IV
King’s College, London, where I was entered in October, 1854, was then even more than now considered as a bulwark of orthodoxy and the Established Church. To begin with, every student on admission was required to sign the Thirty-nine Articles. I believe the regulation was defended on the ground that, although a lad of seventeen was hardly likely to be a stalwart defender of these Articles, he acknowledged by signing them the principles of authority; he bowed before the teaching of his spiritual pastors, and accepted what he could neither prove nor disprove. Considering all that we have to accept on trust in the scientific world, perhaps it is not too much to invite this confidence on the part of a boy. Of course, all the Professors were Church of England men; there was a very terrible Council consisting of so many Grand Inquisitors; the least suspicion of heterodoxy was visited by deprivation. They were as implacable as the Holy Office. No reputation, no abilities, no services, no distinction could save the heretic. The orthodoxy of the College gave, however, no farther trouble to students than a weekly lecture by the Principal on these Articles which they had been made to accept on trust. During my year at the College we got through four, I remember—the first four. The remaining thirty-five I have continued to accept on trust.
I cannot say that the students were carefully looked after, or that the teaching could be called good. Our Professor of Classics, Dr. Browne, was a kindly and genial scholar. We translated a good deal. We wrestled with him all the time about learning Virgil by heart. He also gave us a course of Logic and another of Rhetoric, both of which, although very short and elementary, proved truly useful to one, at least, of his students. The Professor of Mathematics had been, I daresay, a good teacher in earlier years; when I joined he was old and had quite lost all interest in his work. Indeed, he no longer pretended any, but sat at his desk while the men worked at their own sweet will, bringing him from time to time difficulties and questions which he solved for them mechanically. There were French classes and German classes. There was a Greek Testament class, which I attended; it was compulsory.
Our best Professor was a man of considerable mark as an antiquary and archaeologist—the late J.S. Brewer. He was, if I remember right, Professor both of English History and of Literature, the two going together in those dark days. He was a stimulating lecturer, full of forcible eloquence and of enthusiasm for his subject. He could also on occasion show a rough side of tongue and temper.
So far as I can remember, there was very little in the way of social life among the students of my time. A Debating Society existed—I was a member, but never ventured to speak. I remember, however, the outrageous nonsense that was talked by the ingenuous youth—nonsense that set me against Debating Societies for life. I forget whether there were cricket and boat clubs, but I think not. There were a few residents, and I daresay they made a society of their own. Of the students who were there in my time one or two emerged afterwards from the ruck. Wace, afterwards Principal of King’s, was one; a laborious scholar, who made the best use of his talents. I believe that he was for many years a leader writer for the Times. Ainger, at this moment Canon of Bristol and Master of the Temple, a man of accomplishments and readiness was another. Years afterwards I was present at the annual prize-giving. My former Professor, Archdeacon Browne, who had long before retired from his post, addressed the meeting. He said that it had afforded him peculiar gratification to observe the distinctions achieved by former students of King’s. Among those who had thus risen to greatness, he said, were Bishops, Deans, Archdeacons, and Beneficed Clergy. No distinctions outside the Church were worth considering in a College so ecclesiastical, but the worthy Archdeacon represented the King’s College of its founders.
I made a few friends in the college, some half dozen or so, who went on to Cambridge at the same time as myself. When lectures were over I used generally to walk away by myself into the City. There was no reason for getting into the City; I knew nothing about its history; but it fascinated me, as it does to this day. Apart from all its historical associations, the City has still a strange and inexplicable charm for me. I like now, as I liked then, to wander about among its winding lanes and narrow streets; to stand before those old, neglected City churchyards; to look into the old inn yards, of which there remain but one or two. If I could only by some effort of the memory recall those streets and houses, which I suppose I saw while they were still standing, but have forgotten! I knew the City before they provided it with the new broad thoroughfares; before they pulled down so many of the City churches. I ought to remember the double quadrangle of Doctors’ Commons—that quaint old college in the heart of the City; Gerard’s Hall; St. Michael’s subterranean Church; the buildings on the site of the Hanseatic Aula; St. Paul’s School; the Merchant Taylors’ School; Whittington’s Alms-House; and I know not what beside. Alas! I have long since forgotten them. In those days, however, I walked about among these ancient monuments. When I was tired and hungry I would look for a chop-house, dine, and then walk slowly home to my lodgings, taking a cup of coffee at a coffee-house on the way. My lodgings were in a place called Featherstone Buildings, Holborn. I shared rooms with a brother, who was in the City. He had a good many friends in London, and was out nearly every evening. I had few, and remained left to my own devices; we had little in common, and went each his own way; which is an excellent rule for brothers, and maintains fraternal affection.
I ought to have stayed at home in the evening and worked. Now Featherstone Buildings is a very quiet place; there is no thoroughfare; all the houses were then—and I daresay are still—let out in lodgings; our one sitting room, which was also my study, was the second floor front. In the evening the place was absolutely silent; the silence sometimes helped me in my work; sometimes it got on my nerves and became intolerable. I would then go out and wander about the streets for the sake of the animation, the crowds, and the lights; or I would go half-price—a shilling—to the pit of a theatre; or I would, also for a shilling, drop into a casino and sit in a corner and look on at the dancing. I was shy; I looked much younger than my age; I spoke to no one, and no one spoke to me. The thing was risky, but I came to no harm; nor did I ever think much about the character of the people who frequented the places. One of them was in Dean Street, Soho. It is now a school; it was then “Caldwell’s”—a dancing place frequented by shop-girls, dressmakers, and young fellows. I do not know what the reputation of the place was; no doubt it was pretty bad; but, so far as I remember, it was a quiet and well-conducted place. To this day I cannot think of those lonely evenings in my London lodging without a touch of the old terror. I see myself sitting at a table, books spread out before me. I get to work. Presently I sit up and look round. The silence is too much for me. I take my hat and I go out. There are thousands of young fellows today who find, as I found every evening, the silence and loneliness intolerable. If I were a rich man I would build colleges for these young fellows, where they could live together, and so keep out of mischief. As for my friends, they were too far off to be of much use to me; they lived for the most part at Clapham and Camberwell, four miles away.
I have mentioned the brother who became Senior Wrangler. Two or three years afterwards he had a long and serious illness. At the same time my youngest sister—a child of six or so—was threatened with St. Vitus’s Dance. As change of air was wanted for both, lodgings were taken at Freshwater Bay, in the Isle of Wight. I went with the two patients, and it was a delightful holiday. The sick people were convalescent. My brother talked to me all day long about Cambridge, and what he thought I ought to do. My imagination was fired. It seemed to me—it seems so still—the most splendid thing in the world for a young fellow to go to the University; there to contend with young giants; and, if he can, to keep his field and be victorious. My own victories proved humble, but I formed and cherished ambitions which were delightful, and at least I had the training.
I remember Freshwater for another reason. It was the beginning of the Crimean War, and Tennyson’s Maud had just come out. I read the poem on the beach in that lovely bay; I saw the poet himself stalking among the hills—the Queen’s Poet, the country people called him. I had seen the splendid fleets of which he spoke go forth to war. Heaven! How the lines at the end of Maud rang in my brain! The fleets went out to war, but they saw little; the war was carried on by the armies. In those days the poor lads had to face the awful Russian winter with brown paper boots, shoddy great-coats, and green coffee berries. I remember the people of Portsmouth going about with white faces, the men swearing and cursing, the women weeping. I remember, seeing the wounded borne on stretchers up the street to the new hospital under the walls. And I remember—saddest sight of all—seeing the remains of a regiment, that had been cut to pieces, marching from the Dockyard gates to the barracks—the band was reduced to five or six; the regiment was a skeleton. The men were ragged, and as they passed along they were followed by the weeping and wailing of the women. The poor degraded sailors’ and soldiers’ women had so much left of womanhood as to weep for the brave men who lay in the cemetery far away on the Crimean shores. I visited Freshwater again after forty years. Alas! the place is ruined. They have built a promenade round the little bay; there are rows of houses and villas and terraces. Tennyson’s Freshwater is gone; no one would recognise, in the cockney watering-place, the lonely and secluded spot which furnished inspiration for Tennyson’s most beautiful poem.
My three short terms at King’s College, London, came to an end—not altogether ingloriously. I kept up the honour of my little school by taking the mathematical scholarship; I carried off prizes in classics, mathematics, and divinity. But nobody cared about any of the students; during the whole time I was there I never remember a single word of personal interest or of encouragement. The men went to lectures; if they failed to attend, a letter was sent to their people at home; of individual interest or encouragement there was absolutely none. I believe it was much the same thing at most of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge at this time. The men were left severely alone; so that, after all, King’s was not behind its betters.
One little distinction made me at the time very proud. It was in my first term. When the news came home of the Battle of the Alma, Trench, then Archbishop of Dublin, and formerly one of the professors of King’s, sent a poem to the Times upon the victory. Professor Browne gave it to his class for Latin elegiacs. My copy, I was rejoiced to hear, was selected to be sent to the Archbishop. He wrote a very cordial letter in reply, with a kindly message to me. I wish I had kept the letter with that message.
One of my prizes, I have said, was for divinity. It was still my purpose to enter into holy orders. That is to say, I used to consider this my purpose. But as to any deliberate preparation for the life, or attempt to realise what it meant; or what was meant by the ecclesiastical mind; or to understand the necessity for acquiring the power of speaking, or of any qualification even distantly belonging to the clerical profession—I paid no attention and gave no thought to such things. Had I done so; had I realised the terrible weight of the fetters with which the average clergyman of the time went about laden—the chain of literal inspiration and verbal accuracy, the blind opposition to science, the dreary Evangelisations of the religious literature, the wrangles over points long since consigned to the limbo of old controversies, the intolerant spirit, the artificial life, the affected piety—I should have given up the thought of taking holy orders long before the decision was forced upon me.
During this period I began to write—or to make the first serious attempt at writing. That is to say, I had always been writing; as a boy, trying the most impossible things, even comedies. Now, however, I began to form definite ambitions. I would be a poet. I believe that this dream, which happens to thousands of lads of every degree, may be the most useful illusion possible. For it necessitates the writing of verse, and there is no kind of exercise more valuable, if one is destined to write prose, than the writing of verse, even though the result is by no means a success. My dream made me perfectly and entirely happy; my verses I thought splendid. Long years afterwards, when this youthful dream had been well-nigh forgotten, I came across a bundle of papers tied up carefully. They were my poems. Each was dated carefully, after the fashion of the bards of fame. I turned them over. Heavens! How could anyone, even in the present day, imagine or persuade himself that this stuff was poetry! I found crude and commonplace thoughts, echoes of Tennyson and Wordsworth—everything except what I had imagined when I wrote this skimble-skamble stuff. Suddenly I understood. The years rolled back. I saw myself with glowing cheek, with beating pulse, with humid eye, reading over what I had just written. And I saw that the young man read on the page before him, not the lame lines and the forced rhymes, but the thoughts in his own mind—the splendid thoughts, which were borrowed here and lifted there unconsciously, and which were lying in his brain waiting to be worked up and absorbed, and to form part of himself. And so this bundle of bad verses was in itself a part of education.
I once wrote a story—a very simple story it was—of three boys and a girl. One of my boys was a youth with literary ambitions. In my presentment of that youth I seem to see some kind of portrait, or sketch after the life, of myself. The book was called All in a Garden Fair, from which I have already quoted. Here is a passage in which the boy’s early efforts are described:—
“ ‘Such a boy as Allen is, before all things, fond of books. This means two things—first, that he is curious about the world, eager to learn, and, secondly, that he is open to the influences of form and style. Words and phrases move him in the silent page as the common man is moved by the orator. He has been seized by the charm of language. You understand me not, my daughter; but listen still. When a boy has once learned to love words, when he feels how a thing said one way is delightful, and said another way is intolerable, that boy may become a mere rhetorician, pedant, and precisian; or an orator, one of those who move the world; or a poet, one of those born to be loved.’
“ ‘And Allen, you think, will be—what? A rhetorician, or an orator, or a poet?’
“ ‘It may be the first, but I think he will not be. For I also observe in the boy the intuitions, the fire, the impatience, and the emotion, which belong to the orator who speaks because he must, and to the poet who writes because he cannot help it. I think—nay, I am sure—that a lad with these sympathies cannot be a mere rhetorician or a maker of phrases.’
“Claire listened, trying still to connect this theory with the conspiracy, but she failed.
“ ‘He reads, because it is his time for reading everything. He has no choice. It is his nature to read. He was born to read. He reads by instinct. He reads poetry, and his brain is filled with magnificent colours and splendid women; he reads romances, and he dreams of knights and stately dames; he reads history, and his heart burns within him; he reads biography, and he worships great heroes; he reads tragedy, and he straightway stalks about the Forest another Talma; he reads idyls, and the meadows become peopled to him with the shepherds and shepherdesses—he lives two lives: one of these is dull and mean; to think of it, while he is living the other, makes him angry and ashamed, for in the other he lives in an enchanted world, where he is a magician and can conjure spirits.’ ”
I have not succeeded in becoming a poet; I still think, however, that there is nothing in the world so entirely desirable as a poetic life—if uninterrupted, without anxieties for the daily bread, sustained by noble thought, and encouraged by great success. Of all the men of our century I would rather have been Tennyson than any other man whatever.
However, I had my dream, and it was very delightful. And when I went up to Cambridge, exchanging my lonely lodgings in Holborn for a fuller and healthier social life, I ceased to think of poetry, and for three years almost ceased to think of writing at all. Once, I remember, I attempted a poem for the Chancellor’s Prize. When I had half finished it, one of our men brought me a MS. It was his poem. No one was to be allowed to send in his composition in his own handwriting. Would I write it out for him? I looked at it with a sinking heart. It was a great deal better than mine. It was so unusually good that it failed to get the prize. Now mine was of a good honest mediocrity, so mediocre that I have often lamented the incident which prevented my sending it in.