FOX HOW

The gray-stone house stands now, as it stood then, on a "how" or rising ground in the beautiful Westmorland valley leading from Ambleside to Rydal. The "Doctor" built it as a holiday paradise for himself and his children, in the year 1833. It is a modest building, with ten bedrooms and three sitting-rooms. Its windows look straight into the heart of Fairfield, the beautiful semicircular mountain which rears its hollowed front and buttressing scaurs against the north, far above the green floor of the valley. That the house looked north never troubled my grandfather or his children. What they cared for was the perfect outline of the mountain wall, the "pensive glooms," hovering in that deep breast of Fairfield, the magic never-ending chase of sunlight and cloud across it on fine days, and the beauty of the soft woodland clothing its base. The garden was his children's joy as it became mine. Its little beck with its mimic bridges, its encircling river, its rocky knolls, its wild strawberries and wild raspberries, its queen of birch-trees rearing a stately head against the distant mountain, its rhododendrons growing like weeds on its mossy banks, its velvet turf, and long silky grass in the parts left wild--all these things have made the joy of three generations.

Inside, Fox How was comfortably spacious, and I remember what a palace it appeared to my childish eyes, fresh from the tiny cabin of a 400-ton sailing-ship, and the rough life of a colony. My grandmother, its mistress, was then sixty-one. Her beautiful hair was scarcely touched with gray, her complexion was still delicately clear, and her soft brown eyes had the eager, sympathetic look of her Cornish race. Charlotte BrontË, who saw her a few years earlier, while on a visit to Miss Martineau, speaks of her as having been a "very pretty woman," and credits her and her daughters with "the possession of qualities the most estimable and endearing." In another letter, however, written to a less familiar correspondent, to whom Miss BrontË, as the literary lady with a critical reputation to keep up, expresses herself in a different and more artificial tone, she again describes my grandmother as good and charming, but doubts her claim to "power and completeness of character." The phrase occurs in a letter describing a call at Fox How, and its slight pomposity makes the contrast with the passage in which Matthew Arnold describes the same visit the more amusing.

At seven came Miss Martineau, and Miss BrontË (Jane Eyre); talked to
Miss Martineau (who blasphemes frightfully) about the prospects of the
Church of England, and, wretched man that I am, promised to go and see
her cow-keeping miracles to-morrow, I who hardly know a cow from a
sheep. I talked to Miss BrontË (past thirty and plain, with expressive
gray eyes, though) of her curates, of French novels, and her education
in a school at Brussels, and sent the lions roaring to their dens at
half-past nine.

No one, indeed, would have applied the word "power" to my grandmother, unless he had known her very well. The general impression was always one of gentle sweetness and soft dignity. But the phrase, "completeness of character," happens to sum up very well the impression left by her life both on kindred and friends. What Miss BrontË exactly meant by it it is difficult to say. But the widowed mother of nine children, five of them sons, and all of them possessed of strong wills and quick intelligence, who was able so to guide their young lives that to her last hour, thirty years after her husband's death had left her alone with her task, she possessed their passionate reverence and affection, and that each and all of them would have acknowledged her as among the dearest and noblest influences in their lives, can hardly be denied "completeness of character." Many of her letters lie before me. Each son and daughter, as he or she went out into the world, received them with the utmost regularity. They knew that every incident in their lives interested their mother; and they in their turn were eager to report to her everything that came to them, happy or unhappy, serious or amusing. And this relation of the family to their mother only grew and strengthened with years. As the daughters married, their husbands became so many new and devoted sons to this gentle, sympathetic, and yet firm-natured woman. Nor were the daughters-in-law less attached to her, and the grandchildren who in due time began to haunt Fox How. In my own life I trace her letters from my earliest childhood, through my life at school, to my engagement and marriage; and I have never ceased to feel a pang of disappointment that she died before my children were born. Matthew Arnold adored her, and wrote to her every week of his life. So did her other children. William Forster, throughout his busy life in Parliament, vied with her sons in tender consideration and unfailing loyalty. And every grandchild thought of a visit to Fox How as not only a joy, but an honor. Indeed, nothing could have been more "complete," more rounded, than my grandmother's character and life as they developed through her eighty-three years. She made no conspicuous intellectual claim, though her quick intelligence, her wide sympathies, and clear judgment, combined with something ardent and responsive in her temperament, attracted and held able men; but her personality was none the less strong because it was so gently, delicately served by looks and manner.

Perhaps the "completeness" of my grandmother's character will be best illustrated by one of her family letters, a letter which may recall to some readers Stevenson's delightful poem on the mother who sits at home, watching the fledglings depart from the nest.

So from the hearth the children flee,
By that almighty hand
Austerely led; so one by sea
Goes forth, and one by land;
Nor aught of all-man's sons escapes from that command.

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And as the fervent smith of yore
Beat out the glowing blade,
Nor wielded in the front of war
The weapons that he made,
But in the tower at home still plied his ringing trade;
So like a sword the son shall roam
On nobler missions sent;
And as the smith remained at home
In peaceful turret pent,
So sits the while at home the mother well content.

The letter was written to my father in New Zealand in the year 1848, as a family chronicle. The brothers and sisters named in it are Walter, the youngest of the family, a middy of fourteen, on board ship, and not very happy in the Navy, which he was ultimately to leave for Durham University and business; Willy, in the Indian Army, afterward the author of Oakfield, a novel attacking the abuses of Anglo-Indian life, and the first Director of Public Instruction in the Punjab--commemorated by his poet brother in "A Southern Night"; Edward, at Oxford; Mary, the second daughter, who at the age of twenty-two had been left a widow after a year of married life; and Fan, the youngest daughter of the flock, who now, in 1917, alone represents them in the gray house under the fells. The little Westmorland farm described is still exactly as it was; and has still a Richardson for master, though of a younger generation. And Rydal Chapel, freed now from the pink cement which clothed it in those days, and from the high pews familiar to the children of Fox How, still sends the cheerful voice of its bells through the valley on Sunday mornings.

The reader will remember, as he reads it, that he is in the troubled year of 1848, with Chartism at home and revolution abroad. The "painful interest" with which the writer has read Clough's "Bothie" refers, I think, to the fact that she has recognized her second son, my father, as to some extent the hero of the poem.

Fox How, Nov. 19, 1848.
My Dearest Tom,--... I am always intending to send you something like a
regular journal, but twenty days of the month have now passed away, and
it is not done. Dear Matt, who was with us at the beginning, and who I
think bore a part in our last letters to you, has returned to his post
in London, and I am not without hope of hearing by to-morrow's post that
he has run down to Portsmouth to see Walter before he sails on a cruise
with the Squadron, which I believe he was to do to-day. But I should
think they would hardly leave Port in such dirty weather, when the wind
howls and the rain pours, and the whole atmosphere is thick and lowering
as I suppose you rarely or never see it in New Zealand. I wish the more
that Matt may get down to Spithead, because the poor little man has been
in a great ferment about leaving his Ship and going into a smaller one.
By the same post I had a letter from him, and from Captain Daws, who had
been astonished and grieved by Walter's coming to him and telling him he
wished to leave the ship. It was evident that Captain D. was quite
distressed about it.

She then discusses, very shrewdly and quietly, the reasons for her boy's restlessness, and how best to meet it. The letter goes on:

Certainly there is great comfort in having him with so true and good a
friend as Captain D. and I could not feel justified in acting against
his counsel. But as he gets to know Walter better, I think it very
likely that he will himself think it better for him to be in some ship
not so likely to stay about in harbor as the St. Vincent; and will
judge that with a character like his it might be better for him to be on
some more distant stations.
I write about all this as coolly as if he were not my own dear youngest
born, the little dear son whom I have so cherished, and who was almost a
nursling still, when the bond which kept us all together was broken. But
I believe I do truly feel that if my beloved sons are good and worthy of
the name they bear, are in fact true, earnest, Christian men, I have no
wish left for them--no selfish longings after their companionship, which
can for a moment be put in comparison with such joy. Thus it almost
seemed strange to me when, in a letter the other day from Willy to
Edward, in reference to his--E's--future destination--Willy rather urged
upon him a home, domestic life, on my account, as my sons were already
so scattered. As I say, those loving words seemed strange to me; because
I have such an overpowering feeling that the all-in-all to me is that my
sons should be in just that vocation in life most suited to them, and
most bringing out what is highest and best in them; whether it might be
in England, or at the furthest extremity of the world.

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November 24, 1848.--I have been unwell for some days, dearest Tom, and
this makes me less active in all my usual employments, but it shall not,
if I can help it, prevent my making some progress in this letter, which
in less than a week may perhaps be on its way to New Zealand. I have
just sent Fan down-stairs, for she nurses her Mother till I begin to
think some change good for her. She has been reading aloud to me, and
now, as the evening advances I have asked some of them to read to me a
long poem by Clough--(the "Bothie") which I have no doubt will reach
you. It does not look attractive to me, for it is in English
Hexameters, which are to me very cumbrous and uninviting; but probably
that may be for some want of knowledge in my own ear and taste. The poem
is addressed to his pupils of last summer, and in scenery, etc., will
have, I suppose, many touches from his Highland residence; but, in a
brief Preface, he says that the tale itself is altogether fiction.

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To turn from things domestic to things at large, what a state of things
is this at Berlin! a state of siege declared, and the King at open issue
with his representatives!--from the country districts, people flocking
to give him aid, while the great towns are almost in revolt. "Always too
late" might, I suppose, have been his motto; and when things have been
given with one hand, he has seemed too ready to withdraw them with the
other. But, after all, I must and do believe that he has noble
qualities, so to have won Bunsen's love and respect.
November 25.--Mary is preparing a long letter, and it will therefore
matter the less if mine is not so long as I intended. I have not yet
quite made up the way I have lost in my late indisposition, and we have
such volumes of letters from dear Willy to answer, that I believe this
folio will be all I can send to you, my own darling; but you do not
dwell in my heart or my thoughts less fondly. I long inexpressibly to
have some definite ideas of what you are now--after some eight months of
residence--doing, thinking, feeling; what are your occupations in the
present, what your aims and designs for the future. The assurance that
it is your first and heartful desire to please God, my dear son; that
you have struggled to do this and not allowed yourself to shrink from
whatever you felt to be involved in it, this is, and will be my deepest
and dearest comfort, and I pray to Him to guide you into all truth. But
though supported by this assurance, I do not pretend to say that often
and often I do not yearn over you in my thoughts, and long to bestow
upon you in act and word, as well as in thought, some of that
overflowing love which is cherished for you in your home.

And here follows a tender mother-word in reference to an early and unrequited attachment of my father's, the fate of which may possibly have contributed to the restlessness which sent him beyond the seas.

But, dear Tom, I believe that though the hoped for flower and fruit have
faded, yet that the plant has been strengthened and purified.... It
would be a grief to me not to believe that you will yet be most happy in
married life; and when you can make to yourself a home I shall perhaps
lose some of my restless longing to be near you and ministering to your
comfort, and sharing in your life--if I can think of you as cheered and
helped by one who loved you as I did your own beloved father.
Sunday, November 26.--Just a year, my son, since you left England! But
I really must not allow myself to dwell on this, and all the thoughts it
brings with it; for I found last night that the contrast between the
fulness of thought and feeling, and my own powerlessness to express it
weighed on me heavily; and not having yet quite recovered my usual tone,
I could not well bear it. So I will just try to collect for you a few
more home Memoranda, and then have done.... Our new tenant, James
Richardson, is now fairly established at his farm, and when I went up
there and saw the cradle and the happy childish faces around the table,
and the rows of oatmeal cake hanging up, and the cheerful, active Mother
going hither and thither--now to her Dairy--now guiding the steps of the
little one that followed her about--and all the time preparing things
for her husband's return from his work at night, I could not but feel
that it was a very happy picture of English life. Alas! that there are
not larger districts where it exists! But I hope there is still much of
it; and I feel that while there is an awful undercurrent of misery and
sin--the latter both caused by the first and causing it--and while, on
the surface, there is carelessness, and often recklessness and hardness
and trifling, yet that still, in our English society, there is, between
these two extremes, a strength of good mixed with baser elements, which
must and will, I fully believe, support us nationally in the troublous
times which are at hand--on which we are actually entered.
But again I am wandering, and now the others have gone off to the Rydal
Chapel without me this lovely Sunday morning. There are the bells
sounding invitingly across the valley, and the evergreens are white and
sparkling in the sun.
I have a note from Clough.... His poem is as remarkable, I think, as you
would expect, coming from him. Its power quite overcame my dislike to
the measure--so far at least as to make me read it with great
interest--often, though, a painful one. And now I must end.

As to Miss BrontË's impressions of Matthew Arnold in that same afternoon call of 1850, they were by no means flattering. She understands that he was already the author of "a volume of poems" (The Poems by A, 1849), remarks that his manner "displeases from its seeming foppery," but recognizes, nevertheless, in conversation with him, "some genuine intellectual aspirations"! It was but a few years later that my uncle paid his poet's homage to the genius of the two sisters--to Charlotte of the "expressive gray eyes"--to Emily of the "chainless soul." I often try to picture their meeting in the Fox How drawing-room: Matthew Arnold, tall, handsome, in the rich opening of his life, his first poetic honors thick upon him, looking with a half-critical, half-humorous eye at the famous little lady whom Miss Martineau had brought to call upon his mother; and beside him that small, intrepid figure, on which the worst storms of life had already beaten, which was but five short years from its own last rest. I doubt whether, face to face, they would ever have made much of each other. But the sister who could write of a sister's death as Charlotte wrote, in the letter that every lover of great prose ought to have by heart--

Emily suffers no more from pain or weakness now, she never will suffer
more in this world. She is gone, after a hard, short conflict.... We are
very calm at present, why should we be otherwise? The anguish of seeing
her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of death is gone; the
funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. No need now to tremble for
the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not feel them.--

must have stretched out spiritual hands to Matthew Arnold, had she lived to read "A Southern Night"--that loveliest, surely, of all laments of brother for brother.

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