A Writer's Recollections Volume I Part 3

But above all cries comes one whereat every stone in this and other lordly mansions may totter and quake for fear:

"Se...c...ond Edition of the Morning _Herald_--L...a...test news from Paris:--arrival of the King of the French."

I have gone out and bought the said portentous _Herald_, and send it herewith, that you may read and know. As the human race forever stumbles up its great steps, so it is now. You remember the Reform Banquets [in Paris] last summer?--well!--the diners omitted the king's health, and abused Guizot's majority as corrupt and servile: the majority and the king grew excited; the Government forbade the Banquets to continue. The king met the Chamber with the words "_pa.s.sions aveugles_" to characterize the dispositions of the Banqueters: and Guizot grandly declared against the spirit of Revolution all over the world. His practice suited his words, or seemed to suit them, for both in Switzerland and Italy, the French Government incurred the charge of siding against the Liberals. Add to this the corruption cases you remember, the Praslin murder, and later events, which powerfully stimulated the disgust (moral indignation that People does not feel!) entertained by the lower against the governing cla.s.s.

Then Thiers, seeing the breeze rising, and hoping to use it, made most telling speeches in the debate on the Address, clearly defining the crisis as a question between revolution and counter-revolution, and declaring enthusiastically for the former. Lamartine and others, the sentimental and the plain honest, were very damaging on the same side. The Government were harsh-- abrupt--almost scornful. They would not yield--would not permit banquets: would give no Reform till they chose. Guizot spoke (alone in the Chamber, I think) to this effect. With decreasing Majorities the Government carried the different clauses of the address, amidst furious scenes; opposition members crying that they were worse than Polignac. It was resolved to hold an Opposition banquet in Paris in spite of the Government, last Tuesday, the 22d.

In the week between the close of the debate and this day there was a profound, uneasy excitement, but nothing I think to appall the rulers. They had the fortifications; all kinds of stores; and 100,000 troops of the line. To be quite secure, however, they determined to take a formal legal objection to the banquet at the doors; but not to prevent the procession thereto. On that the Opposition published a proclamation inviting the National Guard, who sympathized, to form part of the procession in uniform. Then the Government forbade the meeting altogether--absolutely--and the Opposition resigned themselves to try the case in a Court of Law.

_So did not the people!_

They gathered all over Paris: the National Guard, whom Ministers did not trust, were not called out: the Line checked and dispersed the mob on all points. But next day the mob were there again: the Ministers in a const.i.tutional fright called out the National Guard: a body of these hard by the Opera refused to clear the street, they joined the people. Troops were brought up: the Mob and the National Guard refused to give them pa.s.sage down the Rue le Pelletier, which they occupied: after a moment's hesitation, they were marched on along the Boulevard.

This settled the matter! Everywhere the National Guard fraternized with the people: the troops stood indifferent. The King dismissed the Ministers: he sent for Mole; a shade better: not enough: he sent for Thiers--a pause; this was several shades better--still not enough: meanwhile the crowd continued, and attacks on different posts, with slight bloodshed, increased the excitement: finally _the King abdicated_ in favor of the Count of Paris, and fled. The Count of Paris was taken by his mother to the Chamber--the people broke in; too late--not enough:--a republic--an appeal to the people. The royal family escaped to all parts, Belgium, Eu, England: _a Provisional Government named_.

You will see how they stand: they have adopted the last measures of Revolution.--News has just come that the National Guard have declared against a Republic, and that a collision is inevitable.

If possible I will write by the next mail, and send you a later paper than the _Herald_ by this mail.

Your truly affectionate, dearest Tom,

M. ARNOLD.

To this let me add here two or three other letters or fragments, all unpublished, which I find among the papers from which I have been drawing, ending, for the present, with the jubilant letter describing his election to the Poetry Professors.h.i.+p at Oxford, in 1857. Here, first of all, is an amusing reference, dated 1849, to Keble, then the idol of every well-disposed Anglican household:

I dined last night with a Mr. Grove,[1] a celebrated man of science: his wife is pretty and agreeable, but not on a first interview. The husband and I agree wonderfully on some points. He is a bad sleeper, and hardly ever free from headache; he equally dislikes and disapproves of modern existence and the state of excitement in which everybody lives: and he sighs after a paternal despotism and the calm existence of a Russian or Asiatic. He showed me a picture of Faraday, which is wonderfully fine: I am almost inclined to get it: it has a curious likeness to Keble, only with a calm, earnest look unlike the latter's Flibbertigibbet, fanatical, twinkling expression.

[Footnote 1: Afterward Sir William Grove, F.R.S., author of the famous essay on "The Correlation of Physical Force."]

Did ever anybody apply such adjectives to John Keble before! Yet if any one will look carefully at the engraving of Keble so often seen in quiet parsonages, they will understand, I think, exactly what Matthew Arnold meant.

In 1850 great changes came upon the Arnold family. The "Doctor's" elder three children--Jane, Matthew, and my father--married in that year, and a host of new interests sprang up for every member of the Fox How circle. I find in a letter to my father from Arthur Stanley, his father's biographer, and his own Oxford tutor, the following reference to "Matt's" marriage, and to the second series of Poems--containing "Sohrab and Rustum"--which were published in 1854. "You will have heard," writes Stanley, "of the great success of Matt's poems. He is in good heart about them. He is also--I must say so, though perhaps I have no right to say so--greatly improved by his marriage--retaining all the genius and n.o.bleness of mind which you remember, with all the lesser faults pruned and softened down." Matt himself wrote to give news of his wedding, to describe the bride--Judge Wightman's daughter, the dear and gracious little lady whom we grandchildren knew and loved as "Aunt f.a.n.n.y Lucy"--and to wish my father joy of his own. And then there is nothing among the waifs and strays that have come to me worth printing, till 1855, when my uncle writes to New Zealand:

I hope you have got my book by this time. What you will like best, I think, will be the "Scholar Gipsy." I am sure that old c.u.mner and Oxford country will stir a chord in you. For the preface I doubt if you will care, not having much before your eyes the sins and offenses at which it is directed: the first being that we have numbers of young gentlemen with really wonderful powers of perception and expression, but to whom there is wholly wanting a "_bedeutendes Individuum"_--so that their productions are most unedifying and unsatisfactory. But this is a long story.

As to Church matters. I think people in general concern themselves less with them than they did when you left England. Certainly religion is not, to all appearance at least, losing ground here: but since the great people of Newman's party went over, the disputes among the comparatively unimportant remains of them do not excite much interest. I am going to hear Manning at the Spanish Chapel next Sunday. Newman gives himself up almost entirely to organizing and educating the Roman Catholics, and is gone off greatly, they say, as a preacher.

G.o.d bless you, my dearest Tom: I cannot tell you the almost painful longing I sometimes have to see you once more.

The following year the brothers met again; and there followed, almost immediately, my uncle's election to the Poetry Professors.h.i.+p at Oxford.

He writes, in answer to my father's congratulations:

HAMPTON, _May 16, 1857._

MY DEAR TOM,--My thoughts have often turned to you during my canva.s.s for the Professors.h.i.+p--and they have turned to you more than ever during the last few days which I have been spending at Oxford. You alone of my brothers are a.s.sociated with that life at Oxford, the _freest_ and most delightful part, perhaps, of my life, when with you and Clough and Walrond I shook off all the bonds and formalities of the place, and enjoyed the spring of life and that unforgotten Oxfords.h.i.+re and Berks.h.i.+re country. Do you remember a poem of mine called "The Scholar Gipsy"? It was meant to fix the remembrance of those delightful wanderings of ours in the c.u.mner hills before they were quite effaced--and as such Clough and Walrond accepted it, and it has had much success at Oxford, I am told, as was perhaps likely from its _couleur locale_. I am hardly ever at Oxford now, but the sentiment of the place is overpowering to me when I have leisure to feel it, and can shake off the interruptions which it is not so easy to shake off now as it was when we were young. But on Tuesday afternoon I smuggled myself away, and got up into one of our old coombs among the c.u.mner hills, and into a field waving deep with cowslips and gra.s.ses, and gathered such a bunch as you and I used to gather in the cowslip field on Lutterworth road long years ago.

You dear old boy, I love your congratulations although I see and hear so little of you, and, alas! _can_ see and hear but so little of you. I was supported by people of all opinions, the great bond of union being, I believe, the affectionate interest felt in papa's memory. I think it probable that I shall lecture in English: there is no direction whatever in the Statute as to the language in which the lectures shall be: and the Latin has so died out, even among scholars, that it seems idle to entomb a lecture which, in English, might be stimulating and interesting.

On the same occasion, writing to his mother, the new Professor gives an amusing account of the election day, when my uncle and aunt came up to town from Hampton, where they were living, in order to get telegraphic news of the polling from friends at Oxford. "Christ Church"--i.e., the High Church party in Oxford--had put up an opposition candidate, and the excitement was great. My uncle was by this time the father of three small boys, Tom, Trevenen--_alias_ Budge--and Richard--"Diddy."

We went first to the telegraph station at Charing Cross. Then, about 4, we got a message from Walrond--"nothing certain is known, but it is rumored that you are ahead." Then we went to get some toys for the children in the Lowther Arcade, and could scarcely have found a more genuine distraction than in selecting wagons for Tom and Trev, with horses of precisely the same color, not one of which should have a hair more in his tail than the other--and a musical cart for Diddy. A little after five we went back to the telegraph office, and got the following message--"Nothing declared, but you are said to be quite safe. Go to Eaton Place." ["Eaton Place" was then the house of Judge Wightman, Mrs. Matthew Arnold's father.]

To Eaton Place we went, and then a little after 6 o'clock we were joined by the Judge in the highest state of joyful excitement with the news of my majority of 85, which had been telegraphed to him from Oxford after he had started and had been given to him at Paddington Station.... The income is 130 a year or thereabouts: the duties consist as far as I can learn in a.s.sisting to look over the prize compositions, in delivering a Latin oration in praise of founders at every alternate commemoration, and in preparing and giving three Latin lectures on ancient poetry in the course of the year. _These lectures I hope to give in English_.

The italics are mine. The intention expressed here and in the letter to my father was, as is well known, carried out, and Matthew Arnold's Lectures at Oxford, together with the other poetic and critical work produced by him during the years of his professors.h.i.+p, became so great a force in the development of English criticism and English taste, that the lifelike detail of this letter acquires a kind of historical value.

As a child of fourteen I first made acquaintance with Oxford while my uncle was still Professor. I remember well some of his lectures, the crowded lecture-hall, the manner and personality of the speaker, and my own shy pride in him--from a great distance. For I was a self-conscious, bookish child, and my days of real friends.h.i.+p with him were still far ahead. But during the years that followed, the ten years that he held his professors.h.i.+p, what a spell he wielded over Oxford, and literary England in general! Looking back, one sees how the first series of _Essays in Criticism_, the _Lectures on Celtic Literature_, or _On Translating Homer, Culture, and Anarchy_ and the rest, were all the time working on English taste and feeling, whether through sympathy or antagonism; so that after those ten years, 1857-1867, the intellectual life of the country had absorbed, for good and all, an influence, and a stimulus, which had set it moving on new paths to new ends. With these thoughts in mind, supplying a comment on the letter which few people could have foreseen in 1857, let me quote a few more sentences:

Keble voted for me after all. He told the Coleridges he was so much pleased with my letter (to the electors) that he could not refrain.

... I had support from all sides. Archdeacon Denison voted for me, also Sir John Yarde Buller, and Henley, of the high Tory party. It was an immense victory--some 200 more voted than have ever, it is said, voted in a Professors.h.i.+p election before. It is a great lesson to Christ Church, which was rather disposed to imagine it could carry everything by its great numbers.

Good-by, my dearest mother.... I have just been up to see the three dear little brown heads on their pillows, all asleep.... My affectionate thanks to Mrs. Wordsworth and Mrs. Fletcher for their kind interest in my success.

It is pleasant to think of Wordsworth's widow, in her "old age serene and bright," and of the poet's old friend, Mrs. Fletcher, watching and rejoicing in the first triumphs of the younger singer.

So the ten years of approach and attack--in the intellectual sense--came to an end, and the ten central years of mastery and success began. Toward the end of that time, as a girl of sixteen, I became a resident in Oxford. Up to then Ruskin--the _Stones of Venice_ and certain chapters in _Modern Painters_--had been my chief intellectual pa.s.sion in a childhood and first youth that cut but a very poor figure, as I look back upon them, beside the "wonderful children" of this generation! But it must have been about 1868 that I first read _Essays in Criticism._ It is not too much to say that the book set for me the currents of life; its effect heightened, no doubt, by the sense of kins.h.i.+p. Above all it determined in me, as in many others, an enduring love of France and of French literature, which played the part of schoolmaster to a crude youth. I owe this to my uncle, and it was a priceless boon. If he had only lived a little longer--if he had not died so soon after I had really begun to know him--how many debts to him would have been confessed, how many things said, which, after all, were never said!

CHAPTER IV

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 w.i.l.l.y"--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 w.i.l.l.y, 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 w.i.l.l.y"; and there were other photographs on gla.s.s 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 Addis...o...b.. 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 Addis...o...b..; third, having been at Rugby and Christ Church. This gives me a sort of position--but still I know the danger is awful--for const.i.tutionally 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!