CHAPTER I

YORKSHIRE DAYS

In view of my present cult for Russia and things Russian, I like to think that my first childish memory is of the word “Moscow”. Moscow to me was a dog, not a town--an old Newfoundland dog named, no doubt, in honour of the Crimean War, which will sufficiently date these reminiscences. Moscow had his kennel in the backyard under a big spreading tree, and from this tree exuded drops of bright gum. It was my fearful joy to rush to the tree, seize the gum-drops which were well within the length of Moscow’s chain, and be back before he could begin to bark ferociously. When later I learnt that to some people Moscow was a cathedral city, not a dog, my universe rocked with Einsteinian relativity. Russia was about us in those days, a strange, inhuman Russia of Tzars and Siberia. My first toy was a box of bricks and soldiers mixed, called “The Siege of Sevastopol”, given by a patriotic uncle. I hated soldiers and sieges and muskets and bayonets, but the word Sevastopol was a marvel, and a soft joy to my child’s mouth. I turned it over and over, and when much later I learned its Greek origin and meaning, there seemed a real fitness in things.

Then, every Christmas came Russia again. My father had had some business relations with Russia, and every year some kind Russian used to send him a package of caviare and cranberries and reindeers’ tongues. The caviare was reserved for my father, but he gave me sometimes delicious morsels on hot toast, and he has left me the legacy of a too delicate palate. The cranberries were made into sauce for venison, for the grown-ups’ dinners, but a few reindeers’ tongues found their way to our schoolroom breakfast, where they were keenly appreciated by one little greedy fat child. Oh those reindeers’ tongues! they tasted not only of reindeer, but--but of snow-fields and dreaming forests.

[Illustration: JANE HARRISON (aged five).

_To face page 10._ ]

My father had also imported a tiny Russian sledge, and sometimes he took me for drives--thank God it only held one, so I could dream undisturbed of steppes and Siberia and bears and wolves. All my lore was derived from two enchanting books--_Near Home_ and _Far Off_. I wish I had them now,[1] but north and 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. Moritz a friend died. Her funeral procession was a long line of sledges. It was unspeakably solemn and silent. When I die, if I cannot be buried at sea, I should like to go to my grave in a sledge.

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

* * * * *

But Russia soon faded, leaving only my native Yorkshire. And here I must make confession. In politics I am an old Liberal, with a dash of the Little Englander and the Bolshevik. I hate the Empire; it stands to me for all that is tedious and pernicious in thought; within it are always and necessarily the seeds of war. I object to nearly all forms of patriotism. But when I search the hidden depths of my heart, I find there the most narrow and local of parochialisms. I am intensely proud of being a Yorkshire woman.

My gifted friend Hope Mirrlees has written a wonderful novel, _Counterplot_, in which she shows that only in and through the pattern of art, or it may be of religion, which is a form of art, do we at all seize and understand the tangle of experience which we call Life. Until I met Aunt Glegg in the _Mill on the Floss_, I never knew myself. I _am_ Aunt Glegg; with all reverence I say it. I wear before the world a mask of bland cosmopolitan courtesy and culture; I am advanced in my views, eager to be in touch with all modern movements, but beneath all that lies Aunt Glegg, rigidly, irrationally conservative, fibrous with prejudice, deep-rooted in her native soil.

It is said by Southerners that we Yorkshire people are exclusive, gruff in manner, harsh and unsympathetic in soul. Gruff in manner I grant it, but our bark is worse than our bite. Exclusive? possibly, yet I have heard a Yorkshire lady say “there are some quite decent people in Scotland.” Harsh and unsympathetic in soul. Well. A friend of mine was left by her husband alone in a small moorland cottage they had taken for the summer. At nightfall a knock was heard; her landlord entered, under his arm a large grey rabbit. “I heerd t’ Maister had left yer alawn, maybe ye’d be lawnly. I brought t’ rabbit; he’d be a bit o’ company for yer.” I myself was left by a friend in a small Yorkshire inn. The landlady looked in on me in the 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 breast with unlimited savoury trimmings. She looked in to mark my progress. “Aye, yer eat but poorly, yer’ve been living maybe wi’ them Southerners.” When I left my inn, I thanked the landlady for all her kindness. She looked at me steadily and said, “It weren’t you, I knawed yer fayther, t’aud Charlie ’Arrison.” Now my father was never called “Charlie”; he was far too remote and solemn a man for diminutives. She was using what grammarians call--or would call if they ever attended to anything of any importance--the _subjective_ diminutive. It simply expressed the kindliness in her heart towards me and mine. We are not a sentimental people. I picked up a book of Yorkshire poems. Among them was an Ode to Spring. It began thus:

T’aud Winter ’e got nawtice ter quit. He made sooch a muck o’ the place.

I like to think that we Yorkshire people have another trait in common with the Russians. The vice we hate above all others is pretentiousness. I have heard one Russian charge another with pretentiousness; if it existed at all it was so infinitesimal as to be invisible to the naked English eye. Just so with the Yorkshireman. You may break every commandment of the Decalogue--he is easy enough, as long as you are a fairly good fellow he will pardon you--but try to show off, to impress him in any way, and you are done.

To such, I admit, my countrymen were cold and harsh. I remember a hapless clergyman who came north to take charge of our parish while the Vicar was away. The poor man arrived charged with good intentions; he meant to “brighten our Services”; he brought with him leaflets and new hymn-books and new hassocks to compel us to kneel flat upon our knees instead of comfortably crouching through the Litany as had been our Evangelical wont. He even put a little cross on the Communion Table, but this my father with his own hands swiftly and silently removed. The first Sunday the church was full; the second, spite of all the “brightness”, it was chill and empty save for a few sullen faces. I approved of the new man’s views, though I did not like him, so I went conscientiously round to the chief parishioners to ask why they did not come to church. “We dawn’t haud wi’ ’is ways,” was the answer. I thought it was the hassocks and the hymn-books and the leaflets. “Naw--’e could do as ’e liked wi’ them papers and such like--they was naw matter--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 to him as your particular words; it is _you_, the whole of you, you “in a loomp”, as he would say, that the Yorkshireman wisely reckons with. They were instinctively better bred than I was with my rationalising right and wrong, and they had felt the bad manners of the changes worked in their old Vicar’s absence. After holding out for three months the innovator went back to his own place a sadder and a wiser Southerner.

* * * * *

My people must have been, I think, singularly old-fashioned and provincial even for those days. I remember that an old gentleman who came often to see us used to kiss my eldest sister’s hand and call her “Mistress Elizabeth”, unusual even in the ’fifties. How I wished some one would kiss my hand! But no one ever did till I came in my old age to courteous France. And as to Mistress Jane--no, it was Lady Jane I longed to be, for my cult was for Lady Jane Grey. I had a child’s magical habit of mind; if I could get the name _exactly_, I should somehow possess the person. To name is to create. “And God said to the light, ‘Light’” (He named it), and there _was_ Light. So I consulted my kind nurse as to whether I could ever become Lady Jane. “Yes, of course, miss,” said the cheery woman. “If you’re good, maybe when you’re a big girl you’ll marry a lord and then you’ll be a lady.”

Gentle Jane was as good as gold, She always did as she was told, And when she grew old, she was given in marriage To a first-class Earl who kept his carriage.

Hope shone bright, but I was a cautious child, and I referred the question to my better-informed governess. The blow fell. No, not even if I married a dozen lords could I ever be Lady Jane, unless they made my father an earl, which seemed somehow unlikely. So the dream faded, but not wholly. I could still “stay at home in my castle reading Plato while the ladies of the Court went hunting in the park”. And here I must confess my motives were not as purely platonic as they seem. The terror of my childhood was that I should be forced some day to ride to hounds. I loved the hounds, but oh how I hated the horses! I still hate their huge teeth and bulging eyes and satin skins. I learnt to ride (very badly) on an adorable donkey with long furry ears and soft kind eyes, and a small furry donkey slept in my bed every night for years. One night the nurse took it away, saying it was time I learnt not to be a baby. I said not a word, I had long learnt to keep silence. But I was found at midnight with swollen eyes, staring wide awake. The nurse, being a sensible woman, put back my donkey, and I slept soft and warm. Alas! I was soon promoted to a Shetland pony, the veriest little imp of hell. He spent his time running away and buck-jumping; I spent my time prostrate on the Filey sands. He effectively broke my nerve; I was, and remain, a physical coward, and in a community of bold riders was an object of ignominy. No one understood, no one sympathised, till at a Swedish sanatorium I, by good fortune, met Mr. Lytton Strachey. We were both there to undergo Swedish massage, and Swedish massage as 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 was sound advice, sympathetically given. I learnt then, for the first time, how tender, if how searching, is the finger Mr. Strachey lays on our human frailties.

* * * * *

My religious training was oddly mixed. My father was incapable of formulating a conviction, but I think he really would have sympathised with the eminent statesman who “had a great respect for religion as long as it did not interfere with a gentleman’s private life!” I remember his look of annoyance when the Archbishop of York, who was lunching with us after a Confirmation, and had been told that I had played the village organ, put his hand on my head and bade me “consecrate my great gifts to God”. That Archbishop was a splendid figure to my childish imagination. I loved his ritual robes and voluminous sleeves, but one day I looked into my brother-in-law’s study and found the apparitor arranging these vestments. Alas! the sleeves were not real sleeves, they came off. The apparitor, touched by my interest, very kindly showed me how they hooked on, but the gilt was off the gingerbread. To return to my father. The Archbishop was trying enough, but an old Evangelical clergyman was worse. He called to say good-bye to us one day and asked if, before parting, we would all kneel down and “ask a blessing” on our journey. I can see my father’s face of cold disgust. He was in his own house and he could not be rude, so he sat down--he never knelt--and covered his angry face with one hand and let the old clergyman pray. Then he saw him courteously to the door and came back muttering something. I could only catch the word “indecent”. He attended church with fair regularity, but we children noticed that on what used to be called “Sacrament Sundays” he was apt to have a slight attack of lumbago, which passed off on Monday morning.

[Illustration: CHARLES HARRISON. (Father of Jane Harrison.) _To face page 18._ ]

But my stepmother was made of quite other metal. She was a Celt and her religion was of the fervent semi-revivalist type. She was a conscientious woman and tried to do her duty, I am sure, to the three rather dour little girls who had been her pupils and were later presented to her as stepdaughters. She gave us Scripture lessons every Sunday. Her main doctrines were that we must be “born again” and that “God would have our whole hearts or nothing”. I think I early felt that this was not quite fair. Why, if we were to care for Him only, had He made this delightful world full of enchanting foreign languages? Anyhow, the holocaust I honestly attempted was a complete failure. I was from the outset a hopeless worldling. But the apparatus of religion interested me. Sunday was an exciting if laborious day. I taught twice in the Sunday School, and from the age of twelve played the organ at two services. I followed the prayers in Latin, and the lesson in German, and the Gospel in Greek; this with some misgivings as to the “whole-heartedness” of this proceeding. We always had to write out one of the sermons from memory, and were never told which. This has given me a bad habit of attending closely to any nonsense I may happen to hear at a meeting or a lecture. I see my happier friends sleeping and yawning or nudging each other; my attention is glued to the speaker.

Every Sunday I learnt the Collect for the day and either the Epistle or the Gospel. My favourite Collect was that for Advent Sunday, and it still thrills me, but I cannot have had any real taste for literature as some of the hymns that delighted me most were abominable doggerel.

My favourite moral-song ran as follows:

How proud we are, how pleased to show Our clothes and call them rich and new, When the poor sheep and silkworm wore That very clothing long before!

Partly, no doubt, it was that in my childish mind I had a pleasant picture of an old sheep suitably attired in a Victorian bonnet with strings and a shawl, but chiefly it pleased me because it expressed my innate and still inveterate dislike of, and contempt for, everything _chic_ and smart. Perhaps it is some complex caused by my own childish sufferings in my “Sunday clothes”, though heaven knows they were plain enough. Anyhow, even now when I see a faultlessly turned out man or woman I always expect he or she will prove to be a fool and a bore. We cannot all be distinguished, but for heaven’s sake let us all be shabby and comfortable. At a Cambridge function, when he was Chancellor, I once gazed with admiration at the late Duke of Devonshire. His right boot had a largish hole in it from which emerged a grey woollen toe. That, I felt, was really ducal. I turned the same sour eye on the very rich. I remember Miss Pernel Strachey raising the question: “Why do rich people always get so dull?” Now that Miss Strachey is Principal of Newnham, she will, I hope, employ some of her leisure in reading her Bible. “It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.” For “Kingdom of God” read “Kingdom of the higher spiritual values” and she has her answer.

* * * * *

My secular education till I was seventeen was in the hands of a rather rapid succession of governesses, all of them strictly English. My father’s creed was a simple one: All foreigners were Papists, all Papists were liars, and he “wouldn’t have one in his house”. How long and ardently I longed in vain to see a Papist! The result of my father’s simple faith was that never in this world shall I be able to speak French. When I was sent to Cheltenham to be “finished”, I was placed in the Upper First at once because I could read three or four languages and knew “Noel et Chapsal” off by heart. My first morning the French master gave a simple _dictée_. Some isolated words I could make out, but not a single intelligible sentence. I sent in a blank sheet and cried with rage. All my governesses were grossly ignorant, but they were good women, steadily kind to me; they taught me deportment, how to come into a room, how to get into a carriage, also that “little girls should be seen and not heard”, and that I was there (in the schoolroom) “to learn, not to ask questions.” On Saturdays we repeated the Books of the Bible in their correct order and the Kings of Israel and Judah, the signs of the Zodiac and the Tables of Weights and Measures. I also learnt by a mysterious system of mnemonics many isolated dates. I can still give correctly the date of the Creation of the World, the Fall, the Flood, the battle of Quebec and the Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood.

Victorian education was ingeniously useless. Every day I spent an hour doing exquisite hems and seams. I cannot to this day make the simplest garment. But for some things I am devoutly thankful. I was made to learn for some fifteen years three verses of the Bible every day. I might choose what poetry I wished. In this way I learnt impartially great quantities of Milton, Wordsworth and Mrs. Hemans, Gray’s “Elegy”, the “Prisoner of Chillon” and the like. I learnt them all lying on a back-board, and to this day my flat back is the admiration of dressmakers. When, nowadays, I see the round backs of my young friends, and watch them slinking round doors as though they were criminals and not English gentlewomen, and especially when they fail to get up when addressed by their elders and betters, I sometimes sigh for a little “deportment”, but, after all, we of a past generation have no more right to impose our manners than we have to impose our morals. When a young man comes to tea with me for the first time, it gives me, I confess, a slight shock when he lies down full length on the rug, but thereby he expresses his willingness for a kindly relation, and things are more comfortable than if he sat, hat in hand, on the edge of his chair. Again, it surprised me a little when at Cambridge I asked a young man to tea for the first time and he answered _on a post-card_: “I’ll come if I can, but don’t count on me.” “Count on” him, the lout! I crossed his name (an honoured name by the by) out of my address book, but the same evening--in penance for my bad temper--I wrote to him _on a post-card_ and said I hoped I might “count on him” for another Sunday. And then things change so swiftly; the vulgarism of one generation is the polished _cliché_ of the next. When I was young, to apologise by saying “sorry” would have been--witness the _Punch_ of the period--to write yourself down a shop-man; now I hear “sorry” drop quite easily from the most blue-blooded lips. As to the absurdities of Victorian education, we learnt certainly a great deal of miscellaneous rubbish (I am prepared though to defend the signs of the Zodiac), but odd scraps of information are stimulating to a child’s imagination. Nowadays it seems you learn only what is reasonable and relevant. I went to Rome with a young friend, educated on the latest lines, and who had taken historical honours at Cambridge. The first morning the pats of butter came up stamped with the Twins. “Good old Romulus and Remus,” said I. “Good old who?” said she. She had never heard of the Twins and was much bored when I told her the story; they had no place in “constitutional history”, and for her the old wolf of the Capitol howled in vain: “Great God! I’d rather be ...”

We old people must, however, steadily face the fact that the young are more likely to be right than the old, and this in literature as in morals and manners. If we old ones have behind us a larger personal experience, they, the young, have behind them the collective experience of a whole additional generation. Youth starts life from the vantage point of the shoulders of age, and his vista is likely to be wider and clearer. As Mr. Sheppard observed: “When the fathers think that the Age of Reason is achieved, the sons may be trusted, if they are of good stock, to see that it is still far off.” I will make a personal confession. The methods of the Georgian novelist have often tried me sorely. I had always been used to think of art as a thing of selection. I looked to it for a certain peace and largeness. Then when I took up “Ulysses”, I found myself not only wallowing in a drain of obscenities that would have abashed Zola, but also exposed to a trickle of trivialities that exasperated my every nerve, and made me feel as though I were in a psycho-analyst’s consulting room with a patient forced to unburden himself of every thought, every impression, however feeble and seemingly irrelevant. And yet all the time I felt, “This is written by a man of genius, who am I to judge him? Let me try first to understand him.” “Psychoanalyst’s consulting room.” Yes, the conviction grew. Joyce is trying to make audible, make conscious the subconscious. He is dredging the great deeps of personality. That is his tremendous contribution, and after him follow a host of less-gifted imitators. Then, happily, I read _Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown_, and Mrs. Woolf made me see that these Georgian characters, which I had thought were so unreal and even teasing, were real with an intimacy and a spirituality before unattempted. So I have my reward. I don’t say I always get there! I don’t say that when I go joyously to bed with a novel, it is Mr. Joyce I take with me. It is not, it is Jane Austen or George Eliot or even Trollope, but at least I know there is somewhere to get to; the gates of a New Jerusalem are even for me ajar!

* * * * *

To return to my governesses. There was one notable exception--a woman of real intelligence, ignorant but willing and eager to learn anything and everything I wanted. Together we learnt to read German, Latin badly, and with the quantities of course all wrong, the Greek Testament and even a little Hebrew. Unfortunately, having no guide, we began with the Psalms which are hard nuts to crack. I wanted to find out the 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 thing that is raw”. Alas! my kind governess was shortly removed to a lunatic asylum. What share I may have had in her mental downfall I do not care to inquire.

A keen impulse was given to my study of the Greek Testament by the arrival of a new curate. He was fresh from Oxford and not, I think, averse to showing off. Rashly in one of his sermons he drew attention to a mistranslation. This filled me with excitement and alarm. I saw in a flash that the whole question of the “verbal inspiration of the Bible” was at issue. That afternoon I took my Greek Testament down to the Sunday School and, eager for further elucidation, waylaid the hapless curate. I soon found that his knowledge of Greek was, if possible, more slender than my own. But, if embarrassed, he was friendly. Alas! that curate did not confine his attentions to the Greek text. I was summarily despatched in dire disgrace to Cheltenham. My stepmother said I was behaving “like a kitchen-maid”. Considering the subject of my converse with the curate, I fail to see the analogy. My father, as usual, said nothing. He scarcely ever did say anything. His great natural silence--which he has handed down to me--was, I think, increased by my stepmother’s rather violent Celtic volubility. “Mother’d talk the hind leg off a donkey,” observed one of her sons. I heard her voice once in an adjoining room passionately haranguing my father. From him not a sound. But when we met for dinner, we saw with some embarrassment that a portrait of my mother, long consigned to an attic, was hanging on the wall opposite my father’s seat. He had himself brought it down and hung it up. Such was his dumb reprisal. My mother died almost at my birth, but I have been told she was a silent woman of singular gentleness and serenity.

[Illustration: ELIZABETH HAWKSLEY HARRISON (_née_ NELSON). (Mother of Jane Harrison.) _To face page 28_]

Books were, till I went to school, a serious difficulty. My father’s school-books had somehow perished. I saved up my money to buy a second-hand Virgil. The process was long, for my income was sixpence a week, mulcted of a compulsory penny for the missionaries. My edition of the _Aeneid_ contained not a hint as to scansion. I knew the poem was in hexameters, but I was constantly held up by the elision of nasal terminations. I was almost in despair when a boy-friend who had just been promoted to doing verse at school offered to show me, as he expressed it, “how to do the trick”. His explanations were a veritable Apocalypse and I was enraptured, but he rather let me down by observing at the end, “It’s a silly game, but if you’re in the Fourth you’ve got to do it!”

This same boy-friend got me into serious disgrace later at school, at Cheltenham. I was working for the London Matriculation then just opened to women, and he proposed to write to me just before the examination to “buck me up”. No letter reached me, but one morning I was summoned before Miss Beale’s throne, where she sat in state before the Lower School came into prayers. She had in front of her a post-card (post-cards had only just been invented) written in a schoolboy scrawl and signed “Peveril”. “That”, she said, pointing a disgusted finger at the signature, “is a boy’s name.” “Yes,” I said, “it’s Peveril; he promised to write to me before the examination,” and I put out my hand for the post-card. “No, this must go to your parents,” and then came a long harangue. It ended with these words which intrigued me so that I remember them exactly: “You are too young, and I hope too innocent, to realise the gross vulgarity of such a letter or the terrible results to which it might lead.” I was indeed, and still am, for what do you think was the offence? After his signature “Peveril” had written “_Give my love to the Examiners!_” The story may stand to mark the abyss of fatuous prudery into which the girls’ schools of the middle Victorian period--even the very best--had fallen. I was too furious that my letter had been read to think of anything else. At home a scrupulous code of honour prevailed as to letters. I remember being allowed to take a bundle of letters to the village post. I employed my time learning by heart the various names, titles, prefixes and addresses. These when I got back I repeated, expecting praise for my diligence and accuracy. Instead I was told I had done a most dishonourable thing. Never, under any circumstances, was I to read the address of a letter unless addressed to myself. _Tempora mutantur._ I know a certain distinguished family all of whose members make a practice of reading all post-cards and all the letters left lying about the house. When I got home, my father sent for me and said, “Miss Beale said I was to read that,” pointing to the post-card. “I don’t see any harm in it--but he’d no business to write to you on a post-card, the puppy.” Post-cards were an innovation and all innovations anathema. All boys and all young men who proposed for his daughters were to my father “puppies”. It is only due to “Peveril” to add that this offence he never committed, hence much was forgiven him. Peveril is a county magnate now, a Justice of the Peace, a Constant Reader of the _Spectator_--not, I feel sure, of the _Nation_!

* * * * *

I, too, am a Justice of the Peace. I mention this not as an empty boast, but in all humility, because my short experience as a magistrate taught me much. I should like every young man and woman to go through this experience for a year or two and not wait till they are sixty and it is too late to become a good citizen. I may say at once that I was quite useless on the Bench. I have really no head for business, and am prone to observe only the irrelevant. A candid friend told me that I had been chosen just “to represent Art and Letters”, and that _therefore_ only an elegant indolence was expected of me. Still, I like to remember that I saved a poor Armenian from a fine. He had somehow muddled his identity card. I felt that all consideration was due to any one who could speak Armenian, perhaps the most difficult of all European languages. And then, what about my own identity card? A very moderate amount of red tape is apt to make me “see red”, but I can just manage to fill in a passport form and describe my eyes, my nose, my forehead and my figure generally, but when the préfecture asks for the birthplace of your maternal grandfather, what are you to do? If you speak the truth and say you don’t know and don’t want to, you will be detained at the pleasure of the Republic, stand for hours in a queue of Polish Jews and get no lunch. The only sound policy is to write in the name of some obscure Yorkshire village. As the official will not be able to read, still less to pronounce it, his official soul will be satisfied. This, I fancy, was what the Armenian had been after. Anyhow, I got him off.

We had, of course, dull hours--mainly spent in fining undergraduates for exceeding speed limits. If you have been knocked down twice yourself, at first you feel a ferocious joy, but vengeance soon palls. As a rule no attempt was made at defence; the undergraduate had had his fun and cheerfully paid down his--or rather his father’s--money in fines of ever-increasing severity. One brighter spirit, I remember, began a long and laboured defence; it was couched in a lingo unknown to me, some strange up-to-date slang. I began eagerly to take valuable linguistic notes. But the presiding magistrate was a cold insensate man, dead to the charms of language; he curtly requested the undergraduate to confine his remarks to the King’s English. The poor boy looked round piteously, said, “Yes, sir; thank you, sir,” and collapsed.

Many of the charges were for petty thefts. At first this embarrassed me a good deal. I could not bear to look at the prisoner lest he should be suffering agonies of shame. I soon found my embarrassment was needless. Shame is the high prerogative of a sensitive humanity. These poor creatures were not shameless because they were hardened criminals; they were just too stupid to feel shame. They were, most of them, morally half-witted, cases not for the law, but the leech or the psychologist. One pitiable case I remember of a man 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, petty thefts and the like. For years he had drifted lower and lower. “Then”, said he, “came the war. That _was_ a bit of luck. I got a job at once and kept it, and then”, he added sadly, “came the bluggy Peace and they chucked me.” No criticism, I am sure, was intended of the high conventions of Versailles, it was just that he had lost his job. I think all the Bench hung their heads. This was the world as we, its rulers, had made it.

Let no one think that the English Bench is a place unfit for a lady. One day it was reported by the constable that the prisoner had used peculiarly foul language. “What did he say?” asked a magistrate. “Well, sir, it isn’t hardly fit for me to repeat,” said the constable. The clerk added that he had had the “language” typed and a copy would be handed round if the Bench desired. The Bench did desire, and it was circulated. The unknown to me has always had an irresistible lure, and all my life I have had a curiosity to know what really bad language consisted of. In the stables at home I had heard an occasional “damn” from the lips of a groom, but that was not very informing. Now was the chance of my life. The paper reached the old gentleman next me. I had all but stretched out an eager hand. He bent over me in a fatherly way and said, “I am sure _you_ will not want to see this.” I was pining to read it, but sixty years of sex-subservience had done their work. I summoned my last blush, cast down my eyes and said, “O no! No. Thank you so much.” Elate with chivalry he bowed and pocketed the script.

I have always known we English were a good-natured, easy-going people, serenely sure of ourselves, not prone to take offence, but on the Bench I learnt that we are something a little more. Every official, from the presiding magistrate to the constable, had for the prisoner a steady courtesy and a real consideration and even kindliness. Once only did I hear a barrister begin to bluster a little and slightly heckle a prisoner, but the feeling of the court was so manifestly against him that he swiftly collapsed. There was to be no bullying of the under dog.

* * * * *

But all this is by anticipation. To return to Cheltenham. I had to face the ordeal of the Matriculation Examination of the London University, uncheered by “Peveril’s” letter. Examinations were novelties then. I felt the whole honour of the College was on my shoulders and I was almost senseless from nervousness. To my dying day I shall affectionately remember the Registrar of the University. Before I went in he asked my name. I could not remember it. Everything had gone blank. He looked at me so kindly and said, “Oh it is of no consequence, later on perhaps.” And later he came into the Hall to see how I was getting on. He found me writing merrily.

I carried away from Cheltenham College a dislike for history which has lasted all my life. Our history lessons consisted mainly in moralisings on the doings and misdoings of kings and nobles. We did the Stuart period in tedious detail, and as Miss Beale was Cromwellian and I, like all children, a passionate Royalist, I was in a constant state of irritation. There was an odd rule throughout the College that no girl might buy a book. It sprang from Miss Beale’s horror of what she called “undigested knowledge”. She need not have feared with most of us that the amount of knowledge absorbed, digested or undigested, would have been excessive. I broke the rule and secretly bought a small life of Archbishop Laud. This I read, learned, marked and inwardly digested. Later, I again broke the rule and bought Bryce’s _Holy Roman Empire_. Mr. Bryce was coming to examine us and I scored handsomely by my perfidy. Normally, what we had to feed on were the notes we took of lectures; these notes were carefully corrected and severely commented on. It was a wretched starvation system, but gave constant practice in composition. For two things, however, I am thankful to Cheltenham. Arithmetic and elementary mathematics were admirably taught, and it was a rapture to me to understand at last why you turned fractions upside down in division. When I first got possession of an _x_ I felt I had a new mastery of the world. Only my teachers stopped short too soon--just where real mathematics began, and when later at Cambridge I heard Mr. Bertrand Russell discourse on the amazing beauty of mathematics, I felt like a Peri outside Paradise. I had no mathematical ability. I never saw the inner necessity of the truths of which I wrote the proofs with glib understanding, but my teachers might have dragged me through at least the Calculuses.

But, most of all, I am grateful for my training in elementary chemistry. We had lectures with experiments, and a few of us were allowed to go and do analyses of simple substances at the laboratory of the boys’ college. You watch an experiment, some one pours some hydrosulphuric acid (I hope it _is_ hydrosulphuric acid, my chemistry is faded) on some loaf sugar, and in a moment the quiet white sugar is a seething black volcano. Things are never the same to you again. You know they _are_ not what they seem; you picture hidden terrific forces, you can even imagine that the whole solid earth is only such forces held in momentous balance.

Though I have lived most of my life with educationalists, I have little interest in education. I dislike schools, both for boys and girls. A child between the ages of eight and eighteen, the normal school years, is too young to form a collective opinion, children only set up foolish savage taboos. I dislike also all plans for “developing a child’s mind”, and all conscious forms of personal influence of the younger by the elder. Let children early speak at least three foreign languages, let them browse freely in a good library, see all they can of the first-rate in nature, art, and literature--above all, give them a chance of knowing what science and scientific method means, and then leave them to sink or swim. Above all things, do not cultivate in them a taste for literature.

In answer to numerous inquiries, I beg to state that my first literary effort was a tract entitled “Praying for Rain”. I was in urgent need of a guinea to subscribe to a portrait of Miss Beale and I dared not ask for such a sum. I sent my attempt to the Religious Tract Society and almost by return came back a post-office order for three guineas. If I had kept to tract-writing, I would not be the needy woman I still am. I shall never forget the sight of that delicious thin green paper. It was to me untold wealth, but I was burdened with a sense of guilt. I dared not tell my father about the post-office order. He held old-fashioned views as to women earning money. To do so was to bring disgrace on the men of the family. I longed to spend the extra two guineas on books, but I dared not. Long ago I had told a lie and been made to stay at home from Church and learn by heart the story of Ananias and Sapphira, who _kept back part of the price_. “The feet of the young men who carried them out” seemed to be waiting for me, so I offered my holocaust, sent the whole three guineas to Miss Beale’s portrait, and thereby, I hope, effaced the blot from the family scutcheon. I always sent a copy of every book I wrote to my father, and he always acknowledged them in the same set words: “Thank you for the book you have sent me, your mother and sisters are well. Your affectionate father.” I am sure he never read them, and I suspect his feeling towards them was what the Freudians call _ambivalent_--half shame, half pride. Years after his death I learnt, and it touched me deeply, that, on the rare occasions when he left home, he took with him a portmanteau full of my books. Why? Well, after all, he was a Yorkshireman, it may have been he wanted a “bit o’ coompany”.

My father was the shyest man I ever knew, and terribly absent-minded. Legend says that two years after he was married he rode up to Limber Grange, my maternal grandfather’s house, and asked to see Miss Elizabeth Nelson. I know myself that if he found unexpected visitors in the drawing-room, he would give a frightened look round, shake hands courteously with his embarrassed wife and daughters, and disappear like a shot deer. In our rambling, uncomfortable old house he had furnished for himself a Harbour of Refuge, known as his workroom. It contained countless fishing-rods and a lathe on which he turned boxes of ebony and ivory. It would have been a bold servant who would have intruded there; even my stepmother dare not enter unbidden. My father always said grace before dinner and luncheon, but was furious when a clerical son-in-law wanted to say it before breakfast. The form he adopted, and from which nothing could wean him, was his own: “For what we are about to receive, _may the Lord be truly thankful_.” My own absences of mind I control severely, but I have occasional lapses, as when I turned into the trimming of a white muslin tennis hat three ten pound notes destined to pay my college fees. Six months later, after much fruitless and anguished searching, the trimming was unpicked and the notes emerged.

My elder sister was less successful. As a clergyman’s wife, it was part of her frequent duty to write “characters” for young parishioners seeking situations. Every college tutor at the end of the May-term knows the suffering entailed. Any form of literary composition caused my sister acute agony. One day my niece and I noticed that she was sitting at her writing-table with the characteristic hunted look. “I wonder what old Dobbin is up to,” said my niece. (Old Dobbin was her reverent appellation for a really adored mother.) “Writing testimonials by the look of her,” said I. “I’ll go and look,” said my niece. Looking over her mother’s shoulder, my niece read, “I am seeking a situation for a young cat, Mr. Velvet Brown (the actual name of my small nephew’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 in person and habits. He has lived for some months in a clergyman’s family.” Here she paused, pen in air, for inspiration, and was gradually restored to reality by a prolonged giggle.

I ought, in justice to my sister, to explain that “Mr. Velvet Brown” played a large part in the home life of the Vicarage, which he never left till death removed him. He was a cat of great dignity. Tail in air, he always trotted after my brother-in-law on his parish rounds. If he was lost the whole house was upset. My small nephew was, after the fashion of his generation, usually kind and forbearing to his mother. I remember once she was, I must own, rather “nagging” at him, and he said to her gently, “There, there, Mother, that will do.” But when my sister said angrily, “Where on earth has that cat got to?” he looked at her reprovingly and answered, “Mother, Mr. Velvet Brown has gone for a stroll; he will be back for supper, and you’d better keep some fish and a saucer of cream.” One of my most cherished possessions is a photograph I still have of Mr. Velvet Brown. He is taken standing on his hind-legs with his right paw uplifted. This was supposed to be my brother-in-law’s favourite pulpit attitude. But, alas! Mr. Velvet Brown was not what the French call “un chat sérieux”, and one evening he went out to return no more. It was this absence of mind in my sister and not, as I then stupidly thought, lack of brains that made her construing of Latin sometimes fail to carry conviction. I can hear her musical voice now, as she stumbled through the dreary waste of a Latin exercise book. “The sharp horse was pricking on the idle spur.” Her wits were always wool-gathering like my father’s, and here was no wool to gather. I would not “put it past” her now to assert that “the wall was building up Balbus”.

My father left Yorkshire because of the threatened approach within a mile of our house of a small branch railway, connecting Scarbro’ and Whitby. He feared it would bring with it tourists, char-à-bancs, gas lighting, and all the pollution of villadom. I think he was unduly anxious. We left, but about ten years later I came back on a visit to friends. I had occasion to go down to the little moorland station to fetch a parcel of books. The tiny train came puffing up, stopped; the guard’s van opened and some parcels were flung out. Then forth stepped the single passenger, a great grey sheep-dog, respectfully met by the station-master. Yorkshire is a Paradise for dogs, specially sporting dogs. I have seen them crowding the platform at York station about the Twelfth of August, waited on assiduously by eager porters while their masters went neglected. But all dogs are treated with due respect. I was once privileged to attend a huge St. Bernard on his way home from Yorkshire. My friend and I travelled first-class in honour of our great companion. The guard looked at the three of us, grinned, and said, “Happen t’awd dog ud liever not travel wi’ strangers.” He clapped an “Engaged” on the carriage and was gone, never waiting for or, I am sure, thinking of a tip.