Part 4

Reynolds was somebody. He married his daughter to Thomas Hood, and his son was, I believe, the Reynolds of Sunday newspaper fame.

With this exception the school was purely classical; nothing whatever was taught but Greek and Latin. History, geography, English, and its grammar, were unheard of. We had to teach ourselves to read and spell, and none will dispute that the prayers before scanty meat were beautifully given by the Grecians, those head boys who proceeded to the University. Grammar we learnt only from the Greek and Latin, but it was sufficient; composition we derived from the same source, whence, perhaps, our habit of inversion, so offensive nowadays to poetic dribblers, who doat on Wordsworthy prose.

The steward of the school, who was ruler, a sort of president of the growing-up republic, named Higgins, was an oldish man, grey-pated, with a youthful slim figure, fair skin, and a straight disciplinarian mouth. He presided at meal-time, seated at a desk on the large daïs at the upper end of the hall, like a modern Pontius Pilate. There he was, to receive criminals led to judgment by the monitors, and to flog them without mercy. He was greatly feared and, of course, greatly hated. He reminded one of a snake in his movements, which were rapid and flexible. No complaint was made to him of the boys, by beadles or monitors, but what was believed by him; he required no proof.

It was a sort of Russian system; every official, every monitor, was a spy, and the steward was the willing knout, a creature emotional as a reptile, servile as a dog, and as a cat cruel.

Nevertheless, there was one extenuating circumstance—he had a pretty daughter, with whom a friend and school-fellow of mine was in love.

I have remarked on the strictly classical character of the school; but, after all, if one learns only one good thing well, one wishes to know others, and can teach one’s self. Then, classics have another advantage: Horace alone can make a gentleman. But what is more remarkable than all the other omissions in the school is, that the boys were never, individually, taught a word of religion. When it is remembered what a powerful influence the wealth of the clergy exercises, one must pause in wonder over the fact of religious teaching being a thing unknown. Religious machinery was everywhere visible. There was a grand organ in the gallery at one end of the dining-hall, over the doorway; there was an organist, Mr. Glen, to accompany the hymn or psalm during the daily services before meat, consisting of a bit of Bible and a thanksgiving, the Grecians being pro-chaplains. There was a form of prayer read by any boy in the wards who was handy at bed-time, and a chapter selected at his option; but no teaching of the Scriptures or of the Church dogmas, if we may except the services at Christ Church on Sundays. There may have been such an appointment as chaplain to Christ’s Hospital; if so it was strictly honorary, and kept a profound secret.

By the way, there was some religious improvement to be derived personally through the committing of a misdemeanour, the punishment for which was the getting a chapter in the Bible by heart. I profited by this myself in a curious manner, for, being a very sensitive boy, I made a bad reader, so, when called upon to perform the evening service, I always read the chapter which I knew by heart, and that so impressively and faultlessly, that I came off with much _éclat_.

I can still repeat that chapter, but no other.

XII.

Perhaps ten thousand boys have passed through the school since I bade farewell to its cloisters, but I am unable to say whether the system of non-religious teaching has been changed. Our reverend classical masters manifested no religious tastes; it may be due to their not having imbibed any when they were pupils like ourselves in the school. I do recollect Mr. Lynam, of whom I was a pupil for several years, correcting my pronunciation of _Jōb_, which I called _Jŏb_. If we were reading something from Scripture before him, I have wholly forgotten it; the occasion must have been so rare.

What the effect of religious ignorance may have been on so many before and after me, it is difficult to surmise. I have no recollection of any boy, in after-life, becoming a bishop or a millionaire. Nature was open to them; she is constantly carrying on revelations, and all must begin with these before entertaining Divine ones. The greater our acquaintance is with natural teaching, the better we are able to judge of religious. A well-educated scientific man would decide a religious question in five minutes which would take five hundred years for all the doctors of divinity to get to the bottom of. A large knowledge of Nature is requisite even to find a meaning for any inspired passage, and it is doubtful if any divine ever had training enough to understand fully any one important passage of Holy Writ. Those men who are recognized as having undergone inspiration were never able to state lucidly what they heard, but recorded it in such shape as must for ever puzzle the brains of the priesthood. If such men as the Herschels had been made the vehicles of a revelation, it would have been expressed to the world in such tangible language as shuts out all dispute.

The advantages of knowledge derived from observations made within the sacred precincts of Nature is that there is always a revelation going on, made by a silent, invisible power that we can question without offence. But the custodes of the holy archives greatly disapprove of such proceeding. The Catholic forbids the perusal of Scripture; the Protestant the perusal of Nature; and that reverend gorilla, the agnostic, inculcates the wisdom of studying all things and learning nothing. Surely he is the missing link!

I admire the clergy as gentlemen and men of education, but the fault is that they proceed from the university to the Church, and drop science and literature out of their daily life, returning to ignorance at the same pace as they quitted it as children. The cultivated class find it impossible to converse with them on any profitable grounds.

XIII.

My mother’s youngest brother was an officer of artillery, and, as adjutant, was always stationed at Woolwich. He had married the daughter of a Mr. Samuel Enderby, an oil-merchant, and a man of great wealth, living on Croom’s Hill, Greenwich, when first I knew his family, and afterwards moving to a mansion on Blackheath.

When a day’s holiday occurred, I and my cousin walked down to my uncle’s house, taking that of the Enderbys on our way. We were paid our travelling expenses both ways, though we never rode, but kept the money in our pockets, together with the heavy tips that we got at both houses.

My uncle did not attain the rank of captain, even, till middle age. Promotion in the artillery, going by rotation, was slow, and so long remained, owing to the Duke of Wellington’s narrow ideas, and _brevet_ at last had to be substituted for real rank.

My uncle, however, died a lieutenant-general, with a good-service pension, followed by the command of a brigade.

My son, Alfred Egmont Hake, has given a true and pleasing account of my uncle, Henry William Gordon, and his family relations, derived from information supplied by me for his “Story of Chinese Gordon,” who was one of my uncle’s younger sons.

I had a strong love for this uncle, and he reciprocated the feeling; nay, more, he always overlooked my faults, which were not a few in the eyes of those relatives who were incompetent to judge me, and expected me to play the commonplace game in life for which, unfortunately, I was wholly unqualified.

Charles Gordon’s education was military only. His rapidity of perception and combination, so conspicuous in his command of an army, were left otherwise barren; he was, therefore, unable to grasp the great truths that surround our actual being, sacrificing their beauty and enjoyment to a meaningless superstition. He had even humour of the most delicate kind, without which no man of genius is ever born, for it is the crowning faculty of man’s intellect.

As possessing a judgment myself which reaches no conclusion before passing through an unprejudiced analysis of all things great and small concerning it, I have never been able to conceive a soldier’s duties accordant with a Christian’s, or to realize such an idea as that of a man leading one army of paid assassins against another, with a love of Christ, or of his Maker, or of mankind in his heart. The fact that men offer their own lives only shows how earnest they are in the profession of shedding blood. Those of the Mahometan class might infuse religion into slaughter; but not one of the disciples or evangelists could have done it, except one.

“Rich must a hero be in superstition Who deems ’twas God who gave him his commission.”

Throughout his childhood and youth, Charles Gordon associated with soldiers. His family were of the military class; he imbibed the love of their profession. He had an acute mind, with faculties which, if trained, would have served for a philosopher; but he had not the originality that leads a man to educate himself, and to cast all falsehood out of his nature. A slight knowledge of physiology would have sufficed to root out most of his theological ideas; but that slight knowledge, even, he did not possess; and what he most wished might be, he believed. His name is great, but his reputation will rest finally on his military genius and his many virtues.

But to return to my subject. A day’s holiday at Woolwich was a pleasant pastime. It sometimes included a visit to Greenwich Hospital, sometimes a review, and more than once a sight of Richardson’s Theatre at Greenwich Fair-time, when all that is tragical in the world was enacted with all the rant that tradition had handed down from stage to stage.

XIV.

I passed my last remaining holidays with my mother at Exeter, the old dean and chapter town of the west. Exeter continues in my mind to be a mediæval city, its inhabitants a people of the middle ages. To enjoy the height of respectability it was necessary to have a visiting connection with the bishop of the diocese, and this secured the unenviable acquaintance of the dean, the Mr. Dean, the divinest of doctors, and the whole chapter, which, judging from its antecedents, owed its importance to and was in itself a mere Chapter of Accidents. To think how men, ignorant of all things save privilege and dogma, can testimonialize their fellow-citizens by means of a nodding smile! To be admitted into the close to eat mutton and red-currant jelly with the canons of the cathedral was a fortune of social rank, sufficiently ample to confer honour on the dozens who knew them. How strange is all this to minds of any magnitude! A string of minor infallibles, each the owner of dearly beloved brethren whom he condescends to despise, ruling over the pauper intellects and imaginations of a city!

Yet all these idolaters are great economists; instead of earning their own respectability, they seek to get it dirt-cheap by having it conferred upon them.

I found my mother in better circumstances; her younger uncle had died, and as he could not take his hoard away with him, he left it to be divided among his near relations, but the only one, the Rev. Robert Clarke, who bore his name, came best off; and he deserved it, not only for his own sake, but because he was already better off than most of those who profited under the will! This cousin was the kindest, the most clerically gentlemanlike of the cloth he favoured. The name of Clarke is on record at Hexham as that of liberal Church patrons.

But mediæval cities and people of the middle ages, still playing out the ancestral game, have their theatres. To that of Exeter I went to see Yates perform the part of Falstaff. I was deeply bitten by the fun, and the next day performed much of the character myself before my mother, and kept her in a continual roar of laughter.

The eminent surgeon, Mr. Shelden, was, in times preceding, a practitioner in the place; as such he was a friend of the Gordons. He left a relict, whom my mother often took me to see—a charming lady, who knew how to make herself delightful to a child. Mr. Shelden was Professor of Anatomy at the College of Surgeons in London. In the museum of the college there is a mummy which he made, and which he called “Madame Mahogany.” It excited much curiosity at one time. On visiting the museum, I readily found it on the left of the entrance door. There is a portrait of this eminent man in the Devon and Exeter Hospital, painted by the artist from memory after Shelden’s death, and it was said to be an excellent likeness by those who remembered him.

It may interest some to know that my grandfather resided for many years at Bowhill House in St. Thomas’s. The place was purchased over his head, and made the county lunatic asylum, which purpose I believe it serves to this day.

With this place were associated some of my mother’s happiest as well as most miserable recollections. The names of those who were known to her family are still rife in the old red sandstone country, and have been distinguished in the new generation. I must mention that of Mr. Northmore, of Cleve, who was a generous-minded reformer in days when to be a radical was worse than to lead a life of blasphemy. He was the first scientific man who succeeded in condensing a gas. The one he operated on was chlorine; his results were published in _Nicholson’s Journal_ in the year 1809. So little interest attached to great discoveries in those days that his researches were forgotten, and Faraday long afterwards succeeded in the same work. He had never heard the name of Northmore, and published his own results as the first obtained in that direction. This I learned from Mr. Northmore himself, when I was grown up. That philosopher did not even claim his discovery when the scientific world was ringing with Faraday’s praise.

Among other friends of her youth my mother long remembered with affection her school-fellow, Ann Gifford, the daughter of a grocer in Exeter. The name was afterwards known through the brother becoming master of the rolls and obtaining a peerage as counsel for great George our king, during the prosecution of the queen.

In those days counsel were at their boldest, when Denman, who had to examine the Duke of York, could say to him in open court, “Stand forth, thou slanderer!”

I have heard say that one of the most amusing transfigurations ever produced, without a miracle, was that of Mr. Wareman Gifford, from a grocer behind the counter to the brother of a lord.

XV.

At school was laid the foundation of two lifelong friendships; one with Henry Edmondes, who afterwards was a barrister, and became deputy clerk of the peace for Middlesex during Sergeant Adams’s chairmanship—another with Hugh Worthington Statham, who proceeded to medicine, finally occupying the mastership of the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries. Edmondes was of short stature, with an intellect the better of which I have never known. He had all the humour of Charles Dickens, and, had he lived, might have proved a closer rival than Thackeray to that inimitable writer. He had advantages that Dickens never acquired; he was a scholar, well read in English, French, and Italian, as well as in classics, and was free from that silly sentimentalism which at times placed Dickens below par.

Statham, like myself, is still alive: never losing sight of the _literæ humaniores_, he threw his excellent abilities into the healing art, and touched the first place in his branch of the profession. Next to my brother, he is my oldest friend. Our first meeting must have been seventy years ago.[1]

I have not yet alluded to the King’s Ward, a sort of aristocratic section of the school, in which the boys were trained for the navy. Candidates were received into it at their own option. They formed a society apart, not associating with the other boys; consequently their deeds were traditional, relating to how in times past they had been in revolt, defying their masters, escaping from the school, and, after being retaken, how they were locked up in the prison cell and tamed on bread and water.

Their studies were under a mathematical master, apart from the other boys. They were distinguished by a metal badge with some emblem upon it, which was worn by them on the left shoulder.

They were always considered a very “gallous” set, which, in the school vocabulary, signified “daring.”

I preferred my solitary walks in the cloisters to joining in the games, and this secluded habit sometimes raised a faction against me, and I had only the choice left me of yielding or of being mobbed. There was a game in which some hundreds held on to each other by the tails of their coats, while the leader determined the direction they should take by going himself the way which pleased him. I was always a candidate for the leadership, and my plan was to drag the long chain of boys through segments of circles to left and back to right; the effect of this was, by a swift and sudden turn, to throw half the boys off their legs to the ground, the hinder ones coming in for the fall as the impetus given by the foremost reached them.

It appears remarkable, at first thought, that with so many hundreds one should learn the name of every boy; but it is nothing compared with what is achieved by study. Some forty years ago I had a conversation with Professor Henslow, of Cambridge, on the subject of getting names by heart. At that time there were sixty thousand plants classified. He said that a botanist would by degrees fix all these names on his memory without any effort.

A memorable group among us was that of three brothers named Leighton, a family of such beauty as can only be rarely seen. Two of them were Grecians. The eldest, James Leighton, was tall, with dark hair and complexion, and of a graceful figure. He proceeded to the university early in my time, so I saw little of him, but that little has lasted my memory for seventy years. David Leighton came next; he was of a fair complexion, with large grey eyes, with nose and lips exquisitely curved, and a countenance expressive of talent and good nature.

The Grecians might reach their twentieth year at the school, and, as men, had the advantage of their dress being made of fine cloth; it was otherwise the same as that of the boys, except that they had broad red girdles, stamped like those of the monitors. In such dress the Grecians had a truly noble appearance; one might think of them as high officials at the court of Edward the Sixth.

The youngest of the group was Frederick Leighton, my junior, and my particular friend. He had dark and refined features, with curling hair.

I met David Leighton again at Baden Baden in 1832, among the fashionable crowds from all nations. He was chaplain to the English residents of the place. I have heard nothing more of this fine family from that time to this.

I asked him what he had done at Cambridge. His answer was, that he had disgusted his whole family.

Another contemporary, one who made some figure in professional life, was Lawson Cape. As a boy he was the greediest of readers. His father brought him historical works week after week, and he devoured their contents as fast as they reached him. He was short, fair-haired, freckled, quick at reading, quick at learning, quick at looking about him. It was difficult to follow his movements, so excited were they on all occasions. I met him again at Florence, during the carnival. I saw him abroad once more at Baden Baden, after which he settled in London as an accoucheur, when I came across him for the last time.

He was related to Sir Charles Locock, and through his influence acquired an obstetric practice in town.

[1] He died at the beginning of 1892, after entering his eighty-fourth year. He was two months my senior. I have later on made a distinction between early friends and later ones, dwelling on the fact that what happens to us before we have attained our full growth is nourished as a part of us, and so becomes ingrained in our natures.

XVI.

Dr. Basham, physician to the Westminster Hospital, was another of us. I lost sight of him between the years 1824 and 1860, when I met him in the laboratory, and knew him again at a glance.

Sir Henry Cole, whom I had not seen for five and thirty years, another boy, came across me at one of Lady Ripon’s receptions; I recognized him too, though he was disguised in the broad red ribbon and star of the Bath.

These two men reached notoriety, each in his calling, Basham as a physician, Cole as an official in the office of Records. But they and their like were of the vanishing class, their names are disappearing; they filled only a little space in their own generation, which they accompany to oblivion.

My school days are a memory that I have never refreshed by visiting those ancient halls and cloisters; once only since I left them have I passed through from Newgate Street to Little Britain. I found all there was doubly dead. It was dead in its own past, and dead in mine. I saw a moral blank in which love was absent, absent as it had ever been between the pupil and his masters. During my holidays at Seaford, I experienced thirty days at a time of love and kindness; the recollection of this drew me to it again. I was seldom at Brighton without going over there with my brother and his wife, or with his children and mine, to look once more at the house on the Crouch, and to walk over that beautiful south down that ascends from the beach and the sea to Cuckmere.

When we no longer knew one living creature there, we still found pleasure in asking the oldest inhabitants if they remembered Captain and Mrs. Wallinger.

When I quitted school and gave up the mediæval costume, I was put into fine clothes, and spent a fortnight at Woolwich, taken about from sight to sight by my uncle, dining often at the artillery mess, taking a spare bed at the quarters of Colonel Wylde, and waited on by his man, when I learned, and have since often found, that a soldier makes the best valet in the world. Whatever familiarity you may show him, he never becomes familiar with you; he is always respectful. No one knew this better than my famed cousin, Charles Gordon. He, when at home, would talk to the soldier-footman of certain members of his mother’s family, who were expected as guests, and, calling them good-naturedly by opprobrious names, would ask if they were in the house; but the servant, however hard driven by the persistency of his young master, would to the last pretend not to understand to whom he made allusion.

I did not like that visit to Woolwich: my uncle was very severe, though only at the moment, on the faults of young people, though a kinder heart could not well be. The evenings were formal; we sat round a table, every one in some manner occupied. Unused to fine furniture I kicked the leg of the table. The uncle showed anger on his expressive face, while he asked, “Can’t you reconnoitre?” I was given an elegant copy of “Gil Bias” to read; unused to such editions, unused to reading in the presence of fine people, I damped my finger at my lips. “Give me the book,” shouted the good uncle; “I’ll show you how to turn over the leaves!” In this he performed the feat as any other gentleman would do, and handed the book back.

This and similar incidents so troubled me that I contemplated taking flight; but my patience under trial prevailed, and I bided the time for a visit to Seaford, which soon came about.

This was in 1824, when Charles Gordon was not yet a denizen of our world.