>>>  YOU ARE VIEWING A 200 LINE SAMPLE OF EBOOK# E06392  <<<

TITLE: A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS (IN TWO VOLUMES), VOLUME I
AUTHOR: MRS. HUMPHRY WARD
EBOOK: E06392 (O'Briens Book Cellar)
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS (IN TWO VOLUMES), VOLUME I

BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

Published November, 1918

[Illustration: DR. THOMAS ARNOLD OF RUGBY]

_To

T. H. W.

(In memory of April 6, 1872)_

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

   I. EARLY DAYS

  II. FOX HOW

 III. THE FAMILY OF FOX HOW

  IV. OTHER CHILDREN OF FOX HOW

   V. THE FRIENDS OF FOX HOW

  VI. YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD

 VII. BALLIOL AND LINCOLN

VIII. EARLY MARRIED LIFE

  IX. THE BEGINNINGS OF "ROBERT ELSMERE"

ILLUSTRATIONS

DR. THOMAS ARNOLD OP RUGBY  _Frontispiece_

MATTHEW ARNOLD

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN J

FOX HOW, THE WESTMORLAND HOME OF THE ARNOLDS

BENJAMIN JOWETT

A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS

CHAPTER I

EARLY DAYS

Do we all become garrulous and confidential as we approach the gates of
old age? Is it that we instinctively feel, and cannot help asserting,
our one advantage over the younger generation, which has so many over
us?--the one advantage of _time!_

After all, it is not disputable that we have lived longer than they.
When they talk of past poets, or politicians, or novelists, whom the
young still deign to remember, of whom for once their estimate agrees
with ours, we can sometimes put in a quiet, "I saw him"--or, "I talked
with him"--which for the moment wins the conversational race. And as we
elders fall back before the brilliance and glitter of the New Age,
advancing "like an army with banners," this mere prerogative of years
becomes in itself a precious possession. After all, we cannot divest
ourselves of it, if we would. It is better to make friends with it--to
turn it into a kind of _panache_--to wear it with an air, since wear it
we must.

So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to
look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows
upon most of us. I cannot hope that what I have to say will be very
interesting to many. A life spent largely among books, and in the
exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a
subject-matter, when one comes to write about it. I can only attempt it
with any success, if my readers will allow me a large psychological
element. The thoughts and opinions of one human being, if they are
sincere, must always have an interest for some other human beings. The
world is there to think about; and if we have lived, or are living, with
any sort of energy, we _must_ have thought about it, and about ourselves
in relation to it--thought "furiously" often. And it is out of the many
"thinkings" of many folk, strong or weak, dull or far-ranging, that
thought itself grows. For progress surely, whether in men or nations,
means only a richer knowledge; the more impressions, therefore, on the
human intelligence that we can seize and record, the more sensitive
becomes that intelligence itself.

But of course the difficulty lies in the seizing and recording--in the
choice, that is, of what to say, and how to say it. In this choice, as I
look back over more than half a century, I can only follow--and
trust--the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction.
I shall be telling what is primarily true, or as true as I can make it,
as distinguished from what is primarily imagination, built on truth. But
the truth one uses in fiction must be interesting! Milton expresses that
in the words "sensuous" and "passionate," which he applies to poetry in
the _Areopagitica_. And the same thing applies to autobiography, where
selection is even more necessary than in fiction. Nothing ought to be
told, I think, that does not interest or kindle one's own mind in
looking back; it is the only condition on which one can hope to interest
or kindle other minds. And this means that one ought to handle things
broadly, taking only the salient points in the landscape of the past,
and of course with as much detachment as possible. Though probably in
the end one will have to admit--egotists that we all are!--that not much
detachment _is_ possible.

For me, the first point that stands out is the arrival of a little girl
of five, in the year 1856, at a gray-stone house in a Westmorland
valley, where, fourteen years earlier, the children of Arnold of Rugby,
the "Doctor" of _Tom Brown's Schooldays_, had waited on a June day, to
greet their father, expected from the South, only to hear, as the summer
day died away, that two hours' sharp illness, that very morning, had
taken him from them. Of what preceded my arrival as a black-haired,
dark-eyed child, with my father, mother, and two brothers, at Fox How,
the holiday house among the mountains which the famous headmaster had
built for himself in 1834, I have but little recollection. I see dimly
another house in wide fields, where dwarf lilies grew, and I know that
it was a house in Tasmania, where at the time of my birth my father,
Thomas Arnold, the Doctor's second son, was organizing education in the
young colony. I can just recall, too, the deck of a ship which to my
childish feet seemed vast--but the _William Brown_ was a sailing-ship of
only 400 tons!--in which we made the voyage home in 1856. Three months
and a half we took about it, going round the Horn in bitter weather,
much run over by rats at night, and expected to take our baths by day in
two huge barrels full of sea water on the deck, into which we children
were plunged shivering by our nurse, two or three times a week. My
father and mother, their three children, and some small cousins, who
were going to England under my mother's care, were the only passengers.

I can remember, too, being lifted--weak and miserable with toothache--in
my father's arms to catch the first sight of English shores as we neared
the mouth of the Thames; and then the dismal inn by the docks where we
first took shelter. The dreary room where we children slept the first
night, its dingy ugliness and its barred windows, still come back to me
as a vision of horror. Next day, like angels of rescue, came an aunt and
uncle, who took us away to other and cheerful quarters, and presently
saw us off to Westmorland. The aunt was my godmother, Doctor Arnold's
eldest daughter--then the young wife of William Edward Forster, a Quaker
manufacturer, who afterward became the well-known Education Minister of
1870, and was Chief Secretary for Ireland in the terrible years 1880-82.

To my mother and her children, Fox How and its inmates represented much
that was new and strange. My mother was the granddaughter of one of the
first Governors of Tasmania, Governor Sorell, and had been brought up in
the colony, except for a brief schooling at Brussels. Of her personal
beauty in youth we children heard much, as we grew up, from her old
Tasmanian friends and kinsfolk who would occasionally drift across us;
and I see as though I had been there a scene often described to me--my
mother playing Hermione in the "Winter's Tale," at Government House when
Sir William Denison was Governor--a vision, lovely and motionless, on
her pedestal, till at the words, "Music! awake her! Strike!" she kindled
into life. Her family were probably French in origin. Governor Sorell
had been a man of promise in his youth. His father, General William
Alexander Sorell, of the Coldstream Guards, was a soldier of some
eminence, whose two sons, William and Thomas, both served under Sir John
Moore and at the Cape. But my great-grandfather ruined his military
career, while he was Deputy Adjutant-General at the Cape, by a
love-affair with a brother officer's wife, and was banished or
promoted--whichever one pleases to call it--to the new colony of
Tasmania, of which he became Governor in 1816. His eldest son, by the
wife he had left behind him in England, went out as a youth of
twenty-one or so, to join his father, the Governor, in Tasmania, and I
possess a little calf-bound diary of my grandfather written in a very
delicate and refined hand, about the year 1823. The faint entries in it
show him to have been a devoted son. But when, in 1830 or so, the
Governor left the colony, and retired to Brussels, my grandfather
remained in Van Diemen's Land, as it was then generally called, became
very much attached to the colony, and filled the post of Registrar of
Deeds for many years under its successive Governors. I just remember
him, as a gentle, affectionate, upright being, a gentleman of an old,
punctilious school, strictly honorable and exact, content with a small
sphere, and much loved within it. He would sometimes talk to his
children of early days in Bath, of his father's young successes and
promotions, and of his grandfather, General Sorell, who, as Adjutant of
the Coldstream Guards from 1744 to 1758, and associated with all the
home and foreign service of that famous regiment during those years,
through the Seven Years' War, and up to the opening of the American War
of Independence, played a vaguely brilliant part in his grandson's
recollections. But he himself was quite content with the modest affairs
of an infant colony, which even in its earliest days achieved, whether
in its landscape or its life, a curiously English effect; as though an
English midland county had somehow got loose and, drifting to the
Southern seas, had there set up--barring a few black aborigines, a few
convicts, its mimosas, and its tree-ferns--another quiet version of the
quiet English life it had left behind.

But the Sorells, all the same, had some foreign and excitable blood in
them. Their story of themselves was that they were French Huguenots,
expelled in 1685, who had settled in England and, coming of a military
stock, had naturally sought careers in the English army. There are
points in this story which are puzzling; but the foreign touch in my
mother, and in the Governor--to judge from the only picture of him which
remains--was unmistakable. Delicate features, small, beautifully shaped
hands and feet, were accompanied in my mother by a French vivacity and
quickness, an overflowing energy, which never forsook her through all

<<<  END OF SAMPLE... (THE FULL EBOOK HAS 307932 TOTAL CHARACTERS)  >>>