A PRIVATE TUTOR DE LUXE
Early Youth Under a Private Tutor--Poetry--Premonitions of
Modern Liberalism
The tutor of whom I have spoken was the Rev. W. B. Philpot, a favorite
pupil of Doctor Arnold's at Rugby, an intimate friend of Tennyson's, and
himself a devotee of the Muses. His domed forehead was massive, his
features were delicately chiseled, and his eyes were a clear gray. His
back hair--the only hair he had got--showed a slight tendency to assume
picturesque and flowing curves on the collars of his well-made coats;
and, having heard from my father that I, too, was a poet, he declared
himself eager to welcome me, not only as a disciple, but also as a
valued friend. Mr. Philpot lived at Littlehampton, where he occupied a
most capacious house. It was the principal house in a very old-fashioned
terrace, which faced a sandy common, and enjoyed in those days an
uninterrupted view of miles of beach and the racing waves of the sea.
Mr. Philpot's disciples numbered from ten to twelve. They had, for the
most part, been removed from Harrow or Eton, by reason of no worse fault
than a signal inclination to indolence; and though, even under their
preceptor's genial and scholarly auspices, none of them except myself
showed much inclination for study, we formed together an agreeable and
harmonious party, much of its amenity being due to the presence of Mrs.
Philpot, his wife, whose brother, Professor Conington, was then the most
illustrious representative of Latin learning at Oxford.
We enjoyed, under Mr. Philpot's care, the amplest domestic comforts, and
we enjoyed, under our own care, almost unlimited credit at every shop in
the town. We had carriages, the hire of which went down in Mr. Philpot's
account, whenever we wanted them for expeditions; and we would often
drive out in the warm after-dinner twilights to a tea garden three miles
away, where we lingered among the scent of roses till the bell of some
remote church tower sounded, through the dewy quiet, its nine notes to
the stars. We had boats on the Arun, a stream on which our oars would
take us sometimes beyond Amberly, and not bring us back till midnight.
On other occasions we would, like Tennyson's hero, "nourish a youth
sublime" in wandering on the nocturnal beach, and, pre-equipped with
towels, would bathe in the liquid moonlight.
The Littlehampton season, so far as visitors were concerned, was summer,
and from the middle of May onward various ladies of ornamental and
interesting aspect would make their appearance on the pavement of Beach
Terrace, or, seen on the balconies of houses which had just unclosed
their shutters, would trouble and enliven the atmosphere with
suggestions of vague adventures. Some of these we came to know, as Mr.
Philpot and his wife had many mundane acquaintances. Others--and indeed
most of them--remained tantalizing mysteries to the end. At all events
they filled the air with the subtle pollen of a romance which a closer
familiarity with them might very possibly have destroyed.
The effect on myself of such influences was presently betrayed by the
fact that poetry, as understood by Pope, no longer satisfied me. I
gradually submitted to the dominion of Keats, Browning, and Matthew
Arnold. Even at Denbury, in my most conservative days, I had so far
escaped from the atmosphere of Pope's Pastorals that I had described a
beautiful valley in which I would often sequester myself as a place--
Where no man's voice, or any voice makes stir,
Save sometimes through the leafy loneliness
The long loose laugh of the wild woodpecker.
One of my fellow pupils, whose youth had an air of manhood, and who
played with much expression on the cornet, confided to me, on returning
from a summer holiday, his adventures on the Lake of Como, where,
resting on his oars, he had agitated with his musical notes the pulses
of a fair companion. "Now there," he said, "you have something which, if
you tried, you might manage to make a verse about." I tried, and the
result was this:
The stars are o'er our heads in hollow skies,
In hollow skies the stars beneath our boat,
Between the stars of two infinities
Midway upon a gleaming film we float.
My lips are on the sounding horn;
The sounding horn with music fills.
Faint echoes backward from the world are born,
Tongued by yon distant zone of slumbering hills.
The world spreads wide on every side,
But cold and dark it seems to me.
What care I on this charmed tide
For aught save those far stars and thee?
I accomplished, however, such feats of imagination, not on my friend's
behalf only, but on my own also. Readers of _Martin Chuzzlewhit_ will
remember how "Baily Junior," who was once bootboy at Mrs. Todger's
boarding-house, imagined that Mrs. Gamp was in love with him, and that
her life was blighted by the suspicion that such a passion was hopeless.
I, in common with other imaginative boys, was frequently beatified by
the magic of a not unlike illusion. My practical hopes for the future,
so far as I troubled to form any, were to enter the diplomatic service
as soon as I left Oxford, and it seemed to me that this or that
distinguished and beautiful lady, old enough to be my mother, would
meanwhile be blighted by some hopeless passion for myself, or
else--what, in my opinion, was a still more exciting alternative--that I
should, like another Byron, be blighted into renown through her
treachery by a misplaced passion for _her_. As I paced the sands at
Littlehampton, I pictured myself as having discovered her faithlessness
on the eve of my own departure for the Embassy at Constantinople, and I
addressed to her the following epistle, which I could not, with all my
ingenuity, manage to protract beyond the two opening stanzas:
For you the ballroom's jaded glow--
The gems unworthy of your hair.
For me the milk-white domes that blow
Their bubbles to the orient air.
Your heart at dawn in curtained ease
Shall ache through dreams that are not rest.
But mine shall leap to meet the seas
That broke against Leander's breast.
Such dreams are not more absurd than those of the French Jacobins, who
thought themselves Gracchus or Brutus; and they were accompanied when I
was at Littlehampton by the growth of other preoccupations, which
related to matters very different from the romance of individual
adolescence. Mr. Philpot, in his own tastes, and also in his choice of
pupils, was fastidious to a degree, which perhaps would be out of date
to-day, and had actually been known to apologize, under his breath, for
the fact that one of his flock--a singularly handsome youth and heir to
an enormous fortune--came of a family which "was still distinctly in
business." But he betrayed, at the same time, strong Radical leanings.
Indeed, through him I first became aware that Radicalism meant more than
some perverse absurdity of the ignorant. He completely bewildered and at
the same time amused his pupils by taking in a paper called _The
Beehive_, one of the earliest of the "Labor organs" of England; and from
this mine of wisdom he would on occasion quote. To most of us the views
expressed by him seemed no more than comic oddities, but they were to
myself so far a definite irritant that I devised, though I never showed
them to him, a series of pictures called "The Radical's Progress," in
which the hero began as a potboy in a public house, and ended as an
overdressed ruffian, waving a tall silk hat and throwing rotten eggs at
Conservative voters from a cart. A taste of Mr. Philpot's equalitarian
sentiments was given to us one day at luncheon, the occasion being his
wife's commendation of a celebrated Sussex bootmaker who had just called
for orders. "I like that man," she said. "He is always so civil and
respectful." "Mary Jane! Mary Jane!" said Mr. Philpot, clearing his
throat, and speaking from the other end of the table, "that
respectfulness of yours is a quality to which I myself attach very
little importance." In view of this speech we felt considerable
satisfaction when, a few hours later, the day being the 5th of November,
a disturbance was made by some boys at the front door, and Mr. Philpot,
snatching up a tall hat, went out to appease the storm by the serene
majesty of his presence. He was far from gratified when the immediate
result of his intervention was to elicit the disrespectful cry of "Hit
'n on the bloody drum."
But, besides the novelty, as we thought it, of his vague democratic
opinions, he exhibited what to me was at least equally novel--namely, a
liberalism before unknown to me with regard to theological doctrine. He
never obtruded this on us in any systematic way; but on not infrequent
occasions he solemnly gave us to understand that dissenters enjoyed the
means of salvation no less fully than Churchmen; that sacraments were
mere symbols useful for edification according to varying circumstances;
that sacerdotal orders were mere certificates of the fitness of
individuals for the office of Christian ministers, and that everything
in the nature of dogmatic authority was due to, and tainted with, the
apostacy of Babylonian Rome. To myself all this was shocking in an
extreme degree, and I began to ask myself the question, which might
otherwise not have occurred to me, of whether the Church of Rome was not
perhaps the one true religion, after all.
These movements of the spirit on my part led to the following incident.
Among Mr. Philpot's pupils was a shy and very delicate boy, whose
parents took a house at Littlehampton, and with whom he lived. His
father was a fire-eating Irish baronet, who might have walked out of the
pages of one of Lever's novels. His diet was as meager as that of an
Indian fakir, though not otherwise resembling it. It consisted of rum
and milk; and his favorite amusement was lying down on his bed and
shooting with a pistol at the wick of a lighted candle. His wife--a lady
of gentle and somewhat sad demeanor--one day took it into her head to
join the Catholic Church; and Mr. Philpot hastened, as soon as he heard
the news, to ask her, in the name of common sense and of conscience,
what could have induced her to take a step so awful. Her answer, so he
informed me afterward, was that I had told her that it was the best
thing she could do. I had no recollection of having tendered to her any
such momentous advice, and Mr. Philpot, who hardly could help smiling,
acquitted me of playing intentionally the part of a disguised Jesuit. I
must, however, have said something on behalf of the mystical Babylon,
for not long afterward I was busy with a theological poem, prominent in
which were the two following lines:
Oh, mother, or city of the sevenfold throne,
We sit beside the severing sea and mourn--
and by way of correcting such defects in my sentiments Mr. Philpot lent
me a work by Archer Butler, a Christian Platonist, who would provide me,
in his opinion, with a religious philosophy incomparably more rational
than the Roman. This work had the result of directing me to certain old
translations of Plotinus and other Neoplatonists of Alexandria; and my
dominant idea for a time was that in Alexandrian mysticism Anglicans
would discover a rock, firmly based, on which they would bring Rome to
her knees, and conquer the whole world.
But such juvenile theologies, and the secret troubles connected with
them, did not seriously interfere with the adventurous optimism of
youth. They did but give a special flavor to the winds blown from the
sea, to the suggestions of the sunsets on which the eyes of youth
looked, and mixed themselves with the verses of Browning, Matthew
Arnold, and Shelley. But a yet more successful rival to the speculations
of Archer Butler and Plotinus was, in my own case, another and a new
poet, who had at that time just made himself famous. This poet was
Swinburne, who had recently given to the world his first _Poems and
Ballads_. That volume, on the ground that it was an outrage on morals
and decency, had been received, when originally published, with such a
howl of execration that the publishers hastily withdrew it, and for some
time it was unobtainable; but at length another firm found courage
enough to undertake its reissue. To Mr. Philpot, who knew it merely by
extracts, the mere mention of this volume seemed to be something in the
nature of an indecency. But there is always an attraction in the
forbidden. I dreamed of this volume, from which I had seen extracts
likewise; and at last a chance came to me of securing an apple from the
boughs of this replanted tree of knowledge.
Among our various dissipations were occasional excursions to Brighton,
and on one of these I was accompanied by a fellow pupil whose family had
a house there in one of the then fashionable squares. The family was
absent, but the house was open, and my friend proposed that we should
sleep there and make a night of it. We accordingly telegraphed to Mr.
Philpot that we should be back next day by breakfast time, and arranged
to dine early, and spend the evening at the play. As we walked to the
theater we found the shops still open, and we paused to look for a
moment at the windows of Treacher's Library. In a long row of volumes I
saw one bound in green. Its gilt lettering glittered, and the gaslight
revealed to me the reissued poems of Swinburne. I went in and bought it
and entered the dress circle hugging this priceless treasure. The play,
I believe, had something to do with racing, but I hardly looked at the
stage. My eyes and attention were magnetized by the green object on my
knee. I occasionally peeped at its pages; but the light, while the play
was in progress, was too dim to render the print legible. Between the
acts, however, I began to decipher stanzas such as the following, and
notes new to the world invaded my ears like magic:
The sea gives her shells to the shingle,
The earth gives her streams to the sea,
or again:
As the waves of the ebb drawing seaward
When their hollows are full of the night.
When had words, I asked myself, ever made music such as this? I felt by
the time I got back to my friend's door that:
I on honeydew had fed,
And drunk the milk of paradise.
This magic still remained with me when, my days at Littlehampton being
ended, I went at length to Oxford. But meanwhile to my conditions at
home a new element was added, by which the scope of my experiences was
at once greatly enlarged.
I have mentioned already that, during the first sixty years of the
growth of Torquay, the owners of Cockington had preserved their rural
seclusion intact, having refused, during that long period, to permit the
erection of more than two villas on their property. But somewhere about
the year 1860 a solitary exception was made in favor of Mr. William
Froude, my mother's eldest brother, to whom, by my paternal uncle, a
lease was granted of a certain number of acres on the summit of what was
then a wooded and absolutely rural hill. Here he erected a house of
relatively considerable size, from which, as a distant spectacle,
Torquay was visible beyond a tract of intervening treetops. It was
nearing completion at the time when I was first under Mr. Philpot's
care. My father, being a complete recluse, and my kindred, whether at
Cockington Court or otherwise, confining their intimacies to hereditary
friends and connections, I found few fresh excitements at their houses
or his beyond such as I could spin for myself, like a spider, out of my
own entrails. It was, therefore, for me a very agreeable circumstance
that presently in Chelston Cross, while I was still under Mr. Philpot's
care, I was provided with a second home during a large part of my
holidays, and subsequently of my Oxford vacations, where the stir of the
outer world was very much more in evidence.
Distinguished as a man of science, a mathematician, and a classical
scholar, Mr. Froude possessed the most fascinating manners imaginable.
His wife, the daughter of an old-world Devonshire notable who once owned
the borough of Dartmouth, returning two members for it, he himself being
always one, was a woman of remarkable intellect, of a singularly genial
shrewdness, and of manners attractive to every one with whom she might
come in contact. Indeed, no two persons could have been more happily
qualified than Mr. and Mrs. William Froude, together with their daughter
(subsequently Baroness A. von Hugel), to render their house a center of
interesting and intellectual society, and their circle of friends was
widened by two adventitious circumstances. Mrs. Froude, under the
influence of Newman, who was her frequent and intimate correspondent,
had entered the Catholic Church, her children following her example, and
the freemasonry of a common faith resulted in closely connecting her and
hers with various old Catholic families and many distinguished
converts; while Mr. Froude, at the time to which I now refer, was
becoming, through his indulgence in purely accidental taste, a figure in
the world of national, and even of international, affairs.
His favorite recreation was yachting, and one of his possessions was a
sailing yacht. He was thus, as a man of alert observation, led to pay
special attention to the relation of a vessel's lines to its behavior
under different conditions in respect of its stability and speed, and
the project occurred to him of testing his rough conclusions by means of
miniature models, these being placed in some small body of water and
then submitted to systematic experiments. Accordingly, soon after he had
settled himself at Chelston Cross, he proceeded to lease a field which
adjoined his garden, and constructed in it a sort of covered canal,
along which models of various designs were towed, the towing-machine
recording the various results by diagrams. The discoveries which Mr.
Froude thus made soon proved so remarkable that Edward, Duke of Somerset
(then First Lord of the Admiralty), secured for him a government grant,
in order that his operations might be extended, the whole of the earlier
expenses having been borne by Mr. Froude himself. The enterprise soon
attracted the attention of other governments also; Admiral Popoff, on
behalf of the Tsar, having come all the way from Russia to visit Mr.
Froude in connection with it. But the pilgrims to Chelston Cross were
not naval experts only. Torquay was at that time nearing its social
zenith, and the rumor that Mr. Froude was conducting a series of
mysterious experiments which bade fair to revolutionize the naval
architecture of the world stirred interest in many men of
mark--statesmen and others who were far from being naval experts, and
also of ladies, many of them with charming eyes whose attention alone
was, in my opinion at all events, sufficient to throw a halo of success
round any experiment which excited it.
All of these, masculine and feminine alike, were sensible of the charm
of Mr. William Froude and his family; and for many years, even in
London, it would have been difficult to find a house more frequented
than Chelston Cross by a society of well-known and entertaining persons,
not only English, but continental and American also. Thus, during the
years of my tutelage at Littlehampton and Oxford, which comprised but
occasional and brief visits to London, I acquired a considerable
acquaintance, and what may be called some knowledge of the world, before
I had entered the world as my own master and on my own account. Of the
persons with whom I became, during that period, familiar some idea may
be given by a mention of the names, or by brief sketches, of a few of
them--those being selected who, whether as types or otherwise, may still
have some meaning and interest for the social generation of to-day.