Anand Gholap
Theosophy
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Anand Gholap Theosophy
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Illustrated
SECOND EDITION
From a photograph by H.S. Mendelssohn, 27,
Cathcart Road, South Kensington, London
ANNIE BESANT
1885
PREFACE
It is a difficult thing to tell the story
of a life, and yet more difficult when that life is one's own. At the best, the
telling has a savour of vanity, and the only excuse for the proceeding is that
the life, being an average one, reflects many others, and in troublous times
like ours may give the experience of many rather than of one. And so the
autobiographer does his work because he thinks that, at the cost of some
unpleasantness to himself, he may throw light on some of the typical problems
that are vexing the souls of his contemporaries, and perchance may stretch out a
helping hand to some brother who is struggling in the darkness, and so bring him
cheer when despair has him in its grip. Since all of us, men and women of this
restless and eager generation—surrounded by forces we dimly see but cannot as
yet understand, discontented with old ideas and half afraid of new, greedy for
the material results of the knowledge brought us by Science but looking askance
at her agnosticism as regards the soul, fearful of superstition but still more
fearful of atheism, turning from the husks of outgrown creeds but filled with
desperate hunger for spiritual ideals--since all of us have the same anxieties,
the same griefs, the same yearning hopes, the same passionate desire for
knowledge, it may well be that the story of one may help all, and that the tale
of one should that went out alone into the darkness and on the other side found
light, that struggled through the Storm and on the other side found Peace, may
bring some ray of light and of peace into the darkness and the storm of other
lives.
ANNIE BESANT.
The Theosophical Society,
17 & 19, Avenue Road, Regent's Park,
August, 1893.
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I.
"OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE INTO THE HERE"
II.
EARLY CHILDHOOD
III.
GIRLHOOD
IV.
MARRIAGE
VII.
ATHEISM AS I KNEW AND TAUGHT IT
VIII.
AT WORK
XII.
STILL FIGHTING
XIII.
SOCIALISM
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
ANNIE BESANT, 1885
Frontispiece
HOROSCOPE OF ANNIE BESANT
Page 12
ANNIE BESANT, 1869
Facing page 86
THOMAS SCOTT
Facing page 112
CHARLES BRADLAUGH, M.P.
Facing page 212
CHARLES BRADLAUGH AND HENRY
LABOUCHERE
Facing page 254
NORWICH BRANCH OF THE
SOCIALIST LEAGUE
Facing page 314
STRIKE COMMITTEE OF THE
MATCHMAKERS' UNION
Facing page 336
MEMBERS OF THE MATCHMAKERS'
UNION
Facing page 338
"OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE
INTO THE HERE."
1.
On October 1,
1847, I am credibly informed, my baby eyes opened to the
light(?) of a
2.
A friendly
astrologer has drawn for me the following chart, showing the position of the
planets at this, to me fateful, moment; but I know nothing of astrology, so feel
no wiser as I gaze upon my horoscope.
4.
Horoscope of
Annie Besant.
5.
Keeping in
view the way in which sun, moon, and planets influence the physical condition of
the earth, there is nothing incongruous with the orderly course of nature in the
view that they also influence the physical bodies of men, these being part of
the physical earth, and largely moulded by its conditions. Any one who knows the
characteristics ascribed to those who are born under the several signs of the
Zodiac, may very easily pick out the different types among his own
acquaintances, and he may then get them to go to some astrologer and find out
under what signs they were severally born. He will very quickly discover that
two men of completely opposed types are not born under the same sign, and the
invariability of the concurrence will convince him that law, and not chance, is
at work. We are born into earthly life under certain conditions, just as we were
physically affected by them pre-natally, and these will have their bearing on
our subsequent physical evolution. At the most, astrology, as it is now
practised, can only calculate the interaction between these physical conditions
at any given moment, and the conditions brought to them by a given person whose
general constitution and natal condition are known. It cannot say what the
person will do, nor what will happen to him, but only what will be the physical
district, so to speak, in which he will find himself, and the impulses that will
play upon him from external nature and from his own body. Even on those matters
modern astrology is not quite reliable—judging from the many blunders made—or
else its professors are very badly instructed; but that there is a real science
of astrology I have no doubt, and there are some men who are past masters in it.
6.
It has always
been somewhat of a grievance to me that I was born in
7.
My maternal
grandfather was a typical Irishman, much admired by me and somewhat feared also,
in the childish days. He belonged to a decayed Irish family, the Maurices, and
in a gay youth, with a beautiful wife as light-hearted as himself, he had
merrily run through what remained to him in the way of fortune. In his old age,
with abundant snow-white hair, he still showed the hot Irish blood on the
lightest provocation, stormily angry for a moment and easily appeased. My mother
was the second daughter in a large family, in a family that grew more numerous
as pounds grew fewer, and she was adopted by a maiden aunt, a quaint memory of
whom came through my mother's childhood into mine, and had its moulding effect
on both our characters. This maiden aunt was, as are most Irish folk of decayed
families, very proud of her family tree with its roots in the inevitable
"kings." Her particular kings were the "seven kings of
8.
Thus those
shadowy forms influenced her in childhood, and exercised over her a power that
made her shrink from aught that was unworthy, petty or mean. To her the lightest
breath of dishonour was to be avoided at any cost of pain, and she wrought into
me, her only daughter, that same proud and passionate horror at any taint of
shame or merited disgrace. To the world always a brave front was to be kept, and
a stainless reputation, for suffering might be borne but dishonour never. A
gentlewoman might starve, but she must not run in debt; she might break her
heart, but it must be with a smile on her face. I have often thought that the
training in this reticence and pride of honour was a strange preparation for my
stormy, public, much attacked and slandered life; and certain it is that this
inwrought shrinking from all criticism that touched personal purity and personal
honour added a keenness of suffering to the fronting of public odium that none
can appreciate who has not been trained in some similar school of dignified
self-respect. And yet perhaps there was another result from it that in value
outweighed the added pain: it was the stubbornly resistant feeling that rose and
inwardly asserted its own purity in face of foulest lie, and turning scornful
face against the foe, too proud either to justify itself or to defend, said to
itself in its own heart, when condemnation was loudest: "I am not what you think
me, and your verdict does not change my own self. You cannot make me vile
whatever you think of me, and I will never, in my own eyes, be that which you
deem me to be now." And the very pride became a shield against degradation, for,
however lost my public reputation, I could never bear to become sullied in my
own sight—and that is a thing not without its use to a woman cut off, as I was
at one time, from home, and friends, and Society. So peace to the maiden aunt's
ashes, and to those of her absurd kings, for I owe them something after all. And
I keep grateful memory of that unknown grand-aunt, for what she did in training
my dear mother, the tenderest, sweetest, proudest, purest of women. It is well
to be able to look back to a mother who served as ideal of all that was noblest
and dearest during childhood and girlhood, whose face made the beauty of home,
and whose love was both sun and shield. No other experience in life could quite
make up for missing the perfect tie between mother and child—a tie that in our
case never relaxed and never weakened. Though her grief at my change of faith
and consequent social ostracism did much to hasten her death-hour, it never
brought a cloud between our hearts; though her pleading was the hardest of all
to face in later days, and brought the bitterest agony, it made no gulf between
us, it cast no chill upon our mutual love. And I look back at her to-day with
the same loving gratitude as ever encircled her to me in her earthly life. I
have never met a woman more selflessly devoted to those she loved, more
passionately contemptuous of all that was mean or base, more keenly sensitive on
every question of honour, more iron in will, more sweet in tenderness, than the
mother who made my girlhood sunny as dreamland, who guarded me, until my
marriage, from every touch of pain that she could ward off or bear for me, who
suffered more in every trouble that touched me in later life than I did myself,
and who died in the little house I had taken for our new home in Norwood, worn
out, ere old age touched her, by sorrow, poverty, and pain, in May, 1874.
9.
My earliest
personal recollections are of a house and garden that we lived in when I was
three and four years of age, situated in Grove Road, St. John's Wood. I can
remember my mother hovering round the dinner-table to see that all was bright
for the home-coming husband; my brother—two years older than myself—and I
watching "for papa"; the loving welcome, the game of romps that always preceded
the dinner of the elder folks. I can remember on the 1st of October, 1851,
jumping up in my little cot, and shouting out triumphantly: "Papa! mamma! I am
four years old!" and the grave demand of my brother, conscious of superior age,
at dinner-time: "May not Annie have a knife to-day, as she is four years old?"
10.
It was a sore
grievance during that same year, 1851, that I was not judged old enough to go to
the Great Exhibition, and I have a faint memory of my brother consolingly
bringing me home one of those folding pictured strips that are sold in the
streets, on which were imaged glories that I longed only the more to see.
Far-away, dusky, trivial memories, these. What a pity it is that a baby cannot
notice, cannot observe, cannot remember, and so throw light on the fashion of
the dawning of the external world on the human consciousness. If only we could
remember how things looked when they were first imaged on the retinae; what we
felt when first we became conscious of the outer world; what the feeling was as
faces of father and mother grew out of the surrounding chaos and became familiar
things, greeted with a smile, lost with a cry; if only memory would not become a
mist when in later years we strive to throw our glances backward into the
darkness of our infancy, what lessons we might learn to help our stumbling
psychology, how many questions might be solved whose answers we are groping for
in the West in vain.
11.
The next
scene that stands out clearly against the background of the past is that of my
father's death-bed. The events which led to his death I know from my dear
mother. He had never lost his fondness for the profession for which he had been
trained, and having many medical friends, he would now and then accompany them
on their hospital rounds, or share with them the labours of the dissecting-room.
It chanced that during the dissection of the body of a person who had died of
rapid consumption, my father cut his finger against the edge of the breast-bone.
The cut did not heal easily, and the finger became swollen and inflamed. "I
would have that finger off, Wood, if I were you," said one of the surgeons, a
day or two afterwards, on seeing the state of the wound. But the others laughed
at the suggestion, and my father, at first inclined to submit to the amputation,
was persuaded to "leave Nature alone."
12.
About the
middle of August, 1852, he got wet through, riding on the top of an omnibus, and
the wetting resulted in a severe cold, which "settled on his chest." One of the
most eminent doctors of the day, as able as he was rough in manner, was called
to see him. He examined him carefully, sounded his lungs, and left the room
followed by my mother. "Well?" she asked, scarcely anxious as to the answer,
save as it might worry her husband to be kept idly at home. "You must keep up
his spirits," was the thoughtless answer. "He is in a galloping consumption; you
will not have him with you six weeks longer." The wife staggered back, and fell
like a stone on the floor. But love triumphed over agony, and half an hour later
she was again at her husband's side, never to leave it again for ten minutes at
a time, night or day, till he was lying with closed eyes asleep in death.
13.
I was lifted
on to the bed to "say good-bye to dear papa" on the day before his death, and I
remember being frightened at his eyes which looked so large, and his voice which
sounded so strange, as he made me promise always to be "a very good girl to
darling mamma, as papa was going right away." I remember insisting that "papa
should kiss Cherry," a doll given me on my birthday, three days before, by his
direction, and being removed, crying and struggling, from the room. He died on
the following day, October 5th, and I do not think that my elder brother and
I—who were staying at our maternal grandfather's—went to the house again until
the day of the funeral. With the death, my mother broke down, and when all was
over they carried her senseless from the room. I remember hearing afterwards
how, when she recovered her senses, she passionately insisted on being left
alone, and locked herself into her room for the night; and how on the following
morning her mother, at last persuading her to open the door, started back at the
face she saw with the cry: "Good God, Emily! your hair is white!" It was even
so; her hair, black, glossy and abundant, which, contrasting with her large grey
eyes, had made her face so strangely attractive, had turned grey in that night
of agony, and to me my mother's face is ever framed in exquisite silver bands of
hair as white as the driven unsullied snow.
14.
I have heard
that the love between my father and mother was a very beautiful thing, and it
most certainly stamped her character for life. He was keenly intellectual and
splendidly educated; a mathematician and a good classical scholar, thoroughly
master of French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, with a smattering of
Hebrew and Gaelic, the treasures of ancient and of modern literature were his
daily household delight. Nothing pleased him so well as to sit with his wife,
reading aloud to her while she worked; now translating from some foreign poet,
now rolling forth melodiously the exquisite cadences of "Queen Mab." Student of
philosophy as he was, he was deeply and steadily sceptical; and a very religious
relative has told me that he often drove her from the room by his light, playful
mockery of the tenets of the Christian faith. His mother and sister were strict
Roman Catholics, and near the end forced a priest into his room, but the priest
was promptly ejected by the wrath of the dying man, and by the almost fierce
resolve of the wife that no messenger of the creed he detested should trouble
her darling at the last.
15.
Deeply read
in philosophy, he had outgrown the orthodox beliefs of his day, and his wife,
who loved him too much to criticise, was wont to reconcile her own piety and his
scepticism by holding that "women ought to be religious," while men had a right
to read everything and think as they would, provided that they were upright and
honourable in their lives. But the result of his liberal and unorthodox thought
was to insensibly modify and partially rationalise her own beliefs, and she put
on one side as errors the doctrines of eternal punishment, the vicarious
atonement, the infallibility of the Bible, the equality of the Son with the
Father in the Trinity, and other orthodox beliefs, and rejoiced in her later
years in the writings of such men as Jowett, Colenso, and Stanley. The last
named, indeed, was her ideal Christian gentleman, suave, polished, broad-minded,
devout in a stately way. The baldness of a typical Evangelical service outraged
her taste as much as the crudity of Evangelical dogmas outraged her intellect;
she liked to feel herself a Christian in a dignified and artistic manner, and to
be surrounded by solemn music and splendid architecture when she "attended
Divine service." Familiarity with celestial personages was detestable to her,
and she did her duty of saluting them in a courtly and reverent fashion.
Westminster Abbey was her favourite church, with its dim light and shadowy
distances; there in a carven stall, with choristers chanting in solemn rhythm,
with the many-coloured glories of the painted windows repeating themselves on
upspringing arch and clustering pillars, with the rich harmonies of the pealing
organ throbbing up against screen and monument, with the ashes of the mighty
dead around, and all the stately memories of the past inwrought into the very
masonry, there Religion appeared to her to be intellectually dignified and
emotionally satisfactory.
16.
To me, who
took my religion in strenuous fashion, this dainty and well-bred piety seemed
perilously like Laodicean lukewarmness, while my headlong vigour of conviction
and practice often jarred on her as alien from the delicate balance and absence
of extremes that should characterise the gentlewoman. She was of the old
régime; I of the stuff from which fanatics are made: and I have often
thought, in looking back, that she must have had on her lips many a time
unspoken a phrase that dropped from them when she lay a-dying: "My little one,
you have never made me sad or sorry except for your own sake; you have always
been too religious." And then she murmured to herself: "Yes, it has been darling
Annie's only fault; she has always been too religious." Methinks that, as the
world judges, the dying voice spake truly, and the dying eyes saw with a real
insight. For though I was then kneeling beside her bed, heretic and outcast, the
heart of me was religious in its very fervour of repudiation of a religion, and
in its rebellious uprising against dogmas that crushed the reason and did not
satisfy the soul. I went out into the darkness alone, not because religion was
too good for me, but because it was not good enough; it was too meagre, too
commonplace, too little exacting, too bound up with earthly interests, too
calculating in its accommodations to social conventionalities. The Roman
Catholic Church, had it captured me, as it nearly did, would have sent me on
some mission of danger and sacrifice and utilised me as a martyr; the Church
established by law transformed me into an unbeliever and an antagonist.
17.
For as a
child I was mystical and imaginative religious to the very finger-tips, and with
a certain faculty for seeing visions and dreaming dreams. This faculty is not
uncommon with the Keltic races, and makes them seem "superstitious" to more
solidly-built peoples. Thus, on the day of my father's funeral, my mother sat
with vacant eyes and fixed pallid face—the picture comes back to me yet, it so
impressed my childish imagination—following the funeral service, stage after
stage, and suddenly, with the words, "It is all over!" fell back fainting. She
said afterwards that she had followed the hearse, had attended the service, had
walked behind the coffin to the grave. Certain it is that a few weeks later she
determined to go to the Kensal Green Cemetery, where the body of her husband had
been laid, and went thither with a relative; he failed to find the grave, and
while another of the party went in search of an official to identify the spot,
my mother said, "If you will take me to the chapel where the first part of the
service was read, I will find the grave." The idea seemed to her friend, of
course, to be absurd; but he would not cross the newly-made widow, so took her
to the chapel. She looked round, left the chapel door, and followed the path
along which the corpse had been borne till she reached the grave, where she was
quietly standing when the caretaker arrived to point it out. The grave is at
some distance from the chapel, and is not on one of the main roads; it had
nothing on it to mark it, save the wooden peg with the number, and this would be
no help to identification at a distance since all the graves are thus marked,
and at a little way off these pegs are not visible. How she found the grave
remained a mystery in the family, as no one believed her straightforward story
that she had been present at the funeral. With my present knowledge the matter
is simple enough, for I now know that the consciousness can leave the body, take
part in events going on at a distance, and, returning, impress on the physical
brain what it has experienced. The very fact that she asked to be taken to the
chapel is significant, showing that she was picking up a memory of a previous
going from that spot to the grave; she could only find the grave if she started
from the place from which she had started before. Another proof of this
ultra-physical capacity was given a few months later, when her infant son, who
had been pining himself ill for "papa," was lying one night in her arms. On the
next morning she said to her sister: "Alf is going to die." The child had no
definite disease, but was wasting away, and it was argued to her that the
returning spring would restore the health lost during the winter. "No," was her
answer. "He was lying asleep in my arms last night, and William" (her husband)
"came to me and said that he wanted Alf with him, but that I might keep the
other two." In vain she was assured that she had been dreaming, that it was
quite natural that she should dream about her husband, and that her anxiety for
the child had given the dream its shape. Nothing would persuade her that she had
not seen her husband, or that the information he had given her was not true. So
it was no matter of surprise to her when in the following March her arms were
empty, and a waxen form lay lifeless in the baby's cot.
18.
My brother
and I were allowed to see him just before he was placed in his coffin; I can see
him still, so white and beautiful, with a black spot in the middle of the fair,
waxen forehead, and I remember the deadly cold which startled me when I was told
to kiss my little brother. It was the first time that I had touched Death. That
black spot made a curious impression on me, and long afterwards, asking what had
caused it, I was told that at the moment after his death my mother had
passionately kissed the baby brow. Pathetic thought, that the mother's kiss of
farewell should have been marked by the first sign of corruption on the child's
face!
19.
I do not
mention these stories because they are in any fashion remarkable or out of the
way, but only to show that the sensitiveness to impressions other than physical
ones, that was a marked feature in my own childhood, was present also in the
family to which I belonged. For the physical nature is inherited from parents,
and sensitiveness to psychic impressions is a property of the physical body; in
our family, as in so many Irish ones, belief in "ghosts" of all descriptions was
general, and my mother has told me of the banshee that she had heard wailing
when the death-hour of one of the family was near. To me in my childhood, elves
and fairies of all sorts were very real things, and my dolls were as really
children as I was myself a child. Punch and Judy were living entities, and the
tragedy in which they bore part cost me many an agony of tears; to this day I
can remember running away when I heard the squawk of the coming Punch, and
burying my head in the pillows that I might shut out the sound of the blows and
the cry of the ill-used baby. All the objects about me were to me alive, the
flowers that I kissed as much as the kitten I petted, and I used to have a
splendid time "making believe" and living out all sorts of lovely stories among
my treasured and so-called inanimate playthings. But there was a more serious
side to this dreamful fancy when it joined hands with religion.
20.
EARLY
CHILDHOOD.
21.
And now began
my mother's time of struggle and of anxiety. Hitherto, since her marriage, she
had known no money troubles, for her husband was earning a good income; he was
apparently vigorous and well: no thought of anxiety clouded their future. When
he died, he believed that he left his wife and children safe, at least, from
pecuniary distress. It was not so. I know nothing of the details, but the
outcome of all was that nothing was left for the widow and children, save a
trifle of ready money. The resolve to which my mother came was characteristic.
Two of her husband's relatives, Western and Sir William Wood, offered to educate
her son at a good city school, and to start him in commercial life, using their
great city influence to push him forward. But the young lad's father and mother
had talked of a different future for their eldest boy; he was to go to a public
school, and then to the University, and was to enter one of the "learned
professions"—to take orders, the mother wished; to go to the Bar, the father
hoped. On his death-bed there was nothing more earnestly urged by my father than
that Harry should receive the best possible education, and the widow was
resolute to fulfil that last wish. In her eyes, a city school was not "the best
possible education," and the Irish pride rebelled against the idea of her son
not being "a University man." Many were the lectures poured out on the young
widow's head about her "foolish pride," especially by the female members of the
Wood family; and her persistence in her own way caused a considerable alienation
between herself and them. But Western and William, though half-disapproving,
remained her friends, and lent many a helping hand to her in her first difficult
struggles. After much cogitation, she resolved that the boy should be educated
at Harrow, where the fees are comparatively low to lads living in the town, and
that he should go thence to Cambridge or to Oxford, as his tastes should direct.
A bold scheme for a penniless widow, but carried out to the letter; for never
dwelt in a delicate body a more resolute mind and will than that of my dear
mother.
22.
In a few
months' time—during which we lived, poorly enough, in Richmond Terrace, Clapham,
close to her father and mother—to Harrow, then, she betook herself, into
lodgings over a grocer's shop, and set herself to look for a house. This grocer
was a very pompous man, fond of long words, and patronised the young widow
exceedingly, and one day my mother related with much amusement how he had told
her that she was sure to get on if she worked hard. "Look at me!" he said,
swelling visibly with importance; "I was once a poor boy, without a penny of my
own, and now I am a comfortable man, and have my submarine villa to go to every
evening." That "submarine villa" was an object of amusement when we passed it in
our walks for many a long day.
23.
"There is Mr.
—'s submarine villa," some one would say, laughing: and I, too, used to laugh
merrily, because my elders did, though my understanding of the difference
between suburban and submarine was on a par with that of the honest grocer.
24.
My mother had
fortunately found a boy, whose parents were glad to place him in her charge, of
about the age of her own son, to educate with him; and by this means she was
able to pay for a tutor, to prepare the two boys for school. The tutor had a
cork leg, which was a source of serious trouble to me, for it stuck out straight
behind when we knelt down to family prayers—conduct which struck me as
irreverent and unbecoming, but which I always felt a desire to imitate. After
about a year my mother found a house which she thought would suit her scheme,
namely, to obtain permission from Dr. Vaughan, the then head-master of Harrow,
to take some boys into her house, and so gain means of education for her own
son. Dr. Vaughan, who must have been won by the gentle, strong, little woman,
from that time forth became her earnest friend and helper; and to the counsel
and active assistance both of himself and of his wife, was due much of the
success that crowned her toil. He made only one condition in granting the
permission she asked, and that was, that she should also have in her house one
of the masters of the school, so that the boys should not suffer from the want
of a house-tutor. This condition, of course, she readily accepted, and the
arrangement lasted for ten years, until after her son had left school for
Cambridge.
25.
The house she
took is now, I am sorry to say, pulled down, and replaced by a hideous red-brick
structure. It was very old and rambling, rose-covered in front, ivy-covered
behind; it stood on the top of Harrow Hill, between the church and the school,
and had once been the vicarage of the parish, but the vicar had left it because
it was so far removed from the part of the village where all his work lay. The
drawing-room opened by an old-fashioned half-window, half-door—which proved a
constant source of grief to me, for whenever I had on a new frock I always tore
it on the bolt as I flew through—into a large garden which sloped down one side
of the hill, and was filled with the most delightful old trees, fir and laurel,
may, mulberry, hazel, apple, pear, and damson, not to mention currant and
gooseberry bushes innumerable, and large strawberry beds spreading down the
sunny slopes. There was not a tree there that I did not climb, and one, a
widespreading Portugal laurel, was my private country house. I had there my
bedroom and my sitting-rooms, my study, and my larder. The larder was supplied
by the fruit-trees, from which I was free to pick as I would, and in the study I
would sit for hours with some favourite book—Milton's "Paradise Lost" the chief
favourite of all. The birds must often have felt startled, when from the small
swinging form perching on a branch, came out in childish tones the "Thrones,
dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers," of Milton's stately and sonorous
verse. I liked to personify Satan, and to declaim the grand speeches of the
hero-rebel, and many a happy hour did I pass in Milton's heaven and hell, with
for companions Satan and "the Son," Gabriel and Abdiel. Then there was a terrace
running by the side of the churchyard, always dry in the wettest weather, and
bordered by an old wooden fence, over which clambered roses of every shade;
never was such a garden for roses as that of the Old Vicarage. At the end of the
terrace was a little summer-house, and in this a trap-door in the fence, which
swung open and displayed one of the fairest views in England. Sheer from your
feet downwards went the hill, and then far below stretched the wooded country
till your eye reached the towers of Windsor Castle, far away on the horizon. It
was the view at which Byron was never tired of gazing, as he lay on the flat
tombstone close by—Byron's tomb, as it is still called—of which he wrote:—
(1)
"Again I
behold where for hours I have pondered,
As reclining, at eve, on yon tombstone I lay,
Or round the steep brow of the churchyard I wandered,
To catch the last gleam of the sun's setting ray."
26.
Reader mine,
if ever you go to Harrow, ask permission to enter the old garden, and try the
effect of that sudden burst of beauty, as you swing back the small trap-door at
the terrace end.
27.
Into this
house we moved on my eighth birthday, and for eleven years it was "home" to me,
left always with regret, returned to always with joy.
28.
Almost
immediately afterwards I left my mother for the first time; for one day,
visiting a family who lived close by, I found a stranger sitting in the
drawing-room, a lame lady with a strong face, which softened marvellously as she
smiled at the child who came dancing in; she called me to her presently, and
took me on her lap and talked to me, and on the following day our friend came to
see my mother, to ask if she would let me go away and be educated with this
lady's niece, coming home for the holidays regularly, but leaving my education
in her hands. At first my mother would not hear of it, for she and I scarcely
ever left each other; my love for her was an idolatry, hers for me a devotion.
(A foolish little story, about which I was unmercifully teased for years, marked
that absolute idolatry of her, which has not yet faded from my heart. In
tenderest rallying one day of the child who trotted after her everywhere,
content to sit, or stand, or wait, if only she might touch hand or dress of
"mamma," she said: "Little one" (the name by which she always called me), "if
you cling to mamma in this way, I must really get a string and tie you to my
apron, and how will you like that?" "O mamma, darling," came the fervent answer,
"do let it be in a knot." And, indeed, the tie of love between us was so tightly
knotted that nothing ever loosened it till the sword of Death cut that which
pain and trouble never availed to slacken in the slightest degree.) But it was
urged upon her that the advantages of education offered were such as no money
could purchase for me; that it would be a disadvantage for me to grow up in a
houseful of boys—and, in truth, I was as good a cricketer and climber as the
best of them—that my mother would soon be obliged to send me to school, unless
she accepted an offer which gave me every advantage of school without its
disadvantages. At last she yielded, and it was decided that Miss Marryat, on
returning home, should take me with her.
29.
Miss
Marryat—the favourite sister of Captain Marryat, the famous novelist—was a
maiden lady of large means. She had nursed her brother through the illness that
ended in his death, and had been living with her mother at Wimbledon Park. On
her mother's death she looked round for work which would make her useful in the
world, and finding that one of her brothers had a large family of girls, she
offered to take charge of one of them, and to educate her thoroughly. Chancing
to come to Harrow, my good fortune threw me in her way, and she took a fancy to
me and thought she would like to teach two little girls rather than one. Hence
her offer to my mother.
30.
Miss Marryat
had a perfect genius for teaching, and took in it the greatest delight. From
time to time she added another child to our party, sometimes a boy, sometimes a
girl. At first, with Amy Marryat and myself, there was a little boy, Walter
Powys, son of a clergyman with a large family, and him she trained for some
years, and then sent him on to school admirably prepared. She chose "her
children"—as she loved to call us—in very definite fashion. Each must be gently
born and gently trained, but in such position that the education freely given
should be a relief and aid to a slender parental purse. It was her delight to
seek out and aid those on whom poverty presses most heavily, when the need for
education for the children weighs on the proud and the poor. "Auntie" we all
called her, for she thought "Miss Marryat" seemed too cold and stiff. She taught
us everything herself except music, and for this she had a master, practising us
in composition, in recitation, in reading aloud English and French, and later,
German, devoting herself to training us in the soundest, most thorough fashion.
No words of mine can tell how much I owe her, not only of knowledge, but of that
love of knowledge which has remained with me ever since as a constant spur to
study.
31.
Her method of
teaching may be of interest to some, who desire to train children with least
pain, and the most enjoyment to the little ones themselves. First, we never used
a spelling-book—that torment of the small child—nor an English grammar. But we
wrote letters, telling of the things we had seen in our walks, or told again
some story we had read; these childish compositions she would read over with us,
correcting all faults of spelling, of grammar, of style, of cadence; a clumsy
sentence would be read aloud, that we might hear how unmusical it sounded, an
error in observation or expression pointed out. Then, as the letters recorded
what we had seen the day before, the faculty of observation was drawn out and
trained. "Oh, dear! I have nothing to say!" would come from a small child,
hanging over a slate. "Did you not go out for a walk yesterday?" Auntie would
question. "Yes," would be sighed out; "but there's nothing to say about it."
"Nothing to say! And you walked in the lanes for an hour and saw nothing, little
No-eyes? You must use your eyes better to-day." Then there was a very favourite
"lesson," which proved an excellent way of teaching spelling. We used to write
out lists of all the words we could think of which sounded the same but were
differently spelt. Thus: "key, quay," "knight, night," and so on, and great was
the glory of the child who found the largest number. Our French lessons—as the
German later—included reading from the very first. On the day on which we began
German we began reading Schiller's "Wilhelm Tell," and the verbs given to us to
copy out were those that had occurred in the reading. We learned much by heart,
but always things that in themselves were worthy to be learned. We were never
given the dry questions and answers which lazy teachers so much affect. We were
taught history by one reading aloud while the others worked—the boys as well as
the girls learning the use of the needle. "It's like a girl to sew," said a
little fellow, indignantly, one day. "It is like a baby to have to run after a
girl if you want a button sewn on," quoth Auntie. Geography was learned by
painting skeleton maps—an exercise much delighted in by small fingers—and by
putting together puzzle maps, in which countries in the map of a continent, or
counties in the map of a country, were always cut out in their proper shapes. I
liked big empires in those days; there was a solid satisfaction in putting down
Russia, and seeing what a large part of the map was filled up thereby.
32.
The only
grammar that we ever learned as grammar was the Latin, and that not until
composition had made us familiar with the use of the rules therein given. Auntie
had a great horror of children learning by rote things they did not understand,
and then fancying they knew them. "What do you mean by that expression, Annie?"
she would ask me. After feeble attempts to explain, I would answer: "Indeed,
Auntie, I know in my own head, but I can't explain." "Then, indeed, Annie, you
do not know in your own head, or you could explain, so that I might know in my
own head." And so a healthy habit was fostered of clearness of thought and of
expression. The Latin grammar was used because it was more perfect than the
modern grammars, and served as a solid foundation for modern languages.
33.
Miss Marryat
took a beautiful place, Fern Hill, near Charmouth, in Dorsetshire, on the
borders of
34.
Daily, when
our lessons were over, we had plenty of fun; long walks and rides, rides on a
lovely pony, who found small children most amusing, and on which the coachman
taught us to stick firmly, whatever his eccentricities of the moment; delightful
all-day picnics in the lovely country round Charmouth, Auntie our merriest
playfellow. Never was a healthier home, physically and mentally, made for young
things than in that quiet village. And then the delight of the holidays! The
pride of my mother at the good report of her darling's progress, and the renewal
of acquaintance with every nook and corner in the dear old house and garden.
35.
The dreamy
tendency in the child, that on its worldly side is fancy, imagination, on its
religious side is the germ of mysticism, and I believe it to be far more common
than many people think. But the remorseless materialism of the day—not the
philosophic materialism of the few, but the religious materialism of the
many—crushes out all the delicate buddings forth of the childish thought, and
bandages the eyes that might otherwise see. At first the child does not
distinguish between what it "sees" and what it "fancies"; the one is as real, as
objective, to it as the other, and it will talk to and play with its
dream-comrades as merrily as with children like itself. As a child, I myself
very much preferred the former, and never knew what it was to be lonely. But
clumsy grown-ups come along and tramp right through the dream-garden, and crush
the dream-flowers, and push the dream-children aside, and then say, in their
loud, harsh voices—not soft and singable like the dream-voices—"You must not
tell such naughty stories, Miss Annie; you give me the shivers, and your mamma
will be very vexed with you." But this tendency in me was too strong to be
stifled, and it found its food in the fairy tales I loved, and in the religious
allegories that I found yet more entrancing. How or when I learned to read, I do
not know, for I cannot remember the time when a book was not a delight. At five
years of age I must have read easily, for I remember being often unswathed from
a delightful curtain, in which I used to roll myself with a book, and told to
"go and play," while I was still a five-years'-old dot. And I had a habit of
losing myself so completely in the book that my name might be called in the room
where I was, and I never hear it, so that I used to be blamed for wilfully
hiding myself, when I had simply been away in fairyland, or lying trembling
beneath some friendly cabbage-leaf as a giant went by.
36.
I was between
seven and eight years of age when I first came across some children's allegories
of a religious kind, and a very little later came "Pilgrim's Progress," and
37.
From the age
of eight my education accented the religious side of my character. Under Miss
Marryat's training my religious feeling received a strongly Evangelical bent,
but it was a subject of some distress to me that I could never look back to an
hour of "conversion"; when others gave their experiences, and spoke of the
sudden change they had felt, I used to be sadly conscious that no such change
had occurred in me, and I felt that my dreamy longings were very poor things
compared with the vigorous "sense of sin" spoken of by the preachers, and used
dolefully to wonder if I were "saved." Then I had an uneasy sense that I was
often praised for my piety when emulation and vanity were more to the front than
religion; as when I learned by heart the Epistle of James, far more to
distinguish myself for my good memory than from any love of the text itself; the
sonorous cadences of many parts of the Old and New Testaments pleased my ear,
and I took a dreamy pleasure in repeating them aloud, just as I would recite for
my own amusement hundreds of lines of Milton's "Paradise Lost," as I sat
swinging on some branch of a tree, lying back often on some swaying bough and
gazing into the unfathomable blue of the sky, till I lost myself in an ecstasy
of sound and colour, half chanting the melodious sentences and peopling all the
blue with misty forms. This facility of learning by heart, and the habit of
dreamy recitation, made me very familiar with the Bible and very apt with its
phrases. This stood me in good stead at the prayer-meetings dear to the
Evangelical, in which we all took part; in turn we were called on to pray
aloud—a terrible ordeal to me, for I was painfully shy when attention was called
to me; I used to suffer agonies while I waited for the dreaded words, "Now,
Annie dear, will you speak to our Lord." But when my trembling lips had forced
themselves into speech, all the nervousness used to vanish and I was swept away
by an enthusiasm that readily clothed itself in balanced sentences, and alack!
at the end, I too often hoped that God and Auntie had noticed that I prayed very
nicely—a vanity certainly not intended to be fostered by the pious exercise. On
the whole, the somewhat Calvinistic teaching tended, I think, to make me a
little morbid, especially as I always fretted silently after my mother. I
remember she was surprised on one of my home-comings, when Miss Marryat noted
"cheerfulness" as a want in my character, for at home I was ever the blithest of
children, despite my love of solitude; but away, there was always an aching for
home, and the stern religion cast somewhat of a shadow over me, though,
strangely enough, hell never came into my dreamings except in the interesting
shape it took in "Paradise Lost." After reading that, the devil was to me no
horned and hoofed horror, but the beautiful shadowed archangel, and I always
hoped that Jesus, my ideal Prince, would save him in the end. The things that
really frightened me were vague, misty presences that I felt were near, but
could not see; they were so real that I knew just where they were in the room,
and the peculiar terror they excited lay largely in the feeling that I was just
going to see them. If by chance I came across a ghost story it haunted me for
months, for I saw whatever unpleasant spectre was described; and there was one
horrid old woman in a tale by Sir Walter Scott, who glided up to the foot of
your bed and sprang on it in some eerie fashion and glared at you, and who made
my going to bed a terror to me for many weeks. I can still recall the feeling so
vividly that it almost frightens me now!
38.
GIRLHOOD.
39.
In the spring
of 1861 Miss Marryat announced her intention of going abroad, and asked my dear
mother to let me accompany her. A little nephew whom she had adopted was
suffering from cataract, and she desired to place him under the care of the
famous Düsseldorf oculist. Amy Marryat had been recalled home soon after the
death of her mother, who had died in giving birth to the child adopted by Miss
Marryat, and named at her desire after her favourite brother Frederick (Captain
Marryat). Her place had been taken by a girl a few months older than myself,
Emma Mann, one of the daughters of a clergyman, who had married Miss Stanley,
closely related, indeed, if I remember rightly, a sister of the Miss Mary
Stanley who did such noble work in nursing in the Crimea.
40.
For some
months we had been diligently studying German, for Miss Marryat thought it wise
that we should know a language fairly well before we visited the country of
which it was the native tongue. We had been trained also to talk French daily
during dinner, so we were not quite "helpless foreigners" when we steamed away
from St. Catherine's Docks, and found ourselves on the following day in Antwerp,
amid what seemed to us a very Babel of conflicting tongues. Alas for our
carefully spoken French, articulated laboriously! We were lost in that swirl of
disputing luggage-porters, and could not understand a word! But Miss Marryat was
quite equal to the occasion, being by no means new to travelling, and her French
stood the test triumphantly, and steered us safely to a hotel. On the morrow we
started again through Aix-la-Chapelle to
41.
Here was a
fine source of amusement. They would make their horses caracole on the gravel in
front of our window; they would be just starting for their ride as we went for
walk or drive, and would salute us with doffed hat and low bow; they would
waylay us on our way downstairs with demure "Good morning"; they would go to
church and post themselves so that they could survey our pew, and Lord
Charles—who possessed the power of moving at will the whole skin of the
scalp—would wriggle his hair up and down till we were choking with laughter, to
our own imminent risk. After a month of this Auntie was literally driven out of
the pretty château, and took refuge in a girls' school, much to our disgust; but
still she was not allowed to be at rest. Mischievous students would pursue us
wherever we went; sentimental Germans, with gashed cheeks, would whisper
complimentary phrases as we passed; mere boyish nonsense of most harmless kind,
but the rather stern English lady thought it "not proper," and after three
months of Bonn we were sent home for the holidays, somewhat in disgrace. But we
had some lovely excursions during those months; such clambering up mountains,
such rows on the swift-flowing
42.
A couple of
months later we rejoined Miss Marryat in
43.
In the spring
of 1862 it chanced that the Bishop of Ohio visited
44.
The summer of
1862 was spent with Miss Marryat at Sidmouth, and, wise woman that she was, she
now carefully directed our studies with a view to our coming enfranchisement
from the "schoolroom." More and more were we trained to work alone; our
leading-strings were slackened, so that we never felt them save when we
blundered; and I remember that when I once complained, in loving fashion, that
she was "teaching me so little," she told me that I was getting old enough to be
trusted to work by myself, and that I must not expect to "have Auntie for a
crutch all through life." And I venture to say that this gentle withdrawal of
constant supervision and teaching was one of the wisest and kindest things that
this noble-hearted woman ever did for us. It is the usual custom to keep girls
in the schoolroom until they "come out"; then, suddenly, they are left to their
own devices, and, bewildered by their unaccustomed freedom, they waste time that
might be priceless for their intellectual growth. Lately, the opening of
universities to women has removed this danger for the more ambitious; but at the
time of which I am writing no one dreamed of the changes soon to be made in the
direction of the "higher education of women."
45.
During the
winter of 1862-63 Miss Marryat was in
46.
Thus set free
from the schoolroom at 16˝, an only daughter, I could do with my time as I
would, save for the couple of hours a day given to music, for the satisfaction
of my mother. From then till I became engaged, just before I was 19, my life
flowed on smoothly, one current visible to all and dancing in the sunlight, the
other running underground, but full and deep and strong. As regards my outer
life, no girl had a brighter, happier life than mine; studying all the mornings
and most of the afternoons in my own way, and spending the latter part of the
day in games and walks and rides—varied with parties at which I was one of the
merriest of guests. I practised archery so zealously that I carried up
triumphantly as prize for the best score the first ring I ever possessed, while
croquet found me a most eager devotee. My darling mother certainly "spoiled" me,
so far as were concerned all the small roughnesses of life. She never allowed a
trouble of any kind to touch me, and cared only that all worries should fall on
her, all joys on me. I know now what I never dreamed then, that her life was one
of serious anxiety. The heavy burden of my brother's school and college life
pressed on her constantly, and her need of money was often serious. A lawyer
whom she trusted absolutely cheated her systematically, using for his own
purposes the remittances she made for payment of liabilities, thus keeping upon
her a constant drain. Yet for me all that was wanted was ever there. Was it a
ball to which we were going? I need never think of what I would wear till the
time for dressing arrived, and there laid out ready for me was all I wanted,
every detail complete from top to toe. No hand but hers must dress my hair,
which, loosed, fell in dense curly masses nearly to my knees; no hand but hers
must fasten dress and deck with flowers, and if I sometimes would coaxingly ask
if I might not help by sewing in laces, or by doing some trifle in aid, she
would kiss me and bid me run to my books or my play, telling me that her only
pleasure in life was caring for her "treasure." Alas! how lightly we take the
self-denying labour that makes life so easy, ere yet we have known what life
means when the protecting motherwing is withdrawn. So guarded and shielded had
been my childhood and youth from every touch of pain and anxiety that love could
bear for me, that I never dreamed that life might be a heavy burden, save as I
saw it in the poor I was sent to help; all the joy of those happy years I took,
not ungratefully I hope, but certainly with as glad unconsciousness of anything
rare in it as I took the sunlight. Passionate love, indeed, I gave to my
darling, but I never knew all I owed her till I passed out of her tender
guardianship, till I left my mother's home. Is such training wise? I am not
sure. It makes the ordinary roughnesses of life come with so stunning a shock,
when one goes out into the world, that one is apt to question whether some
earlier initiation into life's sterner mysteries would not be wiser for the
young. Yet it is a fair thing to have that joyous youth to look back upon, and
at least it is a treasury of memory that no thief can steal in the struggles of
later life. "Sunshine" they called me in those bright days of merry play and
earnest study. But that study showed the bent of my thought and linked itself to
the hidden life; for the Fathers of the early Christian Church now became my
chief companions, and I pored over the Shepherd of Hernias, the Epistles of
Polycarp, Barnabas, Ignatius, and Clement, the commentaries of Chrysostom, the
confessions of Augustine. With these I studied the writings of Pusey, Liddon,
and Keble, with many another smaller light, joying in the great conception of a
Catholic Church, lasting through the centuries, built on the foundations of
apostles and of martyrs, stretching from the days of Christ Himself down to our
own—"One Lord, one Faith one Baptism," and I myself a child of that Holy Church.
The hidden life grew stronger, constantly fed by these streams of study; weekly
communion became the centre round which my devotional life revolved, with its
ecstatic meditation, its growing intensity of conscious contact with the Divine;
I fasted, according to the ordinances of the Church; occasionally flagellated
myself to see if I could bear physical pain, should I be fortunate enough ever
to tread the pathway trodden by the saints; and ever the Christ was the figure
round which clustered all my hopes and longings, till I often felt that the very
passion of, my devotion would draw Him down from His throne in heaven, present
visibly in form as I felt Him invisibly in spirit. To serve Him through His
Church became more and more a definite ideal in my life, and my thoughts began
to turn towards some kind of "religious life," in which I might prove my love by
sacrifice and turn my passionate gratitude into active service.
47.
Looking back
to-day over my life, I see that its keynote—through all the blunders, and the
blind mistakes, and clumsy follies—has been this longing for sacrifice to
something felt as greater than the self. It has been so strong and so persistent
that I recognise it now as a tendency brought over from a previous life and
dominating the present one; and this is shown by the fact that to follow it is
not the act of a deliberate and conscious will, forcing self into submission and
giving up with pain something the heart desires, but the following it is a
joyous springing forward along the easiest path, the "sacrifice" being the
supremely attractive thing, not to make which would be to deny the deepest
longings of the soul, and to feel oneself polluted and dishonoured. And it is
here that the misjudgment comes in of many generous hearts who have spoken
sometimes lately so strongly in my praise. For the efforts to serve have not
been painful acts of self-denial, but the yielding to an overmastering desire.
We do not praise the mother who, impelled by her protecting love, feeds her
crying infant and stills its wailings at her breast; rather should we blame her
if she turned aside from its weeping to play with some toy. And so with all
those whose ears are opened to the wailings of the great orphan Humanity; they
are less to be praised for helping than they would be to be blamed if they stood
aside. I now know that it is those wailings that have stirred my heart through
life, and that I brought with me the ears open to hear them from previous lives
of service paid to men. It was those lives that drew for the child the alluring
pictures of martyrdom, breathed into the girl the passion of devotion, sent the
woman out to face scoff and odium, and drove her finally into the Theosophy that
rationalises sacrifice, while opening up possibilities of service beside which
all other hopes grow pale.
