V
It is a little difficult to explain why I did not come to do what was
the natural thing for any one in my circumstances to do, and take my
world for granted. A certain innate scepticism, I think, explains it
and a certain inaptitude for sympathetic assimilation. My father, I
believe, was a sceptic; my mother was certainly a hard woman.
I was an only child, and to this day I do not know whether my father is
living or dead. He fled my mother’s virtues before my distincter
memories began. He left no traces in his flight, and she, in her
indignation, destroyed every vestige that she could of him. Never a
photograph nor a scrap of his handwriting have I seen; and it was, I
know, only the accepted code of virtue and discretion that prevented
her destroying her marriage certificate and me, and so making a clean
sweep of her matrimonial humiliation. I suppose I must inherit
something of the moral stupidity that would enable her to make a
holocaust of every little personal thing she had of him. There must
have been presents made by him as a lover, for example—books with
kindly inscriptions, letters perhaps, a flattened flower, a ring, or
such-like gage. She kept her wedding-ring, of course, but all the
others she destroyed. She never told me his christian name or indeed
spoke a word to me of him; though at times I came near daring to ask
her: add what I have of him—it isn’t much—I got from his brother, my
hero, my uncle Ponderevo. She wore her ring; her marriage certificate
she kept in a sealed envelope in the very bottom of her largest trunk,
and me she sustained at a private school among the Kentish hills. You
must not think I was always at Bladesover—even in my holidays. If at
the time these came round, Lady Drew was vexed by recent Company, or
for any other reason wished to take it out of my mother, then she used
to ignore the customary reminder my mother gave her, and I “stayed on”
at the school.
But such occasions were rare, and I suppose that between ten and
fourteen I averaged fifty days a year at Bladesover.
Don’t imagine I deny that was a fine thing for me. Bladesover, in
absorbing the whole countryside, had not altogether missed greatness.
The Bladesover system has at least done one good thing for England, it
has abolished the peasant habit of mind. If many of us still live and
breathe pantry and housekeeper’s room, we are quit of the dream of
living by economising parasitically on hens and pigs.... About that
park there were some elements of a liberal education; there was a great
space of greensward not given over to manure and food grubbing; there
was mystery, there was matter for the imagination. It was still a park
of deer. I saw something of the life of these dappled creatures, heard
the belling of stags, came upon young fawns among the bracken, found
bones, skulls, and antlers in lonely places. There were corners that
gave a gleam of meaning to the word forest, glimpses of unstudied
natural splendour. There was a slope of bluebells in the broken
sunlight under the newly green beeches in the west wood that is now
precious sapphire in my memory; it was the first time that I knowingly
met Beauty.
And in the house there were books. The rubbish old Lady Drew read I
never saw; stuff of the Maria Monk type, I have since gathered, had a
fascination for her; but back in the past there had been a Drew of
intellectual enterprise, Sir Cuthbert, the son of Sir Matthew who built
the house; and thrust away, neglected and despised, in an old room
upstairs, were books and treasures of his that my mother let me rout
among during a spell of wintry wet. Sitting under a dormer window on a
shelf above great stores of tea and spices, I became familiar with much
of Hogarth in a big portfolio, with Raphael, there was a great book of
engravings from the stanzas of Raphael in the Vatican—and with most of
the capitals of Europe as they had looked about 1780, by means of
several pig iron-moulded books of views. There was also a broad
eighteenth century atlas with huge wandering maps that instructed me
mightily. It had splendid adornments about each map title; Holland
showed a fisherman and his boat; Russia a Cossack; Japan, remarkable
people attired in pagodas—I say it deliberately, “pagodas.” There were
Terrae Incognitae in every continent then, Poland, Sarmatia, lands
since lost; and many a voyage I made with a blunted pin about that
large, incorrect and dignified world. The books in that little old
closet had been banished, I suppose, from the saloon during the
Victorian revival of good taste and emasculated orthodoxy, but my
mother had no suspicion of their character. So I read and understood
the good sound rhetoric of Tom Paine’s “Rights of Man,” and his “Common
Sense,” excellent books, once praised by bishops and since sedulously
lied about. Gulliver was there unexpurgated, strong meat for a boy
perhaps but not too strong I hold—I have never regretted that I escaped
niceness in these affairs. The satire of Traldragdubh made my blood
boil as it was meant to do, but I hated Swift for the Houyhnhnms and
never quite liked a horse afterwards. Then I remember also a
translation of Voltaire’s “Candide,” and “Rasselas;” and, vast book
though it was, I really believe I read, in a muzzy sort of way of
course, from end to end, and even with some reference now and then to
the Atlas, Gibbon—in twelve volumes.
These readings whetted my taste for more, and surreptitiously I raided
the bookcases in the big saloon. I got through quite a number of books
before my sacrilegious temerity was discovered by Ann, the old
head-housemaid. I remember that among others I tried a translation of
Plato’s “Republic” then, and found extraordinarily little interest in
it; I was much too young for that; but “Vathek”—“Vathek” was glorious
stuff. That kicking affair! When everybody _had_ to kick!
The thought of “Vathek” always brings back with it my boyish memory of
the big saloon at Bladesover.
It was a huge long room with many windows opening upon the park, and
each window—there were a dozen or more reaching from the floor up—had
its elaborate silk or satin curtains, heavily fringed, a canopy (is
it?) above, its completely white shutters folding into the deep
thickness of the wall. At either end of that great still place was an
immense marble chimney-piece; the end by the bookcase showed the wolf
and Romulus and Remus, with Homer and Virgil for supporters; the design
of the other end I have forgotten. Frederick, Prince of Wales,
swaggered flatly over the one, twice life-size, but mellowed by the
surface gleam of oil; and over the other was an equally colossal group
of departed Drews as sylvan deities, scantily clad, against a
storm-rent sky. Down the centre of the elaborate ceiling were three
chandeliers, each bearing some hundreds of dangling glass lustres, and
over the interminable carpet—it impressed me as about as big as
Sarmatia in the store-room Atlas—were islands and archipelagoes of
chintz-covered chairs and couches, tables, great Sevres vases on
pedestals, a bronze man and horse. Somewhere in this wilderness one
came, I remember, upon—a big harp beside a lyre-shaped music stand, and
a grand piano....
The book-borrowing raid was one of extraordinary dash and danger.
One came down the main service stairs—that was legal, and illegality
began in a little landing when, very cautiously, one went through a red
baize door. A little passage led to the hall, and here one
reconnoitered for Ann, the old head-housemaid—the younger housemaids
were friendly and did not count. Ann located, came a dash across the
open space at the foot of that great staircase that has never been
properly descended since powder went out of fashion, and so to the
saloon door. A beast of an oscillating Chinaman in china, as large as
life, grimaced and quivered to one’s lightest steps. That door was the
perilous place; it was double with the thickness of the wall between,
so that one could not listen beforehand for the whisk of the
feather-brush on the other side. Oddly rat-like, is it not, this
darting into enormous places in pursuit of the abandoned crumbs of
thought?
And I found Langhorne’s “Plutarch” too, I remember, on those shelves.
It seems queer to me now to think that I acquired pride and
self-respect, the idea of a state and the germ of public spirit, in
such a furtive fashion; queer, too, that it should rest with an old
Greek, dead these eighteen hundred years to teach that.