Martin Farquhar Tupper - My Life as an Author

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I remember also in my nursery days to have heard this curious story of a
dream. My father, when a young man, was a student at Guy's Hospital,
from which school of medicine he went to Yarmouth to attend the wounded
after the battle of Copenhagen. He was on one occasion leaving Guernsey
for Southampton in the clumsy seagoing smack of those days, when, on the
night before embarking, he dreamt that on his way to the harbour he
crossed the churchyard and fell into an open grave. Telling this to his
parents at "The Pollet," they would not let him go, with a sort of
superstitious wisdom; for, strangely enough, the smack was seized on its
voyage by a privateer, and all the crew and passengers were
consigned--for twelve years--to a French prison! I have heard my father
tell this tale, and noted early how true was Dr. Watts' awkward line,
"On little things what great depend." I might say more about warnings in
dreams and other somnolencies, whereof we all have experiences. For
instance, my "Dream of Ambition" in Proverbial Philosophy was a real
one. And this reminds me now of another like sort of spiritual monition
alluded to in my Proverbial Essay on "Truth in Things False," which has
several times occurred to myself, as this, for example: Years ago, in
Devonshire, for the first time, I was on the top of a coach passing
through a town--I think it was Crediton--and I had the strange feeling
that I had seen all this before: now, we changed horses just on this
side of a cross street, and I resolved within myself to test the truth
of the place being new to me or not, by prophesying what I should see
right and left as we passed; to my consternation it was all as I had
foreseen,--a market-place with the usual incidents. Now, if reasonably
asked how to account for this (and most of us have felt the like), I
reply that possibly in an elevated state of health and spirits the soul
may outrun the body, and literally foresee coming events both real and
ideal. But we must leave this to the Psychical Society for a judgment
upon the famous Horatian philosophy of "more things in heaven and
earth," &c.

* * * * *

On Mr. Galton's topic of hereditary talent I have little to report as to
myself. Neither father nor mother had any leanings either towards verse
or prose; but my mother was an excellent pianiste and a fair landscape
painter both in oils and water-colour; also she drew and printed on
stone, and otherwise showed that she came of an artistic family. As to
my father's surroundings, his brother Peter, a consul-general in Spain,
wrote a tragedy called Pelayo; and I possess half-a-dozen French songs,
labelled by my father "in my late dear father's handwriting," but
whether or not original, I cannot tell. As a Guernseyman, he might well
be as much French as English. They seem to me clever and worthy of
Beranger, though long before him: possibly they are my grandsire's. A
very fair judge of French poetry, and himself a good Norman poet, Mr.
John Sullivan of Jersey writes and tells me that the songs are
excellent, and that he remembers them to have been popularly sung when
he was a boy.

About the matter of hereditary bias itself, we know that as with animals
so with men, "fortes creantur fortibus, et bonis;" this so far as bodies
are concerned; but surely spirits are more individual, as innumerable
instances prove, where children do not take after their parents. If,
however, I may mention my own small experience of this matter, literary
talent, or at all events authorship, _is_ hereditary, especially in
these days of that general epidemic, the "cacoethes scribendi."

* * * * *

I wrote this paper following originally for an American publication; and
as I cannot improve upon it, and it has never been printed in England, I
produce it here in its integrity.

A true and genuine record of what English schools of the highest class
were more than sixty-five years ago cannot fail to have much to interest
the present generation on both sides of the Atlantic; if only because we
may now indulge in the self-complacency of being everyway wiser, better,
and happier than our recent forebears. And in setting myself to write
these early revelations, I wish at once to state that, although at times
necessarily naming names (for the too frequent use of dashes and
asterisks must otherwise destroy the verisimilitude of plain
truth-telling), I desire to say nothing against or for either the dead
or the living beyond their just deserts, and I protest against any
charge of unreasonable want of charity as to my whilom "schools and
schoolmasters." It is true that sometimes I loved them not, neither can
I in general respect their memory; but the causes of such a feeling on
my part shall be made manifest anon, and I am sure that modern parents
and guardians will rejoice that much of my childhood's hard experience
has not been altogether that of their own boys.

I was sent to school much too soon, at the early age of seven, having
previously had for my home tutor a well-remembered day-teacher in
"little Latin and less Greek" of the name of Swallow, whom I thought a
wit and a poet in those days because one morning he produced as an
epitaph on himself the following effusion:

"Beneath this stone a Swallow lies,
No one laughs and no one cries;
Where he is gone or how he fares
No one knows and no one cares."

At this time of day I suspect this epigram not to be quite original, but
it served to give me for the nonce a high opinion of the pundit who read
with me Cornelius Nepos and Caesar and some portions of that hopeless
grammar, the Eton Greek, in the midst of his hard-breathing consumption
of perpetual sandwiches and beer.

The first school chosen for me (though expensive, there could not have
been a worse one) was a large mixed establishment for boys of all ages,
from infancy to early manhood, belonging to one Rev. Dr. Morris of
Egglesfield House, Brentford Butts, which I now judge to have been
conducted solely with a view to the proprietor's pocket, without
reference to the morals, happiness, or education of the pupils committed
to his care. All I care to remember of this false priest (and there were
many such of old, whatever may be the case now) are his cruel
punishments, which passed for discipline, his careful cringing to
parents, and his careless indifference towards their children, and in
brief his total unfitness for the twin duties of pastor and teacher. A
large private school of mixed ages and classes is perilously liable to
infection from licentious youths left to themselves and their evil
propensities, and I can feelingly recollect how miserable for nearly a
year was that poor little helpless innocent of seven under the
unrestricted tyranny of one Cooke (in after years a life convict for
crime) who did all he could to pollute the infant mind of the little fag
delivered over to his cruelty. Cowper's Tirocinium well expresses the
situation:--

"Would you your son should be a sot or dunce,
Lascivious, headstrong, or all these at once,
Train him in public with a mob of boys,
Childish in mischief only and in noise,
Else of a mannish growth and, five in ten,
For infidelity and lewdness, men."

My next school was more of a success; for Eagle House, Brookgreen, where
I was from eight to eleven, had for its owner and headmaster a most
worthy and excellent layman, Joseph Railton. Mr. Railton was gentle,
though gigantic, fairly learned, just and kindly. His school produced,
amongst others eminent, the famous naval author Kingston, well known
from cabin-boy to admiral; there was also Lord Paulet, some others of
noble birth, and the two Middletons, nick-named Yankees, whom years
after I visited at their ruined mansion in South Carolina after the
Confederate War. Through the personal good influence of honest "Old
Joe," and his middle-aged housekeeper, Mrs. Jones, our whole
well-ordered company of perhaps a hundred boys lived and learned, worked
and played purely, and happily together: so great a social benefactor
may a good school chieftain be.

I have little to regret in my Brook Green recollections; the annual fair
was memorable with Richardson's show and Gingel's conjuring, and the
walks for mild cricketing at Shepherd's Bush, and the occasional Sundays
at home; and how pleasant to a schoolboy was the generous visitor who
tipped him, a good action never forgotten; and the garden with its
flowering tulip-tree, and the syringas and rose-trees jewelled with the
much-prized emerald May-bugs; for the whole garden was liberally thrown
open to us beyond the gravelled playground; all being now given over to
monks and nuns. Then I recollect how a rarely-dark annular eclipse of
the sun convulsed the whole school, bringing smoked glass to a high
premium; and there was a notable boy's library of amusing travels and
stories, all eagerly devoured; and old Phulax the house-dog, and good
Mr. Whitmore an usher, who gave a certain small boy a diamond
prayer-book, greatly prized then, though long since lost, and suitably
inscribed for him "_Parvum parva decent_;" and the speech days, wherein
the same small boy always signalised himself, to the general
astonishment, for he was usually a stammerer, owing much to the early
worries of Brentford; all these are agreeable reminiscences.

My next school at eleven was Charterhouse, or as my schoolfellow
Thackeray was wont to style it, Slaughterhouse, no doubt from the cruel
tyranny of another educational D.D., the Rev. Dr. Russell. For this man
and the school he so despotically drilled into passive servility and
pedantic scholarship, I have less than no reverence, for he worked so
upon an over-sensitive nature to force a boy beyond his powers, as to
fix for many years the infirmity of stammering, which was my affliction
until past middle life. As for tuition, it must all have grown of itself
by dint of private hard grinding with dictionaries and grammars, for the
exercises, themes, and other lessons were notoriously difficult, and
those before me would be inextricable puzzles now; however, we had to do
them, and we did them, unhelped by any teacher but our own industry. As
for the masters in school, two more ignorant old parsons than Chapman
and "Bob Watki" could not readily be found; and though the four others,
Lloyd, Dickens, Irvine, and Penny were somewhat more intelligent, still
all six in the lower school were occasionally summoned to a "concio," if
the interpretation of any ordinary passage in Homer or Virgil or Horace
was haply in dispute between a monitor and his class. In the upper
school the single really excellent teacher and good clergyman, Edward
Churton, had but one fault, a meek subserviency to the tyrannic Russell,
who domineered over all to our universal terror; and I remember kindly
Mr. Churton once affected to tears at the cruelty of his chief. What
should we think nowadays of an irate schoolmaster smashing a child's
head between two books in his shoulder-of-mutton hands till the nose
bled, as I once saw? Or, in these milder times when your burglar or
garotter is visited with a brief whipping, what shall we judge of the
wisdom or equity of some slight fault of idleness or ignorance being
visited with the Reverend Doctor's terrible sentence, "Allen, three
rods, eighteen, and most severely"?

Let me comment on this line, one of a sharp satire by a boy named
Barnes, long since an Indian Judge and I suppose translated Elsewhere.
Allen was head-gown-boy, and so chief executioner, the three rods being
some five-feet bunches of birch armed with buds as sharp as thorns,
renewed after six strokes for fresh excoriation! sometimes the
exhibition was in medio, a public terror to evil-doers, or doers of
nothing, but usually in a sort of side chapel to the lower school where
the whipping-block stood. Who could tolerate such things now? and who
can wonder that I, as a lad, proclaimed that I would rather die than be
flogged, for I had resolved in that event to commit justifiable homicide
on my flogger? I do not mean Allen, who became Head of Dulwich College,
and with whom I have since dined, annually as donor of a picture there,
but Russell, concerning whom I vowed that if ever he was made a Bishop
(happily he wasn't) I would desert the Church of England; as yet I have
not, albeit it has lately become so papalised as to be little worth an
honest Protestant's adherence.

As to the exclusively classic education in my young days, to the
resolute neglect of all other languages and sciences, I for myself have
from youth upwards always protested against it as mainly waste of time
and of very little service in the battle of life. For proof of this,
before I was eighteen, I wrote that essay on Education to be seen in my
first series of Proverbial Philosophy, which long years after the
celebrated Dr. Binney of the Weigh-house in Thames Street issued with my
leave as a tractate useful to the present generation. And while there
was so much fuss made as to the criminality of a false quantity in
Greek, or a deficient acquaintance with those awkward verbs in "Mi," or
above all a false concord (every one of which derelictions in duty
involved severe punishment), let us remember that all this time
Holywell Street was suffered to infect Charterhouse with its poison (I
speak of long ago, before Lord Campbell's wholesome Act), and that our
clerical tutors and governors professionally recognised no sort of sins
or shortcomings but those committed in class! They practically ignored
everything out of school, much as a captain knows nothing of his company
off duty. It was the idle system of boys set to govern boys, that the
masters might have no damage. I think the system was called Lancastrian.

One very noticeable trait in the parson-schoolmasters of those old days
(and perhaps it still survives) was the subserviency to rank and wealth
towards any pupils likely to give them livings, whereof more anon; at
present, an appropriate instance occurs to me. I was in my thirteenth
year monitor of the playground, when one Dillon, a scion of a titled
family, hunted and killed a stray dog there, and much to their credit
for humanity a number of other boys hunted and pelted _him_ into a dry
ditch or vallum, dug for the leaping-pole under a Captain Clias who
taught us athletics. I was technically responsible for this open insult
offered to Hibernian nobility, however well disposed to look another way
and let lynch-law take its course. Accordingly, the Doctor had me up for
punishment, and he inflicted an almost impossible imposition, Book
Epsilon of the Iliad (the longest of all) to be translated word for
word, English and Greek, and to be given to him in MS. within a month
(it would have been work for a year), that or expulsion. Had Mr. Dillon
been a plebeian, no notice would have been taken of the matter, but he
was an honourable, so Russell must avenge his righteous punishment.
However, the result of this outrageous set-task was curious and worthy
of this its first and only record. All the seventy boys in Irvine's
house and others elsewhere, volunteered to do the whole imposition for
me, and within a week hundreds of pages closely written with Greek and
Latin, were sewn together, making a large quarto pamphlet, which was
duly handed by me to the wondering Doctor; who had, however, too much
shrewdness to care to inquire closely as to this popular outburst of a
general indignation, so he said nothing more about it.

For other playground reminiscences: I saw, even in those tame times for
cricket when overhand bowling was illegal, and the fierce artillery of a
Spofforth impossible, a poor lad killed in the field, one Honourable
Henry Howard; he was taken to the pump for recovery, as from a swoon,
but the ball had struck him behind the ear, stone-dead. Again as to that
pump; it was sometimes maliciously used for sousing unfortunate
day-boys, who were allowed two minutes law out of school to enable them
to escape pursuit after lessons, most unjustly, and injuriously, seeing
that old Sutton founded his Charterhouse mainly for day-boys (John Leech
was one in my time) and for pensioners ("old Cods") whereof Colonel
Newcome of Thackeray fame, was another; but both of these charity
classes were utterly despised and ignored by the reverend brigands who
kept all the loaves and fishes for themselves.

One remarkable playground experience was the fact that it helped to
develop in me antiquarian inclinations, and my own discovered
hunting-ground for Roman numismatics in the south of England, long
afterwards expanded in "Farley Heath" near Albury. At Charterhouse
there was a great slope or semi-mound which had in old times been
utilised as a wholesale grave for the victims of plague and other
epidemics. It strikes me now as most perilous, but we boys used to dig
and scratch among bones and other _debris_ for on occasional coin or
lead token, whereof I found several; it is only a wonder that we did not
unearth pestilence, but mould is fortunately very antiseptic. Another
playground peculiarity was that after the hoop season, usually driven in
duplicate or triplicate, the hoops were "stored" or "shied" into the
branching elms, from which they were again brought down by hockey-sticks
flung at them; a great boon to the smaller boys who thus gratuitously
became possessed of valuable properties. And for all else, there were
fights behind the school, in those pugilistic days scientifically
conducted with seconds and bottleholders, and some "claret" drawn, and
other like fashionable brutalities; also in its season came football,
but not quite so fiercely fought as it is now; and there was Mr.
Rackwitz, the man of sweets and pastries at the corner; and another sort
of rackets in the tennis court; and for another sort of court there was
then extant a bit of ruinous Gothic in old Rutland Court, a ghostly
entrance from Charterhouse Square, some thought haunted, and long since
cleared away.

And now crossing the Square we come to No. 41, the Queen Anne fashioned
mansion where Mr. Andrew Irvine (another Reverend Master, who like all
the rest, except Churton, almost never "did duty," and when he did
manifestly could neither read, preach, not pray) had a houseful of
pupils, whereof the writer was one. That long room is full of ancient
memories of past and gone Carthusians, though it is now humiliated into
a local charity school. I remember some humorous scenes there, chiefly
owing to the master's notorious niggardliness. Andrew had some Gruyere
cheese, easily accessible to the boyish plunderers of his larder. Now we
had complained that our slabs of butter laid between the cut sides of
the rolls often were salt and strong, so one "Punsonby" (afterwards an
earl) managed to put a piece of highly-flavoured Gruyere into a roll,
and publicly at breakfast produced it before Mr. Irvine as a proof of
the bad butter provided by the unfortunate housekeeper. He was overborne
against his own convictions, by the heroic impudence of chief big boys
whom he dared not offend, and actually pretended indignation, promising
better butter in future!

For another small scholastic recollection: Andrew's Indian brother had
brought over a lot of curiosities from the East, including a rhinoceros
skin, and bows and arrows, idols, and the like, all of which were
carelessly stored away in a cellar near the larder aforesaid. Of course
the boys made a raid upon such _spolia opima_, and divers portions of
that thick hide were exhibited as Indian rubber: but Andrew never knew
that many other things vanished, and that for example Knighton used to
walk home on Saturdays with preternaturally stiff arms, an arrow
(possibly poisoned) being hid in each sleeve! some creeses also were
appropriated by others. I wonder if any Carthusian of my time survives
as the possessor of such loot.

Let me record, too, that in those evil days (for I am not one who can
think this age as "pejor avis") boys used to go, on their Monday
mornings' return from the weekly holiday, out of their way to see the
wretches hanging at Newgate; that the scenes of cruelty to animals in
Smithfield were terrible; that books of the vilest character were
circulated in the long-room; and that both morality and religion were
ignored by the seven clergymen who reaped fortunes by neglecting five
hundred boys. If more memories are wanted of those times, here are two;
the planned famine on one occasion, when--under monitorial
inspiration--all the juniors clamoured for "more, more," seeing they had
slabbed on the underside of the tables masses of bread and butter
supposed to have been eaten-out; and on another, that lobsters,
surreptitiously obtained from out-of-bounds by the big boys were sworn
in the _debris_ of their smaller claws to be pieces of sealing-wax! and
nothing else: at least a reckless young aristocrat declared that they
were so,--and the mean-spirited Andrew, fearful of giving offence in
such high quarters, pretended to believe him.

Yet another trifle; for I find that such trivials are attractive to
homeflock readers, by whose taste I feel the more public pulse, even as
Rousseau did with his housekeeper. We, that is Knighton and Ellis and I,
used to return on Sunday night in my father's carriage by the back way
of Clerkenwell to Charterhouse in order to avoid the crowds of cattle;
and I well remember that sometimes we would utilise apples and nuts from
the dessert as missiles from our carriage window as we sped along. Alas!
on one occasion Knighton was skilful enough to smash a chemist's blue
bottle with an apple,--and on another I am aware that an oil lamp in
Carthusian Street succumbed to my only too-true cockshy: "Et hoc
meminisse _dolendum_."

Another incident was amusing in its way. Poor Mr. Irvine (who was going
to be married) mended up a very much smashed greenhouse to greet his
bride thereby with floral joy. Unluckily, the boys preferred broken
panes to whole ones, so nothing was easier than by flinging brickbats
and even mugs over the laundry wall to revel in the sweet sound of
smashed glass; moreover this would go to evidence the popular animosity
against a wretched bridegroom. Then, when he reappeared after some
temporary absence before the wedding, it was after this ridiculous
fashion. There was a wooden staircase screened off one side of the
long-room down which he would occasionally creep to listen at the door
at bottom to the tattle of the boys about him. He was heard creaking
downstairs, and some active young fellow by a round-about byway managed
to steal down behind and suddenly pushed him by the burst open door,
spread-eagle fashion, into the laughing long-room! The poor victim
pretended it was an accident, "Ye see, Mr. Yates, I was coming down the
stair, and me foot slipped." It seems that the luckless Andrew was
coming, so he averred, expressly to expostulate with the boys, to throw
himself on their generosity for a subscription towards his ruined
greenhouse, and to ask Messrs. "Punsonby," Yates, & Co. to promote it.
This they promised to do, and did after an original fashion. Several
pounds worth of pence and half-pence were distributed through the house,
so that when Andrew with his traitorous aides went round to collect
monies, it miraculously happened to be all coppers, unrelieved by a
single sparkle of silver or gold. On which, in a red rage (and he often
was in the like) he flung the whole bowlful into the long-room fire,
from the ashes whereof for days after the small boys gladly collected
hot half-pence. We must recollect that the canny Scot was a mean
over-reaching man, so perhaps he was well paid out. Soon after the
wedding, the bridegroom held high festival, and gave a grand dinner to
all the masters. Our big boys were equal to the occasion, and as the
hired waiters from the Falcon brought out the viands (all was a delusive
peace as they went in) our harpies flew upon the spoil, and each meat,
fish and fowl was cleared off the great dishes held between the helpless
hands of the astonished servitors! It was really too bad, but if a man
is so manifestly unpopular no doubt he deserves it. Rugbeians would not
have so served Arnold. Nearly all my schoolmates are dead, and I cannot
call on Charles Roe or Frank Ellis to corroborate my small anecdotes,
but I could till lately on Sir William Knighton and one or two more. In
a crowd of five hundred scholars (Russell's average number, afterwards
much diminished, until Godalming brought up the tale), there must be
many still extant and of eminence whom I would name if I did but know
them. Certainly, yes, Trevelyan was my next neighbour in the "emeriti,"
and there was Hebert, the one distinguished in the State, the other in
the Church; also Cole, and his noble chief of Enniskillen, whom I have
visited at Florence Court; and Walford, our great genealogist, with many
more; among the more recent dead, let me mention my good friend
Archibald Mathison, lately an Indian Judge, and Robert Curzon, and
Arthur Helps, the historian of Mexico. Thackeray I knew then but very
slightly, as he was a lower schoolboy, and John Leech not at all,
because he was a day boy, seeing that the upper school was made to keep
foolishly aloof from all such; however, in after years I made good
acquaintance with both of those true geniuses, and had Leech down to
Albury, and to illustrate my tales, whilst I have several times
compared judgments with Thackeray as to Doctor Birch and his young
friends and other scholia.

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