Thomas Adolphus Trollope

“ Did any one ever see a vain man shy? I do not think the Americans are an especially vain people; but there are specialties of their social condition which lead to every American citizen’s estimate of himself, from the cradle upwards, being equal to his estimate of any other man. And one consequence of this is a certain frank and unconstrained manner in their intercourse with strangers or new acquaintances which is invaluable to a shy man.
I remember an incident of my first year at Winchester, when I was between ten and eleven, which is illustrative of the misery which shyness may inflict. ”

“ I have also before me a portrait of Prince Metternich, made at the time of which I am writing by M. Hervieu in crayons for my mother. And without of course claiming either for the artist or for the style of work such power as belongs to the portrait of which I have been speaking, I may say that it does very faithfully and expressively give you the presentment of a man in whom strength of will, tenacity of purpose, and high intellectual power are combined with suave gentleness of manner and an air of high-bred courtesy. ”

“ Having got through the list, he flings the rod on the ground, makes a demi-volte so as to face the whole school, taking off his hat as he does so, and the “prefect of school” who has been waiting on the steps of the master’s seat, with the prayer-book open in his hand, instantly reads the short prayer with which the school concludes, while those who have been scourged stand in the background hurriedly readjusting their brace buttons so as not to be behind hand at the buttery hatch for breakfast. Of any disgrace attached to the reception of a scourging, no one had any smallest conception. ”

“ And certainly the decision to which my mother and I came during these walks round and round the Hadley garden was audacious rather than prudent.
I have never regretted it during any part of the now well-nigh half a century of life that has elapsed since the resolution was taken. I have been, I have not the smallest doubt, a much happier man than I should have been, had I followed a more beaten track. My brother Anthony used to say of me that I should never have earned my salt in the routine work of a profession, or any employment under the authoritative supervision of a superior. ”

“ But it is difficult for middle-aged people of the present day to form any vivid and sufficient conception of the greatness of them. Of course the mere material ameliorations and extensions have so metamorphosed the localities that I, on returning after long years to the London I once knew, topographically at least, so well, find myself in a new town of which the geography is in some parts strange to me, with just so much of the old landmarks remaining as serves to suggest false clues to the labyrinth and render the matter more puzzling. ”

“ I had seen quite enough of the labourers on the farm at Harrow to know what a man living with his family on a pound a week was like, and I could have managed to live if necessary with such men for a week or two without any insuperable repugnance. But some of the denizens of that steerage bolgia were blackguards of a description quite new to me. ”

“ When at the end of the summer holidays in that year, 1820, I returned to college, again brought down to Winchester by my father in his gig, I confess to having felt for some short time a very desolate little waif. As I, at the time a child barely out of the nursery, look back upon it, it seems to my recollection that the strongest sense of being shoved off from shore without guidance, help, or protection, arose from never seeing or speaking to a female human being. ”

“ Whately was not a man fitted to shine in society, unless it were the society of those prepared by knowledge of and regard for him to recognise his undisputed{200} right to be the acknowledged leader of it. Shuttleworth was, on the contrary, eminently calculated to contribute more than his share to the most brilliant social intercourse. He had, with abundance of solid sweetmeat at the bottom of the trifle, a sparkling store of that froth of wit which is most accepted as the readiest and pleasantest social small change. Whately’s wit was not of the kind which ever set any “table on a roar.” ”

“ Putting aside the mere extension of streets and dwellings, which, great as it has been in Paris, has been much greater in London, the changes in the former city have been far more radical. Certainly there are{264} many quarters of London where the eye now rests on that which is magnificent, and which at the time when I knew the town well, presented nothing but what was, if not sordid, at least ugly. But to those who remember the streets of Louis Philippe’s city, the change in the whole conception of city life, and the manière d’être of the population, is far greater. ”

“ Among the few surviving remembrances of those childhood’s years in Keppel Street, I can still recall to the mind’s eye the face and features of “Farmer,” the highly trustworthy and responsible middle-aged woman who ruled the nursery there, into which a rapid succession of brothers and sisters was being introduced in those years. Farmer, as I remember her, inspired more awe than affection. She was an austere and somewhat grim sort of body. And somehow or other the obscurely terrible fact that she was an Anabaptist (!) had reached the world of the nursery. ”

“ There was an air of unmistakable stupidity over the whole establishment. Nobody laughed. Nobody seemed to converse. There was excellent lodging, clothing, and food in plenty till they died! And that was all. Perhaps it may be fairly assumed that no one, save people of very mediocre powers and intelligence, had ever felt tempted to become a Shaking Quaker. But it can hardly be said that their experiment exhibited a very tempting sample of a world to be modelled after their fashion! ”

“ If the increase and changes of London and Paris have made my early recollections of those cities emphatically those of a former age, the changes at Vienna, though of course smaller in absolute extent, have yet more entirely metamorphosed the character of the place. The abolition of the wall, which used to shut in the exclusive little city, and placed between it and the suburbs not only a material barrier, but a gulf such as that which divided Dives from Lazarus, has changed the social habitudes and even the moral characteristics of the inhabitants. ”

“ And the impression left on my mind by eight years’ experience of such a system is, that it was pre-eminently calculated to engender and foster habitual conceptions of the paramount authority of law, as distinguished from the dictates of personal notions or caprices; of self-reliance, and of conscious responsibility in the individual as forming an unit in an organised whole. Of course the eighteen prefects were to a much smaller degree coerced by the machine, and to a very great degree active agents in the working of it. And I was a prefect during three years of my eight in college. ”

“ She always came down to breakfast clad in a green riding-habit, and passed most of her life on horseback. After dinner, in the long low drawing-room, with its faded stone-coloured curtains and bookless desert spaces, she always slept, as peacefully as she does now in Julians churchyard. She never meddled at all with the housekeeping of her establishment. ”

“ It thus came to pass that many a big hulking fellow was subjected to the authority of a “prefect” whom he could have tossed over his head. It was an authority nobody dreamed of resisting; a matter of course; not a rule of the stronger supported by violence. And the result—contributed to, also, by other arrangements, of which I shall speak hereafter—was that anything of the nature of “bullying” was infinitely rarer at Winchester than at Harrow. ”

“ It would be absurd to imagine that all those sons of Birmingham tradesmen were stupider or duller boys than the average of our Winchester lads. But it appeared to me that it was far more difficult to teach them with any fair amount of success. They were no doubt all, or nearly all, the sons of men who had never learned anything in their lives save the elements of a strictly commercial education. And I felt myself tempted to believe that the results of heredity must extend themselves even to the greater or lesser receptivity of one description of teaching instead of another. ”

“ But I was told that in some few cases the young men of the upper class might be seen in the houses of certain of their non-noble fellow-citizens, but never with any reciprocity of toleration. In respect of mere wealth and luxury in the manner of living, there were many bourgeois families on a par, and in many cases on far more than a par, with those of the nobles. And no doubt it frequently occurred that the social law which forbade all intercourse between the two septs, was felt to be as inconvenient and as much a matter of regret on one side of the barrier as on the other. ”

“ Of course I, like most of my contemporaries, left Winchester—and indeed subsequently left Oxford—as ignorant of any modern language, save English, as of Chinese! And as for music—though Oxford and Cambridge are the only universities in Europe which give degrees in music—it is hardly an exaggeration to say that, with very rare exceptions, to have taught an undergraduate, or a boy at a public school, music, would have been thought much on a par with teaching him to hem a pocket-handkerchief. ”

“ Harry Drury, who was perhaps foremost in his feeling of antagonism to the vicar, was a man of decidedly literary tastes, though they shared his devotion with those of a bon vivant. He was a ripe scholar, and undoubtedly the vicar’s superior in talent and intellect. But he was essentially a coarse man, coarse in manner and coarse in feeling. Cunningham was the reverse of all this. He was, I believe, the son of a London hatter, but in external manner and appearance he was a more gentlemanlike man than any of the Harrow masters of that day, save Dr. ”

“ But Thiers was, from the bow with which he first received you to the latest word you heard from him, all brightness. Of dignity he had nothing at all. If Guizot might have been taken for a schoolmaster, Thiers might have been mistaken for a stockbroker, say, a prosperous, busy, bustling, cheery stockbroker, or any such man of business. And if Guizot gave one the impression of being more English than French, his great rival was unmistakeably and intensely French. I have no recollection of having much enjoyed my interview with M. Guizot. ”

“ Let any Londoner, with the exception of the comparatively small number of those who use carriages of their own, think what his life would be, and the transaction of his day’s work or of his day’s pleasure, without any means of locomotion save his own legs or a hackney coach, which, at a cost of about five times the cab hire of the present day, used to shut him up in an atmosphere like that of a very dirty stable, and jolt him over the uneven pavement at a pace of about four miles an hour. ”

“ Whether it might be possible for a man devoid of all advantage of feature to produce on those brought into contact with him the same remarkable impression of dignity, the consciousness of high station, and perfection of courtly bearing combined with a pellucid simplicity of manner, I cannot say. But it is true that all this was rendered more possible in the case of Metternich by great personal handsomeness. ”

“ And not only do the two bodies associate indiscriminately with each other in perfect neighbourliness and good fellowship, but they do so, forming one single oasis in the midst of the surrounding continental life, in a manner which makes one constantly feel how infinitely nearer an American is to an Englishman in ideas, habits, ways, and civilisation, than either of them are to any other denizen of earth’s surface. ”

“ The impressions I received from my visit to Mount Lebanon do not dispose me to accept any such explanation of the Shaking Quaker raison d’être. I saw no signs whatever, among either the men or the women, of individuals who had been tempest-tossed in any of the world’s maelstroms, or of temperaments for which the contemplative life might be supposed to have had greater attractions than the active life of the world. ”

“ An aged woman once nearly six feet high, then much bent by rheumatism, rather grim and somewhat stern, she very conscientiously administered the prescribed “black-dose and calomel pill” to those under her care at the sick-house. To be there was called being “continent;” to leave it was “going abroad”—intelligibly enough. Tea was provided there for those “continent” instead of the usual breakfast of bread and butter and beer; and I remember overhearing Mother Gumbrell, oppressed by an unusual number of inmates, say, “Talk of Job indeed! Job never had to cut crusty loaves into bread and butter!” ”

“ Nor were the Cincinnati girls in 1829 like the New York belles of 1887. But there was much of the same charm about them, which arises from unaffected and unself-regarding desire to please. American girls are accused of being desperate flirts. But many an Englishman has been deceived by imagining that the smiles and cheerfulness and laughing chatter of some charming girl new to Europe were intended for his special benefit, when they were in truth only the perfectly natural and unaffected outcome of a desire to do her duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call her! ”

“ I do not know whether children of eight years old, or thereabouts, would at the present day be allowed to range London so freely as we were. But our great amusement and delight was to take long exploring walks in as distant parts of the huge (though then comparatively small) city as could be compassed within the time at our disposition. One especially favourite excursion, I well remember, was to the White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly to see the coaches start or arrive. ”

“ If it was true that there was any such special feeling of antagonism between Whately and Shuttleworth it was a pity; for assuredly there were very few, if any, men among the heads of colleges of that day, better calculated by power and originality of mind, and in many respects by liberality of thinking, to understand and foregather with Whately than the Warden of New College.
Shuttleworth was, and had the reputation of being an especially witty man. And I consider Whately to have been the wittiest man I ever knew. But it is true that their wit was of a very different character. ”

“ That portrait, in common with most of those by the great masters in the art of portraiture, reveals to you, with an instantly recognised truthfulness, the interior and intrinsic nature of the man, with a luminousness which your own gaze on the living person would not achieve for you. ”

“ He considered Shuttleworth “a man of very limited reading.” And this perhaps he may have seemed to one of whom it used to be said jocosely in his own family that “Henry reads a book, not as other mortals do, line after line, but obliquely, from the left hand upper corner of a page to the right hand lower corner of the same!”
Milman, on the same occasion, spoke much of the decay of a love of learning in England generally, and particularly at Oxford. He said that no four men could be found there who were up to the European level of the day in any branch of learning—not even in theology. ”

“ There was one among the many acquaintances we made at Vienna who belonged in nowise to any division of its society, but who was, like ourselves, to be met with among them all. This was old John Cramer the pianist. I took a great liking to him. The mingled simplicity, bonhomie, shrewdness, and old-world courtesy of the old man delighted me. He was full of old-world stories, generally ending any anecdote of some one of the many notable personages he had known with a sigh, and “Well, peace to his manes!” ”