Chapter IX: Middle Life

On his return from his Italian tour my brother at once commenced practice in the Ecclesiastical Courts, and took a small house in Bell Yard, Doctors’ Commons, where he went to reside, and which he describes to his mother as follows:—

“_April 1851._—I am in excellent health and spirits. I have a
funny little house here: there are three floors and two rooms
on each: then there is a ground-floor, the front room of which
I use as an office, and the back room as a bath room, for I
stick diligently to the cold-water system. A kitchen below
completes my establishment. I have a housekeeper, who sits
downstairs in the kitchen and sleeps in the top story; she is
miraculously clean and tidy, and cooks very well, although I
never dine at home. She is also a wonderful gossip.”

Here he practised for a few years regularly, and with very fair success, but his professional career was destined to be short and broken, and need not detain us. It is his home life with which we are concerned, and it was the pressure of what he looked upon as a higher home duty which decided him, after a struggle, to abandon his profession. He was married in the autumn of 1852, and, in the course of a few years, the health of his wife’s mother by adoption made it desirable that they should be always with her, and that she should spend the winter months abroad. When it became clear that this was necessary, he accepted it, and made the best of it; though I find abundant traces in his correspondence of the effort which it required to do so. Thus he writes from Pau, the place fixed upon for their foreign winter residence, “I always found that changing one’s residence and plans gave one a fit of the blues for a time, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter.” And again; “The business of life is to be bored in all directions. You must not imagine, however, that I am ill, or out of spirits. I have no right to be either, and won’t be, please God.” But the necessary want of regular employment, the sinking into what is called “an idle man,” and abandoning all active part in “the struggle for existence,” was no small trial to one who held that the “full employment of all powers, physical, mental, and spiritual, is the true secret of happiness, so that no time may be left for morbid self-analysis.” You are all perhaps too young to understand this, and probably, when you think about such matters at all, imagine that the happiest life must be one in which you would only have to amuse yourselves. It may, I hope, shake any such belief to find that the period in my brother’s life in which he was thus thrown on his own resources, and had the most complete liberty to follow his own fancies, was just that in which you may find traces of _ennui_, and a tendency to be dissatisfied with the daily task of getting through time.

He took the best course of getting rid of the blues, however, by throwing himself heartily into such occupations as were to be had at Pau. The chief of these was a Pen and Pencil Club, to which most of the English and American residents belonged, and of which he became the secretary. Besides the ordinary meetings, for which he wrote a number of _vers de société_, on the current topics and doings of the place, the Club indulged in private theatricals. On these occasions he was stage manager, and frequently author; most of the charades and short pieces, which you have seen, and acted in, at Offley, were originally written by him for the Pen and Pencil Club at Pau. “It was a mild literary society,” an old friend writes to me, “which he carried almost entirely on his own shoulders, and made a success.” Then he set to work for the first time to cultivate in earnest his talent for music, and took to playing the violoncello, communicating intelligence of his own progress, and of musical doings at Pau generally, to his sister, whom he looked upon as his guide and instructress. These were not always devoid of incident, as for instance the following:—

“PAU, VILLA SALUSBURY.

“We have an opera here this season. The _prima donna_ and the
tenor are good; the rest so-so. The orchestra and chorus bad;
the basso execrable: when he doesn’t bellow like a bull, he
neighs like a horse; however, he does his best. I don’t know
how you feel, but to me a mediocre opera is an unmitigated
bore. I would rather by half hear a good French play. There
was a scene at the opera the other night. The conductor of
the orchestra is the _amant_ of the contralto. Just before
the opera began, the conductor in a jealous fit tried to
strangle the contralto: whereupon the basso profundo knocked
the conductor down: whereupon the conductor ran off towards the
river to drown himself: whereupon he was knocked down again
to save his life: whereupon he threatened to cut everybody’s
throat: whereupon he was locked up in prison, and there
remains. So there is no conductor, and the contralto can’t sing
from the throttling.”

The violoncello soon grew to be a resource, and I believe he played really well, though he used to groan to me as to the impossibility of adapting adult fingers to the work, and to mourn over the barbarism of our school days, when no one ever thought of music as a possible study for boys. Soon, however, other objects of deeper interest began to gather round him. His eldest boy was born in 1853, his second in 1855, during their summer in England.

“The young one,” he writes to his sister, “is like his
mamma, they say, and is going to be dark, which will be a
good contrast to Herbert, who is a regular Saxon. I want his
(Herbert’s) yellow hair to grow long that it may be done into
a pigtail; I think it would look quaint and create a sensation
among the Cockneys, but I’m afraid I shan’t get my own way.
To return to the new arrival, you will be happy to hear that
he inherits your talent for music; he is always meandering
with his hands as if he was playing the violoncello; it is a
positive fact, I assure you, and makes me laugh to bursting
point. A—— must have been more struck with my performances than
I had credited. I feel quite flattered to possess an infant
phenomenon who played (or would have played) the violoncello,
if we had let him, from his birth. In the meantime that
instrument has been somewhat neglected by me. A——, the baby,
and the partridges (what a conjunction), divide my allegiance.
However, my music mania is as strong as ever, in spite of
the rather excruciating tones which all beginners draw from
the instrument: they tell me that the sounds resemble the
bellowings of a bereaved cow; luckily the house is a large one.”

He took to farming also, as another outlet for superfluous energy, but without much greater success than generally falls to the lot of amateurs. Indeed, his long winter absences from England kept him from gaining anything more than a superficial knowledge of agriculture, such as is disclosed in the following note to his mother, in answer to inquiries as to crops and prospects:—

“Farming is better certainly this year than the last, but we
farmers always grumble, as you know, and I don’t like to say
anything until the new wheat is threshed. You ought to sow your
tares and rye immediately, and they will do very well after
potatoes; they ought to be well manured. If you mean by ‘rye’
Italian rye-grass, I don’t exactly know when it is best to sow
it; in the spring I believe, but I have never had any yet, and
you must ask about it. One thing I know, that it ought to have
liquid manure, to be put on directly after cutting; this will
give you a fresh crop in a little more than a month.”

When the Volunteer movement began, he threw himself into it at once; for no man was more impatient of, or humiliated by, the periodical panics which used to seize the country. He helped to raise a corps in his own neighbourhood, of which he became captain, and went to one of the first classes for Volunteers at the School of Musketry, to make himself competent to teach his men. As to the result he writes:—

“UNDERCLIFF, _1860_.

“Our schooling at Hythe terminated on Friday last, on which
day 100 lunatics were let loose upon society. I say lunatics,
because all of us just now have but one idea, and talk,
think, and dream of nothing but the rifle (call it Miss
Enfield) morning, noon, and night. Colonel Welsford, the chief
instructor, is a charming man and a delightful lecturer, and
withal a greater lunatic than any of us—just the right man in
the right place. I shot fairly, but did not distinguish myself
as Harry did.”

I spoke of his “_vers de société_” just now, and in this connection will here give you a specimen of them. The expenses of the corps of course considerably exceeded the Government grant, and the deficiency had to be met somehow. My brother started a theatrical performance in the Town Hall, Hitchin, as a method at once of making both ends meet, and of interesting the townspeople in the corps. The last piece of the entertainment was one of his own. The characters were played chiefly by members of his own family. He himself acted the part of a pompous magistrate, and at the close spoke the following