Read Ebook: What I Remember Volume 2 by Trollope Thomas Adolphus

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INDEX

For I was born a rambler.

"Jog on, jog on, the foot-path way, And merrily hent the stile-a: Your merry heart goes all the day, Your sad tires in a mile-a."

Over how many miles of "foot-path way," under how many green hedges, has my childish treble chanted that enlivening ditty!

But that was in much earlier days to those I am now writing of.

During the years between my dreary time at Birmingham and my first departure for Italy, I find the record of many pedestrian or other rambles in England and abroad. There they are, all recorded day by day--the qualities of the inns and the charges at them , the beauty and specialties of the views, the talk of wayfaring companions, the careful measurements of the churches, the ever-recurring ascent of the towers of them, &c. &c.

I seem to have been an amateur of sermons in those days, from the constant records I find of sermons listened to, by no means always, or indeed generally, complimentary to the preachers. Here is an entry criticising, with young presumption, a sermon by Dr. Dibdin, whose bibliophile books, however, I had much taste for.

"I heard Dr. Dibdin preach. He preached with much gesticulation, emphasis, and grimace the most utterly trashy sermon I ever heard; words--words--words--without the shadow of an idea in them."

I remember, as if it were yesterday, a shrewd sort of an old lady, the mother, I think, of the curate of the parish, who heard me, as we were leaving the church, expressing my opinion of the doctor's discourse, saying, "Well, it is a very old story, young gentleman, and it is mighty difficult to find anything new to say about it!"

I had entirely forgotten, but find from my diary that it was our pleasant friend but indifferent preacher, Dr. Dibdin, who on the 11th of February, 1839, married my sister, Cecilia, to Mr., now Sir John, Tilley.

I remember, however, perfectly well, without any reference to my diary, hearing--it must have been much about the same time--Sydney Smith preach a sermon at St. Paul's, which much impressed me. He took for his text, "Knowledge and wisdom shall be the stability of thy times" . Of course the gist of his discourse may be readily imagined. But the manner of the preacher remains more vividly present to my mind than his words. He spoke with extreme rapidity, and had the special gift of combining extreme rapidity of utterance with very perfect clearness. His manner, I remember thinking, was unlike any that I had ever witnessed in the pulpit, and appeared to me to resemble rather that of a very earnest speaker at the hustings than the usual pulpit style. His sentences seemed to run downhill, with continually increasing speed till they came to a full stop at the bottom. It was, I think, the only sermon I ever heard which I wished longer. He carried me with him completely, for the century was in those days, like me, young. But if I were to hear a similarly fervid discourse now on the same subject, I should surely desire some clearer setting forth of the difference between "knowledge" and "wisdom."

The following letter from the Earl of Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, to my mother on the subject, is illustrative of the strong interest he took in the matter, and of the means which he thought necessary for obtaining information respecting it:

"MADAM,--The letters to Macclesfield and Manchester shall be sent by this evening's post. On your arrival at Macclesfield be so kind as to ask for Reuben Bullock, of Roe Street, and at Manchester for John Doherty, a small bookseller of Hyde's Cross in the town. They will show you the secrets of the place, as they showed them to me.

"Mr. Wood himself is not now resident in Bradford, he is at present in Hampshire; but his partner, Mr. Walker, carries out all his plans with the utmost energy. I will write to him to-night. The firm is known by the name of 'Wood and Walker,' Mr. Wood is a person whom you may easily see in London on your return to town. With every good wish and prayer for your success,

"I remain your very obedient servant,

"ASHLEY.

It is useless here and now to say anything of the horrors of uncivilised savagery and hopeless abject misery which we witnessed. They are painted in my mother's book, and should any reader ever refer to those pages for a picture of the state of things among the factory hands at that time, he may take with him my testimony to the fact that there was no exaggeration in the outlines of the picture given. What we are there described to have seen, we saw.

He came and dined with us at our hotel, but it was, I remember, with much difficulty that we persuaded him to do so, and when at table his excitement in talking was so great and continuous that he could eat next to nothing.

I remember, too, a Rev. Mr. Bull, to whom he introduced us subsequently at Bradford. We passed the evening with this gentleman at the house of Mr. Wood, of the firm of Walker and Wood, to whom also we had letters from Lord Shaftesbury. He, like our host, was an ardent advocate of the ten hours' bill, but unlike him, had very little hope of legislative interference. Messrs. Walker and Wood employed three thousand hands. At a sacrifice of some thousands per annum, they worked their hands an hour less than any of their neighbours, which left the hours, as Mr. Wood strongly declared, still too long. Those gentlemen had built and endowed a church and a school for their hands, and everything was done in their mill which could humanise and improve the lot of the men, women, and children. Mr. Bull, who was to be the incumbent of the new church, then not quite finished, was far less hopeful than his patron. He told me that he looked forward to some tremendous popular outbreak, and should not be surprised any night to hear that every mill in Bradford was in flames.

"In the evening," says my diary, "we drove out to Stayley Bridge to hear the preaching of Stephens, the man who has become the subject of so much newspaper celebrity," "We reached a miserable little chapel, filled to suffocation, and besieged by crowds around the doors. We entered through the vestry with very great difficulty, and only so by the courtesy of sundry persons who relinquished their places, on Doherty's representing to them that we were strangers from a distance and friends to the cause. Presently Stephens arrived, and a man who had been ranting in the pulpit, merely, as it seemed, to occupy the people till he should come, immediately yielded his place to him. Stephens spoke well, and said some telling words in that place, of the cruel and relentless march of the great Juggernauth, Gold. But I did not hear anything which seemed to me to justify his great reputation. Really the most striking part of the performance, and that which I thought seemed to move the people most, was Oastler's mounting the pulpit and giving out the verses of a hymn, one by one, which the congregation sang after him." So says my diary. Him I remember well, though Stephens not at all. I remember, too, the pleasure with which I listened to his really fine delivery of the lines; his pronunciation of the words was not incorrect, and when he spoke, as I heard him on sundry subsequent occasions, his language, though emphasised rather, as it seemed, than marred by a certain roughness of Lancashire accent, was not that of an uncultivated man. Yes! Oastler, the King of Lancashire as the people liked to call him, was certainly a man of power, and an advocate whom few platform orators would have cared to meet as an adversary.

When my mother's notes for her projected novel were completed, we thought that before turning our faces southwards, we would pay a flying visit to the lake district, which was new ground to both of us. I remember well my intense delight at my first introduction to mountains worthy of the name. But I mean to mention here two only of my reminiscences of that first visit to lake-land.

The one other incident of our visit to lake-land which I will record, was our visit to Wordsworth.

For my part I managed to incur his displeasure while yet on the threshold of his house. We were entering it together, when observing a very fine bay-tree by the door-side, I unfortunately expressed surprise at its luxuriance in such a position. "Why should you be surprised?" he asked, suddenly turning upon me with much displeasure in his manner. Not a little disconcerted, I hesitatingly answered that I had imagined the bay-tree required more and greater warmth of sunshine than it could find there. "Pooh!" said he, much offended at the slight cast on his beloved locality, "what has sunshine got to do with it?"

I had not the readiness to reply, that in truth the world had abundance of testimony that the bay could flourish in those latitudes! But I think, had I done so it might have made my peace--for the remainder of that evening's experiences led me to imagine that the great poet was not insensible to incense from very small and humble worshippers.

The evening, I think I may say the entire evening, was occupied by a monologue addressed by the poet to my mother, who was of course extremely well pleased to listen to it. I was chiefly occupied in talking to my old schoolfellow, Herbert Hill, Southey's nephew, who also passed the evening there, and with whom I had a delightful walk the next day. But I did listen with much pleasure when Wordsworth recited his own lines descriptive of Little Langdale. He gave them really exquisitely. But his manner in conversation was not impressive. He sat continuously looking down with a green shade over his eyes even though it was twilight; and his mode of speech and delivery suggested to me the epithet "maundering," though I was ashamed of myself for the thought with reference to such a man. As we came away I cross-examined my mother much as to the subjects of his talk. She said it had been all about himself and his works, and that she had been interested. But I could not extract from her a word that had passed worth recording.

I do not think that he was popular with his neighbours generally. There were stories current, at Lowther among other places, which imputed to him a tendency to outstay his welcome when invited to visit in a house. I suspect there was a little bit of a feud between him and my brother-in-law, Mr. Tilley, who was the Post Office surveyor of the district. Wordsworth as receiver of taxes, or issuer of licenses or whatever it was, would have increased the profits of his place if the mail coach had paid its dues, whether for taxes or license, at his end of the journey instead of at Kendal, as had been the practice. But of course any such change would have been as much to the detriment of the man at Kendal as to Wordsworth's advantage. And my brother-in-law, thinking such a change unjust, would not permit it.

I cannot say that on the whole the impression made on me by the poet on that occasion was a pleasant one. There was something in the manner in which he almost perfunctorily, as it seemed, uttered his long monologue, that suggested the idea of the performance of a part got up to order, and repeated without much modification as often as lion-hunters, duly authorised for the sport in those localities, might call upon him for it. I dare say the case is analogous to that of the hero and the valet, but such was my impression.

I had been for some time past, as has been said, trying my hand, not without success, at a great variety of articles in all sorts of reviews, magazines, and newspapers. I already considered myself a member of the guild of professional writers. I had done much business with publishers on behalf of my mother, and some for other persons, and talked glibly of copyrights, editions, and tokens.

As for the Bretons, the individual has withered to that extent that he now wears trousers instead of breeches, while his world has become more and more assimilated to that of the Faubourg St. Antoine, with the result of losing all those really very notable and stiff and sturdy virtues which differentiated the Breton peasant, when I first knew him, while it would be difficult indeed to say what it has gained. At all events the progress which can be stated is mainly to be stated in negatives. The Breton, as I first knew him, believed in all sorts of superstitious rubbish. He now believes in nothing at all. He was disposed to honour and respect God, and his priest, and his seigneur perhaps somewhat too indiscriminately. Now he neither honours nor respects any earthly or heavenly thing. These at least were the observations which a second, or rather third visit to the country a few years ago suggested to me, mainly, it is true, as regards the urban population. And without going into any of the deeper matters which such changes suggest to one's consideration, there can be no possible doubt as to the fact that the country and its people are infinitely less interesting than they were.

I was not greedy of money in those days, and had no unscriptural hankerings after laying up treasure upon earth. All I wanted was a sufficient supply for my unceasing expenditure in locomotion and inn bills--the latter, be it observed, always on a most economical scale. I was not a profitable customer; I took nothing "for the good of the house." I had a Gargantuesque appetite, and needed food of some sort in proportion to its demands. I neither took, or cared to take, any wine with my dinner, and never wanted any description of "nightcap." As for accommodation for the night, anything sufficed me that gave me a clean bed and a sufficient window-opening on fresh air, under such conditions as made it possible for me to have it open all night. To the present day I cannot sleep to my liking in a closed chamber; and before now, on the top of the Righi, have had my bed clothes blown off my bed, and snow deposited where they should have been.

As my volumes on Brittany, published in 1840, are little likely to come under the eye of any reader at the present day, and as the passage I am about to quote indicates accurately enough the main point of difference between what the traveller at that day saw and what the traveller of the present day may see, I think I may be pardoned for giving it.

"It would seem that the fickleness of fashion exercises in constant local variations that mutability which is utterly denied to it in Brittany with regard to time. Every district, almost every commune has its own peculiar 'mode' which changes not from generation to generation. As the mothers dress, so do their daughters, so did their grandmothers, and so will their grand-daughters." "If a woman of one parish marries, or takes service, or for any other cause resides in another, she still retains the mode of her native village; and thus carries about her a mark, which is to those, among whom she is a sojourner, a well-recognised indication of the place whence she comes, and to herself a cherished souvenir of the home which she never ceases to consider her own country.

My Breton book is not a bad one, especially as regards the upper or northern part of the province. That which concerns Lower Brittany is very imperfect, mainly, I take it, because I had already nearly filled my destined two volumes when I reached it. I find there, however, the following notice of the sardine fishery, which has some interest at the present day. Perhaps the majority of the thousands of English people who nowadays have "sardines" on their breakfast-table every morning are not aware that the contents of a very large number of the little tin boxes which are supposed to contain the delicacy are not sardines at all. They are very excellent little fishes, but not sardines; for the enormously increased demand for them has outstripped the supply. In the days when the following sentences were written sardines might certainly be had in London at such shops as Fortnum and Mason's, but they were costly, and by no means commonly met with.

At the present day it must be enormously larger. I remember well the exceeding plentifulness of the little fishes--none of them so large as many of those which now fill the so-called sardine boxes--when I was at Douarnenez in 1839. All the men, women, and children in the place seemed to be feasting upon them all day long. Plates with heaps of them fried and piled up crosswise, like timber in a timber-yard, were to be seen outdoors and indoors, wherever three or four people could be found together. All this was a thing of the past when I revisited Douarnenez in 1866. Every fish was then needed for the tinning business. They were to be had of course by ordering and paying for them, but very few indeed were consumed by the population of the place.

There is another passage in my book on Brittany respecting which it would be interesting to know whether recent travellers can report that the state of things there described no longer exists. I wrote in 1839--

I must tell one other story of my Breton recollections, which refers to a time much subsequent to the publication of the book I have been quoting. It was in 1866 that I revisited Brittany in company with my present wife; and one of the objects of our little tour was the Finisterre land's end at the extreme point of the horn-like promontory which forms the department so named. We found some difficulty in reaching the spot, not the least part of which was caused by the necessity of threading our way, when in the immediate neighbourhood of the cliffs, among enormous masses of seaweed stacked in huge heaps and left to undergo the process of decay, which turns it into very valuable manure. The odour which impregnated the whole surrounding atmosphere from these heaps was decidedly the worst and most asphyxiating I ever experienced.

The rock ledges, among which we were clambering, were in many places fearful spots enough--places where a stumble or a divagation of the foot but six or eight inches from the narrow path would have precipitated the blunderer to assured and inevitable destruction. "Here," said I to my wife, as we stood side by side on one such ledge, "would be the place for a husband, who wanted to get rid of his wife, to accomplish his purpose. Done in ten seconds! With absolute certainty! One push would suffice! No cry of any more avail than the screams of those gulls! And no possibility of the deed being witnessed by any mortal eye!"

I had hardly got the words out of my mouth before our ears were startled by a voice hailing us; and after some searching of the eye we espied a man engaged in seeking sea-fowls' eggs, who had placed himself in a position which I should have thought it absolutely impossible to reach, whence he had seen us, as we now saw him!

Let this then, my brethren, be a warning to you!

Returning from my Breton journey, I reached my mother's house in York Street on the 23rd of July, 1839, and on the 26th of the same month left London with her to visit my married sister in her new home at Penrith, where Mr. Tilley had established himself as Post Office surveyor of the northern district. His home was a pretty house situated between the town and the well-known beacon on the hill to the north of it.

The first persons I became acquainted with in this, to me, entirely new region, were Sir George Musgrave, of Edenhall, and his wife, who was a sister of Sir James Graham. My brother-in-law took me over to Edenhall, a lovely walk from Penrith, and we found both Sir George and Lady Musgrave at home. We--my mother and I--had not at that time conceived the idea of becoming residents at Penrith. But when subsequently we were led to do so, we found extremely pleasant and friendly neighbours at Edenhall, and though not in strict chronology due in this place, I may throw together my few reminiscences of Sir George.

We bought a field in a very beautiful situation overlooking the ruins of Brougham Castle and the confluence of the Eden with the Lowther, and proceeded to build a house on the higher part of it. But there was a considerable drop from the lower limit of our ground to the road which skirted the property, and furnished the only access to it. There was some difficulty, therefore, in contriving a tolerable entrance from the road for wheel traffic, and it was found necessary to cause a tiny little spring that rose in the bank by the roadside to change its course in some small degree. The affair seemed to us a matter of infinitesimal importance, but Sir George was dismayed. We had moved, he said, a holy well, and the consequence would surely be that we should never succeed in establishing ourselves in that spot.

And surely enough we never did so succeed; for, after having built a very nice little house, and lived in it one winter and half a summer, we--for I cannot say that it was my mother more than I, or I more than my mother--made up our minds that "the sun yoked his horses too far from Penrith town," and that we had had enough of it. Sir George, of course, when he heard our determination, while he expressed all possible regret at losing us as neighbours, said that he knew perfectly well that it must be so, from the time that we so recklessly meddled with the holy well.

He was the most hospitable man in the world, and could never let many days pass without asking us to dine with him. But his hospitality was of quite the old world school. One day, but that was after our journey to Italy and when he had become intimate with us, being in a hurry to get back into the drawing-room to rejoin a pretty girl next whom I had sat at dinner, I tried to escape from the dining-room. "Come back!" he roared, before I could get to the door, "we won't have any of your d--d forineering habits here! Come back and stick to your wine, or by the Lord I'll have the door locked."

Most of my readers have probably heard of the "Luck of Edenhall," for besides Longfellow's well-known poem, the legend relating to it has often been told in print. I refer to it here merely to mention a curious trait of character in Sir George Musgrave in connection with it. The "Luck of Edenhall" is an ancient decorated glass goblet, which has belonged to the Musgraves time out of mind, and which bears on it the legend:--

"When this cup shall break or fall, Farewell the luck of Edenhall."

After what I have written of Sir George and the holy well, which we so unfortunately moved from its proper site, it will be readily imagined that he attached no small importance to the safe keeping of the "Luck;" and truly he did so. But instead of simply locking it up, where he might feel sure it could neither break nor fall, he would show it to all visitors, and not content with that, would insist on their taking it into their hands to examine and handle it. He maintained that otherwise there was no fair submission to the test of luck, which was intended by the inscription. It would have been mere cowardly prevarication to lock it away under circumstances which took the matter out of the dominion of "luck" altogether. I wonder that under such circumstances it has not fallen, for the nervous trepidation of the folks who were made to handle it may be imagined!

Nobody knows anything about mutton in these days, for the very sufficient reason that there is no mutton worth knowing anything about. Scientific breeding has improved it off the face of the earth. The immature meat is killed at two years old, and only we few survivors of a former generation know how little like it is to the mutton of former days. The Monmouthshire farmers told me the other day that they could not keep Welsh sheep of pure breed, because nothing under an eight-foot park paling would confine them. Just as if they did not jump in the days when I jumped too! Believe me, my young friends, that George the Third knew what he was talking about when he said that very little venison was equal to a haunch of four-year-old mutton. And the gravy!--chocolate-coloured, not pink, my innocent young friends. Ichabod! Ichabod!

Then there were two pretty girls, Margaret and Charlotte Story, the nieces of old De Whelpdale, the lord of the manor. I think he and Mrs. De Whelpdale never left their room, for I do not remember to have ever seen either of them; nor do I remember that I at all resented their absence from the drawing-room when I used to call at the manor house. One of the girls was understood to be engaged to be married to a far distant lieutenant, of whom Penrith knew nothing, which circumstance gave rise to sundry ingenious conceits in the acrostic line, based on allusions to "his story" and "mystery!" I wonder whether Charlotte is alive! If she is, and should see this page, she will remember! It was for her sake that I deserted, or tried to desert, Sir George's port, as related above.

We left Penrith on that occasion without having formed any decided intention of establishing ourselves there, and returned to London towards the end of August, 1839. During the next two months I was hard at work completing the MS. of my volumes on Brittany. And in November of the same year, after that long fast from all journeying, my mother and I left London for a second visit to Paris. But we did not on this occasion travel together.

I left London some days earlier than she did, and travelled by Ostend, Cologne, and Mannheim, my principal object being to visit my old friend, Mrs. Fauche, who was living at the latter place. I passed three or four very pleasant days there, including, as I find by my diary, sundry agreeable jaunts to Heidelberg, Carlsruhe, &c. My mother and I had arranged to meet at Paris on the 4th of December, and at that date I punctually turned up there.

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