“Amongst other things it occurs to me how much I have had to thank God for through life, and how my family have always drawn together in the way I wished them. And here I should be doing injustice to George, if I did not in my own mind trace much of this happy result to his quiet and imperceptible influence as an elder brother, in many ways of which my wife and I were not exactly cognizant at the time. Perhaps I am thinking more about him just now as he was in his natural place as my right-hand man when I was taken unwell; and when I say truly, that neither his mother or I ever had even an unkind word or disrespectful look from him since he was born, and that his constant study through life, as far as we are concerned, has been to spare us rather than give us trouble, and throw his own personal interests over much more than we chose to allow him, it is especially for the purpose of giving dear A—— (her adopted daughter) a precedent to quote with her own lips in the training of her own boys which I know will be particularly acceptable to herself. It is the last theme on which he would like to expatiate, but that such was my deliberate and true opinion, will be, I doubt not, one of these days, a source of satisfaction to them both, and to the children.”
Your grandfather died shortly afterwards, and a year later George wrote to his mother:—
“I feel that we have great cause for gratitude and rejoicing as a family; I mean for the way in which we hang together, and the utter absence of any subject of discord or disagreement between any of our members. I think we may well be happy, even while thinking of what happened this time last year, as I have done very frequently of late.”
He would have been impatient, almost angry, if anyone had told him that the “hanging together,” at which he rejoiced, was mainly his own doing.
In the village, too, he was beginning to find occupation of the most useful kind. Thus he opened a village reading-room for the labourers, which was furnished with books and papers, and lighted and warmed, every evening from seven to nine. “Hitherto it is a great success,” he writes in 1868: “we have fifty members who subscribe 2d. a week, and we give them a cup of coffee and a biscuit for 1d. Some of them drink five or six cups a night. Whether coffee will continue to beat beer I don’t know, but at present it keeps them from the public-house, and saves their wages for their wives. Some of them are very fond of reading, and the rest play draughts and dominoes.” Then there were frequent “laundry entertainments,”—penny readings, or theatrical performances in the big laundry,—of which his sister writes: “The boys and Mr. Phillips and I used to make the music, but the great hits of the evening were always George’s. He used to recite ‘The One-horse Chay,’ or some Ingoldsby Legend, or ‘The Old Woman of Berkeley,’ or sing a comic song, and the people liked his performances better than anything. Like all very reserved people, he acted wonderfully well, and always knew how every part should be done, so he used to coach us all when a play was being got up. But he would never criticise unless asked: he always thought that people knew as well as he did how to do their parts, but they did not. He was always so droll on these occasions. When a performance was proposed by the boys, he used to say it was too much trouble, and that he wanted to be left quiet. But they always got their way, and when it was inevitable he would learn his entire part while we others were mastering a page. I was always whip, because I could not stand doing anything by halves, and used to drive everyone mercilessly till the scenes began to go smoothly. He would sometimes rehearse his part almost under his breath, gabbling it off with the book in his hand, and then I would remonstrate, and he would go through it splendidly, as well as on the day of performance.”
But the reform which he had most at heart he never lived to carry out. The industry of straw-plaiting, which prevails in the neighbourhood, while it enables the women and girls to earn high wages, makes them bad housewives, all their cooking and cleaning being neglected, while they run in and out of neighbours’ houses, gossiping and plaiting. In the hope of curing this evil he looked forward to fitting up a large barn in the village as a sort of general meeting-place. Here, when he had made the roof air-tight, and laid down a good floor, there was to be a stove for cooking and baking, and appliances for instruction in other household work. Under his wife and sister there were to be “cooking classes, sewing classes, and singing classes; and, in the evenings, entertainments for the poor people, a piano and night classes, sometimes theatricals, and often concerts, and when the boys wanted to dance they were to have their dances there. He used to think that constant meetings in the barn would humanize us all, and be a very pleasant thing for making rich and poor meet on equal terms.” It is perhaps vain to dwell upon such things, but I cannot help hoping that some day those of you who have the opportunity of realizing such plans may remember to what purposes the big barn was once destined. Of one other part of his village work, his Sunday evening classes for the big boys, I shall have to speak presently.
But you must not suppose from anything in this chapter that he ever lost his interest in politics, or public affairs. He was always a keen politician, retaining, however, all his early beliefs. “You have all got far beyond me,” he writes to his sister; “and my dear mother turning Radical in her old age is delightful.” Perhaps the most ardent politician amongst us all is the best witness to call on this subject. “I don’t think anything was more remarkable about George than his politics. He, who was so good an old Tory in many ways, showed that he believed in a universal principle and duty underlying all the political opinions about the best means of carrying out reforms. I think it is very rare, when people are discussing politics, to find this constant recognition of something beyond party nostrums. But (as in his father) I have always detected it in George; and, when I have got very hot whilst propounding Radicalism against all the rest here, have always found sympathy from him at the bottom; and I have always felt at last how much more truly liberal he was at heart than we Radicals, because we are always wanting to force on our opinions our own way, whilst in him I always recognized a divine sort of justice and patience, which used to make me feel very conceited, and wanting in faith. He was born with aristocratic instincts, being by nature intensely sensitive and refined, with a loathing of anything blatant and in bad taste, and with an intense love of justice; and the unwise, violent, foolish way in which many men like —— expound their doctrines disgusted him beyond measure, though he would always recognize the real truth that lay at the bottom of Radicalism.”
But he shall speak for himself on one great event, which you are all old enough to remember, the late war between France and Germany. Almost the first incident of the war—the despatch of the then Emperor, speaking of the Prince Imperial’s “baptism of fire”—roused his indignation so strongly that it found vent in the following lines:—
By! baby Bunting,
Daddy’s gone a hunting,