Part 2

I was also fortunate enough, when I was about fifteen, to come in for the reversion of a cupboard full of chemical apparatus, which had belonged to my eldest brother, and here in a little room with retorts and test-tubes I spent many a half-holiday, carrying out important experiments and prosecuting valuable inventions, which ended almost invariably in bad smells and worse headaches. Perpetual motion, as usual in such cases, was one of my chief objects; and I could not for the life of me tell why a solid cylinder of wood, placed with its axis horizontal in the side of a box containing water, and so carefully fitted that it would turn on its axis without allowing the water to run out, would not revolve perpetually—seeing indeed that the one half of it which was in the water, being lighter than water, would continually tend to rise, and the other half of it which was in the air would continually tend to fall. I invented an arrangement for the pianoforte after the Morse telegraphic system, by which extemporaneous effusions could be written down in the act of playing—an invention which luckily has not been generally adopted; and was engaged on various other little patents at different times. Sometimes I gave a lecture—though it must be confessed that it was with difficulty that any of the household could be induced to attend! The lecture was small, but the danger from explosions and horrible smells was great. My remarks were not very lucid or explanatory, but consisted mainly of expressions like “Now I will show you something else” or “You needn’t be frightened, there is no danger.” These investigations were however very absorbing and excited far more interest in my mind than anything I learned at school; and I remember that they led me to think quite seriously about being a doctor (I suppose from some vague notion about the connection between chemicals and medicine)—a profession which my father was inclined to recommend to me, and which I have sometimes regretted that I did not adopt.

Towards the later part of my time at Brighton the natural _épanchement_ of youth led me often to seek consolation and an escape from the wounds of daily life in intercourse with Nature. The Brighton social life—with its greetings where no kindness is—was to me chilly in the extreme, and I often used in later years to feel that I “caught cold” (morally speaking) whenever I returned to it. The scenery and surroundings of Brighton are also bare and chilly enough; and trees, whose friendly covert I have always loved, do not exist there; but the place has two Nature-elements in it—and these two singularly wild and untampered—the Sea and the Downs. We lived within two hundred yards of the sea, and its voice was in our ears night and day. On terrific stormy nights it was a “grisly joy” to go down to the water’s edge at 10 or 11 p.m.—pitchy darkness—feeling one’s way with feet or hands, over the stony beach, hardly able to stand for the wind—and to watch the white breakers suddenly leap out of the gulf close upon one—the “scream of the madden’d beach dragged down by the wave,” the booming of the wind, like distant guns, and the occasional light of some vessel laboring for its life in the surge.

But the Downs were my favorite refuge. On sunny days I would wander on over them for miles, not knowing very clearly where I was going—in a strange broody moony state—glad to find some hollow (like that described in Jefferies’ _Story of my Heart_) where one could lie secluded for any length of time and see only the clouds and the grasses and an occasional butterfly, or hear the distant bark of a dog or the far rumble of a railway train. The Downs twined themselves with all my thought and speculations of that time. Their chaste subdued gracious outlines and quiet colour have a peculiar charm. Their strongest line is generally some white edge of cliffs or curve of the shore itself, their deepest tint the blue of the sea or occasionally a field of red clover or one overgrown with charlock. For the rest they wear the faint blue-green colour of thin turf through which the chalk almost shows. Over the velvety sward and among the fine herbage cropped by plentiful sheep run innumerable tiny flowers dwarfed by salt wind and scanty soil—thistles, whose chins rest on the ground out of which they grow; patches of sweet thyme which the wild bees love, of pink centaury and thrift and madder and dwarf-broom, and that sweet yellow lotus or bird’s-foot trefoil, which runs all over the world, in Siberia and Alps and Himalayas the same, one of the commonest and friendliest of all the flowers that grow. Overhead the lark sings, the clouds drift through the untampered blue, the bee and the butterfly sweep past on the breeze. Three or four miles from Brighton, and one is in a world remote from man. Except an occasional shepherd there is hardly a human to be seen. Here and there in a hollow nestles the tiniest hamlet—an old farmhouse, one or two cottages, a dwarf church faced with rough work of flints, a few trees and a well. Taking its character from the sky—as all chalk and limestone countries largely do—this land has an ethereal beauty in summer weather; but on wintry and gray days it is monotonous and sad. The shepherd then huddles himself in his cloak in the lee of the gorse-bush, the cloudy rack drives over the backs of his sheep, line behind line the Downs stretch, colorless, unbroken by any hint of tree or habitation; the wind whistles among the thin grass stems with a peculiar shrill and mournful pipe, and in its pauses the sullen and distant roar of the sea is heard.

How can I describe, how shall I not recall, the thoughts which came to me as I wandered, towards the close of my school time, over these same hills—the brooding ill-defined, half-shapen thoughts? The Downs were my escape; even in their most chill and lonely moods they were my escape from a worse coldness and loneliness, which, except for a few boyfriends at school, I somehow experienced during all that time. Nature was more to me, I believe, than any human attachment, and the Downs were my Nature. It was among them at a later time that I first began to write a few verses. But at the time I mention, and till quite the end of my school days, I never wrote anything at all. If the thought of writing had occurred to me I should have deemed it, in my then state of mind, monstrous presumption—but I doubt whether the thought ever did occur to me. I did not even read poetry. Mozart and Beethoven were familiar to me, but I must have been eighteen years old before I was roused to any interest in Tennyson (the poet of the day) by a lecture at school on “In Memoriam.” After that I read “In Memoriam” and loved it well. This was followed (at Cambridge) by Wordsworth; and then by Shelley, who excited in me the same passionate attachment that he has excited in so many others. After that Whitman dominated me. I do not think any others of the poets—unless Plato should bear that name—have deeply influenced me.

As to friends—that absorbing subject—I can trace the desire for a passionate attachment in my earliest boyhood. But the desire had no expression, no chance of expression. Such things as affection were never spoken about either at home or at school, and I naturally concluded that there was no room for them in the scheme of creation! The glutinous boyfriendships that one formed in class-room or playground were of the usual type: they staved off a greater hunger, but they did not satisfy. On the other hand I worshipped the very ground on which some, generally elder, boys stood; they were heroes for whom I would have done anything. I dreamed about them at night, absorbed them with my eyes in the day, watched them at cricket, loved to press against them unnoticed in a football melly, or even to get accidentally hurt by one of them at hockey, was glad if they just spoke to me or smiled; but never got a word farther with it all. What could I say? Even to one of the masters, I remember, who was a little kind to me, I felt this unworded devotion; but he never helped me over the stile, and so I remained on the farther side.

I often think what a fund of romance, and of intense feeling, there is in this direction latent in so many boys and capable even of heroic expression—and how much will have to be done some day in the matter of directing and giving a constructive outlet to it. Already however there is a great difference in the tone of the public schools themselves on this subject, from what there was twenty-five or thirty years ago. The trouble in schools from bad sexual habits and frivolities arises greatly—though of course not altogether—from the suppression and misdirection of the natural emotions of boy-attachment. I, as a day boy, and one who happened to be rather pure-minded than otherwise, grew up quite free from these evils: though possibly it would have been a good thing if I had had a little more experience of them than I had. As it was, no elder person _ever_ spoke to me about sexual matters—no mother, father, brother, monitor or master ever said a word. I picked up the usual information from the talk of my companions, and made up my own mind unbiased by any person or book. I suppose it was in consequence of this that I never saw anything repellent or shameful in sexual acts themselves. From the earliest time when I thought about these things they seemed to me natural—like digestion or any other function—and I remember wondering why people made such a fuss about the mention of them—why they told lies rather than speak the truth, why they were shocked, or why they giggled and stuffed handkerchiefs in their mouths. It was not till (at the age of twenty-five) I read Whitman—and then with a great leap of joy—that I met with the treatment of sex which accorded with my own sentiments.

Nevertheless though these desires were never to me unclean, yet during all that time of later boyhood and early university life they were strangely discounted by that other desire of the heart. I could not think much of sex while the hunger of the heart was unsatisfied—and _that_ for the time being occupied all the foreground of my life. Indeed at times it threatened to paralyse my mental and physical faculties. It was like an open wound continually bleeding. I felt starved and unfed, and unable to rest in the chilling contacts of ordinary life. As to the usual attractions set before the eyes of middle-class youth, the hopeless, helpless young ladyisms, or the bolder beauties of the gutter, they were both a detestable boredom to me.

For indeed the life, and with it the character, of the ordinary “young lady” of that period, and of the sixties generally, was tragic in its emptiness. The little household duties for women, encouraged in an earlier and simpler age, had now gone out of date, while the modern idea of work in the great world was not so much as thought of. In a place like Brighton there were hundreds, perhaps, of households, in which girls were growing up with but one idea in life, that of taking their “proper place in society.” A few meagre accomplishments—plentiful balls and dinner-parties, theatres and concerts—and to loaf up and down the parade, criticizing each other, were the means to bring about this desirable result! There was absolutely nothing else to do or live for. It is curious—but it shows the state of public opinion of that time—to think that my father, who was certainly quite advanced in his ideas, never for a moment contemplated that any of his daughters should learn professional work with a view to their living—and that in consequence he more than once drove himself quite ill with worry. Occasionally it happened that, after a restless night of anxiety over some failure among his investments, and of dread lest he should not be able at his death to leave the girls a competent income, he would come down to breakfast looking a picture of misery. After a time he would break out. “Ruin impended over the family,” securities were falling, dividends disappearing; there was only one conclusion—“the girls would have to go out as governesses.” Then silence and gloom would descend on the household. It was true; that was the only resource. There was only one profession possible for a middle-class woman—to be a governess—and to adopt that was to become a _pariah_. But in a little time affairs would brighten up again. Stocks went up, the domestic panic subsided; and dinner-parties and balls were resumed as usual.

As time went by, and I gradually got to know what life really meant, and to realize the situation, it used to make me intensely miserable to return home and see what was going on there. My parents of course were fully occupied, but for the rest there were six or seven servants in the house, and my six sisters had absolutely nothing to do except dabble in paints and music as aforesaid, and wander aimlessly from room to room to see if by any chance “anything was going on.” Dusting, cooking, sewing, darning—all light household duties were already forestalled; there was no private garden, and if there had been it would have been “unladylike” to do anything in it; _every_ girl could not find an absorbing interest in sol-fa or water-colours; athletics were not invented; every aspiration and outlet, except in the direction of dress and dancing, was blocked; and marriage, with the growing scarcity of men, was becoming every day less likely, or easy to compass. More than once girls of whom I least expected it told me that their lives were miserable “with nothing on earth to do.” Multiply this picture by thousands and hundreds of thousands all over the country, and it is easy to see how, when the causes of the misery were understood, it led to the powerful growth of the modern “Women’s Movement.”

During my school-days, however, this tragedy had, so far as our household was concerned, hardly developed itself, or at any rate become at all serious; and a charming recollection of that period is that of my companionship with two of my elder sisters. With one of these—my sister Ellen, afterwards Mrs. Hyett—I used to go long country walks. She had an eye for landscape and animal painting, and sometimes brought her sketch-book with her. Occasionally on hired hacks we rode together over the Downs. Her mind had an adventurous outdoor quality about it; and our conversation turned mainly on what we saw on our explorations, and on speculations about foreign lands. The other sister (Lizzie, afterwards Lady Daubeney) was never much of a walker; but she stayed at home and played Beethoven’s Sonatas, and these were a continual delight to me. I stood quietly by and turned over the pages by the hour. The “Sonata Appassionata” was a dream of wonder. This sister had a highly poetic, sensitive temperament. When the younger ones of the family were children she told us absorbing fairy-tales. At the time I speak of she was the one in the household who gave to the atmosphere a touch of sympathy, tenderness and romance; which was of priceless value. As my mind expanded we even talked a little poetic philosophy together, and discussed Tennyson and Shakespeare.

My younger brother, Alfred, who was my schoolfellow at the Lycée at Versailles, went to the Brighton College with me (I joining for the second time) when the family returned to Brighton in 1858. But at an early age (fourteen) he joined the Navy, and after a preliminary year on board the _Britannia_ training-ship, went away to sea. Consequently he was not so much at home during those early years. The sea-life suited him, I think. With a rather dare-devil temperament as a boy he was always getting into scrapes at school. [Once, I remember, he had the brilliant idea of lighting a fire in his locker in the schoolroom, and then sitting, all innocence, on the seat—until the crackling of sticks and the curling smoke drew all eyes that way, and he was discovered like the phœnix in apparent peril of being consumed!] In the Navy, at an early period, he distinguished himself by saving life under risky circumstances. In one case a man had fallen overboard at night in the Tagus from another ship, and in the darkness was being swept by the current seawards past the _Warrior_, on which ship my brother was—when the latter, who was on deck at the time, jumped in to the rescue, at the same time calling to some of the bluejackets to man a boat and follow. Of course he and the drowning man were immediately lost to sight in the gloom, and when the boat did get under weigh it was only by his distant shouts that its crew could be guided. The two men had drifted half a mile or more before they were picked up; but it was not too late, and their rescue was safely effected. In another case off the Falkland Isles he swam to the rescue of an ordinary seaman under even more perilous conditions, and for this act gained the Albert medal—which may be called the V.C. of life-saving medals.

At a later period [1875–76] my brother Alfred was lieutenant on board H.M.S. _Challenger_, and it was under his management that the deepest sounding effected up to that period was taken. He obtained 4,475 fathoms, or nearly 27,000 feet in the vicinity of the Ladrone Islands. After the _Challenger_ he had several commands in China and elsewhere, including charge of the Marine Survey of India; and as commander of the _Investigator_ he spent several years surveying and making charts of the coasts of India and the Andaman Islands. In 1885, in connection with the Burmese expedition against King Thebaw, the important duty was assigned to him of leading the War Flotilla up the river Irrawaddy. As an officer he was well liked, being considerate of the men under him, but firm in their management, and in moments of danger plucky and reliable.[2]

In later years he published not a few papers on nautical and astronomical matters, and in 1915 a more popular illustrated handbook for travellers, entitled _Nature Notes for Ocean Voyagers_ (Griffin, 5s.).

Such, roughly summed together, are the main outlines of my early days—full after all of tenderest recollections. A large family is a roughish training school, but it is a valuable one. Over-sensitive and of a clinging disposition by nature, I early learned the profound lessons of suffering and of self-dependence. My spirit concentrated itself, and partially overcame its inherent vagueness and weakness in years of silence. The tension of those early days, the unexpressed hatred which I felt, though I did not understand it, for the social conditions in which I was born, was destined, when its meaning gradually realized itself in my consciousness, to become one of the great directing forces of my after life.

II MY PARENTS

My father (born in 1797) had a curious early life. He came of a family which had lived in Cornwall (Launceston) for some generations. He was the eldest son—though he had three sisters—of an Admiral in the Navy, and appears to have taken to his father’s profession, when a boy, as a matter of course. He was not, however, at all suited to it, for he was of a rather studious temperament, and the rough life of the Navy of those days was probably very distasteful to him. He was in one or two skirmishes with the French off the American coast, and I remember his telling me of the painful feeling which he experienced once when being in a small boat and coming across some French sailors in another small boat he had to take aim and fire at them. To his relief, however, no one was hurt!

When he was twenty-three or twenty-four my father began to learn German and read philosophy in his spare hours, which did not look as though he were destined to remain long on board ship! As a matter of fact he left the Navy when he was about twenty-five. The bad climate of Trincomalee, where he was stationed for two years, damaged his health. He came to London and set about reading for the Chancery Bar. In due course he was called and for some years practised with success—so much so indeed that on his retirement he was greatly complimented by the presiding judge. In 1833 he married; and this it was which, curiously enough, led to his retirement from the Bar. For his father-in-law—Thomas Wilson—who had also been in the Navy, and who was then a widower, only consented to the marriage on condition that his daughter should remain at home, and that the married couple should therefore take up their abode at his house at Walthamstow. This they did, and the distance from London, a considerable matter in those days, combined perhaps with a little anxiety about my father’s health, which still remained unsatisfactory, brought about the abandonment of his profession—a great mistake as it appeared, for of course as soon as he lost his regular occupation he began to worry badly. Then, when Mr. Wilson died, in 1843, a move to Brighton (which just then was growing into importance, and yet retained some of its old-world character) was thought advisable, both for my father’s sake and for that of the little family which now had to be considered. But as far as my father was concerned this did not mend matters, and my mother has often told me that this was the worst period of their married life.

He got more and more anxious and restless—to a degree which seemed almost a danger to his mind—till at last my mother induced him to let himself be appointed magistrate and take his seat on the Brighton bench; after which his serenity returned, and he remained one of the most active and probably the most public spirited of the members of the Brighton and afterwards of the Hove magistracy till a year or two before his death. The death of his own father in 1846 freed him from any real cause for pecuniary anxiety—though from time to time all through his later life he was liable to fits of considerable depression and nervousness about his monetary concerns. He settled down permanently at Brighton (No. 45 Brunswick Square) into the life of the respectable _rentier_, with its usual aims and ideals as far as his family was concerned, though for himself his aims were very different from those of the society round him, and his conception of life was as broad as it could well be upon the foundation of that particular social status to which he belonged.

His early life in the Navy had given my father that honest, somewhat simple, cast of mind which belongs to sea-faring folk. He was always ready to be impressed by a tale of distress—especially if it came from the lips of one of the fair sex. At the same time his active brain had carried him far in most fields of thought. Though having a strong religious feeling, he soon emancipated himself from current orthodoxies in religion, and seldom in later life went to church—a fact which to the mild respectabilities around us was a sufficient justification for calling him an Atheist. For Frederick W. Robertson, who was then preaching at Brighton, and who not unfrequently came to our house, and for Frederick D. Maurice, however, he had a great admiration; and his own views were—as far as I remember what he said when I was a boy—a kind of Broad Church mysticism, derived at first from reading S. T. Coleridge (whom he had met occasionally in former years in London), and gradually broadening out under the influence of Eckhardt, Tauler, Kant, Fichte, Hegel and others into a religious and philosophic mysticism without much admixture of the Broad Church at all.