I VISIT EDINBURGH AND LONDON.
A visit to Glasgow and to the relatives of my sister-in-law opened out
a different vista to me. This was a great manufacturing and commercial
city, which had far outgrown Edinburgh in population and wealth; but
the Edinburgh people still boasted of being the Athens of the north,
the ancient capital with the grandest historic associations. In Glasgow
I fell in with David Murray and his wife (of D. & W. Murray
Adelaide)--not quite so important a personage as be became later. Not a
relative of mine; but a family connection, for his brother William
married Helen Cumming, Mrs. J. B. Spence's sister. David Murray was
always a great collector of paintings, and especially of prints, which
last he left to the Adelaide Art Gallery. He was a close friend of my
brother John's until the death of the latter. One always enjoys meeting
with Adelaide people in other lands, and comparing the most recent
items of news. I went to Dumfries according to promise, and spent many
days with my old friend Mrs. Graham, but stayed the night always with
her sister, Mrs. Maxwell, wife of a printer and bookseller in the town.
Dumfries was full of Burns's relies and memorials. Mr. Gilfillan had
taken the likeness of Mrs. Burns and her granddaughter when he was a
young man, and Mrs. Maxwell corresponded with the granddaughter. It was
also full of associations with Carlyle. His youngest sister, Jean the
Craw, as she was called on account of her dark hair and complexion was
Mrs. Aitkin, a neighbour and close friend of Mrs. Maxwell. I was taken
to see her, and I suppose introduced as a sort of author, and she
regretted much that this summer Tom was not coming to visit her at
Dumfries. She was a brisk, cheery person, with some clever daughters,
who were friends of the Maxwell girls. When the Froude memorials came
out no one was more indignant than Jean the Craw--"Tom and his wife
always understood each other. They were not unhappy, though after her
death he reproached himself for some things."
I found that my friend had just as much to do from morning to night as
she could do, and I hoped with a great hope that "Uphill Work" would be
published, and all the world would see how badly capable and
industrious women were paid. I fancied that a three-volume novel would
be read, marked, and inwardly digested by everybody! But Mrs. Graham
was appreciated by the matron, the doctors, and by the people of
Dumfries, as she had not been in the village of Kirkbeen. Her
picturesque descriptions of life in the various colonies interested
home-staying folk, for she had the keenest observing faculties. There
was an old cousin of Uncle Handyside's who always turned the
conversation on to Russia, where he had visited successful brothers;
but his talk was not incisive. My cousin Agnes asked me when I supposed
this visit was paid, and I said a few years ago, probably, when she
laughed and said--"Nicol Handyside spent six weeks in Russia 30 years
ago, and he has been talking about it ever since." One visit I paid in
Edinburgh to an old lady from Melrose, who lived with a married
daughter. She had always been very deaf, and the daughter was out. With
great difficulty I got her to see by my card that my name was Spence.
"Are you Jessie Spence?" I shook my head. "No; Katie." "Are you Mary
Spence?" Another headshake, "No; I am Katie." "Then who are you?" She
could understand the negative by the headshaking, but not anything
else. I wanted a piece of paper or a slate badly, but the daughter came
in and made her mother understand that I was the middle Spence girl,
and then the old lady said, "It is a very hot country you come from,"
her only idea apparently of wonderful Australia. And to think that in
times long past some intriguing aunts tried very hard to arrange a
marriage between my father and the deaf young lady who had about 600
pounds a year in land in and near Melrose. She might have been my
mother! The idea was appalling! None of her children inherited the
deafness, and they took a fair proportion of good looks from their
father, for the mother was exceedingly homely. A brightlooking grandson
was on the rug looking through a bound volume of Punch, as my nephew in
Australia loved to do. The two mothers were school companions and
playmates.
My return to London introduced me to a wider range of society. I had
admissions to the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Commons from Sir
Charles Dilke, Professor Pearson's friend, and I had invitations to
stay for longer or shorter periods with people various in means, in
tastes, and in interests. To Mr. Hare I was especially drawn, and I
should have liked to join him and his family in their yearly walking
tour, which was to be through the Tyrol and Venice; but Aunt Mary
protested for two good and sufficient reasons. The first was that I
could not walk 16 or 20 miles a day, even in the mountains, which Katie
Hare said was so much easier than on the plains; and the second was
that to take six weeks out of my visit to the old country was a great
deal too much. If it could have done any good to proportional
representation I might have stood out; but it could not. For that I
have since travelled thousands of miles by sea and by land; and, though
not on foot, I have undergone much bodily fatigue and mental strain,
but in these early days of the movement it had only entered the
academic stage. My "Plea for Pure Democracy" had been written at a
white heat of enthusiasm. I do not think I ever before or since reached
a higher level. I took this reform more boldly than Mr. Mill, who
sought by giving extra votes for property and university degrees or
learned professions to cheek the too great advance of democracy. I was
prepared to trust the people; and Mr. Hare was also confident that, if
all the people were equitably represented in Parliament, the good would
be stronger than the evil. The wise would be more effectual than the
foolish. I do not think any one whom I met took the matter up so
passionately as I did; and I had a feeling that in our new colonies the
reform would meet with less obstruction than in old countries bound by
precedent and prejudiced by vested interests. Parliament was the
preserve of the wealthy in the United Kingdom. There was no property
qualification for the candidate in South Australia, and we had manhood
suffrage.
South Australia was the first community to give the secret ballot for
political elections. It had dispensed with Grand Juries. It had not
required a member of either House to stand a new election if he
accepted Ministerial office. Every elected man was eligible for office.
South Australia had been founded by doctrinaires, and occasionally a
cheap sneer had been levelled at it on that account; but, to my mind,
that was better than the haphazard way in which other colonies grew.
When I visited Sir Rowland Hill he was recognised as the great post
office reformer. To me he was also one of the founders of our province,
and the first pioneer of quota representation. When I met Matthew
Davenport Hill I respected him because he tried to keep delinquent boys
out of gaol, and promoted the establishment of reform schools; but I
also was grateful to him for suggesting to his brother the park lands
which surround Adelaide, and give us both beauty and health. To Col.
Light, who laid out the city so well, we owe the many open spaces and
squares; but he did not originate the idea of the park lands. Much of
the work of Mr. Davenport Hill and of his brother Frederick I took up
later with their niece (Miss C. E. Clark), and their ideas have been
probably more thoroughly carried out in South Australia than anywhere
else; but in 1865 I was learning a great deal that bore fruit
afterwards.
I fear it would make this narrative too long if I went into detail
about the interesting people I met. Florence and Rossamund Davenport
Hill introduced me to Miss Frances Power Cobbe, whose "Intuitive
Morals" I admired so much. At Sir Rowland Hill's I met Sir Walter
Crofter, a prison reformer; Mr. Wells, Editor of "All the Year Round;"
Charles Knight, who had done so much for good and cheap literature;
Madame Bodichon (formerly Barbara Smith), the great friend and
correspondent of George Eliot, who was interesting to me because by
introducing the Australian eucalyptus to Algeria she had made an
unhealthy marshy country quite salubrious. She had a salon, where I met
very clever men and women--English and French--and which made me wish
for such things in Adelaide. The kindness and hospitality that were
shown to me--an absolute stranger--by all sorts of people were
surprising. Mr. and Mrs. Westlake took me on Sunday to see Bishop
Colenso. He showed me the photo of the enquiring Zulu who made him
doubt the literal truth of the early books of the Bible, and presented
me with the people's edition of his work on the Pentateuch.
In all my travels and visits I saw little of the theatre or concert
room, and some of the candid confessions of Mrs. Oliphant might stand
for my own. I had read so many plays before I saw one that the
unreality of much of the acted drama impressed me unfavourably. The
asides in particular seemed impossible, and I think the more carefully
the pieces are put on the stage the more critical I become concerning
their probability; and when I hear the praise of the beautiful and
expensive theatrical wardrobes which, in the case of actresses seem to
set the fashion for the wealthy and well-born, I feel that it is a
costly means of making the story more unlikely. I seem to lose the
identity of the heroine who in two hours wears three or four different
toilettes complete. As Mrs. Oliphant did not identify the "nobody in
white tights" who rendered from "Twelfth Night" the lovely lines
beginning "That strain again; it had a dying fall" with the Orsino she
had imagined when reading the play, so I, who knew "She Stoops to
Conquer" almost by heart, was disappointed when I saw it on the stage.
I was taken to the opera once by Mr. and Mrs. Bakewell, and heard Patti
in "Don Giovanni," at Covent Garden, but opera of all kinds is wasted
on me. I liked some of the familiar airs and choruses, but all opera
needs far more make-believe than I am capable of. It is a pity that I
am so insensible to the youngest and the most progressive of the fine
arts. I am, however, in the good company of Mrs. Oliphant, who,
speaking of the musical parties in Eton, where she lived so long, for
the education of tier boys, writes in words that suit me perfectly: "In
one of these friends' houses a family quartet played what were rather
new and terrible to me--long sonatas and concerted pieces which filled
my soul with dismay. It is a dreadful confession to make, and proceeds
from want of education and instruction, but I fear any appreciation of
music I have is purely literary. I love a song and a 'tune;' the
humblest fiddler has sometimes given me the greatest pleasure, and
sometimes gone to my heart; but music, properly so called, the only
music that many of my friends would listen to, is to me a wonder and a
mystery. My mind wanders through adagios and andantes, gaping, longing
to understand. Will no one tell me what it means? I want to find the
old unhappy far off things which Wordsworth imagined in the Gaelic song
of the 'Highland Lass.' I feel out of it, uneasy, thinking all the time
what a poor creature I must be. I remember the mother of the sonata
players approaching me with beaming countenance on the occasion of one
of these performances, expecting the compliment which I faltered forth,
doing my best not to look insincere. 'And I have this every evening of
my life,' cried the triumphant mother. 'Good heavens, and you have
survived it all' was my internal response." But the worst thing is when
you do not expect a musical evening and this superior music is sprung
on you. Mrs. Webster and I were once invited to meet some very
interesting people, some of the best conversationalists in Melbourne,
and we were given high-class music instead, and scarcely could a remark
be exchanged when a warning finger was held up and silence insisted on.
I could not sing, but sometimes I attempted to hum a tune. I recollect
during my first visit to Melbourne, my little nephew Johnnie, delighted
in the rhymes and poems which I recited; but one day when I was ironing
I began to sing, and he burst out with "Don't sing, auntie; let me hear
the voice of your words." So for my own delectation I began
Wordsworth's "Leechgatherer"--
There was a roaring in the wind all night,
The rain came heavily and fell in floods;
But now the sun is rising calm and bright.
The birds are singing in the distant woods;
Over his own sweet voice the stock dove broods.
The jay makes answer as the magpie chatters,
And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.
"Oh, that's pretty, auntie; say it again," I said it again, and yet
again, at his request, till he could almost repeat it. And he was not
quite 4 years old. He is still alive, and has not become a poet, which
was what I expected in those early days. He could repeat great screeds
of Browning's "Pied Piper of Hamelin," which was his especial
favourite. Music has often cheated me of what is to me the keenest
pleasure in life. Like Samuel Johnson, I enjoy greatly "good talk,"
though I never took such a dominant part in it. There are two kinds of
people who reduce me to something like silence--those who know too
little and those who know too much. My brother-in-law's friend, Mr.
Cowan, was a great talker, and a good one, but he scarcely allowed me a
fair share. He was also an admirable correspondent.
One predominant talker I met at Mr. Edwin Hill's--William Ellis, a
special friend of the Hills, and a noteworthy man. One needs to look
back 60 years to become conscious of how much English education was in
the hands of the church. Not only the public schools and the university
were overshadowed by the Established Church, but what schools were
accessible to the poor were a sort of appanage to the rectory, and the
teachers were bound to work for the good of the church and the
convenience of the incumbent. The commercial schools, which were
independent of the church, to which Non-conformists sent their boys,
were satirised by Dickens, and they deserved the satire. The masters
were generally incompetent, and the assistant teachers or ushers were
the most miserable in regard to payment and status. William Ellis
expended large sums of money, and almost all his leisure, in
establishing secular schools that were good for something. He called
them Birkbeck schools, thus doing honour to the founder of mechanics'
institutes, and perhaps the founder of the first of these schools; and
he taught what he called social science in them himself. He was the
Senor Ferrer of England; and, though he escaped martyrdom in the more
enlightened country he was looked on suspiciously by those who
considered education that was not founded on revealed religion and
permeated by its doctrines as dangerous and revolutionary.
But there was one great personage who saw the value of those teachings
on things that make for human happiness and intellectual freedom, and
that was the Prince Consort. He asked William Ellis to give some
lessons to the eldest of the Royal children--the Princess Victoria,
Prince Edward (our present King), and Prince Alfred, afterwards Duke of
Saxe-Coburg. Mr. Ellis said all three were intelligent, and Princess
Victoria exceptionally so. What a tragedy it was--more so than that of
many an epic or drama--that the Princess Royal and the husband of her
choice, who had educated themselves and each other to take the reins of
the German Empire, and had drawn up so many Plans for the betterment of
the general conditions of the people, should, on their accession to
power, have met death standing on the steps of the throne; and that
only a powerless widow should have been left without much authority
over her masterful son. But my firm belief is that in many of the
excellent things that the Kaiser William has done for his people, he is
working on the plans that had been committed to writing by the Crown
Prince and Princess. Her father's memory was so dear to the Crown
Princess that anything he had suggested to her was cherished all her
life; and I do not doubt that these early lessons on the right relation
of human beings to each other--the social science which regards human
happiness as depending on justice and toleration--is even now bearing
fruit in the Fatherland. Shortsighted mortals see the immediate
failures, but in the larger eye of the Infinite and the Eternal there
is always progress towards better things from every honest attempt to
remedy injustice, and to increase knowledge.
I arranged for a week in Paris with my young friends, Rosa and Symonds
Clark, of Hazelwood, and we travelled as far as Paris with the Hare
family, who went on to the Tyrol. We enjoyed the week. Louis Napoleon
appeared then to be quite secure on his throne, and we saw the fetes
and illuminations for his birthday. What a day and night of rain it
was! But the thousands of people, joyful and good-humoured under
umbrellas or without them--gave us a favourable impression of Parisian
crowds. In London I had been with Mr. Cowan in the crush to the
theatre. It was contrary to his principles to book seats, and I never
was so frightened in my life. I thought a London crowd rough and
merciless. I was the only one of the party who could speak any French,
and I spoke it badly, and had great difficulty in following French
conversations; but we got into a hotel where no English was spoken, and
managed to pull through. But we did not know a soul, and I think we did
not learn so much from our week's sightseeing as we should have done if
Miss Katie Hare had stayed the week with us.
I then paid a visit to Birmingham, and spent a week at the sittings of
the British Association. By subscribing a guinea I was made an
Associate, and some of the sessions were very interesting, but much too
deep for me. I sat out a lecture on the Higher Mathematics, by
Professor Henry Smith, to whom Professor Pearson gave me an
introduction, in hopes that I might visit Oxford; but he was going
abroad, and I could not go to Oxford if I knew nobody--especially
alone. I went, however, to Carr's Lane Chapel, where a humble friend
had begged me to go, because there she had been converted, and there
the Rev. R. W. Dale happened to preach on "Where prayer was wont to be
made." He said that consecration was not due to a Bishop or to any
ecclesiastical ceremony, but to the devout prayers and praise of the
faithful souls within it--that thousands over Scotland and England, and
others in America, Australia, and New Zealand, look back to words which
they had heard and praises and prayers in which they had joined as the
holiest times in their lives. I thought of my good Mrs. Ludlow, and
thanked God for her. When Mr. Cowan took me to the church in Essex
place where he and his friend Wren used to hear Mr. W. J. Fox, M.P. for
Oldham, preach, a stranger, a young American, was there. I found out
afterwards he was Moncure Conway, and he gave us a most striking
discourse. There was going on in Birmingham at this time a controversy
between the old Unitarians and the new. In the Church of the Messiah
the old ministers gave a series of sermons on the absolute truth of the
New Testament miracles. The Old Testament he was quite willing to give
up, but he pinned his faith on those wrought by Christ and His
apostles. Some of the congregation told me they had never thought of
doubting them before, but the more Mr. B. defended them as the bulwarks
of Christianity, the more they felt that our religion rested on other
foundations. I saw a good deal of the industrial life of Birmingham,
and had a sight of the Black Country by day and by night. Joseph
Chamberlain was then a young man; I believe he was a Sunday school
teacher. The Unitarian Sunday Schools taught writing and arithmetic as
well as reading. In the terrible lack of national day schools many of
the poor had no teaching at all but what was given on Sundays, and no
time on other days of the week to learn anything. I could not help
contrasting the provision made by the parish schools of Scotland out of
the beggarly funds or tithes given for church and schools out of the
spoils of the Ancient Church by the Lords of the Congregation.
Education was not free, but it was cheap, and it was general. Scotchmen
made their way all over the world better than Englishmen mainly because
they were better educated. The Sunday school was not so much needed,
and was much later in establishing itself in Scotland. Good Hannah More
taught girls to read the Bible under a spreading tree in her garden
because no church would give her a place to teach in. "If girls were
taught to read where would we get servants?" It was an early cry.