In 1841 or 1842—I forget exactly the date—I was sent to what is now the Modern School. My father would not let me go to the Grammar School, partly because he had such dreadful recollections of his treatment there, and partly because in those days the universities were closed to Dissenters. The Latin and Greek in the upper school were not good for much, but Latin in the lower school—Greek was not taught—consisted almost entirely in learning the Eton Latin grammar by heart, and construing Cornelius Nepos. The boys in the lower school were a very rough set. About a dozen were better than the others, and kept themselves apart.
The recollections of school are not interesting to me in any way, but it is altogether otherwise with playtime and holidays. School began at seven in the morning during half the year, but later in winter. At half-past eight or nine there was an interval of an hour for breakfast. It was over when I got home, and I had mine in the kitchen. It was dispatched in ten minutes, and my delight in cold weather then was to lie in front of the fire and read Chambers’ Journal. Blessings on the brothers Chambers for that magazine and for the Miscellany, which came later! Then there was Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales of Ulysses. It was on a top shelf in the shop, and I studied it whilst perched on the shop ladder. Another memorable volume was a huge atlas-folio, which my sister and I called the Battle Book. It contained coloured prints, with descriptions of famous battles of the British Army. We used to lug it into the dining-room in the evening, and were never tired of looking at it. A little later I managed to make an electrical machine out of a wine bottle, and to produce sparks three-quarters of an inch long. I had learned the words “positive” and “negative”, and was satisfied with them as an explanation, although I had not the least notion what they meant, but I got together a few friends and gave them a demonstration on electricity.
Never was there a town better suited to a boy than Bedford at that time for out-of-door amusements. It was not too big—its population was about 10,000—so that the fields were then close at hand. The Ouse—immortal stream—runs through the middle of the High Street. To the east towards fenland, the country is flat, and the river is broad, slow, and deep. Towards the west it is quicker, involved, fold doubling almost completely on fold, so that it takes sixty miles to accomplish thirteen as the crow flies. Beginning at Kempston, and on towards Clapham, Oakley, Milton, Harrold, it is bordered by the gentlest of hills or rather undulations. At Bedford the navigation for barges stopped, and there were very few pleasure boats, one of which was mine. The water above the bridge was strictly preserved, and the fishing was good. My father could generally get leave for me, and more delightful days than those spent at Kempston Mill and Oakley Mill cannot be imagined. The morning generally began, if I may be excused the bull, on the evening before, when we walked about four miles to bait a celebrated roach and bream hole. After I got home, and just as I was going to bed, I tied a long string round one toe, and threw the other end of the string out of window, so that it reached the ground, having bargained with a boy to pull this end, not too violently, at daybreak, about three-quarters of an hour before the time when the fish would begin to bite well. At noon we slept for a couple of hours on the bank. In the evening we had two hours more sport, and then marched back to town. Once, in order to make a short cut, we determined to swim the river, which, at the point where we were, was about sixty feet wide, deep, and what was of more consequence, bordered with weeds. We stripped, tied our clothes on the top of our heads and our boots to one end of our fishing lines, carrying the other end with us. When we got across we pulled our boots through mud and water after us. Alas! to our grief we found we could not get them on, and we were obliged to walk without them. Swimming we had been taught by an old sailor, who gave lessons to the school, and at last I could pick up an egg from the bottom of the overfall, a depth of about ten feet. I have also been upset from my boat, and had to lie stark naked on the grass in the sun till my clothes were dry. Twice I have been nearly drowned, once when I wandered away from the swimming class, and once when I could swim well. This later peril is worth a word or two, and I may as well say them now. I was staying by the sea-side, and noticed as I was lying on the beach about a couple of hundred yards from the shore a small vessel at anchor. I thought I should like to swim round her. I reached her without any difficulty, in perfect peace, luxuriously, I may say, and had just begun to turn when I was suddenly overtaken by a mad conviction that I should never get home. There was no real danger of failure of strength, but my heart began to beat furiously, the shore became dim, and I gave myself up for lost. “This then is dying,” I said to myself, but I also said—I remember how vividly—“There shall be a struggle before I go down—one desperate effort”—and I strove, in a way I cannot describe, to bring my will to bear directly on my terror. In an instant the horrible excitement was at an end, and there was a great calm. I stretched my limbs leisurely, rejoicing in the sea and the sunshine. This story is worth telling because it shows that a person with tremulous nerves, such as mine, never ought to say that he has done all that he can do. Notice also it was not nature or passion which carried me through, but a conviction wrought by the reason. The next time I was in extremity victory was tenfold easier.
In the winter, fishing and boating and swimming gave way to skating. The meadows for miles were a great lake, and there was no need to take off skates in order to get past mills and weirs. The bare, flat Bedfordshire fields had also their pleasures. I had an old flint musket which I found in an outhouse. I loaded it with hard peas, and once killed a sparrow. The fieldfares, or felts, as we called them, were in flocks in winter, but with them I never succeeded. On the dark November Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, when there was not a breath of wind, and the fog hung heavily over the brown, ploughed furrows, we gathered sticks, lighted a fire, and roasted potatoes. They were sweet as peaches. After dark we would “go a bat-fowling”, with lanterns, some of us on one side of the hedge and some on the other. I left school when I was between fourteen and fifteen, and then came the great event and the great blunder of my life, the mistake which well-nigh ruined it altogether. My mother’s brother had a son about five years older than myself, who was being trained as an Independent minister. To him I owe much. It was he who introduced me to Goethe. Some time after he was ordained, he became heterodox, and was obliged to separate himself from the Independents to whom he belonged. My mother, as I have already said, was a little weak in her preference for people who did not stand behind counters, and she desired equality with her sister-in-law. Besides, I can honestly declare that to her an Evangelical ministry was a sacred calling, and the thought that I might be the means of saving souls made her happy. Finally, it was not possible now to get a living in Bedford as a bookseller. The drawing class in the school was fairly good, and I believe I had profited by it. Anyhow, I loved drawing, and wished I might be an artist. The decision was against me, and I was handed over to a private tutor to prepare for the Countess of Huntingdon’s College at Cheshunt, which admitted students other than those which belonged to the Connexion, provided their creed did not materially differ from that which governed the Connexion trusts.
Before I went to college I had to be “admitted”. In most Dissenting communities there is a singular ceremony called “admission”, through which members of the congregation have to pass before they become members of the church. It is a declaration that a certain change called conversion has taken place in the soul. Two deacons are appointed to examine the candidate privately, and their report is submitted to a church-meeting. If it is satisfactory, he is summoned before the whole church, and has to make a confession of his faith, and give an account of his spiritual history. As may be expected, it is very often inaccurately picturesque, and is framed after the model of the journey to Damascus. A sinner, for example, who swears at his pious wife, and threatens to beat her, is suddenly smitten with giddiness and awful pains. He throws himself on his knees before her, and thenceforward he is a “changed character”. I had to tell the church that my experience had not been eventful. I was young, and had enjoyed the privilege of godly parents.
What was conversion? It meant not only that the novice unhesitatingly avowed his belief in certain articles of faith, but it meant something much more, and much more difficult to explain. I was guilty of original sin, and also of sins actually committed. For these two classes of sin I deserved eternal punishment. Christ became my substitute, and His death was the payment for my transgression. I had to feel that His life and death were appropriated by me. This word “appropriated” is the most orthodox I can find, but it is almost unintelligible. I might perhaps say that I had to feel assured that I, personally, was in God’s mind, and was included in the atonement.
This creed had as evil consequences that it concentrated my thoughts upon myself, and made me of great importance. God had been anxious about me from all eternity, and had been scheming to save me. Another bad result was that I was satisfied I understood what I did not in the least understand. This is very near lying. I can see myself now—I was no more than seventeen—stepping out of our pew, standing in the aisle at the pew-door, and protesting to their content before the minister of the church, father and mother protesting also to my own complete content, that the witness of God in me to my own salvation was as clear as noonday. Poor little mortal, a twelvemonth out of round jackets, I did not in the least know who God was, or what was salvation.
On entering the college I signed the Thirty-nine Articles, excepting two or three at most; for the Countess, so far as her theology went, was always Anglican. One of her chaplains was William Romaine, the famous incumbent of St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, who on his first Good Friday in that church administered to five hundred communicants. The book I was directed to study by the theological professor after admission, was a book on the Atonement, by somebody named Williams. He justified the election of a minority to heaven and a majority to hell on the ground that God owed us nothing, and being our Maker, might do with us what He pleased. This struck me as original, but I had forgotten that it is the doctrine of the Epistle to the Romans. It is almost incredible to me now, although I was hardly nineteen, that I should have accepted without question such a terrible invention, and the only approach to explanation I can give is that all this belonged to a world totally disconnected from my own, and that I never thought of making real to myself anything which this supernatural world contained.
The most important changes in life are not those of one belief for another, but of growth, in which nothing preceding is directly contradicted, but something unexpected nevertheless makes its appearance. On the bookshelf in our dining-room lay a volume of Wordsworth. One day, when I was about eighteen, I took it out, and fell upon the lines—