IS the study of heredity a science or a pure romance? For the unlearned at least I like to think it is the latter, since no law that the Professors ever formulated can explain the caprices of each little human soul, bobbing up like a coracle over life’s horizon and bringing with it things gathered at random from an infinitely remote and varying ancestry. It is, I believe, generally known that the subject of this biography was a granddaughter of Arnold of Rugby, and therewith her intellectual ability and the force of her character are thought to be sufficiently explained. But what of her mother, the beautiful Julia Sorell, of whom her sad husband said at her death that she had “the nature of a queen,” ever thwarted and rebuffed by circumstance? What of the strain of Spanish Protestant blood that ran in the veins of the Sorells: for although they were refugees from France after the Edict of Nantes, it is most probable that they came of Spanish origin? What of the strain brought in by the wild and forcible Kemps of Mount Vernon in Tasmania? A daughter of Anthony Fenn Kemp (himself a “character” of a remarkable kind) married William Sorell and so became the mother of Julia and the grandmother of Mary Arnold; but the principal fact that is known of her is that she deserted her three daughters after bringing them to England for their education, went off with an army officer and was hardly heard of more. An ungovernable temper seems to have marked most of this family, and the recollections of her childhood were so terrible to Julia Sorell that she wrote in after years to her husband, “Few families have been blessed with such a home training as yours, and certainly very few in our rank of life have been cursed with such as mine.” Yet although Julia inherited much of this violence and passion, to her own constant misery, she had also “the nature of a queen,” and transmitted it in no small degree to her daughter Mary.

The Sorells were descended from Colonel William Sorell, one of the early Governors of Tasmania, who had been appointed to the post in 1816. Nine years before, on his appointment as Adjutant-General at the Cape of Good Hope, this Colonel Sorell had left behind him in England a woman to whom he was legally married and by whom he had had several children, but whom he never saw again after leaving these shores. He occupied himself, indeed, with another lady, while the unfortunate wife at home struggled to maintain his children on the very inadequate allowance which he had granted her. Twice the allowance lapsed, with calamitous results for the wife and children, and it was only on the active intervention of Lord Bathurst, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, that the payment of her quarterly instalments was resumed in 1818. Meanwhile, her eldest son William, a steady, hard-working lad, had been trying to support the family from his own earnings of 12s. a week, and when he grew to man’s estate he applied to Lord Bathurst for permission to join his father in Van Diemen’s Land, hoping that so he might help to reconcile his parents. Lord Bathurst gave him his passage out, but had in fact already decided to recall Governor Sorell, so that when young Sorell arrived at Hobart Town early in 1824 he found his father only awaiting the arrival of his successor (the well-known Colonel Arthur), before quitting the Colony for good. William, however, decided to remain there, accepted the position of Registrar of Deeds from Colonel Arthur, and made his permanent home in the island. He married the head-strong Miss Kemp, and in his sad after-life suffered a reversal of the parts played by his own father and mother. Long after his wife had deserted him he lived on in Hobart Town, much respected and beloved, and remembered by his granddaughter as a “gentle, affectionate, upright being, a gentleman of an old, punctilious school, content with a small sphere and much loved within it.”

His daughter Julia grew up as the favourite and pet of Hobart Town society, much admired by the subalterns of the solitary battalion of British troops that maintained our prestige among the convicts and the “blacks” of that remote settlement. But for her Fate held other things in store. Early in 1850 there appeared at Hobart Town a young man of twenty-six, tall and romantic-looking, who bore a name well known even in the southern seas—the name of Thomas Arnold. He was the second son of Dr. Arnold of Rugby. He had left the Old World for the Newest three years before on a genuine quest for the ideal life; had tried farming in New Zealand, but in vain, and had then, after some adventures in schoolmastering, come to Tasmania at the invitation of the Governor, Sir William Denison, to organize the public education of the Colony. Fortune seemed to smile upon the young Inspector of Schools, who as a first-classman and an Arnold found a kind and ready welcome from those who reigned in Tasmania, and when he met Julia Sorell a few weeks after he landed and fell in love with her at first sight, no obstacles were placed in his way. They were married on June 12, 1850—a love-match if ever there was one, but a match that was too soon to be subjected to that most fiery test of all, a religious struggle of the deepest and most formidable kind.

Thomas Arnold came of a family to whom religion was always a “concern,” as the Quakers call it; whether it was the great Doctor, with his making of “Christian gentlemen” at Rugby and his fierce polemics against the “Oxford malignants,” or Matt, with his “Power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness,” or William (a younger brother), with his religious novel, Oakfield, about the temptations of Indian Army life; and Thomas was by no means exempt from the tradition. A sentimental idealist by nature, he was a friend of Clough and had already been immortalized as “Philip” in the Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich.[1] He came now to the Antipodes in rationalistic mood and in search of the nobler, freer life; but soon the old beliefs reasserted themselves, yet brought no peace. His mind was “hot for certainties in this our life,” and he had not been five years in Tasmania before he was seeing much of a certain Catholic priest and feeling himself strongly drawn towards the ancient fold. His poor wife, in whom her Huguenot ancestry had bred an instinctive and invincible loathing for Catholicism, felt herself overtaken by a kind of black doom; she made wild threats of leaving him, she shuddered at the thought of what might happen to the children. Yet nothing that she or any of his friends could say might avert the fatal step. Tom Arnold was received into the Roman Catholic Church at Hobart Town on January 12, 1856.

His prospects immediately darkened, for feeling ran high in the Colony against Popery, and it soon became clear that he must give up his appointment and return to England. Already three children had been born to him and Julia, but the young wife was now plunged in preparations for the uprooting of her household and the transport of the whole family across the globe, to an unknown future and a world of unknown faces. The voyage was accomplished in a sailing-ship of 400 tons, the William Brown, so overrun by rats that the mother and nurse had to take turns to watch over the children at night, lest their faces should be bitten; but after more than three months of this existence the ship did finally reach English waters and cast anchor in the Thames on October 17, 1856. It was wet autumn weather and the little family huddled forlornly in a small inn in Thames Street, but the next day a deliverer appeared in the person of William Forster (the future Education Minister), who had married Tom’s eldest sister Jane a few years before and who now carried off the whole family to better quarters in London, helped them in the kindest way and finally saw off the mother and children to the friendly shelter of Fox How—that beloved home among the Westmorland hills which “the Doctor” had built to house his growing family and which was now to play so great a part in the development of his latest descendant, the little Mary Arnold.

Mary Augusta had been born at Hobart Town on June 11, 1851. She was, of course, the apple of her parents’ eyes, and the descriptions which her father wrote of her, in the long letters that went home to his mother at Fox How by every available boat, give a curiously vivid picture of a little creature richly endowed with fairy gifts, but above all with the crowning gift of life. At first she is a “pretty little creature, with a compact little face, good features and an uncommonly large forehead”; then at eight months, “If you could but see our darling Mary! The vigour of life, the animation, the activity of eye and hand that she displays are astonishing. Her brown hair in its abundance is the admiration of everybody.” At a year old she is “passionate but not peevish, sensitive to the least harshness in word or gesture, but usually full of merriment and gladsomeness. She is like a sparkling fountain or a gay flower in the house, filling it with light and freshness.” She has many childish ailments, but conquers them all in a manner strangely prophetic of her later power of resisting illness. “I fear you will think she must be a very sickly child,” writes her father, “and she certainly is delicate and easily put out of order; but I have much faith in the strength of her constitution, for in all her ailments she has seemed to have a power of battling against them, a vitality that pulls her through.” As a little thing of under two her feelings are terribly easily worked upon: “The other evening it was raining very hard and I began to talk to her about the poor people out in the rain who were getting wet and had no warm fire to sit by and no nice dry clothes to put on. You cannot imagine how this touched her. She kept on repeating over and over again, ‘Poor people! Poor people! Out in the rain! Get warm! get warm!’” But as she grows bigger she develops a will of her own that sorely troubles her father, beset with all the ideas of his generation about “prompt obedience”; at three and a half he writes: “Little Polly is as imitative as a monkey and as mischievous; self-willed and resolute to take the lead and have her own way, whenever her companions are anything approaching to her own age. Not a very easy character to manage as you will see, yet often to be led through her feelings, when it would be difficult to drive her in defiance of her will.” Soon he is having “a regular pitched battle with her about once a day,” and writes ruefully home—as though he were having the worst of it—that Polly is “kind enough where she can patronize, but her domineering spirit makes even her kindness partake of oppression.” Two little brothers, Willie and Theodore, had already been added to the family by the time they made the voyage home—playthings whom Mary alternately slapped and cuddled and in whom she took an immense pride of possession. They were the first of a long series of brothers and sisters to whom her kindness, in after years, was certainly not of the kind that “partakes of oppression.”

Thus, at the age of five, this little spirit, passionate, self-willed and tender-hearted, came within the direct orbit of the Arnold family. During most of the four years that followed their arrival she was either staying with her grandmother, the Doctor’s widow, at Fox How, or else living as a boarder at Miss Clough’s little school at Eller How, near Ambleside, and spending her Saturdays at Fox How. Her father meanwhile took work under Newman in Dublin and earned a precarious subsistence for his wife and family by teaching at the Catholic University there. They were times of hardship and privation for Julia, who never ceased to be in love with Tom and never ceased to curse the day of his conversion; and as the babies increased and the income did not she was fain to allow her eldest daughter to live more and more with the kind grandmother, who asked no better than to have the child about the house. And, indeed, to have this particular child about the house was not always a light undertaking! She was wonderfully quick, clever and affectionate, but her tempers sometimes shook her to pieces in storms of passion, and the devoted “Aunt Fan,” the Doctor’s youngest daughter, who lived with her mother at Fox How, was often sorely puzzled how to deal with her. Still, by a judicious mixture of severity and tenderness she won the child’s affection, so that Mary was wont to say, looking slyly at her aunt, “I like Aunt Fan—she’s the master of me!”

The Arnold atmosphere made indeed a very remarkable influence for any impressionable child of Mary’s age to live in; it supplied a deep-rooted sense of calm and balance, an unalterable family affection and a sad disapproval of tempers and excesses of all kinds which, as time went on, had a marked effect on the Tasmanian child. From a Sorell by birth and temperament, as I believe she was, she gradually became an Arnold by environment. If she inherited from her mother those wilder springs of energy and courage which impelled her, like some dÆmon within, to be up and doing in life’s race, it was from the Arnolds that she learnt the art of living, the art of harnessing the dÆmon. They certainly made a memorable group, the nine sons and daughters of Arnold of Rugby: all of whom, except Fan, the youngest daughter, were scattered from the nest by the time that “little Polly” came to Fox How, but all of whom maintained for each other and for their mother the tenderest affection, so that life at the Westmorland home was continually crossed and re-crossed by their visits and their letters. In looking through these faded letters the reader of to-day is struck by their seriousness and simplicity of tone, by the intense family affection they display and by the very real relation in which the writers stood towards the “indwelling presence of God.” Hardly a member of the family can be mentioned without the prefix “dear” or “dearest,” nor can anyone who is acquainted with the Arnold temperament doubt that this was genuine. Birthdays are made the occasion for rather solemn words of love or exhortation, and if any sorrow strikes the family one may expect without fail to find a complete reliance on the accustomed sources of consolation. Yet they are not prigs, these brothers and sisters; their roots strike deep down to the bed-rock of life, and though they are all (except poor Tom) in fairly prosperous circumstances, they can be generous and open-handed to those who are less so. Tom was, I think, the special darling of the family, and his lapse to Catholicism a terrible trial to them, but none the less did they labour for Tom’s children in all simplicity of heart.

The daughter who, next to “Aunt Fan,” had most to do with little Mary was Jane, the wife of William Forster; Mary was her godchild, and soon conceived a kind of passion for this sweet-faced woman of thirty-five, who, childless herself, returned the little girl’s affection in no ordinary degree. Mary would sometimes go to stay with her at Burley-in-Wharfedale, where she looked with awe at the “great wheels” in Uncle Forster’s woollen mill and saw the children working there—children untouched as yet by their master’s schemes for their welfare, or by the still remoter visions of their small observer. Then there was Matt—Matt the sad poet and gay man of the world, who brought with him on his rarer visits to Fox How the breath of London and of great affairs, for was he not, in his sisters’ eyes at least, the spoilt darling of society, the diner-out, the frequenter of great houses? He looked, we know, with unusual interest upon Tom’s Polly, and in later years was wont to say, with his whimsical smile, that she “got her ability from her mother.” Another aunt to whom the Tasmanian child became much devoted was her namesake Mary, at that time Mrs. Hiley, a woman whose rich, responsive nature and keen sense of humour endeared her greatly to the few friends who knew her well, and whose early rebellions and idealisms had given her a most human personality. It was she among all the group who understood and sympathized most keenly with Tom’s wife, so that between Julia and Mary Hiley a bond was forged that ended only with the former’s death. Poor Julia! The Arnold atmosphere was indeed sometimes a formidable one, and had little sympathy to give to her own undisciplined and tempestuous nature, with its strange deeps of feeling. Julia’s temptations—to extravagance in money matters and to passionate outbursts of temper—were not Arnold temptations, and she often felt herself disapproved of in spite of much outward affection and kindness. And then she would have morbid reactions in which the old Calvinistic hell-fire of her forefathers seemed very near. Once when she was staying at Fox How, ill and depressed, she wrote to her husband: “The feeling grows upon me that I am one of those unhappy people whom God has abandoned, and it is the effect of this feeling I am sure which causes me to behave as I often do. Oh! it is an awful thing to despair about one’s future state....” Probably she felt that in spite of their undoubted humility, her in-laws never quite despaired about theirs.

By the time that Mary was seven years old, that is in the autumn of 1858, it was decided that she should go as a boarder to Miss Anne Clough’s school at Ambleside, or rather at Eller How on the slopes of Wansfell behind the town. Here she spent two years and more—happy on the whole, often naughty and wilful, but usually held in awe by Miss Clough’s stately presence and power of commanding her small flock. There was only one other boarder besides Mary, a girl named Sophie Bellasis, whose recollections of those days were preserved and given to the world long afterwards by her husband, the late Mr. T. C. Down, in an article published by the Cornhill Magazine.[2] Miss Bellasis’ impressions of the queer little girl, Mary Arnold, who was her fellow-boarder, make so vivid a picture that I may perhaps be forgiven for reproducing them here:

It was during these years, from six to nine, that the foundation was laid of that passionate adoration for the fells, with their streams, bogs and stone walls, which became one of Mary’s most intimate possessions and never deserted her in after years. In her Recollections she describes a walk up the valley to Sweden Bridge with her father and Arthur Clough, the two men safely engaged in grown-up talk while she, happy and alone, danced on in front or lingered behind, all eyes and ears for the stream, the birds and the wind. It was a walk of which she soon knew every inch, just as she knew every inch of the Fox How garden, and I believe that the sights and sounds of that rough northern valley came to be woven in with the very texture of her soul. They appealed to something primitive and deep-down in her little heart, some power that remained with her through life and that, as she once said to me, “stands more rubs than anything else in our equipment.”

Then, when she was only nine and a half, she was transferred to a school at Shiffnal in Shropshire, kept by a certain Miss Davies, whose sister happened to be an old friend of Tom Arnold’s and offered now to undertake little Mary’s maintenance if she were sent to this “Rock Terrace School for Young Ladies.” But the change seemed to call out all the demon in Mary’s composition; she fought blindly against the restrictions and rules of this new community, felt herself at enmity with all the world and broke out ever and anon in storms of passion. In the first chapter of Marcella it is all described—the “sulks, quarrels and revolts” of Marcie Boyce (alias Mary Arnold), the getting up at half-past six on dark winter mornings, the cold ablutions and dreary meals, and the occasional days in bed with senna-tea and gruel when Miss Davies (at her wits’ end, poor lady!) would try the method of seclusion as a cure for Mary’s tantrums. The poor little thing suffered cruelly from headaches and bad colds, and laboured too under a sore sense of poverty and disadvantage as compared with the other girls; she was, in fact, paid for at a lower rate than most of the other boarders, and was not allowed to forget it. Often she writes home to beg for stamps, and once she says to her father: “Do send me some more money. It was so tantalizing this morning, a woman came to the door with twopenny baskets, so nice, and many of the other girls got them and I couldn’t.” Another time she begs him to send her the threepence that she has “earned,” by writing out some lists of names for him. But on Saturdays she had one joy, fiercely looked forward to all the week; a “cake-woman” came to the school, and by hoarding up her tiny weekly allowance she was able—usually—to buy a three-cornered jam puff. To a rather starved and very lonely little girl of nine or ten this was—she often said to us afterwards—the purest consolation of the week.

But there were some compensations even in these unlovely surroundings. The nice old German governess, FrÄulein Gerecke, was always kind to her, and tried in little unobtrusive ways to ease the lot which Mary found so hard to bear. Once she made for her, surreptitiously, a white muslin frock with blue ribbons and laid it on her bed in time for some little function of the school for which Mary had received no “party frock” from home. A gush of hot tears was the response, tears partly of gratitude, partly of soreness at the need for it; but the muslin frock was worn nevertheless, and entered from that moment into the substance of the day-dreams and stories that she was for ever telling herself. Any child who has a faculty for it will understand how great a consolation were these self-told stories, in which she rioted especially on days of senna-tea and gruel. Tales of the Princess of Wales and how she, Mary, herself succeeded in stopping her runaway horses, with the divinity’s pale agitation and gratitude, filled the long hours, and the muslin frock usually came into the story when Mary made her trembling appearance “by command” at the palace afterwards. Gradually, too, these tales came to weave themselves round more accessible mortals, for Mary’s heart and affections were waking up and she did not escape, any more than the modern schoolgirl, her share of “adorations.” At twelve years old she fell headlong in love with the Vicar of Shiffnal and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Cunliffe; going to church—especially in the evenings, when the Vicar preached—became a romance; seeing Mrs. Cunliffe pass by in her pony-carriage lent a radiance to the day. The Vicar’s wife, a gentle Evangelical, felt genuinely drawn towards the untamed little being and did her best to guide the wayward footsteps, while Mary on her side wrote poems to her idol, keeping them fortunately locked within her desk, and let her fancy run from ecstasy to ecstasy in the dreams that she wove around her. What “dauntless child” among us does not know these splendours, and the transforming effect that they have upon the prickly hide of youth? Little Mary Arnold was destined to leave her mark upon the world, partly by power of brain, but more by sheer power of love, and the first human beings to unlock the unguessed stores of it within her were these two kindly Evangelicals.

Still, the demon was not quite exorcised, and “Aunt Fan” still found Mary something of a handful when she stayed at Fox How, though now in a different way.

She stayed for four years at Miss Davies’s, during which time her parents moved (in 1862) from Dublin to Birmingham, where Tom Arnold was offered work under Newman at the Oratory School. The change brought a small increase in salary, but not enough to cover the needs of the still growing family, and if it had not been for the help freely given during these years by W. E. Forster, the struggling pair must almost have gone down under their difficulties. One result of the change was that the elder boys, Willie and Theodore, were themselves sent to the Oratory School, and the thought of Arnold of Rugby’s grandsons being pupils of Newman gave rise to bitter reflections at Fox How. “I was very glad to hear of Willy’s having done so well in the examination of his class,” wrote Julia to her husband from the family home, “although I must confess the thought of our son being examined by Dr. Newman had carried a pang to my heart. Your mother I found felt it in the same way; she said (when I read out to her that part of your letter) with her eyes full of tears, ‘Oh! to think of his grandson, dearest Tom’s son, being examined by Dr. Newman!’” Still, Julia was emphatically of opinion that if priests were to have a hand in their education at all, she would rather it were English than Irish priests.[3]

Meanwhile, the shortcomings of the school at Shiffnal were becoming evident to Mary’s mother, and in the winter of 1864-5 she succeeded in arranging that the child should be sent instead to another near Clifton, kept by a certain Miss May, which was smaller and also more expensive than Miss Davies’s. Heaven knows how the payments were managed, but the change answered extremely well, for after the first term Mary settled down in complete happiness and soon developed such a devotion to Miss May as made short work of her remaining tendencies to temper and “contrariness.” Miss May must have been exactly the type of schoolmistress that Mary needed at this stage—kind and large-hearted, with the understanding necessary to win the confidence of such an uncommon little creature—so that it was not long before the child’s mind began to expand in every direction. Long afterwards she was wont to say that the actual knowledge she acquired at school was worth next to nothing—that she learnt no subject thoroughly and left school without any “edged tools.” But certainly by the time she was twelve she could write a French letter such as not many of us could produce with all our advantages, while the drawing and music that she learnt at school encouraged certain natural talents in her that were to give her some of the purest joys of her after-life. Still, no doubt her mind received no systematic training, and at Miss Davies’s I believe that Mangnall’s Questions were still the common textbook! Though she learnt a little German and Latin she always said that she had them to do all over again when she needed them later for her work, while Greek, which became the joy and consolation of her later years, was entirely a “grown-up” acquisition. But whatever the imperfections of her nine years of school, better times were at hand both for Mary and her mother.

Whether it was that after two or three years of the Birmingham Oratory, Tom Arnold’s political radicalism (always a sturdy growth) began to make him uneasy at the proceedings of Pio Nono—for 1864 was the year of the Encyclical—or whether it was more particularly the Mortara case, as he says in his autobiography,[4] at any rate his feeling towards the Catholic Church had grown distinctly cool by the end of that year, and he was meditating leaving the Oratory. Gradually the rumour spread among his friends that Tom Arnold was turning against Rome, and in June, 1865, a paragraph to this effect appeared in the papers. Little Mary, now a girl of fourteen, heard the news while she was at Miss May’s, and wrote in ecstasy to her mother:

‘My precious Mother, I have indeed seen the paragraphs about Papa. The L’s showed them me on Saturday. You can imagine the excitement I was in on Saturday night, not knowing whether it was true or not. Your letter confirmed it this morning and Miss May, seeing I suppose that I looked rather faint, sent me on a pretended errand for her notebook to escape the breakfast-table. My darling Mother, how thankful you must be! One feels as if one could do nothing but thank Him.”