Reminiscences of a Student's Life (2025)

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Reminiscences
of a Student’s Life

Jane Ellen Harrison

Second Impression

Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the
Hogarth Press, 52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.
1925

Yorkshire Days

In view of my present cult for Russia andthings Russian, I like to think that my firstchildish memory is of the word “Moscow”.Moscow to me was a dog, not a town—anold Newfoundland dog named, no doubt, inhonour of the Crimean War, which willsufficiently date these reminiscences. Moscowhad his kennel in the backyard under a bigspreading tree, and from this tree exuded dropsof bright gum. It was my fearful joy torush to the tree, seize the gum-drops whichwere well within the length of Moscow’schain, and be back before he could begin tobark ferociously. When later I learnt thatto some people Moscow was a cathedral city,not a dog, my universe rocked with Einsteinianrelativity. Russia was about us inthose days, a strange, inhuman Russia of Tzarsand Siberia. My first toy was a box of bricksand soldiers mixed, called “The Siege ofSevastopol”, given by a patriotic uncle. I[Pg 10]hated soldiers and sieges and muskets andbayonets, but the word Sevastopol was amarvel, and a soft joy to my child’s mouth. Iturned it over and over, and when much laterI learned its Greek origin and meaning, thereseemed a real fitness in things.

Then, every Christmas came Russia again.My father had had some business relationswith Russia, and every year some kind Russianused to send him a package of caviare andcranberries and reindeers’ tongues. Thecaviare was reserved for my father, but hegave me sometimes delicious morsels on hottoast, and he has left me the legacy of a toodelicate palate. The cranberries were madeinto sauce for venison, for the grown-ups’dinners, but a few reindeers’ tongues foundtheir way to our schoolroom breakfast, wherethey were keenly appreciated by one littlegreedy fat child. Oh those reindeers’ tongues!they tasted not only of reindeer, but—but ofsnow-fields and dreaming forests.

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My father had also imported a tiny Russiansledge, and sometimes he took me for drives—thankGod it only held one, so I could dreamundisturbed of steppes and Siberia and bearsand wolves. All my lore was derived fromtwo enchanting books—Near Home and FarOff. I wish I had them now,[1] but north and[Pg 11]south were jumbled and jostled in my fancies.Since then I have only once been in a sledge.When I was spending a winter at S. Moritza friend died. Her funeral procession wasa long line of sledges. It was unspeakablysolemn and silent. When I die, if I cannotbe buried at sea, I should like to go to my gravein a sledge.

[1] A kind reader of the Nation has since supplied my need.

But Russia soon faded, leaving only mynative Yorkshire. And here I must makeconfession. In politics I am an old Liberal,with a dash of the Little Englander and theBolshevik. I hate the Empire; it stands tome for all that is tedious and pernicious inthought; within it are always and necessarilythe seeds of war. I object to nearly all formsof patriotism. But when I search the hiddendepths of my heart, I find there the mostnarrow and local of parochialisms. I amintensely proud of being a Yorkshire woman.

My gifted friend Hope Mirrlees haswritten a wonderful novel, Counterplot, inwhich she shows that only in and through thepattern of art, or it may be of religion, which isa form of art, do we at all seize and understandthe tangle of experience which we call Life.Until I met Aunt Glegg in the Mill on theFloss, I never knew myself. I am AuntGlegg; with all reverence I say it. I wear[Pg 12]before the world a mask of bland cosmopolitancourtesy and culture; I am advanced in myviews, eager to be in touch with all modernmovements, but beneath all that lies AuntGlegg, rigidly, irrationally conservative, fibrouswith prejudice, deep-rooted in her nativesoil.

It is said by Southerners that we Yorkshirepeople are exclusive, gruff in manner, harshand unsympathetic in soul. Gruff in mannerI grant it, but our bark is worse than our bite.Exclusive? possibly, yet I have heard a Yorkshirelady say “there are some quite decentpeople in Scotland.” Harsh and unsympatheticin soul. Well. A friend of minewas left by her husband alone in a smallmoorland cottage they had taken for thesummer. At nightfall a knock was heard;her landlord entered, under his arm a largegrey rabbit. “I heerd t’ Maister had left yeralawn, maybe ye’d be lawnly. I brought t’rabbit; he’d be a bit o’ company for yer.” Imyself was left by a friend in a small Yorkshireinn. The landlady looked in on me inthe morning, bearing a huge dead duck.“Yer’ll maybe be lawnly wi’out Missie,happen yer’d fancy a dook fer yer dinner.”I did, and I ate two huge slices of its fat breastwith unlimited savoury trimmings. Shelooked in to mark my progress. “Aye,[Pg 13]yer eat but poorly, yer’ve been living maybewi’ them Southerners.” When I left my inn,I thanked the landlady for all her kindness.She looked at me steadily and said, “Itweren’t you, I knawed yer fayther, t’audCharlie ’Arrison.” Now my father wasnever called “Charlie”; he was far too remoteand solemn a man for diminutives. She wasusing what grammarians call—or would callif they ever attended to anything of anyimportance—the subjective diminutive. Itsimply expressed the kindliness in her hearttowards me and mine. We are not a sentimentalpeople. I picked up a book of Yorkshirepoems. Among them was an Ode toSpring. It began thus:

I like to think that we Yorkshire peoplehave another trait in common with theRussians. The vice we hate above all othersis pretentiousness. I have heard one Russiancharge another with pretentiousness; if itexisted at all it was so infinitesimal as to beinvisible to the naked English eye. Just sowith the Yorkshireman. You may breakevery commandment of the Decalogue—heis easy enough, as long as you are a fairlygood fellow he will pardon you—but try to[Pg 14]show off, to impress him in any way, and youare done.

To such, I admit, my countrymen were coldand harsh. I remember a hapless clergymanwho came north to take charge of our parishwhile the Vicar was away. The poor manarrived charged with good intentions; hemeant to “brighten our Services”; he broughtwith him leaflets and new hymn-books andnew hassocks to compel us to kneel flat uponour knees instead of comfortably crouchingthrough the Litany as had been our Evangelicalwont. He even put a little cross on theCommunion Table, but this my father withhis own hands swiftly and silently removed.The first Sunday the church was full; thesecond, spite of all the “brightness”, it waschill and empty save for a few sullen faces. Iapproved of the new man’s views, though Idid not like him, so I went conscientiouslyround to the chief parishioners to ask why theydid not come to church. “We dawn’t haudwi’ ’is ways,” was the answer. I thought itwas the hassocks and the hymn-books and theleaflets. “Naw—’e could do as ’e liked wi’them papers and such like—they was nawmatter—but we dawn’t haud wi’ ’is ways.”Subsequent analysis taught me that “ways”is Yorkshire for the sum total of your reactions.Your particular deeds are of as little significance[Pg 15]to him as your particular words; it is you, thewhole of you, you “in a loomp”, as he wouldsay, that the Yorkshireman wisely reckonswith. They were instinctively better bredthan I was with my rationalising right andwrong, and they had felt the bad manners ofthe changes worked in their old Vicar’sabsence. After holding out for three monthsthe innovator went back to his own place asadder and a wiser Southerner.

My people must have been, I think,singularly old-fashioned and provincial evenfor those days. I remember that an oldgentleman who came often to see us usedto kiss my eldest sister’s hand and call her“Mistress Elizabeth”, unusual even in the’fifties. How I wished some one would kissmy hand! But no one ever did till I came inmy old age to courteous France. And as toMistress Jane—no, it was Lady Jane Ilonged to be, for my cult was for Lady JaneGrey. I had a child’s magical habit of mind;if I could get the name exactly, I should somehowpossess the person. To name is tocreate. “And God said to the light, ‘Light’”(He named it), and there was Light. So Iconsulted my kind nurse as to whether I couldever become Lady Jane. “Yes, of course,miss,” said the cheery woman. “If you’re[Pg 16]good, maybe when you’re a big girl you’llmarry a lord and then you’ll be a lady.”

Hope shone bright, but I was a cautiouschild, and I referred the question to mybetter-informed governess. The blow fell.No, not even if I married a dozen lordscould I ever be Lady Jane, unless they mademy father an earl, which seemed somehowunlikely. So the dream faded, but notwholly. I could still “stay at home in mycastle reading Plato while the ladies of theCourt went hunting in the park”. Andhere I must confess my motives were not aspurely platonic as they seem. The terrorof my childhood was that I should be forcedsome day to ride to hounds. I loved thehounds, but oh how I hated the horses! Istill hate their huge teeth and bulging eyesand satin skins. I learnt to ride (very badly)on an adorable donkey with long furry earsand soft kind eyes, and a small furry donkeyslept in my bed every night for years. Onenight the nurse took it away, saying it wastime I learnt not to be a baby. I said nota word, I had long learnt to keep silence.[Pg 17]But I was found at midnight with swolleneyes, staring wide awake. The nurse, beinga sensible woman, put back my donkey, andI slept soft and warm. Alas! I was soonpromoted to a Shetland pony, the veriest littleimp of hell. He spent his time running awayand buck-jumping; I spent my time prostrateon the Filey sands. He effectivelybroke my nerve; I was, and remain, a physicalcoward, and in a community of bold riderswas an object of ignominy. No one understood,no one sympathised, till at a Swedishsanatorium I, by good fortune, met Mr.Lytton Strachey. We were both there toundergo Swedish massage, and Swedish massageas administered by a robust native is“no picnic”. “Take my advice,” he said;“as soon as they touch you begin to yell,and go on yelling till they stop.” It wassound advice, sympathetically given. I learntthen, for the first time, how tender, if howsearching, is the finger Mr. Strachey lays onour human frailties.

My religious training was oddly mixed.My father was incapable of formulating aconviction, but I think he really would havesympathised with the eminent statesman who“had a great respect for religion as long asit did not interfere with a gentleman’s private[Pg 18]life!” I remember his look of annoyancewhen the Archbishop of York, who waslunching with us after a Confirmation, andhad been told that I had played the villageorgan, put his hand on my head and bademe “consecrate my great gifts to God”.That Archbishop was a splendid figure tomy childish imagination. I loved his ritualrobes and voluminous sleeves, but one dayI looked into my brother-in-law’s study andfound the apparitor arranging these vestments.Alas! the sleeves were not real sleeves, theycame off. The apparitor, touched by myinterest, very kindly showed me how theyhooked on, but the gilt was off the gingerbread.To return to my father. The Archbishopwas trying enough, but an old Evangelicalclergyman was worse. He called tosay good-bye to us one day and asked if, beforeparting, we would all kneel down and “aska blessing” on our journey. I can see myfather’s face of cold disgust. He was in hisown house and he could not be rude, so hesat down—he never knelt—and covered hisangry face with one hand and let the oldclergyman pray. Then he saw him courteouslyto the door and came back mutteringsomething. I could only catch the word“indecent”. He attended church with fairregularity, but we children noticed that on[Pg 19]what used to be called “Sacrament Sundays”he was apt to have a slight attack of lumbago,which passed off on Monday morning.

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But my stepmother was made of quiteother metal. She was a Celt and her religionwas of the fervent semi-revivalist type. Shewas a conscientious woman and tried to doher duty, I am sure, to the three rather dourlittle girls who had been her pupils and werelater presented to her as stepdaughters. Shegave us Scripture lessons every Sunday. Hermain doctrines were that we must be “bornagain” and that “God would have our wholehearts or nothing”. I think I early felt thatthis was not quite fair. Why, if we wereto care for Him only, had He made thisdelightful world full of enchanting foreignlanguages? Anyhow, the holocaust I honestlyattempted was a complete failure. I was fromthe outset a hopeless worldling. But theapparatus of religion interested me. Sundaywas an exciting if laborious day. I taughttwice in the Sunday School, and from theage of twelve played the organ at two services.I followed the prayers in Latin, and thelesson in German, and the Gospel in Greek;this with some misgivings as to the “whole-heartedness”of this proceeding. We alwayshad to write out one of the sermons frommemory, and were never told which. This[Pg 20]has given me a bad habit of attending closelyto any nonsense I may happen to hear at ameeting or a lecture. I see my happierfriends sleeping and yawning or nudging eachother; my attention is glued to the speaker.

Every Sunday I learnt the Collect for theday and either the Epistle or the Gospel.My favourite Collect was that for AdventSunday, and it still thrills me, but I cannothave had any real taste for literature as someof the hymns that delighted me most wereabominable doggerel.

My favourite moral-song ran as follows:

Partly, no doubt, it was that in my childishmind I had a pleasant picture of an old sheepsuitably attired in a Victorian bonnet withstrings and a shawl, but chiefly it pleased mebecause it expressed my innate and still inveteratedislike of, and contempt for, everythingchic and smart. Perhaps it is somecomplex caused by my own childish sufferingsin my “Sunday clothes”, though heavenknows they were plain enough. Anyhow,even now when I see a faultlessly turned outman or woman I always expect he or she[Pg 21]will prove to be a fool and a bore. Wecannot all be distinguished, but for heaven’ssake let us all be shabby and comfortable.At a Cambridge function, when he wasChancellor, I once gazed with admirationat the late Duke of Devonshire. His rightboot had a largish hole in it from whichemerged a grey woollen toe. That, I felt,was really ducal. I turned the same soureye on the very rich. I remember MissPernel Strachey raising the question: “Whydo rich people always get so dull?” Nowthat Miss Strachey is Principal of Newnham,she will, I hope, employ some of her leisurein reading her Bible. “It is easier for acamel to go through a needle’s eye than fora rich man to enter into the Kingdom ofGod.” For “Kingdom of God” read“Kingdom of the higher spiritual values”and she has her answer.

My secular education till I was seventeenwas in the hands of a rather rapid successionof governesses, all of them strictly English.My father’s creed was a simple one: Allforeigners were Papists, all Papists were liars,and he “wouldn’t have one in his house”.How long and ardently I longed in vain tosee a Papist! The result of my father’ssimple faith was that never in this world[Pg 22]shall I be able to speak French. When Iwas sent to Cheltenham to be “finished”, Iwas placed in the Upper First at once becauseI could read three or four languages and knew“Noel et Chapsal” off by heart. My firstmorning the French master gave a simpledictée. Some isolated words I could makeout, but not a single intelligible sentence.I sent in a blank sheet and cried with rage.All my governesses were grossly ignorant, butthey were good women, steadily kind to me;they taught me deportment, how to comeinto a room, how to get into a carriage, alsothat “little girls should be seen and not heard”,and that I was there (in the schoolroom) “tolearn, not to ask questions.” On Saturdayswe repeated the Books of the Bible in theircorrect order and the Kings of Israel andJudah, the signs of the Zodiac and the Tablesof Weights and Measures. I also learnt bya mysterious system of mnemonics manyisolated dates. I can still give correctly thedate of the Creation of the World, the Fall,the Flood, the battle of Quebec and theDiscovery of the Circulation of the Blood.

Victorian education was ingeniously useless.Every day I spent an hour doing exquisitehems and seams. I cannot to this day makethe simplest garment. But for some thingsI am devoutly thankful. I was made to[Pg 23]learn for some fifteen years three verses ofthe Bible every day. I might choose whatpoetry I wished. In this way I learnt impartiallygreat quantities of Milton, Wordsworthand Mrs. Hemans, Gray’s “Elegy”,the “Prisoner of Chillon” and the like. Ilearnt them all lying on a back-board, and tothis day my flat back is the admiration ofdressmakers. When, nowadays, I see theround backs of my young friends, and watchthem slinking round doors as though theywere criminals and not English gentlewomen,and especially when they fail to get up whenaddressed by their elders and betters, I sometimessigh for a little “deportment”, but,after all, we of a past generation have no moreright to impose our manners than we haveto impose our morals. When a young mancomes to tea with me for the first time, itgives me, I confess, a slight shock when helies down full length on the rug, but therebyhe expresses his willingness for a kindlyrelation, and things are more comfortablethan if he sat, hat in hand, on the edge ofhis chair. Again, it surprised me a littlewhen at Cambridge I asked a young manto tea for the first time and he answeredon a post-card: “I’ll come if I can, but don’tcount on me.” “Count on” him, the lout!I crossed his name (an honoured name by[Pg 24]the by) out of my address book, but the sameevening—in penance for my bad temper—Iwrote to him on a post-card and said I hopedI might “count on him” for another Sunday.And then things change so swiftly; thevulgarism of one generation is the polishedcliché of the next. When I was young, toapologise by saying “sorry” would have been—witnessthe Punch of the period—to writeyourself down a shop-man; now I hear“sorry” drop quite easily from the mostblue-blooded lips. As to the absurdities ofVictorian education, we learnt certainly agreat deal of miscellaneous rubbish (I amprepared though to defend the signs of theZodiac), but odd scraps of information arestimulating to a child’s imagination. Nowadaysit seems you learn only what is reasonableand relevant. I went to Rome with a youngfriend, educated on the latest lines, and whohad taken historical honours at Cambridge.The first morning the pats of butter cameup stamped with the Twins. “Good oldRomulus and Remus,” said I. “Good oldwho?” said she. She had never heard ofthe Twins and was much bored when I toldher the story; they had no place in “constitutionalhistory”, and for her the old wolfof the Capitol howled in vain: “Great God!I’d rather be ...”

[Pg 25]We old people must, however, steadily facethe fact that the young are more likely to beright than the old, and this in literature as inmorals and manners. If we old ones havebehind us a larger personal experience, they,the young, have behind them the collectiveexperience of a whole additional generation.Youth starts life from the vantage point ofthe shoulders of age, and his vista is likelyto be wider and clearer. As Mr. Sheppardobserved: “When the fathers think that theAge of Reason is achieved, the sons may betrusted, if they are of good stock, to see that itis still far off.” I will make a personal confession.The methods of the Georgiannovelist have often tried me sorely. I hadalways been used to think of art as a thing ofselection. I looked to it for a certain peace andlargeness. Then when I took up “Ulysses”,I found myself not only wallowing in a drainof obscenities that would have abashed Zola,but also exposed to a trickle of trivialities thatexasperated my every nerve, and made me feelas though I were in a psycho-analyst’s consultingroom with a patient forced to unburdenhimself of every thought, every impression,however feeble and seemingly irrelevant.And yet all the time I felt, “This is writtenby a man of genius, who am I to judge him?Let me try first to understand him.” “Psychoanalyst’s[Pg 26]consulting room.” Yes, the convictiongrew. Joyce is trying to make audible,make conscious the subconscious. He isdredging the great deeps of personality. Thatis his tremendous contribution, and after himfollow a host of less-gifted imitators. Then,happily, I read Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,and Mrs. Woolf made me see that theseGeorgian characters, which I had thought wereso unreal and even teasing, were real with anintimacy and a spirituality before unattempted.So I have my reward. I don’t say I alwaysget there! I don’t say that when I gojoyously to bed with a novel, it is Mr. JoyceI take with me. It is not, it is Jane Austenor George Eliot or even Trollope, but atleast I know there is somewhere to get to; thegates of a New Jerusalem are even for meajar!

To return to my governesses. There wasone notable exception—a woman of realintelligence, ignorant but willing and eager tolearn anything and everything I wanted.Together we learnt to read German, Latinbadly, and with the quantities of course allwrong, the Greek Testament and even alittle Hebrew. Unfortunately, having noguide, we began with the Psalms which arehard nuts to crack. I wanted to find out the[Pg 27]meaning of such obscure and exciting verses as“Or ever your pots be made hot with thorns,so let indignation vex him even as a thingthat is raw”. Alas! my kind governess wasshortly removed to a lunatic asylum. Whatshare I may have had in her mental downfallI do not care to inquire.

A keen impulse was given to my study ofthe Greek Testament by the arrival of a newcurate. He was fresh from Oxford and not,I think, averse to showing off. Rashly inone of his sermons he drew attention to a mistranslation.This filled me with excitementand alarm. I saw in a flash that the wholequestion of the “verbal inspiration of theBible” was at issue. That afternoon I took myGreek Testament down to the Sunday Schooland, eager for further elucidation, waylaid thehapless curate. I soon found that his knowledgeof Greek was, if possible, more slenderthan my own. But, if embarrassed, he wasfriendly. Alas! that curate did not confinehis attentions to the Greek text. I wassummarily despatched in dire disgrace toCheltenham. My stepmother said I wasbehaving “like a kitchen-maid”. Consideringthe subject of my converse with thecurate, I fail to see the analogy. My father,as usual, said nothing. He scarcely ever didsay anything. His great natural silence—which[Pg 28]he has handed down to me—was, Ithink, increased by my stepmother’s ratherviolent Celtic volubility. “Mother’d talkthe hind leg off a donkey,” observed one of hersons. I heard her voice once in an adjoiningroom passionately haranguing my father.From him not a sound. But when we metfor dinner, we saw with some embarrassmentthat a portrait of my mother, long consignedto an attic, was hanging on the wall oppositemy father’s seat. He had himself brought itdown and hung it up. Such was his dumbreprisal. My mother died almost at my birth,but I have been told she was a silent woman ofsingular gentleness and serenity.

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Books were, till I went to school, a seriousdifficulty. My father’s school-books had somehowperished. I saved up my money to buya second-hand Virgil. The process was long,for my income was sixpence a week, mulctedof a compulsory penny for the missionaries.My edition of the Aeneid contained not ahint as to scansion. I knew the poem was inhexameters, but I was constantly held up bythe elision of nasal terminations. I wasalmost in despair when a boy-friend who hadjust been promoted to doing verse at schooloffered to show me, as he expressed it, “howto do the trick”. His explanations were averitable Apocalypse and I was enraptured,[Pg 29]but he rather let me down by observing at theend, “It’s a silly game, but if you’re in theFourth you’ve got to do it!”

This same boy-friend got me into seriousdisgrace later at school, at Cheltenham. Iwas working for the London Matriculationthen just opened to women, and he proposedto write to me just before the examination to“buck me up”. No letter reached me, butone morning I was summoned before MissBeale’s throne, where she sat in state beforethe Lower School came into prayers. Shehad in front of her a post-card (post-cards hadonly just been invented) written in a schoolboyscrawl and signed “Peveril”. “That”, shesaid, pointing a disgusted finger at the signature,“is a boy’s name.” “Yes,” I said,“it’s Peveril; he promised to write to me beforethe examination,” and I put out my hand forthe post-card. “No, this must go to yourparents,” and then came a long harangue. Itended with these words which intrigued meso that I remember them exactly: “You aretoo young, and I hope too innocent, to realisethe gross vulgarity of such a letter or theterrible results to which it might lead.” Iwas indeed, and still am, for what do youthink was the offence? After his signature“Peveril” had written “Give my love to theExaminers!” The story may stand to mark[Pg 30]the abyss of fatuous prudery into which thegirls’ schools of the middle Victorian period—eventhe very best—had fallen. I was toofurious that my letter had been read to thinkof anything else. At home a scrupulous codeof honour prevailed as to letters. I rememberbeing allowed to take a bundle of letters to thevillage post. I employed my time learningby heart the various names, titles, prefixes andaddresses. These when I got back I repeated,expecting praise for my diligence and accuracy.Instead I was told I had done a most dishonourablething. Never, under any circumstances,was I to read the address of a letter unlessaddressed to myself. Tempora mutantur. Iknow a certain distinguished family all ofwhose members make a practice of readingall post-cards and all the letters left lying aboutthe house. When I got home, my fathersent for me and said, “Miss Beale said I wasto read that,” pointing to the post-card. “Idon’t see any harm in it—but he’d no businessto write to you on a post-card, the puppy.”Post-cards were an innovation and all innovationsanathema. All boys and all youngmen who proposed for his daughters were tomy father “puppies”. It is only due to“Peveril” to add that this offence he nevercommitted, hence much was forgiven him.Peveril is a county magnate now, a Justice of[Pg 31]the Peace, a Constant Reader of the Spectator—not,I feel sure, of the Nation!

I, too, am a Justice of the Peace. Imention this not as an empty boast, but in allhumility, because my short experience as amagistrate taught me much. I should likeevery young man and woman to go throughthis experience for a year or two and not waittill they are sixty and it is too late to becomea good citizen. I may say at once that I wasquite useless on the Bench. I have really nohead for business, and am prone to observeonly the irrelevant. A candid friend told methat I had been chosen just “to represent Artand Letters”, and that therefore only anelegant indolence was expected of me. Still,I like to remember that I saved a poorArmenian from a fine. He had somehowmuddled his identity card. I felt that allconsideration was due to any one who couldspeak Armenian, perhaps the most difficult ofall European languages. And then, whatabout my own identity card? A very moderateamount of red tape is apt to make me “seered”, but I can just manage to fill in a passportform and describe my eyes, my nose, my foreheadand my figure generally, but when thepréfecture asks for the birthplace of yourmaternal grandfather, what are you to do?[Pg 32]If you speak the truth and say you don’t knowand don’t want to, you will be detained at thepleasure of the Republic, stand for hours ina queue of Polish Jews and get no lunch.The only sound policy is to write in the nameof some obscure Yorkshire village. As theofficial will not be able to read, still less topronounce it, his official soul will be satisfied.This, I fancy, was what the Armenian hadbeen after. Anyhow, I got him off.

We had, of course, dull hours—mainlyspent in fining undergraduates for exceedingspeed limits. If you have been knocked downtwice yourself, at first you feel a ferociousjoy, but vengeance soon palls. As a rule noattempt was made at defence; the undergraduatehad had his fun and cheerfully paiddown his—or rather his father’s—moneyin fines of ever-increasing severity. Onebrighter spirit, I remember, began a long andlaboured defence; it was couched in a lingounknown to me, some strange up-to-dateslang. I began eagerly to take valuablelinguistic notes. But the presiding magistratewas a cold insensate man, dead to the charmsof language; he curtly requested the undergraduateto confine his remarks to the King’sEnglish. The poor boy looked round piteously,said, “Yes, sir; thank you, sir,” andcollapsed.

[Pg 33]Many of the charges were for petty thefts.At first this embarrassed me a good deal. Icould not bear to look at the prisoner lest heshould be suffering agonies of shame. I soonfound my embarrassment was needless. Shameis the high prerogative of a sensitive humanity.These poor creatures were not shamelessbecause they were hardened criminals; theywere just too stupid to feel shame. Theywere, most of them, morally half-witted, casesnot for the law, but the leech or the psychologist.One pitiable case I remember of aman more intelligent but slightly maudlin.We had to examine into his wretched past.He told us of his hopeless efforts to get work,of occasional jobs lost through drink, pettythefts and the like. For years he had driftedlower and lower. “Then”, said he, “camethe war. That was a bit of luck. I got ajob at once and kept it, and then”, he addedsadly, “came the bluggy Peace and theychucked me.” No criticism, I am sure, wasintended of the high conventions of Versailles,it was just that he had lost his job. I thinkall the Bench hung their heads. This wasthe world as we, its rulers, had made it.

Let no one think that the English Benchis a place unfit for a lady. One day it wasreported by the constable that the prisonerhad used peculiarly foul language. “What[Pg 34]did he say?” asked a magistrate. “Well,sir, it isn’t hardly fit for me to repeat,” saidthe constable. The clerk added that he hadhad the “language” typed and a copy wouldbe handed round if the Bench desired. TheBench did desire, and it was circulated. Theunknown to me has always had an irresistiblelure, and all my life I have had a curiosityto know what really bad language consistedof. In the stables at home I had heard anoccasional “damn” from the lips of a groom,but that was not very informing. Now wasthe chance of my life. The paper reachedthe old gentleman next me. I had all butstretched out an eager hand. He bent overme in a fatherly way and said, “I am sureyou will not want to see this.” I was piningto read it, but sixty years of sex-subserviencehad done their work. I summoned my lastblush, cast down my eyes and said, “O no!No. Thank you so much.” Elate withchivalry he bowed and pocketed the script.

I have always known we English were agood-natured, easy-going people, serenely sureof ourselves, not prone to take offence, buton the Bench I learnt that we are somethinga little more. Every official, from the presidingmagistrate to the constable, had forthe prisoner a steady courtesy and a real considerationand even kindliness. Once only[Pg 35]did I hear a barrister begin to bluster a littleand slightly heckle a prisoner, but the feelingof the court was so manifestly against himthat he swiftly collapsed. There was to beno bullying of the under dog.

But all this is by anticipation. To returnto Cheltenham. I had to face the ordeal ofthe Matriculation Examination of the LondonUniversity, uncheered by “Peveril’s” letter.Examinations were novelties then. I feltthe whole honour of the College was on myshoulders and I was almost senseless fromnervousness. To my dying day I shall affectionatelyremember the Registrar of the University.Before I went in he asked my name.I could not remember it. Everything hadgone blank. He looked at me so kindly andsaid, “Oh it is of no consequence, later onperhaps.” And later he came into the Hallto see how I was getting on. He found mewriting merrily.

I carried away from Cheltenham Collegea dislike for history which has lasted all mylife. Our history lessons consisted mainly inmoralisings on the doings and misdoings ofkings and nobles. We did the Stuart periodin tedious detail, and as Miss Beale wasCromwellian and I, like all children, apassionate Royalist, I was in a constant state[Pg 36]of irritation. There was an odd rule throughoutthe College that no girl might buy a book.It sprang from Miss Beale’s horror of whatshe called “undigested knowledge”. Sheneed not have feared with most of us thatthe amount of knowledge absorbed, digestedor undigested, would have been excessive. Ibroke the rule and secretly bought a smalllife of Archbishop Laud. This I read,learned, marked and inwardly digested. Later,I again broke the rule and bought Bryce’sHoly Roman Empire. Mr. Bryce was comingto examine us and I scored handsomely by myperfidy. Normally, what we had to feed onwere the notes we took of lectures; thesenotes were carefully corrected and severelycommented on. It was a wretched starvationsystem, but gave constant practice in composition.For two things, however, I amthankful to Cheltenham. Arithmetic andelementary mathematics were admirably taught,and it was a rapture to me to understand atlast why you turned fractions upside down indivision. When I first got possession of an xI felt I had a new mastery of the world.Only my teachers stopped short too soon—justwhere real mathematics began, and whenlater at Cambridge I heard Mr. BertrandRussell discourse on the amazing beauty ofmathematics, I felt like a Peri outside Paradise.[Pg 37]I had no mathematical ability. I never sawthe inner necessity of the truths of which Iwrote the proofs with glib understanding, butmy teachers might have dragged me throughat least the Calculuses.

But, most of all, I am grateful for mytraining in elementary chemistry. We hadlectures with experiments, and a few of uswere allowed to go and do analyses of simplesubstances at the laboratory of the boys’college. You watch an experiment, someone pours some hydrosulphuric acid (I hopeit is hydrosulphuric acid, my chemistry isfaded) on some loaf sugar, and in a momentthe quiet white sugar is a seething blackvolcano. Things are never the same to youagain. You know they are not what theyseem; you picture hidden terrific forces, youcan even imagine that the whole solid earthis only such forces held in momentous balance.

Though I have lived most of my life witheducationalists, I have little interest in education.I dislike schools, both for boys andgirls. A child between the ages of eight andeighteen, the normal school years, is too youngto form a collective opinion, children onlyset up foolish savage taboos. I dislike alsoall plans for “developing a child’s mind”,and all conscious forms of personal influenceof the younger by the elder. Let children[Pg 38]early speak at least three foreign languages,let them browse freely in a good library, seeall they can of the first-rate in nature, art,and literature—above all, give them a chanceof knowing what science and scientific methodmeans, and then leave them to sink or swim.Above all things, do not cultivate in them ataste for literature.

In answer to numerous inquiries, I beg tostate that my first literary effort was a tractentitled “Praying for Rain”. I was inurgent need of a guinea to subscribe to aportrait of Miss Beale and I dared not askfor such a sum. I sent my attempt to theReligious Tract Society and almost by returncame back a post-office order for threeguineas. If I had kept to tract-writing, Iwould not be the needy woman I stillam. I shall never forget the sight ofthat delicious thin green paper. It was tome untold wealth, but I was burdened witha sense of guilt. I dared not tell my fatherabout the post-office order. He held old-fashionedviews as to women earning money.To do so was to bring disgrace on the menof the family. I longed to spend the extratwo guineas on books, but I dared not. Longago I had told a lie and been made to stayat home from Church and learn by heartthe story of Ananias and Sapphira, who kept[Pg 39]back part of the price. “The feet of theyoung men who carried them out” seemedto be waiting for me, so I offered my holocaust,sent the whole three guineas to MissBeale’s portrait, and thereby, I hope, effacedthe blot from the family scutcheon. I alwayssent a copy of every book I wrote to myfather, and he always acknowledged them inthe same set words: “Thank you for thebook you have sent me, your mother andsisters are well. Your affectionate father.”I am sure he never read them, and I suspecthis feeling towards them was what theFreudians call ambivalent—half shame, halfpride. Years after his death I learnt, and ittouched me deeply, that, on the rare occasionswhen he left home, he took with hima portmanteau full of my books. Why?Well, after all, he was a Yorkshireman, itmay have been he wanted a “bit o’ coompany”.

My father was the shyest man I ever knew,and terribly absent-minded. Legend saysthat two years after he was married he rodeup to Limber Grange, my maternal grandfather’shouse, and asked to see Miss ElizabethNelson. I know myself that if he foundunexpected visitors in the drawing-room, hewould give a frightened look round, shakehands courteously with his embarrassed wifeand daughters, and disappear like a shot deer.[Pg 40]In our rambling, uncomfortable old househe had furnished for himself a Harbour ofRefuge, known as his workroom. It containedcountless fishing-rods and a lathe onwhich he turned boxes of ebony and ivory.It would have been a bold servant who wouldhave intruded there; even my stepmotherdare not enter unbidden. My father alwayssaid grace before dinner and luncheon, butwas furious when a clerical son-in-lawwanted to say it before breakfast. The formhe adopted, and from which nothing couldwean him, was his own: “For what we areabout to receive, may the Lord be truly thankful.”My own absences of mind I controlseverely, but I have occasional lapses, as whenI turned into the trimming of a white muslintennis hat three ten pound notes destined topay my college fees. Six months later, aftermuch fruitless and anguished searching, thetrimming was unpicked and the notes emerged.

My elder sister was less successful. As aclergyman’s wife, it was part of her frequentduty to write “characters” for youngparishioners seeking situations. Every collegetutor at the end of the May-term knows thesuffering entailed. Any form of literarycomposition caused my sister acute agony.One day my niece and I noticed that she wassitting at her writing-table with the characteristic[Pg 41]hunted look. “I wonder what oldDobbin is up to,” said my niece. (OldDobbin was her reverent appellation for areally adored mother.) “Writing testimonialsby the look of her,” said I. “I’llgo and look,” said my niece. Looking overher mother’s shoulder, my niece read, “Iam seeking a situation for a young cat, Mr.Velvet Brown (the actual name of my smallnephew’s cat, at the time felt to be superfluous).I can in every way heartily recommend him;he is a good mouser, affectionate and clean inperson and habits. He has lived for somemonths in a clergyman’s family.” Here shepaused, pen in air, for inspiration, and wasgradually restored to reality by a prolongedgiggle.

I ought, in justice to my sister, to explainthat “Mr. Velvet Brown” played a largepart in the home life of the Vicarage, whichhe never left till death removed him. He wasa cat of great dignity. Tail in air, he alwaystrotted after my brother-in-law on his parishrounds. If he was lost the whole house wasupset. My small nephew was, after thefashion of his generation, usually kind andforbearing to his mother. I remember onceshe was, I must own, rather “nagging” athim, and he said to her gently, “There, there,Mother, that will do.” But when my sister[Pg 42]said angrily, “Where on earth has that catgot to?” he looked at her reprovingly andanswered, “Mother, Mr. Velvet Brown hasgone for a stroll; he will be back for supper,and you’d better keep some fish and a saucer ofcream.” One of my most cherished possessionsis a photograph I still have of Mr.Velvet Brown. He is taken standing on hishind-legs with his right paw uplifted. Thiswas supposed to be my brother-in-law’sfavourite pulpit attitude. But, alas! Mr.Velvet Brown was not what the French call“un chat sérieux”, and one evening he wentout to return no more. It was this absenceof mind in my sister and not, as I then stupidlythought, lack of brains that made her construingof Latin sometimes fail to carry conviction.I can hear her musical voice now, as shestumbled through the dreary waste of a Latinexercise book. “The sharp horse was prickingon the idle spur.” Her wits were alwayswool-gathering like my father’s, and here wasno wool to gather. I would not “put itpast” her now to assert that “the wall wasbuilding up Balbus”.

My father left Yorkshire because of thethreatened approach within a mile of our houseof a small branch railway, connecting Scarbro’and Whitby. He feared it would bring withit tourists, char-à-bancs, gas lighting, and all[Pg 43]the pollution of villadom. I think he wasunduly anxious. We left, but about tenyears later I came back on a visit to friends.I had occasion to go down to the little moorlandstation to fetch a parcel of books. Thetiny train came puffing up, stopped; the guard’svan opened and some parcels were flung out.Then forth stepped the single passenger, agreat grey sheep-dog, respectfully met bythe station-master. Yorkshire is a Paradisefor dogs, specially sporting dogs. I have seenthem crowding the platform at York stationabout the Twelfth of August, waited onassiduously by eager porters while theirmasters went neglected. But all dogs aretreated with due respect. I was once privilegedto attend a huge St. Bernard on hisway home from Yorkshire. My friend andI travelled first-class in honour of our greatcompanion. The guard looked at the threeof us, grinned, and said, “Happen t’awddog ud liever not travel wi’ strangers.” Heclapped an “Engaged” on the carriage andwas gone, never waiting for or, I am sure,thinking of a tip.[Pg 44]

CHAPTER II

Cambridge and London

At Cambridge great men and women beganto come into my life. Women’s colleges werea novelty, and distinguished visitors werebrought to see us as one of the sights. Turgenevcame, and I was told off to show him round.It was a golden opportunity. Dare I askhim to speak just a word or two of Russian?He looked such a kind old snow-white Lion.Alas! he spoke fluent English; it was agrievous disappointment. Then Ruskin came.I showed him our small library. He lookedat it with disapproving eyes. “Each book”,he said gravely, “that a young girl touchesshould be bound in white vellum.” I thoughtwith horror of the red moroccos and Spanishleather that had been my choice. A fewweeks later the old humbug sent us his ownworks bound in dark blue calf! Then cameMr. Gladstone. His daughter Helen was acollege friend of mine, or rather, more[Pg 45]exactly, a friendly enemy. We fought abouteverything, and had not an idea in common.She was the most breezy, boisterous creaturepossible; we called her Boreas, for she had ahabit of picking her friends up and runningwith them the length of the corridors. Shewas a thorough Lyttelton, without a trace of herfather, whom she adored. I was a rigid Toryin those days, and I resolutely refused to jointhe mob of students in cheering and clappingthe Grand Old Man on his arrival. I shutmyself up in my room. Thither—to tease me—shebrought him. He sat down and askedme who was my favourite Greek author. Tactcounselled Homer, but I was perverse and notquite truthful, so I said “Euripides.” Æschyluswould have been creditable, Sophocles respectable,but the sceptic Euripides! It was toomuch, and with a few words of warning hewithdrew. And then last, but oh, so utterlyfirst, came George Eliot. It was in the dayswhen her cult was at its height—thank heavenI never left her shrine!—and we used to waitoutside Macmillan’s shop to seize the newinstalments of Daniel Deronda. She camefor a few minutes to my room, and I wasalmost senseless with excitement. I had justrepapered my room with the newest thing indolorous Morris papers. Some one must havecalled her attention to it, for I remember that[Pg 46]she said in her shy, impressive way, “Yourpaper makes a beautiful background for yourface.” The ecstasy was too much, and Iknew no more. Later, in London, I met, ofcourse, many eminent men, but there nevercame again a moment like that. Browningwas only to me a cheerful, amusing gossip.Herbert Spencer took me in to dinner once,but he would discuss the Athenæum cook,and on that subject he found me ill-informed.Pater and his sisters were good, and openedtheir house to me; I always think of him as asoft, kind cat; he purred so persuasively thatI lost the sense of what he was saying. Athis house I often met Henry James. I likedto watch that ingenious spider weaving hiswebs, but to me he had no appeal. MissBosanquet’s recent delightful Henry James atWork has made me realise what I lost.

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Tennyson’s daughter-in-law, Mrs. LionelTennyson, later Mrs. Augustine Birrell, wasamong my closest friends. She took me tostay with the great man. He met us at thestation, grunting fiercely that he “was notgoing to dress for dinner because I had come.”It was rather frightening, but absurd. Thevain old thing (he was the most openly vainman I ever met) knew quite well that he lookedhis best in his ample poet’s cloak. It is a rareand austere charm that gains by evening[Pg 47]dress. He was very kind to me according tohis rather fierce lights; he took me a long,memorable Sunday morning walk, recited“Maud” to me, and countless other things.It was an anxious joy; he often forgot his ownpoems and was obviously annoyed if I couldnot supply the words. He would stopsuddenly and ask angrily: “Do you thinkBrowning could have written that line?Do you think Swinburne could?” I couldtruthfully answer, “Impossible.” If heposed a good deal, he was scarcely to blame;the house was so charged with an atmosphereof hero-worship that free breathing wasdifficult. Tennyson remains to me a greatpoet, and I am proud to have known him.When I hear young reactionaries say he is nopoet at all, I think them simply silly. Hewas intensely English, and therefore not at hisbest as a conscious thinker; but he felt soundly,and his mastery of language was superb.While the English language is, such poems as“In Memoriam”, “The Lotus-Eaters”,“Ulysses”, “Crossing the Bar” must live.Of very great artists there were, in England,none to know. But I learnt much from theyoung school of Impressionists then fightingtheir way to recognition. Burne-Jones toowas kind to me; he used often to come and sitwith me, turning over drawings of Greek[Pg 48]vases with eager, delighted fingers. SometimesI sat with him as he drew his strangevisions; often a silent, decorative cat sat on hisshoulder. He wrote me many letters withwhimsical illustrative drawings. I am sorrynow that I tore them up. The people I mostlonged after, Christina Rossetti and Swinburne,were not diners-out, and I never knew them.The men and women who influenced me most—myreal friends—are living still. Of themI may not write.

One dear, dead woman remains—MissThackeray, who later married RichmondRitchie, the brother of a college friend. Imet her first at Eton, and I like to think shetook a fancy to me, for she asked me downto Chiswick to see her. She suggested anafternoon, at five, and at five I presentedmyself. She received me with open arms,and hospitably put her hand on a small blacksatin bag in which I carried my book for thetrain. “Let Susan take your luggage upstairs,”she said. “Come and have tea.” Iclung to the said “luggage”, and explainedthat she had not asked me to stay the night.“Oh, but I want you to stay a long, longtime.” Why, oh why, did I not stay? Wasit that I shrank from breaking a dinner engagement,or was it a snobbish fear that Susan,as she unpacked my “luggage”, might think[Pg 49]a copy of Christina Rossetti’s poems inadequatenight-gear? I lost my opportunity, she neverasked me again. I met her soon after,crossing Kensington Square; she shook hands,but seemed excited and affairée. “I mustn’tstop; some friends—some dear, dear friends—arecoming to dinner, and I have promisedto get them an egg.” And she was goneto the High Street. She never, I think, hadher delicate feet quite on the ground. I haveoften been sorry that I did not keep Punch’sfine parody of her novels. It ended thus:“A kind hand was outstretched to help me.Two kind hands. I never knew which Itook.”

Walter Raleigh was an early friend, heand his delightful mother and sisters. Iremember we were all sitting round the fireafter dinner one night, and Walter was readingout some of his verses. One poem wasabout the on-coming of Night and containedthe line:

“How beautiful!” I murmured fatuously(my friends tell me that at any mention of abear I am apt to get maudlin). “Walter,”said his mother fiercely, “how dare you beso blasphemous! God doesn’t lead round[Pg 50]bears.” “Well, mother,” said Walter, “it’syour fault; you always used to tell us whenwe were children that God guided the starsin their paths, and”, looking at me, “I learntit all at my mother’s knee.” “I am sureyour father wouldn’t have liked it,” continuedhis mother. At this appeal to his filial pietyWalter, of course, collapsed, but he told meafterwards, in private, that he was sure hisfather would have liked the line about theBear, and that he should keep it in. Dr.Raleigh, it seems, held unusually wide viewsfor a Congregationalist minister. Mrs.Raleigh was always called in her family“Mrs. Fox”, because of the unexpectedwhiskings of her mind. When the BritishGovernment broke out into a sort of epidemicof title-giving, confounding gentlemen andscholars with lord mayors and profiteers,Walter was of course knighted. I hadscarcely a friend left who was not so mishandled.His family were amused and ratherdisgusted, but Walter himself was simplydelighted and played with his absurd titlelike a toy. Smart ladies began to take himup and pet him, and his sisters called him “theduchesses’ darling”, but he just genuinelyenjoyed it all. He was the one plain sonin a family of extraordinarily handsomedaughters, all “variations”, as some one[Pg 51]said, “of a beautiful theme”. But thoughhe was plain to uncouthness as a young man,all through his life some unseen inner spiritwas at work, chiselling his face, and, beforehe died, he was beautiful. He was the besttalker I ever knew, and a quite inspiredlecturer. The views he tenaciously heldwere reactionary and, to my mind, preposterous.We wrangled ceaselessly. Hepaid, alas, for his fantastic militarism withhis life.

In those days I met many specimens ofa class of Victorian who, if not exactly distinguished,were at least distinctive and are,I think, all but extinct—British Lions andLionesses. The Lionesses first—that wasthe name we gave them at Newnham. Theywere all spinsters, well-born, well-bred, well-educatedand well off. They attended mylectures on Greek Art. Greek Art was atthat time booming and was eminently respectable.At home they gardened a great deal;they, most of them, had country houses. Theirgardens were a terror to me, for I nevercould remember the names of the plantswith slips attached to them, and to blunderover a plant’s name was as bad to a Lionessas a false quantity. They kept diaries inwhich they entered accurately the state of[Pg 52]the weather on each day. If they lived inLondon they promoted Friendly Girls andWorkhouse Nursing. Above all, they kepta vigilant eye on the shortcomings of localofficials; they frequently wrote to the Times,heading their letters: “Re Mud and Slush”.In the spring and early summer they wentto Italy, accompanied usually by “a youngrelative”, whose expenses they paid; theyvoyaged mainly to Rome and Florence, butthe more adventurous went to Assisi. Attiredin mushroom hats, veils and dust cloaks, theysketched a great deal. The subject of theirsketches was always recognisable—ruinedtowers and church porches. The ordinaryman was to them negligible, but they spokeof their own male relatives with respect andfrequently quoted the opinions of “my uncle,the Dean”, or “my cousin, the Archdeacon”.They were a fine upstanding breed, and Imiss them. They had no unsatisfied longings,had never heard of “suppressed complexes”,and lived happily their vigorous, if somewhatangular, lives.

Their counterparts were the British Lions.Of them, naturally, I knew less. Real intimacybetween the two genders was not inthose days usual, but I watched them withdelight from afar. You could always counton them to roar suitably. I worked for some[Pg 53]time on the Council of the Girls’ Public DaySchool Company, which was largely mannedby British Lions, and I was privileged to gowith them to preside at local prize-givings.They made speeches and I held a large andagonising bouquet. The sentiments of thesespeeches were on well-established lines, andalways, always, at the end came the inevitable:

I thought at one time of offering a smallprize of half-a-crown to any Lion who wouldresist that temptation. A little later I workedon the Council of the Classical Association.There I might safely have raised the prizeto five shillings. There lived no Lion whocould end his address without telling you thatit was the writing of Latin Prose that hadmade him what he was! Am I indiscreetif I mention that I was yachting once witha British Lion? He was oldish and had adeck-cabin. I happened to look in in passing.On the table lay a Bible, on the Bible a tooth-brush.Cleanliness was “next to godliness”.Oh England—my England!

It was about then that I began lecturingon Greek Art at boys’ schools. Archdeacon[Pg 54]Wilson first asked me to Clifton; he told meafterwards that he had not dared to tell hisCouncil that the lecturer was a woman tillall was over. Later I learnt that amongmy audience had been no less persons thanDr. MacTaggart and Roger Fry, and thatthey had deigned to discuss my lecture. ThenMr. Warre Cornish, always the kindest offriends, asked me to Eton. I do not supposethe lectures did any good, but they amusedthe boys. One of the masters asked a verysmall Winchester “man” if he had likedthe lecture. “Not the lecture,” he saidcandidly, “but I liked the lady; she waslike a beautiful green beetle.” In thosedays one’s evening gowns were apt to becovered with spangles, and mine of blue-greensatin had caught the light of the magic-lantern.A young prig, who bore an honouredname, was introduced to me at Eton; hewrote me next day a patronising letter ofthanks, in which he said he hoped to go onwith archæology, as he was going up toOxford to “do Grates”. Alas! he neverdid anything half so useful. My youngestbrother was at Harrow; he wrote to me tosay he had heard I was lecturing at Eton.It didn’t matter, apparently, what I did at thatbenighted place, but he “did hope I wasn’tcoming lecturing at Harrow, as it would make[Pg 55]it very awkward for him with the otherfellows.” I saw his position and respected it.

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Then there was the actual CambridgeAcademic circle—a brilliant circle, it seemsto me, looking back. Cambridge society wasthen small enough to be one, and there wereendless small, but not informal, dinner-parties.The order of University precedencewas always strictly observed. Henry Sidgwickwas the centre, and with him his twomost intimate friends, Frederick Myers andEdmund Gurney. Frederick Myers rang,perhaps, the most sonorously of all, but tome he always rang a little false. EdmundGurney was, I think, the most lovable andbeautiful human being I ever met. Thiswas the Psychical Research circle; theirquest, scientific proof of immortality. Toput it thus seems almost grotesque now; thenit was inspiring. About this nucleus froma wider world ranged Balfours, Jebbs, andlater rose a younger generation—the threeDarwin sons, the Verralls, husband and wife,both my closest friends; Robert Neil ofPembroke, whose sympathetic Scotch silencesmade the dreariest gathering burn and glow;the George Protheros, Frederick Maitland,whose daughter, Fredegond Shove, is nowthe sweetest of our lyrical singers. And in[Pg 56]the midst of them Mrs. Henry Sidgwick (theyounger Miss Balfour) shone like a star.She had none of her husband’s or her brother’ssocial gifts, yet in any society she shone witha sort of lambent light. When we took herfor our Principal, I am afraid science losta fine researcher. Still, she had a perfectpassion for accounts. “Why need I dressfor dinner,” she said to me plaintively, “whenI might be getting on with these?” touchingher account-books tenderly. She was meticulouslytrue. We were talking once in Hallof the odd lingo that shops and business invent,“haberdashery”, “hosiery”, etc.—words unknownto the outside world. I cited, “Alighthere for the Albert Memorial”. Whoeversays “alight”? “I always say ‘alight’,”remarked Mrs. Sidgwick; “it’s a very goodword.” “Forgive me,” said I “I’m quitesure you don’t.” A few minutes later shejoined me in the corridor. “You are quiteright,” she said; “I find I don’t say ‘alight’but”, cautiously, “I think I always shallnow.” I do hope she does! Another timeI was holding forth on the supreme importanceof classics in education. “Don’t you think”,she said, “you a little confuse between theimportance of your subject and the extraordinarydelight you manage to extract fromit?” That was well observed. Her great[Pg 57]truthfulness made her very naïve; shewalked through a vulgar and wicked worldin perpetual blinkers. Though her austerityof dress and manners always made me feel avulgarian, how I adored her! how she mademe laugh! I never told my love, and, alas!on college politics I had almost always tooppose her. Sheltered by the publicity ofThe Nation I tell it now. Why is it thatthose we most adore most move us to mirth?As soon as we laugh at a person we begina little to love them.

One scientific friend, Francis Darwin, hadlasting influence on me. Classics he regardedwith a suspicious eye, but he was kind to me.One day he found me busy writing an articleon the “Mystica vannus Iacchi”. “Imust get it off to-night,” I said industriously.“What is a vannus?” he asked. “Oh, a‘fan’,” I said; “it was a mystical object usedin ceremonies of initiation.” “Yes, butVirgil says it is an agricultural implement.Have you ever seen one?” “No,” Iconfessed. “And you are writing about athing you have never seen,” groaned myfriend. “Oh, you classical people!” Itdid not end there. He interviewed farmers—noresult; he wrote to agricultural institutesabroad, and, finally, in remote provincialFrance, unearthed a mystic “fan” still in[Pg 58]use, and had it despatched to Cambridge.Luckily he also found that his old gardener wasperhaps the last man in England who coulduse the obsolete implement. On his lawnwere to be seen a gathering of learned scholarstrying, and failing, to winnow with thevannus. Its odd shape explained all its uses,mystic and otherwise. Three months laterI despatched a paper to the Hellenic Journalon what I had seen and did understand. Itwas a lifelong lesson to me. It was not quiteall my fault. I had been reared in a schoolthat thought it was far more important toparse a word than to understand it. I hadmyself, as a student, eagerly asked why thevannus was mystic, and the answer had been,“You have construed the passage correctly;that will do for the present.” And as my“coach” closed his Virgil, he remarkedsadly, “Bad sport in subjunctives to-day.”Such training was perhaps the best possiblefor my always flighty mind.

The last distinguished person whom Ihelped to entertain years later, at Newnham,was the Crown Prince of Japan. If you mustcurtsey to a man young enough to be yourgrandson, it is at least some consolation to knowthat he believes himself to be God. It wasthat which interested me. I found in the[Pg 59]Prince a strange charm. He was intenselyquiet and had about him a sort of serenity andsecurity that really seemed divine. Japaneseis one of the few languages which contain thehard i. All Indo-European languages havelost it, except Russian, though a Russiantold me that he had heard the exact sound fromthe lips of a cockney newspaper boy pronouncing“Piccadilly”. The Prince was goodenough to say his own royal name to me twoor three times, but alas! I forgot it.

My lot has not lain in the courts of kings,but one royal lady, the Empress Frederick,was very gracious to me, and I am proud toremember her goodness. The Empress sentfor me to tell her about some German excavationsof Greek theatres, and to explain the newtheory started by Dörpfeld as to the Greekstage. Hers was almost the saddest face Ihave ever seen, but she had the real sacredhunger for knowledge, and I am sure, hadfate not broken her wings and caged her in apalace, she would have flown high. We werein the middle of eager talk when a servant camein and said the Prince of Wales (King Edward)wanted to see her. So little was I used toroyal etiquette (which for the subject issimply the etiquette of servants) that I all butcommitted a gaffe by getting up to release her;—shesaved me by shaking her head impatiently[Pg 60]at the servant and saying “No, no,” andturning to me, “Go on, go on, I must know.”My future King had a good long wait. I sawthe Empress again and again, and learnt tolove her. But, oh how glad I was when Iheard she was safely dead, dead and, though Icould not know that then, spared the tortureof the war. She bade me, when I next wentto Greece, go and see her daughter, the CrownPrincess of Greece. Of course I had to go,but I was sorry I went. The daughter wasas common as the mother was distinguished.She had a bad Board-School accent and usedslang. She did not really care about Greekthings at all, but talked loudly about “ourWaldstein who has made awfully jolly excavations”.She bored me as much as I boredher. Every one ought to see a little ofroyalties. It is so humbling and at firstirritating to have to behave like a servant, andit makes you understand how servants reallymust feel.

Interviewers—after the first moment ofexcited importance—are not an interestingtribe, but one of them comes back to me witha whiff of fragrance, an American lady fromthe Middle West. A little old lady she was,with white curls and a Quaker bonnet, andromance in her heart. She brought a letter[Pg 61]of introduction and asked if I would visit herin her Bloomsbury lodgings. I found herthere at eleven in the morning with a daintytea-tray before her; she must have spread itwith her own hands; no Bloomsbury landladywas capable of it. She had heard, she said,that we English ladies liked to drink a cup oftea at eleven. She must have heard it belowstairs. And then began the interview. Shehad been told that I was a great authority onGreek vases, would I give her my idea on“their place in modern education”. Ibegan to stumble out a few platitudes. Sheinterrupted me with, “You’ll excuse me,Miss Harrison, but you’re dropping pearls anddiamonds from your mouth, and I must getout my pencil and notebook.” Then, thenat last, out came the romance; she herself wasa “school teacher”; she had saved up hermoney to come to Europe, not to see Europebut to—write a book on Greek Art! OfGreek and Greek Art she knew nothing, but,pencil in hand, she was travelling round to themuseums of Europe to learn, and then, Ojoy! to write: the gallantry and the innocenceof it! I don’t know if that strangely compoundedbook ever saw the light. It may bedeath found her before she reached her HappyIsles, but she had the spirit of Ulysses. Beforeshe left she asked, “Did I know Mr. Andrew[Pg 62]Lang?” She had a letter to him. “But”,she said sadly, “my mind misgives me, MissHarrison, that Mr. Andrew Lang is not anearnest seeker after truth.”

And that reminds me of my first meetingwith “Andrew of the brindled hair”, at adinner-party. Our hostess brought him upto me and, with a misguided desire to bepleasant, said, “You know Miss Harrison,and I am sure you have read her delightfulbooks.” “Don’t know Miss Harrison,”muttered Andrew, “never read her delightfulbooks, don’t want to,” etc. (Oh, Andrew,and you had reviewed those “delightful books”not too delightedly!) “Come, Mr. Lang,”I said, “we’re both hungry, and I promisenot to say a single word to you. Be a man.”Alas! I broke my word. It was an enchantingdinner.[Pg 63]

CHAPTER III

Greece and Russia

All through my London life (fifteen years)I lectured there and in the provinces. Beingone of a family of twelve, my fortune wasslender, and social life is costly. I regretthose lecturing years. I was voluble and hadinstant success, but it was mentally demoralisingand very exhausting. Though I wasalmost fatally fluent, I could never face a bigaudience without a sinking in the pit of whatis now called the solar plexus. Moreover, Iwas lecturing on art, a subject for which I hadno natural gifts. My reactions to art are,I think, always second-hand; hence, aboutart, I am docile and open to persuasion. Inliterature I am absolutely sure of my owntastes, and a whole Bench of Bishops couldnot alter my convictions. Happily, however,bit by bit, art and archæology led to mythology,mythology merged in religion; there I was athome. All through my London life Iworked very hard—but, no! I remember[Pg 64]that Professor Gilbert Murray once told methat I had never done an hour’s really hardwork in my life. I think he forgets that Ihave learnt the Russian declensions, whichis more than he ever did. But I believe he isright. He mostly is. I never work in thesense of attacking a subject against the grain,tooth and nail. The kingdom of heavenfrom me “suffereth no violence”. TheRussian verb “to learn” takes the dative,which seems odd till you find out that it isfrom the same root as “to get used to”.When you learn you “get yourself used to”a thing. That is worth a whole treatise ofpedagogy. And it explained to me my ownprocesses. One reads round a subject, soaksoneself in it, and then one’s personal responsibilityis over; something stirs and ferments,swims up into your consciousness, and youknow you have to write a book. That maynot be “hard work”, but let me tell ProfessorMurray it is painfully and pleasantly like it inits results; it leaves you spent, washed out, arag, but an exultant rag.

My London life was happily broken bymuch going abroad. All my archæology wastaught me by Germans. The great ErnstCurtius, of Olympian fame, took me roundthe museums of Berlin. Heinrich Brunn[Pg 65]came to see me in my lodgings at Munich,where I was thriftily living on four marks aday. I remember his first visit—a knock,a huge figure looming in the doorway, abenevolent, bearded, spectacled face, and hepresented himself with the words, “Brunnbin Ich”. Dörpfeld was my most honouredmaster—we always called him “Avtos”.He let me go with him on his PeloponnesosReise and his Insel Reise. They were marvelsof organisation, and the man himself was amiracle. He would hold us spellbound fora six hours’ peripatetic lecture, only broken byan interval of ten minutes to partake of agoat’s-flesh sandwich and etwas frisches Bier.Once I saw, to my sorrow, three Englishmentailing away after the frisches Bier. I wasmore grieved than surprised. They wereOxford men—the (then) Provost of Oriel, thePrincipal of Brasenose and an eminent fellowof Balliol. It was worth many hardships tosee forty German professors try to mountforty recalcitrant mules. My own horsemanship,as already hinted, is nothing to “writehome about”, but compared to those Germanprofessors I am a centaur. How it all comesback to me, for only last month, to my greatjoy, I met the grandson of Ernst Curtius,Professor Robert Ernst Curtius, a worthydescendant.[Pg 66]

Greece in those days held many adventures.To one of these I still look back with poignantshame for my own bad manners. We arrivedat Vurkano, just as the monastery gates wereclosing, and were hospitably received. TheHegoumenos led me into supper, placed meby his side, and fed me with titbits from hisown plate. The Greek clergy, even themonks who may not marry, are quite simpleand friendly to women. After the Romanattitude, it is refreshing to be accepted as aman and a brother—if a weaker one—andnot looked at with sour eyes as an incarnatesnare. I remember at Tinos I was watchingthe procession of the miraculous Eikon; thepriest carrying the Eikon saw that I was theonly West-European woman struggling in athrong of men, and sent a young priest tofetch me to walk by his side. There I couldsafely watch all that went on, the bowings,the kissings of the Eikon, and the priests’splendid vestments, the cures. But to returnto my Hegoumenos. After supper he saidhe had a question to ask me. He had heardthat rich Englishmen had in their mouths“stranger” (or “guest”) teeth made of gold,and which moved. Was it true? It was.Had I in my mouth by any chance a strangertooth? I had, I owned, one, but in the bestOriental fashion I deprecated any mention[Pg 67]of it. It was but a poor thing, made not ofgold, but of an elephant’s tusk. Did I evertake it out? Yes. When? “Oh,” nervously,“only very early in the morning.”After a short sleep—sleep in a Greek monasteryis rarely for long—I woke. The Hegoumenoswas seated at my bed-head telling hisbeads and ... watching. Oh, why, whydid I not take out that “stranger” tooth?I might so easily have made a good manhappy. The Graiæ themselves pointed theway. But I was young, and youth is vainand cruel. He was too polite to press thematter, and withdrew himself, slowly andsadly. In about ten minutes he was back,his face dark with anger. A terrible scandalhad arisen in the monastery, its sanctity wasoutraged; we must leave at once. For onebad moment I feared that the scandal wasmy wholly unchaperoned state. No suchthing. With a Greek the great improprietyfor a woman is to travel alone and unprotected.What had happened was this. The friendwith whom I was travelling, after a feverishnight spent in wrestling with the hosts ofMidian, had gone out to get cool, seen apump in the monastery courtyard, and incontinentlyproceeded to have a much-neededshower-bath. The news flew like wildfirethrough the Brotherhood, and the Hegoumenos[Pg 68]was summoned to purge the outrage.I ruthlessly sacrificed my kind protector. The“Lord”, I said, was young and ignorant; heknew no Greek letters (a gross libel); he hadbeen born and reared not in Christian England,but in a strange barbarian hyperborean land,where raiment was scanty and Christianmodesty unknown. Would His Reverencepardon the young man and teach him better?Fired with missionary zeal, the Hegoumenossent for the “Lord”, and finding him dumb,pointed to a place about an inch above hiswrists, told him that thus far, without dangerto his soul, could a Christian man wash himself.The “Lord” was heard to mutter tohimself words to the effect that he would“jolly well like to put the Hegoumenosunder his own pump”. This I hastily translatedinto a solemn promise that while lifelasted the “Lord”, by the heads of hisfathers, would never exceed the limit. Thecrisis passed. When we left next morningwe gave more than the wonted largesse inthe hope of atoning for the bath. But theoutraged saint was far too fine a Christianand a gentleman to be won by money. Theadieus were frigid. We left under a cloud.At parting I gave him my photograph. Heplaced it below the Eikon of the Virgin andsolemnly commended me to her protection[Pg 69]against the spiritual dangers to which I wasso obviously exposed.

Long after, I visited Mount Athos. Ofcourse, as a woman I could not set foot onthe sacred promontory. My friends startedoff elate in the early morning, to visit themonasteries. Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith, Iremember, proudly led the way. We merewomen were left behind on the yacht disconsolate.They came back in the eveningafter the usual Pauline adventures in baskets,and with them came some Mount Athos monksto see the ship and the women, and sellrosaries, etc. One of the monks—a Russian,I think, for I could not understand his Greek,gave me a sheet of letter-paper with, forheading, a brightly coloured picture of theMountain Mother issuing from Mount Athos.He pointed to the picture and then to me,and then to the mountain, as though hewould say: Well, we’ve smuggled in onewoman anyhow. It was wonderful to findthe Great Mother here in her own Thrace,and worshipped still not by women but byher own celibate priests, the Kouretes.

The British Legation, at Athens, keptopen house, and in those days the cheeryyoung men who dwelt there made it a pleasantplace. It was the proud boast of some ofthem that they had never been up to the[Pg 70]Acropolis, and that they only knew one wordof modern Greek and that was sitheróthromos,the Greek for railway station, by means ofwhich they hoped shortly to make theirescape. They pretended, of course, thatthey were frightened to death of me becauseof my Greek, and that they dare not ask meto dance. They maligned themselves; theyfeared nothing in the world except that theymight have to apply their minds to somethingsometime. They might have said withPunch’s malingering marine, “Well sir, it’sthis way with me. I eats well and I sleepswell, but when I sees a bit o’ work, I’s allof a tremble.”

At Athens I met Samuel Butler. Wewere in the same hotel; he saw me diningalone and kindly crossed over to ask if hemight join me. Of course I was delightedand looked forward to pleasant talks, but,alas! he wanted me only as a safety-valvefor his theory on the woman-authorship ofthe Odyssey, and the buzzing of that crazybee drowned all rational conversation.

The first time I went to Athens I had theluck to make a small archæological discovery.I was turning over the fragments in theAcropolis Museum, then little more than alumber-room. In a rubbish pile in thecorner, to my great happiness, I lighted on[Pg 71]the small stone figure of a bear. The furryhind paw was sticking out and caught my eye.I immediately had her—it was manifestly ashe-bear—brought out and honourably placed.She must have been set up originally in theprecinct of Artemis Brauronia. Within thisprecinct, year by year, went on the arkteiaor bear-service. No well-born Athenianwould marry a girl unless she had accomplishedher bear-service, unless she was, in aword, confirmed to Artemis. In the Lysistrataof Aristophanes the chorus of women chantof the benefits they have received from thestate, and the sacred acts they had accomplishedbefore they came to maturity, and say,“I, wearing a saffron robe, was a bear at theBrauronian festival.” Always these well-born,well-bred little Athenian girls must, tothe end of their days, have thought reverentlyof the Great She-Bear. Among the Apachesto-day, we are told, only ill-bred Americansor Europeans who have never had any “raising”would think of speaking of the Bearwithout his reverential prefix of “Ostin”,meaning “Old One”, the equivalent of theRoman senator.

Crete I visited again and again, and toCrete I owe the impulse to my two mostserious books, the Prolegomena to the Study[Pg 72]of Greek Religion and Themis. Somewhereabout the turn of the century there had cometo light in the palace of Cnossos a clay sealingwhich was a veritable little manual of primitiveCretan faith and ritual. I shall neverforget the moment when Mr. Arthur Evansfirst showed it me. It seemed too good to betrue. It represented the Great Mother standingon her own mountain with her attendantlions, and before her a worshipper in ecstasy.At her side, a shrine with “horns of consecration”.And another sealing read theriddle of the horns. The Minotaur is seatedon the royal throne, and the Minotaur isnone other than the human King—Godwearing the mask of a bull. Here was thisancient ritual of the Mother and the Sonwhich long preceded the worship of theOlympians: here were the true Prolegomena.Then when, some years later, I again visitedCrete, I met with the sequel that gave methe impulse to Themis, the Hymn of theKouretes found in the temple of DiktaeanZeus. Here we have embodied the magicalrite of the Mother and the Son, the inductionof the Year-Spirit who long preceded theworship of the Father. My third book onGreek religion, the Epilegomena, is, in themain, a résumé of the two first, and an attemptto relate them to our modern religious outlook.[Pg 73]I should like to apologise here forthe clumsy and pedantic titles Prolegomenaand Epilegomena, but they really express therelation of the two books to my central work—Themis.

Copenhagen possesses a small but valuablecollection of vases, and I had long plannedto go there. I was delighted when a friendoffered to take me in his yacht. My childhoodhaving been passed between sea andmoor, I have always had a passion for thesea and for sailing; but I am a wretched sailor,and the friends who are kind enough to takeme on their yachts have always cause forrepentance. The voyage began with disaster.In the North Sea we met bad weather, andthe vessel, a yawl of only 20 tons, was in somedanger. When she got back to dock atCowes, they told us it was a wonder we hadnot all gone to the bottom. The last thingI remember was crawling on deck and seeingabove me waves mountain high that seemedas if they must fall and swallow us. ThenI suppose I lost consciousness, for I woke—asI thought—in heaven, in utter bliss. Roundme were kneeling angels in blue gowns andwhite caps with streamers. Under stress ofweather we had put in at Heligoland, andthey had landed me in a boat and, every hand[Pg 74]being needed aboard, had left me lying onthe shore, and the women of Heligolandcrowded to see me. I suppose it was therelief from the heaving sea, but I knew thenthe extreme of physical rapture after physicalanguish. We were weather-bound for acouple of days and then made our way intothe Eider Canal, where all was peace. Arguingon philosophy all day long, for my hostwas a hard thinker as well as a bold andskilful seaman, we drifted through long linesof one-legged storks and into the Baltic, withits fiords and its beech trees, with theirbranches dipping into the water. The Balticis a “short” unpleasant sea, but I rememberwith pride that I recovered sufficiently tosteer the yacht into Copenhagen. There Ilearnt what honesty is. The keeper of theMuseum met me the first day, but the secondhe was engaged. He left me a huge bunchof keys and the freedom of the place. Ihad the yacht’s boat in the canal at the Museumdoor and could easily have looted the wholeplace. But it seems, among the hardy Norsemen,these things simply are not done. Yetin my own England, at the British Museum,when I am at work a member of the staffnever leaves me. Ostensibly he is there tohelp me, but really as policeman. I rememberSir Francis Darwin telling me that in Stockholm[Pg 75]he and a Swedish friend were crossinga bridge and they saw a gold watch lying onthe pavement. Sir Francis stooped to pickit up and said: “I suppose we must take itto the police.” “Oh no,” said the Swede,“just put it on the parapet, where it will besafe; the man who lost it is sure to come back.”I fancy if you left a gold watch on the parapetof London Bridge it would not wait long forits owner; yet we English are supposed tobe an honest people.

To face page 90.

Stockholm, whither I went to see the greatprehistoric museum, was a sad disappointment.I had heard it called the “Veniceof the North”. It is common to the vergeof squalor. It contains one beautiful building,the architect of which was a Frenchman.I have come to realise that many people, ifthey see water and some islands or a lake, feelthat it must be beautiful. In the same waythey find mountains always beautiful andinspiring. The Matterhorn is, to me, one ofthe ugliest objects in all nature, like nothingon earth but a colossal extracted fang turnedupside down, but all the same, every nightduring the season, the terrace of theRiffel Alp’s Hotel is crowded with archdeaconsgazing raptly at the Matterhornand praising God for the beauties of Hishandiwork.[Pg 76]

To Petersburg I journeyed solely andsimply to study the Kertsch antiquities in theHermitage. I knew no word of Russian, andcared nothing then for Russia; my eyes wereblinded for the moment by the “glory thatwas Greece”. I had taken letters from theBritish Museum, and was at once shown intoa gorgeous room in which sat a still moregorgeous official, smoking cigarettes. Hewas all courtesy and kindness—what couldhe do for me? Did I know So-and-so? HadI seen this and that?—but no mention ofKertsch. I am now convinced that, thoughhe must have known the name, he had nonotion of its archæological significance, noreven that it had been an Athenian colony.At last, timidly, I tried to state my business.Could I have the vases out of their cases, andwas there yet any material unpublished byStephani that I could have access to? Helooked rather blank, and then with a sort oftwinkle in his deep-set eyes said if there wasanything about social matters or the court inwhich he could help me, would I commandhim; but as for these learned matters, would Ipardon him if he referred me to the gentlemanwho was good enough to act as his brains.Here he significantly touched his handsomeempty head. He took me to a distant roomwhere a shabby German Pole was at work,[Pg 77]surrounded by papers and potsherds. Heproved an efficient specialist. I saw mynoble backwoodsman no more—no doubt hewas gladly rid of the “mad Englishwoman”.I couldn’t help liking the friendly creature;he had the simple, perfect manners of whichRussians hold the secret. But in those daysI was a ferocious moralist, and his quite openand shameless inadequacy made a prematureBolshevist of me. But oh, what a fool, whatan idiot I was to leave Russia without knowingit! I might so easily have made thepilgrimage to Tolstoy; I might even haveseen Dostoevsky. It has been all my life mybesetting sin that I could only see one thing ata time. I was blinded by over-focus. I ambitterly, eternally punished. Never nowshall I see Moscow and Kiev, cities of mydreams.

Literally of my dreams. Twice only inmy life have I dreamt a significant dream.This is one. One night soon after theRussian revolution I dreamt I was in a great,ancient forest—what in Russian would becalled “a dreaming wood”. In it wascleared a round space, and the space wascrowded with huge bears softly dancing. Isomehow knew that I had come to teach themto dance the Grand Chain in the Lancers,a square dance now obsolete. I was not the[Pg 78]least afraid, only very glad and proud. I wentup and began trying to make them join handsand form a circle. It was no good. I triedand tried, but they only shuffled away, courteouslywaving their paws, intent on their ownmysterious doings. Suddenly I knew thatthese doings were more wonderful andbeautiful than any Grand Chain (as, indeed,they might well be!). It was for me to learn,not to teach. I woke up crying, in an ecstasyof humility.

That may stand for what Russia hasmeant to me. And let there be no misunderstanding.It is not “the Slav soul”that drew me. Not even, indeed, Russianliterature. Of course, years before I hadread and admired Turgenev and Tolstoy andDostoevsky, but at least by the two last I wasmore frightened than allured. I half resentedtheir probing poignancy, and some passages,like the end of the Idiot and the scene betweenDimitri Karamasov and Grushenka, seemedto me in their poignancy to pass the limits ofthe permissible in art. They hurt too badlyand too inwardly. No, it was not theseportentous things that laid a spell upon me.It was just the Russian language. If I couldhave my life over again, I would devote it notto art or literature, but to language. Lifeitself may hit one hard, but always, always one[Pg 79]can take sanctuary in language. Language isas much an art and as sure a refuge as paintingor music or literature. It reflects andinterprets and makes bearable life; onlyit is a wider, because more subconscious,life.[Pg 80]

CONCLUSION

I have spoken much of people, nothing ofbooks—yet the influence of books on my lifehas been intimate and incessant. When Ifirst came to London I became a Life Memberof the London Library. London life wascostly, but I felt that, if the worst came to theworst, with a constant supply of books and asmall dole for tobacco, I could cheerfullyface the Workhouse. Three books stand outas making three stages in my thinking: Aristotle’sEthics, Bergson’s L’Évolution créatriceand Freud’s Totemism and Taboo. By natureI was a Platonist, but Aristotle, I think,helped me more than Plato. It happenedthat the Ethics was among the set books formy year at Cambridge. To realise therelease that Aristotle brought, you must havebeen reared as I was in a narrow school ofEvangelicalism—reared with sin always present,with death and judgement before you, Hell andHeaven to either hand. It was like comingout of a madhouse into a quiet college quadrangle[Pg 81]where all was liberty and sanity, andyou became a law to yourself. The doctrineof virtue as the Mean—what an uplift andrevelation to one “born in sin”! Thenotion of the summum bonum as an “energy”,as an exercise of personal faculty, to one whohad been taught that God claimed all, and thenotion of the “perfect life” that was to includeas a matter of course friendship. I rememberwalking up and down in the College garden,thinking could it possibly be true, were thechains really broken and the prison doorsopen.

In 1907 came L’Évolution créatrice. Offand on I had read philosophy all my life, fromHeracleitos to William James, but of lateyears I had read it less and less, feeling that Igot nothing new, only a ceaseless shuffling ofthe cards, a juggling with the same glass balls,and then suddenly it seemed this new Mosesstruck the rock and streams gushed forth in thedesert. But I need not tell of an experienceshared in those happy years by every thinkingman in Europe.

With Freud it was quite different. Bytemperament I am, if not a prude, at least aPuritan, and at first the ugliness of it allsickened me. I hate a sick-room, and havea physical fear of all obsessions and insanity.Still I struggled on, feeling somehow that[Pg 82]behind and below all this sexual mud wassomething big and real. Then fortunately Ilighted on Totemism and Taboo, and at oncethe light broke and I felt again the sense ofrelease. Here was a big constructive imagination;here was a mere doctor laying bare theorigins of Greek drama as no classical scholarhad ever done, teaching the anthropologistwhat was really meant by his totem and taboo,probing the mysteries of sin, of sanctity, ofsacrament—a man who, because he understood,purged the human spirit from fear. Ihave no confidence in psycho-analysis as amethod of therapeutics. I am sure that Mr.Roger Fry is right and Freud quite wrongas to the psychology of art, but I am equallysure that for generations almost every branchof human knowledge will be enriched andillumined by the imagination of Freud.

Looking back over my own life, I see withwhat halting and stumbling steps I made myway to my own special subject. Greekliterature as a specialism I early felt wasbarred to me. The only field of research thatthe Cambridge of my day knew of was textualcriticism, and for fruitful work in thatmy scholarship was never adequate. WeHellenists were, in truth, at that time a“people who sat in darkness”, but we were[Pg 83]soon to see a great light, two great lights—archæology,anthropology. Classics wereturning in their long sleep. Old men beganto see visions, young men to dream dreams.I had just left Cambridge when Schliemannbegan to dig at Troy. Among my owncontemporaries was J. G. Frazer, who wassoon to light the dark wood of savage superstitionwith a gleam from The Golden Bough.The happy title of that book—Sir JamesFrazer has a veritable genius for titles—madeit arrest the attention of scholars. They sawin comparative anthropology a serious subjectactually capable of elucidating a Greek orLatin text. Tylor had written and spoken;Robertson Smith, exiled for heresy, had seenthe Star in the East; in vain; we classicaldeaf-adders stopped our ears and closed oureyes; but at the mere sound of the magicalwords “Golden Bough” the scales fell—weheard and understood. Then ArthurEvans set sail for his new Atlantis and telegraphednews of the Minotaur from his ownlabyrinth; perforce we saw this was a seriousmatter, it affected the “Homeric Question”.

By nature, I am sure, I am not an archæologist—stillless an anthropologist—the“beastly devices of the heathen” weary anddisgust me. But, borne along by the irresistibletide of adventure, I dabbled in both[Pg 84]archæology and anthropology, and I am gladI did, for both were needful for my realsubject—religion. When I say “religion”,I am instantly obliged to correct myself; itis not religion, it is ritual that absorbs me. Ihave elsewhere[2] tried to show that Art is notthe handmaid of Religion, but that Art insome sense springs out of Religion, and thatbetween them is a connecting link, a bridge,and that bridge is Ritual. On that bridge,emotionally, I halt. It satisfies somethingwithin me that is appeased by neither Religionnor Art. A ritual dance, a ritual processionwith vestments and lights and banners, moveme as no sermon, no hymn, no picture, nopoem has ever moved me; perhaps it is becausea procession seems to me like life, like duréeitself, caught and fixed before me. Onlytwice have I seen a ritual dance, and firstthe dance of the Seises before the high altarin the Cathedral at Seville. It was at Carnivaltime I saw it. I felt instantly that it wasfrankly Pagan. Its origin is, as the RomanChurch frankly owns, “perdue dans la nuitdes temps”—we can but conjecture that ittook its rise in the dances of the Kouretesof Crete to Mother and Son. The dancewas accompanied by a prayer to the settingsun, a prayer for light and healing. The[Pg 85]movements executed by six choristers areattenuated to a single formal step. It isdecorous, even prim, like some stiff stylisedshadow. But it is strangely moving in thefading light with the wondrous setting of thehigh altar and the golden grille, and above allthe sound of the harsh, plangent Spanishvoices. Great Pan, indeed, is dead—hisghost still dances.

[2] Art and Ritual (Home University Library).

Only last year I saw a wondrous ritualprocession, a marked contrast to the Sevilledance. It is held at Echternach each year,on the Tuesday after Pentecost. It is, Ithink, the most living survival of the ritualdance to be seen in Europe. Thanks to thekindness of a Luxembourgoise lady, MadameEmil Mayerisch de Saint Hubert, I was ableto observe it in every detail. The dancingprocession is held now in honour of our Saxonsaint, St. Willibrord, but obviously it goesback to magical days. The dancers musterat the bridge below the little town and,gathering numbers as they go, dance throughthe streets, halting here and there and endingin the Basilica. As the dance is magical, itis essential that the whole town should betraversed. The clergy are in attendance, anyone and every one dances or rather leaps,for it is a jumping step; like the CretanKouretes they “leap for health and wealth”.[Pg 86]I saw an old, old woman, scarcely able towalk, but she “lifted her foot in the dance”.I saw a woman with a sick baby in her arms,and she danced for healing; but most of allit was the young men, the Kouretes, whodanced.

The ritual dance is all but dead, but theritual drama, the death and the resurrectionof the Year-Spirit, still goes on. I realisedthis when I first heard Mass celebrated accordingto the Russian, that is substantially theGreek rite. There you have the real enactingof a mystery—the mystery of the deathand resurrection of the Year-Spirit whichpreceded drama. It is hidden, out of sight;the priest comes out from behind the goldengate to announce the accomplishment. It isthe coming out of the Messenger in a Greekplay to announce the Death and the Resurrection.The Roman Church has sadlymarred its mystery. The rite of consecrationis performed in public before the altarand loses thereby half its significance.

I mention these ritual dances, this ritualdrama, this bridge between art and life,because it is things like these that I was allmy life blindly seeking. A thing has littlecharm for me unless it has on it the patinaof age. Great things in literature, Greekplays for example, I most enjoy when behind[Pg 87]their bright splendours I see moving darkerand older shapes. That must be my apologiapro vita mea.

At the close of one’s reminiscences it isfitting that one should say something as tohow life looks at the approach of Death. Asto Death, when I was young, personal immortalityseemed to me axiomatic. The merethought of Death made me furious. I wasso intensely alive I felt I could defy any one,anything—God, or demon, or Fate herself—toput me out. All that is changed now.If I think of Death at all it is merely as anegation of life, a close, a last and necessarychord. What I dread is disease, that is, bad,disordered life, not Death, and disease, so far,I have escaped. I have no hope whateverof personal immortality, no desire even fora future life. My consciousness began ina very humble fashion with my body; withmy body, very quietly, I hope it will end.

And then there is another thought. Weare told now that we bear within us the seeds,not of one, but of two lives—the life of therace and the life of the individual. The lifeof the race makes for racial immortality; thelife of the individual suffers l’attirance de la[Pg 88]mort, the lure of death; and this from theoutset. The unicellular animals are practicallyimmortal; the complexity of the individualspells death. The unmarried andthe childless cut themselves loose from racialimmortality, and are dedicate to individuallife—a side track, a blind alley, yet surely asupreme end in itself. By what miracle Iescaped marriage I do not know, for all mylife long I fell in love. But, on the whole,I am glad. I do not doubt that I lost much,but I am quite sure I gained more. Marriage,for a woman at least, hampers the two thingsthat made life to me glorious—friendship andlearning. In man it was always the friend,not the husband, that I wanted. Family lifehas never attracted me. At its best it seemsto me rather narrow and selfish; at its worst,a private hell. The rôle of wife and motheris no easy one; with my head full of otherthings I might have dismally failed. On theother hand, I have a natural gift for communitylife. It seems to me sane and civilisedand economically right. I like to livespaciously, but rather plainly, in large hallswith great spaces and quiet libraries. I liketo wake in the morning with the sense of agreat, silent garden round me. These thingsare, or should be, and soon will be, forbiddento the private family; they are right and good[Pg 89]for the community. If I had been rich Ishould have founded a learned communityfor women, with vows of consecration anda beautiful rule and habit; as it is, I amcontent to have lived many years of my lifein a college. I think, as civilisation advances,family life will become, if not extinct, at leastmuch modified and curtailed.

Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasantthing. It is true you are gently shoulderedoff the stage, but then you are given such acomfortable front stall as spectator, and, ifyou have really played your part, you aremore than content to sit down and watch.All life has become a thing less strenuous,softer and warmer. You are allowed allsorts of comfortable little physical licences;you may doze through dull lectures, you maygo to bed early when you are bored. Theyoung all pay you a sort of tender deferenceto which you know you have no real claim.Every one is solicitous to help you; it seemsthe whole world offers you a kind, protectingarm. Life does not cease when you are old,it only suffers a rich change. You go onloving, only your love, instead of a burning,fiery furnace, is the mellow glow of anautumn sun. You even go on falling inlove, and for the same foolish reasons—the[Pg 90]tone of a voice, the glint of a strangely seteye—only you fall so gently; and in old ageyou may even show a man that you liketo be with him without his wanting tomarry you or thinking you want to marryhim.

But then “old age is lonely”. Not ifyou follow my example! My friends, menand women, are most of them some twentyyears younger than I am. I have only onefriend made in my ’seventies, Mr. Guy leStrange, if he will let me so account him.He taught me, with infinite patience andkindness, when I was over seventy theelements of Persian, a sure road to my heart.And, I admit, Fate has been very kind tome. In my old age she has sent me, tocomfort me, a ghostly daughter, dearer thanany child after the flesh, more gifted thanany possible offspring of Aunt Glegg.

I should like to run on and tell of my lifesince I left Cambridge. For leave Cambridge,with measureless regret, I did. Ibegan to feel that I had lived too long thestrait Academic life with my mind intentlyfocussed on the solution of a few problems.I wanted before the end came to see thingsmore freely and more widely, and, above all,to get the new focus of another civilisation.[Pg 91]Russia, my “Land of Heart’s Desire”, wasclosed to me. France and America in Francehave received me with a kindness I canneither repay nor forget.

If only I might tell of the wonderful newfriends, French and Russian, I have made inParis and at Pontigny! But these thingsare too present, too intimate—so my talemust end.

American Women’s University Club,

4 rue de Chevreuse, Paris.

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