Transcriber’s Note:
Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like
this_. Footnotes were renumbered sequentially and were moved to
follow the paragraph in which the anchor occurs.
Reminiscences of
a Student’s Life
Reminiscences
of a Student’s Life
Jane Ellen Harrison
_Second Impression_
[Illustration]
Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the
Hogarth Press, 52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.
1925
_First published October 1925._
_Reprinted December 1925._
_Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
YORKSHIRE DAYS 9
CHAPTER II
CAMBRIDGE AND LONDON 44
CHAPTER III
GREECE AND RUSSIA 63
CONCLUSION 80
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACE PAGE
Jane Harrison (aged five) 10
Charles Harrison, father of Jane Harrison 18
Elizabeth Hawksley Harrison, mother of
Jane Harrison 28
Jane Harrison (aged twenty-five) 45
Jane Harrison (aged thirty-three) 54
Jane Harrison and Hope Mirrlees 90
CHAPTER I
YORKSHIRE DAYS
In view of my present cult for Russia and things Russian, I like to
think that my first childish memory is of the word “Moscow”. Moscow
to me was a dog, not a town--an old Newfoundland dog named, no doubt,
in honour of the Crimean War, which will sufficiently date these
reminiscences. Moscow had his kennel in the backyard under a big
spreading tree, and from this tree exuded drops of bright gum. It
was my fearful joy to rush to the tree, seize the gum-drops which
were well within the length of Moscow’s chain, and be back before he
could begin to bark ferociously. When later I learnt that to some
people Moscow was a cathedral city, not a dog, my universe rocked
with Einsteinian relativity. Russia was about us in those days, a
strange, inhuman Russia of Tzars and Siberia. My first toy was a box
of bricks and soldiers mixed, called “The Siege of Sevastopol”, given
by a patriotic uncle. I hated soldiers and sieges and muskets and
bayonets, but the word Sevastopol was a marvel, and a soft joy to
my child’s mouth. I turned it over and over, and when much later I
learned its Greek origin and meaning, there seemed a real fitness in
things.
Then, every Christmas came Russia again. My father had had some
business relations with Russia, and every year some kind Russian
used to send him a package of caviare and cranberries and reindeers’
tongues. The caviare was reserved for my father, but he gave me
sometimes delicious morsels on hot toast, and he has left me the
legacy of a too delicate palate. The cranberries were made into sauce
for venison, for the grown-ups’ dinners, but a few reindeers’ tongues
found their way to our schoolroom breakfast, where they were keenly
appreciated by one little greedy fat child. Oh those reindeers’
tongues! they tasted not only of reindeer, but--but of snow-fields
and dreaming forests.
[Illustration: JANE HARRISON (aged five).
_To face page 10._
]
My father had also imported a tiny Russian sledge, and sometimes he
took me for drives--thank God it only held one, so I could dream
undisturbed of steppes and Siberia and bears and wolves. All my lore
was derived from two enchanting books--_Near Home_ and _Far Off_.
I wish I had them now,[1] but north and south were jumbled and
jostled in my fancies. Since then I have only once been in a sledge.
When I was spending a winter at S. Moritz a friend died. Her funeral
procession was a long line of sledges. It was unspeakably solemn and
silent. When I die, if I cannot be buried at sea, I should like to go
to my grave in a sledge.
[1] A kind reader of the _Nation_ has since supplied my need.
* * * * *
But Russia soon faded, leaving only my native Yorkshire. And here I
must make confession. In politics I am an old Liberal, with a dash of
the Little Englander and the Bolshevik. I hate the Empire; it stands
to me for all that is tedious and pernicious in thought; within it
are always and necessarily the seeds of war. I object to nearly
all forms of patriotism. But when I search the hidden depths of my
heart, I find there the most narrow and local of parochialisms. I am
intensely proud of being a Yorkshire woman.
My gifted friend Hope Mirrlees has written a wonderful novel,
_Counterplot_, in which she shows that only in and through the
pattern of art, or it may be of religion, which is a form of art,
do we at all seize and understand the tangle of experience which
we call Life. Until I met Aunt Glegg in the _Mill on the Floss_, I
never knew myself. I _am_ Aunt Glegg; with all reverence I say it.
I wear before the world a mask of bland cosmopolitan courtesy and
culture; I am advanced in my views, eager to be in touch with all
modern movements, but beneath all that lies Aunt Glegg, rigidly,
irrationally conservative, fibrous with prejudice, deep-rooted in her
native soil.
It is said by Southerners that we Yorkshire people are exclusive,
gruff in manner, harsh and unsympathetic in soul. Gruff in manner I
grant it, but our bark is worse than our bite. Exclusive? possibly,
yet I have heard a Yorkshire lady say “there are some quite decent
people in Scotland.” Harsh and unsympathetic in soul. Well. A friend
of mine was left by her husband alone in a small moorland cottage
they had taken for the summer. At nightfall a knock was heard;
her landlord entered, under his arm a large grey rabbit. “I heerd
t’ Maister had left yer alawn, maybe ye’d be lawnly. I brought t’
rabbit; he’d be a bit o’ company for yer.” I myself was left by
a friend in a small Yorkshire inn. The landlady looked in on me
in the morning, bearing a huge dead duck. “Yer’ll maybe be lawnly
wi’out Missie, happen yer’d fancy a dook fer yer dinner.” I did,
and I ate two huge slices of its fat breast with unlimited savoury
trimmings. She looked in to mark my progress. “Aye, yer eat but
poorly, yer’ve been living maybe wi’ them Southerners.” When I left
my inn, I thanked the landlady for all her kindness. She looked at
me steadily and said, “It weren’t you, I knawed yer fayther, t’aud
Charlie ’Arrison.” Now my father was never called “Charlie”; he was
far too remote and solemn a man for diminutives. She was using what
grammarians call--or would call if they ever attended to anything of
any importance--the _subjective_ diminutive. It simply expressed the
kindliness in her heart towards me and mine. We are not a sentimental
people. I picked up a book of Yorkshire poems. Among them was an Ode
to Spring. It began thus:
T’aud Winter ’e got nawtice ter quit.
He made sooch a muck o’ the place.
I like to think that we Yorkshire people have another trait in
common with the Russians. The vice we hate above all others is
pretentiousness. I have heard one Russian charge another with
pretentiousness; if it existed at all it was so infinitesimal as to
be invisible to the naked English eye. Just so with the Yorkshireman.
You may break every commandment of the Decalogue--he is easy enough,
as long as you are a fairly good fellow he will pardon you--but try
to show off, to impress him in any way, and you are done.
To such, I admit, my countrymen were cold and harsh. I remember
a hapless clergyman who came north to take charge of our parish
while the Vicar was away. The poor man arrived charged with good
intentions; he meant to “brighten our Services”; he brought with him
leaflets and new hymn-books and new hassocks to compel us to kneel
flat upon our knees instead of comfortably crouching through the
Litany as had been our Evangelical wont. He even put a little cross
on the Communion Table, but this my father with his own hands swiftly
and silently removed. The first Sunday the church was full; the
second, spite of all the “brightness”, it was chill and empty save
for a few sullen faces. I approved of the new man’s views, though
I did not like him, so I went conscientiously round to the chief
parishioners to ask why they did not come to church. “We dawn’t haud
wi’ ’is ways,” was the answer. I thought it was the hassocks and the
hymn-books and the leaflets. “Naw--’e could do as ’e liked wi’ them
papers and such like--they was naw matter--but we dawn’t haud wi’ ’is
ways.” Subsequent analysis taught me that “ways” is Yorkshire for the
sum total of your reactions. Your particular deeds are of as little
significance to him as your particular words; it is _you_, the whole
of you, you “in a loomp”, as he would say, that the Yorkshireman
wisely reckons with. They were instinctively better bred than I was
with my rationalising right and wrong, and they had felt the bad
manners of the changes worked in their old Vicar’s absence. After
holding out for three months the innovator went back to his own place
a sadder and a wiser Southerner.
* * * * *
My people must have been, I think, singularly old-fashioned and
provincial even for those days. I remember that an old gentleman who
came often to see us used to kiss my eldest sister’s hand and call
her “Mistress Elizabeth”, unusual even in the ’fifties. How I wished
some one would kiss my hand! But no one ever did till I came in my
old age to courteous France. And as to Mistress Jane--no, it was
Lady Jane I longed to be, for my cult was for Lady Jane Grey. I had
a child’s magical habit of mind; if I could get the name _exactly_,
I should somehow possess the person. To name is to create. “And God
said to the light, ‘Light’” (He named it), and there _was_ Light.
So I consulted my kind nurse as to whether I could ever become Lady
Jane. “Yes, of course, miss,” said the cheery woman. “If you’re
good, maybe when you’re a big girl you’ll marry a lord and then
you’ll be a lady.”
Gentle Jane was as good as gold,
She always did as she was told,
And when she grew old, she was given in marriage
To a first-class Earl who kept his carriage.
Hope shone bright, but I was a cautious child, and I referred the
question to my better-informed governess. The blow fell. No, not
even if I married a dozen lords could I ever be Lady Jane, unless
they made my father an earl, which seemed somehow unlikely. So the
dream faded, but not wholly. I could still “stay at home in my castle
reading Plato while the ladies of the Court went hunting in the
park”. And here I must confess my motives were not as purely platonic
as they seem. The terror of my childhood was that I should be forced
some day to ride to hounds. I loved the hounds, but oh how I hated
the horses! I still hate their huge teeth and bulging eyes and satin
skins. I learnt to ride (very badly) on an adorable donkey with long
furry ears and soft kind eyes, and a small furry donkey slept in my
bed every night for years. One night the nurse took it away, saying
it was time I learnt not to be a baby. I said not a word, I had long
learnt to keep silence. But I was found at midnight with swollen
eyes, staring wide awake. The nurse, being a sensible woman, put back
my donkey, and I slept soft and warm. Alas! I was soon promoted to
a Shetland pony, the veriest little imp of hell. He spent his time
running away and buck-jumping; I spent my time prostrate on the Filey
sands. He effectively broke my nerve; I was, and remain, a physical
coward, and in a community of bold riders was an object of ignominy.
No one understood, no one sympathised, till at a Swedish sanatorium
I, by good fortune, met Mr. Lytton Strachey. We were both there to
undergo Swedish massage, and Swedish massage as administered by a
robust native is “no picnic”. “Take my advice,” he said; “as soon as
they touch you begin to yell, and go on yelling till they stop.” It
was sound advice, sympathetically given. I learnt then, for the first
time, how tender, if how searching, is the finger Mr. Strachey lays
on our human frailties.
* * * * *
My religious training was oddly mixed. My father was incapable
of formulating a conviction, but I think he really would have
sympathised with the eminent statesman who “had a great respect for
religion as long as it did not interfere with a gentleman’s private
life!” I remember his look of annoyance when the Archbishop of York,
who was lunching with us after a Confirmation, and had been told that
I had played the village organ, put his hand on my head and bade me
“consecrate my great gifts to God”. That Archbishop was a splendid
figure to my childish imagination. I loved his ritual robes and
voluminous sleeves, but one day I looked into my brother-in-law’s
study and found the apparitor arranging these vestments. Alas! the
sleeves were not real sleeves, they came off. The apparitor, touched
by my interest, very kindly showed me how they hooked on, but the
gilt was off the gingerbread. To return to my father. The Archbishop
was trying enough, but an old Evangelical clergyman was worse. He
called to say good-bye to us one day and asked if, before parting,
we would all kneel down and “ask a blessing” on our journey. I can
see my father’s face of cold disgust. He was in his own house and
he could not be rude, so he sat down--he never knelt--and covered
his angry face with one hand and let the old clergyman pray. Then he
saw him courteously to the door and came back muttering something. I
could only catch the word “indecent”. He attended church with fair
regularity, but we children noticed that on what used to be called
“Sacrament Sundays” he was apt to have a slight attack of lumbago,
which passed off on Monday morning.
[Illustration: CHARLES HARRISON.
(Father of Jane Harrison.)
_To face page 18._
]
But my stepmother was made of quite other metal. She was a Celt
and her religion was of the fervent semi-revivalist type. She was
a conscientious woman and tried to do her duty, I am sure, to the
three rather dour little girls who had been her pupils and were later
presented to her as stepdaughters. She gave us Scripture lessons
every Sunday. Her main doctrines were that we must be “born again”
and that “God would have our whole hearts or nothing”. I think I
early felt that this was not quite fair. Why, if we were to care
for Him only, had He made this delightful world full of enchanting
foreign languages? Anyhow, the holocaust I honestly attempted was a
complete failure. I was from the outset a hopeless worldling. But
the apparatus of religion interested me. Sunday was an exciting if
laborious day. I taught twice in the Sunday School, and from the age
of twelve played the organ at two services. I followed the prayers in
Latin, and the lesson in German, and the Gospel in Greek; this with
some misgivings as to the “whole-heartedness” of this proceeding.
We always had to write out one of the sermons from memory, and were
never told which. This has given me a bad habit of attending closely
to any nonsense I may happen to hear at a meeting or a lecture. I see
my happier friends sleeping and yawning or nudging each other; my
attention is glued to the speaker.
Every Sunday I learnt the Collect for the day and either the Epistle
or the Gospel. My favourite Collect was that for Advent Sunday,
and it still thrills me, but I cannot have had any real taste
for literature as some of the hymns that delighted me most were
abominable doggerel.
My favourite moral-song ran as follows:
How proud we are, how pleased to show
Our clothes and call them rich and new,
When the poor sheep and silkworm wore
That very clothing long before!
Partly, no doubt, it was that in my childish mind I had a pleasant
picture of an old sheep suitably attired in a Victorian bonnet with
strings and a shawl, but chiefly it pleased me because it expressed
my innate and still inveterate dislike of, and contempt for,
everything _chic_ and smart. Perhaps it is some complex caused by my
own childish sufferings in my “Sunday clothes”, though heaven knows
they were plain enough. Anyhow, even now when I see a faultlessly
turned out man or woman I always expect he or she will prove to be
a fool and a bore. We cannot all be distinguished, but for heaven’s
sake let us all be shabby and comfortable. At a Cambridge function,
when he was Chancellor, I once gazed with admiration at the late Duke
of Devonshire. His right boot had a largish hole in it from which
emerged a grey woollen toe. That, I felt, was really ducal. I turned
the same sour eye on the very rich. I remember Miss Pernel Strachey
raising the question: “Why do rich people always get so dull?” Now
that Miss Strachey is Principal of Newnham, she will, I hope, employ
some of her leisure in reading her Bible. “It is easier for a camel
to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter into the
Kingdom of God.” For “Kingdom of God” read “Kingdom of the higher
spiritual values” and she has her answer.
* * * * *
My secular education till I was seventeen was in the hands of a
rather rapid succession of governesses, all of them strictly English.
My father’s creed was a simple one: All foreigners were Papists, all
Papists were liars, and he “wouldn’t have one in his house”. How
long and ardently I longed in vain to see a Papist! The result of my
father’s simple faith was that never in this world shall I be able
to speak French. When I was sent to Cheltenham to be “finished”, I
was placed in the Upper First at once because I could read three or
four languages and knew “Noel et Chapsal” off by heart. My first
morning the French master gave a simple _dictée_. Some isolated words
I could make out, but not a single intelligible sentence. I sent in
a blank sheet and cried with rage. All my governesses were grossly
ignorant, but they were good women, steadily kind to me; they taught
me deportment, how to come into a room, how to get into a carriage,
also that “little girls should be seen and not heard”, and that I
was there (in the schoolroom) “to learn, not to ask questions.” On
Saturdays we repeated the Books of the Bible in their correct order
and the Kings of Israel and Judah, the signs of the Zodiac and the
Tables of Weights and Measures. I also learnt by a mysterious system
of mnemonics many isolated dates. I can still give correctly the date
of the Creation of the World, the Fall, the Flood, the battle of
Quebec and the Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood.
Victorian education was ingeniously useless. Every day I spent an
hour doing exquisite hems and seams. I cannot to this day make the
simplest garment. But for some things I am devoutly thankful. I was
made to learn for some fifteen years three verses of the Bible
every day. I might choose what poetry I wished. In this way I learnt
impartially great quantities of Milton, Wordsworth and Mrs. Hemans,
Gray’s “Elegy”, the “Prisoner of Chillon” and the like. I learnt
them all lying on a back-board, and to this day my flat back is the
admiration of dressmakers. When, nowadays, I see the round backs
of my young friends, and watch them slinking round doors as though
they were criminals and not English gentlewomen, and especially when
they fail to get up when addressed by their elders and betters, I
sometimes sigh for a little “deportment”, but, after all, we of a
past generation have no more right to impose our manners than we
have to impose our morals. When a young man comes to tea with me
for the first time, it gives me, I confess, a slight shock when
he lies down full length on the rug, but thereby he expresses his
willingness for a kindly relation, and things are more comfortable
than if he sat, hat in hand, on the edge of his chair. Again, it
surprised me a little when at Cambridge I asked a young man to tea
for the first time and he answered _on a post-card_: “I’ll come if
I can, but don’t count on me.” “Count on” him, the lout! I crossed
his name (an honoured name by the by) out of my address book,
but the same evening--in penance for my bad temper--I wrote to
him _on a post-card_ and said I hoped I might “count on him” for
another Sunday. And then things change so swiftly; the vulgarism
of one generation is the polished _cliché_ of the next. When I was
young, to apologise by saying “sorry” would have been--witness the
_Punch_ of the period--to write yourself down a shop-man; now I hear
“sorry” drop quite easily from the most blue-blooded lips. As to
the absurdities of Victorian education, we learnt certainly a great
deal of miscellaneous rubbish (I am prepared though to defend the
signs of the Zodiac), but odd scraps of information are stimulating
to a child’s imagination. Nowadays it seems you learn only what
is reasonable and relevant. I went to Rome with a young friend,
educated on the latest lines, and who had taken historical honours at
Cambridge. The first morning the pats of butter came up stamped with
the Twins. “Good old Romulus and Remus,” said I. “Good old who?” said
she. She had never heard of the Twins and was much bored when I told
her the story; they had no place in “constitutional history”, and
for her the old wolf of the Capitol howled in vain: “Great God! I’d
rather be ...”
We old people must, however, steadily face the fact that the young
are more likely to be right than the old, and this in literature
as in morals and manners. If we old ones have behind us a larger
personal experience, they, the young, have behind them the collective
experience of a whole additional generation. Youth starts life from
the vantage point of the shoulders of age, and his vista is likely
to be wider and clearer. As Mr. Sheppard observed: “When the fathers
think that the Age of Reason is achieved, the sons may be trusted,
if they are of good stock, to see that it is still far off.” I will
make a personal confession. The methods of the Georgian novelist have
often tried me sorely. I had always been used to think of art as a
thing of selection. I looked to it for a certain peace and largeness.
Then when I took up “Ulysses”, I found myself not only wallowing in a
drain of obscenities that would have abashed Zola, but also exposed
to a trickle of trivialities that exasperated my every nerve, and
made me feel as though I were in a psycho-analyst’s consulting room
with a patient forced to unburden himself of every thought, every
impression, however feeble and seemingly irrelevant. And yet all
the time I felt, “This is written by a man of genius, who am I to
judge him? Let me try first to understand him.” “Psychoanalyst’s
consulting room.” Yes, the conviction grew. Joyce is trying to make
audible, make conscious the subconscious. He is dredging the great
deeps of personality. That is his tremendous contribution, and
after him follow a host of less-gifted imitators. Then, happily, I
read _Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown_, and Mrs. Woolf made me see that
these Georgian characters, which I had thought were so unreal and
even teasing, were real with an intimacy and a spirituality before
unattempted. So I have my reward. I don’t say I always get there!
I don’t say that when I go joyously to bed with a novel, it is Mr.
Joyce I take with me. It is not, it is Jane Austen or George Eliot or
even Trollope, but at least I know there is somewhere to get to; the
gates of a New Jerusalem are even for me ajar!
* * * * *
To return to my governesses. There was one notable exception--a
woman of real intelligence, ignorant but willing and eager to learn
anything and everything I wanted. Together we learnt to read German,
Latin badly, and with the quantities of course all wrong, the Greek
Testament and even a little Hebrew. Unfortunately, having no guide,
we began with the Psalms which are hard nuts to crack. I wanted to
find out the meaning of such obscure and exciting verses as “Or ever
your pots be made hot with thorns, so let indignation vex him even as
a thing that is raw”. Alas! my kind governess was shortly removed to
a lunatic asylum. What share I may have had in her mental downfall I
do not care to inquire.
A keen impulse was given to my study of the Greek Testament by the
arrival of a new curate. He was fresh from Oxford and not, I think,
averse to showing off. Rashly in one of his sermons he drew attention
to a mistranslation. This filled me with excitement and alarm. I saw
in a flash that the whole question of the “verbal inspiration of
the Bible” was at issue. That afternoon I took my Greek Testament
down to the Sunday School and, eager for further elucidation,
waylaid the hapless curate. I soon found that his knowledge of Greek
was, if possible, more slender than my own. But, if embarrassed,
he was friendly. Alas! that curate did not confine his attentions
to the Greek text. I was summarily despatched in dire disgrace to
Cheltenham. My stepmother said I was behaving “like a kitchen-maid”.
Considering the subject of my converse with the curate, I fail to see
the analogy. My father, as usual, said nothing. He scarcely ever did
say anything. His great natural silence--which he has handed down to
me--was, I think, increased by my stepmother’s rather violent Celtic
volubility. “Mother’d talk the hind leg off a donkey,” observed one
of her sons. I heard her voice once in an adjoining room passionately
haranguing my father. From him not a sound. But when we met for
dinner, we saw with some embarrassment that a portrait of my mother,
long consigned to an attic, was hanging on the wall opposite my
father’s seat. He had himself brought it down and hung it up. Such
was his dumb reprisal. My mother died almost at my birth, but I have
been told she was a silent woman of singular gentleness and serenity.
[Illustration:
ELIZABETH HAWKSLEY HARRISON (_née_ NELSON).
(Mother of Jane Harrison.)
_To face page 28_]
Books were, till I went to school, a serious difficulty. My father’s
school-books had somehow perished. I saved up my money to buy a
second-hand Virgil. The process was long, for my income was sixpence
a week, mulcted of a compulsory penny for the missionaries. My
edition of the _Aeneid_ contained not a hint as to scansion. I
knew the poem was in hexameters, but I was constantly held up by
the elision of nasal terminations. I was almost in despair when
a boy-friend who had just been promoted to doing verse at school
offered to show me, as he expressed it, “how to do the trick”. His
explanations were a veritable Apocalypse and I was enraptured, but
he rather let me down by observing at the end, “It’s a silly game,
but if you’re in the Fourth you’ve got to do it!”
This same boy-friend got me into serious disgrace later at school,
at Cheltenham. I was working for the London Matriculation then just
opened to women, and he proposed to write to me just before the
examination to “buck me up”. No letter reached me, but one morning
I was summoned before Miss Beale’s throne, where she sat in state
before the Lower School came into prayers. She had in front of her
a post-card (post-cards had only just been invented) written in a
schoolboy scrawl and signed “Peveril”. “That”, she said, pointing a
disgusted finger at the signature, “is a boy’s name.” “Yes,” I said,
“it’s Peveril; he promised to write to me before the examination,”
and I put out my hand for the post-card. “No, this must go to your
parents,” and then came a long harangue. It ended with these words
which intrigued me so that I remember them exactly: “You are too
young, and I hope too innocent, to realise the gross vulgarity of
such a letter or the terrible results to which it might lead.” I
was indeed, and still am, for what do you think was the offence?
After his signature “Peveril” had written “_Give my love to the
Examiners!_” The story may stand to mark the abyss of fatuous
prudery into which the girls’ schools of the middle Victorian
period--even the very best--had fallen. I was too furious that my
letter had been read to think of anything else. At home a scrupulous
code of honour prevailed as to letters. I remember being allowed to
take a bundle of letters to the village post. I employed my time
learning by heart the various names, titles, prefixes and addresses.
These when I got back I repeated, expecting praise for my diligence
and accuracy. Instead I was told I had done a most dishonourable
thing. Never, under any circumstances, was I to read the address of
a letter unless addressed to myself. _Tempora mutantur._ I know a
certain distinguished family all of whose members make a practice
of reading all post-cards and all the letters left lying about the
house. When I got home, my father sent for me and said, “Miss Beale
said I was to read that,” pointing to the post-card. “I don’t see any
harm in it--but he’d no business to write to you on a post-card, the
puppy.” Post-cards were an innovation and all innovations anathema.
All boys and all young men who proposed for his daughters were to
my father “puppies”. It is only due to “Peveril” to add that this
offence he never committed, hence much was forgiven him. Peveril is a
county magnate now, a Justice of the Peace, a Constant Reader of the
_Spectator_--not, I feel sure, of the _Nation_!
* * * * *
I, too, am a Justice of the Peace. I mention this not as an empty
boast, but in all humility, because my short experience as a
magistrate taught me much. I should like every young man and woman to
go through this experience for a year or two and not wait till they
are sixty and it is too late to become a good citizen. I may say at
once that I was quite useless on the Bench. I have really no head
for business, and am prone to observe only the irrelevant. A candid
friend told me that I had been chosen just “to represent Art and
Letters”, and that _therefore_ only an elegant indolence was expected
of me. Still, I like to remember that I saved a poor Armenian from
a fine. He had somehow muddled his identity card. I felt that all
consideration was due to any one who could speak Armenian, perhaps
the most difficult of all European languages. And then, what about
my own identity card? A very moderate amount of red tape is apt to
make me “see red”, but I can just manage to fill in a passport form
and describe my eyes, my nose, my forehead and my figure generally,
but when the préfecture asks for the birthplace of your maternal
grandfather, what are you to do? If you speak the truth and say you
don’t know and don’t want to, you will be detained at the pleasure of
the Republic, stand for hours in a queue of Polish Jews and get no
lunch. The only sound policy is to write in the name of some obscure
Yorkshire village. As the official will not be able to read, still
less to pronounce it, his official soul will be satisfied. This, I
fancy, was what the Armenian had been after. Anyhow, I got him off.
We had, of course, dull hours--mainly spent in fining undergraduates
for exceeding speed limits. If you have been knocked down twice
yourself, at first you feel a ferocious joy, but vengeance soon
palls. As a rule no attempt was made at defence; the undergraduate
had had his fun and cheerfully paid down his--or rather his
father’s--money in fines of ever-increasing severity. One brighter
spirit, I remember, began a long and laboured defence; it was
couched in a lingo unknown to me, some strange up-to-date slang. I
began eagerly to take valuable linguistic notes. But the presiding
magistrate was a cold insensate man, dead to the charms of language;
he curtly requested the undergraduate to confine his remarks to the
King’s English. The poor boy looked round piteously, said, “Yes, sir;
thank you, sir,” and collapsed.
Many of the charges were for petty thefts. At first this embarrassed
me a good deal. I could not bear to look at the prisoner lest he
should be suffering agonies of shame. I soon found my embarrassment
was needless. Shame is the high prerogative of a sensitive humanity.
These poor creatures were not shameless because they were hardened
criminals; they were just too stupid to feel shame. They were, most
of them, morally half-witted, cases not for the law, but the leech
or the psychologist. One pitiable case I remember of a man more
intelligent but slightly maudlin. We had to examine into his wretched
past. He told us of his hopeless efforts to get work, of occasional
jobs lost through drink, petty thefts and the like. For years he had
drifted lower and lower. “Then”, said he, “came the war. That _was_
a bit of luck. I got a job at once and kept it, and then”, he added
sadly, “came the bluggy Peace and they chucked me.” No criticism,
I am sure, was intended of the high conventions of Versailles, it
was just that he had lost his job. I think all the Bench hung their
heads. This was the world as we, its rulers, had made it.
Let no one think that the English Bench is a place unfit for a
lady. One day it was reported by the constable that the prisoner
had used peculiarly foul language. “What did he say?” asked a
magistrate. “Well, sir, it isn’t hardly fit for me to repeat,” said
the constable. The clerk added that he had had the “language” typed
and a copy would be handed round if the Bench desired. The Bench did
desire, and it was circulated. The unknown to me has always had an
irresistible lure, and all my life I have had a curiosity to know
what really bad language consisted of. In the stables at home I had
heard an occasional “damn” from the lips of a groom, but that was not
very informing. Now was the chance of my life. The paper reached the
old gentleman next me. I had all but stretched out an eager hand.
He bent over me in a fatherly way and said, “I am sure _you_ will
not want to see this.” I was pining to read it, but sixty years of
sex-subservience had done their work. I summoned my last blush, cast
down my eyes and said, “O no! No. Thank you so much.” Elate with
chivalry he bowed and pocketed the script.
I have always known we English were a good-natured, easy-going
people, serenely sure of ourselves, not prone to take offence, but
on the Bench I learnt that we are something a little more. Every
official, from the presiding magistrate to the constable, had for
the prisoner a steady courtesy and a real consideration and even
kindliness. Once only did I hear a barrister begin to bluster a
little and slightly heckle a prisoner, but the feeling of the court
was so manifestly against him that he swiftly collapsed. There was to
be no bullying of the under dog.
* * * * *
But all this is by anticipation. To return to Cheltenham. I had
to face the ordeal of the Matriculation Examination of the London
University, uncheered by “Peveril’s” letter. Examinations were
novelties then. I felt the whole honour of the College was on my
shoulders and I was almost senseless from nervousness. To my dying
day I shall affectionately remember the Registrar of the University.
Before I went in he asked my name. I could not remember it.
Everything had gone blank. He looked at me so kindly and said, “Oh it
is of no consequence, later on perhaps.” And later he came into the
Hall to see how I was getting on. He found me writing merrily.
I carried away from Cheltenham College a dislike for history which
has lasted all my life. Our history lessons consisted mainly in
moralisings on the doings and misdoings of kings and nobles. We
did the Stuart period in tedious detail, and as Miss Beale was
Cromwellian and I, like all children, a passionate Royalist, I was in
a constant state of irritation. There was an odd rule throughout the
College that no girl might buy a book. It sprang from Miss Beale’s
horror of what she called “undigested knowledge”. She need not
have feared with most of us that the amount of knowledge absorbed,
digested or undigested, would have been excessive. I broke the rule
and secretly bought a small life of Archbishop Laud. This I read,
learned, marked and inwardly digested. Later, I again broke the rule
and bought Bryce’s _Holy Roman Empire_. Mr. Bryce was coming to
examine us and I scored handsomely by my perfidy. Normally, what we
had to feed on were the notes we took of lectures; these notes were
carefully corrected and severely commented on. It was a wretched
starvation system, but gave constant practice in composition. For
two things, however, I am thankful to Cheltenham. Arithmetic and
elementary mathematics were admirably taught, and it was a rapture
to me to understand at last why you turned fractions upside down in
division. When I first got possession of an _x_ I felt I had a new
mastery of the world. Only my teachers stopped short too soon--just
where real mathematics began, and when later at Cambridge I heard Mr.
Bertrand Russell discourse on the amazing beauty of mathematics, I
felt like a Peri outside Paradise. I had no mathematical ability.
I never saw the inner necessity of the truths of which I wrote the
proofs with glib understanding, but my teachers might have dragged me
through at least the Calculuses.
But, most of all, I am grateful for my training in elementary
chemistry. We had lectures with experiments, and a few of us were
allowed to go and do analyses of simple substances at the laboratory
of the boys’ college. You watch an experiment, some one pours some
hydrosulphuric acid (I hope it _is_ hydrosulphuric acid, my chemistry
is faded) on some loaf sugar, and in a moment the quiet white sugar
is a seething black volcano. Things are never the same to you again.
You know they _are_ not what they seem; you picture hidden terrific
forces, you can even imagine that the whole solid earth is only such
forces held in momentous balance.
Though I have lived most of my life with educationalists, I have
little interest in education. I dislike schools, both for boys and
girls. A child between the ages of eight and eighteen, the normal
school years, is too young to form a collective opinion, children
only set up foolish savage taboos. I dislike also all plans for
“developing a child’s mind”, and all conscious forms of personal
influence of the younger by the elder. Let children early speak
at least three foreign languages, let them browse freely in a good
library, see all they can of the first-rate in nature, art, and
literature--above all, give them a chance of knowing what science and
scientific method means, and then leave them to sink or swim. Above
all things, do not cultivate in them a taste for literature.
In answer to numerous inquiries, I beg to state that my first
literary effort was a tract entitled “Praying for Rain”. I was in
urgent need of a guinea to subscribe to a portrait of Miss Beale and
I dared not ask for such a sum. I sent my attempt to the Religious
Tract Society and almost by return came back a post-office order
for three guineas. If I had kept to tract-writing, I would not be
the needy woman I still am. I shall never forget the sight of that
delicious thin green paper. It was to me untold wealth, but I was
burdened with a sense of guilt. I dared not tell my father about the
post-office order. He held old-fashioned views as to women earning
money. To do so was to bring disgrace on the men of the family. I
longed to spend the extra two guineas on books, but I dared not. Long
ago I had told a lie and been made to stay at home from Church and
learn by heart the story of Ananias and Sapphira, who _kept back
part of the price_. “The feet of the young men who carried them out”
seemed to be waiting for me, so I offered my holocaust, sent the
whole three guineas to Miss Beale’s portrait, and thereby, I hope,
effaced the blot from the family scutcheon. I always sent a copy of
every book I wrote to my father, and he always acknowledged them in
the same set words: “Thank you for the book you have sent me, your
mother and sisters are well. Your affectionate father.” I am sure he
never read them, and I suspect his feeling towards them was what the
Freudians call _ambivalent_--half shame, half pride. Years after his
death I learnt, and it touched me deeply, that, on the rare occasions
when he left home, he took with him a portmanteau full of my books.
Why? Well, after all, he was a Yorkshireman, it may have been he
wanted a “bit o’ coompany”.
My father was the shyest man I ever knew, and terribly absent-minded.
Legend says that two years after he was married he rode up to
Limber Grange, my maternal grandfather’s house, and asked to see
Miss Elizabeth Nelson. I know myself that if he found unexpected
visitors in the drawing-room, he would give a frightened look round,
shake hands courteously with his embarrassed wife and daughters,
and disappear like a shot deer. In our rambling, uncomfortable old
house he had furnished for himself a Harbour of Refuge, known as his
workroom. It contained countless fishing-rods and a lathe on which he
turned boxes of ebony and ivory. It would have been a bold servant
who would have intruded there; even my stepmother dare not enter
unbidden. My father always said grace before dinner and luncheon,
but was furious when a clerical son-in-law wanted to say it before
breakfast. The form he adopted, and from which nothing could wean
him, was his own: “For what we are about to receive, _may the Lord be
truly thankful_.” My own absences of mind I control severely, but I
have occasional lapses, as when I turned into the trimming of a white
muslin tennis hat three ten pound notes destined to pay my college
fees. Six months later, after much fruitless and anguished searching,
the trimming was unpicked and the notes emerged.
My elder sister was less successful. As a clergyman’s wife, it
was part of her frequent duty to write “characters” for young
parishioners seeking situations. Every college tutor at the end of
the May-term knows the suffering entailed. Any form of literary
composition caused my sister acute agony. One day my niece and
I noticed that she was sitting at her writing-table with the
characteristic hunted look. “I wonder what old Dobbin is up to,”
said my niece. (Old Dobbin was her reverent appellation for a really
adored mother.) “Writing testimonials by the look of her,” said
I. “I’ll go and look,” said my niece. Looking over her mother’s
shoulder, my niece read, “I am seeking a situation for a young cat,
Mr. Velvet Brown (the actual name of my small nephew’s cat, at the
time felt to be superfluous). I can in every way heartily recommend
him; he is a good mouser, affectionate and clean in person and
habits. He has lived for some months in a clergyman’s family.” Here
she paused, pen in air, for inspiration, and was gradually restored
to reality by a prolonged giggle.
I ought, in justice to my sister, to explain that “Mr. Velvet Brown”
played a large part in the home life of the Vicarage, which he never
left till death removed him. He was a cat of great dignity. Tail in
air, he always trotted after my brother-in-law on his parish rounds.
If he was lost the whole house was upset. My small nephew was, after
the fashion of his generation, usually kind and forbearing to his
mother. I remember once she was, I must own, rather “nagging” at him,
and he said to her gently, “There, there, Mother, that will do.” But
when my sister said angrily, “Where on earth has that cat got to?”
he looked at her reprovingly and answered, “Mother, Mr. Velvet Brown
has gone for a stroll; he will be back for supper, and you’d better
keep some fish and a saucer of cream.” One of my most cherished
possessions is a photograph I still have of Mr. Velvet Brown. He is
taken standing on his hind-legs with his right paw uplifted. This
was supposed to be my brother-in-law’s favourite pulpit attitude.
But, alas! Mr. Velvet Brown was not what the French call “un chat
sérieux”, and one evening he went out to return no more. It was this
absence of mind in my sister and not, as I then stupidly thought,
lack of brains that made her construing of Latin sometimes fail to
carry conviction. I can hear her musical voice now, as she stumbled
through the dreary waste of a Latin exercise book. “The sharp horse
was pricking on the idle spur.” Her wits were always wool-gathering
like my father’s, and here was no wool to gather. I would not “put it
past” her now to assert that “the wall was building up Balbus”.
My father left Yorkshire because of the threatened approach within
a mile of our house of a small branch railway, connecting Scarbro’
and Whitby. He feared it would bring with it tourists, char-à-bancs,
gas lighting, and all the pollution of villadom. I think he was
unduly anxious. We left, but about ten years later I came back on a
visit to friends. I had occasion to go down to the little moorland
station to fetch a parcel of books. The tiny train came puffing up,
stopped; the guard’s van opened and some parcels were flung out.
Then forth stepped the single passenger, a great grey sheep-dog,
respectfully met by the station-master. Yorkshire is a Paradise for
dogs, specially sporting dogs. I have seen them crowding the platform
at York station about the Twelfth of August, waited on assiduously by
eager porters while their masters went neglected. But all dogs are
treated with due respect. I was once privileged to attend a huge St.
Bernard on his way home from Yorkshire. My friend and I travelled
first-class in honour of our great companion. The guard looked at
the three of us, grinned, and said, “Happen t’awd dog ud liever not
travel wi’ strangers.” He clapped an “Engaged” on the carriage and
was gone, never waiting for or, I am sure, thinking of a tip.