OTHER CHILDREN OF FOX HOW
I have now to sketch some other figures in the Fox How circle, together
with a few of the intimate friends who mingled with it frequently, and
very soon became names of power to the Tasmanian child also.
Let me take first Doctor Arnold's third son, "Uncle Willy"--my father's
junior by some four years. William Delafield Arnold is secure of long
remembrance, one would fain think, if only as the subject of Matthew
Arnold's two memorial poems--"A Southern Night" and "Stanzas from
Carnac." But in truth he had many and strong claims of his own. His
youth was marked by that "restlessness," which is so often spoken of in
the family letters as a family quality and failing. My father's
"restlessness" made him throw up a secure niche in English life, for the
New Zealand adventure. The same temperament in Mary Twining, the young
widow of twenty-two, took her to London, away from the quiet of the
Ambleside valley, and made her an ardent follower of Maurice, Kingsley,
and Carlyle. And in Willy, the third son, it showed itself first in a
revolt against Oxford, while he was still at Christ Church, leading to
his going out to India and joining the Indian Army, at the age of
twenty, only to find the life of an Indian subaltern all but
intolerable, and to plunge for a time at least into fresh schemes of
change.
Among the early photographs at Fox How there is a particularly fine
daguerreotype of a young officer in uniform, almost a boy, slim and well
proportioned, with piled curly hair, and blue eyes, which in the late
'fifties I knew as "Uncle Willy"; and there were other photographs on
glass of the same young man, where this handsome face appeared again,
grown older--much older--the boyish look replaced by an aspect of rather
grave dignity. In the later pictures he was grouped with children, whom
I knew as my Indian cousins. But him, in the flesh, I had never seen. He
was dead. His wife was dead. On the landing bookcase of Fox How there
was, however, a book in two blue volumes, which I soon realized as a
"novel," called _Oakfield_, which had been written by the handsome young
soldier in the daguerreotype. I tried to read it, but found it was about
things and persons in which I could then take no interest. But its
author remained to me a mysteriously attractive figure; and when the
time came for me to read my Uncle Matthew's poems, "A Southern Night,"
describing the death at Gibraltar of this soldier uncle, became a great
favorite with me. I could see it all as Matthew Arnold described it--the
steamer approaching Gibraltar, the landing, and the pale invalid with
the signs on him of that strange thing called "death," which to a child
that "feels its life in every limb" has no real meaning, though the talk
of it may lead vaguely to tears, as that poem often did with me.
Later on, of course, I read _Oakfield_, and learned to take a more
informed pride in the writer of it. But it was not until a number of
letters written from India by William Arnold to my father in New Zealand
between 1848 and 1855, with a few later ones, came into my possession,
at my father's death, that I really seemed to know this dear vanished
kinsman, though his orphaned children had always been my friends.
[Illustration: FOX HOW, THE WESTMORELAND HOME OF THE ARNOLDS.]
The letters of 1848 and 1849 read like notes for _Oakfield_. They were
written in bitterness of soul by a very young man, with high hopes and
ideals, fresh from the surroundings of Oxford and Rugby, from the
training of the Schoolhouse and Fox How, and plunged suddenly into a
society of boys--the subalterns of the Bengal Native Infantry--living
for the most part in idleness, often a vicious idleness, without any
restraining public opinion, and practically unshepherded, amid the
temptations of the Indian climate and life. They show that the novel is,
indeed, as was always supposed, largely autobiographical, and the
references in them to the struggle with the Indian climate point sadly
forward to the writer's own fate, ten years later, when, like the hero
of his novel, Edward Oakfield, he fell a victim to Indian heat and
Indian work. The novel was published in 1853, while its author was at
home on a long sick leave, and is still remembered for the anger and
scandal it provoked in India, and the reforms to which, no doubt, after
the Mutiny, it was one of the contributing impulses. It is, indeed, full
of interest for any student of the development of Anglo-Indian life and
society; even when one remembers how, soon after it was published, the
great storm of the Mutiny came rushing over the society it describes,
changing and uprooting everywhere. As fiction, it suffers from the Rugby
"earnestness" which overmasters in it any purely artistic impulse, while
infusing a certain fire and unity of its own. But various incidents in
the story--the quarrel at the mess-table, the horse-whipping, the court
martial, the death of Vernon, and the meeting between Oakfield and
Stafford, the villain of the piece, after Chilianwallah--are told with
force, and might have led on, had the writer lived, to something more
detached and mature in the way of novel-writing.
But there were few years left to him, "poor gallant boy!"--to quote the
phrase of his poet brother; and within them he was to find his happiness
and his opportunity in love and in public service, not in literature.
Nothing could be more pathetic than the isolation and revolt of the
early letters. The boy Ensign is desperately homesick, pining for Fox
How, for his mother and sisters, for the Oxford he had so easily
renounced, for the brothers parted from him by such leagues of land and
sea.
The fact that one learns first in India [he says, bitterly] is the
profound ignorance which exists in England about it. You know how one
hears it spoken of always as a magnificent field for exertion, and
this is true enough in one way, for if a man does emerge at all, he
emerges the more by contrast--he is a triton among minnows. But I
think the responsibility of those who keep sending out here young
fellows of sixteen and seventeen fresh from a private school or
Addiscombe is quite awful. The stream is so strong, the society is
so utterly worldly and mercenary in its best phase, so utterly and
inconceivably low and profligate in its worst, that it is not
strange that at so early an age, eight out of ten sink beneath it.
... One soon observes here how seldom one meets _a happy man_.
I came out here with three great advantages [he adds]. First, being
twenty instead of seventeen; secondly not having been at Addiscombe;
third, having been at Rugby and Christ Church. This gives me a sort
of position--but still I know the danger is awful--for
constitutionally I believe I am as little able to stand the
peculiar trials of Indian life as anybody.
And he goes on to say that if ever he feels himself in peril of sinking
to the level of what he loathes--"I will go at once." By coming out to
India he had bound himself to one thing only--"to earn my own bread."
But he is not bound to earn it "as a gentleman." The day may come--
when I shall ask for a place on your farm, and if you ask how I am
to get there, you, Tom, are not the person to deny that a man who
is in earnest and capable of forming a resolution can do more
difficult things than getting from India to New Zealand!
And he winds up with yearning affection toward the elder brother so far
away.
I think of you very often--our excursion to Keswick and Greta Hall,
our walk over Hardknot and Wrynose, our bathes in the old Allen
Bank bathing-place [Grasmere], our parting in the cab at the corner
of Mount St. One of my pleasantest but most difficult problems is
when and where we shall meet again.
In another letter, written a year later, the tone is still despondent.
"It is no affectation to say that I feel my life, in one way, cannot now
be a happy one." He feels it his duty for the present to "lie still," as
Keble says, to think, it may be to suffer. "But in my castle-buildings I
often dream of coming to you." He appreciates, more fully than ever
before, Tom's motives in going to New Zealand--the desire that may move
a man to live his own life in a new and freer world. "But when I am
asked, as I often am, why you went, I always grin and let people answer
themselves; for I could not hope to explain without preaching a sermon.
An act of faith and conviction cannot be understood by the light of
worldly motives and interests; and to blow out this light, and bring the
true one, is not the work of a young man with his own darkness to
struggle through; so I grin as aforesaid." "God is teaching us," he
adds--i.e., the different members of the family--"by separation,
absence, and suffering." And he winds up--"Good-by. I never like
finishing a letter to you--it seems like letting you fall back again to
such infinite distance. And you are often very near me, and the thought
of you is often cheery and helpful to me in my own conflict." Even up to
January, 1850, he is still thinking of New Zealand, and signing himself,
"ever, dear Tom, whether I am destined to see you soon, or never again
in this world--Your most truly affectionate brother."
Alack! the brothers never did meet again, in this world which both took
so hardly. But for Willy a transformation scene was near. After two
years in India, his gift and his character had made their mark. He had
not only been dreaming of New Zealand; besides his daily routine, he had
been working hard at Indian languages and history. The Lawrences, both
John and Henry, had found him out, and realized his quality. It was at
Sir Henry Lawrence's house in the spring of 1850 that he met Miss Fanny
Hodgson, daughter of the distinguished soldier and explorer, General
Hodgson, discoverer of the sources of the Ganges, and at that time the
Indian Surveyor-General. The soldier of twenty-three fell instantly in
love, and tumult and despondency melted away. The next letter to New
Zealand is pitched in quite another key. He still judges Indian life and
Indian government with a very critical eye. "The Alpha and Omega of the
whole evil in Indian Society" is "the regarding India as a rupee-mine,
instead of a Colony, and ourselves as Fortune-hunters and
Pension-earners rather than as emigrants and missionaries." And outside
his domestic life his prospects are still uncertain. But with every mail
one can see the strained spirit relaxing, yielding to the spell of love
and to the honorable interests of an opening life.
"To-day, my Thomas [October 2, 1850], I sit, a married man in the Bengal
army, writing to a brother, it may be a married man, in Van Diemen's
Land." (Rumors of Tom's courtship of Julia Sorell had evidently just
reached him.) He goes on to describe his married home at Hoshyarpore,
and his work at Indian languages. He has been reading Carlyle's
_Cromwell_, and marveling at the "rapid rush of thought which seems more
and more to be engrossing people in England!" "In India you will easily
believe that the torpor is still unbroken." (The Mutiny was only seven
short years ahead!) And he is still conscious of the "many weights which
do beset and embitter a man's life in India." But a new stay within, the
reconciliation that love brings about between a man and the world,
upholds him.
"'To draw homeward to the general life,' which you, and dear Matt
himself, and I, and all of us, are--or at least may be--living,
independent of all the accidents of time and circumstance--this is a
great alleviation." The "_fundamentals"_ are safe. He dwells happily on
the word--"a good word, in which you and I, so separated, as far as
accidents go, it may be for all time, can find great comfort, speaking
as it does of Eternity." One sees what is in his mind--the brother's
"little book of poems" published a year before:
Yet they, believe me, who await
No gifts from chance, have conquered fate,
They, winning room to see and hear,
And to men's business not too near
Though clouds of individual strife
Draw homeward to the general life.
* * * * *
To the wise, foolish; to the world
Weak;--yet not weak, I might reply,
Not foolish, Fausta, in His eye,
To whom each moment in its race,
Crowd as we will its neutral space,
Is but a quiet watershed
Whence, equally, the seas of life and death are fed.
Six months later the younger brother has heard "as a positive fact" of
Tom's marriage, and writes, with affectionate "chaff":
I wonder whether it has changed you much?--not made a Tory of you,
I'll undertake to say! But it is wonderfully sobering. After all,
Master Tom, it is not the very exact _finale_ which we should have
expected to your Republicanism of the last three or four years, to
find you a respectable married man, holding a permanent appointment!
Matt's marriage, too, stands pre-eminent among the items of family news.
What blind judges, sometimes, the most attached brothers are of each
other!
I hear too by this mail of Matt's engagement, which suggests many
thoughts. I own that Matt is one of the very last men in the world
whom I can fancy happily married--or rather happy in matrimony. But
I dare say I reckon without my host, for there was such a "_longum
intervallum"_ between dear old Matt and me, that even that last month
in town, when I saw so much of him, though there was the most
entire absence of elder-brotherism on his part, and only the most
kind and thoughtful affection, for which I shall always feel
grateful, yet our intercourse was that of man and boy; and though
the difference of years was not so formidable as between "Matthew"
and Wordsworth, yet we were less than they a "pair of Friends,"
though a pair of very loving brothers.
But even in this gay and charming letter one begins to see the shadows
cast by the doom to come. The young wife has gone to Simla, having been
"delicate" for some time. The young husband stays behind, fighting the
heat.
The hot weather, old boy, is coming on like a tiger. It is getting
on for ten at night; but we sit with windows all wide open, the
punkah going, the thinnest conceivable garments, and yet we sweat,
my brother, very profusely.... To-morrow I shall be up at
gun-fire, about half-past four A.M. and drive down to the civil
station, about three miles off, to see a friend, an officer of our
own corps ... who is sick, return, take my Bearer's daily account,
write a letter or so, and lie down with _Don Quixote_ under a
punkah, go to sleep the first chapter that Sancho lets me, and
sleep till ten, get up, bathe, re-dress and breakfast; do my daily
business, such as it is--hard work, believe me, in a hot sleep-
inducing, intestine-withering climate, till sunset, when doors and
windows are thrown open ... and mortals go out to "eat the air," as
the natives say.
The climate, indeed, had already begun its deadly attack upon an
organism as fine and sensitive as any of the myriad victims which the
secret forces of India's sun and soil have exacted from her European
invaders. In 1853, William Delafield Arnold came home invalided, with
his wife and his elder two children. The third, Oakeley (the future War
Minister in Mr. Balfour's Government), was born in England in 1855.
There were projects of giving up India and settling at home. The young
soldier whose literary gift, always conspicuous among the nine in the
old childish Fox How days, and already shown in _Oakfield_, was becoming
more and more marked, was at this time a frequent contributor to the
_Times_, the _Economist_, and _Fraser_, and was presently offered the
editorship of the _Economist_. But just as he was about to accept it,
came a flattering offer from India, no doubt through the influence of
Sir John Lawrence, of the Directorship of Public Instruction in the
Punjaub. He thought himself bound to accept it, and with his wife and
two children went out again at the end of 1855. His business was to
organize the whole of native education in the Punjaub, and he did it so
well during the short time that remained to him before the Mutiny broke
out, that during all that time of terror, education in the Punjaub was
never interrupted, the attendances at the schools never dropped, and the
young Director went about his work, not knowing often, indeed, whether
the whole province might not be aflame within twenty-four hours, and its
Anglo-Indian administration wiped out, but none the less undaunted and
serene.
To this day, three portrait medals in gold and silver are given every
year to the best pupils in the schools of the Punjaub, the product of a
fund raised immediately after his death by William Arnold's
fellow-workers there, in order to commemorate his short heroic course in
that far land, and to preserve, if they could, some record of that
"sweet stateliness" of aspect, to use the expression of one who loved
him, which "had so fascinated his friends."
The Mutiny passed. Sir John Lawrence paid public and flattering tribute
to the young official who had so amply justified a great man's choice.
And before the storm had actually died away, within a fortnight of the
fall of Delhi, while it was not yet certain that the troops on their way
would arrive in time to prevent further mischief, my uncle, writing to
my father of the awful days of suspense from the 14th to the 30th of
September, says:
A more afflicted country than this has been since I returned to it
in November. 1855--afflicted by Dearth--Deluge--Pestilence--far
worse than war, it would be hard to imagine. _In the midst of it
all, the happiness of our domestic life has been almost perfect_.
With that touching sentence the letters to my father, so far, at least,
as I possess them, come to an end. Alas! In the following year the
gentle wife and mother, worn out by India, died at a hill-station in the
Himalayas, and a few months later her husband, ill and heartbroken, sent
his motherless children home by long sea, and followed himself by the
overland route. Too late! He was taken ill in Egypt, struggled on to
Malta, and was put ashore at Gibraltar to die. From Cairo he had written
to the beloved mother who was waiting for him in that mountain home he
so longed to reach, that he hoped to be able to travel in a fortnight.
But do not trust to this.... Do not in fact expect me till you hear
that I am in London. I much fear that it may be long before I see
dear, dear Fox How. In London I must have advice, and I feel sure
I shall be ordered to the South of England till the hot weather is
well advanced. I must wait too in London for the darling children.
But once in London, I cannot but think my dearest mother will
manage to see me, and I have even had visions of your making one
of your spring tours, and going with me to Torquay or wherever I
may go.... Plans--plans--plans! They will keep.
And a few days later:
As I said before, do not expect me in England till you hear I am
there. Perhaps I was too eager to get home. Assuredly I have been
checked, and I feel as if there were much trouble between me and
home yet.... I see in the papers the death of dear Mrs.
Wordsworth....
Ever my beloved mother ...
Your very loving son,
W.D. ARNOLD.
He started for England, but at Gibraltar, a dying man, was carried
ashore. His younger brother, sent out from England in post haste, missed
him by ill chance at Alexandria and Malta, and arrived too late. He was
buried under the shelter of the Rock of Spain and the British flag. His
intimate friend, Meredith Townsend, the joint editor and creator of the
_Spectator_, wrote to the _Times_ shortly after his death:
William Arnold did not live long enough (he was thirty-one) to gain
his true place in the world, but he had time enough given him to
make himself of importance to a Government like that of Lord
Dalhousie, to mold the education of a great province, and to win
the enduring love of all with whom he ever came in contact.
It was left, however, for his poet-brother to build upon his early grave
"the living record of his memory." A month after "Willy's" death, "Matt"
was wandering where--
beneath me, bright and wide
Lay the low coast of Brittany--
with the thought of "Willy" in his mind, as he turns to the sea that
will never now bring the wanderer home.
O, could he once have reached the air
Freshened by plunging tides, by showers!
Have felt this breath he loved, of fair
Cool northern fields, and grain, and flowers.
He longed for it--pressed on!--In vain!
At the Straits failed that spirit brave,
The south was parent of his pain,
The south is mistress of his grave.
Or again, in "A Southern Night"--where he muses on the "two jaded
English," man and wife, who lie, one under the Himalayas, the other
beside "the soft Mediterranean." And his first thought is that for the
"spent ones of a work-day age," such graves are out of keeping.
In cities should we English lie
Where cries are rising ever new,
And men's incessant stream goes by!--
* * * * *
Not by those hoary Indian hills,
Not by this gracious Midland sea
Whose floor to-night sweet moonshine fills
Should our graves be!
Some Eastern sage pursuing "the pure goal of being"--"He by those Indian
mountains old, might well repose." Crusader, troubadour, or maiden dying
for love--
Such by these waters of romance
'Twas meet to lay!
And then he turns upon himself. For what is beauty, what wisdom, what
romance if not the tender goodness of women, if not the high soul of
youth?
Mild o'er her grave, ye mountains, shine!
Gently by his, ye waters, glide!
To that in you which is divine
They were allied.
* * * * *
Only a few days after their father's death, the four orphan children of
the William Arnolds arrived at Fox How. They were immediately adopted as
their own by William and Jane Forster, who had no children; and later
they added the name of Forster to that of Arnold. At that moment I was
at school at Ambleside, and I remember well my first meeting with the
Indian children, and how I wondered at their fair skins and golden hair
and frail, ethereal looks.
By this time Fox How was in truth a second home to me. But I have still
to complete the tale of those who made it so. Edward Penrose, the
Doctor's fourth son, who died in 1878, on the threshold of fifty, was a
handsome, bearded man of winning presence and of many friends. He was at
Balliol, then a Fellow of All Souls, and in Orders. But he first found
his real vocation as an Inspector of Schools in Devon and Cornwall, and
for eighteen years, from 1860 to 1878, through the great changes in
elementary education produced by his brother-in-law's Education Act, he
was the ever-welcome friend of teachers and children all over the wide
and often remote districts of the West country which his work covered.
He had not the gifts of his elder brothers--neither the genius of
Matthew nor the restless energy and initiative of William Delafield, nor
the scholarly and researching tastes of my father; and his later life
was always a struggle against ill-health. But he had Matthew's kindness,
and Matthew's humor--the "chaff" between the two brothers was
endless!--and a large allowance of William's charm. His unconscious talk
in his last illness was often of children. He seemed to see them before
him in the country school-rooms, where his coming--the coming of "the
tall gentleman with the kind blue eyes," as an eye-witness describes
him--was a festa, excellent official though he was. He carried
enthusiasm into the cause of popular education, and that is not a very
common enthusiasm in this country of ours. Yet the cause is nothing more
nor less than the cause of _the international intelligence_, and its
sharpening for the national tasks. But education has always been the
Cinderella of politics; this nation apparently does not love to be
taught! Those who grapple with its stubbornness in this field can never
expect the ready palm that falls to the workers in a dozen other fields.
But in the seed sown, and the human duty done, they find their reward.
"Aunt Mary," Arnold's second daughter, I have already spoken of. When my
father and mother reached England from Tasmania, she had just married
again, a Leicestershire clergyman, with a house and small estate near
Loughborough. Her home--Woodhouse--on the borders of Charnwood Forest,
and the beautiful Beaumanoir Park, was another fairyland to me and to my
cousins. Its ponds and woods and reed-beds; its distant summer-house
between two waters, where one might live and read and dream through long
summer hours, undisturbed; its pleasant rooms, above all the "tapestry
room" where I generally slept, and which I always connected with the
description of the huntsman on the "arras," in "Tristram and Iseult";
the Scott novels I devoured there, and the "Court" nights at Beaumanoir,
where some feudal customs were still kept up, and its beautiful
mistress, Mrs. Herrick, the young wife of an old man, queened it very
graciously over neighbors and tenants--all these are among the lasting
memories of life. Mrs. Herrick became identified in my imagination with
each successive Scott heroine,--Rowena, Isabella, Rose Bradwardine, the
White Lady of Avenel, and the rest. But it was Aunt Mary herself, after
all, who held the scene. In that Leicestershire world of High Toryism,
she raised the Liberal flag--her father's flag--with indomitable
courage, but also with a humor which, after the tragic hours of her
youth, flowered out in her like something new and unexpectedly
delightful. It must have been always there, but not till marriage and
motherhood, and F.D. Maurice's influence, had given her peace of soul
does it seem to have shown itself as I remember it--a golden and
pervading quality, which made life unfailingly pleasant beside her. Her
clear, dark eyes, with their sweet sincerity, and the touch in them of a
quiet laughter, of which the causes were not always clear to the
bystanders, her strong face with its points of likeness to her father's,
and all her warm and most human personality--they are still vividly
present to me, though it is nearly thirty years since, after an hour or
two's pain, she died suddenly and unexpectedly, of the same malady that
killed her father. Consumed in her youth by a passionate idealism, she
had accepted at the hands of life, and by the age of four and twenty, a
lot by no means ideal--a home in the depths of the country, among
neighbors often uncongenial, and far from the intellectual pleasures she
had tasted during her young widowhood in London. But out of this lot she
made something beautiful, and all her own--by sheer goodness,
conscience, intelligence. She had her angles and inconsistencies; she
often puzzled those who loved her; but she had a large brain and a large
heart; and for us colonial children, conscious of many disadvantages
beside our English-born cousins, she had a peculiar tenderness, a
peculiar laughing sympathy, that led us to feel in "Aunt Maria" one of
our best friends.
Susan Arnold, the Doctor's fourth daughter, married Mr. John Cropper in
1858, and here, too, in her house beside the Mersey, among fields and
trees that still maintain a green though besmutted oasis in the busy
heart of Liverpool, that girdles them now on all sides, and will soon
engulf them, there were kindness and welcome for the little Tasmanians.
She died a few years ago, mourned and missed by her own people--those
lifelong neighbors who know truly what we are. Of the fifth daughter,
Frances, "Aunt Fan," I may not speak, because she is still with us in
the old house--alive to every political and intellectual interest of
these darkened days, beloved by innumerable friends in many worlds, and
making sunshine still for Arnold's grandchildren and their children's
children. But it was to her that my own stormy childhood was chiefly
confided, at Fox How; it was she who taught the Tasmanian child to read,
and grappled with her tempers; and while she is there the same magic as
of old clings about Fox How for those of us who have loved it, and all
it stands for, so long.