The Adventure of Living : a Subjective Autobiography

s and my own, and an impassioned study of the metrical art, were the essential things about my boyhood. Betw

r reluctantly, for he was horrified by the bullying and cruelty which went on during his own day at English schools, my father consented to my mother's desire that we should g

. In this matter I developed an extraordinary power of resistance, partly due, no doubt, to my bad eyesight. I was pronounced, in reports, to be a boy who gave no trouble

if attempts were made to coerce me, I was, like the immortal Mr. Micawber, not disinclined for a scrap. I stood erect before my fellow-boy, and when he tried to bully me I punched his head. Mr. Micawber's

obably for my good. It was ultimately decided that my brother and I, instead of returning to MacLaren's, should, as I have already mentioned, go to the house of a clergyman,

erable mental power. She combined the qualities of a self- sacrificing and devoted mother with a certain ironic, or even sardonic, touch. She was a daughter of Mr. Tattersall, the owner of Tattersall's sale-rooms, and at her

s thronged, not only with her country neighbours but with numbers of smart people from London-people such as Hayward, Bagehot, Lord Houghton, on the literary side, and men like Sir Walter Harcourt on the political. Again, picturesque figures in the European world, such as the Comte de Paris, the Due d'Aumale, were often guests, and

ents would have thought it an unforgivable crime to keep books from a child of theirs, for some reason or other I used to like in the summer-time to get up at about five or six o'clock (I was not a very good sleeper in those days, though I have been a perfect sleeper ever since), dress myself, run through the silent, sleeping house, and hide in the Great Parlour. There in absolute quietness and with a great sense of grandeur

ear the watchdo

ally deli

egacy, and p

ed death of

of emotion and sa

and every other possible poet of my generation. I forget the exact date on which I became enamoured of the Elizab

do under such circums

hat Marlowe, Beaumont

the equals, if not in

espe

r dispute my opinions. He left me to find out the true Shakespeare for myself. This I ultimately did, and ended by

at once got the Ode to the Unfortunate Lady by heart. I dipped into The Rape of the Lock, gloried in the Moral Essays, especially in the Characters of Women and the epistle to Bathurst on the use of riches.

old poeti

on breath

ands the ly

he Elegy in a Country Church

ems of some obscure author or other, I did not rest satisfied till I had got hold of his Complete Works. For example, when Crabbe was spoken of, I ran straight to The Tales of the Hall and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I even tasted The Angel in the House when I heard that Rossetti and Ruskin, and even Swinburne, admired Coventry Patmore.

er the

tic airs o

thentic" what Pinkerton in The Wrecker fe

nticist, and full of Elizabethan fancies, imaginings. and even melancholies-I use the word, of course, in the sense of Burton, or of Shakespeare. Yet all the time I read masses of Pope. The occasion for my satire was one which must be described as inevitable in the case of one eager to try his hand at

villa let u

out what sums

an of Wells, bought by Lord Waldegrave in the 'thirties or 'forties, and then gradually turned by Frances, Lady Waldegrave, into a big country-house, but a house too big for the piece of ground in which it

d mortar by a

adows by a tu

sion where a

e for Baron,

Pope was little read by the youth of the 'seventies, my coupl

d, I added some of my own devising. In this way Prosody early became for me what it has always been, a source of pleasure and delight in itself. I liked discovering metrical devices in the poets, analysing them, i.e. discovering the way the trick worked, and in making experiments for myself. The result of this activity was that I had soon written enough verse to make a little pamphlet. With this pamphlet in my pocket and without consultation with anybody-the young of the poets

s going to become a poet. Possibly I thought the trade was a bad one for a second son who must support himself. It is more probable that I instinctively felt that although it was so great a source of joy to me, poetry was not my true vocation. Perhaps, also, I had already begun to note the voice of pessimism raised by the poets of the 'seven

in this direction had been more than sketchy. The only schoolroom matter in which I had made any advance was mathematics. Euclid and algebra fascinated me. I felt for them exactly what I felt for poetry. Though I did not know till many years afterwards that when Pythagoras discovered the forty-seventh proposition he sacrificed a yoke of oxen, not to Pallas Athene but to the Muses, I was instinctively exactly of his opinion. I can remember to this day how I worked out the proof of the forty-seventh proposition with Mr. Battersby, a young Cambridge man who was curate to Mr. Philpott and who took us on in mathematics. The realisation of the absolute, unalterable fact that in every right-angled triangle the square of the side subtending it is equal to the squares of the sides containing it, filled me with the kind of joy and glory that one feels on readi

t ought to be something of a mathematician. Needless to say, my teachers did not see the connection. They were simply amazed that the same person should become as drunk wi

y for themselves in their youth (that, I suppose, is the case with most of us) to observe my hardihood in the way of metrical experiment. Here is the Invocation to the Muses which served as an Int

HE M

87

, Muses love-l

d, Comic, Tra

breathe

wept from Keats'

Shelley's, which

n, and s

e such as Byr

ve-stirring, q

e you n

rite lyrics a

idiot, used b

deuce tak

at.

gton Symonds. It happened that Mr. Gosse was a visitor at the house on the day in question, and that to my great delight we all talked poetry. I saw my chance, and proceeded to propound to these two authorities the following question: "Why is it that n

ylas! why

bird salutet

ackened strin

thou want m

titude of youth I verified Mr. Gosse's quotation the moment I got home. I took my poetry very seriously in those days. I rushed to the Great Parlour,

e manner. In my poem the virtuous and "misunderstood" Byron is pursued and persecuted by the spirits of Evil, Hypocrisy, Fraud

ory published in 1875, was one of the crew of a small ship which ran down the boat containing Shelley and Williams, under the mistaken impression that the rich "milord Byron" was

et is that? Ah,

I have a sin h

ishing-nets th

oh, 'twas fif

t he will no

loving eyes,

was not him I

ch lord I co

ght wild eyes a

my Shelley and Byron poems, I had written a piece of imitation Browningese which is no

VAL'S L

refused him he makes a last request, offering to sell his muse, which he had hoped to keep unhir

on all go

st win i

, I'll se

y her for

write by

e me you

u more f

my garre

h, I was

s a very ch

he pris

e it grow

I steal,

t brought u

ve me the t

isn't muc

Then I di

d you a lodg

at.

oly which had to be feigned in my case, was reserved for

NN

87

l, ye that ha

from draped death

el? Does life

t?-why leave u

arth, not sure

beyond this

and loves so

ak?-is it so

s stream and wh

tals some fain

d ones, if the

s when all seems

h. O speak, y

ope of dying

at.

that most difficult of measures, the Spenserian stanza. The matter of the composition is by no means memorable, but I think I have a right to congratulate myself upon the fact that I was

POWERS

harmony doth

hear the wail

ee its voice, an

raise it from t

arth but livi

oddess, no fa

singing, as t

r dull tasks; the

ing, not a thoug

use of whom th

reigneth in eac

ages their grea

fe tuneful by

id the love-g

savage and a

beauty e'er ca

all to which f

is but of this poo

I

who wander

ot, thou goddes

all that live

lves they cannot

assion, of th

have no star, n

in the storm

s the beasts w

e, nor care to loo

hese men; I l

rs, no rays fo

with those th

be that glori

poets who hav

as, I canno

e, all my tire

ht have known

not let my achi

at.

to the Hall. Rossetti and Morris, however, make a fuss because the paper is not to their taste. Walt Whitman, already a great favourite of mine, "though spurning a jingle," is hailed as "the singer of songs for all time." Proteus (Wilfrid Blount) is mentioned, for my cult for him was already growing. Among other poets w

elapsed, but n

know, has ye

m the point of view of metre include some English hexameters. I was inspired to write them by an inten

course of the stream until, as the old geographers used to say about the Rhin

ose only raison d'être was a certain competence of expression-was a poem entitled Love's Arrows, which was accepted, to my great delight, by Sir George Grove, then the Editor of Macmillan's Magazine, a periodical given up to belles-

en one upon the sleeping boy. He at the touch of that arrow sprang up, and crying against her with much loathing, fled over the meadows. She followed him to overtake him, but could not, albeit she strove greatly; and soon, wearied with her running, fell upon the grass in a swoon. Here had she lain, had not a goatherd of those parts found her and brought her to the village. Thus was much woe wrought unto the damsel, for after this she never again knew any joy, nor delighted in aught, save only it were to sit waiting and watching among the lilies by the pool. By these things it seemeth that the boy was not mortal, as she supposed, but rather the Demon or Spirit of Love, whom John of Dreux for his two arrows holdeth to be that same Eros of Greece.-MSS. Mus. Aix. B. 754. Needless to say, it was a pure invention and not a copy, or travesty of an old model. I was egregiously proud of the sc