I was soon taken off the Westminster, and my occupation now was to write Chapman’s letters, to keep his accounts, and, most disagreeable, to “subscribe” his publications, that is to say, to call on booksellers and ask how many copies they would take. Of George Eliot, who lodged at No. 142, I have often spoken, and have nothing to add. It is a lasting sorrow to me that I allowed my friendship with her to drop, and that after I left Chapman I never called on her. She was then unknown, except to a few friends, but I did know what she was worth. I knew that she was not only endowed with extraordinary genius, but with human qualities even more precious. She took the kindest notice of me, an awkward creature not accustomed to society. It is sad that youth should be so confident in its own resources that it will not close its hand upon the treasure which is placed inside it. It was not only George Eliot by whom I neglected to profit. I might have seen Rachel. I recollect the evening, and I believe I was offered a ticket. It was not worth while to walk a couple of hundred yards to enrich myself for ever! I knew intimate friends of Caroline Fox, but I made no effort to become acquainted with her. What a difference it would make to me now, living so much in the past, if Penjerrick, with a dream of its lawn sloping southward and seaward, and its society of all the most interesting people in England, should be amongst my possessions, thrusting out and replacing much that is ugly, monotonous, and depressing. I would earnestly, so earnestly, implore every boy and girl religiously to grasp their chances. Lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven.
There was one opportunity, however, I did not miss, and this was Caleb Morris. About him also I have written, but for the sake of continuity I will repeat some of it. He had singular influence, not only over me, but over nearly every young man whom he met. He was originally an Independent minister in Wales, where the people are mostly Dissenters, but he came to London when he had not passed middle life, and took charge of the church in Fetter Lane. He was tall, broad-shouldered, handsome, erect, but was partly disabled by a strangely nervous temperament which, with an obscure bodily trouble, frequently prevented him from keeping his engagements. Often and often messengers had to be dispatched late on Sunday morning to find a substitute for him at Fetter Lane, and people used to wait in the portico of the chapel until the service had well begun, and then peep through the door to see who was in the pulpit. He was the most eloquent speaker I ever heard. I never shall forget his picture of the father, in the parable of the prodigal son, watching for his child’s return, all his thoughts swallowed up in one—Will he come back to-day? When he did come—no word of rebuke. The hardest thing in the world is to be completely generous in forgiveness. The most magnanimous of men cannot resist the temptation—but at the same time you must see, my dearest, don’t you? Almost equally difficult, but not quite, is the simple confession without an extenuating word, I have sinned against Heaven. The father does not hear. Bring forth the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet. A ring on his hand! Shoes on his feet we can understand, but there is to be a ring, honour, ennoblement! . . . The first movement of repentance was—I will arise and go to my father. The omissions in Morris’s comment were striking. There was no word of the orthodox machinery of forgiveness. It was through Morris that the Bible became what it always has been to me. It has not solved directly any of the great problems which disturb my peace, and Morris seldom touched them controversially, but he uncovered such a wealth of wonder and beauty in it that the problems were forgotten.
Lord Bacon was Morris’s hero, both for his method and his personal character. These were the days before the researches of Spedding, when Bacon was supposed to be a mass of those impossible paradoxes in which Macaulay delighted. To Morris, Bacon’s Submission and his renunciation of all defence were sufficient. With what pathos he repeated Bacon’s words when the Lords asked him whether the subscription to the Submission was in his own hand. “My Lords, it is my act, my hand, my heart. I beseech your Lordships, be merciful to a broken reed.”
There is nothing more to be said about Chapman’s. I left after an offer of partnership, which, it is needless to say, I did not accept. Mr. Whitbread obtained for me a clerkship in the Registrar-General’s office, Somerset House. I was there two or three years, and was then transferred to the Admiralty. Meanwhile I had married.
The greater part of my life has been passed in what it is now usual to contemn as the Victorian age. Whatever may be the justice of the scorn poured out upon it by the superior persons of the present generation, this Victorian age was distinguished by an enthusiasm which can only be compared to a religious revival. Maud was read at six in the morning as I walked along Holborn; Pippa Passes late at night in my dark little room in Serle Street, although of course it was a long while after the poem made its appearance. Wonderful! What did I see as I stood at my desk in my Serle Street bedroom?
“Day!
Faster and more fast,
O’er night’s brim, day boils at last;
Boils, pure gold, o’er the cloud-cup’s brim
Where spurting and suppresst it lay—”
There on the horizon lies the cloud cup. Over the brim boils, pure gold, the day! The day which is before me is Pippa’s day, and not a day in the Strand: it is a “twelve-hours treasure”: I am as eager as Pippa “not to squander a wavelet of thee”. The vision still lives. The friend who stood by my side is still with me, although he died years and years ago. What was true of me was true of half a score of my friends. If it is true that the Victorian time was ugly and vulgar, it was the time of the Virginians, of David Copperfield, of Tennyson’s Poems, of Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, of the Letters and Life of Lord Bacon, of Emerson’s Essays, of Festus, of the Dramatis Personæ, and of the Apologia. We were at the Academy at eight o’clock on a May morning to see, at the very earliest moment, the Ophelia, the Order for Release, the Claudio and Isabella, Seddon’s Jerusalem, Lewis’s Arab Scribe and his Frank Encampment in the Desert. The last two, though, I think, were in the exhibition of the Old Water Colour Society. The excitement of those years between 1848 and 1890 was, as I have said, something like that of a religious revival, but it was reasonable.
These notes are not written for publication, but to please two or three persons related to me by affection.