The Early Life of Mark Rutherford (W. Hale White)

by William Hale White

The Reply is an admirable specimen of the way in which a controversy should be conducted; without heat, the writer uniformly mindful of his object, which is not personal distinction, but the conviction of his neighbour, poor as well as rich, all the facts in order, every point answered, and not one evaded. At the opening of the first letter, a saying of Burkitt’s is quoted with approval. “Painted glass is very beautiful, but plain glass is the most useful as it lets through the most light.” A word, by the way, on Burkitt. He was born in 1650, went to Cambridge, and became rector, first of Milden, and then of Dedham, both in Suffolk. As rector of Dedham he died. There he wrote the Poor Man’s Help and Young Man’s Guide, which went through more than thirty editions in fifty years. There he wrestled with the Baptists, and produced his Argumentative and Practical Discourse on Infant Baptism. I have wandered through these Dedham fields by the banks of the Stour. It is Constable’s country, and in its way is not to be matched in England. Although there is nothing striking in it, its influence, at least upon me, is greater than that of celebrated mountains and waterfalls. What a power there is to subdue and calm in those low hills, overtopped, as you see it from East Bergholt, by the magnificent Dedham half-cathedral church! It is very probable that Burkitt, as he took his walks by the Stour, and struggled with his Argument, never saw the placid, winding stream; nor is it likely that anybody in Bedford, except my father, had heard of him. For his defence of the schools my father was presented at a town’s meeting with a silver tea-service.

By degrees, when the battle was over, the bookselling business very much fell off, and after a short partnership with his brother-in-law in a tannery, my father was appointed assistant door-keeper of the House of Commons by Lord Charles Russell. He soon became door-keeper. While he was at the door he wrote for a weekly paper his Inner Life of the House of Commons, afterwards collected and published in book form. He held office for twenty-one years, and on his retirement, in 1875, 160 members of the House testified in a very substantial manner their regard for him. He died at Carshalton on February 11, 1882. There were many obituary notices of him. One was from Lord Charles Russell, who, as Serjeant-at-Arms, had full opportunities of knowing him well. Lord Charles recalled a meeting at Woburn, a quarter of a century before, in honour of Lord John Russell. Lord John spoke then, and so did Sir David Dundas, then Solicitor-General, Lord Charles, and my father. “His,” said Lord Charles, “was the finest speech, and Sir David Dundas remarked to me, as Mr. White concluded, ‘Why that is old Cobbett again minus his vulgarity.’” He became acquainted with a good many members during his stay at the House. New members sought his advice and initiation into its ways. Some of his friends were also mine. Amongst these were Sir John Trelawney and his gifted wife. Sir John belonged to the scholarly Radical party, which included John Stuart Mill and Roebuck. The visits to Sir John and Lady Trelawney will never be forgotten, not so much because I was taught what to think about certain political questions, but because I was supplied with a standard by which all political questions were judged, and this standard was fixed by reason. Looking at the methods and the procedure of that little republic and at the anarchy of to-day, with no prospect of the renewal of allegiance to principles, my heart sinks. It was through one of the Russells, with whom my father was acquainted, that I was permitted with him to call on Carlyle, an event amongst the greatest in my life, and all the happier for me because I did not ask to go.

What I am going to say now I hardly like to mention, because of its privacy, but it is so much to my father’s honour that I cannot omit it. Besides, almost everybody concerned is now dead. When he left Bedford he was considerably in debt, through the falling off in his bookselling business which I have just mentioned, caused mainly by his courageous partisanship. His official salary was not sufficient to keep him, and in order to increase it, he began to write for the newspapers. During the session this was very hard work. He could not leave the House till it rose, and was often not at home till two o’clock in the morning or later, too tired to sleep. He was never able to see a single revise of what he wrote. In the end he paid his debts in full.

My father was a perfectly honest man, and hated shiftiness even worse than downright lying. The only time he gave me a thrashing was for prevarication. He had a plain, but not a dull mind, and loved poetry of a sublime cast, especially Milton. I can hear him even now repeat passages from the Comus, which was a special favourite. Elsewhere I have told how when he was young and stood at the composing desk in his printing office, he used to declaim Byron by heart. That a Puritan printer, one of the last men in the world to be carried away by a fashion, should be vanquished by Byron, is as genuine a testimony as any I know to the reality of his greatness. Up to 1849 or thereabouts, my father in religion was Independent and Calvinist, the creed which, as he thought then, best suited him. But a change was at hand. His political opinions remained unaltered to his death, but in 1851 he had completed his discovery that the “simple gospel” which Calvinism preached was by no means simple, but remarkably abstruse. It was the Heroes and Hero Worship and the Sartor Resartus which drew him away from the meeting-house. There is nothing in these two books directly hostile either to church or dissent, but they laid hold on him as no books had ever held, and the expansion they wrought in him could not possibly tolerate the limitations of orthodoxy. He was not converted to any other religion. He did not run for help to those who he knew could not give it. His portrait; erect, straightforward-looking, firmly standing, one foot a little in advance, helps me and decides me when I look at it. Of all types of humanity the one which he represents would be the most serviceable to the world at the present day. He was generous, open-hearted, and if he had a temper, a trifle explosive at times, nobody for whom he cared ever really suffered from it, and occasionally it did him good service. The chief obituary notice of him declared with truth that he was the best public speaker Bedford ever had, and the committee of the well-known public library resolved unanimously “That this institution records with regret the death of Mr. W. White, formerly and for many years an active and most valuable member of the committee, whose special and extensive knowledge of books was always at its service, and to whom the library is indebted for the acquisition of its most rare and valuable books.” The first event in my own life is the attack by the mob upon our house, at the general election in 1832, to which I have referred. My cradle—as I have been told—had to be carried from the front bedroom into the back, so that my head might not be broken by the stones which smashed the windows.

The first thing I can really see is the coronation of Queen Victoria and a town’s dinner in St. Paul’s Square. About this time, or soon after, I was placed in a “young ladies’” school. At the front door of this polite seminary I appeared one morning in a wheelbarrow. I had persuaded a shop boy to give me a lift.

It was when I was about ten years old—surely it must have been very early on some cloudless summer morning—that Nurse Jane came to us. She was a faithful servant and a dear friend for many years—I cannot say how many. Till her death, not so long ago, I was always her “dear boy”. She was as familiar with me as if I were her own child. She left us when she married, but came back on her husband’s death. Her father and mother lived in a little thatched cottage at Oakley. They were very poor, but her mother was a Scotch girl, and knew how to make a little go a long way. Jane had not infrequent holidays, and she almost always took my sister and myself to spend them at Oakley. This was a delight as keen as any which could be given me. No entertainment, no special food was provided. As to entertainment there was just the escape to a freer life, to a room in which we cooked our food, ate it, and altogether lived during waking hours when we were indoors. Oh, for a house with this one room, a Homeric house! How much easier and how much more natural should we be if we watched the pot or peeled the potatoes as we talked, than it is now in a drawing-room, where we do not know what chair to choose amongst a dozen scattered about aimlessly; where there is no table to hide the legs or support the arms; a room which compels an uncomfortable awkwardness, and forced conversation. Would it not be more sincere if a saucepan took part in it than it is now, when, in evening clothes, tea-cup in hand, we discuss the show at the Royal Academy, while a lady at the piano sings a song from Aida?

As to the food at Oakley, it was certainly rough, and included dishes not often seen at home, but I liked it all the better. My mother was by no means democratic. In fact she had a slight weakness in favour of rank. Somehow or other she had managed to know some people who lived in a “park” about five or six miles from Bedford. It was called a “park”, but in reality it was a big garden, with a meadow beyond. However, and this was the great point, none of my mother’s town friends were callers at the Park. But, notwithstanding her little affectations, she was always glad to let us go to Oakley with Jane, not that she wanted to get rid of us, but because she loved her. Nothing but good did I get from my wholly unlearned nurse and Oakley. Never a coarse word, unbounded generosity, and an unreasoning spontaneity, which I do think one of the most blessed of virtues, suddenly making us glad when nothing is expected. A child knows, no one so well, whereabouts in the scale of goodness to place generosity. Nobody can estimate its true value so accurately. Keeping the Sabbath, no swearing, very right and proper, but generosity is first, although it is not in the Decalogue. There was not much in my nurse’s cottage with which to prove her liberality, but a quart of damsons for my mother was enough. Going home from Oakley one summer’s night I saw some magnificent apples in a window; I had a penny in my pocket, and I asked how many I could have for that sum. “Twenty.” How we got them home I do not know. The price I dare say has gone up since that evening. Talking about damsons and apples, I call to mind a friend in Potter Street, whose name I am sorry to say I have forgotten. He was a miller, tall, thin, slightly stooping, wore a pepper-and-salt suit of clothes, and might have been about sixty years old when I was ten or twelve. He lived in an ancient house, the first floor of which overhung the street; the rooms were low-pitched and dark. How Bedford folk managed to sleep in them, windows all shut, is incomprehensible. At the back of the house was a royal garden stretching down to the lane which led to the mill. My memory especially dwells on the currants, strawberries, and gooseberries. When we went to “uncle’s”, as we called him, we were turned out unattended into the middle of the fruit beds if the fruit was ripe, and we could gather and eat what we liked. I am proud to say that this Potter Street gentleman, a nobleman if ever there was one, although not really an uncle, was in some way related to my father.

The recollections of boyhood, so far as week-days go, are very happy. Sunday, however, was not happy. I was taken to a religious service, morning and evening, and understood nothing. The evening was particularly trying. The windows of the meeting-house streamed inside with condensed breath, and the air we took into our lungs was poisonous. Almost every Sunday some woman was carried out fainting. Do what I could it was impossible to keep awake. When I was quite little I was made to stand on the seat, a spectacle, with other children in the like case, to the whole congregation, and I often nearly fell down, overcome with drowsiness. My weakness much troubled me, because, although it might not be a heinous sin, such as bathing on Sunday, it showed that I was not one of God’s children, like Samuel, who ministered before the Lord girded with a linen ephod. Bathing on Sunday, as the river was always before me, was particularly prominent as a type of wickedness, and I read in some book for children, by a certain divine named Todd, how a wicked boy, bathing on the Sabbath, was drawn under a mill-wheel, was drowned, and went to hell. I wish I could find that book, for there was also in it a most conclusive argument intended for a child’s mind against the doctrine, propounded by people called philosophers, that the world was created by chance. The refutation was in the shape of a dream by a certain sage representing a world made by Chance and not by God. Unhappily all that I recollect of the remarkable universe thus produced is that the geese had hoofs, and “clamped about like horses”. Such was the awful consequence of creation by a No-God or nothing.