightingale’s work in
the Crimea. Dorothy wished to join Miss Nightingale’s band of lady
nurses at the seat of war, but her parents’ opposition and her own want
of training prevented her from carrying out this wish. From this time,
however, she fretted against the life of comparative inactivity to which
she was restricted so long as she remained in her village home. Some
years were passed (wasted, we well may think) in unnecessary friction
between herself and her father, she desiring to leave home, and he
opposing her wishes in this respect. At last she did leave, in 1861,
more or less in face of her father’s opposition; he declined to make her
any allowance beyond what he had been accustomed to give her for
pocket-money and clothes, and she had therefore to live partly on what
she was able to earn. She obtained work as a village schoolmistress at
Little Woolston, near Bletchley, and lived for three years in a small
cottage, quite alone, without even a servant; her life at this time must
have been very much like that described in _Jane Eyre_, where the
heroine gains her livelihood for a time by similar work. She showed, as
a village schoolmistress, that keen sympathy with children and power
over them which always distinguished her. She could enter, through her
bright imagination, into the feelings and thoughts of children, and her
playfulness and love of fun made her a real friend and companion to
them. At Little Woolston, too, she did a good deal of amateur nursing
for the parents and friends of her little pupils. Her biographer, Miss
Lonsdale,[5] says that the people in the neighbourhood of the village
were very quick to discover that the new schoolmistress was a real lady,
but for some time they could not get over their astonishment if they
found Miss Pattison blacking her own grate when they came to see her.
She was, perhaps, the first instance they had come across of a
cultivated woman who thought that “being a lady” was not inconsistent
with working hard. Dirtiness, untidiness, and muddle vex the soul of the
“real lady” far more than doing the work which produces cleanliness and
order.
After three years at Little Woolston, Miss Pattison made what many must
think was the great mistake of her life. Her strong will has already
been spoken of; she had found by experience that she could not submit it
even to the control of her own father, to whom she was naturally bound
by strong feelings of affection. It was necessary to her to have freedom
and scope for her energies, and to learn by self-government what she had
failed to learn through the government of others. Notwithstanding the
incompatibility of her nature with the absolute submission required in
such institutions, Miss Pattison joined a High Church Sisterhood, at
Coatham, called the Sisterhood of the Good Samaritan. It was part of the
discipline of the sisterhood to require unquestioning obedience to all
commands. The reason, the feelings, the natural piety of the novices
were completely subordinated to obedience as their first and paramount
duty. By way of training in unquestioning obedience, Sister Dora, as she
was now called, was subjected to various tests of submissiveness; one
day, for instance, after she had made all the beds, they were pulled to
pieces again by the order of the Superior, and she was told to make them
again. In some institutions of this kind, after the floor has been
carefully and thoroughly scrubbed by a novice, some one enters, by order
of the Superior, with mud or ashes, and purposely makes it dirty again;
the novice is then ordered to return to her work and scrub the floor
once more, and she is expected to do so without showing the least sign
of disappointment or annoyance. It may be true that this system fosters
the habit of unquestioning obedience, but if so it must be at the
expense of other and more valuable qualities. This unnatural system is
perverting to the moral sense and judgment, as Sister Dora, a few years
later, found to her cost.