From a Cornish Window / A New Edition - Arthur Quiller-Couch

"You don't care for school-work," he writes to an Old Cliftonian. … "I demur to your statement that when you take up schoolmastering your leisure for this kind of thing will be practically gone. Not at all. If you have the root of the matter in you the school-work will insist upon this kind of thing as a relief. My plan always was to recognise two lives as necessary—the one the outer Kapelistic life of drudgery, the other the inner and cherished life of the spirit. It is true that the one has a tendency to kill the other, but it must not, and you must see that it does not.… The pedagogic is needful for bread and butter, also for a certain form of joy; of the inner life you know what I think."

These are wise words, and I believe they represent Brown more truly than utterances which only seem more genuine because less deliberate. He was as a house master excellent, with an excellence not achievable by men whose hearts are removed from their work: he awoke and enjoyed fervent friendships and the enthusiastic admiration of many youngsters; he must have known of these enthusiasms, and was not the man to condemn them; he had the abiding assurance of assisting in a kind of success which he certainly respected. He longed for the day of emancipation, to return to his Island; he was impatient; but I must decline to believe he was unhappy.

Indeed, his presence sufficiently denied it. How shall I describe him? A sturdy, thick-set figure, inclining to rotundity, yet athletic; a face extraordinarily mobile; bushy, grey eyebrows; eyes at once deeply and radiantly human, yet holding the primitive faun in their coverts; a broad mouth made for broad, natural laughter, hearty without lewdness. "There are nice Rabelaisians, and there are nasty; but the latter are not Rabelaisians. I have an idea," he claimed, "that my judgment within this area is infallible." And it was. All honest laughter he welcomed as a Godlike function.

"God sits upon His hill,
And sees the shadows fly;
And if He laughs at fools, why should He not?"

And for that matter, why should not we? Though at this point his fine manners intervened, correcting, counselling moderation. "I am certain God made fools for us to enjoy, but there must be an economy of joy in the presence of a fool; you must not betray your enjoyment." Imagine all this overlaid with a certain portliness of bearing, suggestive of the high-and-dry Oxford scholar. Add something of the parsonic (he was ordained deacon before leaving Oxford, but did not proceed to priest's orders till near the end of his time at Clifton); add a simple natural piety which purged the parsonic of all "churchiness."

"This silence and solitude are to me absolute food," he writes from the Clifton College Library on the morning of Christmas Day, 1875, "especially after all the row and worry at the end of Term.… Where are the men and women? Well, now look here, you'll not mention it again. They're all in church. See how good God is! See how He has placed these leitourgic traps in which people, especially disagreeable people, get caught—and lo! the universe for me!!! me— me.…"

I have mentioned his fine manners, and with a certain right, since it once fell to me—a blundering innocent in the hands of fate—to put them to severest proof. A candidate for a scholarship at Clifton—awkward, and abominably conscious of it, and sensitive—I had been billeted on Brown's hospitality without his knowledge. The mistake (I cannot tell who was responsible) could not be covered out of sight; it was past all aid of kindly dissimulation by the time Brown returned to the house to find the unwelcome guest bathing in shame upon his doorstep. Can I say more than that he took me into the family circle—by no means an expansive one, or accustomed, as some are, to open gleefully to intruders—and for the inside of a week treated me with a consideration so quiet and pleasant, so easy yet attentive, that his dearest friend or most distinguished visitor could not have demanded more? A boy notes these things, and remembers. … "If I lose my manners," Mr. Irwin quotes him as saying once over some trivial forgetfulness, "what is to become of me?" He was shy, too, like the most of his countrymen—"jus' the shy "—but with a proud reserve as far removed as possible from sham humility—being all too sensible and far too little of a fool to blink his own eminence of mind, though willing on all right occasions to forget it. "Once," records Mr. Irwin, "when I remarked on the omission of his name in an article on 'Minor Poets' in one of the magazines, he said, with a smile, 'Perhaps I am among the major!'" That smile had just sufficient irony—no more.