I came down from Oxford to find my mother and my two sisters returned
from America, and living in that Harrow Weald farm-house which my
brother Anthony, in his _Autobiography_, has described, I think, too
much _en noir_. It had once been a very good house, probably the
residence of the owner of the small farm on which it was situated. It
certainly was no longer a very good house, but it was not “tumble-down,”
as Anthony calls it, and was indeed a much better house than it would
have been if its original destination had been that of merely a
farmhouse. But it and “all that it inherited” was assuredly shabby
enough, and had been forlorn enough, as I had known it in my vacations,
when inhabited only by my father, my brother Anthony and myself.
But my mother was one of those people who carry sunshine with them! The
place did not seem the same! The old house, whatever else it may have
been, was roomy; and a very short time elapsed before my mother had got
round her one or two nice girl guests to help her in brightening it.
I may mention here a singular circumstance, which furnished me with
means of estimating my mother’s character in a phase of her life which
rarely comes within the purview of a son. Some years ago, not many years
I think after my mother’s death, an anonymous stranger sent my brother
Anthony a packet of old letters written by my mother to my father
shortly before and shortly after their marriage. He never was able to
ascertain who his benevolent correspondent was, nor how the papers in
question came into his possession. There they are, carefully tied up in
a neat packet, most of them undated by her, but carefully docketed with
the date by my father’s hand. The handwriting, not spoiled as it
afterwards became by writing over a hundred volumes, is a very elegant
one.
There is a singularly old-world flavour about them. There is a staid
moderation in their tone, which a reader of the present day, fresh from
the perusal of similar literature, as supplied by Mr. Mudie, would
probably call coldness. In the few letters which precede the marriage
there are no warm assurances of affection. After marriage the language
becomes more warm. I am tempted to transcribe a few passages that the
girls of the period may see how their great-grandmothers did these
things.
“It does not require three weeks’ consideration, Mr. Trollope”--thus
begins the first letter, undated, but docketed by my father, “F. M.
undated, received 2nd Nov., 1808”--“to enable me to tell you that the
letter you left with me last night was most flattering and gratifying to
me. I value your good opinion too highly not to feel that the generous
proof you have given me of it must for ever, and in any event, be
remembered by me with pride and gratitude. But I fear you are not
sufficiently aware that your choice, so flattering to me, is for
yourself a very imprudent one.” And then follows a business-like
statement of possessions and prospects, which the writer fears fall much
short of what her suitor might reasonably expect.
But none of my father’s faults tended in the slightest degree to lead
him to marry a millionnaire, whom he cared less for, in preference to a
girl without a sixpence, whom he loved better.
“In an affair of this kind,” the letter I have cited goes on to say, “I
do not think it any disadvantage to either party that some time should
elapse between the first contemplation and final decision of it. It
gives each an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the other’s
opinion on many important points, which could not be canvassed before it
was thought of, and which it would be useless to discuss after it was
settled.”
Could Mrs. Chapone have expressed herself better?
I find in another letter, dated (by my father) 6th December, 1808, the
following George-the-Thirdian passage: “The most disagreeable of created
beings, Col. ---- by name, by profession Sir ----’s led captain, is,
while I am writing, talking in an animated strain of eloquence to Mrs.
Milton” (my grandfather the vicar’s second wife and the writer’s
stepmother), “frequently seasoning his discourse with the polished
phrase, ‘Blood and thunder, ma’am!’ so if I happen to swear a little
before I conclude, be so good as to believe that I am accidentally
writing down what he is saying.... Poor dear innocent Dr. Nott! His
simplicity is quite pathetic! I am really afraid that he will be taking
twopence instead of two pounds from his parishioners, merely because he
does not know the difference between them. I cannot help feeling a
tender interest for such lamb-like innocence of the ways of this wicked
world. I dare say the night I saw him at the opera, he thought he was
_only_” (note the distinction) “at the play, nay, perhaps believed they
were performing an oratorio.”
In one letter of the 9th of April, 1809, I find a mention of “a frank”
sent by Mr. Mathias with a translation by him into Italian of the “Echo
Song” in _Comus_, of which the writer says that it is “elegantly done,
but is not Milton.”
In another of the 18th of May, 1809--the last before the marriage took
place--I find the following, which may interest some people. “I wish you
could be here to-morrow,” she writes, “we are going to see the prisoners
of war at Odiam (near Reading) perform one of Molière’s plays. Two years
ago we attended several of them, and I never enjoyed anything more.”
More than a score of these faded eighty-year-old letters are before me;
and I might perhaps have gleaned from them some other little touches
illustrative of men and manners when George the Third was king, but were
I to yield to all the temptations of the sort that beset the path on
which I am travelling, I should try my readers’ patience beyond all hope
of forgiveness.
My mother had brought home with her the MS. of a couple of volumes on
America; and the principal business on hand when I came home from Oxford
was the finding a publisher for these. In this quest she was zealously
and very energetically assisted by Captain Basil Hall, himself the
author of a work on America and sundry other books, which at that time
had made a considerable reputation. Basil Hall’s book on America did not
take a favourable view of the Americans or their institutions; and it
had been mercilessly attacked and accused of misrepresentation by all
the critics of the Liberal party. For Hall’s book, and everything else
concerning America, was in those days looked at from a political party
point of view. America and the Americans were understood to be
anti-everything that was dear to Conservatives. They were accordingly
the pets of the Whigs (Radicals and Radicalism had not yet emerged into
the ken of respectable folk, either Whig or Tory), and Hall’s book had
been abused accordingly. He was very sore about the accusations of
untruthfulness, and was delighted with a book which supported his
assertions and his views. How my mother came to be introduced to him,
and how it came to pass that the MS. of her work was shown to him, I do
not remember, but the result was that he was zealously eager for the
publication of it. The title, if I recollect rightly, was proposed by
him. _The Domestic Manners of the Americans_ was published, and made an
immediate and great success. It was emphatically the book of the season,
was talked of everywhere, and read by all sorts and conditions of men
and women. It was highly praised by all the Conservative organs of the
press, and vehemently abused by all those of the opposite party. Edition
after edition was sold, and the pecuniary results were large enough to
avert from the family of the successful authoress the results of her
husband’s ruined fortunes.
The Americans were made very angry by this account of their “domestic
manners”--very naturally, but not very wisely. Of course, it was
asserted that many of the statements made were false and many of the
descriptions caricatured. Nothing in the book from beginning to end was
false; nothing of minutest detail which was asserted to have been seen
had not been seen; nor was anything intentionally caricatured or
exaggerated for the sake of enhancing literary effect. But the tone of
the book was unfriendly, and was throughout the result of offended taste
rather than of well-weighed opinion. It was full of universal
conclusions drawn from particular premises; and no sufficient weight, or
rather no weight at all, was allowed to the fact that the observations
on which the recorded judgments were founded had been gathered almost
entirely in what was then the Far West, and represented the “domestic
manners” of the Atlantic states hardly at all. Unquestionably the book
was a very clever one, and written with infinite _verve_ and brightness.
But--save for the fact that censure and satire are always more amusing
than the reverse--an equally clever and equally truthful book might have
been written in a diametrically opposite spirit.
No doubt the markedly favourable reception of the book was what mainly
irritated our American cousins. But they certainly were angry far beyond
what the importance of the matter would seem to have justified. I
remember that Colley Grattan, whose fame as the author of _Highways and
Byways_ was then at its zenith, in writing to me from Boston, where he
resided for many years as British Consul, inviting me to visit him
there, went into the question of the reception I might be likely to meet
with on that side of the Atlantic. “I think,” he wrote, “that to come
over under a false name would be _infra dig_. But really I fear that if
you come under your own, you may be _in for a dig_!”
Whether Grattan exaggerated the wrath of his Bostonian friends for the
sake of his joke, I do not know. Unquestionably the Americans, even
speaking of them as a nation, were made very angry by my mother’s book.
But the anger was not of a very spiteful or rancorous description, for
from that day to this I have never met with anything but kindness and
cordial friendliness from all the Americans I have known--and I have
known very many.
The return of my mother, and the success of her book, produced a change
in the condition and circumstances of affairs at home which resembled
the transformation scene in a pantomime that takes place at the advent
of the good fairy. Even the old farm-house at Harrow Weald was
brightened up physically, and to a far greater degree morally, by her
presence. But we did not remain long there. Very shortly she took us
back to Harrow, not to the large house built by my father on Lord
Northwick’s land, but to another very good house on the same farm--not
above a stone’s throw from the previous one, which he had made (very
imprudently) by adding to and improving the original farm-house--a very
comfortable residence. This was the house which the world has heard of
as “Orley Farm.”
And there my mother became immediately surrounded by many old friends
and many new ones. I remember among the latter Letitia Landon, better
known to the world as “L. E. L.” She was a _petite_ figure, very
insignificant-looking, with a sharp chin, turn-up nose, and on the whole
rather _piquante_ face, though without any pretension to good looks. I
remember her being seated one day at dinner by the side of a certain
dignitary of the Church, who had the reputation of being more of a _bon
vivant_ than a theologian, and who was old enough to have been her
father; and on my asking her afterwards what they had been talking about
so earnestly, as I had seen them, “About eating, to be sure!” said she.
“I always talk to everybody on their strong point. I told him that
writing poetry was my trade, but that eating was my pleasure, and we
were fast friends before the fish was finished!” Her sad fate and tragic
ending, poor soul! attracted much attention and sympathy at the time.
And doubtless fate and the world used her hardly; but she was one of
those who never under any circumstances would have run a straight and
prosperous course.
Another visitor whom I remember well at that and other times was the
Rev. Henry Milman, the third son of Sir Francis Milman, who was, if I
rightly recollect, physician to Queen Charlotte. I remember hearing him
say (but this was long previously) that no man need think much about the
gout, who had never had it till he was forty. His widow, Lady Milman,
lived with her daughter many years at Pinner, near Harrow, and they were
very old friends of my mother. She was a dear old lady with certain
points of eccentricity about her. She used always to carry a volume of
South’s sermons with her to church for perusal during the less
satisfactory discourse of her more immediate pastor; and I am afraid was
not sufficiently careful to conceal her preference. It must be over
sixty years since, lunching one day at Pinner, I was much amused at her
insisting that Abraham, the old one-eyed footman, who had lived in the
family all his life, should kneel before the dining-room fire to warm
her plate of pickled salmon! I remember walking with her shortly before
her death in the kitchen garden at Pinner, when Saunders, the old
butler, who had developed into a sort of upper gardener, was pruning the
peach trees. “Oh! don’t cut that, Saunders,” said my lady; “I want to
see those blossoms. And I shall never see them another year!” “Must come
off, my lady,” said Saunders inexorably, as he sheared away the branch.
“He never will let me have my way,” grumbled the little old lady, as she
resumed her trot along the gravel walk under the peach wall. My lady,
however, could assert herself sufficiently on some occasions. I happened
to be at Pinner one day when Mrs. Archdeacon Hodgson, a neighbour,
called somewhat earlier in the day than the recognised hour for morning
visits. “Very glad to see you, my dear,” said my lady, rising to meet
her astonished visitor, who was at least twice as big a woman as
herself, I mean physically, “but _you must not do this sort of thing
again_!”
Her third son, Henry Milman, who, having begun his career as the author
of perhaps the best “Newdegate” ever written, was famous during the
earlier part of it as a poet and dramatist, and during the latter
portion of it (more durably) as an historian, was, with his very
beautiful wife, one of our visitors at this period. He was at that time
certainly a very brilliant man, but I did not like him as well as I did
his elder brother, Sir William. I give only the impressions of an
undergraduate, who was, I think, rather boyish for his age. But it
seemed to me that the poet had a strain of worldliness in his character,
and a certain flavour of cynicism (not incompatible, however, with
serious views and earnest feeling on religious subjects), which were
wholly absent from the elder brother, who wrote neither poems nor
histories, but was to my then thinking a very perfect gentleman. “_Nec
vixit male qui natus moriensque fefellit._”
I find recorded in a diary of that time (November, 1832) some notes of a
conversation with Henry Milman one evening when I, with my parents and
sister, had been dining with Lady Milman at Pinner, which are perhaps
worth reproducing here.
I asked him in the course of a long after-dinner conversation what he
thought of Shuttleworth’s book on the _Consistency of Revelation with
Itself and with Human Reason_, which formed the second volume of the
series called the “Theological Library,” and which I had recently been
reading. He said the work had a great many faults, one of the principal
of which was its great difficulty. On this point I find, from other
entries in my diary, that my undergraduate experience fully coincided
with his more valuable judgment. The reasoning in a great many places
was, he said, false; and in that part which treated of the Mosaic
account of the creation of the world, the great question was entirely
blinked. The abstract of moral duties appeared to him, he said, to be by
far the most able part of the book. He considered Shuttleworth “a man
of very limited reading.” And this perhaps he may have seemed to one of
whom it used to be said jocosely in his own family that “Henry reads a
book, not as other mortals do, line after line, but obliquely, from the
left hand upper corner of a page to the right hand lower corner of the
same!”
Milman, on the same occasion, spoke much of the decay of a love of
learning in England generally, and particularly at Oxford. He said that
no four men could be found there who were up to the European level of
the day in any branch of learning--not even in theology. And speaking of
England generally, he said that in no one public library in the country
could the books requisite for a man, who wished to write a learned work
on any subject whatever, be found. Germany was, and was, he thought,
likely to remain, the great emporium of all learning.
As for the Church, he said that it would never be the profession that it
had been--that it would not be his choice for a son of his; and that the
law was the only profession for talent in these days. He observed that
it was very remarkable that no change--no revolution--had ever passed
over this country without adding power and wealth to that profession.
Here, also, I may record, if the reader will pardon the abruptness of a
transition that hurries him from scholarly disquisition to antipodean
regions of subject and social atmosphere, an expedition I and my
brother Anthony made together, which recurs to my mind in connection
with those days. But I think that it must have belonged to the Harrow
Weald times before the return of my mother from America, because the
extreme impecuniosity, which made the principal feature of it, would not
have occurred subsequently. We saw--my brother and I--some advertisement
of an extra-magnificent entertainment that was to take place at
Vauxhall; something of so gorgeous promise in the way of illuminations
and fireworks, and all for the specially reduced entrance fee of one
shilling each person, that, chancing to possess just that amount, we
determined to profit by so unique an occasion. Any means of conveyance
other than legs, ignorant in those days of defeat, was not to be thought
of. We had just the necessary two shillings, and no more. So we set off
to walk the (at least) fourteen miles from Harrow Weald to Vauxhall,
timing ourselves to arrive there about nine in the evening. Anthony
danced all night. I took no part in that amusement, but contented myself
with looking on and with the truly superb display of fireworks. Then at
about 1 A.M. we set off and walked back our fourteen miles home again
without having touched bite or sup! Did anybody else ever purchase the
delight of an evening at Vauxhall at so high a price?
I did, however, much about the same time a harder day’s walk. I was
returning from Oxford to Harrow Weald, and I determined to walk it,
not, I think, on this occasion, _deficiente crumenâ_, but for pleasure,
and to try my powers. The distance, I think, is, as near as may be,
forty-seven miles. But I carried a very heavy knapsack--a far heavier
one than any experienced campaigner would have advised. This was the
longest day’s walk I ever achieved; and I arrived very tired and
footsore. But the next morning I was perfectly well, and ready to have
taken the road again. Upon this occasion I walked my first stage of
twelve miles before breakfast; absolutely, that is to say, before
breaking my fast. I think that not very many persons could do this, and
I am sure that the few, who could do it, had much better not do so.
I have spoken of the immense change operated in the circumstances and
surroundings of all of us by my mother’s return from America and the
success of her first work, the _Domestic Manners of the Americans_. But,
efficacious as this success was for producing so great a change, and
sufficient as the continued success of her subsequent works was to
rescue the whole of her family from the slough of ruin, in which my
father’s farming operations, and to some extent, I suppose his
injudicious commercial attempt at Cincinnati, had involved him, the
results of this success were very far from availing to stem the tide of
ruin as regarded his affairs. They were sufficient to relieve him from
all expenses connected with the household or its individual members, but
not to supply in addition to all these, the annual losses on the Harrow
farm. Hence the break-up described by my brother Anthony in his
_Autobiography_, and my father’s exodus from Harrow as there narrated.