Herne Hill, 9th Feb., 1875.
I have been so much angered, distressed, and defeated, by many things,
during these last autumn and winter months, that I can only keep
steadily to my business by insisting to myself on my own extreme value
and importance to the world; and quoting, in self-application, the most
flattering texts I can find, such as, “Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired
to have you,” and so on; hoping that at least a little more of my
foolishness is being pounded out of me at every blow; and that the
dough I knead for Fors may be daily of purer wheat.
I wish I could raise it with less leaven of malice; but I dislike some
things and some people so much, that, having been always an impetuous,
inconsiderate, and weakly communicative person, I find it impossible to
hold my tongue in this time of advanced years and petulance. I am
thankful, to-day, to have one most pleasant thing first to refer
to;—the notable speech, namely, of Mr. Johnson, the President of the
Manchester Chamber of Commerce, on the immorality of cheapness; the
first living words respecting commerce which I have ever known to be
spoken in England, in my time;—on which, nevertheless, I can in no wise
dilate to-day, but most thankfully treasure them for study in a future
letter; having already prepared for this one, during my course of
self-applause taken medicinally, another passage or two of my own
biography, putting some of the reasons for my carelessness about Agnes’
proficiency in reading or writing, more definitely before the reader.
Until I was more than four years old, we lived in Hunter Street,
Brunswick Square, the greater part of the year; for a few weeks in the
summer breathing country air by taking lodgings in small cottages (real
cottages, not villas, so-called) either about Hampstead, or at Dulwich,
at ‘Mrs. Ridley’s,’ the last of a row in a lane which led out into the
Dulwich fields on one side, and was itself full of buttercups in
spring, and blackberries in autumn. But my chief remaining impressions
of those days are attached to Hunter Street. My mother’s general
principles of first treatment were, to guard me with steady
watchfulness from all avoidable pain or danger; and, for the rest, to
let me amuse myself as I liked, provided I was neither fretful nor
troublesome. But the law was, that I should find my own amusement. No
toys of any kind were at first allowed;—and the pity of my Croydon aunt
for my monastic poverty in this respect was boundless. On one of my
birthdays, thinking to overcome my mother’s resolution by splendour of
temptation, she bought the most radiant Punch and Judy she could find
in all the Soho bazaar—as big as a real Punch and Judy, all dressed in
scarlet and gold, and that would dance, tied to the leg of a chair. I
must have been greatly impressed, for I remember well the look of the
two figures, as my aunt herself exhibited their virtues. My mother was
obliged to accept them; but afterwards quietly told me it was not right
that I should have them; and I never saw them again.
Nor did I painfully wish, what I was never permitted for an instant to
hope, or even imagine, the possession of such things as one saw in
toyshops. I had a bunch of keys to play with, as long as I was capable
only of pleasure in what glittered and jingled; as I grew older, I had
a cart, and a ball; and when I was five or six years old, two boxes of
well-cut wooden bricks. With these modest, but, I still think, entirely
sufficient possessions, and being always summarily whipped if I cried,
did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs, I soon attained
serene and secure methods of life and motion; and could pass my days
contentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the colours of my
carpet;—examining the knots in the wood of the floor, or counting the
bricks in the opposite houses; with rapturous intervals of excitement
during the filling of the water-cart, through its leathern pipe, from
the dripping iron post at the pavement edge; or the still more
admirable proceedings of the turncock, when he turned and turned till a
fountain sprang up in the middle of the street. But the carpet, and
what patterns I could find in bed covers, dresses, or wall-papers to be
examined, were my chief resources, and my attention to the particulars
in these was soon so accurate, that when at three and a half I was
taken to have my portrait painted by Mr. Northcote, I had not been ten
minutes alone with him before I asked him why there were holes in his
carpet. The portrait in question represents a very pretty child with
yellow hair, dressed in a white frock like a girl, with a broad
light-blue sash and blue shoes to match; the feet of the child
wholesomely large in proportion to its body; and the shoes still more
wholesomely large in proportion to the feet.
These articles of my daily dress were all sent to the old painter for
perfect realization; but they appear in the picture more remarkable
than they were in my nursery, because I am represented as running in a
field at the edge of a wood with the trunks of its trees striped across
in the manner of Sir Joshua Reynolds; while two rounded hills, as blue
as my shoes, appear in the distance, which were put in by the painter
at my own request; for I had already been once, if not twice, taken to
Scotland; and my Scottish nurse having always sung to me as we
approached the Tweed or Esk,—
“For Scotland, my darling, lies full in my view,
With her barefooted lassies, and mountains so blue,”
I had already generally connected the idea of distant hills with
approach to the extreme felicities of life, in my (Scottish) aunt’s
garden of gooseberry bushes, sloping to the Tay.
But that, when old Mr. Northcote asked me (little thinking, I fancy, to
get any answer so explicit) what I would like to have in the distance
of my picture, I should have said “blue hills” instead of “gooseberry
bushes,” appears to me—and I think without any morbid tendency to think
overmuch of myself—a fact sufficiently curious, and not without
promise, in a child of that age.
I think it should be related also that having, as aforesaid, been
steadily whipped if I was troublesome, my formed habit of serenity was
greatly pleasing to the old painter; for I sat contentedly motionless,
counting the holes in his carpet, or watching him squeeze his paint out
of its bladders,—a beautiful operation, indeed, it seemed to me; but I
do not remember taking any interest in Mr. Northcote’s applications of
the pigments to the canvas; my ideas of delightful art, in that
respect, involving indispensably the possession of a large pot, filled
with paint of the brightest green, and of a brush which would come out
of it soppy. But my quietude was so pleasing to the old man that he
begged my father and mother to let me sit to him for the face of a
child which he was painting in a classical subject; where I was
accordingly represented as reclining on a leopard skin, and having a
thorn taken out of my foot by a wild man of the woods.
In all these particulars, I think the treatment, or accidental
conditions, of my childhood, entirely right, for a child of my
temperament; but the mode of my introduction to literature appears to
me questionable, and I am not prepared to carry it out in St. George’s
schools, without much modification. I absolutely declined to learn to
read by syllables; but would get an entire sentence by heart with great
facility, and point with accuracy to every word in the page as I
repeated it. As, however, when the words were once displaced, I had no
more to say, my mother gave up, for the time, the endeavour to teach me
to read, hoping only that I might consent, in process of years, to
adopt the popular system of syllabic study. But I went on, to amuse
myself, in my own way, learnt whole words at a time, as I did
patterns;—and at five years old was sending for my ‘second volumes’ to
the circulating library.
This effort to learn the words in their collective aspect, was assisted
by my real admiration of the look of printed type, which I began to
copy for my pleasure, as other children draw dogs and horses. The
following inscription, facsimile’d from the fly leaf of my ‘Seven
Champions of Christendom,’ I believe, (judging from the independent
views taken in it of the character of the letter L, and the relative
elevation of G,) to be an extremely early art study of this class; and
as, by the will of Fors, the first lines of the note written the other
day underneath my copy of it, in direction to Mr. Burgess, presented
some notable points of correspondence with it, I thought it well he
should engrave them together, as they stood.
The noble knight like a bold and daring hero then entered the
valley where the dragon had his abode who no sooner had sight
of him but his leathern throat sent forth a sound more