Memoirs of Life and Literature. W. H. Mallock
constituted for us what is commonly called society, our respect for many of them as "Normans" was appreciably tempered by a sense of their dullness as men and women. They were nearly all of them members of old Devonshire families, beyond the circle of which their interests did not often wander. But certain of them in my own memory stand out from the rest as interesting types of conditions which by this time have passed away. Of these I may mention four—Emma and Antony Buller, son and daughter of Sir Antony Buller of Pound; Lord Blatchford, a Gladstonian Liberal, and the celebrated Henry Philpotts, the then Bishop of Exeter.
Antony Buller, who was my godfather, was vicar of a parish on the western borders of Dartmoor. In the fact that "remote from towns he ran his godly race" he resembled the vicar described in "The Deserted Village," but except for his godliness he resembled him in little else. A model of secluded piety, he was educated at Eton and Christchurch; unquestioning in his social as well as his Christian conservatism, and expressing in the refinement of his voice and the well-bred quasi-meekness of his bearing a sense of family connection, tempered by a scholarly recognition of the equality of human souls. Lord Blatchford, his not very distant neighbor, was in many ways an Antony Buller secularized. His piety, polished by the classics and Oxford chapels, was what was in those days called Liberal, rather than Tory. What in Antony Buller was a conservative Christian meekness was in Lord Blatchford a progressive Christian briskness; but his belief in popular progress was accompanied by a smile at its incidents, as though it were a kind of frisking to which the masses ought to be welcome so long as it did not assume too practical a character or endanger any of the palings within the limits of which it ought to be confined.
Emma Buller, too, was typical, but in a totally different way. She was a type of that county life which railways have gradually modified, and by this time almost obliterated. She was a woman remarkable for her vivacity, wit, and humor. At county balls she was an institution. At country houses throughout Devonshire and Cornwall she was a familiar and welcome guest, and to half of her hosts and hostesses she was in one way or another related. Among her accomplishments was the singing of comic songs, in a beautifully clear but half-apologetic voice, so that while gaining in point they lost all trace of vulgarity, her eyes seeming to invite each listener on whom she fixed them to share with her some amusement which was only half legitimate. At the Duke of Bedford's house, near Tavistock, she exercised this magic one evening on Lord John Russell. The song which she sang to him was political. It began thus, each verse having the same recurring burden:
"Come, listen while I sing to you,
Lord John, that prince of sinisters,
Who once pulled down the House of Lords,
The Crown and all the ministers.
That is, he would have if he could,
But a little thing prevented him."
For many years she spent a large part of every winter with Lady (then Miss) Burdett-Coutts, who had in those days a large villa at Torquay, generally filled with visitors. Emma Buller's allusions to these, many of whom were notabilities, enlarged, as I listened to them in my childhood, my conception of the social world, and made it seem vaguely livelier and more fruitful in adventure than the hereditary circle with which alone I was so far familiar.
This result was accentuated by the stories told in my hearing of another personage well known to my family likewise, to which I listened with a yet keener appreciation. Bishop Philpotts—for it is of him I speak—holding till the day of his death a "golden stall" at Durham, the emoluments of which amounted to £5,000 a year, interested me rather as a lay magnate than as a clerical. Among the many villas then rising at Torquay the Bishop built one of the largest. This agreeable residence, in the designing of which he was helped by my father, and which overlooked extensive glades and lawns sloping down toward the sea, enabled him to enjoy a society more entertaining than that of his own cathedral close; and the anecdotes current in my family as to his ways and his mundane hospitalities were as familiar to me as those of any character in the novels of Miss Austen—a writer whose social discrimination delighted and appealed to me before I was ten years old.
The Bishop was renowned for his suave and courtly manners, his charming voice, and the subtle precision of its modulations; and the following stories of him are still fresh in my memory.
At one of his luncheon parties he was specially kind to a country clergyman's wife, who knew none of the company, and he took her out on a terrace in order to show her the view—a view of the sea shut in by the crags of a small cove. "Ah, my lord," gasped the lady, "it reminds one so much of Switzerland." "Precisely," said the Bishop, "except that there we have the mountains without the sea, and here we have the sea without the mountains."
He was somewhat less urbane to an ultra-fashionable lady, his neighbor, who had developed a habit, in his opinion objectionable, of exhibiting his views to her visitors by way of passing the morning. This lady, with a bevy of satellites, having appeared one day in his drawing room about the hour of noon, the Bishop, with the utmost graciousness, took them into a conservatory, showed them some of his plants and then, opening a door, invited them to go outside. As soon as they were in the outer air, he himself retreated, saying, as he closed the door, "We lunch at one."
On another occasion at a dinner party a shy young lady was present, whose mother, with maternal partiality, admitted that her daughter sang. After dinner the Bishop had candles placed on the piano, and begged the shrinking vocalist to give them an exhibition of her skill. The luckless victim protested that she could not sing at all, but presently, despite her objections, she was blushing on the fatal music stool, and was faltering out a desperate something which was at all events intended to be a song. "Thank you," said the Bishop, benignly, as soon as the performance was ended. "The next time you tell us you cannot sing we shall know how to believe you."
On yet another occasion two intrepid females, armed with guidebooks, and obviously determined to see whatever they could, had entered the Bishop's carriage drive, and were considering which way they would take, when their ears were caught by a sound like that of an opening window. They discovered, on looking about them, that the drive was commanded by a summerhouse, and, framed in an open window, was the visage of the Bishop himself. "Ladies," he said, blandly, "these grounds are private, as the gate through which you have just passed may in part have suggested to you. The turn to the left will bring you in due time to the stables. If you should go straight on you will presently reach the house. Should you inspect the house, may I mention to you that in one of the bedrooms is an invalid? You will perhaps pardon my servants if they do not show you that. Good morning."
But my boyish appreciation of the Bishop's mundane qualities was equaled by my faith in the sacrosanctity of his office. I never for a moment doubted that men like Henry of Exeter were channels through which the Christian priesthood received those miraculous powers by their exercise of which alone it was possible for the ordinary sinner to be rescued from eternal torment. Of the structural doctrines of theology which were then the shibboleths of English Churchmanship generally, I never entertained a doubt. That the universe was created in the inside of a week four thousand and four years before the birth of Christ, and that every word of the Bible was supernaturally dictated to the writer, were to me facts as certain as the fact that the ear this globular or that the date of the battle of Hastings was 1066. They belonged to the same order of things as the "two nations"; and the attempts of certain persons to discredit the former and to disturb the reciprocal relations of the latter represented for me a mood so blasphemous and absurd as not to be worthy of a serious man's attention.
And yet in certain ways by the time I was twelve years old I was something of a revolutionary myself. Like the majority of healthy boys, I had tastes for riding and shooting, and to such things as rooks and rabbits my rifle was as formidable as most boys could desire. But long before I was conscious of any passion for sport I found myself beset by another, which was very much more insistent—namely, a passion for literary composition—I cannot say a taste for writing, for I dictated verses to the nursery-maids before I could hold a pen. As soon as I was able to read I came across the works of Fielding, whose style I endeavored to imitate