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A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS (IN TWO VOLUMES), VOLUME I
BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD
Published November, 1918
[Illustration: DR. THOMAS ARNOLD OF RUGBY]
_To
T. H. W.
(In memory of April 6, 1872)_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. EARLY DAYS
II. FOX HOW
III. THE FAMILY OF FOX HOW
IV. OTHER CHILDREN OF FOX HOW
V. THE FRIENDS OF FOX HOW
VI. YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD
VII. BALLIOL AND LINCOLN
VIII. EARLY MARRIED LIFE
IX. THE BEGINNINGS OF "ROBERT ELSMERE"
ILLUSTRATIONS
DR. THOMAS ARNOLD OP RUGBY _Frontispiece_
MATTHEW ARNOLD
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN J
FOX HOW, THE WESTMORLAND HOME OF THE ARNOLDS
BENJAMIN JOWETT
A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS
CHAPTER I
EARLY DAYS
Do we all become garrulous and confidential as we approach the gates of
old age? Is it that we instinctively feel, and cannot help asserting,
our one advantage over the younger generation, which has so many over
us?--the one advantage of _time!_
After all, it is not disputable that we have lived longer than they.
When they talk of past poets, or politicians, or novelists, whom the
young still deign to remember, of whom for once their estimate agrees
with ours, we can sometimes put in a quiet, "I saw him"--or, "I talked
with him"--which for the moment wins the conversational race. And as we
elders fall back before the brilliance and glitter of the New Age,
advancing "like an army with banners," this mere prerogative of years
becomes in itself a precious possession. After all, we cannot divest
ourselves of it, if we would. It is better to make friends with it--to
turn it into a kind of _panache_--to wear it with an air, since wear it
we must.
So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to
look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows
upon most of us. I cannot hope that what I have to say will be very
interesting to many. A life spent largely among books, and in the
exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a
subject-matter, when one comes to write about it. I can only attempt it
with any success, if my readers will allow me a large psychological
element. The thoughts and opinions of one human being, if they are
sincere, must always have an interest for some other human beings. The
world is there to think about; and if we have lived, or are living, with
any sort of energy, we _must_ have thought about it, and about ourselves
in relation to it--thought "furiously" often. And it is out of the many
"thinkings" of many folk, strong or weak, dull or far-ranging, that
thought itself grows. For progress surely, whether in men or nations,
means only a richer knowledge; the more impressions, therefore, on the
human intelligence that we can seize and record, the more sensitive
becomes that intelligence itself.
But of course the difficulty lies in the seizing and recording--in the
choice, that is, of what to say, and how to say it. In this choice, as I
look back over more than half a century, I can only follow--and
trust--the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction.
I shall be telling what is primarily true, or as true as I can make it,
as distinguished from what is primarily imagination, built on truth. But
the truth one uses in fiction must be interesting! Milton expresses that
in the words "sensuous" and "passionate," which he applies to poetry in
the _Areopagitica_. And the same thing applies to autobiography, where
selection is even more necessary than in fiction. Nothing ought to be
told, I think, that does not interest or kindle one's own mind in
looking back; it is the only condition on which one can hope to interest
or kindle other minds. And this means that one ought to handle things
broadly, taking only the salient points in the landscape of the past,
and of course with as much detachment as possible. Though probably in
the end one will have to admit--egotists that we all are!--that not much
detachment _is_ possible.
For me, the first point that stands out is the arrival of a little girl
of five, in the year 1856, at a gray-stone house in a Westmorland
valley, where, fourteen years earlier, the children of Arnold of Rugby,
the "Doctor" of _Tom Brown's Schooldays_, had waited on a June day, to
greet their father, expected from the South, only to hear, as the summer
day died away, that two hours' sharp illness, that very morning, had
taken him from them. Of what preceded my arrival as a black-haired,
dark-eyed child, with my father, mother, and two brothers, at Fox How,
the holiday house among the mountains which the famous headmaster had
built for himself in 1834, I have but little recollection. I see dimly
another house in wide fields, where dwarf lilies grew, and I know that
it was a house in Tasmania, where at the time of my birth my father,
Thomas Arnold, the Doctor's second son, was organizing education in the
young colony. I can just recall, too, the deck of a ship which to my
childish feet seemed vast--but the _William Brown_ was a sailing-ship of
only 400 tons!--in which we made the voyage home in 1856. Three months
and a half we took about it, going round the Horn in bitter weather,
much run over by rats at night, and expected to take our baths by day in
two huge barrels full of sea water on the deck, into which we children
were plunged shivering by our nurse, two or three times a week. My
father and mother, their three children, and some small cousins, who
were going to England under my mother's care, were the only passengers.
I can remember, too, being lifted--weak and miserable with toothache--in
my father's arms to catch the first sight of English shores as we neared
the mouth of the Thames; and then the dismal inn by the docks where we
first took shelter. The dreary room where we children slept the first
night, its dingy ugliness and its barred windows, still come back to me
as a vision of horror. Next day, like angels of rescue, came an aunt and
uncle, who took us away to other and cheerful quarters, and presently
saw us off to Westmorland. The aunt was my godmother, Doctor Arnold's
eldest daughter--then the young wife of William Edward Forster, a Quaker
manufacturer, who afterward became the well-known Education Minister of
1870, and was Chief Secretary for Ireland in the terrible years 1880-82.
To my mother and her children, Fox How and its inmates represented much
that was new and strange. My mother was the granddaughter of one of the
first Governors of Tasmania, Governor Sorell, and had been brought up in
the colony, except for a brief schooling at Brussels. Of her personal
beauty in youth we children heard much, as we grew up, from her old
Tasmanian friends and kinsfolk who would occasionally drift across us;
and I see as though I had been there a scene often described to me--my
mother playing Hermione in the "Winter's Tale," at Government House when
Sir William Denison was Governor--a vision, lovely and motionless, on
her pedestal, till at the words, "Music! awake her! Strike!" she kindled
into life. Her family were probably French in origin. Governor Sorell
had been a man of promise in his youth. His father, General William
Alexander Sorell, of the Coldstream Guards, was a soldier of some
eminence, whose two sons, William and Thomas, both served under Sir John
Moore and at the Cape. But my great-grandfather ruined his military
career, while he was Deputy Adjutant-General at the Cape, by a
love-affair with a brother officer's wife, and was banished or
promoted--whichever one pleases to call it--to the new colony of
Tasmania, of which he became Governor in 1816. His eldest son, by the
wife he had left behind him in England, went out as a youth of
twenty-one or so, to join his father, the Governor, in Tasmania, and I
possess a little calf-bound diary of my grandfather written in a very
delicate and refined hand, about the year 1823. The faint entries in it
show him to have been a devoted son. But when, in 1830 or so, the
Governor left the colony, and retired to Brussels, my grandfather
remained in Van Diemen's Land, as it was then generally called, became
very much attached to the colony, and filled the post of Registrar of
Deeds for many years under its successive Governors. I just remember
him, as a gentle, affectionate, upright being, a gentleman of an old,
punctilious school, strictly honorable and exact, content with a small
sphere, and much loved within it. He would sometimes talk to his
children of early days in Bath, of his father's young successes and
promotions, and of his grandfather, General Sorell, who, as Adjutant of
the Coldstream Guards from 1744 to 1758, and associated with all the
home and foreign service of that famous regiment during those years,
through the Seven Years' War, and up to the opening of the American War
of Independence, played a vaguely brilliant part in his grandson's
recollections. But he himself was quite content with the modest affairs
of an infant colony, which even in its earliest days achieved, whether
in its landscape or its life, a curiously English effect; as though an
English midland county had somehow got loose and, drifting to the
Southern seas, had there set up--barring a few black aborigines, a few
convicts, its mimosas, and its tree-ferns--another quiet version of the
quiet English life it had left behind.
But the Sorells, all the same, had some foreign and excitable blood in
them. Their story of themselves was that they were French Huguenots,
expelled in 1685, who had settled in England and, coming of a military
stock, had naturally sought careers in the English army. There are
points in this story which are puzzling; but the foreign touch in my
mother, and in the Governor--to judge from the only picture of him which
remains--was unmistakable. Delicate features, small, beautifully shaped
hands and feet, were accompanied in my mother by a French vivacity and
quickness, an overflowing energy, which never forsook her through all
her trials and misfortunes. In the Governor, the same physical
characteristics make a rather decadent and foppish impression--as of an
old stock run to seed. The stock had been reinvigorated in my mother,
and one of its original elements which certainly survived in her
temperament and tradition was of great importance both for her own life
and for her children's. This was the Protestant--the _French_
Protestant--element; which no doubt represented in the family from which
she came a history of long suffering at the hands of Catholicism.
Looking back upon her Protestantism, I see that it was not the least
like English Evangelicalism, whether of the Anglican or dissenting type.
There was nothing emotional or "enthusiastic" in it--no breath of Wesley
or Wilberforce; but rather something drawn from deep wells of history,
instinctive and invincible. Had some direct Calvinist ancestor of hers,
with a soul on fire, fought the tyranny of Bossuet and Madame de
Maintenon, before--eternally hating and resenting "Papistry"--he
abandoned his country and kinsfolk, in the search for religious liberty?
That is the impression which--looking back upon her life--it often makes
upon me. All the more strange that to her it fell, unwittingly,
imagining, indeed, that by her marriage with a son of Arnold of Rugby
she was taking a step precisely in the opposite direction, to be, by a
kind of tragic surprise, which yet was no one's fault, the wife of a
Catholic.
And that brings me to my father, whose character and story were so
important to all his children that I must try and draw them, though I
cannot pretend to any impartiality in doing so--only to the insight that
affection gives; its one abiding advantage over the critic and the
stranger.
He was the second son of Doctor Arnold of Rugby, and the younger
brother--by only eleven months--of Matthew Arnold. On that morning of
June 12, 1842, when the headmaster who in fourteen years' rule at Rugby
had made himself so conspicuous a place, not merely in the public-school
world, but in English life generally[1] arose, in the words of
his poet son--to tread--
In the summer morning, the road--
Of death, at a call unforeseen--
Sudden--
My father, a boy of eighteen, was in the house, and witnessed the fatal
attack of _angina pectoris_ which, in two hours, cut short a memorable
career, and left those who till then, under a great man's shelter and
keeping, had--
Rested as under the boughs
Of a mighty oak....
Bare, unshaded, alone.
[Footnote 1: At the moment of correcting these proofs, my attention has
been called to a foolish essay on my grandfather by Mr. Lytton
Strachey, none the less foolish because it is the work of an extremely
clever man. If Mr. Strachey imagines that the effect of my
grandfather's life and character upon men like Stanley and Clough, or a
score of others who could be named, can be accounted for by the eidolon
he presents to his readers in place of the real human being, one can
only regard it as one proof the more of the ease with which a certain
kind of ability outwits itself.]
He had been his father's special favorite among the elder children, as
shown by some verses in my keeping addressed to him as a small boy, at
different times, by "the Doctor." Those who know their _Tom Brown's
Schooldays_ will perhaps remember the various passages in the book where
the softer qualities of the man whom "three hundred reckless childish
boys" feared with all their hearts, "and very little besides in heaven
or earth," are made plain in the language of that date. Arthur's
illness, for instance, when the little fellow, who has been at death's
door, tells Tom Brown, who is at last allowed to see him: "You can't
think what the Doctor's like when one's ill. He said such brave and
tender and gentle things to me--I felt quite light and strong after it,
and never had any more fear." Or East's talk with the Doctor, when the
lively boy of many scrapes has a moral return upon himself, and says to
his best friend: "You can't think how kind and gentle he was, the great
grim man, whom I've feared more than anybody on earth. When I stuck, he
lifted me, just as if I'd been a little child. And he seemed to know all
I'd felt, and to have gone through it all." This tenderness and charm of
a strong man, which in Stanley's biography is specially mentioned as
growing more and more visible in the last months of his life, was always
there for his children. In a letter written in 1828 to his sister, when
my father as a small child not yet five was supposed to be dying, Arnold
says, trying to steel himself against the bitterness of coming loss, "I
might have loved him, had he lived, too dearly--you know how deeply I do
love him now." And three years later, when "little Tom," on his eighth
birthday, had just said, wistfully--with a curious foreboding instinct,
"I think that the eight years I have now lived will be the happiest of
my life," Arnold, painfully struck by the words, wrote some verses upon
them which I still possess. "The Doctor" was no poet, though the best of
his historical prose--the well-known passage in the Roman History, for
instance, on the death of Marcellus--has some of the essential notes of
poetry--passion, strength, music. But the gentle Wordsworthian quality
of his few essays in verse will be perhaps interesting to those who are
aware of him chiefly as the great Liberal fighter of eighty years ago.
He replies to his little son:
Is it that aught prophetic stirred
Thy spirit to that ominous word,
Foredating in thy childish mind
The fortune of thy Life's career--
That naught of brighter bliss shall cheer
What still remains behind?
Or is thy Life so full of bliss
That, come what may, more blessed than this
Thou canst not be again?
And fear'st thou, standing on the shore,
What storms disturb with wild uproar
The years of older men?
* * * * *
At once to enjoy, at once to hope--
That fills indeed the largest scope
Of good our thoughts can reach.
Where can we learn so blest a rule,
What wisest sage, what happiest school,
Art so divine can teach?
The answer, of course, in the mouth of a Christian teacher is that in
Christianity alone is there both present joy and future hope. The
passages in Arnold's most intimate diary, discovered after his death,
and published by Dean Stanley, show what the Christian faith was to my
grandfather, how closely bound up with every action and feeling of his
life. The impression made by his conception of that faith, as
interpreted by his own daily life, upon a great school, and, through the
many strong and able men who went out from it, upon English thought and
feeling, is a part of English religious history.
[Illustration: MATTHEW ARNOLD.
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. From a drawing in possession
of H. E. Wilberforce, Esq.]
But curiously enough the impression upon his own sons _appeared_, at any
rate, to be less strong and lasting than in the case of others. I mean,
of course, in the matter of opinion. The famous father died, and his
children had to face the world without his guiding hand. Matthew and
Tom, William and Edward, the eldest four sons, went in due time to
Oxford, and the youngest boy into the Navy. My grandmother made her home
at Fox How under the shelter of the fells, with her four daughters, the
youngest of whom was only eight when their father died. The devotion of
all the nine children to their mother, to one another, and to the common
home was never weakened for a moment by the varieties of opinion that
life was sure to bring out in the strong brood of strong parents. But
the development of the elder two sons at the University was probably
very different from what it would have been had their father lived.
Neither of them, indeed, ever showed, while there, the smallest tendency
to the "Newmanism" which Arnold of Rugby had fought with all his powers;
which he had denounced with such vehemence in the Edinburgh article on
"The Oxford Malignants." My father was at Oxford all through the agitated
years which preceded Newman's secession from the Anglican communion. He
had rooms in University College in the High Street, nearly opposite
St. Mary's, in which John Henry Newman, then its Vicar, delivered Sunday
after Sunday those sermons which will never be forgotten by the Anglican
Church. But my father only once crossed the street to hear him, and was
then repelled by the mannerism of the preacher. Matthew Arnold
occasionally went, out of admiration, my father used to say, for that
strange Newmanic power of words, which in itself fascinated the young
Balliol poet, who was to produce his first volume of poems two years
after Newman's secession to the Church of Rome. But he was never touched
in the smallest degree by Newman's opinions. He and my father and Arthur
Clough, and a few other kindred spirits, lived indeed in quite another
world of thought. They discovered George Sand, Emerson, and Carlyle,
and orthodox Christianity no longer seemed to them the sure refuge
that it had always been to the strong teacher who trained them as boys.
There are many allusions of many dates in the letters of my father
and uncle to each other, as to their common Oxford passion for George
Sand. _Consuelo_, in particular, was a revelation to the two young
men brought up under the "earnest" influence of Rugby. It seemed to
open to them a world of artistic beauty and joy of which they had
never dreamed; and to loosen the bands of an austere conception of
life, which began to appear to them too narrow for the facts of life.
_Wilhelm Meister_, read in Carlyle's translation at the same time,
exercised a similar liberating and enchanting power upon my father.
The social enthusiasms of George Sand also affected him greatly,
strengthening whatever he had inherited of his father's generous
discontent with an iron world, where the poor suffer too much and
work too hard. And this discontent, when the time came for him to
leave Oxford, assumed a form which startled his friends.
He had done very well at Oxford, taking his two Firsts with ease, and
was offered a post in the Colonial Office immediately on leaving the
University. But the time was full of schemes for a new heaven and a new
earth, wherein should dwell equality and righteousness. The storm of
1848 was preparing in Europe; the Corn Laws had fallen; the Chartists
were gathering in England. To settle down to the old humdrum round of
Civil Service promotion seemed to my father impossible. This revolt of
his, and its effect upon his friends, of whom the most intimate was
Arthur Clough, has left its mark on Clough's poem, the "Vacation
Pastoral," which he called "The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich," or, as it
runs in my father's old battered copy which lies before me,
"Tober-na-Fuosich." The Philip of the poem, the dreamer and democrat,
who says to Adam the Tutor--
Alas, the noted phrase of the prayer-book
Doing our duty in that state of life to which God has called us,
Seems to me always to mean, when the little rich boys say it,
Standing in velvet frock by Mama's brocaded flounces,
Eying her gold-fastened book, and the chain and watch at her bosom,
Seems to me always to mean, Eat, drink, and never mind others--
was in broad outline drawn from my father, and the impression made by
his idealist, enthusiastic youth upon his comrades. And Philip's
migration to the Antipodes at the end--when he
rounded the sphere to New Zealand,
There he hewed and dug; subdued the earth and
his spirit--
was certainly suggested by my father's similar step in 1847, the year
before the poem appeared. Only in my father's life there had been as yet
no parallel to the charming love-story of "The Bothie." His love-story
awaited him on the other side of the world.
At that moment, New Zealand, the land of beautiful mountain and sea,
with its even temperate climate, and its natives whom English enthusiasm
hoped not only to govern, but to civilize and assimilate, was in the
minds of all to whom the colonies seemed to offer chances of social
reconstruction beyond any that were possible in a crowded and decadent
Europe. "Land of Hope," I find it often called in these old letters.
"The gleam" was on it, and my father, like Browning's Waring, heard the
call.
After it; follow it. Follow the gleam!
He writes to his mother in August, 1847, from the Colonial Office:
Every one whom I meet pities me for having to return to London at
this dull season, but to my own feelings, it is not worse than at
other times. The things which would make me loathe the thought of
passing my life or even several years in London, do not depend on
summer or winter. It is the chronic, not the acute ills of London
life which are real ills to me. I meant to have talked to you
again before I left home about New Zealand, but I could not find
a good opportunity. I do not think you will be surprised to hear
that I cannot give up my intention--though you may think me
wrong, you will believe that no cold-heartedness towards home has
assisted me in framing my resolution. Where or how we shall meet
on this side the grave will be arranged for us by a wiser will than
our own. To me, however strange and paradoxical it may sound,
this going to New Zealand is become a work of faith, and I cannot
but go through with it.
And later on when his plans are settled, he writes in exultation to his
eldest sister:
The weather is gusty and rainy, but no cheerlessness without can
repress a sort of exuberant buoyancy of spirit which is supplied
to me from within. There is such an indescribable blessedness in
looking forward to a manner of life which the heart and conscience
approve, and which at the same time satisfies the instinct for the
heroic and beautiful. Yet there seems little enough in a homely life
in a New Zealand forest; and indeed there is nothing in the thing
itself, except in so far as it flows from a principle, a faith.
And he goes on to speak in vague exalted words of the "equality" and
"brotherhood" to which he looks forward in the new land; winding up with
an account of his life in London, its daily work at the Colonial Office,
his walks, the occasional evenings at the opera where he worships Jenny
Lind, his readings and practisings in his lodgings. My poor father! He
little knew what he was giving up, or the real conditions of the life to
which he was going.
For, though the Philip of "The Bothie" may have "hewed and dug" to good
purpose in New Zealand, success in colonial farming was a wild and
fleeting dream in my father's case. He was born for academic life and a
scholar's pursuits. He had no practical gifts, and knew nothing whatever
of land or farming. He had only courage, youth, sincerity, and a
charming presence which made him friends at sight. His mother, indeed,
with her gentle wisdom, put no obstacles in his way. On the contrary,
she remembered that her husband had felt a keen imaginative interest in
the colonies, and had bought small sections of land near Wellington,
which his second son now proposed to take up and farm. But some of the
old friends of the family felt and expressed consternation. In
particular, Baron Bunsen, then Prussian Ambassador to England, Arnold of
Rugby's dear and faithful friend, wrote a letter of earnest and
affectionate remonstrance to the would-be colonist. Let me quote it, if
only that it may remind me of days long ago, when it was still possible
for a strong and tender friendship to exist between a Prussian and an
Englishman!
Bunsen points out to "young Tom" that he has only been eight or nine
months in the Colonial Office, not long enough to give it a fair trial;
that the drudgery of his clerkship will soon lead to more interesting
things; that his superiors speak well of him; above all, that he has no
money and no practical experience of farming, and that if he is going to
New Zealand in the hope of building up a purer society, he will soon
find himself bitterly disillusioned.
Pray, my dear young friend, do not reject the voice of a man of
nearly sixty years, who has made his way through life under much
greater difficulties perhaps than you imagine--who was your father's
dear friend--who feels deeply attached to all that bears the honored
and blessed name of Arnold--who in particular had _your father's
promise_ that he would allow me to offer to _you_, after I had seen
you in 1839, something of that care and friendship he had bestowed
upon Henry [Bunsen's own son]--do not reject the warning voice of
that man, if he entreats you solemnly not to take a _precipitate_
step. Give yourself time. Try a change of scene. Go for a month
or two to France or Germany. I am sure you wish to satisfy your
friends that you are acting wisely, considerately, in giving up
what you have.
_Spartam quam nactus es, orna_--was Niebuhr's word to me when once,
about 1825, wearied with diplomatic life, I resolved to throw up my
place and go--not to New Zealand, but to a German University. Let me
say that concluding word to you and believe me, my dear young friend,
Your sincere and affectionate friend
BUNSEN.
P.S.--If you feel disposed to have half an hour's quiet conversation
with me alone, pray come to-day at six o'clock, and then dine with us
quietly at half-past six. I go to-morrow to Windsor Castle for four
days.
Nothing could have been kinder, nothing more truly felt and meant. But
the young make their own experience, and my father, with the smiling
open look which disarmed opposition, and disguised all the time a
certain stubborn independence of will, characteristic of him through
life, took his own way. He went to New Zealand, and, now that it was
done, the interest and sympathy of all his family and friends followed
him. Let me give here the touching letter which Arthur Stanley, his
father's biographer, wrote to him the night before he left England.
UNIV. COLL., OXFORD, _Nov. 4, 1847._
Farewell!--(if you will let me once again recur to a relation so long
since past away) farewell--my dearest, earliest, best of pupils. I
cannot let you go without asking you to forgive those many annoyances
which I fear I must have unconsciously inflicted upon you in the last
year of your Oxford life--nor without expressing the interest which I
feel, and shall I trust ever feel, beyond all that I can say, in your
future course. You know--or perhaps you hardly can know--how when I
came back to Oxford after the summer of 1842, your presence here was
to me the stay and charm of my life--how the walks--the lectures--the
Sunday evenings with you, filled up the void which had been left in
my interests[1], and endeared to me all the beginnings of my College
labors. That particular feeling, as is natural, has passed away--but
it may still be a pleasure to you to feel in your distant home that
whatever may be my occupations, nothing will more cheer and support
me through them than the belief that in that new world your dear
father's name is in you still loved and honored, and bringing forth
the fruits which he would have delighted to see.
Farewell, my dear friend. May God in whom you trust be with you.
Do not trouble yourself to answer this--only take it as the true
expression of one who often thinks how little he has done for you in
comparison with what he would.
Ever yours,
A. P. STANLEY.
[Footnote 1: By the sudden death of Doctor Arnold.]
But, of course, the inevitable happened. After a few valiant but quite
futile attempts to clear his land with his own hands, or with the random
labor he could find to help him, the young colonist fell back on the
education he had held so cheap in England, and bravely took school-work
wherever in the rising townships of the infant colony he could find it.
Meanwhile his youth, his pluck, and his Oxford distinctions had
attracted the kindly notice of the Governor, Sir George Grey, who
offered him his private secretaryship--one can imagine the twinkle in
the Governor's eye, when he first came across my father building his own
hut on his section outside Wellington! The offer was gratefully refused.
But another year of New Zealand life brought reconsideration. The exile
begins to speak of "loneliness" in his letters home, to realize that it
is "collision" with other kindred minds that "kindles the spark of
thought," and presently, after a striking account of a solitary walk
across unexplored country in New Zealand, he confesses that he is not
sufficient for himself, and that the growth and vigor of the intellect
were, for him, at least, "not compatible with loneliness."
A few months later, Sir William Denison, the newly appointed Governor of
Van Diemen's Land, hearing that a son of Arnold of Rugby, an Oxford
First Class man, was in New Zealand, wrote to offer my father the task
of organizing primary education in Van Diemen's Land.
He accepted--yet not, I think, without a sharp sense of defeat at the
hands of Mother Earth!--set sail for Hobart, and took possession of a
post that might easily have led to great things. His father's fame
preceded him, and he was warmly welcomed. The salary was good and the
field free. Within a few months of his landing he was engaged to my
mother. They were married in 1850, and I, their eldest child, was born
in June, 1851.
And then the unexpected, the amazing thing happened. At the time of
their marriage, and for some time after, my mother, who had been brought
up in a Protestant "scriptural" atmosphere, and had been originally
drawn to the younger "Tom Arnold," partly because he was the son of his
father, as Stanley's _Life_ had now made the headmaster known to the
world, was a good deal troubled by the heretical views of her young
husband. She had some difficulty in getting him to consent to the
baptism of his elder children. He was still in many respects the Philip
of the "Bothie," influenced by Goethe, and the French romantics, by
Emerson, Kingsley, and Carlyle, and in touch still with all that
Liberalism of the later 'forties in Oxford, of which his most intimate
friend, Arthur Clough, and his elder brother, Matthew Arnold, were to
become the foremost representatives. But all the while, under the
surface, an extraordinary transformation was going on. He was never able
to explain it afterward, even to me, who knew him best of all his
children. I doubt whether he ever understood it himself. But he who had
only once crossed the High Street to hear Newman preach, and felt no
interest in the sermon, now, on the other side of the world, surrendered
to Newman's influence. It is uncertain if they had ever spoken to each
other at Oxford; yet that subtle pervasive intellect which captured for
years the critical and skeptical mind of Mark Pattison, and indirectly
transformed the Church of England after Newman himself had left it, now,
reaching across the world, laid hold on Arnold's son, when Arnold
himself was no longer there to fight it. A general reaction against the
negations and philosophies of his youth set in for "Philip," as
inevitable in his case as the revolt against St. Sulpice was for Ernest
Renan. For my father was in truth born for religion, as his whole later
life showed. In that he was the true son of Arnold of Rugby. But his
speculative Liberalism had carried him so much farther than his father's
had ever gone, that the recoil was correspondingly great. The steps of
it are dim. He was "struck" one Sunday with the "authoritative" tone of
the First Epistle of Peter. Who and what was Peter? What justified such
a tone? At another time he found a _Life of St. Brigit of Sweden_ at a
country inn, when he was on one of his school-inspecting journeys across
the island. And he records a mysterious influence or "voice" from it, as
he rode in meditative solitude through the sunny spaces of the Tasmanian
bush. Last of all, he "obtained"--from England, no doubt--the _Tracts
for the Times_. And as he went through them, the same documents, and the
same arguments, which had taken Newman to Rome, nine years before,
worked upon his late and distant disciple. But who can explain
"conversion"? Is it not enough to say, as was said of old, "The Holy
Ghost fell on them that believed"? The great "Malignant" had indeed
triumphed. In October, 1854, my father was received at Hobart, Tasmania,
into the Church of Rome; and two years later, after he had reached
England, and written to Newman asking the new Father of the Oratory to
receive him, Newman replied:
How strange it seems! What a world this is! I knew your father a
little, and I really think I never had any unkind feeling toward him.
I saw him at Oriel on the Purification before (I think) his death
(January, 1842). I was glad to meet him. If I said ever a harsh
thing against him I am very sorry for it. In seeing you, I should
have a sort of pledge that he at the moment of his death made it
all up with me. Excuse this. I came here last night, and it is so
marvelous to have your letter this morning.
So, for the moment, ended one incident in the long bout between two
noble fighters, Arnold and Newman, each worthy of the other's steel. For
my father, indeed, this act of surrender was but the beginning of a long
and troubled history. My poor mother felt as though the earth had
crumbled under her. Her passionate affection for my father endured till
her latest hour, but she never reconciled herself to what he had done.
There was in her an instinctive dread of Catholicism, of which I have
suggested some of the origins--ancestral and historical. It never
abated. Many years afterward, in writing _Helbeck of Bannisdale_, I drew
upon what I remembered of it in describing some traits in Laura
Fountain's inbred, and finally indomitable, resistance to the Catholic
claim upon the will and intellect of men.
And to this trial in the realm of religious feeling there were added all
the practical difficulties into which my father's action plunged her and
his children. The Tasmanian appointment had to be given up, for the
feeling in the colony was strongly anti-Catholic; and we came home, as I
have described, to a life of struggle, privation, and constant anxiety,
in which my mother suffered not only for herself, but for her children.
But, after all, there were bright spots. My father and mother were
young; my mother's eager, sympathetic temper brought her many friends;
and for us children, Fox How and its dear inmates opened a second home,
and new joys, which upon myself in particular left impressions never to
be effaced or undone. Let me try and describe that house and garden and
those who lived in it, as they were in 1856.