CHAPTER XVII. DAILY LIFE. "But blame thou not the winds that make The seeming-wanton ripple shake, The tender-pencil'd shadow play." TENNYSON. My father's habits were extraordinarily simple. For many years he never slept more than "five hours and ten minutes" in any night, often not so much; he had trained himself to wake early as a boy, by going to sleep thinking of the face of a clock with the hands pointing to the hour at which he wished to wake, and his sleep was broken by the most vivid and picturesque dreaming. As late as the last month of his life, I recollect his entertaining us with the account of a dream he had had. He dreamt that he was at Trinity College Chapel, about to celebrate the Communion. But on reaching the altar he found a book printed in an unknown language. He said, "I began to read, but could not remember how the sense went, so I kept up some sort of muttering, and the choir sang responses at intervals, while I beckoned to everyone within reach to come to my assistance. At last a grave-looking man like a verger came, and on my pointing out the book to him he said, rather severely, 'Your Grace is not aware that this is one of the days when the Mozarabic liturgy is used.'" These dreams were always strangely vivid; I remember his telling me he had a dream of skeletons, apparently made of gold, lying in a hollow in the ground which was filled with some opalescent fluid. Again he dreamt that he was passing along a narrow street in some foreign town and saw golden skeletons leaning from the windows. On the skeletons were moving small objects. "This sight," said my father, "inspired me to write verse, and I indited a poem which appeared to me to be very spirited: it began, Oh, not in vain! the poet sings, Forms of things, like earthy worms, Crawl about on forms of things." On one occasion he said that he dreamt that he was at Wellington and a man was shown into his study, who told him that he was a Government Official come down to examine the School. My father said, "I asked him if he would have some lunch; we had just finished our own. He assented, and I took him into the dining-room and then excused myself on the plea that I must see about the examination. I then told the butler to get lunch: then I spent some considerable time in agony at the prospect of a sudden examination; but at last I went back to fetch him. I found the table neatly laid for luncheon: but the Inspector was leaning as far as he could out of the window, to breathe the air: and the only food on the table was two roast ducks in a dish, which were blue with putrefaction." But the most vivid dream of his that I remember was as follows:-"I dreamt," he said, "that I was standing in the cloisters of the Abbey with Dean Stanley, looking at a small cracked slab of slate with letters on it. 'We've found it,' he said. 'Yes,' said I; and how do you account for it?' 'Why,' he said, 'I suppose it is intended to commemorate the fact that the animal innocence was not affected by the villainies of the master.' 'Of course,' I replied. The slab I then saw had on it the letters ITI CAPITANI and I knew that it was the stone that marked the grave of Titus Oates's horse, and the whole inscription was EQUUS TITI CAPITANI-the 'Captain' referring to the fact that I then also knew that Titus Oates had been a train-band Captain." We were staying at Addington early in 1894, when the appointment to the vacant Laureateship was being discussed. The Archbishop came down to breakfast one morning with a very amusing expression of suppressed mirth, and seemed eager to speak to me alone. He took me after breakfast into the library, and told me that he had had a very vivid dream, in which it appeared that he had been himself appointed Poet Laureate. He said, "I thought that I was standing before the Queen, reciting a poem, and I was very uncomfortable, partly because the Lord Chamberlain had just placed the laurel wreath on my head, and it fell a little over one eye, and partly because I was not at all sure that I ought to be dressed, as I was, in full Archiepiscopal robes. But I tried to forget all that, and concentrate my mind on my poem, and I was getting on nicely with it, when I suddenly woke, and went on, saying out loud: Your latest atmosphere device Is all composed of dust and lice. "Was not that a curious use of the word 'atmosphere,' as an adjective, and what could the rest of the poem have been about?" I replied, "No doubt your Grace had composed a sacred epic on the Plagues of Egypt." We had a good deal of amusement, from time to time, about this and other examples of dreams continued for a moment or two, in vocal but extremely obscure language, after waking. The Archbishop told me at dinner that day, recurring to this subject, of the last time that Magee stayed with him. The two prelates had sat up late together alone, and Magee had been very amusing. In the morning, the Archbishop woke, convulsed with laughter over a joke in Latin which he had been dreaming that Magee had made. He said, "I was so much impressed by the incomparable wit of it, that I jumped out of bed, and wrote it down. But when I had done so, I found there was no point in it at all, and then, but not till then, I discovered that it was not even in Latin!" To a later conversation, also about mysterious dream-sayings, the following note-a postscript to a letter-refers. Another genuine dream-sentence- -12 Jan. at waking:"We have long understood her 'case '-that is as Sentias." "Her" refers to Church of England. The speaker is a defender. To this note, in connection with what the Archbishop had been saying about his anxieties in Madagascar, Armenia and Wales, Mr Gosse replied in the following epigram :— "Past Welsh, Armenian, Malagasy shoals, All day he navigates the Ship of Light, Her darkling destinies in dreams at night," which my father read aloud with great amusement at breakfast on the day that he received it. My father used in former days to rise at 5.30, and after a cold bath, taken all the year round, to make himself tea in an Etna and set to work. He had thus generally done a good deal of work before breakfast, but he had besides read the Greek Testament for an hour or worked at his book on the Revelation. In later years the doctors forbade work before breakfast, but he read a good deal in the Bible, and his dressing used to take him an hour, so that he never rose later than about seven. He used a prie-dieu for his devotions, above which were fixed a triptych, a little illuminated picture, painted after a design of his own, and two little wooden circles painted by himself, with sacred emblems. On a little high desk lay a Theocritus or a book of Greek Epigrams, which he liked to read while dressing, with bullets hung on tape for markers, to keep the pages down. Breakfast, unless there were many visitors, was at 8.30, an hour which my father regarded as having a peculiar kind of sanctity; he used indeed to try to have breakfast in holiday time at 8.0, to secure his great delight—“ a good long morning." He was a very small and swift eater, and had in later years a little loaf of brown bread before him, which was offered to special friends as a particular delicacy. Chapel followed breakfast. My father wore in Chapel a purple cassock, linen rochet-copied from the one worn by Warham, in Holbein's picture,-hood and scarf. He read the morning O.T. Lesson, and the prayers after the hymn, using by preference ancient collects. At one time he used to expound the Bible, but seldom in recent years. He was very fond of music and attached to old tunes which he sang fervently, but except Handel he had no special preferences in music and no technical knowledge of it. He preferred old-fashioned florid chants to Gregorians. After Chapel my father set to work on letters at once: the chaplains came to him about noon with correspondence when they had opened and sorted the letters of the day. He was often needlessly exact about trifles in letters, and used to alter expressions which were perfectly adequate into precisely synonymous terms for some unknown reason of his own. "No, I don't like that, he will think "-and then followed some grotesque thought which it was almost inconceivable should enter anyone's head. Sometimes he dictated letters, or dictated the main points: only once he had a secretary who knew shorthand, and he found that a great convenience. The Rev. Colin Campbell, who was my father's senior domestic chaplain from 1894 to 1895, now Vicar of Great Thornham, Suffolk, writes: Riding with him past the House of Lords, a spot which not seldom inspired him to relate some anecdote, I once ventured to remonstrate at the time he spent in the writing and wording of letters. |