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MEMOIRS OF LIFE
AND LITERATURE
[Illustration]
Books by W. H. MALLOCK
Memoirs of Life and Literature
The Limits of Pure Democracy _5th Edition_
Religion as a Credible Doctrine
The Reconstruction of Belief
_Novels_
The Individualist _3rd Edition_
The Heart of Life _3rd Edition_
A Human Document _9th Edition_
[Illustration: ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE]
MEMOIRS OF
LIFE AND LITERATURE
BY
W. H. MALLOCK
AUTHOR OF
"RECONSTRUCTION OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF" ETC.
ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration]
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXX
MEMOIRS OF LIFE AND LITERATURE
Copyright, 1920, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published September, 1920
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
FAMILY ANTECEDENTS 1
The Mallocks of Cockington--Some Old Devonshire Houses--A
Child's Outlook on Life
CHAPTER II
THE TWO NATIONS 20
The Rural Poor of Devonshire--The Old Landed Families--An
Ecclesiastical Magnate
CHAPTER III
A PRIVATE TUTOR DE LUXE 9
Early Youth Under a Private Tutor--Poetry--Premonitions of
Modern Liberalism
CHAPTER IV
WINTER SOCIETY AT TORQUAY 53
Early Acquaintance with Society--Byron's Grandson, Lord
Houghton--A Dandy of the Old School, Carlyle--Lord Lytton, and
Others--Memorable Ladies
CHAPTER V
EXPERIENCES AT OXFORD 68
Early Youth at Oxford--Acquaintance with Browning, Swinburne,
and Ruskin--Dissipations of an Undergraduate--The Ferment of
Intellectual Revolution--_The New Republic_
CHAPTER VI
THE BASIS OF LONDON SOCIETY 92
Early Experiences of London Society--Society Thirty Years Ago
Relatively Small--Arts and Accomplishments Which Can Flourish in
Small Societies Only
CHAPTER VII
VIGNETTES OF LONDON LIFE 113
Byron's Grandson and Shelley's Son--The World of Balls--The
"Great Houses," and Their New Rivals--The Latter Criticized by
Some Ladies of the Old Noblesse--Types of More Serious
Society--Lady Marian Alford and Others--_Salons_ Exclusive and
Inclusive--A Clash of Two Rival Poets--The Poet
Laureate--Auberon Herbert and the Simple Life--Dean
Stanley--Whyte Melville--"Ouida"--"Violet Fane"--Catholic
Society--Lord Bute--Banquet to Cardinal Manning--Difficulties of
the Memoir-writer--Lord Wemyss and Lady P---- --Indiscretions of
Augustus Hare--Routine of a London Day--The Author's Life Out of
London
CHAPTER VIII
SOCIETY IN COUNTRY HOUSES 142
A Few Country Houses of Various Types--Castles and Manor Houses
from Cornwall to Sutherland
CHAPTER IX
FROM COUNTRY HOUSES TO POLITICS 168
First Treatise on Politics--Radical Propaganda--First Visit to
the Highlands--The Author Asked to Stand for a Scotch
Constituency
CHAPTER X
A FIVE MONTHS' INTERLUDE 194
A Venture on the Riviera--Monte Carlo--Life in a Villa at
Beaulieu--A Gambler's Suicide--A Gambler's Funeral
CHAPTER XI
"THE OLD ORDER CHANGES" 209
Intellectual Apathy of Conservatives--A Novel Which Attempts to
Harmonize Socialist Principles with Conservative
CHAPTER XII
CYPRUS, FLORENCE, HUNGARY 226
A Winter in Cyprus--Florence--Siena--Italian
Castles--Cannes--Some Foreign Royalties--Visit During the
Following Spring to Princess Batthyany in Hungary
CHAPTER XIII
TWO WORKS ON SOCIAL POLITICS 255
The Second Lord Lytton at Knebworth--"Ouida"--Conservative
Torpor as to Social Politics--Two Books: _Labor and the Popular
Welfare_ and _Aristocracy and Evolution_--Letters from Herbert
Spencer
CHAPTER XIV
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY AND FICTION 270
The So-called Anglican Crisis--_Doctrine and Doctrinal
Disruption_--Three Novels: _A Human Document_, _The Heart of
Life_, _The Individualist_--Three Works on the Philosophy of
Religion: _Religion as a Credible Doctrine_, _The Veil of the
Temple_, _The Reconstruction of Belief_--Passages from _The Veil
of the Temple_
CHAPTER XV
_From the Highlands to New York_ 292
Summer on the Borders of Caithness--A Two Months' Yachting
Cruise--The Orkneys and the Outer Hebrides--An Unexpected
Political Summons
CHAPTER XVI
POLITICS AND SOCIETY IN AMERICA 308
Addresses on Socialism--Arrangements for Their
Delivery--American Society in Long Island and New
York--Harvard--Prof. William James--President
Roosevelt--Chicago--Second Stay in New York--New York to
Brittany--_A Critical Examination of Socialism_--Propaganda in
England
CHAPTER XVII
THE AUTHOR'S WORKS SUMMARIZED 335
A Boy's Conservatism--Poetic Ambitions--The Philosophy of
Religious Belief--The Philosophy of Industrial
Conservatism--Intellectual Torpor of Conservatives--Final
Treatises and Fiction
CHAPTER XVIII
LITERATURE AND ACTION 343
Literature as Speech Made Permanent--All Written Speech Not
Literature--The Essence of Literature for Its Own Sake--Prose as
a Fine Art--Some Interesting Aspects of Literature as an End in
Itself--Their Comparative Triviality--No Literature Great Which
Is Not More Than Literature--Literature as a Vehicle of
Religion--Lucretius--_The Reconstruction of Belief_
INDEX 373
ILLUSTRATIONS
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE _Frontispiece_
ROBERT BROWNING _Facing p. 30_
THOMAS CARLYLE " 64
JOHN RUSKIN " 86
OUIDA " 126
CARDINAL MANNING " 134
HERBERT SPENCER " 266
THEODORE ROOSEVELT " 318
MEMOIRS OF LIFE AND LITERATURE
CHAPTER I
FAMILY ANTECEDENTS
The Mallocks of Cockington--Some Old Devonshire Houses--A
Child's Outlook on Life
"Memoirs" is a word which, as commonly used, includes books of very
various kinds, ranging from St. Augustine's _Confessions_ to the gossip
of Lady Dorothy Nevill. Such books, however, have all one family
likeness. They all of them represent life as seen by the writers from a
personal point of view; and in this sense it is to the family of Memoirs
that the present book belongs.
But the incidents or aspects of life which a book of memoirs describes
represent something more than themselves. Whether the writer is
conscious of the fact or no, they represent a circle of circumstances,
general as well as private, to which his individual character reacts;
and his reactions, as he records them, may in this way acquire a meaning
and unity which have their origin in the age--in the general conditions
and movements which his personal recollections cover--rather than in
any qualities or adventures which happen to be exclusively his own. Thus
if any writer attempts to do what I have done myself--namely, to examine
or depict in books of widely different kinds such aspects and problems
of life--social, philosophical, religious, and economic--as have in turn
engrossed his special attention, he may venture to hope that a memoir of
his own activities will be taken as representing an age, rather than a
personal story, his personal story being little more than a variant of
one which many readers will recognize as common to themselves and him.
Now for all reflecting persons whose childhood reaches back to the
middle of the nineteenth century, the most remarkable feature of the
period which constitutes the age for themselves cannot fail to be a
sequence of remarkable and momentous changes--changes alike in the
domains of science, religion, and society; and if any one of such
persons should be asked, "Changes from what?" his answer will be, if he
knows how to express himself, "Changes from the things presented to him
by his first remembered experiences, and by him taken for granted," such
as the teaching, religious or otherwise, received by him, and the
general constitution of society as revealed to him by his own
observation and the ways and conversation of his elders. These are the
things which provide the child's life with its starting point, and these
are determined by the facts of family tradition and parentage. It is,
therefore, with a description of such family facts that the author of a
memoir like the present ought properly to begin.
The Mallocks, who have for nearly three hundred years been settled at
Cockington Court, near to what is now Torquay, descend from a William
Malet, Mallek, or Mallacke, who was, about the year 1400, possessed of
estates lying between Lyme and Axmouth. This individual, according to
the genealogists of the Heralds' College, was a younger son of Sir
Baldwyn Malet of Enmore, in the county of Dorset. His descendants, at
all events, from this time onward became connected by marriage with such
well-known West Country families as the Pynes, the Drakes, the
Churchills, the Yonges of Colyton, the Willoughbys of Payhembury, the
Trevelyans, the Tuckfields (subsequently Hippesleys), the Strodes of
Newnham, the Aclands, the Champernownes, and the Bullers. Between the
reigns of Henry VII and Elizabeth they provided successive Parliaments
with members for Lyme and Poole. One of them, Roger, during the reign of
the latter sovereign, found his way to Exeter, where, as a banker or
"goldsmith," he laid the foundations of what was then a very great
fortune, and built himself a large town house, of which one room is
still intact, with the queen's arms and his own juxtaposed on the
paneling. The fortune accumulated by him was, during the next two
reigns, notably increased by a second Roger, his son, in partnership
with Sir Ferdinando Gorges, military governor of Plymouth, who had
somehow become possessed of immense territories in Maine, and was a
prominent figure in the history of English trade with America.
The second Roger, about the year 1640, purchased the Cockington property
from Sir Henry Cary, a Cavalier, who appears to have been a typical
sufferer from his devotion to the royal cause. Roger Mallock was,
indeed, so far Royalist himself that he entered a protest against the
execution of Charles; but both he and his relatives also were evidently
in sympathy otherwise with the Parliamentary party; for, during the
Protectorate, Elizabeth Mallock, his cousin, married Lord Blayney, an
Irishman, who was personally attached to Cromwell; while Rawlin Mallock,
this second Roger's son (who had married Susannah, Sir Ferdinando
Gorges's daughter), was Whig member for Totnes, twice Whig member for
Ashburton, and was one of the small group of peers and country gentlemen
who welcomed William of Orange when he disembarked at Brixham. Rawlin's
heir was a boy--beautiful, as a picture of him in the guise of a little
Cavalier shows--who died a minor in the year 1699, but who, during his
brief life, as a contemporary chronicler mentions, had distinguished
himself by an accomplishment extremely rare among the young country
gentlemen of his own day--indeed, we may add of our own--that is to day,
a precocious knowledge of Hebrew.
The young scholar was succeeded by a third Rawlin, his cousin, a
personage of a very different type, who, in concert with his next-door
neighbor, Mr. Cary of Torre Abbey, added to the pursuits of a Squire
Western the enterprise of a smuggler in a big way of business. He was,
moreover, a patron of the turf, having a large stud farm on Dartmoor,
with results which would have been disastrous for himself if the wounds
inflicted by the world had not been healed through his connection with
the Established Church. He was fortunately the patron of no less than
sixteen livings, or cures of souls, by the gradual sale of most of which
he managed to meet, as a Christian should do, the claims of his lay
creditors. Of the bottles of port with which he stocked the Cockington
cellars two, bearing the date of 1745, still remain--or till lately
remained--unopened. Through the successor of this typical Georgian the
property passed to my grandfather, of whom my father was a younger son.
Like many other younger sons, my father, to use a pious phrase, suffered
himself to be "put into the Church," where two of the livings still
owned by his family awaited him. These, to his temporal advantage, he
presently exchanged for another. His health, however, since I can
remember him, never permitted him to exert himself in the performance of
divine service. Indeed, his ecclesiastical interests were architectural
rather than pastoral. He accordingly, after a brief acquaintance with
his new parishioners, committed them to the spiritual care of a
stalwart and well-born curate, and bought a picturesque retreat about
ten or twelve miles away, embowered in ivy, and overlooking the river
Exe, where he spent his time in enlarging the house and gardens, and in
planting slopes and terraces, about a quarter of a mile in length, with
what were then very rare trees. He was subsequently given for life the
use of another house, Denbury Manor, of which I shall speak presently,
which I myself much preferred, and with which my own early recollections
are much more closely associated.
My mother was a daughter of the Ven. Archdeacon Froude, and sister of
three distinguished brothers--Hurrell Froude, prominent as a leader of
the Tractarian movement, Antony Froude the historian, and William
Froude, who, though his name is less generally known, exercised, as will
be shown presently, an influence on public affairs greater than that of
many cabinet ministers. The Archdeacon of Totnes, their father, was a
Churchman of a type now extinct as the dodo. Born in the early part of
the reign of George III, and inheriting a considerable fortune, he was
in his youth addicted to pursuits a proficiency in which is now regarded
by no one as absolutely essential to a fitness for Holy Orders. He was
famous for his horses, and also for his feats of horsemanship, one of
these being the jumping of a five-barred gate without losing either of
two guinea pieces which were placed at starting between his knees and
the saddle. To the accomplishments of an equestrian he added those of a
dilettante. He was an architect, a collector of pictures, a herald and
archaeologist, and also (as Ruskin declared, to whom some of his
drawings were exhibited) an artist whose genius was all but that of a
master. Like other young men of fortune, he made what was then called
the "grand tour of Europe," his sketchbooks showing that he traveled as
far as Corfu, and subsequently, when he settled for life as the vicar of
Dartington parish, he was regarded as one of the most enlightened
country gentlemen of the district, active in improving the roads, which,
till his time, were abominable, and in bringing poachers to punishment
if not to repentance.
Within a short walk of the parsonage, over the brow of a wooded hill, is
another house, which in the scenery of my childhood was an object no
less familiar--Dartington Hall, the home of the Champernowne family,
with which, by marriage and otherwise, my father's was very closely
connected. Yet another house--it has been mentioned already as
associated with my childhood also--is Denbury Manor, with its stucco
chimneys and pinnacles, its distance from Dartington being something
like eight miles. These four houses--Denbury Manor, Dartington
Parsonage, Dartington Hall, and Cockington Court--all lying within a
circle of some twelve miles in diameter, represent, together with their
adjuncts, the material aspects of the life with which I was first
familiar. Let me give a brief sketch of each, taking Denbury first.
Denbury Manor at the end of the eighteenth century was converted and
enlarged into a dower-house for my mother's grandmother, but was
occupied when first I knew it by my great-aunt, her daughter, an old
Miss Margaret Froude. To judge from a portrait done of her in her youth
by Downman, she must have been then a very engaging _ingenue_; but when
I remember her she looked a hundred and fifty. She was, indeed, when she
died very nearly a hundred, and her house and its surroundings now
figure in my recollections as things of the eighteenth century which,
preserved in all their freshness, had hardly been touched by the years
which by that time had followed it. The house, which was of considerable
antiquity, had been, for my great-grandmother's benefit, modernized or
Elizabethanized under the influence of Horace Walpole and Wyat. It was
backed by a rookery of old and enormous elms. It was approached on one
side by a fine avenue of limes, and was otherwise surrounded by gardens
with gray walls or secretive laurel hedges. Here was a water tank in the
form of a Strawberry Hill chapel. Here was a greenhouse unaltered since
the days of George II. Everywhere, though everything was antique, there
were signs of punctilious care, and morning by morning a bevy of female
villagers would be raking the gravel paths and turning them into
weedless silver. The front door, heavy with nails, would be opened by
an aged footman, his cheeks pink like an apple, and his white silk
stockings and his livery always faultless. Within were old Turkey
carpets, glossy, but not worn with use, heavy Chippendale chairs, great
Delf jugs with the monogram of George II on them, a profusion of
Oriental china, and endless bowls of potpourri. On the shelves of
whatnots were books of long-forgotten eighteenth-century plays. In one
of the sitting rooms was a magnificent portrait by Reynolds of Miss
Froude's mother. It represented her playing on a guitar, and on a table
beneath it reposed the guitar itself. Here and there lay one of the
ivory hands with which powdered ladies once condescended to scratch
themselves. There were shining inkstands whose drawers were still
stocked with the wafers used for sealing letters in the days of Lydia
Languish. In another room, called "the little parlor," and commonly used
for breakfast, an old gentleman by Opie smiled from one of the walls,
and saw one thing only which he might have seen there in his boyhood--a
small piano by Broadwood, always fastidiously polished, as if it had
just come from the shop, and bearing the date of 1780. Many houses
abound in similar furnishings. The characteristic of Denbury was that it
contained nothing else. These things were there, not as survivals of the
past, but as parts of a past which for the inmates had never ceased to
be the present. They were there as the natural appurtenances of a lady
who, so far as I knew, had never been near a railway till a special
train was run to convey mourners to her funeral.
Miss Froude matched her surroundings. During her later years she was
never visible till midday, by which time she would, in an upstairs
drawing room, be found occupying a cushionless chair at a large central
table, with a glass of port at her right hand and a volume of sermons at
her left. On either side of her stood a faithful attendant, one being a
confidential maid, the other a Miss Drake--an old, mittened companion,
hardly younger in appearance than herself--both of whom watched her with
eyes of solicitous reverence, and seemed always ready to collapse into
quasi-religious curtsies. Here she would receive such visitors as
happened to be staying in the house, and subsequently reverential
villagers, who appealed to her for aid or sympathy.
Dartington Parsonage was in one sense more modern than Denbury, having
been for the most part constructed by the Archdeacon himself. Originally
a diminutive dwelling--a relic of medieval times--he enlarged it to the
dimensions of a substantial country house, surrounding a court, and
connected with a medley of outbuildings--servants' offices, stables,
barns, and coach houses, one of these last containing as a solitary
recluse a high-hung yellow chariot, lined with yellow morocco, in which
the Archdeacon had been wont to travel before the battle of Waterloo,
and in which his grandchildren were never weary of swinging themselves.
If the parsonage and its appurtenances can in any sense be called
modern, they represented ideas and conditions which are far enough away
now. There was nothing about them more modern than the early days of
Miss Austen. The dining-room sideboard, with its long row of knife
boxes, whose sloping lids when lifted showed a glimmering of silver
handles, would have seemed familiar to Mr. Knightly, Mr. Woodhouse, and
Sir Thomas Bertram. Opposite the dining room was a library, very
carefully kept, the contents of which were a curious mixture. Besides
great folio editions of the classics and the Christian Fathers, were
collections of the ephemeral literature of the days of Charles II,
notable among which were lampoons on Nell Gwyn and her royal
lover--works which the Archdeacon certainly never bought, and which must
have come to him through his mother from the Cavalier family of
Copplestone. In the hall was a marble table bearing a bust of
Demosthenes. In the drawing-room were watercolor drawings by artists
such as Prout and Stansfield; a group of Dutch paintings, including a
fine Van Ostade; sofas, on which Miss Austen might, have sat by the
Prince Regent; and scrap-work screens on which faded portraits and
landscapes were half eclipsed by quotations from _Elegant Extracts_.
From the drawing-room windows, in my mother's earlier days, might often
have been seen the figure of an old head gardener and factotum, George
Diggins by name, bending over beds of geraniums, who was born in the
reign of George II, who had passed his youth as a charcoal burner in
woods not far from Ugbrooke, the seat of the Catholic Cliffords, and who
often recounted how, on mysterious nights, "four horses and a coach,
with the old Lord Clifford inside it, would come tumbling out of the
woods into the road like so many packs of wool."
Dartington Hall--very well known to architects as the work of John
Holland, Duke of Exeter, in the reign of Richard II--passed by exchange
to the Champernownes in the reign of Henry VIII, and was originally an
enormous structure, inclosing two quadrangles. A large part of it, as
may be seen from old engravings, was falling into ruins in the days of
George II, but its principal feature was intact till the beginning of
the nineteenth century. This was one of the finest baronial halls in
England, seventy feet by forty, with a roof resembling that of the great
hall at Westminster. The roof, however, at that time showing signs of
impending collapse, it was taken down by my grandfather in the year
1810, and only the bare walls and the pointed windows remain. The
inhabited portion, however, is still of considerable extent, one of its
frontages--two hundred and thirty feet in length--abutting so closely on
a churchyard that the dead need hardly turn in their graves to peer in
through the lower windows at faded wall-papers, bedroom doors, and
endless yards of carpet. The interior, as I remember it, did not differ
from that of many old country houses. There were one or two great rooms,
a multitude of family portraits, and landscapes, marbles and coins
brought from Italy by a traveled and dilettante ancestor. It was a great
rendezvous for numerous Buller relations. It was, as was the parsonage
also, a nest of old domestics, all born in the parish, and it included
among its other inmates a ghost, who was called "the Countess," and who
took from time to time alarming strolls along the passages.
It remains to add a word or two with regard to Cockington Court. At the
time when my father was born in it, it was the heart of a neighborhood
remotely and even primitively rural, and fifty years later, when I can
first remember it, its immediate surroundings were unchanged. A few
miles away the modern world had, indeed, begun to assert itself in the
multiplying villas of Torquay, but on the Cockington property, which
includes the district of Chelston, few dwellings existed which had not
been there in the days of Charles II. Torquay, which at the beginning of
the Napoleonic wars was nothing more than a cluster of fishermen's huts,
owed its rise to the presence of the British fleet in Torbay, and the
need of accommodation on shore for officers' wives and families. My
grandfather built two houses, Livermead House and Livermead Cottage, in
answer to this demand. Both were for personal friends, one of them
being the first Lord St. Vincent, the other being Sir John Colbourne,
afterward Lord Seaton. But though elaborate plans were subsequently put
before him for turning the surrounding slopes into a pretentious and
symmetrical watering place, the construction of no new residence was
permitted by himself or his successor till somewhere about the year
1865, when a building lease was granted by the latter to one of his own
connections.
Meanwhile, on adjacent properties, belonging to the Palks and Carys,
Torquay had been developing into what became for a time the most famous
and fashionable of the winter resorts of England, Cockington still
remaining a quiet and undisturbed Arcadia.
But the real or nominal progress of five-and-forty years has brought
about changes which my grandfather, blind to his own interests,
resisted. To-day, as the train, having passed the station of Torre,
proceeds toward that of Paignton, the traveler sees, looking inland at
the Cockington and Chelston slopes, a throng of villas intermixed with
the relics of ancient hedgerows. If, alighting at Torquay station, he
mounts the hill above it by what in my childhood was a brambled and
furtive lane, he will find on either side of him villas and villa
gardens, till at length he is brought to a ridge overlooking a secluded
valley. For some distance villas will still obscure his view, but
presently these end. Below him he will see steep fields descending into
a quiet hollow, the opposite slopes being covered or crowned with woods,
and against them he will see smoke wreaths straying upward from
undiscerned chimneys. A little farther on, the road, now wholly rural,
dips downward, and Cockington village reveals itself, not substantially
changed, with its thatch and its red mud walls, from what it had been
more than two hundred years ago. Its most prominent feature is the
blacksmith's forge, which, unaltered except for repairs, is of much
greater antiquity. It is said that, as a contrast between the old world
and the new, few scenes in England have been more often photographed
than this. Passing the blacksmith's forge, and mounting under the shade
of trees, the road leads to a lodge, the grounds of Cockington Court,
and the church which very nearly touches it.
The house as it now stands--a familiar object to tourists--is merely a
portion of what once was a larger structure. It was partly built by the
Carys in the year of the Spanish Armada. Roger Mallock reconstructed it
some seventy years later. It formed in his days, and up to those of my
grandfather, one side of a square, entered between two towers, and was
surrounded by a deer park of four or five hundred acres. Toward the end
of the eighteenth century, however, agricultural land then rising in
value, my grandfather, who threw away one fortune by refusing to have a
town on his property, had been shrewd enough to get rid of his deer,
and turned most of his parkland into farms. He also destroyed the
forecourt of his house and a range of antique offices, considerably
reducing at the same time the size of the main building by depriving it
of its top story and substituting a dwarfish parapet for what had once
been its eight gables. The interior suffered at his hands to an even
greater extent. A hall with a minstrels' gallery was turned by him into
several rooms as commonplace as it is possible to imagine. Indeed little
of special interest survived him but some fine Italian ceilings, the
most curious of which exists no longer, a paneled dining-room of the
reign of William and Mary, a number of portraits dating from the days of
James I onward, and a wall paper representing life-size savages under
palm trees, which was part of the plunder of a French vessel during the
time of the Napoleonic wars. To this meager list, however, up to my
father's time might have been added another item of a more eloquent and
more unusual kind--namely, a gilded coach, in which, according to
village tradition, an old Madam Mallock (as she was called) used to be
dragged by six horses along the execrable lanes of the neighborhood for
her daily airing in the early part of the reign of George III. It is a
great pity that, of all the appliances of life, carriages are those
which are least frequently preserved. The reason doubtless is that they
take up a good deal of room, and become absurdly old-fashioned long
before they become interesting. The old coach of which I speak was
bequeathed, with other heirlooms, to my father, who, I may say without
filial impiety, proved altogether unworthy of it. He left it in a shed
near a pond, into which it subsequently fell, its _disjecta membra_
being presumably at the bottom still.
But whatever the house may have lost in the way of hereditary contents,
the church contained, in my childhood, other symbols of the past--they
have now likewise vanished--which spoke of "the family" rather than the
mysteries of the Christian faith. The family shrouded its devotions, and
sometimes its slumbers, in a pew which was furnished with a large
fireplace, and eclipsed with its towering walls something like half the
altar. All the panels of the western gallery were emblazoned with coats
of arms and quarterings, and all the available wall space was dark with
family hatchments. One afternoon, some five-and-forty years ago, a
daughter of the house, who happened to be alone indoors, was alarmed by
a summons to show herself and receive the Queen of Holland, who was then
staying at Torquay, and who wished to inspect an old English house and
its appurtenances. My cousin, who took her into the church, and who was
somewhat confused by the presence of so august a visitor, explained the
hatchments, with regard to which the queen questioned her, by saying
that one was put up whenever a member of the Mallock family married.
As for myself, these solemn heraldic objects vaguely imbued me with a
sense, of which I took long in divesting myself, that my own family was
one of the most important and permanent institutions of the country.
They were otherwise associated in my memory with a long succession of
Christmases, when holly berries enlivened their frames and peeped over
the walls of the pew where my elders drowsed, and my coevals were
sustained during the sermon by visions of the plum pudding and crackers
which would reward them in a near hereafter. I can still remember how,
before these joys began, we would group ourselves in the dining-room
windows, peering at distant woods, in which keepers still set man traps,
or watching the village schoolchildren on their way from church
homeward, making with their crimson cloaks a streak of color as they
followed one another across slopes of snow.
The feelings excited by a landscape such as this bore a subtle
resemblance to those produced in myself by the heraldries which thronged
the church. From the windows, indeed, of all the houses of which I have
just been speaking the prospect was morally, if not visually, the same.
They all looked out, as though it were the unquestioned order of things,
on wooded seclusions pricked by manorial chimneys or on lodges and gray
park walls, while somewhere beyond these last lurked the thatch of
contented cottages, at the doors of which, when a member of "the family"
passed, women and children would curtsy and men touch their forelocks.
Here some persons may be tempted to interpose the remark that the aspect
which things thus wore for ourselves was in one respect quite illusory.
They may say that the idyllic contentment which we thus attributed to
the cottagers was the very reverse of the truth, and that the thatch of
their dwellings, however pleasing to the eye, really shrouded a misery
to which history shows few parallels. Such an objection, even if
correct, would, however, be here irrelevant; for I am dealing now not
with things as they actually were, but merely with the impressions
produced by them on childish minds, and more particularly on my own.
Nevertheless, the objection in itself is of quite sufficient importance
to call, even here, for some incidental attention; and how far, in this
respect, our impressions were true or false will appear in the following
chapter.