The Adventure of Living : a Subjective Autobiography. John St. Loe Strachey
of the fact that he was a strenuous Radical, Sir Henry's only remark in telling the story was: "I refused, because I did not like the idea of always voting in the opposite lobby to my father." The first Henry Strachey, though a staunch Whig in early life, was a supporter of William Pitt and later, of Lord Liverpool. Therefore the second Henry Strachey, if he had got into the House, when he first came home, would no doubt have voted with the Radical Rump.
There are many stories I could tell of the second Sir Henry, who lived on at Sutton till the year '58, when my father succeeded, but these again must be kept for another book—if I ever have time to write it. I must say the same of my own grandfather, my father's father, Edward Strachey, and his memorable wife. Of both of them plenty is to be found in Carlyle's account of his early years. I shall only record of Edward Strachey here the fact that after he returned from India he became an official at the India House on the Judicial side, and was called the Examiner, his duties being to examine the reports of important law-cases sent from India to the Board of Directors. When one day I asked my father for his earliest recollection of any important event, he told me that he could well remember his father coming back from the India House (which was by a Thames wherry, for the Examiner lived at Shooter's Hill and had to cross the river) and saying to his mother: "The Emperor is dead." That was in the year 1822, and the Emperor was, of course, Napoleon. Strachey was one of the first people to hear of the event because St. Helena was borrowed by the Government for prison purposes from the East India Company. The East Indiamen, however, still used it as a house of call. Therefore it happened that the East India Company, by the actual appearance of one of the ship's captains at the India House, heard of the great event an hour or two before the Government to whom the despatches were forwarded. My father must have been ten years old at the time, as he was born in 1812.
CHAPTER VI
MY CHILDHOOD AND SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL INCIDENTS
And now for the child who was so happy in his surroundings, and, above all, in those who were to care for him.
There were naturally certain nursery traditions about me of the magnifying kind, but, taken as a whole, I don't think I can claim to have been anything but a normal child, with health fair to moderate and an intelligence which was reasonably quick and responsive. I had, however, no educational precociousness; I did not read till I was nearly nine, and even then did not use the power of reading. The book habit did not come till I was twelve or thirteen-though then it came, as far as poetry was concerned, with a rush. By fifteen I had read all the older English poets and most of the new. In reading poetry I showed a devotion which I am thankful to say I have always maintained. In this matter at least I am the opposite of Darwin. He confessed that the power to read poetry left him entirely in middle life. The older I grow, the more I love verse.
The actual study of metre was a source of acute satisfaction. It is said of me, indeed, that when, at a little more than two and a half years old, we were starting for a long journey to Pau, where my mother had been ordered to winter, I insisted on my father not packing, but taking with him in his hand, Spenser's Faerie Queen. He had been reading it to us that autumn. I did not know what a journey meant, but I was determined the readings should not be broken. I also could not have known what Spenser meant, but his stanza fed ear, and heart, and mind with melody.
It was at this age, too, that I seem to have made two theological observations which greatly amused my family. I was discovered one day digging with tempestuous energy in the garden. When asked what I was doing, I replied, "Digging for hell-fire!" That was especially curious because my father, as a strong Broad Churchman and a devoted friend and disciple of Frederick Maurice, was a wholehearted disbeliever in hell and its flames. He had "dismissed Hell with costs," as Lord Westbury said, ever since he came to man's estate. How I derived my knowledge on this point was never cleared up. Demons with three-pronged forks and curly tails are, of course, universally regarded as "the friends of little children" by natural right, and my preference I must suppose was transferred to their flaming home.
My other early piece of theological criticism was characteristic. Either my father or my mother, I forget which, was explaining to me the story of the Crucifixion and our Lord's arrest by the armed men of the High Priest. Greatly surprised and perturbed by the fact that Christ did not resist and make a fight of it I energetically enquired, "Hadn't He a gun?" I was told No. "Hadn't He a sword?" No. And then: "Hadn't He even a stick with a point?" Though not naturally combative, I have always been a strong believer in the virtue of the counterattack as the best, or, indeed, the only efficient form of self-defence.
I was, I believe, an easy-going, contented child, with no tendency to be frightened either by strangers, by imaginary terrors, or by the dark. I jogged easily along the Nursery high-road. There was, however, a family tradition that, though as a rule I was perfectly willing to let other children have my toys, and would not take the trouble to do what nurses call "stand up for myself," I did occasionally astonish my playmates and my guardians by super-passionate outbursts. These, however, were very rare indeed, for all my life I have had a great dislike or even horror of anything in the shape of losing my temper, an unconscious recognition, as it were, of the wisdom of the Roman saying, "Anger is a short madness." Instinctively I felt with Beaumont and Fletcher:
Oh, what a beast in uncollected man!
My general psychology, as far as I can tell from memory, was plain and straightforward when a child. I have no recollection of feeling any general depression or disappointment, of thinking that I was misunderstood, i.e. of entertaining what is now called "an inferiority complex." I never gave way to any form of childish melancholy. I did not even have alarming, or mysterious, or metaphysical dreams! What makes this more curious is the fact that I very much outgrew my strength, about the age of nine or ten. I was not allowed to play active games, or run about, or do any of the things in which I delighted.
Though without great physical strength, I was all my life exceedingly fond of the joys of bodily exercise, whether swimming, rowing, riding, walking, mountaineering, skating, playing tennis or racquets or whatever game was going.
In none of these pastimes did I reach anything approaching excellence, but from all of them I got intense enjoyment. I tasted, indeed, almost every form of athleticism and genuinely smacked my lips at the flavour of each in turn, yet never bothered about the super-pleasure which comes from doing such things as well as they can be done.
Though my bodily health did not give me an unhappy or depressed childhood, or make me suffer from any sort of morbid reaction, I had occasionally a very curious and somewhat rare experience—one which, though it has been noted and discussed, has never, as far as I know, been fully explained by physicians either of the body or of the soul.
The condition to which I refer is that which the musician Berlioz called "isolement"—the sense of spiritual isolation, which seizes on those who experience it with a poignancy amounting to awe. Wordsworth's Ode to Immortality affords the locus classicus in the way of description:
Fallings from us, vanishings,
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realised.
I once amused myself by getting together a large number of descriptions of "isolement" and found that, though they may differ considerably, they have in common the characteristics enumerated by the Ode.
The first thing to be noted about the sense of isolement is that it comes, not in sleeping, but in waking hours, and that, whether truly or not, it brings with it the feeling that it is the result of some external impulse. The best form of explanation, however, is to describe as exactly as I can my own sensations. Though the sense of isolement has been experienced by me as a little child, as a lad, as a young man, and even up to the age of forty or forty-five, the recollections of my first visitation, which occurred when I could not have been more, at the very most, than six years of age, are very much more vivid and keener-edged than those of the later occasions.
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