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Title: Reminiscences of a student's life
Author: Jane Ellen Harrison
Release date: April 29, 2025 [eBook #75986]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1925
Credits: Carol Brown, Peter Becker and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REMINISCENCES OF A STUDENT'S LIFE ***
Transcriber’s Note:
Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like
this_. Footnotes were renumbered sequentially and were moved to
follow the paragraph in which the anchor occurs.
Reminiscences of
a Student’s Life
Reminiscences
of a Student’s Life
Jane Ellen Harrison
_Second Impression_
[Illustration]
Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the
Hogarth Press, 52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.
1925
_First published October 1925._
_Reprinted December 1925._
_Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
YORKSHIRE DAYS 9
CHAPTER II
CAMBRIDGE AND LONDON 44
CHAPTER III
GREECE AND RUSSIA 63
CONCLUSION 80
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACE PAGE
Jane Harrison (aged five) 10
Charles Harrison, father of Jane Harrison 18
Elizabeth Hawksley Harrison, mother of
Jane Harrison 28
Jane Harrison (aged twenty-five) 45
Jane Harrison (aged thirty-three) 54
Jane Harrison and Hope Mirrlees 90
CHAPTER I
YORKSHIRE DAYS
In view of my present cult for Russia and things Russian, I like to
think that my first childish memory is of the word “Moscow”. Moscow
to me was a dog, not a town--an old Newfoundland dog named, no doubt,
in honour of the Crimean War, which will sufficiently date these
reminiscences. Moscow had his kennel in the backyard under a big
spreading tree, and from this tree exuded drops of bright gum. It
was my fearful joy to rush to the tree, seize the gum-drops which
were well within the length of Moscow’s chain, and be back before he
could begin to bark ferociously. When later I learnt that to some
people Moscow was a cathedral city, not a dog, my universe rocked
with Einsteinian relativity. Russia was about us in those days, a
strange, inhuman Russia of Tzars and Siberia. My first toy was a box
of bricks and soldiers mixed, called “The Siege of Sevastopol”, given
by a patriotic uncle. I hated soldiers and sieges and muskets and
bayonets, but the word Sevastopol was a marvel, and a soft joy to
my child’s mouth. I turned it over and over, and when much later I
learned its Greek origin and meaning, there seemed a real fitness in
things.
Then, every Christmas came Russia again. My father had had some
business relations with Russia, and every year some kind Russian
used to send him a package of caviare and cranberries and reindeers’
tongues. The caviare was reserved for my father, but he gave me
sometimes delicious morsels on hot toast, and he has left me the
legacy of a too delicate palate. The cranberries were made into sauce
for venison, for the grown-ups’ dinners, but a few reindeers’ tongues
found their way to our schoolroom breakfast, where they were keenly
appreciated by one little greedy fat child. Oh those reindeers’
tongues! they tasted not only of reindeer, but--but of snow-fields
and dreaming forests.
[Illustration: JANE HARRISON (aged five).
_To face page 10._
]
My father had also imported a tiny Russian sledge, and sometimes he
took me for drives--thank God it only held one, so I could dream
undisturbed of steppes and Siberia and bears and wolves. All my lore
was derived from two enchanting books--_Near Home_ and _Far Off_.
I wish I had them now,[1] but north and south were jumbled and
jostled in my fancies. Since then I have only once been in a sledge.
When I was spending a winter at S. Moritz a friend died. Her funeral
procession was a long line of sledges. It was unspeakably solemn and
silent. When I die, if I cannot be buried at sea, I should like to go
to my grave in a sledge.
[1] A kind reader of the _Nation_ has since supplied my need.
* * * * *
But Russia soon faded, leaving only my native Yorkshire. And here I
must make confession. In politics I am an old Liberal, with a dash of
the Little Englander and the Bolshevik. I hate the Empire; it stands
to me for all that is tedious and pernicious in thought; within it
are always and necessarily the seeds of war. I object to nearly
all forms of patriotism. But when I search the hidden depths of my
heart, I find there the most narrow and local of parochialisms. I am
intensely proud of being a Yorkshire woman.
My gifted friend Hope Mirrlees has written a wonderful novel,
_Counterplot_, in which she shows that only in and through the
pattern of art, or it may be of religion, which is a form of art,
do we at all seize and understand the tangle of experience which
we call Life. Until I met Aunt Glegg in the _Mill on the Floss_, I
never knew myself. I _am_ Aunt Glegg; with all reverence I say it.
I wear before the world a mask of bland cosmopolitan courtesy and
culture; I am advanced in my views, eager to be in touch with all
modern movements, but beneath all that lies Aunt Glegg, rigidly,
irrationally conservative, fibrous with prejudice, deep-rooted in her
native soil.
It is said by Southerners that we Yorkshire people are exclusive,
gruff in manner, harsh and unsympathetic in soul. Gruff in manner I
grant it, but our bark is worse than our bite. Exclusive? possibly,
yet I have heard a Yorkshire lady say “there are some quite decent
people in Scotland.” Harsh and unsympathetic in soul. Well. A friend
of mine was left by her husband alone in a small moorland cottage
they had taken for the summer. At nightfall a knock was heard;
her landlord entered, under his arm a large grey rabbit. “I heerd
t’ Maister had left yer alawn, maybe ye’d be lawnly. I brought t’
rabbit; he’d be a bit o’ company for yer.” I myself was left by
a friend in a small Yorkshire inn. The landlady looked in on me
in the morning, bearing a huge dead duck. “Yer’ll maybe be lawnly
wi’out Missie, happen yer’d fancy a dook fer yer dinner.” I did,
and I ate two huge slices of its fat breast with unlimited savoury
trimmings. She looked in to mark my progress. “Aye, yer eat but
poorly, yer’ve been living maybe wi’ them Southerners.” When I left
my inn, I thanked the landlady for all her kindness. She looked at
me steadily and said, “It weren’t you, I knawed yer fayther, t’aud
Charlie ’Arrison.” Now my father was never called “Charlie”; he was
far too remote and solemn a man for diminutives. She was using what
grammarians call--or would call if they ever attended to anything of
any importance--the _subjective_ diminutive. It simply expressed the
kindliness in her heart towards me and mine. We are not a sentimental
people. I picked up a book of Yorkshire poems. Among them was an Ode
to Spring. It began thus:
T’aud Winter ’e got nawtice ter quit.
He made sooch a muck o’ the place.
I like to think that we Yorkshire people have another trait in
common with the Russians. The vice we hate above all others is
pretentiousness. I have heard one Russian charge another with
pretentiousness; if it existed at all it was so infinitesimal as to
be invisible to the naked English eye. Just so with the Yorkshireman.
You may break every commandment of the Decalogue--he is easy enough,
as long as you are a fairly good fellow he will pardon you--but try
to show off, to impress him in any way, and you are done.
To such, I admit, my countrymen were cold and harsh. I remember
a hapless clergyman who came north to take charge of our parish
while the Vicar was away. The poor man arrived charged with good
intentions; he meant to “brighten our Services”; he brought with him
leaflets and new hymn-books and new hassocks to compel us to kneel
flat upon our knees instead of comfortably crouching through the
Litany as had been our Evangelical wont. He even put a little cross
on the Communion Table, but this my father with his own hands swiftly
and silently removed. The first Sunday the church was full; the
second, spite of all the “brightness”, it was chill and empty save
for a few sullen faces. I approved of the new man’s views, though
I did not like him, so I went conscientiously round to the chief
parishioners to ask why they did not come to church. “We dawn’t haud
wi’ ’is ways,” was the answer. I thought it was the hassocks and the
hymn-books and the leaflets. “Naw--’e could do as ’e liked wi’ them
papers and such like--they was naw matter--but we dawn’t haud wi’ ’is
ways.” Subsequent analysis taught me that “ways” is Yorkshire for the
sum total of your reactions. Your particular deeds are of as little
significance to him as your particular words; it is _you_, the whole
of you, you “in a loomp”, as he would say, that the Yorkshireman
wisely reckons with. They were instinctively better bred than I was
with my rationalising right and wrong, and they had felt the bad
manners of the changes worked in their old Vicar’s absence. After
holding out for three months the innovator went back to his own place
a sadder and a wiser Southerner.
* * * * *
My people must have been, I think, singularly old-fashioned and
provincial even for those days. I remember that an old gentleman who
came often to see us used to kiss my eldest sister’s hand and call
her “Mistress Elizabeth”, unusual even in the ’fifties. How I wished
some one would kiss my hand! But no one ever did till I came in my
old age to courteous France. And as to Mistress Jane--no, it was
Lady Jane I longed to be, for my cult was for Lady Jane Grey. I had
a child’s magical habit of mind; if I could get the name _exactly_,
I should somehow possess the person. To name is to create. “And God
said to the light, ‘Light’” (He named it), and there _was_ Light.
So I consulted my kind nurse as to whether I could ever become Lady
Jane. “Yes, of course, miss,” said the cheery woman. “If you’re
good, maybe when you’re a big girl you’ll marry a lord and then
you’ll be a lady.”
Gentle Jane was as good as gold,
She always did as she was told,
And when she grew old, she was given in marriage
To a first-class Earl who kept his carriage.
Hope shone bright, but I was a cautious child, and I referred the
question to my better-informed governess. The blow fell. No, not
even if I married a dozen lords could I ever be Lady Jane, unless
they made my father an earl, which seemed somehow unlikely. So the
dream faded, but not wholly. I could still “stay at home in my castle
reading Plato while the ladies of the Court went hunting in the
park”. And here I must confess my motives were not as purely platonic
as they seem. The terror of my childhood was that I should be forced
some day to ride to hounds. I loved the hounds, but oh how I hated
the horses! I still hate their huge teeth and bulging eyes and satin
skins. I learnt to ride (very badly) on an adorable donkey with long
furry ears and soft kind eyes, and a small furry donkey slept in my
bed every night for years. One night the nurse took it away, saying
it was time I learnt not to be a baby. I said not a word, I had long
learnt to keep silence. But I was found at midnight with swollen
eyes, staring wide awake. The nurse, being a sensible woman, put back
my donkey, and I slept soft and warm. Alas! I was soon promoted to
a Shetland pony, the veriest little imp of hell. He spent his time
running away and buck-jumping; I spent my time prostrate on the Filey
sands. He effectively broke my nerve; I was, and remain, a physical
coward, and in a community of bold riders was an object of ignominy.
No one understood, no one sympathised, till at a Swedish sanatorium
I, by good fortune, met Mr. Lytton Strachey. We were both there to
undergo Swedish massage, and Swedish massage as administered by a
robust native is “no picnic”. “Take my advice,” he said; “as soon as
they touch you begin to yell, and go on yelling till they stop.” It
was sound advice, sympathetically given. I learnt then, for the first
time, how tender, if how searching, is the finger Mr. Strachey lays
on our human frailties.
* * * * *
My religious training was oddly mixed. My father was incapable
of formulating a conviction, but I think he really would have
sympathised with the eminent statesman who “had a great respect for
religion as long as it did not interfere with a gentleman’s private
life!” I remember his look of annoyance when the Archbishop of York,
who was lunching with us after a Confirmation, and had been told that
I had played the village organ, put his hand on my head and bade me
“consecrate my great gifts to God”. That Archbishop was a splendid
figure to my childish imagination. I loved his ritual robes and
voluminous sleeves, but one day I looked into my brother-in-law’s
study and found the apparitor arranging these vestments. Alas! the
sleeves were not real sleeves, they came off. The apparitor, touched
by my interest, very kindly showed me how they hooked on, but the
gilt was off the gingerbread. To return to my father. The Archbishop
was trying enough, but an old Evangelical clergyman was worse. He
called to say good-bye to us one day and asked if, before parting,
we would all kneel down and “ask a blessing” on our journey. I can
see my father’s face of cold disgust. He was in his own house and
he could not be rude, so he sat down--he never knelt--and covered
his angry face with one hand and let the old clergyman pray. Then he
saw him courteously to the door and came back muttering something. I
could only catch the word “indecent”. He attended church with fair
regularity, but we children noticed that on what used to be called
“Sacrament Sundays” he was apt to have a slight attack of lumbago,
which passed off on Monday morning.
[Illustration: CHARLES HARRISON.
(Father of Jane Harrison.)
_To face page 18._
]
But my stepmother was made of quite other metal. She was a Celt
and her religion was of the fervent semi-revivalist type. She was
a conscientious woman and tried to do her duty, I am sure, to the
three rather dour little girls who had been her pupils and were later
presented to her as stepdaughters. She gave us Scripture lessons
every Sunday. Her main doctrines were that we must be “born again”
and that “God would have our whole hearts or nothing”. I think I
early felt that this was not quite fair. Why, if we were to care
for Him only, had He made this delightful world full of enchanting
foreign languages? Anyhow, the holocaust I honestly attempted was a
complete failure. I was from the outset a hopeless worldling. But
the apparatus of religion interested me. Sunday was an exciting if
laborious day. I taught twice in the Sunday School, and from the age
of twelve played the organ at two services. I followed the prayers in
Latin, and the lesson in German, and the Gospel in Greek; this with
some misgivings as to the “whole-heartedness” of this proceeding.
We always had to write out one of the sermons from memory, and were
never told which. This has given me a bad habit of attending closely
to any nonsense I may happen to hear at a meeting or a lecture. I see
my happier friends sleeping and yawning or nudging each other; my
attention is glued to the speaker.
Every Sunday I learnt the Collect for the day and either the Epistle
or the Gospel. My favourite Collect was that for Advent Sunday,
and it still thrills me, but I cannot have had any real taste
for literature as some of the hymns that delighted me most were
abominable doggerel.
My favourite moral-song ran as follows:
How proud we are, how pleased to show
Our clothes and call them rich and new,
When the poor sheep and silkworm wore
That very clothing long before!
Partly, no doubt, it was that in my childish mind I had a pleasant
picture of an old sheep suitably attired in a Victorian bonnet with
strings and a shawl, but chiefly it pleased me because it expressed
my innate and still inveterate dislike of, and contempt for,
everything _chic_ and smart. Perhaps it is some complex caused by my
own childish sufferings in my “Sunday clothes”, though heaven knows
they were plain enough. Anyhow, even now when I see a faultlessly
turned out man or woman I always expect he or she will prove to be
a fool and a bore. We cannot all be distinguished, but for heaven’s
sake let us all be shabby and comfortable. At a Cambridge function,
when he was Chancellor, I once gazed with admiration at the late Duke
of Devonshire. His right boot had a largish hole in it from which
emerged a grey woollen toe. That, I felt, was really ducal. I turned
the same sour eye on the very rich. I remember Miss Pernel Strachey
raising the question: “Why do rich people always get so dull?” Now
that Miss Strachey is Principal of Newnham, she will, I hope, employ
some of her leisure in reading her Bible. “It is easier for a camel
to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter into the
Kingdom of God.” For “Kingdom of God” read “Kingdom of the higher
spiritual values” and she has her answer.
* * * * *
My secular education till I was seventeen was in the hands of a
rather rapid succession of governesses, all of them strictly English.
My father’s creed was a simple one: All foreigners were Papists, all
Papists were liars, and he “wouldn’t have one in his house”. How
long and ardently I longed in vain to see a Papist! The result of my
father’s simple faith was that never in this world shall I be able
to speak French. When I was sent to Cheltenham to be “finished”, I
was placed in the Upper First at once because I could read three or
four languages and knew “Noel et Chapsal” off by heart. My first
morning the French master gave a simple _dictée_. Some isolated words
I could make out, but not a single intelligible sentence. I sent in
a blank sheet and cried with rage. All my governesses were grossly
ignorant, but they were good women, steadily kind to me; they taught
me deportment, how to come into a room, how to get into a carriage,
also that “little girls should be seen and not heard”, and that I
was there (in the schoolroom) “to learn, not to ask questions.” On
Saturdays we repeated the Books of the Bible in their correct order
and the Kings of Israel and Judah, the signs of the Zodiac and the
Tables of Weights and Measures. I also learnt by a mysterious system
of mnemonics many isolated dates. I can still give correctly the date
of the Creation of the World, the Fall, the Flood, the battle of
Quebec and the Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood.
Victorian education was ingeniously useless. Every day I spent an
hour doing exquisite hems and seams. I cannot to this day make the
simplest garment. But for some things I am devoutly thankful. I was
made to learn for some fifteen years three verses of the Bible
every day. I might choose what poetry I wished. In this way I learnt
impartially great quantities of Milton, Wordsworth and Mrs. Hemans,
Gray’s “Elegy”, the “Prisoner of Chillon” and the like. I learnt
them all lying on a back-board, and to this day my flat back is the
admiration of dressmakers. When, nowadays, I see the round backs
of my young friends, and watch them slinking round doors as though
they were criminals and not English gentlewomen, and especially when
they fail to get up when addressed by their elders and betters, I
sometimes sigh for a little “deportment”, but, after all, we of a
past generation have no more right to impose our manners than we
have to impose our morals. When a young man comes to tea with me
for the first time, it gives me, I confess, a slight shock when
he lies down full length on the rug, but thereby he expresses his
willingness for a kindly relation, and things are more comfortable
than if he sat, hat in hand, on the edge of his chair. Again, it
surprised me a little when at Cambridge I asked a young man to tea
for the first time and he answered _on a post-card_: “I’ll come if
I can, but don’t count on me.” “Count on” him, the lout! I crossed
his name (an honoured name by the by) out of my address book,
but the same evening--in penance for my bad temper--I wrote to
him _on a post-card_ and said I hoped I might “count on him” for
another Sunday. And then things change so swiftly; the vulgarism
of one generation is the polished _cliché_ of the next. When I was
young, to apologise by saying “sorry” would have been--witness the
_Punch_ of the period--to write yourself down a shop-man; now I hear
“sorry” drop quite easily from the most blue-blooded lips. As to
the absurdities of Victorian education, we learnt certainly a great
deal of miscellaneous rubbish (I am prepared though to defend the
signs of the Zodiac), but odd scraps of information are stimulating
to a child’s imagination. Nowadays it seems you learn only what
is reasonable and relevant. I went to Rome with a young friend,
educated on the latest lines, and who had taken historical honours at
Cambridge. The first morning the pats of butter came up stamped with
the Twins. “Good old Romulus and Remus,” said I. “Good old who?” said
she. She had never heard of the Twins and was much bored when I told
her the story; they had no place in “constitutional history”, and
for her the old wolf of the Capitol howled in vain: “Great God! I’d
rather be ...”
We old people must, however, steadily face the fact that the young
are more likely to be right than the old, and this in literature
as in morals and manners. If we old ones have behind us a larger
personal experience, they, the young, have behind them the collective
experience of a whole additional generation. Youth starts life from
the vantage point of the shoulders of age, and his vista is likely
to be wider and clearer. As Mr. Sheppard observed: “When the fathers
think that the Age of Reason is achieved, the sons may be trusted,
if they are of good stock, to see that it is still far off.” I will
make a personal confession. The methods of the Georgian novelist have
often tried me sorely. I had always been used to think of art as a
thing of selection. I looked to it for a certain peace and largeness.
Then when I took up “Ulysses”, I found myself not only wallowing in a
drain of obscenities that would have abashed Zola, but also exposed
to a trickle of trivialities that exasperated my every nerve, and
made me feel as though I were in a psycho-analyst’s consulting room
with a patient forced to unburden himself of every thought, every
impression, however feeble and seemingly irrelevant. And yet all
the time I felt, “This is written by a man of genius, who am I to
judge him? Let me try first to understand him.” “Psychoanalyst’s
consulting room.” Yes, the conviction grew. Joyce is trying to make
audible, make conscious the subconscious. He is dredging the great
deeps of personality. That is his tremendous contribution, and
after him follow a host of less-gifted imitators. Then, happily, I
read _Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown_, and Mrs. Woolf made me see that
these Georgian characters, which I had thought were so unreal and
even teasing, were real with an intimacy and a spirituality before
unattempted. So I have my reward. I don’t say I always get there!
I don’t say that when I go joyously to bed with a novel, it is Mr.
Joyce I take with me. It is not, it is Jane Austen or George Eliot or
even Trollope, but at least I know there is somewhere to get to; the
gates of a New Jerusalem are even for me ajar!
* * * * *
To return to my governesses. There was one notable exception--a
woman of real intelligence, ignorant but willing and eager to learn
anything and everything I wanted. Together we learnt to read German,
Latin badly, and with the quantities of course all wrong, the Greek
Testament and even a little Hebrew. Unfortunately, having no guide,
we began with the Psalms which are hard nuts to crack. I wanted to
find out the meaning of such obscure and exciting verses as “Or ever
your pots be made hot with thorns, so let indignation vex him even as
a thing that is raw”. Alas! my kind governess was shortly removed to
a lunatic asylum. What share I may have had in her mental downfall I
do not care to inquire.
A keen impulse was given to my study of the Greek Testament by the
arrival of a new curate. He was fresh from Oxford and not, I think,
averse to showing off. Rashly in one of his sermons he drew attention
to a mistranslation. This filled me with excitement and alarm. I saw
in a flash that the whole question of the “verbal inspiration of
the Bible” was at issue. That afternoon I took my Greek Testament
down to the Sunday School and, eager for further elucidation,
waylaid the hapless curate. I soon found that his knowledge of Greek
was, if possible, more slender than my own. But, if embarrassed,
he was friendly. Alas! that curate did not confine his attentions
to the Greek text. I was summarily despatched in dire disgrace to
Cheltenham. My stepmother said I was behaving “like a kitchen-maid”.
Considering the subject of my converse with the curate, I fail to see
the analogy. My father, as usual, said nothing. He scarcely ever did
say anything. His great natural silence--which he has handed down to
me--was, I think, increased by my stepmother’s rather violent Celtic
volubility. “Mother’d talk the hind leg off a donkey,” observed one
of her sons. I heard her voice once in an adjoining room passionately
haranguing my father. From him not a sound. But when we met for
dinner, we saw with some embarrassment that a portrait of my mother,
long consigned to an attic, was hanging on the wall opposite my
father’s seat. He had himself brought it down and hung it up. Such
was his dumb reprisal. My mother died almost at my birth, but I have
been told she was a silent woman of singular gentleness and serenity.
[Illustration:
ELIZABETH HAWKSLEY HARRISON (_née_ NELSON).
(Mother of Jane Harrison.)
_To face page 28_]
Books were, till I went to school, a serious difficulty. My father’s
school-books had somehow perished. I saved up my money to buy a
second-hand Virgil. The process was long, for my income was sixpence
a week, mulcted of a compulsory penny for the missionaries. My
edition of the _Aeneid_ contained not a hint as to scansion. I
knew the poem was in hexameters, but I was constantly held up by
the elision of nasal terminations. I was almost in despair when
a boy-friend who had just been promoted to doing verse at school
offered to show me, as he expressed it, “how to do the trick”. His
explanations were a veritable Apocalypse and I was enraptured, but
he rather let me down by observing at the end, “It’s a silly game,
but if you’re in the Fourth you’ve got to do it!”
This same boy-friend got me into serious disgrace later at school,
at Cheltenham. I was working for the London Matriculation then just
opened to women, and he proposed to write to me just before the
examination to “buck me up”. No letter reached me, but one morning
I was summoned before Miss Beale’s throne, where she sat in state
before the Lower School came into prayers. She had in front of her
a post-card (post-cards had only just been invented) written in a
schoolboy scrawl and signed “Peveril”. “That”, she said, pointing a
disgusted finger at the signature, “is a boy’s name.” “Yes,” I said,
“it’s Peveril; he promised to write to me before the examination,”
and I put out my hand for the post-card. “No, this must go to your
parents,” and then came a long harangue. It ended with these words
which intrigued me so that I remember them exactly: “You are too
young, and I hope too innocent, to realise the gross vulgarity of
such a letter or the terrible results to which it might lead.” I
was indeed, and still am, for what do you think was the offence?
After his signature “Peveril” had written “_Give my love to the
Examiners!_” The story may stand to mark the abyss of fatuous
prudery into which the girls’ schools of the middle Victorian
period--even the very best--had fallen. I was too furious that my
letter had been read to think of anything else. At home a scrupulous
code of honour prevailed as to letters. I remember being allowed to
take a bundle of letters to the village post. I employed my time
learning by heart the various names, titles, prefixes and addresses.
These when I got back I repeated, expecting praise for my diligence
and accuracy. Instead I was told I had done a most dishonourable
thing. Never, under any circumstances, was I to read the address of
a letter unless addressed to myself. _Tempora mutantur._ I know a
certain distinguished family all of whose members make a practice
of reading all post-cards and all the letters left lying about the
house. When I got home, my father sent for me and said, “Miss Beale
said I was to read that,” pointing to the post-card. “I don’t see any
harm in it--but he’d no business to write to you on a post-card, the
puppy.” Post-cards were an innovation and all innovations anathema.
All boys and all young men who proposed for his daughters were to
my father “puppies”. It is only due to “Peveril” to add that this
offence he never committed, hence much was forgiven him. Peveril is a
county magnate now, a Justice of the Peace, a Constant Reader of the
_Spectator_--not, I feel sure, of the _Nation_!
* * * * *
I, too, am a Justice of the Peace. I mention this not as an empty
boast, but in all humility, because my short experience as a
magistrate taught me much. I should like every young man and woman to
go through this experience for a year or two and not wait till they
are sixty and it is too late to become a good citizen. I may say at
once that I was quite useless on the Bench. I have really no head
for business, and am prone to observe only the irrelevant. A candid
friend told me that I had been chosen just “to represent Art and
Letters”, and that _therefore_ only an elegant indolence was expected
of me. Still, I like to remember that I saved a poor Armenian from
a fine. He had somehow muddled his identity card. I felt that all
consideration was due to any one who could speak Armenian, perhaps
the most difficult of all European languages. And then, what about
my own identity card? A very moderate amount of red tape is apt to
make me “see red”, but I can just manage to fill in a passport form
and describe my eyes, my nose, my forehead and my figure generally,
but when the préfecture asks for the birthplace of your maternal
grandfather, what are you to do? If you speak the truth and say you
don’t know and don’t want to, you will be detained at the pleasure of
the Republic, stand for hours in a queue of Polish Jews and get no
lunch. The only sound policy is to write in the name of some obscure
Yorkshire village. As the official will not be able to read, still
less to pronounce it, his official soul will be satisfied. This, I
fancy, was what the Armenian had been after. Anyhow, I got him off.
We had, of course, dull hours--mainly spent in fining undergraduates
for exceeding speed limits. If you have been knocked down twice
yourself, at first you feel a ferocious joy, but vengeance soon
palls. As a rule no attempt was made at defence; the undergraduate
had had his fun and cheerfully paid down his--or rather his
father’s--money in fines of ever-increasing severity. One brighter
spirit, I remember, began a long and laboured defence; it was
couched in a lingo unknown to me, some strange up-to-date slang. I
began eagerly to take valuable linguistic notes. But the presiding
magistrate was a cold insensate man, dead to the charms of language;
he curtly requested the undergraduate to confine his remarks to the
King’s English. The poor boy looked round piteously, said, “Yes, sir;
thank you, sir,” and collapsed.
Many of the charges were for petty thefts. At first this embarrassed
me a good deal. I could not bear to look at the prisoner lest he
should be suffering agonies of shame. I soon found my embarrassment
was needless. Shame is the high prerogative of a sensitive humanity.
These poor creatures were not shameless because they were hardened
criminals; they were just too stupid to feel shame. They were, most
of them, morally half-witted, cases not for the law, but the leech
or the psychologist. One pitiable case I remember of a man more
intelligent but slightly maudlin. We had to examine into his wretched
past. He told us of his hopeless efforts to get work, of occasional
jobs lost through drink, petty thefts and the like. For years he had
drifted lower and lower. “Then”, said he, “came the war. That _was_
a bit of luck. I got a job at once and kept it, and then”, he added
sadly, “came the bluggy Peace and they chucked me.” No criticism,
I am sure, was intended of the high conventions of Versailles, it
was just that he had lost his job. I think all the Bench hung their
heads. This was the world as we, its rulers, had made it.
Let no one think that the English Bench is a place unfit for a
lady. One day it was reported by the constable that the prisoner
had used peculiarly foul language. “What did he say?” asked a
magistrate. “Well, sir, it isn’t hardly fit for me to repeat,” said
the constable. The clerk added that he had had the “language” typed
and a copy would be handed round if the Bench desired. The Bench did
desire, and it was circulated. The unknown to me has always had an
irresistible lure, and all my life I have had a curiosity to know
what really bad language consisted of. In the stables at home I had
heard an occasional “damn” from the lips of a groom, but that was not
very informing. Now was the chance of my life. The paper reached the
old gentleman next me. I had all but stretched out an eager hand.
He bent over me in a fatherly way and said, “I am sure _you_ will
not want to see this.” I was pining to read it, but sixty years of
sex-subservience had done their work. I summoned my last blush, cast
down my eyes and said, “O no! No. Thank you so much.” Elate with
chivalry he bowed and pocketed the script.
I have always known we English were a good-natured, easy-going
people, serenely sure of ourselves, not prone to take offence, but
on the Bench I learnt that we are something a little more. Every
official, from the presiding magistrate to the constable, had for
the prisoner a steady courtesy and a real consideration and even
kindliness. Once only did I hear a barrister begin to bluster a
little and slightly heckle a prisoner, but the feeling of the court
was so manifestly against him that he swiftly collapsed. There was to
be no bullying of the under dog.
* * * * *
But all this is by anticipation. To return to Cheltenham. I had
to face the ordeal of the Matriculation Examination of the London
University, uncheered by “Peveril’s” letter. Examinations were
novelties then. I felt the whole honour of the College was on my
shoulders and I was almost senseless from nervousness. To my dying
day I shall affectionately remember the Registrar of the University.
Before I went in he asked my name. I could not remember it.
Everything had gone blank. He looked at me so kindly and said, “Oh it
is of no consequence, later on perhaps.” And later he came into the
Hall to see how I was getting on. He found me writing merrily.
I carried away from Cheltenham College a dislike for history which
has lasted all my life. Our history lessons consisted mainly in
moralisings on the doings and misdoings of kings and nobles. We
did the Stuart period in tedious detail, and as Miss Beale was
Cromwellian and I, like all children, a passionate Royalist, I was in
a constant state of irritation. There was an odd rule throughout the
College that no girl might buy a book. It sprang from Miss Beale’s
horror of what she called “undigested knowledge”. She need not
have feared with most of us that the amount of knowledge absorbed,
digested or undigested, would have been excessive. I broke the rule
and secretly bought a small life of Archbishop Laud. This I read,
learned, marked and inwardly digested. Later, I again broke the rule
and bought Bryce’s _Holy Roman Empire_. Mr. Bryce was coming to
examine us and I scored handsomely by my perfidy. Normally, what we
had to feed on were the notes we took of lectures; these notes were
carefully corrected and severely commented on. It was a wretched
starvation system, but gave constant practice in composition. For
two things, however, I am thankful to Cheltenham. Arithmetic and
elementary mathematics were admirably taught, and it was a rapture
to me to understand at last why you turned fractions upside down in
division. When I first got possession of an _x_ I felt I had a new
mastery of the world. Only my teachers stopped short too soon--just
where real mathematics began, and when later at Cambridge I heard Mr.
Bertrand Russell discourse on the amazing beauty of mathematics, I
felt like a Peri outside Paradise. I had no mathematical ability.
I never saw the inner necessity of the truths of which I wrote the
proofs with glib understanding, but my teachers might have dragged me
through at least the Calculuses.
But, most of all, I am grateful for my training in elementary
chemistry. We had lectures with experiments, and a few of us were
allowed to go and do analyses of simple substances at the laboratory
of the boys’ college. You watch an experiment, some one pours some
hydrosulphuric acid (I hope it _is_ hydrosulphuric acid, my chemistry
is faded) on some loaf sugar, and in a moment the quiet white sugar
is a seething black volcano. Things are never the same to you again.
You know they _are_ not what they seem; you picture hidden terrific
forces, you can even imagine that the whole solid earth is only such
forces held in momentous balance.
Though I have lived most of my life with educationalists, I have
little interest in education. I dislike schools, both for boys and
girls. A child between the ages of eight and eighteen, the normal
school years, is too young to form a collective opinion, children
only set up foolish savage taboos. I dislike also all plans for
“developing a child’s mind”, and all conscious forms of personal
influence of the younger by the elder. Let children early speak
at least three foreign languages, let them browse freely in a good
library, see all they can of the first-rate in nature, art, and
literature--above all, give them a chance of knowing what science and
scientific method means, and then leave them to sink or swim. Above
all things, do not cultivate in them a taste for literature.
In answer to numerous inquiries, I beg to state that my first
literary effort was a tract entitled “Praying for Rain”. I was in
urgent need of a guinea to subscribe to a portrait of Miss Beale and
I dared not ask for such a sum. I sent my attempt to the Religious
Tract Society and almost by return came back a post-office order
for three guineas. If I had kept to tract-writing, I would not be
the needy woman I still am. I shall never forget the sight of that
delicious thin green paper. It was to me untold wealth, but I was
burdened with a sense of guilt. I dared not tell my father about the
post-office order. He held old-fashioned views as to women earning
money. To do so was to bring disgrace on the men of the family. I
longed to spend the extra two guineas on books, but I dared not. Long
ago I had told a lie and been made to stay at home from Church and
learn by heart the story of Ananias and Sapphira, who _kept back
part of the price_. “The feet of the young men who carried them out”
seemed to be waiting for me, so I offered my holocaust, sent the
whole three guineas to Miss Beale’s portrait, and thereby, I hope,
effaced the blot from the family scutcheon. I always sent a copy of
every book I wrote to my father, and he always acknowledged them in
the same set words: “Thank you for the book you have sent me, your
mother and sisters are well. Your affectionate father.” I am sure he
never read them, and I suspect his feeling towards them was what the
Freudians call _ambivalent_--half shame, half pride. Years after his
death I learnt, and it touched me deeply, that, on the rare occasions
when he left home, he took with him a portmanteau full of my books.
Why? Well, after all, he was a Yorkshireman, it may have been he
wanted a “bit o’ coompany”.
My father was the shyest man I ever knew, and terribly absent-minded.
Legend says that two years after he was married he rode up to
Limber Grange, my maternal grandfather’s house, and asked to see
Miss Elizabeth Nelson. I know myself that if he found unexpected
visitors in the drawing-room, he would give a frightened look round,
shake hands courteously with his embarrassed wife and daughters,
and disappear like a shot deer. In our rambling, uncomfortable old
house he had furnished for himself a Harbour of Refuge, known as his
workroom. It contained countless fishing-rods and a lathe on which he
turned boxes of ebony and ivory. It would have been a bold servant
who would have intruded there; even my stepmother dare not enter
unbidden. My father always said grace before dinner and luncheon,
but was furious when a clerical son-in-law wanted to say it before
breakfast. The form he adopted, and from which nothing could wean
him, was his own: “For what we are about to receive, _may the Lord be
truly thankful_.” My own absences of mind I control severely, but I
have occasional lapses, as when I turned into the trimming of a white
muslin tennis hat three ten pound notes destined to pay my college
fees. Six months later, after much fruitless and anguished searching,
the trimming was unpicked and the notes emerged.
My elder sister was less successful. As a clergyman’s wife, it
was part of her frequent duty to write “characters” for young
parishioners seeking situations. Every college tutor at the end of
the May-term knows the suffering entailed. Any form of literary
composition caused my sister acute agony. One day my niece and
I noticed that she was sitting at her writing-table with the
characteristic hunted look. “I wonder what old Dobbin is up to,”
said my niece. (Old Dobbin was her reverent appellation for a really
adored mother.) “Writing testimonials by the look of her,” said
I. “I’ll go and look,” said my niece. Looking over her mother’s
shoulder, my niece read, “I am seeking a situation for a young cat,
Mr. Velvet Brown (the actual name of my small nephew’s cat, at the
time felt to be superfluous). I can in every way heartily recommend
him; he is a good mouser, affectionate and clean in person and
habits. He has lived for some months in a clergyman’s family.” Here
she paused, pen in air, for inspiration, and was gradually restored
to reality by a prolonged giggle.
I ought, in justice to my sister, to explain that “Mr. Velvet Brown”
played a large part in the home life of the Vicarage, which he never
left till death removed him. He was a cat of great dignity. Tail in
air, he always trotted after my brother-in-law on his parish rounds.
If he was lost the whole house was upset. My small nephew was, after
the fashion of his generation, usually kind and forbearing to his
mother. I remember once she was, I must own, rather “nagging” at him,
and he said to her gently, “There, there, Mother, that will do.” But
when my sister said angrily, “Where on earth has that cat got to?”
he looked at her reprovingly and answered, “Mother, Mr. Velvet Brown
has gone for a stroll; he will be back for supper, and you’d better
keep some fish and a saucer of cream.” One of my most cherished
possessions is a photograph I still have of Mr. Velvet Brown. He is
taken standing on his hind-legs with his right paw uplifted. This
was supposed to be my brother-in-law’s favourite pulpit attitude.
But, alas! Mr. Velvet Brown was not what the French call “un chat
sérieux”, and one evening he went out to return no more. It was this
absence of mind in my sister and not, as I then stupidly thought,
lack of brains that made her construing of Latin sometimes fail to
carry conviction. I can hear her musical voice now, as she stumbled
through the dreary waste of a Latin exercise book. “The sharp horse
was pricking on the idle spur.” Her wits were always wool-gathering
like my father’s, and here was no wool to gather. I would not “put it
past” her now to assert that “the wall was building up Balbus”.
My father left Yorkshire because of the threatened approach within
a mile of our house of a small branch railway, connecting Scarbro’
and Whitby. He feared it would bring with it tourists, char-à-bancs,
gas lighting, and all the pollution of villadom. I think he was
unduly anxious. We left, but about ten years later I came back on a
visit to friends. I had occasion to go down to the little moorland
station to fetch a parcel of books. The tiny train came puffing up,
stopped; the guard’s van opened and some parcels were flung out.
Then forth stepped the single passenger, a great grey sheep-dog,
respectfully met by the station-master. Yorkshire is a Paradise for
dogs, specially sporting dogs. I have seen them crowding the platform
at York station about the Twelfth of August, waited on assiduously by
eager porters while their masters went neglected. But all dogs are
treated with due respect. I was once privileged to attend a huge St.
Bernard on his way home from Yorkshire. My friend and I travelled
first-class in honour of our great companion. The guard looked at
the three of us, grinned, and said, “Happen t’awd dog ud liever not
travel wi’ strangers.” He clapped an “Engaged” on the carriage and
was gone, never waiting for or, I am sure, thinking of a tip.
CHAPTER II
CAMBRIDGE AND LONDON
At Cambridge great men and women began to come into my life. Women’s
colleges were a novelty, and distinguished visitors were brought
to see us as one of the sights. Turgenev came, and I was told off
to show him round. It was a golden opportunity. Dare I ask him to
speak just a word or two of Russian? He looked such a kind old
snow-white Lion. Alas! he spoke fluent English; it was a grievous
disappointment. Then Ruskin came. I showed him our small library. He
looked at it with disapproving eyes. “Each book”, he said gravely,
“that a young girl touches should be bound in white vellum.” I
thought with horror of the red moroccos and Spanish leather that had
been my choice. A few weeks later the old humbug sent us his own
works bound in dark blue calf! Then came Mr. Gladstone. His daughter
Helen was a college friend of mine, or rather, more exactly, a
friendly enemy. We fought about everything, and had not an idea in
common. She was the most breezy, boisterous creature possible; we
called her Boreas, for she had a habit of picking her friends up and
running with them the length of the corridors. She was a thorough
Lyttelton, without a trace of her father, whom she adored. I was a
rigid Tory in those days, and I resolutely refused to join the mob of
students in cheering and clapping the Grand Old Man on his arrival.
I shut myself up in my room. Thither--to tease me--she brought him.
He sat down and asked me who was my favourite Greek author. Tact
counselled Homer, but I was perverse and not quite truthful, so I
said “Euripides.” Æschylus would have been creditable, Sophocles
respectable, but the sceptic Euripides! It was too much, and with a
few words of warning he withdrew. And then last, but oh, so utterly
first, came George Eliot. It was in the days when her cult was at
its height--thank heaven I never left her shrine!--and we used to
wait outside Macmillan’s shop to seize the new instalments of _Daniel
Deronda_. She came for a few minutes to my room, and I was almost
senseless with excitement. I had just repapered my room with the
newest thing in dolorous Morris papers. Some one must have called her
attention to it, for I remember that she said in her shy, impressive
way, “Your paper makes a beautiful background for your face.” The
ecstasy was too much, and I knew no more. Later, in London, I met, of
course, many eminent men, but there never came again a moment like
that. Browning was only to me a cheerful, amusing gossip. Herbert
Spencer took me in to dinner once, but he would discuss the Athenæum
cook, and on that subject he found me ill-informed. Pater and his
sisters were good, and opened their house to me; I always think of
him as a soft, kind cat; he purred so persuasively that I lost the
sense of what he was saying. At his house I often met Henry James.
I liked to watch that ingenious spider weaving his webs, but to me
he had no appeal. Miss Bosanquet’s recent delightful _Henry James at
Work_ has made me realise what I lost.
[Illustration: JANE HARRISON (aged twenty-five).
_To face page 45._
]
Tennyson’s daughter-in-law, Mrs. Lionel Tennyson, later Mrs.
Augustine Birrell, was among my closest friends. She took me to stay
with the great man. He met us at the station, grunting fiercely that
he “was not going to dress for dinner because I had come.” It was
rather frightening, but absurd. The vain old thing (he was the most
openly vain man I ever met) knew quite well that he looked his best
in his ample poet’s cloak. It is a rare and austere charm that gains
by evening dress. He was very kind to me according to his rather
fierce lights; he took me a long, memorable Sunday morning walk,
recited “Maud” to me, and countless other things. It was an anxious
joy; he often forgot his own poems and was obviously annoyed if I
could not supply the words. He would stop suddenly and ask angrily:
“Do you think Browning could have written that line? Do you think
Swinburne could?” I could truthfully answer, “Impossible.” If he
posed a good deal, he was scarcely to blame; the house was so charged
with an atmosphere of hero-worship that free breathing was difficult.
Tennyson remains to me a great poet, and I am proud to have known
him. When I hear young reactionaries say he is no poet at all, I
think them simply silly. He was intensely English, and therefore not
at his best as a conscious thinker; but he felt soundly, and his
mastery of language was superb. While the English language is, such
poems as “In Memoriam”, “The Lotus-Eaters”, “Ulysses”, “Crossing the
Bar” must live. Of very great artists there were, in England, none
to know. But I learnt much from the young school of Impressionists
then fighting their way to recognition. Burne-Jones too was kind to
me; he used often to come and sit with me, turning over drawings of
Greek vases with eager, delighted fingers. Sometimes I sat with him
as he drew his strange visions; often a silent, decorative cat sat on
his shoulder. He wrote me many letters with whimsical illustrative
drawings. I am sorry now that I tore them up. The people I most
longed after, Christina Rossetti and Swinburne, were not diners-out,
and I never knew them. The men and women who influenced me most--my
real friends--are living still. Of them I may not write.
One dear, dead woman remains--Miss Thackeray, who later married
Richmond Ritchie, the brother of a college friend. I met her first
at Eton, and I like to think she took a fancy to me, for she asked
me down to Chiswick to see her. She suggested an afternoon, at five,
and at five I presented myself. She received me with open arms, and
hospitably put her hand on a small black satin bag in which I carried
my book for the train. “Let Susan take your luggage upstairs,”
she said. “Come and have tea.” I clung to the said “luggage”, and
explained that she had not asked me to stay the night. “Oh, but I
want you to stay a long, long time.” Why, oh why, did I not stay?
Was it that I shrank from breaking a dinner engagement, or was it a
snobbish fear that Susan, as she unpacked my “luggage”, might think
a copy of Christina Rossetti’s poems inadequate night-gear? I lost
my opportunity, she never asked me again. I met her soon after,
crossing Kensington Square; she shook hands, but seemed excited
and _affairée_. “I mustn’t stop; some friends--some dear, dear
friends--are coming to dinner, and I have promised to get them an
egg.” And she was gone to the High Street. She never, I think, had
her delicate feet quite on the ground. I have often been sorry that I
did not keep _Punch’s_ fine parody of her novels. It ended thus: “A
kind hand was outstretched to help me. Two kind hands. I never knew
which I took.”
* * * * *
Walter Raleigh was an early friend, he and his delightful mother and
sisters. I remember we were all sitting round the fire after dinner
one night, and Walter was reading out some of his verses. One poem
was about the on-coming of Night and contained the line:
And God leads round His starry Bear.
“How beautiful!” I murmured fatuously (my friends tell me that at any
mention of a bear I am apt to get maudlin). “Walter,” said his mother
fiercely, “how dare you be so blasphemous! God doesn’t lead round
bears.” “Well, mother,” said Walter, “it’s your fault; you always
used to tell us when we were children that God guided the stars in
their paths, and”, looking at me, “I learnt it all at my mother’s
knee.” “I am sure your father wouldn’t have liked it,” continued
his mother. At this appeal to his filial piety Walter, of course,
collapsed, but he told me afterwards, in private, that he was sure
his father would have liked the line about the Bear, and that he
should keep it in. Dr. Raleigh, it seems, held unusually wide views
for a Congregationalist minister. Mrs. Raleigh was always called in
her family “Mrs. Fox”, because of the unexpected whiskings of her
mind. When the British Government broke out into a sort of epidemic
of title-giving, confounding gentlemen and scholars with lord mayors
and profiteers, Walter was of course knighted. I had scarcely a
friend left who was not so mishandled. His family were amused and
rather disgusted, but Walter himself was simply delighted and played
with his absurd title like a toy. Smart ladies began to take him up
and pet him, and his sisters called him “the duchesses’ darling”,
but he just genuinely enjoyed it all. He was the one plain son in a
family of extraordinarily handsome daughters, all “variations”, as
some one said, “of a beautiful theme”. But though he was plain to
uncouthness as a young man, all through his life some unseen inner
spirit was at work, chiselling his face, and, before he died, he was
beautiful. He was the best talker I ever knew, and a quite inspired
lecturer. The views he tenaciously held were reactionary and, to my
mind, preposterous. We wrangled ceaselessly. He paid, alas, for his
fantastic militarism with his life.
* * * * *
In those days I met many specimens of a class of Victorian who, if
not exactly distinguished, were at least distinctive and are, I
think, all but extinct--British Lions and Lionesses. The Lionesses
first--that was the name we gave them at Newnham. They were all
spinsters, well-born, well-bred, well-educated and well off. They
attended my lectures on Greek Art. Greek Art was at that time booming
and was eminently respectable. At home they gardened a great deal;
they, most of them, had country houses. Their gardens were a terror
to me, for I never could remember the names of the plants with slips
attached to them, and to blunder over a plant’s name was as bad to a
Lioness as a false quantity. They kept diaries in which they entered
accurately the state of the weather on each day. If they lived in
London they promoted Friendly Girls and Workhouse Nursing. Above all,
they kept a vigilant eye on the shortcomings of local officials;
they frequently wrote to the _Times_, heading their letters: “_Re_
Mud and Slush”. In the spring and early summer they went to Italy,
accompanied usually by “a young relative”, whose expenses they paid;
they voyaged mainly to Rome and Florence, but the more adventurous
went to Assisi. Attired in mushroom hats, veils and dust cloaks,
they sketched a great deal. The subject of their sketches was always
recognisable--ruined towers and church porches. The ordinary man was
to them negligible, but they spoke of their own male relatives with
respect and frequently quoted the opinions of “my uncle, the Dean”,
or “my cousin, the Archdeacon”. They were a fine upstanding breed,
and I miss them. They had no unsatisfied longings, had never heard of
“suppressed complexes”, and lived happily their vigorous, if somewhat
angular, lives.
Their counterparts were the British Lions. Of them, naturally, I
knew less. Real intimacy between the two genders was not in those
days usual, but I watched them with delight from afar. You could
always count on them to roar suitably. I worked for some time on the
Council of the Girls’ Public Day School Company, which was largely
manned by British Lions, and I was privileged to go with them to
preside at local prize-givings. They made speeches and I held a
large and agonising bouquet. The sentiments of these speeches were
on well-established lines, and always, always, at the end came the
inevitable:
A perfect woman, nobly planned
To warn, to comfort, and command.
I thought at one time of offering a small prize of half-a-crown to
any Lion who would resist that temptation. A little later I worked
on the Council of the Classical Association. There I might safely
have raised the prize to five shillings. There lived no Lion who
could end his address without telling you that it was the writing
of Latin Prose that had made him what he was! Am I indiscreet if I
mention that I was yachting once with a British Lion? He was oldish
and had a deck-cabin. I happened to look in in passing. On the table
lay a Bible, on the Bible a tooth-brush. Cleanliness was “next to
godliness”. Oh England--my England!
* * * * *
It was about then that I began lecturing on Greek Art at boys’
schools. Archdeacon Wilson first asked me to Clifton; he told
me afterwards that he had not dared to tell his Council that the
lecturer was a woman till all was over. Later I learnt that among
my audience had been no less persons than Dr. MacTaggart and Roger
Fry, and that they had deigned to discuss my lecture. Then Mr. Warre
Cornish, always the kindest of friends, asked me to Eton. I do not
suppose the lectures did any good, but they amused the boys. One of
the masters asked a very small Winchester “man” if he had liked the
lecture. “Not the lecture,” he said candidly, “but I liked the lady;
she was like a beautiful green beetle.” In those days one’s evening
gowns were apt to be covered with spangles, and mine of blue-green
satin had caught the light of the magic-lantern. A young prig, who
bore an honoured name, was introduced to me at Eton; he wrote me next
day a patronising letter of thanks, in which he said he hoped to go
on with archæology, as he was going up to Oxford to “do Grates”.
Alas! he never _did_ anything half so useful. My youngest brother
was at Harrow; he wrote to me to say he had heard I was lecturing
at Eton. It didn’t matter, apparently, what I did at that benighted
place, but he “did hope I wasn’t coming lecturing at Harrow, as it
would make it very awkward for him with the other fellows.” I saw
his position and respected it.
[Illustration: JANE HARRISON (aged thirty-three).
_To face page 54._
]
* * * * *
Then there was the actual Cambridge Academic circle--a brilliant
circle, it seems to me, looking back. Cambridge society was then
small enough to be one, and there were endless small, but not
informal, dinner-parties. The order of University precedence was
always strictly observed. Henry Sidgwick was the centre, and with him
his two most intimate friends, Frederick Myers and Edmund Gurney.
Frederick Myers rang, perhaps, the most sonorously of all, but to me
he always rang a little false. Edmund Gurney was, I think, the most
lovable and beautiful human being I ever met. This was the Psychical
Research circle; their quest, scientific proof of immortality. To
put it thus seems almost grotesque now; then it was inspiring. About
this nucleus from a wider world ranged Balfours, Jebbs, and later
rose a younger generation--the three Darwin sons, the Verralls,
husband and wife, both my closest friends; Robert Neil of Pembroke,
whose sympathetic Scotch silences made the dreariest gathering burn
and glow; the George Protheros, Frederick Maitland, whose daughter,
Fredegond Shove, is now the sweetest of our lyrical singers. And in
the midst of them Mrs. Henry Sidgwick (the younger Miss Balfour)
shone like a star. She had none of her husband’s or her brother’s
social gifts, yet in any society she shone with a sort of lambent
light. When we took her for our Principal, I am afraid science lost
a fine researcher. Still, she had a perfect passion for accounts.
“Why need I dress for dinner,” she said to me plaintively, “when I
might be getting on with these?” touching her account-books tenderly.
She was meticulously true. We were talking once in Hall of the odd
lingo that shops and business invent, “haberdashery”, “hosiery”,
etc.--words unknown to the outside world. I cited, “_Alight_ here for
the Albert Memorial”. Whoever says “alight”? “I always say ‘alight’,”
remarked Mrs. Sidgwick; “it’s a very good word.” “Forgive me,” said
I “I’m quite sure you don’t.” A few minutes later she joined me in
the corridor. “You are quite right,” she said; “I find I don’t say
‘alight’ but”, cautiously, “I think I always shall now.” I do hope
she does! Another time I was holding forth on the supreme importance
of classics in education. “Don’t you think”, she said, “you a little
confuse between the importance of your subject and the extraordinary
delight you manage to extract from it?” That was well observed.
Her great truthfulness made her very naïve; she walked through a
vulgar and wicked world in perpetual blinkers. Though her austerity
of dress and manners always made me feel a vulgarian, how I adored
her! how she made me laugh! I never told my love, and, alas! on
college politics I had almost always to oppose her. Sheltered by the
publicity of _The Nation_ I tell it now. Why is it that those we most
adore most move us to mirth? As soon as we laugh at a person we begin
a little to love them.
One scientific friend, Francis Darwin, had lasting influence on me.
Classics he regarded with a suspicious eye, but he was kind to me.
One day he found me busy writing an article on the “Mystica vannus
Iacchi”. “I must get it off to-night,” I said industriously. “What
is a _vannus_?” he asked. “Oh, a ‘fan’,” I said; “it was a mystical
object used in ceremonies of initiation.” “Yes, but Virgil says
it is an agricultural implement. Have you ever seen one?” “No,”
I confessed. “_And you are writing about a thing you have never
seen_,” groaned my friend. “Oh, you classical people!” It did not end
there. He interviewed farmers--no result; he wrote to agricultural
institutes abroad, and, finally, in remote provincial France,
unearthed a mystic “fan” still in use, and had it despatched to
Cambridge. Luckily he also found that his old gardener was perhaps
the last man in England who could use the obsolete implement. On
his lawn were to be seen a gathering of learned scholars trying,
and failing, to winnow with the _vannus_. Its odd shape explained
all its uses, mystic and otherwise. Three months later I despatched
a paper to the _Hellenic Journal_ on what I _had_ seen and _did_
understand. It was a lifelong lesson to me. It was not quite all my
fault. I had been reared in a school that thought it was far more
important to parse a word than to understand it. I had myself, as a
student, eagerly asked why the _vannus_ was mystic, and the answer
had been, “You have construed the passage correctly; that will do for
the present.” And as my “coach” closed his Virgil, he remarked sadly,
“Bad sport in subjunctives to-day.” Such training was perhaps the
best possible for my always flighty mind.
* * * * *
The last distinguished person whom I helped to entertain years later,
at Newnham, was the Crown Prince of Japan. If you must curtsey
to a man young enough to be your grandson, it is at least some
consolation to know that he believes himself to be God. It was that
which interested me. I found in the Prince a strange charm. He was
intensely quiet and had about him a sort of serenity and security
that really seemed divine. Japanese is one of the few languages
which contain the hard _i_. All Indo-European languages have lost
it, except Russian, though a Russian told me that he had heard the
exact sound from the lips of a cockney newspaper boy pronouncing
“Piccad_i_lly”. The Prince was good enough to say his own royal name
to me two or three times, but alas! I forgot it.
My lot has not lain in the courts of kings, but one royal lady,
the Empress Frederick, was very gracious to me, and I am proud to
remember her goodness. The Empress sent for me to tell her about
some German excavations of Greek theatres, and to explain the new
theory started by Dörpfeld as to the Greek stage. Hers was almost the
saddest face I have ever seen, but she had the real sacred hunger for
knowledge, and I am sure, had fate not broken her wings and caged
her in a palace, she would have flown high. We were in the middle of
eager talk when a servant came in and said the Prince of Wales (King
Edward) wanted to see her. So little was I used to royal etiquette
(which for the subject is simply the etiquette of servants) that I
all but committed a _gaffe_ by getting up to release her;--she saved
me by shaking her head impatiently at the servant and saying “No,
no,” and turning to me, “Go on, go on, I must know.” My future King
had a good long wait. I saw the Empress again and again, and learnt
to love her. But, oh how glad I was when I heard she was safely dead,
dead and, though I could not know that then, spared the torture of
the war. She bade me, when I next went to Greece, go and see her
daughter, the Crown Princess of Greece. Of course I had to go, but
I was sorry I went. The daughter was as common as the mother was
distinguished. She had a bad Board-School accent and used slang. She
did not really care about Greek things at all, but talked loudly
about “our Waldstein who has made awfully jolly excavations”. She
bored me as much as I bored her. Every one ought to see a little
of royalties. It is so humbling and at first irritating to have to
behave like a servant, and it makes you understand how servants
really must feel.
* * * * *
Interviewers--after the first moment of excited importance--are not
an interesting tribe, but one of them comes back to me with a whiff
of fragrance, an American lady from the Middle West. A little old
lady she was, with white curls and a Quaker bonnet, and romance in
her heart. She brought a letter of introduction and asked if I would
visit her in her Bloomsbury lodgings. I found her there at eleven in
the morning with a dainty tea-tray before her; she must have spread
it with her own hands; no Bloomsbury landlady was capable of it.
She had heard, she said, that we English ladies liked to drink a
cup of tea at eleven. She must have heard it below stairs. And then
began the interview. She had been told that I was a great authority
on Greek vases, would I give her my idea on “their place in modern
education”. I began to stumble out a few platitudes. She interrupted
me with, “You’ll excuse me, Miss Harrison, but you’re dropping pearls
and diamonds from your mouth, and I must get out my pencil and
notebook.” Then, then at last, out came the romance; she herself was
a “school teacher”; she had saved up her money to come to Europe, not
to see Europe but to--write a book on Greek Art! Of Greek and Greek
Art she knew nothing, but, pencil in hand, she was travelling round
to the museums of Europe to learn, and then, O joy! to write: the
gallantry and the innocence of it! I don’t know if that strangely
compounded book ever saw the light. It may be death found her before
she reached her Happy Isles, but she had the spirit of Ulysses.
Before she left she asked, “Did I know Mr. Andrew Lang?” She had
a letter to him. “But”, she said sadly, “my mind misgives me, Miss
Harrison, that Mr. Andrew Lang is not an earnest seeker after truth.”
And that reminds me of my first meeting with “Andrew of the brindled
hair”, at a dinner-party. Our hostess brought him up to me and, with
a misguided desire to be pleasant, said, “You know Miss Harrison,
and I am sure you have read her delightful books.” “Don’t know Miss
Harrison,” muttered Andrew, “never read her delightful books, don’t
want to,” etc. (Oh, Andrew, and you had reviewed those “delightful
books” not too delightedly!) “Come, Mr. Lang,” I said, “we’re both
hungry, and I promise not to say a single word to you. Be a man.”
Alas! I broke my word. It was an enchanting dinner.
CHAPTER III
GREECE AND RUSSIA
All through my London life (fifteen years) I lectured there and
in the provinces. Being one of a family of twelve, my fortune was
slender, and social life is costly. I regret those lecturing years. I
was voluble and had instant success, but it was mentally demoralising
and very exhausting. Though I was almost fatally fluent, I could
never face a big audience without a sinking in the pit of what is
now called the _solar plexus_. Moreover, I was lecturing on art, a
subject for which I had no natural gifts. My reactions to art are,
I think, always second-hand; hence, about art, I am docile and open
to persuasion. In literature I am absolutely sure of my own tastes,
and a whole Bench of Bishops could not alter my convictions. Happily,
however, bit by bit, art and archæology led to mythology, mythology
merged in religion; there I was at home. All through my London life I
worked very hard--but, no! I remember that Professor Gilbert Murray
once told me that I had never done an hour’s really hard work in my
life. I think he forgets that I have learnt the Russian declensions,
which is more than he ever did. But I believe he is right. He mostly
is. I never work in the sense of attacking a subject against the
grain, tooth and nail. The kingdom of heaven from me “suffereth no
violence”. The Russian verb “to learn” takes the dative, which seems
odd till you find out that it is from the same root as “to get used
to”. When you learn you “get yourself used to” a thing. That is
worth a whole treatise of pedagogy. And it explained to me my own
processes. One reads round a subject, soaks oneself in it, and then
one’s personal responsibility is over; something stirs and ferments,
swims up into your consciousness, and you know you have to write a
book. That may not be “hard work”, but let me tell Professor Murray
it is painfully and pleasantly like it in its results; it leaves you
spent, washed out, a rag, but an exultant rag.
* * * * *
My London life was happily broken by much going abroad. All my
archæology was taught me by Germans. The great Ernst Curtius, of
Olympian fame, took me round the museums of Berlin. Heinrich Brunn
came to see me in my lodgings at Munich, where I was thriftily living
on four marks a day. I remember his first visit--a knock, a huge
figure looming in the doorway, a benevolent, bearded, spectacled
face, and he presented himself with the words, “Brunn bin Ich”.
Dörpfeld was my most honoured master--we always called him “Avtos”.
He let me go with him on his _Peloponnesos Reise_ and his _Insel
Reise_. They were marvels of organisation, and the man himself was
a miracle. He would hold us spellbound for a six hours’ peripatetic
lecture, only broken by an interval of ten minutes to partake of a
goat’s-flesh sandwich and _etwas frisches Bier_. Once I saw, to my
sorrow, three Englishmen tailing away after the _frisches Bier_. I
was more grieved than surprised. They were Oxford men--the (then)
Provost of Oriel, the Principal of Brasenose and an eminent fellow of
Balliol. It was worth many hardships to see forty German professors
try to mount forty recalcitrant mules. My own horsemanship, as
already hinted, is nothing to “write home about”, but compared to
those German professors I am a centaur. How it all comes back to me,
for only last month, to my great joy, I met the grandson of Ernst
Curtius, Professor Robert Ernst Curtius, a worthy descendant.
Greece in those days held many adventures. To one of these I still
look back with poignant shame for my own bad manners. We arrived
at Vurkano, just as the monastery gates were closing, and were
hospitably received. The Hegoumenos led me into supper, placed me
by his side, and fed me with titbits from his own plate. The Greek
clergy, even the monks who may not marry, are quite simple and
friendly to women. After the Roman attitude, it is refreshing to be
accepted as a man and a brother--if a weaker one--and not looked
at with sour eyes as an incarnate snare. I remember at Tinos I was
watching the procession of the miraculous Eikon; the priest carrying
the Eikon saw that I was the only West-European woman struggling
in a throng of men, and sent a young priest to fetch me to walk by
his side. There I could safely watch all that went on, the bowings,
the kissings of the Eikon, and the priests’ splendid vestments,
the cures. But to return to my Hegoumenos. After supper he said he
had a question to ask me. He had heard that rich Englishmen had
in their mouths “stranger” (or “guest”) teeth made of gold, and
which moved. Was it true? It was. Had I in my mouth by any chance
a stranger tooth? I had, I owned, one, but in the best Oriental
fashion I deprecated any mention of it. It was but a poor thing,
made not of gold, but of an elephant’s tusk. Did I ever take it out?
Yes. When? “Oh,” nervously, “only very early in the morning.” After
a short sleep--sleep in a Greek monastery is rarely for long--I
woke. The Hegoumenos was seated at my bed-head telling his beads
and ... watching. Oh, why, why did I not take out that “stranger”
tooth? I might so easily have made a good man happy. The Graiæ
themselves pointed the way. But I was young, and youth is vain and
cruel. He was too polite to press the matter, and withdrew himself,
slowly and sadly. In about ten minutes he was back, his face dark
with anger. A terrible scandal had arisen in the monastery, its
sanctity was outraged; we must leave at once. For one bad moment I
feared that the scandal was my wholly unchaperoned state. No such
thing. With a Greek _the_ great impropriety for a woman is to travel
alone and unprotected. What had happened was this. The friend with
whom I was travelling, after a feverish night spent in wrestling
with the hosts of Midian, had gone out to get cool, seen a pump
in the monastery courtyard, and incontinently proceeded to have a
much-needed shower-bath. The news flew like wildfire through the
Brotherhood, and the Hegoumenos was summoned to purge the outrage.
I ruthlessly sacrificed my kind protector. The “Lord”, I said, was
young and ignorant; he knew no Greek letters (a gross libel); he
had been born and reared not in Christian England, but in a strange
barbarian hyperborean land, where raiment was scanty and Christian
modesty unknown. Would His Reverence pardon the young man and teach
him better? Fired with missionary zeal, the Hegoumenos sent for the
“Lord”, and finding him dumb, pointed to a place about an inch above
his wrists, told him that thus far, without danger to his soul,
could a Christian man wash himself. The “Lord” was heard to mutter
to himself words to the effect that he would “jolly well like to put
the Hegoumenos under his own pump”. This I hastily translated into
a solemn promise that while life lasted the “Lord”, by the heads of
his fathers, would never exceed the limit. The crisis passed. When we
left next morning we gave more than the wonted largesse in the hope
of atoning for the bath. But the outraged saint was far too fine a
Christian and a gentleman to be won by money. The adieus were frigid.
We left under a cloud. At parting I gave him my photograph. He placed
it below the Eikon of the Virgin and solemnly commended me to her
protection against the spiritual dangers to which I was so obviously
exposed.
Long after, I visited Mount Athos. Of course, as a woman I could
not set foot on the sacred promontory. My friends started off elate
in the early morning, to visit the monasteries. Mr. Logan Pearsall
Smith, I remember, proudly led the way. We mere women were left
behind on the yacht disconsolate. They came back in the evening after
the usual Pauline adventures in baskets, and with them came some
Mount Athos monks to see the ship and the women, and sell rosaries,
etc. One of the monks--a Russian, I think, for I could not understand
his Greek, gave me a sheet of letter-paper with, for heading, a
brightly coloured picture of the Mountain Mother issuing from Mount
Athos. He pointed to the picture and then to me, and then to the
mountain, as though he would say: Well, we’ve smuggled in one woman
anyhow. It was wonderful to find the Great Mother here in her own
Thrace, and worshipped still not by women but by her own celibate
priests, the Kouretes.
The British Legation, at Athens, kept open house, and in those days
the cheery young men who dwelt there made it a pleasant place. It
was the proud boast of some of them that they had never been up to
the Acropolis, and that they only knew one word of modern Greek and
that was _sitheróthromos_, the Greek for railway station, by means
of which they hoped shortly to make their escape. They pretended, of
course, that they were frightened to death of me because of my Greek,
and that they dare not ask me to dance. They maligned themselves;
they feared nothing in the world except that they might have to apply
their minds to something sometime. They might have said with Punch’s
malingering marine, “Well sir, it’s this way with me. I eats well and
I sleeps well, but when I sees a bit o’ work, I’s all of a tremble.”
At Athens I met Samuel Butler. We were in the same hotel; he saw me
dining alone and kindly crossed over to ask if he might join me. Of
course I was delighted and looked forward to pleasant talks, but,
alas! he wanted me only as a safety-valve for his theory on the
woman-authorship of the Odyssey, and the buzzing of that crazy bee
drowned all rational conversation.
The first time I went to Athens I had the luck to make a small
archæological discovery. I was turning over the fragments in
the Acropolis Museum, then little more than a lumber-room. In a
rubbish pile in the corner, to my great happiness, I lighted on
the small stone figure of a bear. The furry hind paw was sticking
out and caught my eye. I immediately had her--it was manifestly a
she-bear--brought out and honourably placed. She must have been set
up originally in the precinct of Artemis Brauronia. Within this
precinct, year by year, went on the _arkteia_ or bear-service. No
well-born Athenian would marry a girl unless she had accomplished her
_bear-service_, unless she was, in a word, _confirmed_ to Artemis.
In the _Lysistrata_ of Aristophanes the chorus of women chant of the
benefits they have received from the state, and the sacred acts they
had accomplished before they came to maturity, and say, “I, wearing
a saffron robe, was a bear at the Brauronian festival.” Always these
well-born, well-bred little Athenian girls must, to the end of their
days, have thought reverently of the Great She-Bear. Among the
Apaches to-day, we are told, only ill-bred Americans or Europeans
who have never had any “raising” would think of speaking of the Bear
without his reverential prefix of “Ostin”, meaning “Old One”, the
equivalent of the Roman senator.
* * * * *
Crete I visited again and again, and to Crete I owe the impulse to
my two most serious books, the _Prolegomena to the Study of Greek
Religion_ and _Themis_. Somewhere about the turn of the century
there had come to light in the palace of Cnossos a clay sealing
which was a veritable little manual of primitive Cretan faith and
ritual. I shall never forget the moment when Mr. Arthur Evans first
showed it me. It seemed too good to be true. It represented the
Great Mother standing on her own mountain with her attendant lions,
and before her a worshipper in ecstasy. At her side, a shrine with
“horns of consecration”. And another sealing read the riddle of
the horns. The Minotaur is seated on the royal throne, and the
Minotaur is none other than the human King--God wearing the mask
of a bull. Here was this ancient ritual of the Mother and the Son
which long preceded the worship of the Olympians: here were the true
_Prolegomena_. Then when, some years later, I again visited Crete, I
met with the sequel that gave me the impulse to _Themis_, the _Hymn
of the Kouretes_ found in the temple of Diktaean Zeus. Here we have
embodied the magical rite of the Mother and the Son, the induction
of the Year-Spirit who long preceded the worship of the Father. My
third book on Greek religion, the _Epilegomena_, is, in the main, a
résumé of the two first, and an attempt to relate them to our modern
religious outlook. I should like to apologise here for the clumsy
and pedantic titles _Prolegomena_ and _Epilegomena_, but they really
express the relation of the two books to my central work--_Themis_.
* * * * *
Copenhagen possesses a small but valuable collection of vases, and I
had long planned to go there. I was delighted when a friend offered
to take me in his yacht. My childhood having been passed between sea
and moor, I have always had a passion for the sea and for sailing;
but I am a wretched sailor, and the friends who are kind enough to
take me on their yachts have always cause for repentance. The voyage
began with disaster. In the North Sea we met bad weather, and the
vessel, a yawl of only 20 tons, was in some danger. When she got back
to dock at Cowes, they told us it was a wonder we had not all gone
to the bottom. The last thing I remember was crawling on deck and
seeing above me waves mountain high that seemed as if they must fall
and swallow us. Then I suppose I lost consciousness, for I woke--as
I thought--in heaven, in utter bliss. Round me were kneeling angels
in blue gowns and white caps with streamers. Under stress of weather
we had put in at Heligoland, and they had landed me in a boat and,
every hand being needed aboard, had left me lying on the shore,
and the women of Heligoland crowded to see me. I suppose it was the
relief from the heaving sea, but I knew then the extreme of physical
rapture after physical anguish. We were weather-bound for a couple
of days and then made our way into the Eider Canal, where all was
peace. Arguing on philosophy all day long, for my host was a hard
thinker as well as a bold and skilful seaman, we drifted through
long lines of one-legged storks and into the Baltic, with its fiords
and its beech trees, with their branches dipping into the water. The
Baltic is a “short” unpleasant sea, but I remember with pride that
I recovered sufficiently to steer the yacht into Copenhagen. There
I learnt what honesty is. The keeper of the Museum met me the first
day, but the second he was engaged. He left me a huge bunch of keys
and the freedom of the place. I had the yacht’s boat in the canal at
the Museum door and could easily have looted the whole place. But it
seems, among the hardy Norsemen, these things simply are not done.
Yet in my own England, at the British Museum, when I am at work a
member of the staff never leaves me. Ostensibly he is there to help
me, but really as policeman. I remember Sir Francis Darwin telling me
that in Stockholm he and a Swedish friend were crossing a bridge
and they saw a gold watch lying on the pavement. Sir Francis stooped
to pick it up and said: “I suppose we must take it to the police.”
“Oh no,” said the Swede, “just put it on the parapet, where it will
be safe; the man who lost it is sure to come back.” I fancy if you
left a gold watch on the parapet of London Bridge it would not wait
long for its owner; yet we English are supposed to be an honest
people.
[Illustration: JANE HARRISON AND HOPE MIRRLEES.
_To face page 90._
]
Stockholm, whither I went to see the great prehistoric museum, was a
sad disappointment. I had heard it called the “Venice of the North”.
It is common to the verge of squalor. It contains one beautiful
building, the architect of which was a Frenchman. I have come to
realise that many people, if they see water and some islands or a
lake, feel that it must be beautiful. In the same way they find
mountains always beautiful and inspiring. The Matterhorn is, to me,
one of the ugliest objects in all nature, like nothing on earth but a
colossal extracted fang turned upside down, but all the same, every
night during the season, the terrace of the Riffel Alp’s Hotel is
crowded with archdeacons gazing raptly at the Matterhorn and praising
God for the beauties of His handiwork.
To Petersburg I journeyed solely and simply to study the Kertsch
antiquities in the Hermitage. I knew no word of Russian, and cared
nothing then for Russia; my eyes were blinded for the moment by
the “glory that was Greece”. I had taken letters from the British
Museum, and was at once shown into a gorgeous room in which sat a
still more gorgeous official, smoking cigarettes. He was all courtesy
and kindness--what could he do for me? Did I know So-and-so? Had I
seen this and that?--but no mention of Kertsch. I am now convinced
that, though he must have known the name, he had no notion of its
archæological significance, nor even that it had been an Athenian
colony. At last, timidly, I tried to state my business. Could I
have the vases out of their cases, and was there yet any material
unpublished by Stephani that I could have access to? He looked rather
blank, and then with a sort of twinkle in his deep-set eyes said
if there was anything about social matters or the court in which
he could help me, would I command him; but as for these learned
matters, would I pardon him if he referred me to the gentleman who
was good enough to act as his brains. Here he significantly touched
his handsome empty head. He took me to a distant room where a shabby
German Pole was at work, surrounded by papers and potsherds. He
proved an efficient specialist. I saw my noble backwoodsman no
more--no doubt he was gladly rid of the “mad Englishwoman”. I
couldn’t help liking the friendly creature; he had the simple,
perfect manners of which Russians hold the secret. But in those
days I was a ferocious moralist, and his quite open and shameless
inadequacy made a premature Bolshevist of me. But oh, what a fool,
what an idiot I was to leave Russia without knowing it! I might so
easily have made the pilgrimage to Tolstoy; I might even have seen
Dostoevsky. It has been all my life my besetting sin that I could
only see one thing at a time. I was blinded by over-focus. I am
bitterly, eternally punished. Never now shall I see Moscow and Kiev,
cities of my dreams.
Literally of my dreams. Twice only in my life have I dreamt a
significant dream. This is one. One night soon after the Russian
revolution I dreamt I was in a great, ancient forest--what in Russian
would be called “a dreaming wood”. In it was cleared a round space,
and the space was crowded with huge bears softly dancing. I somehow
knew that I had come to teach them to dance the Grand Chain in the
Lancers, a square dance now obsolete. I was not the least afraid,
only very glad and proud. I went up and began trying to make them
join hands and form a circle. It was no good. I tried and tried, but
they only shuffled away, courteously waving their paws, intent on
their own mysterious doings. Suddenly I knew that these doings were
more wonderful and beautiful than any Grand Chain (as, indeed, they
might well be!). It was for me to learn, not to teach. I woke up
crying, in an ecstasy of humility.
That may stand for what Russia has meant to me. And let there be no
misunderstanding. It is not “the Slav soul” that drew me. Not even,
indeed, Russian literature. Of course, years before I had read and
admired Turgenev and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but at least by the
two last I was more frightened than allured. I half resented their
probing poignancy, and some passages, like the end of the _Idiot_ and
the scene between Dimitri Karamasov and Grushenka, seemed to me in
their poignancy to pass the limits of the permissible in art. They
hurt too badly and too inwardly. No, it was not these portentous
things that laid a spell upon me. It was just the Russian language.
If I could have my life over again, I would devote it not to art
or literature, but to language. Life itself may hit one hard, but
always, always one can take sanctuary in language. Language is as
much an art and as sure a refuge as painting or music or literature.
It reflects and interprets and makes bearable life; only it is a
wider, because more subconscious, life.
CONCLUSION
I have spoken much of people, nothing of books--yet the influence
of books on my life has been intimate and incessant. When I first
came to London I became a Life Member of the London Library. London
life was costly, but I felt that, if the worst came to the worst,
with a constant supply of books and a small dole for tobacco, I
could cheerfully face the Workhouse. Three books stand out as
making three stages in my thinking: Aristotle’s _Ethics_, Bergson’s
_L’Évolution créatrice_ and Freud’s _Totemism and Taboo_. By
nature I was a Platonist, but Aristotle, I think, helped me more
than Plato. It happened that the _Ethics_ was among the set books
for my year at Cambridge. To realise the release that Aristotle
brought, you must have been reared as I was in a narrow school of
Evangelicalism--reared with sin always present, with death and
judgement before you, Hell and Heaven to either hand. It was like
coming out of a madhouse into a quiet college quadrangle where
all was liberty and sanity, and you became a law to yourself. The
doctrine of virtue as the Mean--what an uplift and revelation to one
“born in sin”! The notion of the _summum bonum_ as an “energy”, as
an exercise of personal faculty, to one who had been taught that God
claimed all, and the notion of the “perfect life” that was to include
as a matter of course friendship. I remember walking up and down in
the College garden, thinking could it possibly be true, were the
chains really broken and the prison doors open.
In 1907 came _L’Évolution créatrice_. Off and on I had read
philosophy all my life, from Heracleitos to William James, but of
late years I had read it less and less, feeling that I got nothing
new, only a ceaseless shuffling of the cards, a juggling with the
same glass balls, and then suddenly it seemed this new Moses struck
the rock and streams gushed forth in the desert. But I need not tell
of an experience shared in those happy years by every thinking man in
Europe.
With Freud it was quite different. By temperament I am, if not a
prude, at least a Puritan, and at first the ugliness of it all
sickened me. I hate a sick-room, and have a physical fear of all
obsessions and insanity. Still I struggled on, feeling somehow that
behind and below all this sexual mud was something big and real.
Then fortunately I lighted on _Totemism and Taboo_, and at once
the light broke and I felt again the sense of release. Here was a
big constructive imagination; here was a mere doctor laying bare
the origins of Greek drama as no classical scholar had ever done,
teaching the anthropologist what was really meant by his _totem and
taboo_, probing the mysteries of sin, of sanctity, of sacrament--a
man who, because he understood, purged the human spirit from fear. I
have no confidence in psycho-analysis as a method of therapeutics. I
am sure that Mr. Roger Fry is right and Freud quite wrong as to the
psychology of art, but I am equally sure that for generations almost
every branch of human knowledge will be enriched and illumined by the
imagination of Freud.
* * * * *
Looking back over my own life, I see with what halting and stumbling
steps I made my way to my own special subject. Greek literature
as a specialism I early felt was barred to me. The only field of
research that the Cambridge of my day knew of was textual criticism,
and for fruitful work in that my scholarship was never adequate.
We Hellenists were, in truth, at that time a “people who sat in
darkness”, but we were soon to see a great light, two great
lights--archæology, anthropology. Classics were turning in their long
sleep. Old men began to see visions, young men to dream dreams. I had
just left Cambridge when Schliemann began to dig at Troy. Among my
own contemporaries was J. G. Frazer, who was soon to light the dark
wood of savage superstition with a gleam from _The Golden Bough_.
The happy title of that book--Sir James Frazer has a veritable
genius for titles--made it arrest the attention of scholars. They
saw in comparative anthropology a serious subject actually capable
of elucidating a Greek or Latin text. Tylor had written and spoken;
Robertson Smith, exiled for heresy, had seen the Star in the East; in
vain; we classical deaf-adders stopped our ears and closed our eyes;
but at the mere sound of the magical words “Golden Bough” the scales
fell--we heard and understood. Then Arthur Evans set sail for his new
Atlantis and telegraphed news of the Minotaur from his own labyrinth;
perforce we saw this was a serious matter, it affected the “Homeric
Question”.
By nature, I am sure, I am not an archæologist--still less an
anthropologist--the “beastly devices of the heathen” weary and
disgust me. But, borne along by the irresistible tide of adventure,
I dabbled in both archæology and anthropology, and I am glad I
did, for both were needful for my real subject--religion. When I
say “religion”, I am instantly obliged to correct myself; it is
not religion, it is ritual that absorbs me. I have elsewhere[2]
tried to show that Art is not the handmaid of Religion, but that
Art in some sense springs out of Religion, and that between them
is a connecting link, a bridge, and that bridge is Ritual. On that
bridge, emotionally, I halt. It satisfies something within me that
is appeased by neither Religion nor Art. A ritual dance, a ritual
procession with vestments and lights and banners, move me as no
sermon, no hymn, no picture, no poem has ever moved me; perhaps
it is because a procession seems to me like life, like _durée_
itself, caught and fixed before me. Only twice have I seen a ritual
dance, and first the dance of the Seises before the high altar in
the Cathedral at Seville. It was at Carnival time I saw it. I felt
instantly that it was frankly Pagan. Its origin is, as the Roman
Church frankly owns, “perdue dans la nuit des temps”--we can but
conjecture that it took its rise in the dances of the Kouretes of
Crete to Mother and Son. The dance was accompanied by a prayer to
the setting sun, a prayer for light and healing. The movements
executed by six choristers are attenuated to a single formal step.
It is decorous, even prim, like some stiff stylised shadow. But it
is strangely moving in the fading light with the wondrous setting of
the high altar and the golden grille, and above all the sound of the
harsh, plangent Spanish voices. Great Pan, indeed, is dead--his ghost
still dances.
[2] _Art and Ritual_ (Home University Library).
Only last year I saw a wondrous ritual procession, a marked contrast
to the Seville dance. It is held at Echternach each year, on the
Tuesday after Pentecost. It is, I think, the most living survival
of the ritual dance to be seen in Europe. Thanks to the kindness of
a Luxembourgoise lady, Madame Emil Mayerisch de Saint Hubert, I was
able to observe it in every detail. The dancing procession is held
now in honour of our Saxon saint, St. Willibrord, but obviously it
goes back to magical days. The dancers muster at the bridge below
the little town and, gathering numbers as they go, dance through
the streets, halting here and there and ending in the Basilica. As
the dance is magical, it is essential that the whole town should be
traversed. The clergy are in attendance, any one and every one dances
or rather leaps, for it is a jumping step; like the Cretan Kouretes
they “leap for health and wealth”. I saw an old, old woman, scarcely
able to walk, but she “lifted her foot in the dance”. I saw a woman
with a sick baby in her arms, and she danced for healing; but most of
all it was the young men, the Kouretes, who danced.
The ritual dance is all but dead, but the ritual drama, the death and
the resurrection of the Year-Spirit, still goes on. I realised this
when I first heard Mass celebrated according to the Russian, that is
substantially the Greek rite. There you have the real enacting of a
mystery--the mystery of the death and resurrection of the Year-Spirit
which preceded drama. It is hidden, out of sight; the priest comes
out from behind the golden gate to announce the accomplishment. It is
the coming out of the Messenger in a Greek play to announce the Death
and the Resurrection. The Roman Church has sadly marred its mystery.
The rite of consecration is performed in public before the altar and
loses thereby half its significance.
I mention these ritual dances, this ritual drama, this bridge between
art and life, because it is things like these that I was all my life
blindly seeking. A thing has little charm for me unless it has on
it the patina of age. Great things in literature, Greek plays for
example, I most enjoy when behind their bright splendours I see
moving darker and older shapes. That must be my _apologia pro vita
mea_.
* * * * *
At the close of one’s reminiscences it is fitting that one should
say something as to how life looks at the approach of Death. As to
Death, when I was young, personal immortality seemed to me axiomatic.
The mere thought of Death made me furious. I was so intensely alive
I felt I could defy any one, anything--God, or demon, or Fate
herself--to put me out. All that is changed now. If I think of Death
at all it is merely as a negation of life, a close, a last and
necessary chord. What I dread is disease, that is, bad, disordered
life, not Death, and disease, so far, I have escaped. I have no hope
whatever of personal immortality, no desire even for a future life.
My consciousness began in a very humble fashion with my body; with my
body, very quietly, I hope it will end.
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.
And then there is another thought. We are told now that we bear
within us the seeds, not of one, but of two lives--the life of the
race and the life of the individual. The life of the race makes for
racial immortality; the life of the individual suffers _l’attirance
de la mort_, the lure of death; and this from the outset. The
unicellular animals are practically immortal; the complexity of
the individual spells death. The unmarried and the childless cut
themselves loose from racial immortality, and are dedicate to
individual life--a side track, a blind alley, yet surely a supreme
end in itself. By what miracle I escaped marriage I do not know,
for all my life long I fell in love. But, on the whole, I am glad.
I do not doubt that I lost much, but I am quite sure I gained more.
Marriage, for a woman at least, hampers the two things that made
life to me glorious--friendship and learning. In man it was always
the friend, not the husband, that I wanted. Family life has never
attracted me. At its best it seems to me rather narrow and selfish;
at its worst, a private hell. The rôle of wife and mother is no easy
one; with my head full of other things I might have dismally failed.
On the other hand, I have a natural gift for community life. It seems
to me sane and civilised and economically right. I like to live
spaciously, but rather plainly, in large halls with great spaces and
quiet libraries. I like to wake in the morning with the sense of a
great, silent garden round me. These things are, or should be, and
soon will be, forbidden to the private family; they are right and
good for the community. If I had been rich I should have founded
a learned community for women, with vows of consecration and a
beautiful rule and habit; as it is, I am content to have lived many
years of my life in a college. I think, as civilisation advances,
family life will become, if not extinct, at least much modified and
curtailed.
* * * * *
Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you
are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a
comfortable front stall as spectator, and, if you have really played
your part, you are more than content to sit down and watch. All
life has become a thing less strenuous, softer and warmer. You are
allowed all sorts of comfortable little physical licences; you may
doze through dull lectures, you may go to bed early when you are
bored. The young all pay you a sort of tender deference to which you
know you have no real claim. Every one is solicitous to help you; it
seems the whole world offers you a kind, protecting arm. Life does
not cease when you are old, it only suffers a rich change. You go on
loving, only your love, instead of a burning, fiery furnace, is the
mellow glow of an autumn sun. You even go on falling in love, and
for the same foolish reasons--the tone of a voice, the glint of a
strangely set eye--only you fall so gently; and in old age you may
even show a man that you like to be with him without his wanting to
marry you or thinking you want to marry him.
But then “old age is lonely”. Not if you follow my example! My
friends, men and women, are most of them some twenty years younger
than I am. I have only one friend made in my ’seventies, Mr. Guy
le Strange, if he will let me so account him. He taught me, with
infinite patience and kindness, when I was over seventy the elements
of Persian, a sure road to my heart. And, I admit, Fate has been very
kind to me. In my old age she has sent me, to comfort me, a ghostly
daughter, dearer than any child after the flesh, more gifted than any
possible offspring of Aunt Glegg.
* * * * *
I should like to run on and tell of my life since I left Cambridge.
For leave Cambridge, with measureless regret, I did. I began to feel
that I had lived too long the strait Academic life with my mind
intently focussed on the solution of a few problems. I wanted before
the end came to see things more freely and more widely, and, above
all, to get the new focus of another civilisation. Russia, my “Land
of Heart’s Desire”, was closed to me. France and America in France
have received me with a kindness I can neither repay nor forget.
If only I might tell of the wonderful new friends, French and
Russian, I have made in Paris and at Pontigny! But these things are
too present, too intimate--so my tale must end.
AMERICAN WOMEN’S UNIVERSITY CLUB,
4 RUE DE CHEVREUSE, PARIS.
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