Memoirs of Life and Literature. W. H. Mallock
novels, deriving as I did so a precocious sense of manhood from the eighteenth-century oaths with which I garnished the conversation of my characters. My ambitions, however, as a writer of fiction were on the whole less constant than those which I entertained as a poet. By governesses and other instructors, Wordsworth and Tennyson were obtruded on me as models of beauty and edification. Wordsworth I thought ridiculous. Tennyson seemed to me unmanly and mawkish. The poets I found out for myself were Dryden and, more particularly, Pope; and when I was about fourteen I imagined myself destined to win back for Pope, as a model, the supremacy he had unfortunately lost, while the sentimentalities of Tennyson and his followers would disappear like the fripperies of faded and outworn fashions.
When my father and his family migrated from the banks of the Exe to Denbury these literary projects found fresh means of expanding themselves. Opposite the front door of the Manor House was a large and antique annexe, once occupied by a bailiff who managed the home farm. This my grandfather had intended to connect with the main building, by which means the Manor House would have been nearly doubled in size. His scheme was not carried out. The annexe, covered with increasing growths of ivy, remained locked up and isolated, and for many years stood empty. But on the Archdeacon's death, and the removal of his household from Dartington, a use was at last found for it. The upper rooms were converted into a temporary storehouse for his library—large rooms which now were lined with shelves, and in which fires were frequently lighted to keep the volumes dry. In a moment of happy inspiration I obtained permission to look after the fires myself. The key was placed in my possession. Day by day I entered. I locked myself in, and all the world was before me.
I had often before been irritated, and my curiosity had been continually piqued, by finding that certain books—most of them plays of the time of Charles II—would be taken away from me and secreted if I happened to have abstracted some such stray volume from a bookcase; but here I was my own master. My grandfather's library was, as I have said already, particularly rich in literature of this semiforbidden class, and rows of plays and poems by Congreve, Etheridge, Rochester, Dryden, and their contemporaries offered themselves to my study, as though by some furtive assignation. Among other wrecks of furniture with which the worm-eaten floors were encumbered was an old and battered rocking-horse, bestriding which I studied these secret volumes, and found in it an enchanted steed which would lift me into the air and convey me to magically distant kingdoms.
Inspired by these experiences, and fancying myself destined to accomplish a counter-revolution in the literary taste of England, I endeavored night by night to lay the foundations of my own poetic fame. My bedroom was pungent with the atmosphere of a pre-Tennysonian world. Its floor, uneven with age, was covered with a carpet whose patterns had faded into a dim monochrome, and its walls were dark with portraits of Copplestone forefathers in flowing wigs and satins. My bed was draped with immemorial curtains, colored like gold and bordered with black velvet. Close to the bed was a round mahogany table, furnished with pens and paper, and night by night, propped up by pillows, I endeavored to rival Dryden and Pope, by means of a quill wet with the dews of Parnassus—dews which, having sprinkled the bedclothes, would scandalize the housemaids the next morning by their unfortunate likeness to ink.
My father had originally meant to send me to Harrow, but, on the recommendation of one of the sons of the Bishop of Exeter, he first tried on me the effects of a school which had just been established for the purpose of combining the ordinary course of education with an inculcation of the extremest principles of the High Church Anglican party. I was, however, deficient in one of the main characteristics on which a boy's suitability to school life depends: I had an ingrained dislike, not indeed of physical exercise, but of games. Football to me seemed merely a tiresome madness, and cricket the same madness in a more elaborate form. Instead, therefore, of promoting me to Harrow, where two of his brothers had been educated, he took, after many delays, a step for which I sincerely thanked him—he transferred me, by way of preparation for Oxford, to the most congenial and delightful of all possible private tutors, at whose house I spent the happiest years of my life.
CHAPTER III
A PRIVATE TUTOR DE LUXE
Early Youth Under a Private Tutor—Poetry—Premonitions of Modern Liberalism
The tutor of whom I have spoken was the Rev. W. B. Philpot, a favorite pupil of Doctor Arnold's at Rugby, an intimate friend of Tennyson's, and himself a devotee of the Muses. His domed forehead was massive, his features were delicately chiseled, and his eyes were a clear gray. His back hair—the only hair he had got—showed a slight tendency to assume picturesque and flowing curves on the collars of his well-made coats; and, having heard from my father that I, too, was a poet, he declared himself eager to welcome me, not only as a disciple, but also as a valued friend. Mr. Philpot lived at Littlehampton, where he occupied a most capacious house. It was the principal house in a very old-fashioned terrace, which faced a sandy common, and enjoyed in those days an uninterrupted view of miles of beach and the racing waves of the sea. Mr. Philpot's disciples numbered from ten to twelve. They had, for the most part, been removed from Harrow or Eton, by reason of no worse fault than a signal inclination to indolence; and though, even under their preceptor's genial and scholarly auspices, none of them except myself showed much inclination for study, we formed together an agreeable and harmonious party, much of its amenity being due to the presence of Mrs. Philpot, his wife, whose brother, Professor Conington, was then the most illustrious representative of Latin learning at Oxford.
We enjoyed, under Mr. Philpot's care, the amplest domestic comforts, and we enjoyed, under our own care, almost unlimited credit at every shop in the town. We had carriages, the hire of which went down in Mr. Philpot's account, whenever we wanted them for expeditions; and we would often drive out in the warm after-dinner twilights to a tea garden three miles away, where we lingered among the scent of roses till the bell of some remote church tower sounded, through the dewy quiet, its nine notes to the stars. We had boats on the Arun, a stream on which our oars would take us sometimes beyond Amberly, and not bring us back till midnight. On other occasions we would, like Tennyson's hero, "nourish a youth sublime" in wandering on the nocturnal beach, and, pre-equipped with towels, would bathe in the liquid moonlight.
The Littlehampton season, so far as visitors were concerned, was summer, and from the middle of May onward various ladies of ornamental and interesting aspect would make their appearance on the pavement of Beach Terrace, or, seen on the balconies of houses which had just unclosed their shutters, would trouble and enliven the atmosphere with suggestions of vague adventures. Some of these we came to know, as Mr. Philpot and his wife had many mundane acquaintances. Others—and indeed most of them—remained tantalizing mysteries to the end. At all events they filled the air with the subtle pollen of a romance which a closer familiarity with them might very possibly have destroyed.
The effect on myself of such influences was presently betrayed by the fact that poetry, as understood by Pope, no longer satisfied me. I gradually submitted to the dominion of Keats, Browning, and Matthew Arnold. Even at Denbury, in my most conservative days, I had so far escaped from the atmosphere of Pope's Pastorals that I had described a beautiful valley in which I would often sequester myself as a place—
Where no man's voice, or any voice makes stir,
Save sometimes through the leafy loneliness
The long loose laugh of the wild woodpecker.
One of my fellow pupils, whose youth had an air of manhood, and who played with much expression on the cornet, confided to me, on returning from a summer holiday, his adventures on the Lake of Como, where, resting on his oars, he had agitated with his musical notes the pulses of a fair companion. "Now there," he said, "you have something which, if you tried, you might manage to make a verse about." I tried, and the result was this:
The stars are o'er our heads in hollow skies,
In hollow skies the stars beneath our boat,
Between the stars of two infinities
Midway upon a gleaming film we float.
My