over the command of the 11th Portuguese Dragoons at the battle of
Vittoria, 21 June 1813. He received the gold medal and several foreign
decorations, and retired with brevet of lieutenant-colonel. His brother
Henry Knight went through the whole of the Peninsular War, 1808 to 1814,
as paymaster of the 5th battalion of the King’s German Legion; and he
was at the battle of Waterloo, 18 June 1815, as was his brother John
Knight, then paymaster of the 2nd battalion. They were both in La Haye
Sainte; and the position was shown me carefully, when I visited the
battlefield, 13 August 1868. The buildings had been loopholed; and I was
told that it was very unpleasant inside, when the enemy put their
muskets through the loopholes and began to fire in.
John and Henry had the Waterloo medal, and Henry also had the Gwalior
star, as he was at the battle of Punniar, 29 December 1843. He was then
in the 9th Lancers, to which he was transferred in 1819. He was with
his old battalion at the taking of Copenhagen, 7 September 1807; and
curiously his brother Christopher Knight was there also, as a midshipman
on the Minotaur.
These four great-uncles of mine saw a great deal of hard fighting
without ever being wounded; but I find it recorded of Christopher at the
bombardment of Algiers, 27 August 1816, that “the gallant officer had
the misfortune to be severely contused.” When the old wooden ships were
hit by heavy shot, great chunks of wood came flying off inside; and, if
you were hit by one of these, you were not wounded but contused.
Edward had a son Godfrey Knight, a captain in the 64th--now
Staffordshires--who was in the Indian Mutiny and Persian War. When he
came to stay with us, his anecdotes outshone Aladdin and Sindbad in my
youthful mind: the Jinn seemed tame beside the Gwalior Rebels as
described by him. And he loomed up pretty large himself, when I saw him
in his uniform with medals and clasps. He wore the long whiskers of that
period with eye-glass and moustaches; and the eye-glass seemed to be a
fixture, but in an action in the Mutiny, “unfawt’nately I dwopped my
glass, and the demm’d Pandies nearly got me, haw!” He died at sea on his
way out again, 24 August 1862. Troop-ships still took three months on
the voyage, going by the Cape.
* * * * *
Amongst old letters here, I found one from a distant relative, Lucknow,
1 May 1857:--“The Bengal Army has been in a sad state lately owing to an
idea that Government were issuing cartridges in the making up of which
cows and pigs fat was used, the mere handling of which (to them)
impurities would destroy their caste. From what I have heard from
excellent authority there is no doubt of some objectionable material
having been used, and it was shameful of the Government attempting to
issue them. I was told by our Brigadier (but as a secret) that the
propriety of doing so had been canvassed in Council, so whatever happens
lies on their shoulders. I could hardly have believed any old Indians
would have been so foolish. The matter is now dying away, and the men
practising at the Enfield Rifle schools have ghee served out to them to
grease the wads.” On 30 May the Mutiny reached Lucknow. His horse was
shot under him that evening, and the Brigadier was killed not two yards
off; but he came safely through the Siege.
* * * * *
There are many letters from my old nurse. After leaving us, she went
into the service of a family in France. She writes to me from Sully, 25
January 1871:--“I must begin by telling you of our flight. I am writing
in a very old castle on the borders of the Loire. The marquis, thinking
we were in danger, sent us off here; there were three carriages, all the
horses, and the pack of hounds. We had to pass thro’ a black forest at
night, we were stopped from time to time by French guards; they looked
terrifying on horseback with their long white cloaks. You may guess that
we did not arrive at the end of our journey without sundry frights. We
are with a friend of the family, and have been here more than two
months, and no means of leaving.
“The castle is surrounded by water, two of the towers are in complete
ruins, what is left of them is covered in ivy. The part we inhabit is in
good condition, the rooms are very ancient, the walls and the ceilings
are fresco, the dining-room is hung with tapestry, also the best
bedrooms, the staircases are of stone, ropes passed thro’ iron rings in
the walls supply the place of banisters, the walls are five feet thick;
it will stand the cannon of the enemy, I have no fear in this good old
place. The picture gallery is very interesting to visit, of course all
family portraits, at the end of that is the old theatre; it is now
converted into an ambulance for the wounded.
“We had been quiet a few days when the terrible battle of Bellegarde
began not far from here, the poor wounded soldiers both French and
Prussians were brought here in carts; the first two days they were about
fifty and increased in number every day. It is well for your tender
heart that you were not here, you could not have endured to witness
their sufferings.
“Now for another scene we had General Bourbaki with his army encamped
before the castle. How I wished you were here then. I looked out of my
window, the moon was in its full, showing its bright light over the
scene, the whole of the park was covered in tents, among the trees we
could see the fires and the soldiers sitting around them in their
different costumes; they had with them 150 cannons all arranged in order
ready for an attack.
“The next morning was the worst of all; the Prussians were making for
here on the other side of the Loire. The first thing the General thought
of doing was cutting their march, so he ordered the bridge to be burnt.
We watched the arrival of the enemy, and quite enjoyed their
disappointment at finding themselves the wrong side of the river. They
fired over here, I did not feel very brave that day. This last week they
have been firing on the castle; there is no danger for us, the walls are
thick enough to resist.”
She writes again, 6 February 1872:--“We have been staying a few days at
the Château of Sully. I enjoyed the visit more this time, we could walk
about without fear of the Prussians.... Maréchal de MacMahon with his
son, a very nice boy, has been here for a few days shooting.” There is
much praise of MacMahon in her letters: he is kind and good and brave
and noble, and he comes round to the nursery and tells the children
tales.
She left our house when I was old enough to do without a nurse; but
other servants never left, unless they were going to be married. Ann
came to us when she was sixteen, and stayed till she was sixty-three,
when she retired on a pension. In another household her sister Betsy did
the same. They were both past ninety, when they died; and so also were
Mary and Martha, who were fellow-servants with Ann. I went to tea with
Mary on her ninety-fifth birthday; and she sang “I’m ninety-five,” a
song well known in earlier times.
In their later years they lived a good deal in the past. At some
dinner-party at our house in London the soup was handed round as
mock-turtle, whereas it was real-turtle, and Mary was proud of having
made it. She never let the others hear the last of that. There was to be
another party there, for which great preparations had been made. But, as
Ann told me quite angrily, “on the very morning of the party, King
William went and died, and the party had to be put off, and all the
things were spoilt.” And she was very cross about it still.
There were illuminations for Queen Victoria’s wedding; and the house was
decked with night-lights in little globes of coloured glass. Ann put
them carefully away, and brought them out in 1887 for the Jubilee. There
were illuminations for the wedding of the Prince of Wales; and I had a
night out, 10 March 1863. At the top of Trafalgar Square a wheel of our
brougham got locked into the wheels of another carriage; and it was
impossible to lift them clear, owing to the pressure of the crowd. We
stayed there for hours.
The illuminations in 1863 were things that people would not look at now.
There were gas-pipes twisted into stars and monograms and crowns, with
little holes punctured for the gas: there were some transparencies,
mostly with oil lamps behind; and there were a few devices in cut glass.
The crowd was feebler also. People say we are degenerate now, but I
think it is the other way: some of the worst types seem to be extinct.
We moved into a new house in London on 23 June 1864, and I meant to
celebrate the jubilee by moving out on 23 June 1914, but was not ready
then, and did not finish my move till 23 November. Being newly built,
the house had a hot-water cistern in the bath-room, fed automatically by
the kitchen boiler more than forty feet below. That was a novelty in
1864; and, when people came to call, they went upstairs to look at it,
and could not make it out. A gifted Fellow of King’s was quite disturbed
about it till he thought of Heracleitos and the maxim _Panta Rhei_, and
that enabled him to place our cistern in its true position in the
Universe. Of course, these people knew that hot water was lighter than
cold, and would go up while cold went down, yet were unable to follow
the theory into practice. I have noticed the same thing several times,
when going to Gibraltar by the P. & O. People on board have said the
clock was being altered because we were going south. They knew
theoretically what the reason was, but could not apply their knowledge.
A good many of the people here are of opinion that the Earth is flat;
and I do not know of any simple and decisive way of proving it to be a
globe. I failed miserably with Aristotle’s argument (_De Cælo_, ii. 14.
13) from the shape of the Earth’s shadow on the Moon in an eclipse.
They very soon showed me that they could cast as round a shadow with a
platter or a pail as with a ball of wool. And this, I imagine, was the
reasoning of Anaximander and those others, who suggested that we might
be living on the flat surface of a cylinder or disk.
There is the Horizon argument; but that is not for people living in a
region of high hills, where no horizon can be seen. And the
Circumnavigation argument is answered in this way:--In thick mists on
the moor you think that you are going straight on, but you always go
round in a circle till you come back to where you were before. The other
arguments are too subtle to be grasped at all.
When people have come up for their first visit to London, I have seldom
found them much impressed with the big public buildings. They have seen
photographs, generally taken from some favourable point of view: so they
know what to expect, and the reality is not always equal to their
expectation. The buildings that impress them are the private houses at
the West End. The houses may not be finer than they had expected; but it
is the cumulative effect of street on street and square on square of
large and wealthy houses, stretching out for miles in all directions.
A country cousin coming up to stay with me in London, I made out a list
of sights that should be seen. Besides these sights, she saw a fire at a
house close by. There were lots of engines and escapes, and I felt
rather grateful to Providence for making this addition to my list; but I
felt less grateful three nights afterwards, when Providence added a
burglary, not at a neighbour’s house, but at my own.
In chatting with a small boy who was staying here, I was telling him
about the fig tree, and showing him that on the outer parts the leaves
had five lobes each, but further in (where they received less light) the
leaves had only three lobes, and in the densest part they had only one.
He listened very attentively, and then he went indoors, and said to
everyone he met, “I know all about fig-leaves.”
[Illustration: THE PICTURES WITH THE DOG (_p. 36_), IN THE LOWER PARLOUR
(_p. 50_)]
Writing to my father while my brother was on a visit here, 6 June 1852,
my grandfather says:--“I was talking to him yesterday about his lessons.
He asked if Papa used to learn his book well. I said he was a very good
boy to learn, and did not think of play until he had learnt his lessons,
which had a good effect on him now he was a man; and I hoped he would
try to make even a better man than his Papa and to know more and to do
more. It then dropped, and I did not expect to hear any more about it,
but this morning he asked me if his Papa ever swallowed a fourpenny
piece. I never dreamt of his motive for putting the question to me. I
said No, then he said That is one thing I have done more than Papa.”
In their childhood my brother and sister and their friends were fond of
acting plays of their own writing; and they had to study each other’s
feelings, lest the parts should be refused. She writes to him, 13
October 1858:--“I have quite finished two scenes, but I must alter the
third, as you were to be killed in your sleep, which I know you would
not like: so you shall fight with the guards, and they shall kill you
after a _long_ struggle.” I have several of these plays in manuscript;
and there is no end of killing. With a death-rate of 2 to 3 per scene,
each actor could take several parts.
I took a little boy one afternoon to his first Pantomime at Drury Lane.
We were sitting in the stalls, and the seats were rather low for him, so
I folded up the overcoats for him to sit upon. This brought his head up
level with the other people’s heads, and it also brought his right foot
level with the calf of my left leg. When anything pleased him, he gave
me a little kick to show that he was pleased; and he was pleased with
almost everything. I went home very lame.
A generation later on, that little boy’s little children were staying
with me here; and I felt rather flattered at hearing that I was
mentioned in their prayers each night. But I felt less flattered
afterwards, when I discovered that my name came in between the donkey’s
and the cook’s. Those children used to get a lot of jam upon their
fingers, when they were at tea. One afternoon I heard one of them
telling the other, “Nurse says we mustn’t touch the banisters, because
we’re sticky.” And then I heard them go upstairs on all fours, wiping it
all off upon the carpet. At times they were exacting. I do not object to
being a horse, or even a great grizzeley bear--I know what is expected
of me then. But I do object to being a crocodile, if a crocodile is
expected to lurk underneath a sofa, and snap at people’s legs.
There were some other children, who were friends of mine and also of a
bishop, who was an old friend of their father. One day they told me,
“Bishop’s coming to-morrow.” And thoughtlessly I said, “Give him my
blessing, then.” Next time I saw them, they said in rather a puzzled
way, “We gave the bishop your blessing, but he didn’t seem quite to like
it.”
My acquaintance is not limited to children. There are not many
lexicographers about; yet I number two of them among the friends who
come down here to stay with me. One of them has dealt with Chinese, and
the other with Egyptian hieroglyphics.
* * * * *
In my earlier years I heard a good deal of the Pre-Raphaelite movement,
as embodied in William Holman Hunt. When he was painting his _Eve of St
Agnes_ in 1847, he wanted a couple of blood-hounds to complete the
picture. Meeting a couple in the road, he tracked them to their lair,
which was the house of John Blount Price, an old friend of my father’s
and god-father to me. He lent his dogs, and thus began a friendship
which lasted till his death in 1889.
My portrait was painted by Emily Holman Hunt in 1868. She was William’s
sister, and had acquired all his mannerisms. My hair sticks out like
wrought-iron railings round my head; and I have my old nurse’s authority
for saying that I never wore such an ill-starched collar in my life.
There is also a water-colour of his here, which looks like the estuary
of the Teign near Newton. I asked him if it was, 7 February 1909, and he
told me that he remembered doing it while on a walking-tour in 1860, and
it was somewhere between Falmouth and Exeter, but he was not certain
where. He sketched the scene by moonlight, and put notes in pencil of
the colouring of the various parts; but he did not rub the pencil out
when he put the colours on, and now these notes show through the
colouring. He said he knew they must come through in course of time.
Unless they had, I should never have guessed what tint would be
described as dusky pink.
On hearing people talk of the Pre-Raphaelite movement now, one wonders
if they realize how thoroughly Post-Raphaelite the world was, when that
movement started (1848) and for long years afterwards. Here is an
extract from my diary, 22 August 1874, on my first visit to Dresden. I
was only sixteen then, and have never been a judge of pictures, though
they have always interested me; but I think it gives the point of view
from which most people saw things at that time. “To the picture-gallery
in the Zwinger, and at once went to the _Sistine Madonna_, which has a
room to itself at one end of the building. After seeing many bad or
indifferent copies of a picture, it is difficult to appreciate the
original at once: it is certainly a most wonderful production, and, as a
painting, far surpasses anything I have yet seen, but, as a composition,
I do not like it so much as Titian’s _Assumption_ or Murillo’s
_Immaculate Conception_.” [I never understood the composition till I did
what very few people take the trouble to do--went to Piacenza, 7 August
1898, and looked at the church of San Sisto, for which the Madonna was
painted. On seeing the rectangular windows and their curtains, I
understood the composition at once.] “Then went to Holbein’s _Madonna_,
a Dutch lady in black velvet and frills: not very impressive after
Raphael’s. The other principal pictures are Correggio’s _La Notte_, a
wonderful composition of light and shade, Titian’s _Tribute Money_,
Carlo _Dolce’s Christ blessing the bread_, and Battoni’s _Magdalene_.”
People care no more for Pompeo Battoni now than they cared for
Botticelli then. The fashion is all the other way; and concessions must
be made to fashion, even in a picture-gallery. And in most collections
now the later works have been displaced by early works, almost always
inferior in execution, and very often inferior in conception also. At
the Uffizi the works of Botticelli now have a room apart; but for many
years after I first went to Florence the _Birth of Venus_ was hanging
in the outside corridor, and did not even get a star in Baedeker.
In his essay on Botticelli, written in 1870, Walter Pater termed him “a
secondary painter,” yet found so much in him to praise, that people
hardly noticed this. And that was the beginning of the craze, at any
rate in England. I knew Walter Pater, and always found him much more
level-headed than people might imagine from his style of writing. And he
had no illusions here. It is just the old story:--Wilkes never was a
Wilkite.
All my earlier views of art were dislocated by the opening of the
Grosvenor Gallery, 1 May 1877. By that time I had seen all the great
galleries of Europe, except the Hermitage, and thus had material for
forming an opinion, though the opinion may have been quite wrong.
Anyway, I recognized there a style of art that certainly was great, and
yet could not be classed with the Old Masters or the Modern Painters, or
even as Eclectic. The style is hackneyed now; but in 1877 the _Days of
Creation_ was as great a surprise as _Sartor Resartus_ in 1833 or
_Pickwick_ in 1836. Carlyle and Dickens were established long before my
time, and were suffering then from imitation; and I could not see the
reason why those books were praised so lavishly by the people who read
them when they first came out. And now the younger generation cannot
understand such praising of that picture and the others that were with
it. This generation has grown up in a sort of “greenery-yallery”
Grosvenor Gallery, and has never had to face the pea-greens and
vermilions of the past.
Art has made strange moves since then. Personally, I am always glad of
the impressions of a mind that is brighter than my own, but I do not
want the impressions of a mind that is still duller; and I get
impatient, when the dull mind goes with a clumsy hand, so that the
artist cannot even give me such impressions as he has. When honest
critics praise such work, I fear their minds are very dull indeed.
As an executor I was concerned in putting a memorial window into a
country church. A relative wished for copies of the figures by Sir
Joshua Reynolds in the west window of New College chapel at Oxford.
There are only seven there, and this window needed nine. I thought the
objection fatal; but the purveyor of stained glass replied “Oh no, not
at all: we can design you two to match.” He did design them, and they
matched his copies of the other seven, the copies being quite unlike the
originals.
At the eastern end of Rochester cathedral there is a memorial to Dean
Scott, with a gigantic Alpha and Omega on each side of the altar. As he
was Dean Liddell’s partner in the great Greek lexicon, the double
entendre is rather neat.
One sees trophies everywhere of captured flags and guns and other
instruments of war; but the neatest trophies that I ever saw, were both
at Petersburg. In the Preobrajensky cathedral there was a row of keys of
captured cities, hanging up on pegs with little brass labels for the
names. These came from conquests in the East; and in the Kazan cathedral
there was a similar row of keys of captured cities in the West--Utrecht
and Rheims amongst them.
The first time that I went over Rheims cathedral I noted in my
diary:--“The exterior roof is a considerable height above the interior
vaulting, and is supported by wood-work enough to burn down half-a-dozen
cathedrals.” That was written on 30 March 1875, and it disturbed me in
September 1914, when I heard that the Germans were bombarding Rheims,
and the cathedral was on fire. The exterior roof was burnt and all this
wood-work with it, but the vaulting stood the strain.
Writers on architecture do not always go to see the buildings they
describe. Fergusson gives a plan, section and elevation of the church at
Lodi on pages 50 to 52 of his _History of Modern Architecture_; and he
describes the church as the earliest and best type of its class, and the
only remarkable church now extant which was wholly by Bramante. On the
strength of this I took the trouble to go to Lodi, 28 September 1899, in
order to see the church. But it did not correspond to the designs in
Fergusson. I found out afterwards that Bramante’s designs were never
carried out, and the church was by Battagio.
I just missed seeing the celebrated crane upon Cologne cathedral. I went
there first on 28 August 1868; and it was taken down about three months
before that, after standing there on the stump of the spires for about
400 years, waiting for work to be resumed. I looked with admiration on
the design for the spires, a fine old Fifteenth Century drawing--the
architect sold his soul, and the Devil drew this in his blood. But the
Devil had the best of it, as the spires have ruined the cathedral, being
out of scale with all the rest.
Before the present Law Courts were begun, the rival designs were
exhibited in sheds in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I went to see them several
times; and, speaking from memory, I should say that every one of the
designs was better than what was built. But that was not the architect’s
fault: he had to accept suggestions from all manner of people, each
thinking only of one thing, and not considering the building as a whole.
When the old Law Courts were pulled down, and the exposed side of
Westminster Hall received its present screen and buttresses, a committee
ruined the whole thing by forbidding the architect to carry up the
little towers at the Palace Yard end--an integral part of his design.
Once only, so far as I know, has such interference ended in success.
Scott designed the Foreign Office block of buildings in the Gothic
style; and his design may be seen in the Diploma Gallery of the Royal
Academy. Palmerston could not stand Gothic, and Scott converted his
Gothic to Palladian. Looking down Downing Street from the further side
of Whitehall, one sees that he achieved what Linton and Turner only
dreamt, when they painted their ideals of ancient Rome and Carthage.