Memoirs of Life and Literature

by W. H. Mallock

On the whole, however, the cottagers, no less than their richer neighbors, were preoccupied by interests other than those of mere domestic economy. Their gossip would accordingly take a wider range, as when one of them announced to an aunt of mine that a son and a daughter who had emigrated to the United States had "got stuck in the mud just outside America."

Often their discourses would relate to domestic discipline and theology. There was a certain Mrs. Pawley whose dwelling was widely celebrated as the scene of almost constant strife between herself and her husband, and who, on being asked by one of her lady patronesses if she could not do something to make matters run more smoothly, replied: "That's just what I tries to do, ma'am. I labor for peace, but when I speak to he thereof, he makes hisself ready for battle direckly."

Another good woman again had acquired an unenviable fame by some petty act of larceny which the magistrates had been bound to punish, and was explaining in tears on her doorstep to some lady's sympathetic ears that she had done the unfortunate deed merely because she was "temp'ed," on which a neighbor, who had no need for repentance, promptly appeared on the scene and said to her: "My dear crachur (creature), why be you temp'ed to do sich thing? I be never temp'ed to do nothing but what's good."

Passing one day through an orchard, Mr. Froude the historian encountered a man who was contemplating a heap of apples. The man looked up as though about to speak of the crop, but instead of doing so he gave vent to the following reflection: "Pretty job, sir," he said, "there was about a apple one time. Now the De-vine, He might have prevented that if He'd had a mind to. But com', sir, 'tis a mystery:"

Moral theology would sometimes take a more skeptical turn. A certain Mr. Edwardes—a most amusing man—used to describe a call which he paid one Sunday afternoon to a farmer near Buckfastleigh, whom he found reading his Bible. Mr. Edwardes congratulated him on the appropriate nature of his studies. The farmer pushed the book aside, and, pointing to the open pages, which were those containing the account of the fall of Jericho, said: "Do 'ee believe that, sir? Well—I don't." Mr. Edwardes, with becoming piety, observed that we were bound to believe whatever the Scriptures told us. "Well," the farmer continued, "when I was a boy they used to bake here in the town oven, and whenever the oven was heated, they sounded a sheep's horn. Some of the boys Sundays would get hold of that horn, just for the fun of the thing, and blaw it for all it was worth. If that there story was true, there wouldn't be a house in Buckfastleigh standing."

Independent, if not skeptical, thought was represented even by one of the members of Archdeacon Froude's own domestic establishment—a house carpenter, who was a kind of uncanonical prophet. He would see in the meadows visions of light and fire like Ezekiel's, and convert his commonest actions into means of edification. On one occasion, when he was constructing a bedroom cupboard, a daughter of the house remarked, as she paused to watch him, "Well, John, that cupboard is big enough." "It," said the prophet, reflectively, "is immense, but yet confined. I know of something which is immense, but not confined." On being asked what this was he answered, "The love of God."

Yet another story told by Mr. Antony Froude illustrates rural mentality in relation to contemporary politics. Mr. Froude was the tenant of a well-known house in Devonshire, and had come to be on very friendly terms with Mr. Emmot, his landlord's agent, a typical and true Devonian. One day Mr. Emmot came to him in a condition of some perplexity. He had been asked an important question, and was anxious to know if the answer he had given to it was satisfactory. It appeared that a cottager who had a bit of land of his own had been saying to him, "Look here, Mr. Emmot: can you tell us rightly what the difference be between a Conservative and a Radical?" "Well, Mr. Froude," said Mr. Emmot, "I didn't rightly knaw the philosophy of the thing, so I just said to 'un this: 'You knaw me; well, I be a Conservative. You knaw Jack Radford—biggest blackguard in the parish—well, he be a Radical. Now you knaw.'"

Chance reminiscences such as those which have just been quoted will be sufficient to indicate what, so far as a child could understand them, the conditions and ways of thinking of the rural population were, and how easy and unquestioning were the relations which then subsisted between it and the old landed families. These relations were easy, because the differences between the two classes were commonly assumed to be static, one supporting and one protecting the other, as though they resembled two geological strata. In slightly different language, society was presented to us in the form of two immemorial orders—the men, women, and children who touched their hats and curtsied, and the men, women, and children to whom these salutations were made.

I am not, however—let me say it again—attempting to write a chapter of English history, or to give a precise description of facts as they actually were so much as to depict the impressions which facts, such as they were, produced on children like myself through the medium of personal circumstances. At the same time, in the formation of these impressions we were far from being left to our own unaided intelligence. Our impressions, as just depicted, were sedulously confirmed and developed by carefully chosen governesses. One of these, young as she was, was a really remarkable woman, for whom English history had hatched itself into something like a philosophy. Her philosophy had two bases, one being the postulate of the divine right of kings, the other being her interpretation of the victory of the Normans over the Anglo-Saxons. Charles I she presented to our imaginations as a martyr; and, what was still more important, she seriously taught us that the population of modern England was still divided, so far as race is concerned, precisely as it was at the time of the completion of the Domesday Book; that the peers and the landed gentry were more or less pure-blooded Normans, and the mass of the people Saxons; that the principal pleasure of the latter was to eat to repletion; that their duty was to work for, that their privilege was to be patronized by, Norman overlords and distinguished Norman Churchmen; and finally, that of this Norman minority we ourselves were distinguished specimens. All this we swallowed, aided in doing so by books like Woodstock and Ivanhoe. But grotesque as such ideas seem now, they were not more grotesque than those shadowed forth in some of the novels of Lord Beaconsfield, and more particularly in Sybil, or The Two Nations. Had we indeed been set to compose an essay on the social conditions, as we ourselves understood them, "The Two Nations" would have been the title which we could most appropriately have selected for it.

When, however, forgetting our general principles, we gave our attention to the adult relations and connections who, through personal acquaintance or otherwise, constituted for us what is commonly called society, our respect for many of them as "Normans" was appreciably tempered by a sense of their dullness as men and women. They were nearly all of them members of old Devonshire families, beyond the circle of which their interests did not often wander. But certain of them in my own memory stand out from the rest as interesting types of conditions which by this time have passed away. Of these I may mention four—Emma and Antony Buller, son and daughter of Sir Antony Buller of Pound; Lord Blatchford, a Gladstonian Liberal, and the celebrated Henry Philpotts, the then Bishop of Exeter.