MEMOIRS OF LIFE AND LITERATURE

Books by W. H. MALLOCK

Novels

MEMOIRS OF LIFE AND LITERATURE

BY W. H. MALLOCK AUTHOR OF "RECONSTRUCTION OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF" ETC.

ILLUSTRATED

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON MCMXX

Memoirs of Life and Literature Copyright, 1920, by Harper & Brothers Printed in the United States of America Published September, 1920 {v}

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

The Mallocks of Cockington—Some Old Devonshire Houses—A Child's Outlook on Life

CHAPTER II

The Rural Poor of Devonshire—The Old Landed Families—An Ecclesiastical Magnate

CHAPTER III

Early Youth Under a Private Tutor—Poetry—Premonitions of Modern Liberalism

CHAPTER IV

Early Acquaintance with Society—Byron's Grandson, Lord Houghton—A Dandy of the Old School, Carlyle—Lord Lytton, and Others—Memorable Ladies

CHAPTER V

Early Youth at Oxford—Acquaintance with Browning, Swinburne, and Ruskin—Dissipations of an Undergraduate—The Ferment of Intellectual Revolution—The New Republic

CHAPTER VI

Early Experiences of London Society—Society Thirty Years Ago Relatively Small—Arts and Accomplishments Which Can Flourish in Small Societies Only

CHAPTER VII

Byron's Grandson and Shelley's Son—The World of Balls—The "Great Houses," and Their New Rivals—The Latter Criticized by Some Ladies of the Old Noblesse—Types of More Serious Society—Lady Marian Alford and Others—Salons Exclusive and Inclusive—A Clash of Two Rival Poets—The Poet Laureate—Auberon Herbert and the Simple Life—Dean Stanley—Whyte Melville—"Ouida"—"Violet Fane"—Catholic Society—Lord Bute—Banquet to Cardinal Manning—Difficulties of the Memoir-writer—Lord Wemyss and Lady P—— —Indiscretions of Augustus Hare—Routine of a London Day—The Author's Life Out of London

CHAPTER VIII

A Few Country Houses of Various Types—Castles and Manor Houses from Cornwall to Sutherland

CHAPTER IX

First Treatise on Politics—Radical Propaganda—First Visit to the Highlands—The Author Asked to Stand for a Scotch Constituency

CHAPTER X

A Venture on the Riviera—Monte Carlo—Life in a Villa at Beaulieu—A Gambler's Suicide—A Gambler's Funeral

CHAPTER XI

Intellectual Apathy of Conservatives—A Novel Which Attempts to Harmonize Socialist Principles with Conservative

CHAPTER XII

A Winter in Cyprus—Florence—Siena—Italian Castles—Cannes—Some Foreign Royalties—Visit During the Following Spring to Princess Batthyany in Hungary

CHAPTER XIII

The Second Lord Lytton at Knebworth—"Ouida"—Conservative Torpor as to Social Politics—Two Books: Labor and the Popular Welfare and Aristocracy and Evolution—Letters from Herbert Spencer

CHAPTER XIV

The So-called Anglican Crisis—Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption—Three Novels: A Human Document, The Heart of Life, The Individualist—Three Works on the Philosophy of Religion: Religion as a Credible Doctrine, The Veil of the Temple, The Reconstruction of Belief—Passages from The Veil of the Temple

CHAPTER XV

Summer on the Borders of Caithness—A Two Months' Yachting Cruise—The Orkneys and the Outer Hebrides—An Unexpected Political Summons

CHAPTER XVI

Addresses on Socialism—Arrangements for Their Delivery—American Society in Long Island and New York—Harvard—Prof. William James—President Roosevelt—Chicago—Second Stay in New York—New York to Brittany—A Critical Examination of Socialism—Propaganda in England

CHAPTER XVII

A Boy's Conservatism—Poetic Ambitions—The Philosophy of Religious Belief—The Philosophy of Industrial Conservatism—Intellectual Torpor of Conservatives—Final Treatises and Fiction

CHAPTER XVIII

Literature as Speech Made Permanent—All Written Speech Not Literature—The Essence of Literature for Its Own Sake—Prose as a Fine Art—Some Interesting Aspects of Literature as an End in Itself—Their Comparative Triviality—No Literature Great Which Is Not More Than Literature—Literature as a Vehicle of Religion—Lucretius—The Reconstruction of Belief

{ix}

ILLUSTRATIONS

{1}

CHAPTER I FAMILY ANTECEDENTS

The Mallocks of Cockington—Some Old Devonshire Houses—A Child's Outlook on Life

"Memoirs" is a word which, as commonly used, includes books of very various kinds, ranging from St. Augustine's Confessions to the gossip of Lady Dorothy Nevill. Such books, however, have all one family likeness. They all of them represent life as seen by the writers from a personal point of view; and in this sense it is to the family of Memoirs that the present book belongs.

But the incidents or aspects of life which a book of memoirs describes represent something more than themselves. Whether the writer is conscious of the fact or no, they represent a circle of circumstances, general as well as private, to which his individual character reacts; and his reactions, as he records them, may in this way acquire a meaning and unity which have their origin in the age—in the general conditions and movements which his personal recollections{2} cover—rather than in any qualities or adventures which happen to be exclusively his own. Thus if any writer attempts to do what I have done myself—namely, to examine or depict in books of widely different kinds such aspects and problems of life—social, philosophical, religious, and economic—as have in turn engrossed his special attention, he may venture to hope that a memoir of his own activities will be taken as representing an age, rather than a personal story, his personal story being little more than a variant of one which many readers will recognize as common to themselves and him.

Now for all reflecting persons whose childhood reaches back to the middle of the nineteenth century, the most remarkable feature of the period which constitutes the age for themselves cannot fail to be a sequence of remarkable and momentous changes—changes alike in the domains of science, religion, and society; and if any one of such persons should be asked, "Changes from what?" his answer will be, if he knows how to express himself, "Changes from the things presented to him by his first remembered experiences, and by him taken for granted," such as the teaching, religious or otherwise, received by him, and the general constitution of society as revealed to him by his own observation and the ways and conversation of his elders. These are the things which provide the child's life with its starting point, and these are determined by the facts of{3} family tradition and parentage. It is, therefore, with a description of such family facts that the author of a memoir like the present ought properly to begin.

The Mallocks, who have for nearly three hundred years been settled at Cockington Court, near to what is now Torquay, descend from a William Malet, Mallek, or Mallacke, who was, about the year 1400, possessed of estates lying between Lyme and Axmouth. This individual, according to the genealogists of the Heralds' College, was a younger son of Sir Baldwyn Malet of Enmore, in the county of Dorset. His descendants, at all events, from this time onward became connected by marriage with such well-known West Country families as the Pynes, the Drakes, the Churchills, the Yonges of Colyton, the Willoughbys of Payhembury, the Trevelyans, the Tuckfields (subsequently Hippesleys), the Strodes of Newnham, the Aclands, the Champernownes, and the Bullers. Between the reigns of Henry VII and Elizabeth they provided successive Parliaments with members for Lyme and Poole. One of them, Roger, during the reign of the latter sovereign, found his way to Exeter, where, as a banker or "goldsmith," he laid the foundations of what was then a very great

fortune, and built himself a large town house, of which one room is still intact, with the queen's arms and his own juxtaposed on the paneling. The fortune accumulated by him was, during the next two reigns, notably increased by a{4} second Roger, his son, in partnership with Sir Ferdinando Gorges, military governor of Plymouth, who had somehow become possessed of immense territories in Maine, and was a prominent figure in the history of English trade with America.

The second Roger, about the year 1640, purchased the Cockington property from Sir Henry Cary, a Cavalier, who appears to have been a typical sufferer from his devotion to the royal cause. Roger Mallock was, indeed, so far Royalist himself that he entered a protest against the execution of Charles; but both he and his relatives also were evidently in sympathy otherwise with the Parliamentary party; for, during the Protectorate, Elizabeth Mallock, his cousin, married Lord Blayney, an Irishman, who was personally attached to Cromwell; while Rawlin Mallock, this second Roger's son (who had married Susannah, Sir Ferdinando Gorges's daughter), was Whig member for Totnes, twice Whig member for Ashburton, and was one of the small group of peers and country gentlemen who welcomed William of Orange when he disembarked at Brixham. Rawlin's heir was a boy—beautiful, as a picture of him in the guise of a little Cavalier shows—who died a minor in the year 1699, but who, during his brief life, as a contemporary chronicler mentions, had distinguished

himself by an accomplishment extremely rare among the young country gentlemen of his own day—indeed, we may add of our own—that is to day, a precocious knowledge of Hebrew.{5}

The young scholar was succeeded by a third Rawlin, his cousin, a personage of a very different type, who, in concert with his next-door neighbor, Mr. Cary of Torre Abbey, added to the pursuits of a Squire Western the enterprise of a smuggler in a big way of business. He was, moreover, a patron of the turf, having a large stud farm on Dartmoor, with results which would have been disastrous for himself if the wounds inflicted by the world had not been healed through his connection with the Established Church. He was fortunately the patron of no less than sixteen livings, or cures of souls, by the gradual sale of most of which he managed to meet, as a Christian should do, the claims of his lay creditors. Of the bottles of port with which he stocked the Cockington cellars two, bearing the date of 1745, still remain—or till lately remained—unopened. Through the successor of this typical Georgian the property passed to my grandfather, of whom my father was a younger son.

Like many other younger sons, my father, to use a pious phrase, suffered himself to be "put into the Church," where two of the livings still owned by his family awaited him. These, to his temporal advantage, he presently exchanged for another. His health, however, since I can remember him, never permitted him to exert himself in the performance of divine service. Indeed, his ecclesiastical interests were architectural rather than pastoral. He accordingly, after a brief acquaintance with his new{6} parishioners, committed them to the spiritual care of a stalwart and well-born curate, and bought a picturesque retreat about ten or twelve miles away, embowered in ivy, and overlooking the river Exe, where he spent his time in enlarging the house and gardens, and in planting slopes and terraces, about a quarter of a mile in length, with what were then very rare trees. He was subsequently given for life the use of another house, Denbury Manor, of which I shall speak presently, which I myself much preferred, and with which my own early recollections are much more closely associated.

My mother was a daughter of the Ven. Archdeacon Froude, and sister of three distinguished brothers—Hurrell Froude, prominent as a leader of the Tractarian movement, Antony Froude the historian, and William Froude, who, though his name is less generally known, exercised, as will be shown presently, an influence on public affairs greater than that of many cabinet ministers. The Archdeacon of Totnes, their father, was a Churchman of a type now extinct as the dodo. Born in the early part of the reign of George III, and inheriting a considerable fortune, he was in his youth addicted to pursuits a proficiency in which is now regarded by no one as absolutely essential to a fitness for Holy Orders. He was famous for his horses, and also for his feats of horsemanship, one of these being the jumping of a five-barred gate without losing either of two guinea pieces which were placed at starting{7} between his knees and the saddle. To the accomplishments of an equestrian he added those of a dilettante. He was an architect, a collector of pictures, a herald and

archaeologist, and also (as Ruskin declared, to whom some of his drawings were exhibited) an artist whose genius was all but that of a master. Like other young men of fortune, he made what was then called the "grand tour of Europe," his sketchbooks showing that he traveled as far as Corfu, and subsequently, when he settled for life as the vicar of Dartington parish, he was regarded as one of the most enlightened country gentlemen of the district, active in improving the roads, which, till his time, were abominable, and in bringing poachers to punishment if not to repentance.

Within a short walk of the parsonage, over the brow of a wooded hill, is another house, which in the scenery of my childhood was an object no less familiar—Dartington Hall, the home of the Champernowne family, with which, by marriage and otherwise, my father's was very closely connected. Yet another house—it has been mentioned already as associated with my childhood also—is Denbury Manor, with its stucco chimneys and pinnacles, its distance from Dartington being something like eight miles. These four houses—Denbury Manor, Dartington Parsonage, Dartington Hall, and Cockington Court—all lying within a circle of some twelve miles in diameter, represent, together with their adjuncts, the material aspects of the life with{8} which I was first familiar. Let me give a brief sketch of each, taking Denbury first.

Denbury Manor at the end of the eighteenth century was converted and enlarged into a dower-house for my mother's grandmother, but was occupied when first I knew it by my great-aunt, her daughter, an old Miss Margaret Froude. To judge from a portrait done of her in her youth by Downman, she must have been then a very engaging ingénue; but when I remember her she looked a hundred and fifty. She was, indeed, when she died very nearly a hundred, and her house and its surroundings now figure in my recollections as things of the eighteenth century which, preserved in all their freshness, had hardly been touched by the years which by that time had followed it. The house, which was of considerable antiquity, had been, for my great-grandmother's benefit, modernized or Elizabethanized under the influence of Horace Walpole and Wyat. It was backed by a rookery of old and enormous elms. It was approached on one side by a fine avenue of limes, and was otherwise surrounded by gardens with gray walls or secretive laurel hedges. Here was a water tank in the

form of a Strawberry Hill chapel. Here was a greenhouse unaltered since the days of George II. Everywhere, though everything was antique, there were signs of punctilious care, and morning by morning a bevy of female villagers would be raking the gravel paths and turning them into weedless{9} silver. The front door, heavy with nails, would be opened by an aged footman, his cheeks pink like an apple, and his white silk stockings and his livery always faultless. Within were old Turkey carpets, glossy, but not worn with use, heavy Chippendale chairs, great Delf jugs with the monogram of George II on them, a profusion of Oriental china, and endless bowls of potpourri. On the shelves of whatnots were books of long-forgotten eighteenth-century plays. In one of the sitting rooms was a magnificent portrait by Reynolds of Miss Froude's mother. It represented her playing on a guitar, and on a table beneath it reposed the guitar itself. Here and there lay one of the ivory hands with which powdered ladies once condescended to scratch

themselves. There were shining inkstands whose drawers were still stocked with the wafers used for sealing letters in the days of Lydia Languish. In another room, called "the little parlor," and commonly used for breakfast, an old gentleman by Opie smiled from one of the walls, and saw one thing only which he might have seen there in his boyhood—a small piano by Broadwood, always fastidiously polished, as if it had just come from the shop, and bearing the date of 1780. Many houses abound in similar furnishings. The characteristic of Denbury was that it contained nothing else. These things were there, not as survivals of the past, but as parts of a past which for the inmates had never ceased to be the present. They were there as the natural appurtenances{10} of a lady who, so far as I knew, had never been near a railway till a special train was run to convey mourners to her funeral.

Miss Froude matched her surroundings. During her later years she was never visible till midday, by which time she would, in an upstairs drawing room, be found occupying a cushionless chair at a large central table, with a glass of port at her right hand and a volume of sermons at her left. On either side of her stood a faithful attendant, one being a confidential maid, the other a Miss Drake—an old, mittened companion, hardly younger in appearance than herself—both of whom watched her with eyes of solicitous reverence, and seemed always ready to collapse into quasi-religious curtsies. Here she would receive such visitors as happened to be staying in the house, and subsequently reverential villagers, who appealed to her for aid or sympathy.

Dartington Parsonage was in one sense more modern than Denbury, having been for the most part constructed by the Archdeacon himself. Originally a diminutive dwelling—a relic of medieval times—he enlarged it to the dimensions of a substantial country house, surrounding a court, and connected with a medley of outbuildings—servants' offices, stables, barns, and coach houses, one of these last containing as a solitary recluse a high-hung yellow chariot, lined with yellow morocco, in which the Archdeacon had been wont to travel before the battle of Waterloo, and in which his grandchildren{11} were never weary of swinging themselves. If the parsonage and its appurtenances can in any sense be called modern, they represented ideas and conditions which are far enough away now. There was nothing about them more modern than the early days of Miss Austen. The dining-room sideboard, with its long row of knife boxes, whose sloping lids when lifted showed a glimmering of silver handles, would have seemed familiar to Mr. Knightly, Mr. Woodhouse, and

Sir Thomas Bertram. Opposite the dining room was a library, very carefully kept, the contents of which were a curious mixture. Besides great folio editions of the classics and the Christian Fathers, were collections of the ephemeral literature of the days of Charles II, notable among which were lampoons on Nell Gwyn and her royal lover—works which the Archdeacon certainly never bought, and which must have come to him through his mother from the Cavalier family of Copplestone. In the hall was a marble table bearing a bust of Demosthenes. In the drawing-room were watercolor drawings by artists such as Prout and Stansfield; a group of Dutch paintings, including a fine Van Ostade; sofas, on which Miss Austen might, have sat by the Prince Regent; and scrap-work screens on which faded portraits and landscapes were half eclipsed by quotations from Elegant Extracts. From the drawing-room windows, in my mother's earlier days, might often have been seen the figure of an old head gardener and factotum,{12} George Diggins by name, bending over beds of geraniums, who was born in the