THE winter of 1854–55 I spent in Rome. Here I made the acquaintance of
Leighton, then six-and-twenty. I saw a good deal of him, as I lived
almost entirely amongst the artists, taking lessons myself in water
colours of Leitch. Music also brought us into contact. He had a
beautiful voice, and used to sing a good deal with Mrs. Sartoris—Adelaide
Kemble—whom he greatly admired, and whose portrait is painted under a
monk’s cowl, in the Cimabue procession.
Calling on him one morning, I found him on his knees buttering and
rolling up this great picture, preparatory to sending it to the Academy.
I made some remark about its unusual size, saying with a sceptical smile,
‘It will take up a lot of room.’
‘If they ever hang it,’ he replied; ‘but there’s not much chance of
that.’
Seeing that his reputation was yet to win, it certainly seemed a bold
venture to make so large a demand for space to begin with. He did not
appear the least sanguine. But it was accepted; and Prince Albert bought
it before the Exhibition opened.
Gibson also I saw much of. He had executed a large alto-rilievo monument
of my mother, which is now in my parish church, and the model of which is
on the landing of one of the staircases of the National Gallery. His
studio was always an interesting lounge, for he was ever ready to lecture
upon antique marbles. To listen to him was like reading the ‘Laocoon,’
which he evidently had at his fingers’ ends. My companion through the
winter was Mr. Reginald Cholmondeley, a Cambridge ally, who was studying
painting. He was the uncle of Miss Cholmondeley the well-known
authoress, whose mother, by the way, was a first cousin of George
Cayley’s, and also a great friend of mine.
On my return to England I took up my abode in Dean’s Yard, and shared a
house there with Mr. Cayley, the Yorkshire member, and his two sons, the
eldest a barrister, and my friend George. Here for several years we had
exceedingly pleasant gatherings of men more or less distinguished in
literature and art. Tennyson was a frequent visitor—coming late, after
dinner hours, to smoke his pipe. He varied a good deal, sometimes not
saying a word, but quietly listening to our chatter. Thackeray also used
to drop in occasionally.
George Cayley and I, with the assistance of his father and others, had
started a weekly paper called ‘The Realm.’ It was professedly a currency
paper, and also supported a fiscal policy advocated by Mr. Cayley and
some of his parliamentary clique. Coming in one day, and finding us hard
at work, Thackeray asked for information. We handed him a copy of the
paper. ‘Ah,’ he exclaimed, with mock solemnity, ‘“The Rellum,” should be
printed on vellum.’ He too, like Tennyson, was variable. But this
depended on whom he found. In the presence of a stranger he was grave
and silent. He would never venture on puerile jokes like this of his
‘Rellum’—a frequent playfulness, when at his ease, which contrasted so
unexpectedly with his impenetrable exterior. He was either gauging the
unknown person, or feeling that he was being gauged. Monckton Milnes was
another. Seeing me correcting some proof sheets, he said, ‘Let me give
you a piece of advice, my young friend. Write as much as you please, but
the less you print the better.’
‘For me, or for others?’
‘For both.’
George Cayley had a natural gift for, and had acquired considerable
skill, in the embossing and working of silver ware. Millais so admired
his art that he commissioned him to make a large tea-tray; Millais
provided the silver. Round the border of the tray were beautifully
modelled sea-shells, cray-fish, crabs, and fish of quaint forms, in high
relief. Millais was so pleased with the work that he afterwards painted,
and presented to Cayley, a fine portrait in his best style of Cayley’s
son, a boy of six or seven years old.
Laurence Oliphant was one of George Cayley’s friends. Attractive as he
was in many ways, I had little sympathy with his religious opinions, nor
did I comprehend Oliphant’s exalted inspirations; I failed to see their
practical bearing, and, at that time I am sorry to say, looked upon him
as an amiable faddist. A special favourite with both of us was William
Stirling of Keir. His great work on the Spanish painters, and his
‘Cloister Life of Charles the Fifth,’ excited our unbounded admiration,
while his _bonhomie_ and radiant humour were a delight we were always
eager to welcome.
George Cayley and I now entered at Lincoln’s Inn. At the end of three
years he was duly called to the Bar. I was not; for alas, as usual,
something ‘turned up,’ which drew me in another direction. For a couple
of years, however, I ‘ate’ my terms—not unfrequently with William
Harcourt, with whom Cayley had a Yorkshire intimacy even before our
Cambridge days.
Old Mr. Cayley, though not the least strait-laced, was a religious man.
A Unitarian by birth and conviction, he began and ended the day with
family prayers. On Sundays he would always read to us, or make us read
to him, a sermon of Channing’s, or of Theodore Parker’s, or what we all
liked better, one of Frederick Robertson’s. He was essentially a good
man. He had been in Parliament all his life, and was a broad-minded,
tolerant, philosophical man-of-the-world. He had a keen sense of humour,
and was rather sarcastical; but, for all that, he was sensitively
earnest, and conscientious. I had the warmest affection and respect for
him. Such a character exercised no small influence upon our conduct and
our opinions, especially as his approval or disapproval of these visibly
affected his own happiness.
He was never easy unless he was actively engaged in some benevolent
scheme, the promotion of some charity, or in what he considered his
parliamentary duties, which he contrived to make very burdensome to his
conscience. As his health was bad, these self-imposed obligations were
all the more onerous; but he never spared himself, or his somewhat scanty
means. Amongst other minor tasks, he used to teach at the Sunday-school
of St. John’s, Westminster; in this he persuaded me to join him. The
only other volunteer, not a clergyman, was Page Wood—a great friend of
Mr. Cayley’s—afterwards Lord Chancellor Hatherley. In spite of Mr.
Cayley’s Unitarianism, like Frederick the Great, he was all for letting
people ‘go to Heaven in their own way,’ and was moreover quite ready to
help them in their own way. So that he had no difficulty in hearing the
boys repeat the day’s collect, or the Creed, even if Athanasian, in
accordance with the prescribed routine of the clerical teachers.
This was right, at all events for him, if he thought it right. My spirit
of nonconformity did not permit me to follow his example. Instead
thereof, my teaching was purely secular. I used to take a volume of Mrs.
Marcet’s ‘Conversations’ in my pocket; and with the aid of the diagrams,
explain the application of the mechanical forces,—the inclined plane, the
screw, the pulley, the wedge, and the lever. After two or three Sundays
my class was largely increased, for the children keenly enjoyed their
competitive examinations. I would also give them bits of poetry to get
by heart for the following Sunday—lines from Gray’s ‘Elegy,’ from
Wordsworth, from Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’—such in short as had a moral
rather than a religious tendency.
After some weeks of this, the boys becoming clamorous in their zeal to
correct one another, one of the curates left his class to hear what was
going on in mine. We happened at the moment to be dealing with
geography. The curate, evidently shocked, went away and brought another
curate. Then the two together departed, and brought back the rector—Dr.
Jennings, one of the Westminster Canons—a most kind and excellent man. I
went on as if unconscious of the censorship, the boys exerting themselves
all the more eagerly for the sake of the ‘gallery.’ When the hour was
up, Canon Jennings took me aside, and in the most polite manner thanked
me for my ‘valuable assistance,’ but did not think that the ‘Essay on
Man,’ or especially geography, was suited for the teaching in a
Sunday-school. I told him I knew it was useless to contend with so high
a canonical authority; personally I did not see the impiety of geography,
but then, as he already knew, I was a confirmed latitudinarian. He
clearly did not see the joke, but intimated that my services would
henceforth be dispensed with.
Of course I was wrong, though I did not know it then, for it must be
borne in mind that there were no Board Schools in those days, and general
education, amongst the poor, was deplorably deficient. At first, my idea
was to give the children (they were all boys) a taste for the
‘humanities,’ which might afterwards lead to their further pursuit. I
assumed that on the Sunday they would be thinking of the baked meats
awaiting them when church was over, or of their week-day tops and
tipcats; but I was equally sure that a time would come when these would
be forgotten, and the other things remembered. The success was greater
from the beginning than could be looked for; and some years afterwards I
had reason to hope that the forecast was not altogether too sanguine.
While the Victoria Tower was being built, I stopped one day to watch the
masons chiselling the blocks of stone. Presently one of them, in a
flannel jacket and a paper cap, came and held out his hand to me. He was
a handsome young fellow with a big black beard and moustache, both
powdered with his chippings.
‘You don’t remember me, sir, do you?’
‘Did I ever see you before?’
‘My name is Richards; don’t you remember, sir? I was one of the boys you
used to teach at the Sunday-school. It gave me a turn for mechanics,
which I followed up; and that’s how I took to this trade. I’m a master
mason now, sir; and the whole of this lot is under me.’
‘I wonder what you would have been,’ said I, ‘if we’d stuck to the
collects?’
‘I don’t think I should have had a hand in this little job,’ he answered,
looking up with pride at the mighty tower, as though he had a creative
share in its construction.
All this while I was working hard at my own education, and trying to make
up for the years I had wasted (so I thought of them), by knocking about
the world. I spent laborious days and nights in reading, dabbling in
geology, chemistry, physiology, metaphysics, and what not. On the score
of dogmatic religion I was as restless as ever. I had an insatiable
thirst for knowledge; but was without guidance. I wanted to learn
everything; and, not knowing in what direction to concentrate my efforts,
learnt next to nothing. All knowledge seemed to me equally important,
for all bore alike upon the great problems of belief and of existence.
But what to pursue, what to relinquish, appeared to me an unanswerable
riddle. Difficult as this puzzle was, I did not know then that a long
life’s experience would hardly make it simpler. The man who has to earn
his bread must fain resolve to adapt his studies to that end. His choice
not often rests with him. But the unfortunate being cursed in youth with
the means of idleness, yet without genius, without talents even, is
terribly handicapped and perplexed.
And now, with life behind me, how should I advise another in such a
plight? When a young lady, thus embarrassed, wrote to Carlyle for
counsel, he sympathetically bade her ‘put her drawers in order.’
Here is the truth to be faced at the outset: ‘Man has but the choice to
go a little way in many paths, or a great way in only one.’ ‘Tis thus
John Mill puts it. Which will he, which should he, choose? Both courses
lead alike to incompleteness. The universal man is no specialist, and
has to generalise without his details. The specialist sees only through
his microscope, and knows about as much of cosmology as does his microbe.
Goethe, the most comprehensive of Seers, must needs expose his
incompleteness by futile attempts to disprove Newton’s theory of colour.
Newton must needs expose his, by a still more lamentable attempt to prove
the Apocalypse as true as his own discovery of the laws of gravitation.
All science nowadays is necessarily confined to experts. Without
illustrating the fact by invidious hints, I invite anyone to consider the
intellectual cost to the world which such limitation entails; nor is the
loss merely negative; the specialist is unfortunately too often a bigot,
when beyond his contracted sphere.
This, you will say, is arguing in a circle. The universal must be given
up for the detail, the detail for the universal; we leave off where we
began. Yes, that is the dilemma. Still, the gain to science through a
devotion of a whole life to a mere group of facts, in a single branch of
a single science, may be an incalculable acquisition to human knowledge,
to the intellectual capital of the race—a gain that sometimes far
outweighs the loss. Even if we narrow the question to the destiny of the
individual, the sacrifice of each one for the good of the whole is
doubtless the highest aim the one can have.
But this conclusion scarcely helps us; for remember, the option is not
given to all. Genius, or talent, or special aptitude, is a necessary
equipment for such an undertaking. Great discoverers must be great
observers, dexterous manipulators, ingenious contrivers, and patient
thinkers.
The difficulty we started with was, what you and I, my friend, who
perhaps have to row in the same boat, and perhaps ‘with the same sculls,’
without any of these provisions, what we should do? What point of the
compass should we steer for? ‘Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it
with thy might.’ Truly there could be no better advice. But the
‘finding’ is the puzzle; and like the search for truth it must, I fear,
be left to each one’s power to do it. And then—and then the countless
thousands who have the leisure without the means—who have hands at least,
and yet no work to put them to—what is to be done for these? Not in your
time or mine, dear friend, will that question be answered. For this, I
fear we must wait till by the ‘universal law of adaptation’ we reach ‘the
ultimate development of the ideal man.’ ‘Colossal optimism,’ exclaims
the critic.