Chapter V: Part 5

As a lieutenant in the 15th Light Dragoons--now 15th Hussars--my great-uncle Edward Knight was in command of Sir John Moore’s escort at Corunna. He was close by, when Moore was hit, and he helped to bury him, 17 January 1809; and in after years he inveighed against the celebrated poem on the Burial. It was not like that, and “had no damned poetry in it.”

He went through the rest of the Peninsular War; and, as a major, he took over the command of the 11th Portuguese Dragoons at the battle of Vittoria, 21 June 1813. He received the gold medal and several foreign decorations, and retired with brevet of lieutenant-colonel. His brother Henry Knight went through the whole of the Peninsular War, 1808 to 1814, as paymaster of the 5th battalion of the King’s German Legion; and he was at the battle of Waterloo, 18 June 1815, as was his brother John Knight, then paymaster of the 2nd battalion. They were both in La Haye Sainte; and the position was shown me carefully, when I visited the battlefield, 13 August 1868. The buildings had been loopholed; and I was told that it was very unpleasant inside, when the enemy put their muskets through the loopholes and began to fire in.

John and Henry had the Waterloo medal, and Henry also had the Gwalior star, as he was at the battle of Punniar, 29 December 1843. He was then in the 9th Lancers, to which he was transferred in 1819. He was with his old battalion at the taking of Copenhagen, 7 September 1807; and curiously his brother Christopher Knight was there also, as a midshipman on the Minotaur.

These four great-uncles of mine saw a great deal of hard fighting without ever being wounded; but I find it recorded of Christopher at the bombardment of Algiers, 27 August 1816, that “the gallant officer had the misfortune to be severely contused.” When the old wooden ships were hit by heavy shot, great chunks of wood came flying off inside; and, if you were hit by one of these, you were not wounded but contused.

Edward had a son Godfrey Knight, a captain in the 64th--now Staffordshires--who was in the Indian Mutiny and Persian War. When he came to stay with us, his anecdotes outshone Aladdin and Sindbad in my youthful mind: the Jinn seemed tame beside the Gwalior Rebels as described by him. And he loomed up pretty large himself, when I saw him in his uniform with medals and clasps. He wore the long whiskers of that period with eye-glass and moustaches; and the eye-glass seemed to be a fixture, but in an action in the Mutiny, “unfawt’nately I dwopped my glass, and the demm’d Pandies nearly got me, haw!” He died at sea on his way out again, 24 August 1862. Troop-ships still took three months on the voyage, going by the Cape.

* * * * *

Amongst old letters here, I found one from a distant relative, Lucknow, 1 May 1857:--“The Bengal Army has been in a sad state lately owing to an idea that Government were issuing cartridges in the making up of which cows and pigs fat was used, the mere handling of which (to them) impurities would destroy their caste. From what I have heard from excellent authority there is no doubt of some objectionable material having been used, and it was shameful of the Government attempting to issue them. I was told by our Brigadier (but as a secret) that the propriety of doing so had been canvassed in Council, so whatever happens lies on their shoulders. I could hardly have believed any old Indians would have been so foolish. The matter is now dying away, and the men practising at the Enfield Rifle schools have ghee served out to them to grease the wads.” On 30 May the Mutiny reached Lucknow. His horse was shot under him that evening, and the Brigadier was killed not two yards off; but he came safely through the Siege.

* * * * *

There are many letters from my old nurse. After leaving us, she went into the service of a family in France. She writes to me from Sully, 25 January 1871:--“I must begin by telling you of our flight. I am writing in a very old castle on the borders of the Loire. The marquis, thinking we were in danger, sent us off here; there were three carriages, all the horses, and the pack of hounds. We had to pass thro’ a black forest at night, we were stopped from time to time by French guards; they looked terrifying on horseback with their long white cloaks. You may guess that we did not arrive at the end of our journey without sundry frights. We are with a friend of the family, and have been here more than two months, and no means of leaving.

“The castle is surrounded by water, two of the towers are in complete ruins, what is left of them is covered in ivy. The part we inhabit is in good condition, the rooms are very ancient, the walls and the ceilings are fresco, the dining-room is hung with tapestry, also the best bedrooms, the staircases are of stone, ropes passed thro’ iron rings in the walls supply the place of banisters, the walls are five feet thick; it will stand the cannon of the enemy, I have no fear in this good old place. The picture gallery is very interesting to visit, of course all family portraits, at the end of that is the old theatre; it is now converted into an ambulance for the wounded.

“We had been quiet a few days when the terrible battle of Bellegarde began not far from here, the poor wounded soldiers both French and Prussians were brought here in carts; the first two days they were about fifty and increased in number every day. It is well for your tender heart that you were not here, you could not have endured to witness their sufferings.

“Now for another scene we had General Bourbaki with his army encamped before the castle. How I wished you were here then. I looked out of my window, the moon was in its full, showing its bright light over the scene, the whole of the park was covered in tents, among the trees we could see the fires and the soldiers sitting around them in their different costumes; they had with them 150 cannons all arranged in order ready for an attack.

“The next morning was the worst of all; the Prussians were making for here on the other side of the Loire. The first thing the General thought of doing was cutting their march, so he ordered the bridge to be burnt. We watched the arrival of the enemy, and quite enjoyed their disappointment at finding themselves the wrong side of the river. They fired over here, I did not feel very brave that day. This last week they have been firing on the castle; there is no danger for us, the walls are thick enough to resist.”

She writes again, 6 February 1872:--“We have been staying a few days at the Château of Sully. I enjoyed the visit more this time, we could walk about without fear of the Prussians.... Maréchal de MacMahon with his son, a very nice boy, has been here for a few days shooting.” There is much praise of MacMahon in her letters: he is kind and good and brave and noble, and he comes round to the nursery and tells the children tales.

She left our house when I was old enough to do without a nurse; but other servants never left, unless they were going to be married. Ann came to us when she was sixteen, and stayed till she was sixty-three, when she retired on a pension. In another household her sister Betsy did the same. They were both past ninety, when they died; and so also were Mary and Martha, who were fellow-servants with Ann. I went to tea with Mary on her ninety-fifth birthday; and she sang “I’m ninety-five,” a song well known in earlier times.

In their later years they lived a good deal in the past. At some dinner-party at our house in London the soup was handed round as mock-turtle, whereas it was real-turtle, and Mary was proud of having made it. She never let the others hear the last of that. There was to be another party there, for which great preparations had been made. But, as Ann told me quite angrily, “on the very morning of the party, King William went and died, and the party had to be put off, and all the things were spoilt.” And she was very cross about it still.

There were illuminations for Queen Victoria’s wedding; and the house was decked with night-lights in little globes of coloured glass. Ann put them carefully away, and brought them out in 1887 for the Jubilee. There were illuminations for the wedding of the Prince of Wales; and I had a night out, 10 March 1863. At the top of Trafalgar Square a wheel of our brougham got locked into the wheels of another carriage; and it was impossible to lift them clear, owing to the pressure of the crowd. We stayed there for hours.

The illuminations in 1863 were things that people would not look at now. There were gas-pipes twisted into stars and monograms and crowns, with little holes punctured for the gas: there were some transparencies, mostly with oil lamps behind; and there were a few devices in cut glass. The crowd was feebler also. People say we are degenerate now, but I think it is the other way: some of the worst types seem to be extinct.

We moved into a new house in London on 23 June 1864, and I meant to celebrate the jubilee by moving out on 23 June 1914, but was not ready then, and did not finish my move till 23 November. Being newly built, the house had a hot-water cistern in the bath-room, fed automatically by the kitchen boiler more than forty feet below. That was a novelty in 1864; and, when people came to call, they went upstairs to look at it, and could not make it out. A gifted Fellow of King’s was quite disturbed about it till he thought of Heracleitos and the maxim _Panta Rhei_, and that enabled him to place our cistern in its true position in the Universe. Of course, these people knew that hot water was lighter than cold, and would go up while cold went down, yet were unable to follow the theory into practice. I have noticed the same thing several times, when going to Gibraltar by the P. & O. People on board have said the clock was being altered because we were going south. They knew theoretically what the reason was, but could not apply their knowledge.

A good many of the people here are of opinion that the Earth is flat; and I do not know of any simple and decisive way of proving it to be a globe. I failed miserably with Aristotle’s argument (_De Cælo_, ii. 14. 13) from the shape of the Earth’s shadow on the Moon in an eclipse. They very soon showed me that they could cast as round a shadow with a platter or a pail as with a ball of wool. And this, I imagine, was the reasoning of Anaximander and those others, who suggested that we might be living on the flat surface of a cylinder or disk.

There is the Horizon argument; but that is not for people living in a region of high hills, where no horizon can be seen. And the Circumnavigation argument is answered in this way:--In thick mists on the moor you think that you are going straight on, but you always go round in a circle till you come back to where you were before. The other arguments are too subtle to be grasped at all.

When people have come up for their first visit to London, I have seldom found them much impressed with the big public buildings. They have seen photographs, generally taken from some favourable point of view: so they know what to expect, and the reality is not always equal to their expectation. The buildings that impress them are the private houses at the West End. The houses may not be finer than they had expected; but it is the cumulative effect of street on street and square on square of large and wealthy houses, stretching out for miles in all directions.

A country cousin coming up to stay with me in London, I made out a list of sights that should be seen. Besides these sights, she saw a fire at a house close by. There were lots of engines and escapes, and I felt rather grateful to Providence for making this addition to my list; but I felt less grateful three nights afterwards, when Providence added a burglary, not at a neighbour’s house, but at my own.

In chatting with a small boy who was staying here, I was telling him about the fig tree, and showing him that on the outer parts the leaves had five lobes each, but further in (where they received less light) the leaves had only three lobes, and in the densest part they had only one. He listened very attentively, and then he went indoors, and said to everyone he met, “I know all about fig-leaves.”

Writing to my father while my brother was on a visit here, 6 June 1852, my grandfather says:--“I was talking to him yesterday about his lessons. He asked if Papa used to learn his book well. I said he was a very good boy to learn, and did not think of play until he had learnt his lessons, which had a good effect on him now he was a man; and I hoped he would try to make even a better man than his Papa and to know more and to do more. It then dropped, and I did not expect to hear any more about it, but this morning he asked me if his Papa ever swallowed a fourpenny piece. I never dreamt of his motive for putting the question to me. I said No, then he said That is one thing I have done more than Papa.”

In their childhood my brother and sister and their friends were fond of acting plays of their own writing; and they had to study each other’s feelings, lest the parts should be refused. She writes to him, 13 October 1858:--“I have quite finished two scenes, but I must alter the third, as you were to be killed in your sleep, which I know you would not like: so you shall fight with the guards, and they shall kill you after a _long_ struggle.” I have several of these plays in manuscript; and there is no end of killing. With a death-rate of 2 to 3 per scene, each actor could take several parts.

I took a little boy one afternoon to his first Pantomime at Drury Lane. We were sitting in the stalls, and the seats were rather low for him, so I folded up the overcoats for him to sit upon. This brought his head up level with the other people’s heads, and it also brought his right foot level with the calf of my left leg. When anything pleased him, he gave me a little kick to show that he was pleased; and he was pleased with almost everything. I went home very lame.

A generation later on, that little boy’s little children were staying with me here; and I felt rather flattered at hearing that I was mentioned in their prayers each night. But I felt less flattered afterwards, when I discovered that my name came in between the donkey’s and the cook’s. Those children used to get a lot of jam upon their fingers, when they were at tea. One afternoon I heard one of them telling the other, “Nurse says we mustn’t touch the banisters, because we’re sticky.” And then I heard them go upstairs on all fours, wiping it all off upon the carpet. At times they were exacting. I do not object to being a horse, or even a great grizzeley bear--I know what is expected of me then. But I do object to being a crocodile, if a crocodile is expected to lurk underneath a sofa, and snap at people’s legs.

There were some other children, who were friends of mine and also of a bishop, who was an old friend of their father. One day they told me, “Bishop’s coming to-morrow.” And thoughtlessly I said, “Give him my blessing, then.” Next time I saw them, they said in rather a puzzled way, “We gave the bishop your blessing, but he didn’t seem quite to like it.”

My acquaintance is not limited to children. There are not many lexicographers about; yet I number two of them among the friends who come down here to stay with me. One of them has dealt with Chinese, and the other with Egyptian hieroglyphics.

* * * * *

In my earlier years I heard a good deal of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, as embodied in William Holman Hunt. When he was painting his _Eve of St Agnes_ in 1847, he wanted a couple of blood-hounds to complete the picture. Meeting a couple in the road, he tracked them to their lair, which was the house of John Blount Price, an old friend of my father’s and god-father to me. He lent his dogs, and thus began a friendship which lasted till his death in 1889.

My portrait was painted by Emily Holman Hunt in 1868. She was William’s sister, and had acquired all his mannerisms. My hair sticks out like wrought-iron railings round my head; and I have my old nurse’s authority for saying that I never wore such an ill-starched collar in my life.

There is also a water-colour of his here, which looks like the estuary of the Teign near Newton. I asked him if it was, 7 February 1909, and he told me that he remembered doing it while on a walking-tour in 1860, and it was somewhere between Falmouth and Exeter, but he was not certain where. He sketched the scene by moonlight, and put notes in pencil of the colouring of the various parts; but he did not rub the pencil out when he put the colours on, and now these notes show through the colouring. He said he knew they must come through in course of time. Unless they had, I should never have guessed what tint would be described as dusky pink.

On hearing people talk of the Pre-Raphaelite movement now, one wonders if they realize how thoroughly Post-Raphaelite the world was, when that movement started (1848) and for long years afterwards. Here is an extract from my diary, 22 August 1874, on my first visit to Dresden. I was only sixteen then, and have never been a judge of pictures, though they have always interested me; but I think it gives the point of view from which most people saw things at that time. “To the picture-gallery in the Zwinger, and at once went to the _Sistine Madonna_, which has a room to itself at one end of the building. After seeing many bad or indifferent copies of a picture, it is difficult to appreciate the original at once: it is certainly a most wonderful production, and, as a painting, far surpasses anything I have yet seen, but, as a composition, I do not like it so much as Titian’s _Assumption_ or Murillo’s _Immaculate Conception_.” [I never understood the composition till I did what very few people take the trouble to do--went to Piacenza, 7 August 1898, and looked at the church of San Sisto, for which the Madonna was painted. On seeing the rectangular windows and their curtains, I understood the composition at once.] “Then went to Holbein’s _Madonna_, a Dutch lady in black velvet and frills: not very impressive after Raphael’s. The other principal pictures are Correggio’s _La Notte_, a wonderful composition of light and shade, Titian’s _Tribute Money_, Carlo _Dolce’s Christ blessing the bread_, and Battoni’s _Magdalene_.”

People care no more for Pompeo Battoni now than they cared for Botticelli then. The fashion is all the other way; and concessions must be made to fashion, even in a picture-gallery. And in most collections now the later works have been displaced by early works, almost always inferior in execution, and very often inferior in conception also. At the Uffizi the works of Botticelli now have a room apart; but for many years after I first went to Florence the _Birth of Venus_ was hanging in the outside corridor, and did not even get a star in Baedeker.

In his essay on Botticelli, written in 1870, Walter Pater termed him “a secondary painter,” yet found so much in him to praise, that people hardly noticed this. And that was the beginning of the craze, at any rate in England. I knew Walter Pater, and always found him much more level-headed than people might imagine from his style of writing. And he had no illusions here. It is just the old story:--Wilkes never was a Wilkite.

All my earlier views of art were dislocated by the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, 1 May 1877. By that time I had seen all the great galleries of Europe, except the Hermitage, and thus had material for forming an opinion, though the opinion may have been quite wrong. Anyway, I recognized there a style of art that certainly was great, and yet could not be classed with the Old Masters or the Modern Painters, or even as Eclectic. The style is hackneyed now; but in 1877 the _Days of Creation_ was as great a surprise as _Sartor Resartus_ in 1833 or _Pickwick_ in 1836. Carlyle and Dickens were established long before my time, and were suffering then from imitation; and I could not see the reason why those books were praised so lavishly by the people who read them when they first came out. And now the younger generation cannot understand such praising of that picture and the others that were with it. This generation has grown up in a sort of “greenery-yallery” Grosvenor Gallery, and has never had to face the pea-greens and vermilions of the past.

Art has made strange moves since then. Personally, I am always glad of the impressions of a mind that is brighter than my own, but I do not want the impressions of a mind that is still duller; and I get impatient, when the dull mind goes with a clumsy hand, so that the artist cannot even give me such impressions as he has. When honest critics praise such work, I fear their minds are very dull indeed.

As an executor I was concerned in putting a memorial window into a country church. A relative wished for copies of the figures by Sir Joshua Reynolds in the west window of New College chapel at Oxford. There are only seven there, and this window needed nine. I thought the objection fatal; but the purveyor of stained glass replied “Oh no, not at all: we can design you two to match.” He did design them, and they matched his copies of the other seven, the copies being quite unlike the originals.

At the eastern end of Rochester cathedral there is a memorial to Dean Scott, with a gigantic Alpha and Omega on each side of the altar. As he was Dean Liddell’s partner in the great Greek lexicon, the double entendre is rather neat.

One sees trophies everywhere of captured flags and guns and other instruments of war; but the neatest trophies that I ever saw, were both at Petersburg. In the Preobrajensky cathedral there was a row of keys of captured cities, hanging up on pegs with little brass labels for the names. These came from conquests in the East; and in the Kazan cathedral there was a similar row of keys of captured cities in the West--Utrecht and Rheims amongst them.

The first time that I went over Rheims cathedral I noted in my diary:--“The exterior roof is a considerable height above the interior vaulting, and is supported by wood-work enough to burn down half-a-dozen cathedrals.” That was written on 30 March 1875, and it disturbed me in September 1914, when I heard that the Germans were bombarding Rheims, and the cathedral was on fire. The exterior roof was burnt and all this wood-work with it, but the vaulting stood the strain.

Writers on architecture do not always go to see the buildings they describe. Fergusson gives a plan, section and elevation of the church at Lodi on pages 50 to 52 of his _History of Modern Architecture_; and he describes the church as the earliest and best type of its class, and the only remarkable church now extant which was wholly by Bramante. On the strength of this I took the trouble to go to Lodi, 28 September 1899, in order to see the church. But it did not correspond to the designs in Fergusson. I found out afterwards that Bramante’s designs were never carried out, and the church was by Battagio.

I just missed seeing the celebrated crane upon Cologne cathedral. I went there first on 28 August 1868; and it was taken down about three months before that, after standing there on the stump of the spires for about 400 years, waiting for work to be resumed. I looked with admiration on the design for the spires, a fine old Fifteenth Century drawing--the architect sold his soul, and the Devil drew this in his blood. But the Devil had the best of it, as the spires have ruined the cathedral, being out of scale with all the rest.

Before the present Law Courts were begun, the rival designs were exhibited in sheds in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I went to see them several times; and, speaking from memory, I should say that every one of the designs was better than what was built. But that was not the architect’s fault: he had to accept suggestions from all manner of people, each thinking only of one thing, and not considering the building as a whole. When the old Law Courts were pulled down, and the exposed side of Westminster Hall received its present screen and buttresses, a committee ruined the whole thing by forbidding the architect to carry up the little towers at the Palace Yard end--an integral part of his design. Once only, so far as I know, has such interference ended in success. Scott designed the Foreign Office block of buildings in the Gothic style; and his design may be seen in the Diploma Gallery of the Royal Academy. Palmerston could not stand Gothic, and Scott converted his Gothic to Palladian. Looking down Downing Street from the further side of Whitehall, one sees that he achieved what Linton and Turner only dreamt, when they painted their ideals of ancient Rome and Carthage.

The present Law Courts were not opened until 4 December 1882. That was six months after I was called to the Bar; and I have spoken in the old Chancery courts that have now been pulled down and forgotten--the two courts for the Vice Chancellors, that stood where there is now a lawn just inside the gateway leading into Lincoln’s Inn from Chancery Lane, and the court of the Master of the Rolls, on the other side of Chancery Lane on the site of the north-west corner of the present Record Office. I never spoke in the old Common Law courts at Westminster, but remember trials there long before I was a barrister.

I once spent a whole day there listening to the Tichborne case, and found it rather dull. But the Claimant was a sight: he was so corpulent that they cut a large semicircle out of the table to enable him to sit at it, and even then his waistcoat bulged out above the edge.

The trial in _Pickwick_ seemed more possible then than now. I once heard Dickens read that chapter out. I am not certain of the date, but fully thirty years after he had written it; and he was no longer the same man. It fell rather flat. As a rule, authors should be read, not seen. I used to read Browning with interest and respect, if not with pleasure, until one afternoon I saw him running after an omnibus at the end of Piccadilly; and I could not stand his loftier poetry after seeing that.

Many years ago, during a Salisbury administration, I was in a train on the Great Northern, sitting with my back to the engine in one corner of a carriage, and at Hatfield a bishop got in, and sat with his back to the engine in the other corner. There was nobody else in the carriage, and he must have forgotten that I was there, as he started talking to himself. Apparently, he had been recommending some one for preferment, and now had qualms of conscience as to what he had been saying. “I said his preaching was admired by competent judges.” Pause. “Well, so it is. **** admires it, so does ****, and they’re competent judges. I didn’t say that I admired it.” Long pause. “I said he was a convinced Christian.” Pause. “Well, he _is_ convinced. I didn’t say he wasn’t quarrelsome.” I thought it time to make my presence known.

Amongst the letters here I found one to my father from myself, Trinity College, Cambridge, 17 November 1877:--“I saw Darwin made a Doctor in the Senate House to-day. Huxley and Tyndall and the rest of them were there; and there were two stuffed monkeys--one with a musical-box inside it--suspended from the galleries by cords and dangled over Darwin’s head.”

The present Master of Trinity was headmaster at Harrow, while I was there. In his study one afternoon he was adjusting the accents on some of my Greek verses; and at last, pointing to a misplaced circumflex, he asked me how that could possibly go there. I answered him quite honestly that I didn’t know and didn’t care. It was rather a risky thing to say to a headmaster; but in the evening I received a parcel, and found it was Dean Stanley’s _Life of Arnold_--“C.T. from H.M.B. Harrow. Novʳ. 4. 1875.” I suppose my candour pleased him. I know he was quite snappish at my telling him that I put enclitics in for emphasis, when obviously I put them in to make my verses scan.

It was in my time at Harrow that _Forty Years On_ was written and composed; and I helped to sing it at the concert on Founder’s Day, 10 October 1872, which was the first time it was sung in public. Forty years seemed a very long while then, and does not seem much now; and I see more meaning in “Shorter in wind, though in memory long, What shall it profit you that once you were strong.”

* * * * *

For many years I wasted time in trying to play the piano, until at last I saw that I should never play effectively, and then I gave it up. Curiously, my grandfather went through this process with the flute, though I never knew it till I found a letter of his just now:--2 April 1843, “I once had a great wish to learn the flute, and attended to it, and learnt all that was necessary, but could not make any advancement for want of an ear for it. I could play a tune by notes, but not give it that pleasing air that others could, for want of an ear. Therefore I considered it was time badly spent, and dropt it.” I think the fault was with the fingers more than with the ear. Had the ear been altogether bad, our bad playing might have pleased us.

My father had no ear at all for music, yet went to Oratorios, and slept comfortably through them all, except Haydn’s _Creation_ with its disturbing bursts of sound. At the Opera he kept awake, as that was something more than music; and for some years he went pretty regularly--five-and-twenty times in the season of 1853, and so on. But he cared less for such things as the première of Berlioz’s _Benvenuto Cellini_ on 25 June 1853, than for the spectacle on 19 April 1855, when Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie came there with Queen Victoria. The best spectacle I ever saw, for opera and audience combined, was Glinka’s _Life for the Czar_ at Moscow on the Czar’s name-day, 11 September 1889.

I went to the Opera for the first time on 25 May 1863. It was Meyerbeer’s _Prophête_; and I can still recall the scenery and dresses and acting, and make comparisons with later performances, though I cannot recall the singing at any performance vividly enough to compare it with the singing at another. I suppose my taste in operas has varied with the fashion, and also with my time of life. I was told some years ago, by one of our few living poets, that there was only one opera in the world, and that was Gluck’s _Orfeo_. I should say that others have also run, but otherwise I now agree with him.

A letter from my brother to my father--Wreyland, 30 June 1853--comes strangely from a boy of six. “My Dear Papa, I am very much displeased at your not answering my letter. there is a great fault in you about those things. and I hope you will answer this. two letters would be the sum but I would not trouble you to write two for one long one would be enough.... I know that you are quite an oprea [Opera] man. but you must not expect me to go to that Theatre for I do not like always to see things showy but I want something full of frolic such as the Merry Wives Of Windsor. that is what I want to see.” He knew Shakespeare too well. My grandfather writes to my father, 12 September 1854:--“He is always reading Shakespeare, and gets hold of all improper words: he made use of some to-day.”

The antics of some of the conductors used to amuse me as a boy. They waved their heads and arms, and swayed their bodies, as if they were intoxicated with the music. And then Maud Allan arose upon the stage, and did everything they would have done, were they not compelled to keep their seats. I was at one of her first performances in London; and there was no crowding or applause, such as was usual afterwards--in fact the audience did not quite know what to make of it.

She was not the earliest of these dancers--Isidora Duncan was before her--but she had the advantage of being highly trained as a musician before she took to dancing; and certainly her dancing made me understand much music that I never understood before. I had some correspondence with Dr Raymond Duncan--the brother of Isidora--about the music of the ancient Greeks. He claimed to speak with knowledge; but his logic was too easy for me--the Greeks did everything that was beautiful: this is beautiful: therefore the Greeks did it. I could not see how this would solve such problems as the structure of the tetrachords.

Some years before that time I wrote a little treatise _On the Interpretation of Greek Music_, and prepared to build an instrument of seventy strings. The ancients had seventy notes, having twenty-one notes to the octave, and a compass of three octaves and a third; but they never had so many strings. They tuned their strings to suit the mode or scale that they were going to use; but my object was to have the notes all there without this tuning.

I am a Pythagorean myself, and regard the Aristoxenians as silly folk who misinterpret Aristoxenus--and he merely walked slipshod in the footsteps of Pythagoras. Accordingly, I increased the mean tones (_ab_, _cd_, _de_, _fg_, _ga_) to major tones, and decreased the mean semitones (_bc_, _ef_) proportionately; and then I put _a_¹ and _a_² at about a quarter and a half of a mean tone above _a_, and _b_¹ and _b_² at rather less than an eighth and a quarter of a minor tone above _b_, and so on with the other notes. I worked out the vibrations for one complete tetrachord; and (omitting decimals) they were 243, 246, 249 for _b_, _b_¹, _b_², 256, 263, 271 for _c_, _c_¹, _c_², 288, 296, 304 for _d_, _d_¹, _d_², and 324 for _e_. And then I got Messrs Broadwood to make me a set of tuning-forks to test it--a troublesome piece of work, to which their Mr Hipkins gave a great deal of his valuable time and skill and knowledge. The error in the forks was negligible. The intervals were very curious, and unpleasant at first hearing; but, on getting used to them, I got impatient with the piano for having nothing but mean semitones.

As the piano and all keyed instruments have equal temperament now, they ought to have black keys and white alternately all through, and the music could be rewritten in a simpler form. It is ridiculous to keep to five black keys and seven white, instead of six of each, now we have dropped the system on which the seven and five were based.

I did not build my instrument of seventy strings, as I did not see how it could be kept in tune--a tuner would never get these subtle notes quite true, when his daily work was with the tempered scale. And there were practical difficulties about an instrument of seventy tuning-forks.

Somebody asked me what I meant to call the instrument, and I said Cacophone. That was before I grew accustomed to the intervals, and came to like them. But my answer reached some people’s ears in Paris; and I read in the _Revue Critique_, 27 July 1896, that I had invented a series of sounds “inexécutables par aucune voix humaine ou même féline,” in fact a “miaulement,” which “mérite complètement le nom de Cacophone, sous laquelle, dit-on, il l’a désignée.” Anyway, my cat-squall was antique, and their tempered scale was not; and I retorted with some vigour in that journal, 12 October 1896.

Various people had published transcripts of bits of ancient music, and had been applauded at the concerts where their transcripts were performed; and they did not like my saying that twenty notes in twenty-one were wrong, and the twenty-first was doubtful. Anyone can calculate the intervals between the notes by means of logarithms and the ratios given by Ptolemy and other ancient authors. These people told me volubly that this was only mathematics--“lascia le muse, e studia le matematiche.” They said that Aristoxenus must have used the tempered scale, as he assumes that six tones make an octave. Euclid, _Sectio Canonis_, prop. 9, proves with his usual precision that six tones are greater than an octave. Ptolemy, _Harmonica_, i. 9, says that the Aristoxenians should either have accepted what was proved, or set up something else to take its place; and he would hardly have said that, had they set up the tempered scale.

I have always felt that, if an opinion was worth publishing, it was worth defending; and that was why I defended my views about Greek music in the _Revue Critique_ and elsewhere, and have also defended my views on many other things. Critics often change their tone, when put on their defence. There was a professor of theology at Jena, who was displeased with something that I wrote, and he pitched into me, _Berliner Philologische Wochenschrift_, 18 June 1898. I wrote an Entgegnung, which appeared there, 27 August 1898, with an Erwiderung from him. I remarked that “was er ein Wasserstrahl nennt, ist nicht anderes als der Heilige Geist,” corrected him on other points, and finished off with “in der That scheint er von der Litteratur der Sache ebensowenig zu wissen als von altchristlicher Kunst.” In his reply he was an injured innocent, although he had come down on me as if he were a Pope and Œcumenical Council all rolled up into one.

I had been writing about some portraits of Christ that can probably be dated at 258 A.D., or shortly after that; and I had used them in support of my opinion that Christ was only a little over twenty years of age at the date of the Crucifixion. I did not expect people to acquiesce in this without demur; but the theologians treated dates as dogmas. I cannot see the merit of believing that something happened in one way, if it happened in another way, or did not happen at all.

One evening, when some friends were staying with me, one of them was speaking of something he had seen in Egypt; and he said that he thought Brugsch’s system was the best, as a rough and ready way of getting at dates. You reckon three generations to a century; and, though this may not be true for a century or two, it comes pretty near the truth on an average of several centuries. Another man looked dubious; so I asked him what was wrong, and he explained. He was descended from William the Conqueror both on his father’s side and on his mother’s, but on one side it was twenty-seven generations, and on the other it was twenty-four; and he was just wondering whether he was a century older or younger than himself.

I wrote a book on Egyptian chronology and its application to the early history of Greece. The evidence required more careful sifting than it had received; and my point of view was that of Ovid, _Amores_, ii. 2. 57, 58--“viderit ipse licet, credet tamen ipse neganti, | damnabitque oculos, et sibi verba dabit.” I thought of quoting this upon the title-page, but found it rather long, and only gave a part. And then the _Guardian_ reviewed the book, 9 September 1896, and said:--“The motto on the title-page, _damnabitque oculos_, is, perhaps, the oddest motto that ever graced a scientific treatise issued by a University Press.” Which made it plain that the _Guardian_ had a reviewer who was less familiar with the Latin language than with modern swear-words.

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In reviewing books myself, I have often been amazed at their inaccuracy. Youthful writers have to make mistakes for want of knowledge and experience, but I have found older writers making just as bad mistakes from indolence or carelessness.

There is a brilliant volume by Mahaffy on _The Greek World under Roman Sway_. It came out in 1890, and I reviewed it then. At page 391 I came on something quite incredible about the Proconsul of Asia reserving an exceptional privilege for the Christians. The author cited an inscription in support; so I looked this up, and found it was about the citizens of Chios. Of course, the Greek _X_ is _Ch_; and I presume he made his note of this inscription in that form, and then took his Xians for Christians on the analogy of Xmas for Christmas.

One day Maspero was speaking to me rather strongly of a blunder that a friend of mine had made. I turned to a great work of his own, that was lying on the table, _Les momies royales de Deir el-Bahari_, and pointed to the hieroglyphic _ka_ in one of the hieratic texts he had transcribed there. He looked at it for a minute, and then wrote down the hieroglyphic _cha_. He said that he pronounced _cha_ as _ka_, and this must have led him into writing the wrong sign.

I found mistakes of quite another kind in the article on “Navis” in the third edition of Smith’s _Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities_. The article was written by the present Provost of Eton; and, as he was headmaster at the time, he ought to have asked the boys to instruct him in the art of cribbing. He gives himself away by copying the misprints in the books from which he cribbed. On page 219 he cites Plato, _Leges_, iv. p. 507 instead of 707; and there is the same misprint in Cartault, _Trière Athénienne_, page 234. On page 223 he cites Polybius, xx. 85 instead of Diodorus, xx. 85; and there is the same mistake in Graser, _De veterum re navali_, page 53. On the same page he cites Diodorus, 1. 61; and Graser, page 52, has 50, 61 by mistake for 506, 61, which is the reference to the page and line in Hoeschel’s excerpts. On page 217 he prints a passage in Lucian, _Navigium_, 4, and says he took it from Josephus, _Antiquitates_, iv. 8. 37. He took the passage in Lucian from Breusing, _Nautik der Alten_, page 57, and took the reference to Josephus from another passage that Breusing prints on the same page.

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Now and then I make mistakes myself. In my _Ancient Ships_, note 214, I quoted a passage from Procopius, and added, “Apparently the _gonia_ is here the mast-head, as in Herodotus, viii. 122.” I should not have said that, if I had thought of Herodotus, i. 51; but I did not think of it until the book was out. However, it was only a single sentence in the middle of a very long note; and I hoped no harm was done. Some while afterwards I was at the Royal Academy, when the students were being lectured on Greek Sculpture. The lecturer was speaking of the trophy of the Æginetans, as described by Herodotus, viii. 122; and he told them that the grouping of the things was clear, if the _gonia_ was a mast-head, as had lately been suggested.

There is no stopping a mistake after it has started. In the preface to my _Ancient Ships_ I gave the history of a blunder that was made by Scheffer in 1654, and is now in four authoritative books of reference. In fact, when I am told that all authorities agree, I feel certain that one of them has blundered, and the rest have followed him without inquiry.

Guglielmotti has made a pleasant mistake, which these authorities are sure to copy some day: namely, that Alexander the Great was a distinguished German archæologist of the Nineteenth Century. Graser printed an account of his model of a war-ship of the time of Alexander the Great--“aus der Zeit Alexanders des Grossen.” Guglielmotti mentions it in his treatise _Delle due Navi Romane, etc._, and says, page 67:--“Non dai condottieri della nuova età, Bernardo Graser ed Alessandro de Grossen, egregi giovani, i quali hanno trattati, etc.”

Until I discovered it in Jal, _Archéologie Navale_, vol. ii, page 654, I never knew that “Sea Cheers” was an order given on English ships. Nor could I explain the ritual at All Saints’ Church in Margaret Street, until I got a hint from Baedeker, _Londres_, page 146:--“Cette église appartient à la secte des Puséystes.” This was in the edition of 1873. I got it while I was at Harrow, and found I was at “une des principales universités d’Angleterre,” page 245.

A foreigner once described to me a very interesting survival of our feudal institutions, which he had observed while travelling in a train. At one station they waited, and waited, until a man came running along, carrying a Caduceus, which he handed to the driver; and then at last the train went on. He took the Caduceus to be the symbol of some great lord’s permission to them to travel across his lands. And certainly the Staff did look rather like a Caduceus on some of the older lines that were worked upon that system.

My father used to tell me of a foreigner, who went into the refreshment-room at Swindon, had some soup, and was handed someone else’s change. On returning to the carriage, he extolled this English system, by which a passenger was entitled to a certain amount of refreshments, with a refund for the balance, if he did not take the whole amount.

In a Brighton train a foreigner asked me if he had to change at Clafam Junction. I said Clapham, and he corrected me:--“But in English _ph_ is always _f_. I will show you in my book.” At the time of the railway race to Edinburgh, another foreigner told me that he found the trains very expressive.

Many years ago an old Belgian gentleman came down upon my father:--“I ask the butler for mutton-leg, and he say leg-of-mutton. Now you say mutton-chop. Why do you talk like that?” Some friends of mine from Paris asked me quite angrily:--“Why do you call Portland Place a Place? It is not a Place.” They had gone to the Langham under the impression that it looked out on something like the Vendôme or the Concorde. At an hotel in Switzerland my father was objecting to rooms without a view. The landlord said no others were vacant then, “but to-morrow I shall give you rooms where I shall make you see the Mont Blanc.” Faire voir, of course.

A learned German told me that Thomas Aquinas was one of the most genial men that ever lived. (By a genial man he meant a man of genius). Being in Berlin, I went to see an antiquarian friend, who was a surgeon by profession. I was then at work upon the sort of book that Germans call a Corpus; and he said he hoped to get much information from my corpse.

I have made much worse mistakes myself. On a hot summer day at Ferrara I went into a café to see if I could get an ice. Instead of asking the man if he had got _Gelati_, which are ices, I asked if he had got _Geloni_, which are chilblains. Arriving quite exhausted at an inn in the Tyrol, I said I wanted the _Abendmahl_ at once. The word means Supper, just like _Abendessen_, but is now used only of the Sacrament.

In all probability I shall never again say Thank-you to a German; but I find that, if I do, I must say Donkey’s-hair. I fancied it was Danke-sehr, but am corrected by a girl from a superior sort of school near here.

A man built a bungalow not far from here, and chose to call it Chez-nous; but it is known as Chestnuts. Chars-à-banc are known as Cherubim. On venturing to hint that this was a mistake, I got a crushing reply:--“Why, us read of the Lord a-ridin’ on the wings of the Cherubim, and they folk be a-ridin’ on their seats.”

A quantity of plants arrived here while I was away, and among them were some Kalmias and Andromedas. On my

return I asked where they had all been put; and I was told that some of them were in the greenhouse, others were in various parts of the garden, and the Camels and Dromedaries were out in the orchards.

An old gardener once gave me his opinion that a laundry was better than a garden, “as garments had not got such mazin’ names as plants.” And the maze grows more intricate, when Berberis Darwinii is Barbarous Darwin, and Nicotiana is Nicodemus, and Irises are Irish, and they English Irish be braver than they Spanish Irish.

There was an old lady here who always said:--“If there be a flower that I do like, it be a Pertunium.” It was neither a petunia nor a geranium; but I never found out exactly what it was. Botanists might adopt the name, when they want one for a novelty, for it is better than most of theirs. It may be convenient to give things Greek or Latin names, and it certainly sounds better to say Archæopteryx and Deinotherium than Old Bird and Awful Beast. But it is absurd to take the ancient name for one thing, and give it to another; yet that is what Linnæus and his followers have very often done.

Besides their botanical names, many things have trade names now. There is a plant here of the sort that is described at Kew as Rhododendrum Ponticum Cheiranthifolium. But, when I wanted to get another like it, I found the nurseryman did not know it by that name. He called it Jeremiah J. Colman.

Even in plain English there are pitfalls. At a hotel in Penzance I found the coffee-room quite full, when I came in to breakfast, and I asked the head-waiter if he couldn’t find me a place. He answered:--“Very sorry, sir, only whiting and soles to-day.”

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One morning in London I was eating potted tunny-fish at breakfast, and I soon felt that it was having an effect on me. My brain was clearer than it has ever been before or since. I understood things that had always puzzled me; and nothing was obscure. In fact, for about two hours I was a Man of Genius; and then I dropped down to my usual level.