CHAPTER II. Childhood and Boyhood

CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD

Sisters and brothers—Sisterly teachings—Schools at Boulogne, Kenilworth, and Birmingham

I was born into a family of four sisters and two brothers, who were older than myself by ages ranging from seven to fourteen years, the brothers being all younger than the sisters. My third sister, Adele, was twelve years my senior. She had spinal curvature, and was obliged to lie all day on her back upon a board, and was thus cut off from the romps and companionship of her sisters, though all were greatly attached to her. She hailed my arrival into the world as a fairy gift, and begged hard to be allowed to consider me as her sole ward, and in her simple way educated herself as best she could, in order to be able to teach me. Her idea of education at that time was to teach the Bible as a verbally inspired book, to cultivate memory, to make me learn the merest rudiments of Latin, and above all a great deal of English verse. This she did effectually, and the result was that she believed, and succeeded in making others believe, that I was a sort of infant prodigy.

There exist numerous records of my early performances, and it is certain that I really knew at a very early age a great deal of Scott, of Milton, and of Pope’s translation of the Iliad and Odyssey, and that I delighted in what the family nicknamed “spouting” verse. In middle life I feared that I had been an intolerable prig, and cross-questioned many old family friends about it, but was invariably assured that I was not at all a prig, but seemed to “spout” for pure enjoyment and without any affectation; that I often quoted very aptly on the spur of the moment, and that I was a nice little child. My memories become more or less continuous from about the age of five or six, when I was trotted off to live at a dame’s school a mile away. During these and many subsequent years, my sister Adele had the greater share of my heart, and whenever I was at home I stayed by her sofa-side most of the day. My other sisters teased and petted me alternately; they were relatively too old to be really companions.

It is curious how unchangeable characters are: my eldest sister was just, my youngest was merciful. When my bread was buttered for me as a child, the former picked out the butter that filled the big holes, the latter did not. Consequently I respected the former, and loved the latter. A memory of this trifling occurrence remained inseparably connected in my mind with these dear sisters all my life, and I often amused them by referring to it.

My second sister, Lucy, married before I was ten years old. She was bright, lovable, and very original. Her house was like a second home to me during the four years of boyhood that I spent at Birmingham. I have indeed been fortunate in receiving the sisterly affection that has fallen to my lot.

But I must not stop at this period of my reminiscences to speak of other sisters than Adele, with whom my heart was then so intimately associated. I am enormously indebted to the influence of her pious, serene, and resolute disposition. Though she was compelled to pass the greater part of her life lying on her back, she was so energetic in other ways, and so capable of endurance, that she overcame difficulties that would have been insurmountable to most women who were equally handicapped. She was active in setting up schools and teaching the poor. She had a considerable correspondence, and exerted a wide influence among all classes during many years. Her natural capacity was of an unusually high order, and many who knew her well, and whose opinions deserve respect, thought that a slight betterment of opportunity and circumstances might have caused her name to be as widely loved and known as those of any of our English saints or heroines. She passed her life under an abiding sense of the presence of God and of duty to man, without which few persons have ever done great things. She was most unconventional in her ways, and her remarkable courage was recognised by all the family.

She married a clergyman, the Rev. Shirley Bunbury, shortly after my father’s death in 1844, but was left a widow soon afterwards, with one little girl, on whom she lavished the same educational care that she had bestowed upon myself, but with fuller knowledge. That little girl is now in her turn a widow, with a large and grown-up family. She was married in 1866 to John C. Baron Lethbridge of Tregeare, in Cornwall, about six miles west of Launceston.

I think I can revive my principal feelings at that early age with fair correctness, their change during growth seeming to have been chiefly due to the increased range of mental prospect. The horizon of a child is very narrow and his sky very near. His father is the supreme of beings. He has to learn by slow degrees that there are more and more appreciable stages between the highest and the lowest, and the number of such stages that he can discriminate affords a good measure of his mental calibre at the time. It was about the date of which I have been speaking that my second brother, Erasmus, then a boy of twelve or thirteen, entered the navy, and showed himself to us in his uniform, with the dagger or “dirk” that was part of it. I, a child of five or so, fingered it with awe, and with my little head full of Greeks and Trojans looked upon him as a hero, like Achilles, and can perfectly recall my sense of increased security from knowing that England could henceforth avail herself of his puissant arm and terrible weapon.

I lived and throve in what was practically the country until the age of eight, when I was sent to a school at Boulogne, whither my father escorted me. It was erroneously supposed that I should learn French there and acquire a good accent. What I did learn was the detestable and limited patois that my eighty schoolfellows were compelled to speak under penalty of a fine, and in this cruel way. There were transferable metal labels which were called “marks,” and the boys in whose possession these marks remained after each playtime received a bad record whose accumulation up to a certain point entailed punishment. I rebelled with my whole heart against the treachery encouraged by this system. A boy with a “mark” in his pocket would sidle up and encourage you as he best could to say a word of English, then forthwith he clapped his “mark” into your hand, and went away rejoicing at the riddance.

The school was an old convent near to and within the Calais gate of the upper town; the playground was the paved square of the convent, in which we used the flat gravestones for playing marbles. It is now partly overbuilt by the large church whose dome is conspicuous from afar.

We were daily marched off in a long row of pairs, usually for a walk round the ramparts, sometimes to Napoleon’s Column, then in process of building, and in the summer, not infrequently, to bathe by rocks near the old fort. We prepared ourselves for the latter grateful occasions by saving bread from breakfast; then, after having gathered mussels, we spread their delicious contents on it to eat. An opportunity was then afforded of inspecting with awe the marks of recent birchings, which were reckoned as glorious scars. The birchings were frequent and performed in a long room parallel to, and separated from, the schoolroom by large ill-fitting doors, through which each squeal of the victim was heard with hushed breaths. In that room was a wardrobe full of school-books ready for issue. It is some measure of the then naïveté of my mind that I wondered for long how the books could have been kept so fresh and clean for nearly two thousand years, thinking that the copies of Cæsar’s Commentaries were contemporary with Cæsar himself.

An occasional walk was to a wet plantation on the side of the little river Liane, that feeds the harbour, at which one of our schoolfellows, a gaunt, dyspeptic-looking boy, performed the following feat to our terror and admiration, as we crowded round him to see it. He took a frog by its hind feet, opened his wide mouth and dropped the frog’s fore-feet on his tongue. The frog struggled to get free, and at the critical moment the hind legs were let go, and down went the frog, head foremost, into his gullet. He was our hero for the time; none other dared to attempt the same feat. He said that he felt the frog all the way as it went down to his stomach, and in it.

The school was hateful to me in many ways, and lovable in none, so I was heartily glad to be taken away from it in 1832. I thence returned to my family party, who were newly settled in Leamington. It then consisted of my father, mother, and three sisters; my brothers were away, and my other sister, Lucy, who had married, was living near Birmingham. My grandfather Galton had recently died, and the consequent large accession to my father’s income justified his change of residence, which gave him and my sisters a wider social intercourse than they had at the Larches. Leamington was at that time a little place, attractive to many eminent invalids, who drank the waters and consulted Dr. Jephson, then becoming celebrated.

I was next sent to a small private school at Kenilworth, consisting of some half-dozen pupils, where I received much kindness, and breathed the air of unconstraint during three happy years. It was kept by Mr. Attwood, the clergyman of the parish (a near relative of the inventor of “Attwood’s machine,” by which the rate of falling bodies is measured), who, without any pretence of learning, showed so much sympathy with boyish tastes and aspirations that I began to develop freely. Two of my fellow-pupils, Matthew P. Watt and Hugh William Boulton, were brothers. They were grandsons of my grandfather’s friend of the original “Boulton and Watt” firm, and sons of my father’s friend, who carried on the manufactory. Hugh William became an exceptionally handsome and socially favoured Life-Guardsman; he died young. Matthew was then, subsequently at Cambridge, and again for some years afterwards, an object of reverence to me. I have known few or any who seemed to me his natural superiors in breadth and penetration of intellect, but he was cursed with a fortune far in excess of his simple though cultured needs, which exacted duties from him that he hated. His large fortune also removed the stimulus which necessity gives for getting through work and having done with it, instead of lingering indefinitely. He consequently grew amateurish, wasting thought on ingenious paradoxes and literary trifles, and failed to check a natural tendency towards recluseness and some other oddities of disposition. He gained the University prizes for Greek and Latin Epigrams at Cambridge in 1841, but did not care to compete for other honours. His artistic sense was of a high and classical order. His ideal, like that of Goethe, was a uniform culture of all the higher faculties. There was nothing ignoble in his nature. Whenever I talked with him about my own occasional annoyances, they seemed to become petty through his broad way of looking at things, I may almost say under the mere influence of his presence. His photograph, which is near me as I write, testifies to a personality that accords with the grandeur of his character. I owe much to his influence, and still remain conscious of the void in my friendships caused by his death very many years ago.

When I was fourteen years old it became time for me to go to a bigger school. My father had a Quaker’s repugnance to public schools of the usual type, and it was finally decided that I should be sent to King Edward’s School in Birmingham, then commonly known as the “Free School,” to which a headmaster of high attainments had been recently appointed. This was Dr. Jeune (1806-1868), afterwards Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, and Bishop of Peterborough. I lived as a pupil, together with a few others, at his house by the Five Ways, to which a considerable garden was attached, and whence we walked daily, through a mile or so of street, to and from the school. I retained Dr. Jeune’s friendship until his death, and it was impossible not to recognise his exceptional ability and educational zeal, but the character of the education was altogether uncongenial to my temperament. I learnt nothing, and chafed at my limitations. I had craved for what was denied, namely, an abundance of good English reading, well-taught mathematics, and solid science. Grammar and the dry rudiments of Latin and Greek were abhorrent to me, for there seemed so little sense in them. I was a fool to have been recalcitrant, and not to have profited by what I could have had, because many of my schoolfellows prospered on the teaching. Three of them, F. Rendal, H. Holden, and C. Evans, were the very first in classics of their respective years at Cambridge. The two first were bracketed as equally deserving the position of Senior Classic, and the third gained that honour unpaired. Still, the literary provender provided at Dr. Jeune’s school disagreed wholly with my mental digestion. The time spent there was a period of stagnation to myself, which for many years I bitterly deplored, for I was very willing and eager to learn, and could have learnt much if a suitable teacher had been at hand to direct and encourage me.