Perhaps, however, my most sensational link with the past was as follows.
When I first came into Surrey, the old Lord Lovelace--the man who married Byron"s daughter, and who built Horsley Towers--was still alive and could be seen, as I saw him, driving about our Surrey lanes in a pony-chaise. Lord Lovelace is reported to have made the following entry in his diary about the year 1810, that is, when he was a boy some ten or twelve years old--"Today I dined with the old Lord Onslow [a neighbour then, presumably, of about ninety years of age], and heard him say that as a boy he had known one of the Cromwellian troopers--Captain Augustine--who was on guard round the scaffold when Charles I was executed."
Oddly enough, I have another link with the Cromwellian Wars. I remember, some forty years ago, my uncle, Sir Charles Cave, of whom I am glad to say I can speak in the present tense, told me that he was shooting on one of his farms below Lansdowne, the hill that rises above Bath. The tenant of the land was a very old farmer, and he informed my uncle that his grandmother, who lived to a great age, but whom he had just known as a boy, used to say that she remembered how, when a girl, the soldiers came into the village after the Battle of Lansdowne and took every loaf of bread out of the place.
An even more personal link with the past was afforded by my mother"s aunt, Miss Sykes, and my great-aunt. She had seen George III walking on the terrace at Windsor, old, blind, and mad, with his family and courtiers curtseying to those poor blind eyes and vacant wits every time he turned in his const.i.tutional. Another of her recollections, however, was far more thrilling to me as a lad. Miss Sykes, sister of my mother"s mother, belonged to a naval family, and her mother"s sister had married Admiral Byron, the seaman uncle of the poet. Therefore, Byron and Miss Sykes were in that unnamed relationship, or pseudo-relationship, which belongs to those who have an aunt or an uncle in common. It happened that my aunt was on a visit to the Byrons when the poet"s body, which was consigned to the Admiral, was brought to London. The Admiral, who lived near Windsor, posted up to receive the barrel of spirits in which the remains were preserved. When he returned from his gruesome visit the ladies of his family, and none more so than my aunt, then a girl of fifteen or sixteen, were very anxious to know what he had seen and what the remains of the most-talked-of man in the Europe of his day looked like. "What did he look like, my dear? He looked like an alligator,"
said the Admiral, who did not mince his words. It is strange that men should prefer to put their kin in what, in the naval records after Trafalgar, is called "a pickle" rather than give them a burial at sea or in "some corner of a foreign field"! But on such matters there can be no argument. It is a matter of feeling, not of reasoning.
So much for unwritten chapters and unwritten books, though, perhaps, I ought to add a postscript upon the writing of memoirs, describing how pleasant, though arduous a task it is. At any rate, it has proved so in my case. I began these memoirs with the feeling that, though it was quite worth while to record my part in the general adventure of living, I must expect that, even if I were to contrive to give pleasure to my readers, the part of the writer must be hard, laborious, and ungrateful.
"Why," I asked myself, "should I munch for others the remainder biscuit of life?" Yet, strange to say, what I had looked forward to almost with dread, turned out to be by far the pleasantest literary experience of my life. I have never been one of those people who dislike writing, or find it, as some people do, agonising; but I was not in the least prepared to find how pleasant it could be to dive into the depths of memory and let, what the author of the anonymous Elizabethan play, _Nero_, calls "the grim churl" of memory lead you through the labyrinth of the past.
But, though the path was pleasant, nay, exhilarating and stimulating, I must confess to the fact that I have had no psychological experiences, regrets, or disillusionments. I have had no temptation to write as to the shortness and precariousness of human existence, or to reflect how base I had found mankind, or, again, to deplore the past, curse the present, and dread the future. Life to me, in looking back, seems on the whole a very natural and simple show. No one, in one sense, feels more strongly than I do that we are being swept along by the mighty current of a vast river, without any clearer indication of what is the outlet of the river than of what is its source. But though these things may be an excuse for a great deal of rhetoric, they somehow seem to me, if I may use the word again, natural and non-inflammatory. It is far easier to trust what those who, liking the vagueness of theology, call "the larger hope," but which I should be content to call plainly the mercy of G.o.d--a mercy which I, for one, make bold to say I would rather have uncovenanted than covenanted. Covenanted mercies are a kind of thing which may do very well at an insurance office or for business purposes, but they are not the mercies one would ever dream of asking for or accepting from an earthly father. Then how can one dare to speak of them in the same breath with G.o.d?
"But this," I hear some readers say, "is the illusion of faith and has nothing of the permanence of fact." Well, I, for one, am content to rest on faith, honest and instinctive. Faith, to my mind, is a fact and a very palpable fact,--a fact as vital as any of the other great incommensurables and insolubles of our existence.
If I am asked to treat of the river, or rather, the ocean of life and the adventure of its voyage in terms that will satisfy those not fortunate enough to have faith, let me commend to them that memorable dream set forth by that most honest and exact of agnostics as of jurists, Mr. Justice Stephen. The dream, published some fifty years ago, is as n.o.ble a piece of literature as it is a monument of intellectual insight.
I dreamt [he says, after Bunyan"s fashion] that I was in the cabin of a ship, handsomely furnished and lighted. A number of people were expounding the objects of the voyage and the principles of navigation.
They were contradicting each other eagerly, but each maintained that the success of the voyage depended absolutely upon the adoption of his own plan. The charts to which they appealed were in many places confused and contradictory. They said that they were proclaiming the best of news, but the substance of it was that when we reached port most of us would be thrown into a dungeon and put to death by lingering torments. Some, indeed, would receive different treatment; but they could not say why, though all agreed in extolling the wisdom and mercy of the Sovereign of the country. Saddened and confused I escaped to the deck, and found myself somehow enrolled in the crew. The prospect was unlike the accounts given in the cabin. There was no sun; we had but a faint starlight, and there were occasionally glimpses of land and of what might be lights on sh.o.r.e, which yet were p.r.o.nounced by some of the crew to be mere illusions. They held that the best thing to be done was to let the ship drive as she would, without trying to keep her on what was understood to be her course. For the strangest thing on that strange ship was the fact that there was such a course. Many theories were offered about this, none quite satisfactory; but it was understood that the ship was to be steered due north. The best and bravest and wisest of the crew would dare the most terrible dangers, even, from their comrades, to keep her on her course. Putting these things together, and noting that the ship was obviously framed and equipped for the voyage, I could not help feeling that there was a port somewhere, though I doubted the wisdom of those who professed to know all about it. I resolved to do my duty, in the hope that it would turn out to have been my duty, and I then felt that there was something bracing in the mystery by which we were surrounded, and that, at all events, ignorance honestly admitted and courageously faced, and rough duty vigorously done, was far better than the sham knowledge and the bitter quarrels of the sickly cabin and glaring lamplight from which I had escaped.
Was there ever a n.o.bler parable more n.o.bly expressed? It may well end the last page of the last chapter of _The Adventure of Living_.