took for granted that he would not ordain me; but after a pause he said
“I cannot refuse to ordain you; but I do not think your views are those
of the Church.” I think he hoped that _I_ should then retire of my own
accord. However I said nothing but took it all as settled in my favour,
and in less than an hour the apostolic hands were on my head.
After luncheon the good old man, not without a certain anxiety and
_épanchement_, put his arm in mine and walked with me round the garden.
I remember there was a chaffinch hopping about, and a longish discourse
followed on creation and suffering and vicarious sacrifice, which I
listened to with due deference; but it did not seem to me to lead to any
conclusion; and soon the time came for us to leave the palace, and I saw
him no more.
It may be imagined that I did not find my profession any more
satisfactory after being made priest than before. He of the sour
knife-edge, my superincumbent, left St. Edward’s, being translated into
a canon of Carlisle, and was succeeded, curiously enough, by Maurice
himself. That was I think early in 1871.
Of this transaction, by which F. D. Maurice became incumbent of St.
Edward’s, it may be worth while to say a few words. Maurice had lately
come to Cambridge as Professor of Moral Philosophy. As far as his moral
worth was concerned, the choice was a good one. There was an ineffable
personal charm about him, of moral earnestness and deep feeling,
connecting itself somehow with his lofty venerable head and
extraordinary modesty. But of his philosophy perhaps the less said the
better. He saw facts which doubtless it is impossible adequately to
translate into language. Certainly it was impossible for him. To see him
struggling with the root-ideas which he was always trying, and vainly,
to express, to see him perspiring with effort, tapping his forehead with
his fingers, shutting his eyes, and still only framing broken sentences,
was really touching. The net result among the students was, as I have
hinted, one of personal devotion to him, but of utter bafflement as to
his teaching. It is said that one student hearing that the great man was
giving a course of lectures on the “I” (as he was), made his way down to
the _Physiological_ schools and after many inquiries finding that no
lectures were being given on the _Eye_, came back again with the
conclusion that the whole affair was a myth!
Well, Maurice having expressed a wish to take some practical “duty” in
Cambridge, and the living of St. Edward’s falling vacant at that time, a
movement was got up in the College to offer the living to him. The
living was in the gift of the Fellows of Trinity Hall, and most of the
Fellows were favorable to the proposal. But an unexpected difficulty
arose in the person of the Master (Dr. Geldart). Not that the Master
himself (who was an old sporting man, more than anything else) cared a
button about the matter, but because his wife, Mrs. Geldart, was
accustomed to attend St. Edward’s and fuss round the parson there, and
_she_ strongly disapproved of any one so heretical as Maurice occupying
the pulpit!
I was a Fellow of the College at the time, and the scenes round the
table as we discussed the knotty question were most amusing. The obvious
embarrassment of the old Master when the question arose as to _why_ he
thought Maurice so dangerous; his mysterious references to the opinions
of other people (his wife) and his candid disavowal of any knowledge on
these subjects himself; the guffaws of Henry Fawcett (then Professor of
Political Economy and afterwards Postmaster-General) as he called for
his chop and settled himself down to enjoy a scene to which his
blindness was little drawback; the quips of H. D. Warr, one of the
Fellows; the muttered blasphemies of our Dean (Hopkins), who couldn’t
think why we wasted time “over such blasted nonsense”; the ingenious
surmises of the barrister fellows generally as to what Maurice’s
opinions might conceivably be; and the politic expediencies of the Tutor
(Latham) who at last silenced the Master and his Missus by producing a
letter from the Bishop of Carlisle (Goodwin) endorsing Maurice with a
friendly pat on the back: all this was as good as a play.
Maurice was installed in the living early in 1871, and thenceforth read
the services and prayed and preached, with that profundity of earnest
innocence which was so characteristic of him, and which contrasted
strangely with the manner of his election, and more strangely still with
the cheap commercialism of his congregation.
Maurice had no great ear for music. The organist and choir of
flat-singing shop-girls revelled in florid hymns about the
“blood-of-the-Lamb.” Maurice besought me to alter this and induce them
to sing again those fine old hymns like the “Old Hundredth.” A nice task
for an amiable curate!
It was curious that after having been brought up in and adopted
Maurice’s views, I should now, having become his curate, feel so
uncomfortable as I did. But so it was. I had had experience in the short
space of a year and a half, of three spiritual superiors—each in a sense
more favorable than the last; and yet my sense of aggravation
continually increased. I saw a good deal of Maurice. He was kindness
itself. I opened out my difficulties to him; and he was I think troubled
to find I could not reconcile myself to the position which _he_ occupied
apparently without difficulty. But to me his attitude was a growing
wonder. I could quite understand his historical-philosophical view of
the Creeds and the Old Testament, and that he could read into them a
deep and necessary meaning, satisfactory to his own mind; I had in fact
been already, long before, initiated into this Broad Church attitude by
my father. But when it came to standing up oneself in church and
reciting these documents to a congregation who (as one knew perfectly
well) did not understand a word of them, and practically received them
in their grossest sense and in a spirit of mere superstition, then I
felt it _was_ necessary to draw the line somewhere! It was not that I
then, or at any time, made a trouble of the conformity of my own _views_
with those of the Church; for I thought and I think now, that if a man
feels he can do useful work, and congenial to himself, in that
connection, he had better remain where he is until he is kicked out; and
that seeing the variety of interpretations that Church doctrines are
capable of, it is rather for the Church to decide whether _his_
interpretations are within its pale, or not, than for him to do so. But
the trouble to me was a practical one—namely the insuperable _feeling_
of falsity and dislocation which I experienced, and which accompanied
all my professional work from the reading of the services to the
visiting of old women in their almshouses—who were, one could see,
goaded on to hypocrisy by the position in which they were placed—and who
would hastily shuffle a Bible or prayer-book on to the table, when they
saw the parson coming. This sense of falsity grew on me more and more
till I felt the situation to be intolerable.
It is remarkable—certainly I have found it so in my own life—how little
its greater changes are one’s own choice, and in a sense, how much they
are forced upon one by necessity—sometimes by an outward necessity,
sometimes by an inner and necessary, though perhaps unconscious
evolution of one’s own nature. No doubt I _thought_ about this matter a
great deal, argued to myself the question of my conformity to the
Church, and the pros and cons of remaining in it—worried myself, passed
sleepless nights—and felt generally unhinged over it; but all this
conscious argument brought me no nearer to a decision. Deep below I felt
that some sort of sheer necessity was driving me on. Sometimes when I
was occupied with, and thinking about, quite other things, a kind of
shiver would run down my back: “You’ve got to go, you’ve got to go,” and
I felt as if I was being pushed to the edge of a steep place.
For it was not altogether easy to face the situation. I was doing very
well, in a pecuniary sense, at Cambridge, making with my Fellowship and
small offices as lecturer, librarian, etc., £500 or £600 a year, and
prospects good for the future; the abandonment of my Orders would
probably mean the loss of my Fellowship, and possibly also that I should
have to leave Cambridge altogether. And it did not seem quite reasonable
to risk all this for what might after all be only a Quixotic fancy.
But blessed is Necessity which cuts all arguments short! By the middle
of May 1871 I felt so ill and wretched that I _could_ not stay on even a
few weeks to the end of the term. I begged off my lectures, left Maurice
to find another curate, and ran away!
Meanwhile other threads and clues of life were developing. Up to my
degree (January ’68) I had lived singularly apart from any intellectual
or literary circles. As an undergraduate my companions had mostly been
boating men. After my degree however I came naturally into a more
literary society, consisting partly of the younger Fellows of Colleges
and partly of the more go-ahead students who had not yet taken their
degrees. One or two of the more thoughtful undergrads of my own College
also leaned towards me. I belonged to one or two little societies which
used to meet and discuss literary or other topics. To one of these,
which W. K. Clifford organized, I used, after I became a curate, to rush
round on Sunday evenings after church—in time to take part in the
reading of Mazzini’s _Duty of Man_; illustrated by a plentiful
accompaniment of claret-cup and smoke! Clifford was a kind of Socratic
presiding genius at these meetings—with his Satyr-like face, tender
heart, wonderfully suggestive, paradoxical manner of conversation, and
blasphemous treatment of the existing gods. He invented just at that
time a kind of inverted Doxology which ran:—
O Father, Son and Holy Ghost—
We wonder which we hate the most.
Be Hell, which they prepared before,
Their dwelling now and evermore!
and his influence, combined with that of Mazzini, was certainly part of
my education at that period. If it had by any chance come to the
Bishop’s ears that I attended these meetings there is little wonder
about his hesitation to ordain me!
There was another Cambridge heretic with whom I not unfrequently
consorted—Lock of King’s—who certainly by his attainments and ability
ought to have been made a Fellow of his College, but his views and the
audacity with which he ventilated them proved a fatal obstacle. Having
to write a ’Varsity prize-poem he sat up all the preceding night to do
it, worked himself up into a kind of prophetic frenzy and managed under
cover of a forecast of republican utopianism to introduce the lines:—
Since they traded in holy things, and treated the people like beasts,
The priests shall be slain and the kings shall be drowned in the blood
of the priests.
I don’t feel so certain of the exact words of the first line as I do of
the second, but I hope the author of both (who was then, of course, an
undergraduate) will forgive my quotation of them. It is hardly to be
wondered at that in those days he was _not_ made a Fellow!
One of the undergraduates of my own College with whom I made quite a
friendship at this time was Edward Anthony Beck. He came up to
Cambridge, a poor student from the country district of Castle Rising in
Norfolk, on the shores of the Wash—he also with his head full of rhymes
and verses, which he had written since he was a boy of eight or ten, to
the wonderment and delight of his widower father, who prophesied in no
uncertain tone, a nook in Westminster Abbey for his poet son. Beck was a
bright, capable fellow, with a slight stoop, and a stammer, and a
good-humoured way of laughing at his own oddities. He took the
University by surprise by carrying off, in his first year, the prize
poem on Dante—having been fain, it is said, to work up the subject by
reading Cary’s translation (which he could not afford to buy) on the
bookstalls. Then he wrote another prize poem on Runnymede, which
delighted him chiefly I think on account of a misprint which occurred in
the printed copy. There was an eloquent passage in the poem, describing
the sunrise of freedom in England, and something about the clouds
heralding the approach of morning:—
Streaks rosy-tinted vanward of the sun—
which the printer, in a materialistic mood, altered into:—
_Steaks_ rosy-tinted vanward of the sun.
These rosy-tinted steaks gave Beck, I believe, as much pleasure as he
got from all the _kudos_ of his poetic success. He worked away at
Classics, took a good first-class, and ultimately became a fellow and
tutor of the College. But his vein of poetic feeling and romance,
possibly too soon ripe, ran itself out, and he never carried on this
line of production or published anything. His mind, perhaps from the
same cause, took on a slightly cynical cast; he lapsed into the ordinary
channels of lecturing and coaching, then married and had a large family,
and so gave himself up to the work-a-day routine of College life.
At the time I mention he and I chummed together a good deal—indeed there
was a touch of romance in our attachment—we compared literary notes,
went abroad together once or twice, and after he was made a Fellow, had
rooms adjoining each other, and spent many and many an evening in
common. He became a favorite in the general society of the younger dons
and B.A.’s, on account of his brightness, naturalness and frankly avowed
enjoyment of the good things of life.
As for myself, for a couple of years or so after my degree I entered
with great zest into this academically intellectual existence—these
chit-chat societies, these little supper parties, these lingerings over
the wine in combination-room after dinner—where every subject in Heaven
and Earth was discussed, with the university man’s perfect freedom of
thought and utterance, but also with his perfect absence of practical
knowledge or of intention to apply his theories to any practical issue.
It was helpful no doubt especially as a solvent of old ideas and
prejudices; but after a time it began to pall upon me and bore me. There
was a vein of what might be called painful earnestness in my character.
These talking machines were, many of them, very obnoxious to me. And
then of what avail was the brain, when the heart demanded so much, and
demanding was still unsatisfied?
Looking back, I think with regard to this last-mentioned matter, that
the fault was probably a good deal on my own side. Strong as had been
two or three attachments of this and my earlier undergraduate period,
and deeply as they had moved me (to a degree indeed which I should be
almost ashamed to confess); yet for the most part, owing to my reserved
habits, and the self-repressive education I had received—combined with
the fatuities of public opinion—I consumed my own smoke, and did not
give myself the utterance I ought to have given. By concealing myself I
was unfair to my friends, and at the same time suffered torments which I
need not have suffered.
As I have already said, during the time shortly after my degree I
scribbled a great deal in verse form merely as an outlet to my own
feelings, and without much attention to conventionalities of style and
rhythms—though of course along the ordinary lines of versification. But
now came my introduction to the poet who was destined so deeply to
influence my life. It was in the summer of ’68, I believe (though it may
have been ’69), that one day H. D. Warr—one of the Fellows of Trinity
Hall, and a very brilliant and amusing man—came into my room with a
blue-covered book in his hands (William Rossetti’s edition of Whitman’s
poems) only lately published, and said:—
“Carpenter, what do you think of this?”
I took it from him, looked at it, was puzzled, and asked him what he
thought of it.
“Well,” he said, “I thought a good deal of it at first, but I don’t
think I can stand any more of it.”
With those words he left me; and I remember lying down then and there on
the floor and for half an hour poring, pausing, wondering. I could not
make the book out, but I knew at the end of that time that I intended to
go on reading it. In a short time I bought a copy for myself, then I got
_Democratic Vistas_, and later on (after three or four years) _Leaves of
Grass_ complete.
From that time forward a profound change set in within me. I remember
the long and beautiful summer nights, sometimes in the College garden by
the riverside, sometimes sitting at my own window which itself
overlooked a little old-fashioned garden enclosed by grey and crumbling
walls; sometimes watching the silent and untroubled dawn; and feeling
all the time that my life deep down was flowing out and away from the
surroundings and traditions amid which I lived—a current of sympathy
carrying it westward, across the Atlantic. I wrote to Whitman, obtained
his books from him, and occasional postcardial responses. But outwardly,
and on the surface, my life went on as usual.
What made me cling to the little blue book from the beginning was
largely the poems which celebrate comradeship. That thought, so near and
personal to me, I had never before seen or heard fairly expressed; even
in Plato and the Greek authors there had been something wanting (so I
thought). If there had only been those few poems they would have been
sufficient to hold me; but there were other pieces: there was “Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Rocked Cradle,” “President Lincoln’s
Funeral Hymn,” and the prose Preface[3]—and then afterwards _Democratic
Vistas_.
On the whole at that time I thought most, I believe, of the prose
writings. _Democratic Vistas_ was a mine of new thought. Both this and
the little blue book I read over and over again, and still they were
new. I had read a great deal of Wordsworth about the time of my degree;
then Shelley captivated and held me for a long time; portions of Plato
and of Shakespeare I had read repeatedly; but never had I found anything
approaching these writings of Whitman’s for their inexhaustible quality
and power of making one return to them.
Yet all this time, or for three or four years, I believe my interest in
them was mainly intellectual—that is, they were producing an
intellectual ferment in me, but I had not distinctly come into touch
with the dominant individuality behind them, nor felt that they were
reshaping my moral and artistic ideals. This is partly shown by the fact
that I continued all these years, and up to ’74 or so, writing verse
along the usual lines and upon the usual subjects. Wordsworth’s “Tintern
Abbey” and Shelley’s “Adonais” and “Prometheus” still ruled my artistic
and emotional conceptions; and withal, living as I was in an atmosphere
of literary criticism and finesse, mere academic technique seemed to me
a great matter, and I made great struggles to attain to it.
Though I was not particularly successful in these efforts towards the
conventional in literature, yet I have no doubt they were very helpful
in giving me some sort of training in the power of handling words and
rhythmical forms—and it was a true instinct which led me through this
instead of urging me to leap at once into the ocean of metrical freedom,
so difficult to navigate with success. Anyhow so it was that while (in
other things as well as in literature) my inner scarcely conscious
nature was setting outwards in a swift current from the shores of
conventionality, under the influence of its new genius, into deeps it
little divined, my external self was still busy in a kind of backwater,
and working hard if by any means it might attain to a creditable or even
a possible existence in these channels!
But by ’71 and ’72 I began to feel that continued existence in my
surroundings was becoming impossible to me. The tension and dislocation
of my life was increasing, and I became aware that a crisis was
approaching. In May of the former year I had taken a holiday and got
away from Cambridge. In October I returned to my lecturing and College
work, but not to the church duties; and all ’72 I continued on, going
through the daily round—but in a torpid, perfunctory manner—feeling
probably that I ought to throw it all up, yet without the pluck to do so
till I was fairly forced. By the end of ’72 I was obviously ill and
incapacitated, and when I asked for leave of absence for a couple of
terms it was readily granted—my own object in asking (so I put it to
myself) being to get quite away and for long enough to be able to
estimate my position and future action fairly and deliberately.
The year ’73 was an important one for me. Feeling shattered and
exhausted, and with a big holiday before me, I determined to go to
Italy. It was a new life and I may almost say inspiration. I spent two
months in Rome, a month in the Bay of Naples, and a month at Florence. I
was alone, still alone; but the healing influences of the air and the
sunshine were upon me. Amid the bright external life of the day, and the
rich records and suggestions of the past, all the questions which had
been tormenting me faded away. I _thought_ about them no more; but new
elements came into my life which decided them for me.
The Greek sculpture had a deep effect. The other things, pictures,
architecture, etc., interested me much from an historical or æsthetic
point of view; but this had something more, a germinative influence on
my mind, which adding itself to and corroborating the effect of
Whitman’s poetry, left with me as it were the seed of new conceptions of
life. The marvellous beauty and cleanliness of the human body as
presented by the Greek mind, the way in which the noblest passions of
the soul—the tender pitying love of Diana for Endymion, the haughty
inspiration of Juno, the heroic endurance of the fallen warrior, the
childlike gladness of the faun—were united and blended with the
corporeal form—or rather scarcely conceived of as separated from it; the
emotional atmosphere which went with this, the Greek ideal of the free
and gracious life of man at one with nature and the cosmos—so remote
from the current ideals of commercialism and Christianity!—to become
aware of all this in the midst of that “delicate air” and delightful
landscape and climate of Italy, was indeed a new departure for me.
There are magnificent fragments of Greek sculpture in the British
Museum, not forgetting the priceless frieze of the Parthenon—things
which to a skilled artistic eye are as suggestive as any that can be
found—but to me the great range and completeness of the Italian
galleries, the almost perfect Cupids, fauns, Venuses, athletes,
warriors, youths, maidens, sages, gods, in unending procession under
that southern sky, gave a poetic impulse which I could not, at any rate
at that time, have surmised from a broken marble seen in a London fog!
Nor must I omit, as part of the Greek impression, a visit to the Temples
of Pæstum—which helped to give a habitation in the mind’s eye to those
strings of sculptured figures, exiles in alien Rome, and to intensify
the sense of harmonious life and divine proportion which they had
excited.
I stayed in Italy long enough to see, at Florence, the fireflies skim
and flicker over the blossoming wheat-fields of May and June, and then
returned home, to find that without worrying about it a change had taken
place in my mental attitude which would make my return to the Cambridge
life impossible.
And here I must not omit to mention another influence which played a
large part in the shaping of my life at this time. Most men own a deep
debt to women’s influence in the ordering and guidance of their lives. I
cannot say that I have felt this. With the exception of my mother and
one other person, I cannot remember a single case in which a woman came
to me as a strong motive-force or inspiration, or as a help or a guide
in doubt or difficulty. Perhaps on the emotional side women did not
supply what I needed; while on the intellectual side a woman with
decisive, originative, authentic mind is certainly not often to be met
with. Such a woman, however, of the latter type, was the person to whom
I allude, and whom I may call Olivia (which indeed was one of her
Christian names).