Early Memories

Exham, though but a village in size,

-* — L is historically and archseologically “no mean city.” Its venerable Abbey, the hoary church of the parish, has outlasted the coming and the going of twelve hundred years. Then where were the jerry-built towns of yesterday’s England? Before Syria was conquered by Omar, cowled monks were gathered on the banks of the Tyne. Before liniments and lotions for rheumatism were dreamt of, the old, old Tyne-folk were glad to have the quack surgeon walk nine times round the rheumracked sufferer, — “Malignusobligavit: angelus curavit: dominus salvavit,” — the quack being enjoined by his books to “spit thy spittle on the joint, and it will soon be well with him.” Years before the Council assembled In TrullOy the Al)bey of Hexham claimed the right of sanctuary within the radius of a mile. Before the Third Council was hekl at Constantinople, Queen Etheldrid gave the regality of Hexham to Wilfrid, the local head of the Roman Church. Fifty years before the sacred pictures were condemned by the Fourth Church Council, Trumhriht was consecrated first bishop of Hexham. Before Charlemagne had commended in the Council of Frankfort the veneration of sacred pictures, Acca, our glorious bishop, had embellished with lavish splendour the Abbey under whose shadow I was born. Before the Filioqiie clause was inserted in the Creed at the Council of Aixla-Chapelle, Ethelbehrt was the last bishop buried at Hexham. Am I not justified, therefore, in claiming to be a citizen of “no mean city “? A historical sanctity seems to cling to that Tyneside shrine, and to invest all its people with an unwritten, but indisjjutable, right to be in an illustrious line. There is an old-fashionedness about the most modern of us, — a weird kind of dour silence and reserve which means, being psychologically interpreted, that sleeping dogs should not be wantonly roused. The heredity that goes back but a space of twelve days may have a mushroom flavour, the heredity which goes back twelve hundred years, and even then was venerable, covers all yester-EARLY day’s things with the shamefacedness of conscious inexperience. I know we did not always sustain the highest level of our history, but we comfort ourselves with the ghastly and humbling recollection that even Adam — whether of Moses or of Darwin — did not long sustain his best traditions.

The Englishman who was born in 1830, as I was, may be expected to have some knowledge of the Genesis of modern things, for immediately before that pregnant period social England was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Feudal England, hearing a pistol-shot in the air, woke up and looked round sleepily and Avonderiugly. The night AA’as past, and a white light glimmered on the eastern hills.

The piquant life lived in my father’s house brought me into daily contact with a good deal that was going on — or had been going on within a short radius of years — in the bigger world. The best Radicals and Dissenters in the little town met under my father’s roof night after night, and all the Nonconformist ministers foregathered round his hospitable hearth, the feast ahvays being hot coffee and piles of buttered leavened bread; there, from. secular and from reverend lips, I heard that the British world might at any moment be enveloped in flames. Before telling how thai was, I must make a note or two of childhood’s memories, which, though trivial ii themselves, I cannot now but regard as full of suggestion and rough forecast of many reforms and rearrangements. The solemn threat under which all children of my grade were brought up was, that if Ave did anything wrong Ave should certainly be sent to “Botany Bay.” That was enough to make the stoutest heart quail and to blanch the faces of whole schools. Botany Bay, though known to be a geographical term, was a mystery to our young minds; and mystery, especially moral mystery, has played a great part in the education of the world. We heard of Botany Bay as more advanced minds might have heard of bottomless perdition. There was only one word more terrible to boyish miscreants than Botany Bay, and that appalling word was Van Diemen’s Land. No boy not lost to self-respect could pronounce that word flippantly; indeed, hardly any boy could be persuaded to pronounce it at all. As boys — very little and very superstitious boys — we felt instinctively that Van Diemen’s Land was a bad land, full of brimstone, and

EARLY prEMORTES vull of unholy suggestion. AYhen it was Reported amongst us that the grandfather of h’ne of the hoys had actually hcen in Van Si)iemen’s Land (Avhetlier at his own expense olv not was a secret), our respect for the hoy di’as rudely and A isihly modified. But time I+oftens all things, and some things are Ifeven sanctified by time. One of these things proved to he Van Diemen’s Land itself. At a Methodist meeting in the north, the people had been singing a hymn in which the line “We are marching through Emmanuel’s ground “occurs, and at the close of the hymn one good old man, whose emotion was in excess of his intelligence, fervently prayed,” Grant that when this life is over every one of us may have a cottage in ‘an Diemen’s Land.” “Who can fully exi)lain the laws of mental association The poor man somehow got it into his head that Emmanuel’s ground and Van Diemen’s Land were practically one and the same thing, and thus already the minor prophets had unconsciously foreseen the better future of colonial civilisation and progress, and had hopefully haptised an old name into a ncAV meaning.

All this time I was at once happily and sadly conscious of silently passing through a deep religious experience. To me it has, i I may say so without being misunderstood been ahvays natural to pray. Prom a chilj*^- I “felt after “God; I expected Him; tarried for Him as for one with whom I ha “> an appointment. I have never lost that fee ing of expectancy and nearnesiv The idea praying by the clock, or statedly, or sevei^ times a day with my window open towards Jerusalem, would never occur to me, for it is my delight of delights to pray without ceasing. I would as soon think of breathing seven times a day as of praying seven times a day. Intermission is in other things, never in prayer. My boyhood was steeped in prayer, When I prayed in public T was often asked if I wrote my prayers and committed them to memory. Never! No sentence have I ever prayed from memory! I have let the eager and even clamorous heart say what it would to the condescending and ever-listening Father.

Par off in my boyhood I see two living figures that can never fade from memory. One was the Rev. Michael Singleton, and the other the Rev. William Airey. The first was the Roman Catholic priest of the town, who, according to local Protestant interpretation,

EARLY ^rE^[ORIE,S V ickeclly represented “the man of sin,” “the mystery of iniquity,” and various “little horns “in Daniel and elsewhere. Michael Singleton was, though personally benign, an oJficial terror to all Protestants. And yet he did not look it! — that was the mischief of it! If Ave could have seen” the horn “Ave could have run away from it, or Ave could have tthroAvn stones at it; but it was not to be seen. It might be up the man’s sleeve, or in his boots, or under his suspiciously ample cloak, or inside his silk hat; the fact that Ave were talking about” a horn “did not for a moment affect our use of metaphor or our suspicion of possi])ilities. We Were told by our protesting sires that the wickedness came in exactly at the point of uncertainty as to where the” horn “Was. Mr. Singleton was the gentlest of men, with a smile that was itself a certificate and a fortune. Once the Roman Catholic priest spoke to me, and thus AAdthout knowing it he made an epoch in my life! Little by little it became known in the Sunday school, in Which I was first a scholar and long after-Avards a teacher, that I had been syoken to l)y “the man of sin,” “the mystery of iniquity,” and “the little horn “in Daniel; and some bitter Protestants eagerly looked in ray face in expectation that blotches might at any moment break out. Thus early in life became a local “character.” The dear ol priest, seeing that my waistcoat pocket w{ ’ bulging out, merely touched the protrusioand paternally (in an ecclesiastical sens. smiled; and when I showed him a pocket tui I of cherry stones he looked as if he could have! played at “odds and evens’’ and enjoyetl himself as he used to do in his long-forgotter boyhood. But, again, just as before, that waS where the mischief came in! That was thei hypocrisy and the baseness of the wholt|| thing! Local Protestants, who knew nothing) about the toleration which is born of intelli-; gence, declared that the poking of my littlei wallet of cherry stones was neither more nor less than the deeply calculated trick of the “mother of harlots,” cunningly hiding her cruel purpose behind the smile of a falsei benignity. Local Protestants of a certairiv grade hated Romanism all the more thaiJ’ intellectually they knew little or nothing ’ about it, except that Mr. Singleton said his prayers in Latin and lighted candles in his I church when there was no need of artificial light. Some good people had even a pre-’ judice against the Latin tongue because it was somehow related to the Papal religion. These prejudices are, when viewed from the highest standpoint, of course very small and contemptible, but they played no unimportant part in the conviction and intercourse of a parish that was governed by instinct rather than by educated reason.

In striking contrast to Mr. Singleton stood the parish priest, Mr. Airey, a large, sleek, well-to-do Protestant, who took his Reformation stipend quietly, and diligently and literally obeyed the Act of Uniformity without an intellectual spasm or tremor of misgiving. Mr. Airey took the Church as he found it. No doubt there had been a “Reformation,” for which he was in no way responsible, as could be proved by the favourite argument of an alibi; and beyond that proof he did not worry a p’.ysical constitution that took naturally to good food and sufficient of it. Some men, like some birds, are all feathers. Mr. Airey (though his relative was the .Astronomer Royal) was a downy man — a living feather bed, an incarnation of the spirit of comfort. If Mr. Singleton had a smile, Mr. Airey had a voice. God has dealt to every man severally as He would. To one man He has given five talents, to another two, to another one. To the Roman Catholic priest He gave smile, to the Anglican rector He gave a voice, and each was siipeV i after its own kind. In the matter of cor ducting funerals Mr. Airey stood alone in th county of Northumberland — the county fc which all other counties were, in our estimj tion, created. To be buried by Mr. Aire ’ was to have more dignity in death than tH corpse had ever acquired in life. In ou healthy town, hill-surrounded and perfecthli ventilated, funerals were so infrequent thaTj. the sexton’s wife once complained, “Ther had not been a living soul buried for three) weeks.”’ Thus it became quite an event to watch the large-bodied Mr. Airey, clad in dazzling cambric, with black shoulder-pieces, receive the funeral party at the church gate and sonorously read, in the soft, sunny air of a summer afternoon, “I am the Resurrection, and the Life.” Never were sacred words read more musically or in a manner more worthy of their divine dignity. The voice was large, rich, deep, and far-reaching. Though it was so clear and resonant, it conveyed no hint of effort or task. Infidelity itself, with its noisy clatter and sophistry, might have quailed under that solemn resonance. No heresy ever secured a voice so charming in its potency. That voice belonged to an established and patented orthodoxy. No modern theological empiriliT;m er had the audacity to utter itself ic<? h rich and final tones. There was M. x>) irey’s power, and there was the best de* ce of his lofty and comfortable Protesl?. tism. Mr, Airey had no occasion for the e of logic. Rhetoric did for Mr. Airey e ‘ything that he required. Those two me tiinely represented their respective creeds, lived worthily of their widely divergent conceptions of things ecclesiastical. Personally, I belonged to neither of these local leaders. From beginning to end 1 have been a Dissenter; but I am bound to say, whatever humiliation the statement may involve, that local Nonconformity as I knew it was “nowhere” in the presence of such historical audacity on the one hand, and such dozing self-satisfaction on the other. Nonconformist ministers, with their eighty pounds a year, paid quarterly, and often in arrears, cut a very poor social figure when contrasted with men who had ample and assured endowments and dignities born of the certainty that they alone had the keys of the invisible kingdom. Yet the minister of the Church of Scotland, though as poorly paid as his Nonconformist brethren, was worthy of any company whose passport lay along the line of genius and learning and eloquence. Joseph Gordon was (Mititletl to take his place amongst the highest of his compeers; yet he had but lifty-seven hearers, thirty of whom were generally in doubt of what the eloquent man was talking about.

A significant circumstance occurred at this time, which will further show the atmosphere in which I was reared. A very self-contained and mysterious old man died, and on his florid tombstone, at the close of the usual facts, were engraved the cabalistic letters,

“R. I. P.”

What did they mean? This was the question nightly raised at my father’s supperparliament. What could they mean? Dixon (to assume a few names) suggested that they meant that the deceased was esoterically known by his friends to l)e an old Rip. Thomson scouted this idea and suggested “Rest In Paradise “; whereupon Robson wanted to know if Thomson regarded the deceased as the penitent thief. Williams had no doubt in his” own mind “(a favourite, but really uncalled-for, expression of his) that R. I. P. meant” Resurrection Is Possible,” a suggestion which met with no favour. Richard Watson had not spoken, but his gloomy aspect was significant. Richard’s was a morose piety, due rather to a sulky liver than to any hostile view of Providence. At length, and in a tone which such a liver in its sulkiest moods alone could either explain or justify, he said, “Blank atheism.” “What do you mean?” was the instantaneous inquiry. He said, “The unholy meaning ol’ the unholy letters is only too clear.” “What is it, Richard? “” It is ‘Resurrection Lu Possible y We were silent, but unconvinced. When from my corner of the sofa I said, on the authority of a schoolboy, that R. I. P. meant Heqviescat in pace, it was decided unanimously that this was veiled or clandestine Popery, and that the “little horn in Daniel” might now fairly take its place amongst the fulfilled prophecies. The remainder of that night’s coflee was drunk in the silence of angry sorrow, but it was drunk.

Meanwhile things were moving on outside all sects and all forms and all technical religion. The air was full of y)attle and smoke, and the muttering of thunder that had passed or other thunder that was getting n(parer and nearer. “Men’s hearts failed them for fear”; and what wonder Avlien the word “Chartism” became the password of a l(j A PREACHER’S LIFE

new social masonry! No man could exactly say what “Chartism” meant, for the new language had not then been fully reduced into orthography, etymology, syntax, or prosody. The word Chartism was more than a word; it was a volume — in fact it was the beginning of a library. In our little town a burly shoemaker, with a large white face and very waxy black hands, was suspected of being a “Chartist “; but his occupation, happily for the peace of the town, cast deep suspicion upon his good faith, and for a time arrested his revolutionary influence.

“He’s nobbut [nothing but] a shoemaker,” said a local baker who had no respect for the growing reputation of leather; but he was instantly reminded that what had begun with a shoemaker might spread until it got hold even of painters and carpenters, and probably it might go further still and fascinate the attention of auctioneers and corn merchants. The author of that reminder little knew that he was uttering words of prophecy, for in less than three months it was matter of common talk that a relative of mine, a local painter, ol” wild democratic ideas, had ostentatiously given up all religion, and taken unblushingly to “whistling on Sundays.” Campbell was not a common sign-paintor, hut a painter of Pack Horses, Dun Cows, and Black Bulls. And even further than that his artistic amhition carried him, for he painted my father and myself in oils, my mother declaring that my own likeness was “plain as plain,“‘Avhich for a mother was perhaps to he regarded as thoughtless rather than hard-hearted. This was the man avIio had Avantonly taken to” Avhistling on Sundays. ‘As a man of local fame, all his actions AA-ere more or less influential; so much so that several mothers whose hoys had, for various reasons, hought hoxcs of paints, without knowing one colour from another, feared that, encouraged by Campbell’s example, there might be an indefinite and portentous extension of Sunday Avhistling.

“He paints my pack horse no more,” said the leading publican, who paid irregularly for tAA^o seats in the Independent Chapel.

“Never more shall he darken my
doors,” said a poetic stationer, who
held strong opinions adverse to the
payment of Church rates.

“It is enough to bring lire and brimstone on the town,” said a Scotch packman, who was popularly supposed to have a way of making thirty-five inches look as if they were a yard — a miracle which he performed in the very sight of the maidservants he served, by some occult nse of the first joint of his broad thumb.

These were the men who lustily shouted for “religious liberty all the world over,” and who despised and defied the excommunications pronounced at her jealous altar by “the mother of harlots.” They were perfectly sincere in their shouts for religious liberty, but it must be well understood that they alone (humble souls!) could define the beginning and the ending of such freedom as was acceptable to heaven. One local brewer, who lived on the miseries of the parish, took this matter of Sunday whistling very seriously.

“A man may be overtaken in a fault,” said he, “or he may be suddenly surprised into sin, but whistling is a deliberate act; a man cannot continue it without intention, and his very continuance of it proves that his sin is not a momentary lapse, but a calculated effrontery.” The brewer employed long and emphatic words, havings become insensibly accustomed to their use in connection with the advertisement of his own home-brewed ales.

I knew all these men well. I am not writing fiction. They were honest men and useful citizens, and Ave must in common justice remember that their environment was not favourable to the large-mindedness and intellectual emulation associated with life in large and prosperous towns. It is said that men who live in little houses are apt to lead little lives. Without for a moment admitting this to be a necessity, Ave must all have seen how residence in little toAAns encourages narrowness of criticism and pettiness of prejudice. We must ahvays remember that it takes many men to make all men. Is not variety essential to unity? I think I see a picture of it all in this Valley of Chamounix, Where I indite this opening chapter — this valley of a thousand sunny visions; for in the meadows is the annual clover, and on the hills is the eternal snoAV. The oleander represents one world, and the ice another, yet the two worlds are one. By-and-by it may be found that parochialism and cosmopolitanism have each a special function to fulfil and express.