Read Ebook: Philip Gilbert Hamerton An Autobiography 1834-1858 and a Memoir by His Wife 1858-1894 by Hamerton Eug Nie Hamerton Philip Gilbert

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1829 lines and 207185 words, and 37 pages

"Man in Art" begun.--Family events.--Mr. G. F. Watts.--Mr. Bodley.--"French and English."

Decision to live near Paris.--Practice in painting and etching.--Search for a house.--Cl?matis.

Removal to Paris.--Interest in the Bois de Boulogne.--M. Vierge.--"Man in Art."--Contributions to "Scribner's Magazine."--New form of "The Portfolio."--Honorary degree.--Last Journey to London.--Society of Illustrators.--Illness and death.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON

My reasons for writing an autobiography.--That a man knows the history of his own life better than a biographer can know it.--Frankness and reserve.--The contemplation of death.

My principal reasons for writing an autobiography are because I am the only person in the world who knows enough about my history to give a truthful account of it, and because I dread the possibility of falling into the hands of some writer who might attempt a biography with inadequate materials. I have already been selected as a subject by two or three biographers with very friendly intentions, but their friendliness did not always ensure accuracy. When the materials are not supplied in abundance, a writer will eke them out with conjectural expressions which he only intends as an amplification, yet which may contain germs of error to be in their turn amplified by some other writer, and made more extensively erroneous.

It has frequently been said that an autobiography must of necessity be an untrue representation of its subject, as no man can judge himself correctly. If it is intended to imply that somebody else, having a much slighter acquaintance with the man whose life is to be narrated, would produce a more truthful book, one may be permitted to doubt the validity of the inference. Thousands of facts are known to a man himself with reference to his career, and a multitude of determinant motives, which are not known even to his most intimate friends, still less to the stranger who so often undertakes the biography. The reader of an autobiography has this additional advantage, that the writer must be unconsciously revealing himself all along, merely by his way of telling things.

With regard to the great question of frankness and reserve, I hold that the reader has a fair claim to hear the truth, as a biography is not avowedly a romance, but at the same time that it is right to maintain a certain reserve. My rule shall be to say nothing that can hurt the living, and the memory of the dead shall be dealt with as tenderly as may be compatible with a truthful account of the influences that have impelled me in one direction or another.

I have all the more kindly feelings towards the dead, that when these pages appear I shall be one of themselves, and therefore unable to defend my own memory as they are unable to defend theirs.

The notion of being a dead man is not entirely displeasing to me. If the dead are defenceless, they have this compensating advantage, that nobody can inflict upon them any sensible injury; and in beginning a book which is not to see the light until I am lying comfortably in my grave, with six feet of earth above me to deaden the noises of the upper world, I feel quite a new kind of security, and write with a more complete freedom from anxiety about the quality of the work than has been usual at the beginning of other manuscripts.

Nevertheless, the clear and steady contemplation of death may produce a paralyzing effect upon a man by making his life's work seem very small to him. For, whatever we believe about a future state, it is evident that the catastrophe of death must throw each of us instantaneously into the past, from the point of view of the living, and they will see what we have done in a very foreshortened aspect, so that except in a few very rare cases it must look small to them, and ever smaller as time rolls on, and they will probably not think much of it, or remember us long on account of it. And in thinking of ourselves as dead we instinctively adopt the survivor's point of view. Besides which, it is reasonable to suppose that whatever fate may be in store for us, a greater or less degree of posthumous reputation in two or three nations on this planet can have little effect on our future satisfaction; for if we go to heaven, the beatitude of the life there will be so incomparably superior to the pleasures of earthly fame that we shall never think of such vanity again; and if we go to the place of eternal tortures they will leave us no time to console ourselves with pleasant memories of any kind; and if death is simply the ending of all sensation, all thought, memory, and consciousness, it will matter nothing to a handful of dust what estimate of the name it once bore may happen to be current amongst the living--

"Les grands Dieux savent seuls si l'?me est immortelle, Mais le juste travaille ? leur oeuvre ?ternelle."

My birthplace.--My father and mother.--Circumstances of their marriage.--Their short married life.--Birth of their child.--Death of my mother.--Her character and habits.--My father as a widower.--Dulness of his life.--Its degradation.

I was born at Laneside near Shaw, which is now a manufacturing town of some importance about two miles from Oldham in Lancashire, and about four miles from Rochdale in the same county.

Laneside is a small estate with some houses and a little cotton-mill upon it, which belonged to my maternal grandfather. The house is of stone, with a roof of stone slate such as is usual in those parts, and it faces the road, from which it is separated by a little enclosure, that may be called a garden if you will. When I was a child, there were two or three poplar trees in that enclosure before the house; but trees do not prosper there, and now there is probably not one on the whole estate. One end of the house abuts against the hill, and close behind it is the cotton-mill which my grandfather worked, with no great profit to himself or advantage to his descendants. I have mentioned a road that passes the house; it is steep, narrow, and inconvenient. It leads up to an elevated tract of the most dreary country that can be imagined, but there are one or two fields on the Laneside estate, above the stone-quarry, from which there is a good view in the direction of Rochdale.

Miss Anne Cocker was a young lady with a will of her own, associated, I have been told , with a very sweet and amiable disposition. At a time when my grandmother still vigorously opposed the match with my father, there happened to be a public charity ball in Shaw, and Miss Cocker showed her intentions in a very decided manner, by declining to dance with several gentlemen until the young lawyer presented himself, when she rose immediately with a very gracious smile, which was observed by all near enough to witness it. This was rather unkind perhaps to the other aspirants, and is, in fact, scarcely defensible, but it was Miss Cocker's way of declaring her intentions publicly. When my father made his offer, he was refused by my grandmother's orders, but received encouragement from her daughter , and counted upon the effects of perseverance. At length, when he and Miss Cocker thought they had waited long enough, they determined to marry without Mrs. Cocker's consent, and the determination was notified to my grandmother in the following very decided terms:--

"DR. Madam,--You are no doubt well aware of the warm attachment which has long existed betwixt your dear daughter and myself. Upwards of twelve months ago our affections were immovably fixed upon each other, and I now consider it my duty to inform you that we are fully engaged, and have finally concluded to be married within a fortnight of the present time.

"I sincerely trust that all your hostile feelings towards me are entirely worn out, and that you will receive me as the affectionate husband of your beloved daughter, and I with great confidence hope we shall be a happy family and live together with peace and harmony.

"At my request your daughter will have all her property settled upon herself, so that I can have no control over it--thus leaving it impossible that I should waste it. And I trust that by an active attention to my profession I may be enabled not inconsiderably to augment it.

"Be assured, Dear Madam, that your daughter and myself feel no little solicitude for your comfort and happiness, and that we shall at all times be most happy to promote them.

"It is our mutual and most anxious wish that you should not attempt to throw any obstacle in the way of our marriage, as the only tendency it could have under present circumstances would be to lessen the happiness and comfort of our union.

"We trust therefore that your regard for your daughter's happiness will induce you at once to give your full assent to the fulfilment of our engagement, as you would thereby divest our marriage of all that could possibly lessen the happiness we anticipate from it.

"I know that your principal objection to me has been on account of my unsteadiness, and I deeply regret ever having given you cause to raise such an objection; but I trust my conduct for some time back having been of a very different character, will convince you that I have seen my error. The gayety into which I have fallen may partly be ascribed to the peculiarity of my situation; having no relations near me, no family ties, no domestic comforts, &c., I may be the more excusable for having kept the company of young men, but I can assure you I have lost all inclination for the practice of such follies as I have once fallen into, and I look to a steady, sober married life as alone calculated to afford me happiness.

"I will wait upon you on Monday with most anxious hopes for your favorable answer.

"I am, Dear Madam,

"Yours most respectfully,

"JOHN HAMMERTON.

"Shaw, June 1st, 1833."

The marriage took place according to the fixed resolution of the contracting parties, and their life together was immensely happy during the short time that it lasted. Most unfortunately it came to an end after little more than one year by my mother's lamentably premature death. I happen to possess a letter from my father's sister to her sister Anne in which she gives an account of this event, and print it because it conveys the reality more vividly than a narrative at second hand. The reader will pardon the reference to myself. It matters nothing to a dead man--as I shall be when this page is printed--whether at the age of fourteen days he was considered a fine-looking child or a weakling.

"MY DEAR ANNE,--You will not calculate upon so speedy an answer as this to your long and welcome epistle, nor will you calculate upon the melancholy intelligence I have to communicate. Poor John's wife, certainly the most amiable of all woman-kind, departed this life at twenty minutes past eleven last night. Her recovery from her confinement was very wonderful, we thought, but alas! it was a false one. The Drs. Whitaker of Shaw, Wood of Rochdale, and Bardsley of Manchester all agree in opinion that she has died of mere weakness without any absolute disease. She has been very delicate for a long time. Poor dear John--if I were quite indifferent to him I should grieve to see his agonies--he says at sixty it might have happened in the common course of things and he would have borne it better, but at twenty-nine, just when he is beginning life, his sad bereavement does indeed seem untimely. It is a sore affliction to him, sent for some good, and may he understand and apply it with wisdom! They had, to be sure, hardly been married long enough to quarrel, but I never saw a couple so intent on making each other happy; they had not a thought of each other but what tended to please. The poor little boy is a very fine one, and I hope he will be reared, though it often happens that when the mother is consumptive the baby dies. I do hope when John is able to look after his office a little that the occupation of his mind will give him calm. He walks from room to room, and if I meet him and he is able to articulate at all, he says, 'Ah! where must I be? what must I do?' He says nobody had such a wife, and I do think nobody ever had. He wanted me not to write till arrangements were made about the funeral. I thought you would be sorry to be informed late upon a subject so near John's heart, and that it was too late for Mr. Hinde to come to the funeral. I have really nothing to say except that our poor sister was so tolerable on Wednesday morning that I went with the Milnes of Park House to Henton Park races, which I liked very well, but as things have turned out I heartily repent going. Ann was, we hoped, positively recovering on Monday and Tuesday, but it seems to have been a lightening before death. She was a very long time in the agonies of death, but seemed to suffer very little. Our afflicted brother joins me in best love to you and your dear children. Kind compliments to Mr. Hinde.

"I remain,

"Your affectionate Sister,

"M. HAMMERTON."

The letter is without date, but it bears the Manchester postmark of September 27, 1834, and the day of my birth was the tenth of the same month. The reader may have observed a discrepancy with reference to my mother's health. First it is said that the doctors all agreed in the opinion that she died of mere weakness, without any absolute disease, but afterwards consumption is alluded to. I am not sure, even yet, whether my mother was really consumptive or only suffered from debility. Down to the time when I write this there have never been any symptoms of consumption in me.

No portrait of my mother was ever taken, so that I have never been able to picture her to myself otherwise than vaguely, but I remember that on one occasion in my youth when I played the part of a young lady in a charade, several persons present who had known her, said that the likeness was so striking that it almost seemed as if she had appeared to them in a vision, and they told me that if I wanted to know what my mother was like, I had only to consult a looking-glass. She had blue eyes, a very fair complexion, and hair of a rich, strongly-colored auburn, a color more appreciated by painters than by other people. In the year 1876 I was examining a large boxful of business papers that had belonged to my father, and burning most of them in a garden in Yorkshire, when a little packet fell out of a legal document that I was just going to throw upon the fire. It was a lock of hair carefully folded in a piece of the bluish paper my father used for his law correspondence, and fastened with an old wire-headed pin. I at once took it to a lady who had known my mother, and she said without a moment's hesitation that the hair was certainly hers, so that I now possess this relic, and it is all I have of my poor mother whose face I never saw, and whose voice I never heard. Few people who have lived in the world have left such slight traces. There are no letters of hers except one or two formal compositions written at school under the eye of the mistress, which of course express nothing of her own mind or feelings. Those who knew her have told me that she was a very lively and amiable person, physically active, and a good horsewoman. She and my father were fond of riding out together, and indeed were separated as little as might be during their brief happiness. She even, on one occasion, went out shooting with him and killed something, after which she melted into tears of pity over her victim.

The reader will pardon me for dwelling thus on these few details of a life so sadly and prematurely ended. The knowledge that my mother had died early cast a certain melancholy over my childhood; I found that people looked at me with some tenderness and pity for her sake, so I felt vaguely that there had been a great loss, though unable to estimate the extent of it. Later, when I understood better what pains and perils Nature inflicts on women in order that children may come into the world, it seemed that the days I lived had been bought for me by the sacrifice of days that my mother ought to have lived. She was but twenty-four when she passed away, so that now I have lived more than twice her span.

The effect of the loss upon my father was utterly disastrous. His new and good projects were all shattered, and a cloud fell over his existence that was never lifted. He did not marry again, and he lost his interest in his profession. My mother left him all her property absolutely, so he felt no spur of necessity and became indolent or indifferent; yet those who were capable of judging had a good opinion of his abilities as a lawyer. Just before his wife's death, my father had rather distinguished himself in an important case, and received a testimonial from his client with the following inscription:--

My father's practice at that time was beginning to be lucrative, and would no doubt have become much more so in a few years; but the blow to his happiness that occurred in the September of 1834 produced such discouragement that he sought relief from his depression in the society of lively companions. Most unfortunately for him, there was no lively masculine society in the place where he lived that was not at the same time a constant incitement to drinking. There were a few places in the Lancashire of those days where convivial habits were carried to such a degree that they destroyed what ought to have been the flower of the male population. The strong and hearty men who believed that they could be imprudent with impunity, the lively, intelligent, and sociable men who wanted the wittiest and brightest talk that was to be had in the neighborhood, the bachelor whose hearth was lonely, and the widower whose house had been made desolate, all these were tempted to join meetings of merry companions who set no limits to the strength or the quantity of their potations. My poor father was a man of great physical endowments, and he came at last to have a mistaken pride in being able to drink deeply without betraying any evil effects; but a few years of such an existence undermined one of the finest constitutions ever given to mortal man. A quarryman once told me that my father had appeared at the quarry at six o'clock in the morning looking quite fresh and hearty, when, taking up the heaviest sledge-hammer he could find, he gayly challenged the men to try who could throw it farthest. None of them came near him, on which he turned and said with a laugh of satisfaction, --"Not bad that, for a man who drank thirty glasses of brandy the day before!" Whether he had ever approached such a formidable number I will not venture to say, but the incident exactly paints my father in his northern pride of strength, the fatal pride that believes itself able to resist poison because it has the muscles of an athlete.

My childhood is passed at Burnley with my aunts.--My grandfather and grandmother.--Estrangement between Gilbert Hamerton and his brother of Hellifield Peel.--Death of Gilbert Hamerton.--His taste for the French language.--His travels in Portugal, and the conduct of a steward during his absence.--His three sons.--Aristocratic tendencies of his daughters.--Beginning of my education.--Visits to my father.

I was not brought up during childhood under my father's roof, but was sent to live with his two unmarried sisters. These ladies were then living in Burnley with their mother.

Burnley is now a large manufacturing town of seventy thousand inhabitants, but in those days it was just rising in importance, and a few years earlier it had been a small country town in an uncommonly aristocratic neighborhood. The gate of Towneley Park opens now almost upon the town itself, and in former times there were many other seats of the greater or lesser squires within a radius of a very few miles. It is a common mistake in the south of England to suppose that Lancashire is a purely commercial county. There are, or were in my youth, some very aristocratic neighborhoods in Lancashire, and that immediately about Burnley was one of them. The creation of new wealth, and the extinction or departure of a few families, may have altered its character since then, but in the days of my grandfather nobody thought of disputing the supremacy of the old houses. There was something almost sublime in the misty antiquity of the Towneley family, one of the oldest in all England, and still one of the wealthiest, keeping house in its venerable castellated mansion in a great park with magnificent avenues. Other houses of less wealth and more modern date had their pedigrees in the history of Lancashire.

My grandfather, Gilbert Hamerton, possessed an old gabled mansion with a small but picturesque estate, divided from Towneley Park by a public road, and he had other property in the town and elsewhere enough to make him independent, but not enough to make him one of the great squires. However, as he was the second son of an ancient Yorkshire family, and as pedigrees and quarterings counted for something in those comparatively romantic times, the somewhat exclusive aristocracy about Burnley had received him with much cordiality from the first, and he continued all his life to belong to it. His comparative poverty was excused by a well-known history of confiscation in his family, and perhaps made him rather more interesting, especially as it did not go far enough to become--what poverty becomes so easily--ridiculous. He lived in a large old house, and plentifully enough, but without state and style. His marriage had been extremely imprudent from the worldly point of view. An aunt of my grandfather's, on his mother's side, had invited him to stay with her, and had not foreseen the attractions of a farmer's daughter who was living in the house as a companion. My good, unworldly grandfather fell in love with this girl, and married her. He never had any serious reason to regret this very imprudent step, for Jane Smith became an excellent wife and mother, and she did not even injure his position in society, where she knew how to make herself respected, and was much beloved by her most intimate friends. I remember her, though I never knew my grandfather. My recollection of her is a sort of picture of an old lady always dressed in black, and seated near a window, or walking slowly with a stick. The dawn of reason and feeling is associated in my memory with an intense affection for this old lady and with the kind things she said to me, not yet forgotten. I remember, too, the awful stillness of her dead body , and the strange emptiness of the house when it had been taken away.

Though my grandmother was only a farmer's daughter, her parents were well-to-do in their own line of life, and at various times helped my grandfather with sums of money; but the fact remained that he had married quite out of his class, and it has always seemed to me probable that the marriage may have had some connection with the complete and permanent estrangement that existed between Gilbert Hamerton and his brother, the squire of Hellifield Peel. As soon as I was old enough to understand a little about relationships, I reflected that the houses of my own uncles were open to me, that my cousins were all like brothers and sisters to me, and yet that my father and my aunts had never been to their uncle's house at Hellifield, and that our relations there never came to see us at Burnley. The explanation of this estrangement given by my grandfather, was that there had been a disagreement about land; but perhaps he may have felt some delicacy about telling his children that his unambitious marriage had contributed to render the separation permanent. However this may have been, my grandmother never once saw the inside of her brother-in-law's house, and when she died there was, I believe, not even the formal expression of condolence that is usual among acquaintances. Gilbert Hamerton had lived at Hollins, a house and estate inherited from his mother; and James Hamerton, the elder brother, lived in a castellated peel or border tower at Hellifield, which had been built by Lawrence Hamerton in 1440. The two places are not much more than twenty miles apart; but the brothers never met after their quarrel, and my grandfather's sons and daughters never saw their uncle's house. One result of the estrangement was that we hardly seemed to belong to our own family; and I remember a lady, who had some very vague and shadowy claims to a distant connection with the family at Hellifield, asking one of my aunts in a rather patronizing manner if she also did not "claim to be connected" with the Hamertons of Hellifield Peel. Even to this day it is difficult for me to realize the simple fact that she was niece to an uncle whom she had never seen, and first cousin to his successor.

My grandfather had lived in apparently excellent health till the age of seventy-seven, when one afternoon as he was seated in his dining-room at Hollins, nobody being present except his eldest daughter Mary, he asked her to open the window, and then added, "Say a prayer." She immediately began to repeat a short prayer, and before she had reached the end of it he was dead. There is a strange incident connected with his death, which may be worth something to those who take an interest in what is now called "Psychical Research." At the same hour his married daughter was sitting in a room forty miles away with her little boy, a child just old enough to talk, and the child stared with intense interest at an empty chair. His mother asked what attracted his attention, and the child said, "Don't you see, mamma, the old gentleman who is sitting in that chair?" I am careful not to add details, as my own imagination might unconsciously amplify them, but my impression is that the child was asked to describe the vision more minutely, and that his description exactly accorded with his grandfather's usual appearance.

Perhaps the reader will think this incident hardly worth mentioning, but to a lover of trees, avenues, and old houses, such as I confess myself to be, it seems the very perfection of a vexatious incident. I cannot imagine anything whatever, not entailing any serious consequences, that would have tried my own temper more.

On my grandfather's death, the whole of his property went to his eldest son. He had brought up all his three sons to be solicitors, not because he had any peculiar enthusiasm for the legal profession, but simply as the readiest means of earning a living. The sons themselves had no natural affinity for the law; my eldest uncle heartily disliked it, the other regarded it with cool indifference, and my father expressed his desire that I should never be a lawyer, on the ground that a man had enough to plague him in his own concerns without troubling his mind about those of other people. One curious distinction may be noted here, as the result probably of that intermingling with the every-day world, which happens naturally in the career of provincial attorneys. Whilst my aunts remained all their lives aristocratic in their feelings, and rather liked to enjoy the hospitality of the great houses in the neighborhood, my uncles, and my father also, abandoned all aristocratic memories and aspirations, and entered frankly into the middle class. Each of them did what was natural under the circumstances. Women are generally more aristocratic than men, and cling more decidedly to their class, and I think my aunts showed better taste in liking refined society than my father did in lowering himself to associate with men of an inferior stamp in rank, in manners, and in habits. I distinctly remember how one of my aunts told me that somebody had made a remark on her liking for great people, and the only comment she made was, that she preferred gentlefolks because their manners were more agreeable. She was not a worshipper of rank, but she liked the quiet, pleasant manners of the aristocracy, which indeed were simply her own manners.

My childhood could not have been better cared for, even by my own mother, than by these two excellent ladies. They gave me a beginning of education, and they have told me since that I learned to read English with the greatest facility, so that when I was sent to the Grammar School at Burnley, at the early age of five and a half, the master considered me so well forward that I was set at once to Latin. In those days it was a part of the wisdom of our educators to make us learn Latin out of a grammar written in that language, and I retain some recollection of the perfectly useless mental fatigue and puzzlement that I was made to undergo in learning abstract statements about grammatical science that were written in a tongue which I could not possibly understand. The idea of taking a child five and a half years old, and making it learn a dead language by abstract rules, is of itself a great error. The proper way to teach a child Latin is simply to give it a vocabulary, including only the things that it can see or imagine, and a few verbs to make little phrases. I had learned to read English so easily that good hopes were entertained for the rest of my education, but my progress in Latin was very slow, and the only result of my early training was to give me a horror of everything printed in Latin, that I did not overcome for many years.

There was another child-pupil rather older than I, and the head-master of those days , who had a rude disposition, sometimes amused himself by putting me on one of his knees, and the other little boy on the other knee, after which, by an adroit simultaneous movement of the two legs, he suddenly brought our heads into collision. I quite remember the sensation of being stunned on these occasions, but am not aware that my Latin was any the better for it.

My recollection of those early years is extremely vague, and there is little in them that could interest the reader. I was taken once or twice a year to my father, and always disliked and dreaded those visits, as I feared him greatly, and with good reason. On one of these visits, when quite a child, I persuaded my father's groom to let me mount his saddle-horse, which I remember as a gray animal of what seemed a prodigious altitude. The man put me on the horse's back, and being entirely destitute of common-sense or prudence, actually gave me a whip and left the bridle to me. I applied the whip vigorously, and was very soon thrown off and carried back to the house covered with blood, happily without more serious consequences. Another little incident has more of the comic element. My father employed a tailor for himself, and told the man to make me a suit without entering into any particulars. The tailor being thus left to his own wisdom, made a costume that was the exact copy of a full-grown squire's dress on a small scale. It was composed of a green cut-away coat, a yellow waistcoat, and green trousers, the whole adorned with gilt buttons. The tailor dressed me, and then, proud of his work, presented me to my father and the ladies. If the tailor was proud, my pride and satisfaction were at least equal to his, and we neither of us could in the least understand the roars of laughter that my appearance provoked, whilst our feelings were deeply wounded by my father's tyrannical decree that I was never to wear those beautiful clothes at all. Even to this day I am capable of regretting that suit, and certainly I often see children now whose costumes are at least equally absurd.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet