OTHER CHILDREN OF FOX HOW

I have now to sketch some other figures in the Fox How circle, together with a few of the intimate friends who mingled with it frequently, and very soon became names of power to the Tasmanian child also.

Let me take first Doctor Arnold's third son, "Uncle Willy"--my father's junior by some four years. William Delafield Arnold is secure of long remembrance, one would fain think, if only as the subject of Matthew Arnold's two memorial poems--"A Southern Night" and "Stanzas from Carnac." But in truth he had many and strong claims of his own. His youth was marked by that "restlessness," which is so often spoken of in the family letters as a family quality and failing. My father's "restlessness" made him throw up a secure niche in English life, for the New Zealand adventure. The same temperament in Mary Twining, the young widow of twenty-two, took her to London, away from the quiet of the Ambleside valley, and made her an ardent follower of Maurice, Kingsley, and Carlyle. And in Willy, the third son, it showed itself first in a revolt against Oxford, while he was still at Christ Church, leading to his going out to India and joining the Indian Army, at the age of twenty, only to find the life of an Indian subaltern all but intolerable, and to plunge for a time at least into fresh schemes of change.

Among the early photographs at Fox How there is a particularly fine daguerreotype of a young officer in uniform, almost a boy, slim and well proportioned, with piled curly hair, and blue eyes, which in the late 'fifties I knew as "Uncle Willy"; and there were other photographs on glass of the same young man, where this handsome face appeared again, grown older--much older--the boyish look replaced by an aspect of rather grave dignity. In the later pictures he was grouped with children, whom I knew as my Indian cousins. But him, in the flesh, I had never seen. He was dead. His wife was dead. On the landing bookcase of Fox How there was, however, a book in two blue volumes, which I soon realized as a "novel," called Oakfield, which had been written by the handsome young soldier in the daguerreotype. I tried to read it, but found it was about things and persons in which I could then take no interest. But its author remained to me a mysteriously attractive figure; and when the time came for me to read my Uncle Matthew's poems, "A Southern Night," describing the death at Gibraltar of this soldier uncle, became a great favorite with me. I could see it all as Matthew Arnold described it--the steamer approaching Gibraltar, the landing, and the pale invalid with the signs on him of that strange thing called "death," which to a child that "feels its life in every limb" has no real meaning, though the talk of it may lead vaguely to tears, as that poem often did with me.

Later on, of course, I read Oakfield, and learned to take a more informed pride in the writer of it. But it was not until a number of letters written from India by William Arnold to my father in New Zealand between 1848 and 1855, with a few later ones, came into my possession, at my father's death, that I really seemed to know this dear vanished kinsman, though his orphaned children had always been my friends.

FOX HOW

FOX HOW, THE WESTMORELAND HOME OF THE ARNOLDS.

The letters of 1848 and 1849 read like notes for Oakfield. They were written in bitterness of soul by a very young man, with high hopes and ideals, fresh from the surroundings of Oxford and Rugby, from the training of the Schoolhouse and Fox How, and plunged suddenly into a society of boys--the subalterns of the Bengal Native Infantry--living for the most part in idleness, often a vicious idleness, without any restraining public opinion, and practically unshepherded, amid the temptations of the Indian climate and life. They show that the novel is, indeed, as was always supposed, largely autobiographical, and the references in them to the struggle with the Indian climate point sadly forward to the writer's own fate, ten years later, when, like the hero of his novel, Edward Oakfield, he fell a victim to Indian heat and Indian work. The novel was published in 1853, while its author was at home on a long sick leave, and is still remembered for the anger and scandal it provoked in India, and the reforms to which, no doubt, after the Mutiny, it was one of the contributing impulses. It is, indeed, full of interest for any student of the development of Anglo-Indian life and society; even when one remembers how, soon after it was published, the great storm of the Mutiny came rushing over the society it describes, changing and uprooting everywhere. As fiction, it suffers from the Rugby "earnestness" which overmasters in it any purely artistic impulse, while infusing a certain fire and unity of its own. But various incidents in the story--the quarrel at the mess-table, the horse-whipping, the court martial, the death of Vernon, and the meeting between Oakfield and Stafford, the villain of the piece, after Chilianwallah--are told with force, and might have led on, had the writer lived, to something more detached and mature in the way of novel-writing.

But there were few years left to him, "poor gallant boy!"--to quote the phrase of his poet brother; and within them he was to find his happiness and his opportunity in love and in public service, not in literature.

Nothing could be more pathetic than the isolation and revolt of the early letters. The boy Ensign is desperately homesick, pining for Fox How, for his mother and sisters, for the Oxford he had so easily renounced, for the brothers parted from him by such leagues of land and sea.

The fact that one learns first in India [he says, bitterly] is the
profound ignorance which exists in England about it. You know how one
hears it spoken of always as a magnificent field for exertion, and this
is true enough in one way, for if a man does emerge at all, he emerges
the more by contrast--he is a triton among minnows. But I think the
responsibility of those who keep sending out here young fellows of
sixteen and seventeen fresh from a private school or Addiscombe is quite
awful. The stream is so strong, the society is so utterly worldly and
mercenary in its best phase, so utterly and inconceivably low and
profligate in its worst, that it is not strange that at so early an age,
eight out of ten sink beneath it.... One soon observes here how seldom
one meets a happy man.
I came out here with three great advantages [he adds]. First, being
twenty instead of seventeen; secondly not having been at Addiscombe;
third, having been at Rugby and Christ Church. This gives me a sort of
position--but still I know the danger is awful--for constitutionally I
believe I am as little able to stand the peculiar trials of Indian life
as anybody.

And he goes on to say that if ever he feels himself in peril of sinking to the level of what he loathes--"I will go at once." By coming out to India he had bound himself to one thing only--"to earn my own bread." But he is not bound to earn it "as a gentleman." The day may come--

when I shall ask for a place on your farm, and if you ask how I am to
get there, you, Tom, are not the person to deny that a man who is in
earnest and capable of forming a resolution can do more difficult things
than getting from India to New Zealand!

And he winds up with yearning affection toward the elder brother so far away.

I think of you very often--our excursion to Keswick and Greta Hall, our
walk over Hardknot and Wrynose, our bathes in the old Allen Bank
bathing-place [Grasmere], our parting in the cab at the corner of Mount
St. One of my pleasantest but most difficult problems is when and where
we shall meet again.

In another letter, written a year later, the tone is still despondent. "It is no affectation to say that I feel my life, in one way, cannot now be a happy one." He feels it his duty for the present to "lie still," as Keble says, to think, it may be to suffer. "But in my castle-buildings I often dream of coming to you." He appreciates, more fully than ever before, Tom's motives in going to New Zealand--the desire that may move a man to live his own life in a new and freer world. "But when I am asked, as I often am, why you went, I always grin and let people answer themselves; for I could not hope to explain without preaching a sermon. An act of faith and conviction cannot be understood by the light of worldly motives and interests; and to blow out this light, and bring the true one, is not the work of a young man with his own darkness to struggle through; so I grin as aforesaid." "God is teaching us," he adds--i.e., the different members of the family--"by separation, absence, and suffering." And he winds up--"Good-by. I never like finishing a letter to you--it seems like letting you fall back again to such infinite distance. And you are often very near me, and the thought of you is often cheery and helpful to me in my own conflict." Even up to January, 1850, he is still thinking of New Zealand, and signing himself, "ever, dear Tom, whether I am destined to see you soon, or never again in this world--Your most truly affectionate brother."

Alack! the brothers never did meet again, in this world which both took so hardly. But for Willy a transformation scene was near. After two years in India, his gift and his character had made their mark. He had not only been dreaming of New Zealand; besides his daily routine, he had been working hard at Indian languages and history. The Lawrences, both John and Henry, had found him out, and realized his quality. It was at Sir Henry Lawrence's house in the spring of 1850 that he met Miss Fanny Hodgson, daughter of the distinguished soldier and explorer, General Hodgson, discoverer of the sources of the Ganges, and at that time the Indian Surveyor-General. The soldier of twenty-three fell instantly in love, and tumult and despondency melted away. The next letter to New Zealand is pitched in quite another key. He still judges Indian life and Indian government with a very critical eye. "The Alpha and Omega of the whole evil in Indian Society" is "the regarding India as a rupee-mine, instead of a Colony, and ourselves as Fortune-hunters and Pension-earners rather than as emigrants and missionaries." And outside his domestic life his prospects are still uncertain. But with every mail one can see the strained spirit relaxing, yielding to the spell of love and to the honorable interests of an opening life.

"To-day, my Thomas [October 2, 1850], I sit, a married man in the Bengal army, writing to a brother, it may be a married man, in Van Diemen's Land." (Rumors of Tom's courtship of Julia Sorell had evidently just reached him.) He goes on to describe his married home at Hoshyarpore, and his work at Indian languages. He has been reading Carlyle's Cromwell, and marveling at the "rapid rush of thought which seems more and more to be engrossing people in England!" "In India you will easily believe that the torpor is still unbroken." (The Mutiny was only seven short years ahead!) And he is still conscious of the "many weights which do beset and embitter a man's life in India." But a new stay within, the reconciliation that love brings about between a man and the world, upholds him.

"'To draw homeward to the general life,' which you, and dear Matt himself, and I, and all of us, are--or at least may be--living, independent of all the accidents of time and circumstance--this is a great alleviation." The "fundamentals" are safe. He dwells happily on the word--"a good word, in which you and I, so separated, as far as accidents go, it may be for all time, can find great comfort, speaking as it does of Eternity." One sees what is in his mind--the brother's "little book of poems" published a year before:

Yet they, believe me, who await
No gifts from chance, have conquered fate,
They, winning room to see and hear,
And to men's business not too near
Though clouds of individual strife
Draw homeward to the general life.

---

To the wise, foolish; to the world
Weak;--yet not weak, I might reply,
Not foolish, Fausta, in His eye,
To whom each moment in its race,
Crowd as we will its neutral space,
Is but a quiet watershed
Whence, equally, the seas of life and death are fed.

Six months later the younger brother has heard "as a positive fact" of Tom's marriage, and writes, with affectionate "chaff":

I wonder whether it has changed you much?--not made a Tory of you, I'll
undertake to say! But it is wonderfully sobering. After all, Master Tom,
it is not the very exact finale which we should have expected to your
Republicanism of the last three or four years, to find you a respectable
married man, holding a permanent appointment!

Matt's marriage, too, stands pre-eminent among the items of family news. What blind judges, sometimes, the most attached brothers are of each other!

I hear too by this mail of Matt's engagement, which suggests many
thoughts. I own that Matt is one of the very last men in the world whom
I can fancy happily married--or rather happy in matrimony. But I dare
say I reckon without my host, for there was such a "longum
intervallum" between dear old Matt and me, that even that last month in
town, when I saw so much of him, though there was the most entire
absence of elder-brotherism on his part, and only the most kind and
thoughtful affection, for which I shall always feel grateful, yet our
intercourse was that of man and boy; and though the difference of years
was not so formidable as between "Matthew" and Wordsworth, yet we were
less than they a "pair of Friends," though a pair of very loving
brothers.

But even in this gay and charming letter one begins to see the shadows cast by the doom to come. The young wife has gone to Simla, having been "delicate" for some time. The young husband stays behind, fighting the heat.

The hot weather, old boy, is coming on like a tiger. It is getting on
for ten at night; but we sit with windows all wide open, the punkah
going, the thinnest conceivable garments, and yet we sweat, my brother,
very profusely.... To-morrow I shall be up at gun-fire, about half-past
four A.M. and drive down to the civil station, about three miles off, to
see a friend, an officer of our own corps ... who is sick, return, take
my Bearer's daily account, write a letter or so, and lie down with Don
Quixote under a punkah, go to sleep the first chapter that Sancho lets
me, and sleep till ten, get up, bathe, re-dress and breakfast; do my
daily business, such as it is--hard work, believe me, in a hot
sleep-inducing, intestine-withering climate, till sunset, when doors and
windows are thrown open ... and mortals go out to "eat the air," as the
natives say.

The climate, indeed, had already begun its deadly attack upon an organism as fine and sensitive as any of the myriad victims which the secret forces of India's sun and soil have exacted from her European invaders. In 1853, William Delafield Arnold came home invalided, with his wife and his elder two children. The third, Oakeley (the future War Minister in Mr. Balfour's Government), was born in England in 1855. There were projects of giving up India and settling at home. The young soldier whose literary gift, always conspicuous among the nine in the old childish Fox How days, and already shown in Oakfield, was becoming more and more marked, was at this time a frequent contributor to the Times, the Economist, and Fraser, and was presently offered the editorship of the Economist. But just as he was about to accept it, came a flattering offer from India, no doubt through the influence of Sir John Lawrence, of the Directorship of Public Instruction in the Punjaub. He thought himself bound to accept it, and with his wife and two children went out again at the end of 1855. His business was to organize the whole of native education in the Punjaub, and he did it so well during the short time that remained to him before the Mutiny broke out, that during all that time of terror, education in the Punjaub was never interrupted, the attendances at the schools never dropped, and the young Director went about his work, not knowing often, indeed, whether the whole province might not be aflame within twenty-four hours, and its Anglo-Indian administration wiped out, but none the less undaunted and serene.

To this day, three portrait medals in gold and silver are given every year to the best pupils in the schools of the Punjaub, the product of a fund raised immediately after his death by William Arnold's fellow-workers there, in order to commemorate his short heroic course in that far land, and to preserve, if they could, some record of that "sweet stateliness" of aspect, to use the expression of one who loved him, which "had so fascinated his friends."

The Mutiny passed. Sir John Lawrence paid public and flattering tribute to the young official who had so amply justified a great man's choice. And before the storm had actually died away, within a fortnight of the fall of Delhi, while it was not yet certain that the troops on their way would arrive in time to prevent further mischief, my uncle, writing to my father of the awful days of suspense from the 14th to the 30th of September, says:

A more afflicted country than this has been since I returned to it in
November. 1855--afflicted by Dearth--Deluge--Pestilence--far worse than
war, it would be hard to imagine. In the midst of it all, the happiness
of our domestic life has been almost perfect.

With that touching sentence the letters to my father, so far, at least, as I possess them, come to an end. Alas! In the following year the gentle wife and mother, worn out by India, died at a hill-station in the Himalayas, and a few months later her husband, ill and heartbroken, sent his motherless children home by long sea, and followed himself by the overland route. Too late! He was taken ill in Egypt, struggled on to Malta, and was put ashore at Gibraltar to die. From Cairo he had written to the beloved mother who was waiting for him in that mountain home he so longed to reach, that he hoped to be able to travel in a fortnight.

But do not trust to this.... Do not in fact expect me till you hear that
I am in London. I much fear that it may be long before I see dear, dear
Fox How. In London I must have advice, and I feel sure I shall be
ordered to the South of England till the hot weather is well advanced. I
must wait too in London for the darling children. But once in London, I
cannot but think my dearest mother will manage to see me, and I have
even had visions of your making one of your spring tours, and going with
me to Torquay or wherever I may go.... Plans--plans--plans! They will
keep.