Читать книгу What I Remember - Millicent Garrett Fawcett - Страница 12

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I and all my sisters but the youngest were sent in turn to a school at Blackheath presided over by Miss Louisa Browning. She was an aunt of the poet and a remarkable person in many ways. She ruled her school with a rod of iron; but she was a born teacher, and we all appreciated her thoroughness and method, especially as our ancient governess at home had been incompetent to the last degree. One of Miss Browning’s peculiarities was an objection to needlework in her school. This, she considered, ought to have been taught to us at home. If she saw a girl with a needle in her hand, she would call out in her most commanding tones, “A guinea a stitch, my dear, a guinea a stitch!” Another peculiarity was her passion for gay colours. She daringly mingled scarlet, purple, green, and yellow on her ample person. I remember being taken to school by my father after the summer holidays in 1861, a week or two after the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Miss Browning’s entry into the little drawing-room, clad, as usual, in all the colours of the rainbow. After the more formal greetings, she said to my father, “No doubt, Mr. Garrett, you are astonished not to find me in mourning; but I have a black dress upstairs in case Robert should call.” I never heard that Robert did call, nor saw anything of the black dress; but in after-years, in books and articles written about Robert Browning and his family, I have met with passages some of which asserted positively that he was a Jew by birth, while others denied it. I cannot bring any positive knowledge to bear on the point. Our Miss Browning had an elder brother named Reuben, but this does not prove anything. There was a Richard Garrett, my father’s great-grandfather (born 1733, died 1787), who had ten sons, three of whom were named respectively Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; but we have every reason to believe that he was of an unmixed East Anglian stock, and had no trace of Jewish blood. Miss Browning used to talk to us sometimes about her brothers. Reuben, she declared, was a very devout Christian, but the most selfish man she had ever met, while her darling youngest brother not only was not a professed Christian, but had no religion at all, nothing but the dearest, kindest heart in the world. I have sometimes reflected, especially since I have had the opportunity of seeing Palestine, Algeria, Egypt, etc., that possibly Miss Browning’s love of bright-coloured clothing may indicate an Eastern strain in her ancestry; but she had a very British look.

When my elder sisters, Louie and Elizabeth, were at Blackheath, they had among their schoolfellows two very charming North Country girls, Sophie and Annie Crowe. Their home was at Usworth, in the county of Durham, and my sisters more than once spent part of their summer holidays there. On one of these visits they were introduced to Miss Emily Davies, the only daughter of the Rev. Dr. Davies, rector of Gateshead. The friendship this formed between my sisters, the Crowes, and Miss Davies lasted as long as their lives, and had a strong and enduring influence, not only on the little group immediately concerned, but also on nearly the whole of my family.

Miss Davies had a strong and masterful character; she had early in her own life set before herself as a definite object the improvement of the whole social and political status of women. I do not know how far, if at all, her mind had been influenced by those of her own way of thinking who had preceded her, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and the Shelleys. I think probably not at all, except in so far as these pioneers indicated to her the way not to do it. Miss Davies was the least revolutionary of revolutionists. She meant to spell revolution without the r. She wanted women to have as good and thorough an education as men; she wanted to open the professions to them and to obtain for them the Parliamentary franchise. But she did not want any violence either of speech or action. She remained always the quiet, demure little rector’s daughter, and she meant to bring about all the changes she advocated by processes as gradual and unceasing as the progress of a child from infancy to manhood. Her best route towards her ultimate goal was, she was convinced, through education, and this for a double reason. Firstly, improved education for women was good in itself and would arouse the minimum of opposition. Secondly, education was a necessary preliminary to enable women to occupy the place in national life at which Miss Davies aimed for them. Mrs. Somerville, Miss Herschel, Miss Martineau, and Mrs. Fry had already done really fine work in their several lines, and they were all women who from various accidental circumstances had received a first-rate education. That which had qualified them for their work, Miss Davies aimed at securing for women at large. She was pre-eminently one of those reformers who saw the end from the beginning. She had a logical, thorough, and far-seeing mind; delicately scrupulous as to methods, honest and truthful in word and deed, and also unswerving and unceasing as to objects. She obtained a strong influence over my two elder sisters, and through them a little later on the rest of us. She did not influence my sister Agnes and myself in our childhood. She had had no younger brothers or sisters of her own (her only brother, the Rev. J. Llewellyn Davies, was nearly of her own age), and her manner towards us was not winning. She always seemed (I am speaking still of the late ’fifties and early ’sixties) to be letting us know of how little consequence we were. Later, especially when her experience as first Principal of Girton College had brought her more into contact with young people, her manner softened and she became the friend and comrade of our adult life rather than the stern preceptor of our youth. In 1857 our eldest sister, Louie, married. Alice, our third sister, also married a few years later. Her husband, Herbert Cowell, was practising law in Calcutta, where she spent nearly ten years. Elizabeth consequently became more than ever, therefore, the leader and friend of the younger half of the family. Her deep fund of natural human affection and almost maternal feeling towards us prevented her from falling into the mannerisms which for a time estranged us from Miss Davies. One of Elizabeth’s inventions for our benefit was what she called Talks on Things in General, which took place on Sunday evenings. I can see her now on the sofa in the Alde House drawing-room: George, our youngest brother, on her lap, and the rest of us grouped round her while she talked on just what was uppermost in her own mind at the time: Garibaldi and the freeing of Italy from the Austrians, Carlyle’s Cromwell, Macaulay’s History of England, and modern political events and persons, such as Lord Palmerston, and the chances of a Reform Bill, Louis Napoleon and the Haynau incident, etc., etc. I remember taking the most lively interest in the 1857 campaign in Italy against the Austrians, when the French joined forces with the King of Sardinia. From that time Garibaldi, Cavour, and Victor Emmanuel became my heroes, and I tried to learn all I could about them. To show what a queer little creature I was at that time, I may mention that I remember thinking on my tenth birthday that I had now reached the prime of life and that henceforward I must expect a descent towards the sere and yellow leaf of old age. Perhaps this temperament may explain why Miss Davies wished to snub me. Several years later I was telling my brother George my childish notion of ten being the prime of life, and he in return told me of one of his blunders when he was about the same age. He had begun making a small collection of coins, and was familiar with the terms “obverse” and “reverse” as applied to them. One Sunday in church the hymn selected contained the lines:

Oh, my spirit longs and faints

For the converse of the saints.

He thought this was an example of the extraordinary ideas grown-ups had of enjoying themselves. He had mixed up the word “converse” with “obverse” and “reverse,” and thought the hymn indicated an uncontrollable desire to turn the saints upside down or inside out. Probably everyone who remembers his childhood will recall similar grotesque mistakes.

One of my great joys while at Blackheath was to come up for an occasional week-end with my sister Louie, then living in Manchester Square. She was thirteen years older than myself, and was almost as much a mother to me as a sister. It was she who first opened to me the beauty and wisdom of Wordsworth’s poetry, beginning with the Tintern Abbey poem, “The Happy Warrior,” and the Ode on the “Intimations of Immortality.” There are some lines from these which I always associate with her and with our walks together in Kensington Gardens. On these week-end visits Louie and her husband usually took me to some fascinating entertainment on Saturday afternoon or evening, and on Sunday to hear the Rev. F. D. Maurice preach at St. Peter’s, Vere Street. On Monday morning early I was escorted to an omnibus at the Marble Arch, which deposited me at London Bridge station for the train to Greenwich, whence I walked to my school at Blackheath. My reason for recalling these small excursions now is that many times as my omnibus passed Newgate on Monday morning I saw the huge crowd of evil-looking people assembled outside the prison in order to enjoy the recreation of seeing a man hanged. These executions were then carried out in public, and I cannot imagine a more degrading exhibition. Boys whom we knew at St. Paul’s School (then situated close to Newgate) told us that nothing was done by the school authorities to prevent the lads witnessing the executions. They themselves, they said, thought nothing of going to see them. Public executions were not abolished until 1867. “Sporting” young men of quite good position used to look upon attendance at an execution as quite a legitimate way of enjoying themselves, and I remember one of my Leiston cousins driving himself the forty odd miles to Norwich to see a notorious murderer hanged. These things measure in some degree the distance between 1860 and 1923.

Another feature of my week-ends, in strange contrast with the Newgate horrors, was hearing a great leader of religious thought deliver his soul on the theological problems which were then agitating men’s minds. It was the period just preceding the publication of Essays and Reviews and the prosecution of Bishop Colenso for heresy; and masses of devoutly religious people were clinging tenaciously to the theory that every word in the Bible was verbally inspired by God Himself and therefore must be true, while modern science, even modern common sense, showed plainly that this could not be so. For instance, though the Pentateuch says that the hare chews the cud, it is common knowledge now that the hare does not chew the cud. It was Maurice’s intense conviction which penetrated all his teaching that the spirit of man seeking approach to his Maker was not to be deterred by the proven fact that human error in matters of science formed part of the Bible. It would have been a miracle had it been otherwise. It mattered not an iota to a seeker after the Spirit of God whether the hare chewed the cud or not. The spirit answers to the spirit and the flesh to the flesh. This is not the place to discuss such problems as these, but I hold myself fortunate to have heard Maurice repeatedly at a time when my own mind was in process of formation. He had the voice, the look, the inspiration of a prophet; and spiritual things were to him the greatest realities in the universe.

At Aldeburgh and at Snape, where I had “sat under” Mr. Dowler, a pure formalist and a dull one at that, and Mr. Baker, a most amusing Irishman, I had never heard a word bearing on these problems. Mr. Dowler was platitudinous to the last degree: he never failed on each first Sunday of the month to say “but as we must be brief on this our Sacrament morning.” We hailed the brevity and escaped out of church glad to have got it over in a shorter time than usual. At Snape Church we were continually on the watch for Mr. Baker’s amusing eccentricities. He had a way of interpolating little remarks of his own into the Lessons or Psalms of the day, or, indeed, in any other part of the service. For instance, he would read in his rich rolling Irish voice, “The people who sat in darkness (that was their state) sora great light (that was a better state)”; to the words “King of Kings, Lord of Lords,” he once added, “There’s a many sort of lords: Lord Rendlesham! What is he? Nothing but a poorr, earrthly worrum; that’s not the Lord we have here.” Once well in the middle of the Nicene Creed he paused and exclaimed, “Stop, stop, stop! I’ve forgot the Holy Gospel”—this in his ordinary secular voice—and then without an instant’s pause adding in his clerical voice, “The Holy Gospel is written in the ninth chapter of that according to Saint Matthew, beginning at the fourteenth verse.”

As these are actual literal transcripts from the pastors and masters who had represented the Church of England to my childhood, it is no wonder that both heart and mind were arrested and impressed by F. D. Maurice, who seemed to me to be a modern Isaiah. He awakened in me new thoughts and, I hope, partially at all events, new reverences.

It is only fair to add here that Canon Thompson, who succeeded Mr. Dowler as vicar of Aldeburgh, was a type of the very best kind of clergyman, devout, thoughtful, and original both in his thoughts and in his method of expressing them; but he did not come to Aldeburgh until long after the time of which I am now writing.

I have already referred to the more serious side of Canon Thompson’s character: but I should like also to show another facet of his mind; he had a strong sense of humour kept under strict control. One of his curates, Mr. Brook, also had a sense of humour, but from the clerical point of view not adequately controlled. Canon Thompson said to one of us, “I dare not mention even the slightest jest to Brook in the vestry: he has such a terribly loud laugh!” Canon Thompson did not laugh: he only smiled. One Sunday, when I was on a visit to Alde House, Canon Thompson’s sermon was about a Church in Asia to which one of St. Paul’s epistles had been addressed. He said: “It was a very small Church, and it was insignificant in another respect: it was almost entirely composed of women.” I flamed with indignation at this: but my mother’s presence made me control myself. But there seems to have been a brain-wave which conveyed my sentiments to the pulpit, for the Canon immediately added, “But let us not think less of it for that! What would the Christian Church be without its women?—their purity of motive, their unselfish enthusiasm, their good works?” etc., etc. I was placated, but not satisfied; and a day or two after, when he was calling on my mother, I felt he had been delivered into my hands, and said, “I nearly called out ‘Shame’ in the middle of your sermon last Sunday, Canon Thompson.” He at once replied with his most demure clerical manner, “I know what you mean, but I made it up to you afterwards, didn’t I?”

I will give one more story to illustrate his humour and his observation. There was a travelling dramatic company playing in Aldeburgh, and my sister, Mrs. Anderson, engaged them to perform As You Like It in her garden: all Aldeburgh, including the Vicar and his wife, were present. He sat with an abstracted look on his face, so that it was difficult to say whether his mind was not a thousand leagues away. The actress who played Rosalind was a lady of very ample proportions, with enormous arms, bare to her shoulder, and as large in circumference as a good-sized tree. The next day this poor lady came to see my sister to pour into her ear details of a misfortune which had befallen her. Her husband, who had played the exiled Duke, had run away from her, taking with him not only his own salary, but also hers! What could she do? After a good deal of talk, my sister thought she would like to consult the Vicar. She found him and told him all the sad story. He listened with great attention, and then said very solemnly, “What? Left her? Fled? From those arms?” But, of course, he did not fail to help the poor woman.