Reminiscences and reflexions of a mid and late Victorian

Front matter

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REMINISCENCES AND REFLEXIONS OF A MID AND LATE VICTORIAN

Preface

The following chapters were written at intervals during the year 1916. They were taken in hand on the suggestion of two well-known London publishers, who assured me that autobiographical notes, reminiscences, and reflexions were, barring fiction and travels, the form of literature in which the British public showed most interest at the present time. One's natural modesty, assuming one to be a mentally fairly well-conducted person, makes one more or less diffident in writing about oneself. Whether I answer to the above description or not, certain it is that in penning these pages I have felt a shyness in recording personal facts, which has led me to damp down the personal note as a general rule throughout the book — some friendly critics, to whom I have shown a portion of the manuscript, say too much so. Be this as it may, the aim I have kept before me in writing these somewhat disjointed notes and reminiscences has been rather to offer data and suggestions, slight and scattered though they may be, for the due appreciation, now or hereafter, of the particular period of historic time in which my life has been cast — to wit, roughly speaking, the last third of the nineteenth and the opening years of the twentieth century.

For the rest, I am well aware that the present class of work affords ample scope for the detractory animadversions of the anonymous critic who wants to be " nasty." In a work of reminiscences and reflexions

6 PREFACE

there are almost bound to be some reminiscences which strike some reader or other as being uninteresting and perhaps trivial. These may be the very parts of the book which attract another class of reader. Of the reflexions, again, naturally, while some will appeal to one, the same will antagonize another reader. As regards reviewers, in this connexion, I suppose I shall come off badly at the hands of him or her whose views are those of pro-Feminist fanaticism, who will doubtless find the book very insipid, or at least will say so. The religious fanatic who has the charge of noticing the book in the Press will also probably have his " knife into me," and express himself to a similar scornful effect. These are things of course an author has to put up with in taking up a definite standpoint on controversial subjects where feeling runs high.

Notwithstanding such not unbiased judgments that I probably have to expect from the aforesaid reviewers, I must plead guilty to the conviction that there are those among the reading public who, should they come across the book, will find at least something to interest them in the somewhat varied contents of its pages.

PS. — The publication of this book has been unavoidably delayed for more than a year, mainly owing to the difficulties attending the operations of the printing and publishing trades at the present time. Meanwhile, I may remark, the death of more than one person alluded to in the following pages as living has unhappily supervened. Since 1916 changes, moreover, in the political situation, notably the Russian Revolution and its developments, have taken place. These events, however, I do not think materially affect anything in the contents of the volume.

E. B. B.

January 28, igi8.

Contents

PBAPTER PAOE

I. REMINISCENCES OF CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH . 9

II. MEN AND MOVEMENTS OF THE EARLY EIGHTIES . 34

Chapter I Reminiscences Of Childhood And Youth

Among the crowd of vaguely remembered trivial incidents of very early childhood, the earliest that has distinctly impressed itself upon my mind is the identification of the colour blue in general with the sky in particular. This I have reason to believe occurred at Leamington about the month of September in the year 1857. ^ must have been then a little over three years of age, having been born on July 23, 1854. One or two other things I can recall concerning childish ways of regarding the world which illustrate the parallel between the mind of the young child and that of primitive man. I can recall, for instance, how on one occasion our cat returned to the kitchen one morning with evidences of having been out in a fight during the night. How well I remember, in pondering over the incident of the battle of the cats, that I could not divest myself of the notion of their having talked to each other and so started the quarrel, although well aware that my elders did not believe in animals talking. Mine was then clearly a state of mind in which myths of talking beasts arise in early ages. It is undoubtedly an interesting fact to be able to recollect, if only in a glimpse or two, a childish mental condition, quickly outgrown, but which indicates having passed through a state of mind, however transitory, corresponding to that of primitive humanity.

The scene of most of my earher childish reminiscences was Brighton, where we lived for some years. At that time the atmosphere of the George IV period still lingered in the town. Superannuated old gentlemen, in costume approaching that of the earlier part of the century, were still occasionally to be seen sunning themselves on the sea-front, and especially in the King's Road, of an afternoon. It was at Brighton that I first became aware of the larger issues of the world. The American Civil War and the cotton famine in Lancashire were among my earliest recollections of public events. The International Exhibition of 1862, to which I was taken late the following Autumn, was also a noteworthy event of the time to me. I remember the talk occasioned by Encke's comet in 1861, but as it was in the middle of Summer I was never allowed to stop up late enough to see it myself.

At that time yellow-bodied carriages with a mottled black and white dog running behind them were still to be seen rolling up and down the King's Road. Then was the period — that of the early sixties — of the universal pot-hat (the old beaver was still occasionally to be seen with elderly gentlemen), of the broad-cloth frock coat, of women with enormous crinolines — the younger ones with hair done up in nets, the older ones sporting long curls ; of tallow candles, which might be seen hanging up in bundles outside oil-shops, of bedroom candlesticks with their necessary snuffers-

Gas had only recently been introduced into private houses and was still looked at askance by some as a dangerous innovation. The tea-urn was in its afternoon glory. Daguerreotype photographs were by no means out of date, though they were just beginning to be superseded by the more modern photography. Smoking was not as yet very common among the middle classes, but where practised, it was chiefly in the form of the cigar, cigarettes being quite unknown to the general public. Dickens, it may be remembered, in " Nicholas Nickleby," describes it as a distinguishing mark of some Spaniards he alludes to, that they smoked what he calls " little paper cigars." The clay pipe was universal among the working classes. Turning to the literature of the period, in the department of fiction the great lights of the early sixties were of course Thackeray who died in 1863, Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Bulwer Lytton, and a host of minor writers, such as Anthony Trollope, Whyte Melville, Mrs. Henry Wood, Miss Braddon, etc., who produced novels sold in red and yellow covers which were prominent in all station bookstalls. For the more intellectual reader the works of the Brontes, George Eliot, and Charles Kingsley were the vogue. In the more serious departments, Hallam and Macaulay, recently dead, Carlyle, Mill, Grote, etc., were in the heyday of their glory as embodying the cultured side of English life. Poetry was represented chiefly by Longfellow and Tennyson. Browning's fame came a little later. Darwin had but recently startled the public and shocked the theological world by the publication of the " Origin of Species." But the really cultured class existing at that time in England was, as compared with the present generation, a very restricted one. The intellectual possibilities of the English people were then stunted and cramped by the influence of the dogmatic Calvinistic theology which was the basis of its traditional religious sentiment.

The life our family lived during my childhood was, owing to various causes, exceptionally quiet and retired. Most of the relations and friends who used to visit us were socially uninteresting and of no great account from the side of intellectually profitable intercourse. My paternal grandfather, I may mention, however, whose family originally came from Ockley, in Surrey, was born in the year 1777, dying in 1868, and was consequently in a position to remember the French Revolution. I recollect as a child once questioning him upon the subject, and his relating to me the horrible reports of civil slaughter in Paris that reached his native village. I have since thought that the special event he may have had in his mind was possibly the September massacres of 1792. But the old man, to my disappointment, showed a tendency to switch his conversation off on to the more recent events of 1848, which seemed to me a very insipid change of venue. My grandfather also recollected hearing some of the great singers of the early part of the nineteenth century, notably John Braham. On the whole, however, as will be seen, it was my lot to grow up under no very favourable conditions for intellectual development. The subjects talked of in the family circle were mainly connected with religious dogma, or the sectarian interests of the various religious bodies. Preachers and the pure quality of their orthodoxy, as opposed on the one side to " Romanism " and on the other to " Latitudinarianism," bulked largely among the topics of conversation with ours as with other middle-class families at the time.

A severe censorship in the matter of the literature that was allowed into the house was maintained. The only reading encouraged was that directly or indirectly favouring the " Evangelical " theology. As usual with the bulk of early and mid- Victorian middle-class society, the theatre in all its forms was banned. In fact in many cases, ours among them, any form of amusement was supposed to savour more or less of godlessness. In those where it was not absolutely forbidden there was a tinge of disapproval attaching to it as having the shadow of " worldliness " upon it. The most cruel of all the results of mid- Victorian religion was perhaps the rigid enforcement of the most drastic Sabbatarianism. The horror of the tedium of Sunday infected more or less the whole of the latter portion of the week. Many a story was laid before the youth of the period to the effect that the boy who began by Sabbath-breaking inevitably ended his days on the gallows In fact, didactic narrative, often embodied in the form of the religious tract, was a much commended means in the Evangelical world for converting the sinner from the error of his ways. Thus, to discourage the gratification of the taste for the drama, a moral, inculcating the retribution which the Evangelical God sometimes inflicted on frequenters of " play-houses," was drawn from the history of fires that had taken place in theatres. But this was not all — I can recall a tract (I think it was) which told the story of the conversion of a lady playgoer who, on passing into the theatre, was struck by seeing the words "To the pit" in illuminated letters in front of her.

The notion that entering the pit of a theatre would inevitably land her ultimately in the other " pit " said to be bottomless, appealed to her as a solemn warning ; so she turned back, sought out a suitable conventicle, and became a converted character. But although brought up in this hot-bed of Calvinistic Methodism, and hearing the duties of becoming converted and of cultivating one's soul in the directions approved of by the Evangelical sects, the whole theological business never affected me very deeply. The introspection of the soul and the whole sentiment connected with the Christian cult did not specially appeal to me. I believed in it, of course, in a way, knowing nothing else, and hence it being the only theory of the universe available for my young intelligence. What interested me more than any maunderings anent the individual soul, being " born again " and the like, was when my old governess, who took a truly maternal interest in me, used to talk to me about Daniel's image and its four monarchies. This gave me, in its way and within the limits of the current orthodox creed, a theory of history, such as it was, and I have always felt the need of an intelligible doctrine of history. It appeared to me as much more interesting than any reflexions on the communion of the individual soul with the living presence of its God or its Saviour, and so forth. But if my childish belief in Christian dogmas was somewhat perfunctory, there was one thing that I did believe in, although I did not talk much about it, and that was the supernatural. The somewhat inconsequent assurances of my elders that God, although in the past He had done so, did not permit any manifestation of the supernatural since the beginning of the Christian era, and certainly not in our days, was not quite good enough for me. The credentials of their assurances in this connexion seemed to me doubtful, and the assurance itself to express a purely arbitrary assumption.

The foregoing were the current ideas of the English middle class half a century ago. In economics and politics a few crude aphorisms were supposed sufficient to satisfy every reasonable mind. The enonomic problem of the distribution of wealth, of the antithesis of rich and poor, was supposed to be satisfactorily accounted for and settled by the assumption that wealth was the reward of industry and virtue, and poverty the result of laziness and incompetence, either in the present generation or their fathers. The pohtics of the middle classes of the sixties was Manchester- School Liberalism, coloured more or less — more in some circles and with some persons, less in others — with a snobbish deference to the upper classes, and especially Queen Victoria, who, the middle-class mind of the time flattered itself, was a woman after its own heart. Cobden, Bright, and Palmerston were names to conjure with in middle-class political circles. As regards foreign politics, the views of the English middle classes were largely dictated by their anti-Catholic sentiments. Garibaldi was their popular hero, for example, even more because he fought against the Papal domination in Italy than as a national patriot. This feeling played a part with many people even as late as 1870 in determining the strong sympathy with Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of that year. In short, the middle-class mind of fifty and sixty years a^o raa in certain well-defined grooves which determined its attitude in all particular cases.

The main interest, for the middle-class man or woman of the period in question, outside " business " or the " home " was, as already intimated, religion, especially the internecine rivalry and quarrels of the various Christian sects and churches. For art there was little feeling. In fact, there is only one form of art which can be specially associated with the society of the period, and that was in music, viz. the Oratorio. It is true even the Oratorio, as being a form of public entertainment, was looked upon somewhat doubtfully by the ultra pious. But still Oratorio music did undoubtedly represent the special form in which the consciousness of the society in question seemed to find its artistic expression. For every society has its own artistic expression, such as it is and what there is of it. That the intrinsically ugly and, to many of us to-day, repulsive Calvinistic theology of Evangelicalism could have given birth to any genuine feeling at all, it is difficult to understand. But, as I said above, such as it was, undoubtedly it received its expression in the Oratorio music of Handel and Mendelssohn, particularly in the " Messiah " and the " Elijah." I would signalize especially, in this respect, as typical, the aria " O Rest in the Lord." It is said that when Mendelssohn had written this melody he was inclined | to strike it out of his work as being too sickly sweet, but was prevailed upon by his friends to leave it in. That the composer was intrinsically right in his estimate of it will be probably the opinion of many in the present day, but it is none the less true that it does typically embody the emotional religious sentiment of the English middle classes of the fifties and sixties, in so far as that was genuine. This was shown by the enormous vogue it had. It was to be heard in every church, chapel, and parlour where there was a piano, at this time. It is one of those remarkable musical inspirations which seem to carry in them the whole atmosphere of a period. In its own way, a very different way certainly, it is in this respect comparable with " Ein' feste Burg " and the " Marseillaise." The latter embody the virihty of the German Reformation and the French Revolution respectively. " O Rest in the Lord " embodies the artificial, even where genuine, bourgeois emotional sweetness of the " place of worship " and the family parlour with its antimacassars and tea-urns of the English mid-nineteenth century.

Before taking leave of this world of the sixties — this world of tallow candles, snuffers, tea-urns, women's hair-nets and crinolines, men's broadcloth, stocks and pot-hats, four-post bedsteads, feather beds, hymns and oratorios — there is one question, which has always interested me, to be mooted. In how far are we to regard the religiosity, the theological and ecclesiastical interests, of the early and mid- Victorian period as the product of hypocrisy, and in how far was it genuine ? That some of all this was genuine and a good deal of it deliberate hypocrisy I have no doubt whatever, but I should attribute the bulk of it to something between these two extremes which I should term unconscious hypocrisy. By unconscious hypocrisy I understand an attitude of mind which succeeds in persuading itself that it believes or approves certain things as it professes to do, while really in faro conscientice this profession is dictated by a sense of its own interests, real or supposed. For instance, in discussing Freethought in religion or Radicalism in politics, as a makeweight to the conventional arguments against such subversive doctrines, one often heard it thrown in, that if Freethought prevailed, or the political constitution were overthrown, there would be no security for property and its interests. Apart from the truth of theological doctrine or political theory, religion and the existing English constitution were necessary to keep the lower classes in order. Now it was this sort of remark, thrown in as above said as a makeweight, that first opened my eyes to the subconscious insincerity or unconscious hypocrisy of much of middle-class public opinion on these subjects.

I could not escape the conviction that this secondary consideration, ostensibly a mere " aside " in the argument, was really the determining one in the formation of that opinion, albeit this fact was in many cases not consciously realized by the persons in question themselves. A fairly typical illustration of what is said is afforded by the case of Dr. Colenso, Bishop of Natal, who in 1862 published a book on biblical criticism, the views contained in which are in their substance commonplaces to-day, but were at that time regarded as staggeringly subversive. The view that if the world in general came to disbelieve in the Mosaic authorship and the historicity of the Pentateuch, the world itself — Men entendu the mid- Victorian world of that date — would fall to pieces, was the current middle-class opinion. It seems scarcely credible to-day, but so it was. Hence the zeal with which the current theology with its dogma of biblical infallibility was defended at all costs. But in the case of the aforesaid Bishop of Natal there was an additional reason for using the cry of heresy as a means for effecting his discomfiture. Dr. Colenso was an eminently humane and just man, and in consequence was zealous in defending the rights of the native population of Natal against attempts of the British settlers to ride roughshod over those rights and to exploit the natives in their own interests. Hence the worthy Bishop was by no means a persona grata with the influential colonial magnates, or with the colonists generally, of his diocese. The charge of heresy was therefore a godsend to these gentry as a weapon for getting him removed. Somehow or other they failed, owing, it was said, to their having played their cards badly with the Ecclesiastical Court which judged the case.

But notwithstanding the power of the middle-class ostracism of heterodox opinions, the decade of the sixties from its beginning onward showed an increasing number of books pubUshed, venturing to traverse the current conventional opinion of the day. My own childhood was padded towards the fag-end of the period of moral and intellectual slavery in question, in which the Calvinistic dogmas of Evangelicalism in religion and the Cobden-Bright dogmas of the Manchester School in economics and politics, modified by a snobbish reverence for authority in general and the upper classes, dominated the mentality of the whole social atmosphere. Those who want to know what it had been at an earlier period of the century, say during the forties and fifties, may consult the two vohimes of the late Mr. A. W. Benn's excellent " History of English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century," or the short survey in Professor Bury's " History of Freedom of Thought " (pp. 176-251). But though my youthful days were passed towards the end of the period in question, 1 experienced quite enough for it to have left an enduringly unpleasant reminiscence behind it. This is the more to be regretted as it affects one's memories of persons long since dead, whom one cannot altogether dissociate in one's mind from the at once morally repulsive and intellectually foolish beliefs they held, or professed to hold, and expected other people to hold. In themselves doubtless excellent, good-hearted people, their characters were poisoned and warped by the foulness and follies of their creed.

In the year 1864 we left Brighton and went to Hampstead. Here we led a life almost as retired as that of Brighton. I went to school for a short time, but my education was mainly conducted by private tuition. Here I began to take a definite interest in things, among others natural history, and especially entomology. Here also I made various acquaintances and two friendships, the one a schoolboy friendship originating in common interests, butterfly collecting, etc. This was with the late Vivian Byam Lewes, who subsequently became the great chemist, whose lectures on the subject of practical chemistry in relation to the war are well known, and whose labours and studies in this department were only terminated by his sudden death at the comparatively early age of sixty-three in October 1915. Though close associates in boyhood and early youth, we subsequently drifted asunder owing to various causes, distance of residence, diversity of interests and other things, and I seldom saw Lewes after he had attained to manhood. While not possessed of any special intellectual qualities, Lewes was the type of the conscientious and thorough, if narrow, scientific specialist. He was the nephew of George Henry Lewes, the son of a brother of his who was killed as an officer of the Army Medical Corps in the Crimean War. His mother, a bright, intelligent woman, was a connexion of the Wellesley family. She much impressed me during my later boyhood owing to the freedom of her views on theological and political subjects. As regards the latter, it is true she clung to many of the prejudices of her time and class, with a tincture of aristocratic antipathies thrown in. This was still more the case with economic questions, where she was Manchester School to the backbone. Yet, strange to say, in spite of this strain of Whiggery and Manchesterism in her, this woman was one of the half-dozen persons of my acquaintance from whom a few years later I got some sympathy on the subject of the Commune. The barefaced misrepresentations and obviously unjust judgments of the bourgeois Press, and the brutalities of the Versaillaise soldiery, combined to disgust her with the enemies of the Commune. She also was prepared to recognize the high ideal underlying the movement and animating many of its advocates. Mrs. Edward Lewes was the first woman I had met having any pretensions to high culture or intelligence, and her intellectual superiority to oth»r women I knew was a revelation to me.

The other friendship I made in Hampstead during the late sixties was more enduring than that of Lewes, and happily subsists to this day. William Boulting, the distinguished authority on mediaeval and renaissance Italy, was, when I first met him, a student of medicine at University College. He used to attend with his father and mother a Baptist conventicle in Heath Street, Hampstead, in which my family also held what were known as " sittings." I used to have long walks with Boulting at this time, and one thing 1 can remember very well is that it was our delight on " sacrament " Sundays, while our elders were sacramentalizing within the walls of the chapel, to go for a walk on Hampstead Heath, and in that breezy atmosphere to indulge in free discussion of matters speculative, social and political. During a period of half a century I have never lost sight of Boulting for any long period, and our friendship has always remained unclouded. For long a medical practitioner in Hampstead, Boulting always found time for progressive self -culture, but it is only some twelve years ago that he was able to retire from practice and devote himself to the work of his life, the only work really congenial to him, viz. to his studies in Italian history, and to original thought in philosophy. A scrupulously exact and conscientious historical investigator, and an acute and careful philosophical thinker, I have always found the greatest intellectual stimulus and advantage from intercourse with him. May he live long to continue the good work 1 e has done in his own special department of history, and to produce the work he is capable of in philosophy ! Before leaving the subject I may mention, as illustrating the conscientious thoroughness of Boulting's historical work, that the ItaUan history published in one thick volume by Messrs. Routledge and Sons as an edition of Sismondi's " Italian Republics " is really a work of independent research. The editor, having found so much needing correction and alteration in its proportions to bring the original work of Sismondi up to date, decided to treat it in the manner of Wallenstein's war-steed, of which we are told " the head, neck, legs, and greater part of the body have been renewed ; all the rest is the real horse." There is one thing I always admire and envy in Boulting's work, and that is the faculty it shows for exact and careful research.

I have spoken above, in dealing with the early period of my childhood, of how, in spite of the mid-Victorian common sense, as embodied in my elders, I was imbued with the naive primitive belief of early man in the supernatural, as it is termed. About the age of eight or nine, it only required a very little suggestion to make me go to bed in abject fear of the appearance of a ghost, the devil, or some other unpleasant supernatural figure, out of the darkness by the bedside. Once I remember rousing the household by my screams, on being woke up by the squalling of cats immediately outside the window, believing the room to be full of hobgoblins. This state of mind was also stimulated by nightmares. I can well recall the peculiar horror of one of these, in which I saw seven gibbets on which were hanging seven beings howling. These seven beings were either seven great gaunt cats or seven thin, wizened, hideous old women — which, I could not tell. This dread of the dark and supernatural was, I suppose, common to the children of two or three generations ago, and was not infrequent with those of the time I am speaking of. With the modern child I imagine it hardly exists any more. A noteworthy point in connexion with it is, that this sense of the supernatural, which was the groundwork of the fear, in some cases survived sporadically and on rare occasions into earlier adult life. This has been confirmed by two or three friends of my generation. If I remember rightly, Goethe also has somewhere alluded to this feeling and its gradual cessation with advancing years, in his own life.

The last instance of it in my case was soon after I was married to my first wife, when I was in the early twenties. We were looking for a house, and had seen one which seemed not unsuitable at West Croydon. There was nothing particular about the house, which was a comparatively small double-fronted one, with a good-sized walled garden, and dating probably from about the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The taking of the house was noted as worthy of consideration, and it being somewhat late in the afternoon, we went home. But that same evening in the bedroom, the matter coming up again for discussion, my wife made the remark, " I don't know why it is, but somehow or other I feel there is something uncanny about the house. I can't help fancying that at this moment " — it being then about ten o'clock — " goblins might be holding their revels in that front room." " Very odd," I remarked ; "I had 51 precisely similar feeling myself this afternoon on leaving that house ! " I give this as it was a singular coincidence — a house not specially noteworthy in itself having excited similar fancies in two different persons at the same time. This was the last occasion on which I can remember having experienced a survival of the old childish feeling of the presence of the supernatural. In later life, as Goethe also has remarked, if I am not mistaken, in the passage above referred to in the " Wahrheit und Dichtung," it is difficult even to recall what this old childish feeling was like.