CHAPTER VIII
SOCIETY OF THE LAKES: CHARLES LLOYD[159]
Immediately below the little village of Clappersgate, in which the Scottish ladies resided—Mrs. Millar and Mrs. Cullen—runs the wild mountain river called the Brathay, which, descending from Langdale Head, and soon after becoming confluent with the Rothay (a brook-like stream that comes originally from Easedale, and takes its course through the two lakes of Grasmere and Rydal), finally composes a considerable body of water, that flows along, deep, calm, and steady—no longer brawling, bubbling, tumultuous—into the splendid lake of Windermere, the largest of our English waters, or, if not, at least the longest, and of the most extensive circuit. Close to this little river, Brathay, on the farther side as regards Clappersgate (and what, though actually part and parcel of a district that is severed by the sea, or by Westmoreland, from Lancashire proper, is yet, from some old legal usage, denominated the Lancashire side of the Brathay), stands a modest family mansion, called Low Brathay, by way of distinction from another and a larger mansion, about a quarter of a mile beyond it, which, standing upon a little eminence, is called High Brathay.
In this house of Low Brathay lived, and continued to live, for many years (in fact, until misery, in its sharpest form, drove him from his hearth and his household happiness), Charles L—— the younger[160];—on his own account, and for his personal qualities, worthy of a separate notice in any biography, howsoever sparing in its digressions; but, viewed in reference to his fortunes, amongst the most interesting men I have known. Never do I reflect upon his hard fate, and the bitter though mysterious persecution of body which pursued him, dogged him, and thickened as life advanced, but I feel gratitude to Heaven for my own exemption from suffering in that particular form; and, in the midst of afflictions, of which two or three have been most hard to bear,—because not unmingled with pangs of remorse for the share which I myself may have had in causing them,—still, by comparison with the lot of Charles Lloyd, I acknowledge my own to have been happy and serene. Already, on my first hasty visit to Grasmere in 1807, I found Charles Lloyd settled with his family at Brathay, and a resident there, I believe, of some standing. It was on a wet gloomy evening; and Miss Wordsworth and I were returning from an excursion to Esthwaite Water, when, suddenly, in the midst of blinding rain, without previous notice, she said—Pray, let us call for a few minutes at this house. A garden gate led us into a little shrubbery, chiefly composed of lawns, beautifully kept, through which ran a gravel road, just wide enough to admit a single carriage. A minute or so saw us housed in a small comfortable drawing-room, but with no signs of living creatures near it; and, from the accident of double doors, all covered with baize, being scattered about the house, the whole mansion seemed the palace of silence, though populous, I understood, with children. In no long time appeared Mr. Lloyd, soon followed by his youthful wife, both radiant with kindness; and it may be supposed that we were not suffered to depart for some hours. I call Mrs. Lloyd youthful; and so I might call her husband; for both were youthful, considered as the parents of a numerous family, six or seven children then living—Charles Lloyd himself not being certainly more than twenty-seven, and his "Sophia" perhaps not twenty-five.
On that short visit I saw enough to interest me in both; and, two years after, when I became myself a permanent resident in Grasmere, the connexion between us became close and intimate. My cottage stood just five miles from Brathay; and there were two mountain roads which shortened the space between us, though not the time nor the toil. But, notwithstanding this distance, often and often, upon the darkest nights, for many years, I used to go over about nine o'clock, or an hour later, and sit with him till one. Mrs. Lloyd was simply an amiable young woman, of pleasing person, perfectly well principled, and, as a wife and mother, not surpassed by anybody I have known in either of those characters. In figure she somewhat resembled the ever memorable and most excellent Mrs. Jordan; she was exactly of the middle height and having that slight degree of embonpoint, even in youth, which never through life diminishes or increases. Her complexion may be imagined from the circumstance of her hair being tinged with a slight and not unpleasing shade of red. Finally, in manners she was remarkably self-possessed, free from all awkward embarrassment, and (to an extent which some people would wonder at in one who had been brought up, I believe, wholly in a great commercial town) perfectly lady-like. So much description is due to one who, though no authoress, and never making the slightest pretension to talents, was too much connected subsequently with the lakers to be passed over in a review of their community. Ah! gentle lady! your head, after struggling through many a year with strange calamities, has found rest at length; but not in English ground, or amongst the mountains which you loved: at Versailles it is, and perhaps within a stone's throw of that Mrs. Jordan whom in so many things you resembled, and most of all in the misery which settled upon your latter years. There you lie, and for ever, whose blooming matronly figure rises up to me at this moment from a depth of thirty years! and your children scattered into all lands!
But for Charles Lloyd: he, by his literary works, is so far known to the public, that, on his own account, he merits some separate notice.[161] His poems do not place him in the class of powerful poets; they are loosely conceived—faultily even at times—and not finished in the execution. But they have a real and a mournful merit under one aspect, which might be so presented to the general reader as to win a peculiar interest for many of them, and for some a permanent place in any judicious thesaurus—such as we may some day hope to see drawn off, and carefully filtered, from the enormous mass of poetry produced since the awakening era of the French Revolution. This aspect is founded on the relation which they bear to the real events and the unexaggerated afflictions of his own life. The feelings which he attempts to express were not assumed for effect, nor drawn by suggestion from others, and then transplanted into some ideal experience of his own. They do not belong to the mimetic poetry so extensively cultivated; but they were true solitary sighs, wrung from his own meditative heart by excess of suffering, and by the yearning after old scenes and household faces of an impassioned memory, brooding over vanished happiness, and cleaving to those early times when life wore even for his eyes the golden light of Paradise. But he had other and higher accomplishments of intellect than he showed in his verses, as I shall presently explain; and of a nature which make it difficult to bring them adequately within the reader's apprehension.
Meantime, I will sketch an outline of poor Lloyd's history, so far as I can pretend to know it. He was the son, and probably his calamitous life originally dated from his being the son, of Quaker parents. It was said, indeed, by himself as well as others, that the mysterious malady which haunted him had been derived from an ancestress in the maternal line; and this may have been true; and, for all that, it may also be true that Quaker habits were originally answerable for this legacy of woe. It is sufficiently well known that, in the training of their young people, the Society of Friends make it a point of conscience to apply severe checks to all open manifestations of natural feeling, or of exuberant spirits. Not the passions—they are beyond their control—but the expression of those passions by any natural language; this they lay under the heaviest restraint; and, in many cases, it is possible that such a system of thwarting nature may do no great mischief; just as we see the American Indians, in moulding the plastic skulls of their infants into capricious shapes, do not, after all, much disturb the ordinary course of nature, nor produce the idiots we might have expected. But, then, the reason why such tampering may often terminate in slight results is, because often there is not much to tamper with; the machinery is so slight, and the total range within which it plays is perhaps so narrow, that the difference between its normal action and its widest deviation may, after all, be practically unimportant. For there are many men and women of whom I have already said, borrowing the model of the word from Hartley, that they have not so much passions as passiuncles. These, however, are in one extreme; and others there are and will be, in every class, and under every disadvantage, who are destined to illustrate the very opposite extreme. Great passions—passions pointing to the paths of love, of ambition, of glory, martial or literary—these in men—and in women, again, these, either in some direct shape, or taking the form of intense sympathy with the same passions as moving amongst contemporary men—will gleam out fitfully amongst the placid children of Fox and Penn, not less than amongst us who profess no war with the nobler impulses of our nature. And, perhaps, according to the Grecian doctrine of antiperistasis, strong untameable passions are more likely to arise even in consequence of the counteraction. Deep passions undoubtedly lie in the blood and constitution of Englishmen; and Quakers,[162] after all, do not, by being such, cease, therefore, to be Englishmen.
It is, I have said, sufficiently well known that the Quakers make it a point of their moral economy to lay the severest restraints upon all ebullitions of feeling. Whatever may be the nature of the feeling, whatever its strength, utter itself by word or by gesture it must not; smoulder it may, but it must not break into a flame. This is known; but it is not equally known that this unnatural restraint, falling into collision with two forces at once, the force of passion and of youth, not uncommonly records its own injurious tendencies, and publishes the rebellious movements of nature, by distinct and anomalous diseases. And further, I have been assured, upon most excellent authority, that these diseases, strange and elaborate affections of the nervous system, are found exclusively amongst the young men and women of the Quaker society; that they are known and understood exclusively amongst physicians who have practised in great towns having a large Quaker population, such as Birmingham; that they assume a new type, and a more inveterate character, in the second or third generation, to whom this fatal inheritance is often transmitted; and finally, that, if this class of nervous derangements does not increase so much as to attract public attention, it is simply because the community itself—the Quaker body—does not increase, but, on the contrary, is rather on the wane.
From a progenitrix, then, no matter in what generation, C. Lloyd inherited that awful malady which withered his own happiness, root and branch, gathering strength from year to year. His father was a banker, and, I presume, wealthy, from the ample allowance which he always made to his son Charles. Charles, it is true, had the rights of primogeniture—which, however, in a commercial family, are not considerable—but, at the same time, though eldest, he was eldest of seventeen or eighteen brothers and sisters, and of these I believe that some round dozen or so were living at the time when I first came to know him. He had been educated in the bosom of Quaker society; his own parents, with most of their friends, were Quakers; and, even of his own generation, all the young women continued Quakers. Naturally, therefore, as a boy, he also was obliged to conform to the Quaker ritual. But this ritual presses with great inequality upon the two sexes; in so far, at least, as regards dress. The distinctions of dress which announce the female Quaker are all in her favour. In a nation eminent for personal purity, and where it should seem beforehand impossible for any woman to create a pre-eminence for herself in that respect, so it is, however, that the female Quaker, by her dress, seems even purer than other women, and consecrated to a service of purity; earthly soil or taint, even the sullying breath of mortality, seems as if kept aloof from her person—forcibly held in repulsion by some protecting sanctity. This transcendent purity, and a nun-like gentleness, self-respect, and sequestration from the world—these are all that her peculiarity of dress expresses; and surely this "all" is quite enough to win every man's favourable feelings towards her, and something even like homage. But, with the male Quaker, how different is the case! His dress—originally not remarkable by its shape, but solely by its colour and want of ornament, so peculiar has it become in a lapse of nearly two centuries—seems expressly devised to point him out to ridicule. In some towns, it is true, such as Birmingham and Kendal, the public eye is so familiar with this costume, that in them it excites no feeling whatever more than the professional costume of butchers, bakers, grooms, &c. But in towns not commercial—towns of luxury and parade—a Quaker is exposed to most mortifying trials of his self-esteem. It has happened that I have followed a young man of this order for a quarter of a mile, in Bath, or in one of the fashionable streets of London, on a summer evening, when numerous servants were lounging on the steps of the front door, or at the area gates; and I have seen him run the gauntlet of grim smiles from the men, and heard him run the gauntlet of that sound—the worst which heaven has in its artillery of scorn against the peace of poor man—the half-suppressed titter of the women. Laughing outright is bad, but still that may be construed into a determinate insult that studiously avows more contempt than is really felt; but tittering is hell itself; for it seems mere nature, and absolute truth, that extort this expression of contempt in spite of every effort to suppress it.
Some such expression it was that drove Charles Lloyd into an early apostasy from his sect: early it must have been, for he went at the usual age of eighteen to Cambridge, and there, as a Quaker, he could not have been received. He, indeed, of all men, was the least fitted to contend with the world's scorn, for he had no great fortitude of mind; his vocation was not to martyrdom, and he was cursed with the most exquisite sensibility. This sensibility, indeed, it was, and not so properly any determinate passion, which had been the scourge of his ancestors. There was something that appeared effeminate about it; and which, accordingly, used to provoke the ridicule of Wordsworth, whose character, in all its features, wore a masculine and Roman harshness. But, in fact, when you came to know Charles Lloyd, there was, even in this slight tinge of effeminacy, something which conciliated your pity by the feeling that it impressed you with, of being part of his disease. His sensibility was eminently Rousseauish—that is, it was physico-moral; now pointing to appetites that would have mastered him had he been less intellectual and governed by a less exalted standard of moral perceptions; now pointing to fine aerial speculations, subtle as a gossamer, and apparently calculated to lead him off into abstractions even too remote from flesh and blood.
During the Cambridge vacation, or, it might be, even before he went to Cambridge—and my reason for thinking so is because both, I believe, belonged to the same town, if it could not be said of them as of Pyramus and Thisbe, that "contiguas habuere domos"—he fell desperately in love with Miss Sophia P—— n. Who she was I never heard—that is, what were her connexions; but I presume that she must have been of an opulent family, because Mrs. P—— n, the mother of Mrs. Lloyd, occasionally paid a visit to her daughter at the lakes, and then she brought with her a handsomely-appointed equipage, as to horses and servants. This I have reason to remember from the fact of herself and her daughter frequently coming over on summer evenings to drink tea with me, and the affront (as I then thought it) which Wordsworth fastened upon me in connexion with one of those visits. One evening,[163] * * * * * A pang of wrath gathered at my heart. Yet why? One moment, I felt, indeed, that it was not gentlemanly to interfere with the privileges of any man standing in the situation which I then occupied, of host; but still I should not have regarded it, except from its connexion with a case I recollected in a previous year. One fine summer day, we were walking together—Wordsworth, myself, and Southey. Southey had been making earnest inquiries about poor Lloyd, just then in the crisis of some severe illness, and Wordsworth's answer had been partly lost to me. I put a question upon it, when, to my surprise (my wrath internally, but also to my special amusement), he replied that, in fact, what he had said was a matter of some delicacy, and not quite proper to be communicated except to near friends of the family. This to me!—O ye gods!—to me, who knew by many a hundred conversations how disagreeable Wordsworth was both to Charles Lloyd and to his wife; whilst, on the other hand—not by words only, but by deeds, and by the most delicate acts of confidential favour—I knew that Mr. Wilson (Professor Wilson) and myself had been selected as friends in cases which were not so much as named to Wordsworth. The arrogance of Wordsworth was well illustrated in this case of the Lloyds.