LETTER X.
Denmark Hill,
7th September, 1871.
My Friends,
For the last two or three days, the papers have been full of articles on a speech of Lord Derby’s, which, it seems, has set the public mind on considering the land question. My own mind having long ago been both set, and entirely made up, on that question, I have read neither the speech nor the articles on it; but my eye being caught this morning, fortunately, by the words “Doomsday Book” in my ‘Daily Telegraph,’ and presently, looking up the column, by “stalwart arms and heroic souls of free resolute Englishmen,” I glanced down the space between, and found this, to me, remarkable passage:
“The upshot is, that, looking at the question from a purely mechanical point of view, we should seek the beau ideal in a landowner cultivating huge farms for himself, with abundant machinery and a few well-paid labourers to manage the mechanism, or delegating the task to the smallest possible number of tenants with capital. But when we bear in mind the origin of landlordism, of our national needs, and the real interests of the great body of English tenantry, we see how advisable it is to retain intelligent yeomen as part of our means of cultivating the soil.”
This is all, then, is it, that your Liberal paper ventures to say for you? It is advisable to retain a few intelligent yeomen in the island. I don’t mean to find fault with the ‘Daily Telegraph’: I think it always means well on the whole, and deals fairly; which is more than can be said for its highly toned and delicately perfumed opponent, the ‘Pall Mall Gazette.’ But I think a “Liberal” paper might have said more for the “stalwart arms and heroic souls” than this. I am going myself to say a great deal more for them, though I am not a Liberal—quite the polar contrary of that.
You, perhaps, have been provoked, in the course of these letters, by not being able to make out what I was. It is time you should know, and I will tell you plainly. I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school; (Walter Scott’s school, that is to say, and Homer’s,) I name these two out of the numberless great Tory writers, because they were my own two masters. I had Walter Scott’s novels, and the Iliad, (Pope’s translation), for my only reading when I was a child, on week-days: on Sundays their effect was tempered by ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’; my mother having it deeply in her heart to make an evangelical clergyman of me. Fortunately, I had an aunt more evangelical than my mother; and my aunt gave me cold mutton for Sunday’s dinner, which—as I much preferred it hot—greatly diminished the influence of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ and the end of the matter was, that I got all the noble imaginative teaching of Defoe and Bunyan, and yet—am not an evangelical clergyman.
I had, however, still better teaching than theirs, and that compulsorily, and every day of the week. (Have patience with me in this egotism; it is necessary for many reasons that you should know what influences have brought me into the temper in which I write to you.)
Walter Scott and Pope’s Homer were reading of my own election, but my mother forced me, by steady daily toil, to learn long chapters of the Bible by heart; as well as to read it every syllable through, aloud, hard names and all, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, about once a year; and to that discipline—patient, accurate, and resolute—I owe, not only a knowledge of the book, which I find occasionally serviceable, but much of my general power of taking pains, and the best part of my taste in literature. From Walter Scott’s novels I might easily, as I grew older, have fallen to other people’s novels; and Pope might, perhaps, have led me to take Johnson’s English, or Gibbon’s, as types of language; but, once knowing the 32nd of Deuteronomy, the 119th Psalm, the 15th of 1st Corinthians, the Sermon on the Mount, and most of the Apocalypse, every syllable by heart, and having always a way of thinking with myself what words meant, it was not possible for me, even in the foolishest times of youth, to write entirely superficial or formal English, and the affectation of trying to write like Hooker and George Herbert was the most innocent I could have fallen into.
From my own masters, then, Scott and Homer, I learned the Toryism which my best after-thought has only served to confirm.