by Hugh Walpole
It was the most wonderful box made entirely of crystal, not very large, gleaming with a thousand colors. What had it in it, I asked. She frowned at that. It did not matter what it had in it. You yourself put something into it. The point was that when you had it you were happy and contented and would never want anything again. The days in her youth when she had had it were the happiest of her life. She would have it again before she died....
I may not have remembered exactly the story of the Crystal Box. Years have passed and poor Aunt Julie has gone to far distant countries in search of it. Then, at the time when she told me of it, I believed utterly and devoutly in its existence. The thought of it really changed life for me, and so I may be said in one sense actually to have seen it. But I do not wish too deliberately to turn it into a symbol. I cannot, even now, quite rid myself of the belief that it is, concretely, four square, shining somewhere. I have seen crystal boxes since then but I have never been deceived by them. Miss Julie’s box has been left to me — and by me one day it will perhaps be found. At any rate the thought of it, so beautifully shining, waiting for me, has consoled me on many dreary days since the time at S —— .
That same search is also in “The Captives”. In “Mrs. Seagrim” too, and perhaps in every book that I have ever written.
II: CATHEDRAL PIECE
I
IT has happened that I have spent all my youth under the shadow of English cathedrals. English cathedrals are the sport and plaything of men like Frank Harris and his kind — men who detest English tradition and think it stuffy, reactionary, and snobbish. In some ways they are right; there is no snobbery, I firmly believe, quite so stuffy and reactionary as the snobbery of the élite of English cathedral life. And this I say with a full consciousness of men like Canon.
B —— , Bishop W —— — , Archdeacon Salt, men whom I have known, beneath whose shadows, so to speak, I have grown up, saints of God, men of marvelous purity of life and thought. But such men as these have not been of the cathedral sets at all, they have been childlike men, leading lives that were half lost in mist of faith and hope and charity— “the men like little children” whom Christ said we were to be.
My first cathedral was the Cathedral of Truro in the County of Cornwall, and this is the one that I shall always love most in my heart although it is neither the oldest nor the most beautiful — it is in fact nearly the youngest of all the English cathedrals, my father being its first precentor. It was when he was precentor there under Benson its first bishop that he met my mother, who was a Cornish lady, Barham by name, Foster and Carlyon by family, so that on my mother’s side I am related to almost every family in the South Country.
I was only six years old when I was brought from New Zealand where I was born to Truro. That is thirty-two years ago and it may be only romantic memory that forces me to fancy that my aunts, so quiet and so dignified, my cousin so pretty, my uncle the Archdeacon a little like Mr. Pickwick, and all the others lived in a world far more sweetly colored and sweetly toned than the world of today. Not more interesting. Not nearly as interesting — but the telephone and the halfpenny illustrated paper and the cinematograph have brought China and Peru to the very doors of the sleepiest quietest little towns in England. Have they gained or lost by the change? The question has been asked a hundred million times in the last few years. It is platitudinous indeed to ask it. But something at any rate has gone from the world that the world will never see again. That is certain.
I lived with an aunt in Truro for several years and had nothing but love and kindness and charity. I go back now to Truro whenever I have an opportunity. It is with the country that surrounds it the spot I love most in the world, save only London.
It is one of those English towns into which the country lanes are forever breaking, where the river is lazy and fringed all the way to the sea with deep purple shadowed woods. The lanes are thicker with primroses than any other lanes in the world; the biscuits are sweeter, the bells softer, the knockers on the doors brighter, the canon’s smiles broader, the animals’ noises on market day more vociferous, the rooks in the elms more tempestuous, the sun hotter, the old maids kinder, the puppies and kittens and babies really young for a longer time, the gardens more shady, the circulating libraries more behind the times, the midday siesta more thorough than in any other town in England.
I at least will always believe so whatever anyone else may say.
II
My second cathedral was Canterbury. I went to school in Canterbury and I lived there for several years with my godfather who was a canon of the cathedral. I was very happy there both at school and with my godfather. I remember very little of my years there — I was recovering I suppose from my years at S —— — . I remember a great mulberry tree in my godfather’s red walled garden that, unlike most mulberry trees of my acquaintance, actually bore fruit. I remember reading Fielding right through in a strange glazed set of his works with gold tops that was in my godfather’s library. I remember too an awful day when I was discovered with “Tom Jones”. The book was taken from me and I was told that I must not read it until I was grown up, I who had, alas, already spent two years at S —— ! I had finished the book by the time it was taken from me and I remember feeling confused and bewildered. For the first time I was aware that there were things in life that one must not know until “one was grown up”. But what things? For the first time a great curiosity sprang up in me and I watched grown ups with eager interest. I had absolute faith in their wisdom and knowledge but now they were not only wise and learned but mysterious — another order of beings. And that sense of the marvelous superior mystery in my elders continued until long after I was grown up, continued in fact until the war and the persons who “managed” the war killed it once and forever.
It was in Canterbury, too, that I first felt afraid of what a cathedral could be. I went one winter half holiday to an afternoon service. It was snowing heavily outside and I sat in the back of the nave and felt warm and cosy. I suppose that I fell asleep; in any case I woke suddenly to find the cathedral lit by a kind of ghostly whiteness, some shadow perhaps from the falling snow or caused by my imagination. Not a soul seemed to be about, the pillars of the nave hung, gigantic, above me and there seemed to be whispers on every side.
‘ I walked a few paces down the horrible echoing nave and then I ran. In my confusion I could not find the opening to the great west door and stood there fumbling in the half darkness, my heart clapping like a muffled bell. It seemed to me then that the church was full of creatures. What kind of creatures, I did not dare to turn my head and see. I could hear their voices, could see them pressing one against the other down the nave — the creatures of the cathedral, so much more real than the people who sat in rows down the nave on a Sunday morning. When at last I found the handle, turned it, and was out safely in the precincts, I was three-quarters dead with terror!
It was from that moment I think that I began to be sure that cathedrals had lives of their own and very often wicked lives too! The first impulse to that was given me, perhaps, by Dickens’s “Edwin Drood”, so impressive a book because no one knows its end — but I shall never now lose the belief that cathedrals have a contempt for the “human beings” who worship in them, or, so often today, pretend to worship in them.
However that may be, and I have certainly both Victor Hugo and Huysmans behind me in my superstition, it was not until I went to Durham that I really learned anything about English cathedral towns. I lived for seven years in Durham, going to the school there as a day boy. My father was head of a college for training schoolmasters and we lived in a house tacked onto the great ugly main building rather as an underpaid governess is tacked onto a large overpopulated family. The college stood on a hill and a weedy, neglected, tumbled garden ran from it down to the river. Everything about our house and that garden seemed to me odious and I grew up, through those seven years, discontented, ugly, abnormally sensitive and excessively conceited. I have often enough been
called conceited since then but I am beautiful humility itself today compared with myself in that Durham town. No one liked me — not master, boys, friends of the family, nor relations who came to stay; and I do not in the least wonder at it. I was untidy, uncleanly, excessively gauche. I believed that I was profoundly misunderstood, that people took my pale and pimpled countenance for the mirror of my soul, that I had marvelous things of genius in me that would one day be discovered.
I believed indeed profoundly in my dreams. I wrote endless historical romances filled with countless figures; I read innumerable novels, going to the old deserted town library and burrowing in the dusty shelves, finding, when Fielding and Dickens and Scott and Jane Austen were wrung dry, long forgotten stories by Bage and Holcroft and Miss Ferrier and Mrs. Radcliffe and Maturin — reading myself sick with them all.
I must have gone a little mad at that time. I think and see myself now in retrospect as a sort of “Mariana in the Moated Grange”, dusty, disheveled, creeping away from school as early as possible to rush to the town library, seize three grubby volumes, hurry home by deserted streets, bury myself in the tangled garden were it fine enough, or hide myself in my bedroom from the wet and the cold.
In vain at school masters tried to drive some order and method into my muddled novel-confused head. I could learn nothing accurately, nothing at any rate that they wanted me to learn. Had they asked me for the plot of “Hermsprong” or a list of the characters in the “Waverley Novels” I would have astonished them with my talents. Instead they demanded from me Greek accents and algebraic roots. I know that they hated the very sight, of my long, bony (I was thin in those days), complaining body.
Behind all this the cathedral hung like a disapproving, snobbish rich relation. I fancied (and I think with some justice) that the cathedral set despised the Walpole family who were connected with incipient schoolmasters instead of rotund and elegant canons. I know that we gave one Christmas, in our poor relation of a house, a dance for the children of the Upper Ten; and a dreadful failure (at least to my morbid imagination) it was! All the little daughters of the canons seemed to me to go about with their noses in the air, criticizing all our arrangements, our coffee cups, our ices, and our little festive decorations. I adored my father and mother and was proud as I could be of everything that they did. I longed to pull the hair of the little girls and kick the posteriors of the elegant little boys. Our party was a failure and I would have burned the town down if I could!
The world of my novels became during this time so real to me that the world of school and cathedral and family faded into thin air. I remember once, when a stout overgrown boy was trying to command me to do something or other and I refused, that he threatened me with some dire penalty and I, sticking my chin in the air, replied: “Rot! You can’t do anything! You’re not real!” A silly enough remark, but I so obviously believed it that it struck him considerably and he walked away, puzzled about himself, metaphorically pinching himself to see whether he were there!
I was so crazy at this time that, for hours together, I played an absurd game on a small bagatelle board, pitting authors against one another! Walter Scott would play Dickens; and Harrison Ainsworth, G. P. R. James; and I would solemnly put the scores down on a slip of paper and add them up at the end of the week.
I burst out in the middle of the family meal one day with the remark that Hazlitt was improving and would probably, if he played well on Friday and Saturday, beat Congreve in the month’s total! When I should have been struggling through a line of Æschylus I was wondering whether, with a little cheating, I could push Walter Scott to the head of the list. I hurried down early in the morning before breakfast to finish a game, and how great was my joy when a cold kept me at home and I had a whole day of literary bagatelle in front of me!
All this time I was writing, writing, writing.
“Amado the Fearless”, “Charles the Bold”, “The Trump of the Grave”, “In the Name of the King”, “The Doom of the Halberts” — all of them historical romances. Mine was the true artist’s impulse then, pure and undefiled! No one read my stories. I had no hope of gain for them. I wrote simply because I could not help myself. Two or three years ago, when it was the fashion to publish juvenile efforts, I opened a drawer and searched through my romances. They were of a desperate badness that makes my cheek pale now when I think of them. No merit of originality or form or narrative to be found in any of them anywhere, and yet I may say with truth that I was far prouder of them than I have been of any of my eternally disappointing later works!
Behind all this romantic nonsense the cathedral’s shadow hung. My childish belief that cathedrals had their own secret and mysterious life was confirmed forever during these years. Durham is I suppose one of the world’s most beautiful works. Hanging high in air, perfectly proportioned, pearl shadowed and sky defended, it is enough for anyone’s romantic dreams. And yet romantic though my mind was, it was the sinister revengeful spirit of the thing that I seemed most strongly to feel. Built originally for the worship of God, it appeared to me to have become pagan and heretic through its history of blood and crime — yes and still more through the mosaic of small intrigues, plots, and meannesses that through the years had encrusted it.
It had for the most part developed only the worst and most sordid and cynical side of human character and was glad of it. I can still hear the rustle of the silk dresses of some of the ladies of the cathedral set as they walked out, very ostentatiously, before the sermon of some canon whom they personally disliked. Everybody disliked someone; everyone was intriguing against someone else. When a saint like Bishop Westcott preached I felt that the spirit of the cathedral hated that so good and perfect a man should have his place there. There were many good men, splendid and devout women who served there at one time or another and worshiped God, but the cathedral threw them out when it could.
There was one day when in the middle of the morning Sunday service a madman rushed up the nave, stood on the steps of the choir, and shouted that the cathedral was cursed and would suffer a judgment. As he passed our seat, hustled away by the indignant vergers, I caught a glimpse of his face, satisfied and happy at his protest. He seemed to me less mad than anyone else in the place.
What I needed of course was plenty of cold baths, an enthusiasm for football and cricket, and someone to take the conceit out of me. I had my baths and, just at the end of my time, a sudden passion for Rugby football did a lot for me. And my conceit has in later years been on many occasions assaulted. But that was a queer time; and whenever now I meet a hobbledehoy pimply boy with boots too large and a lost and bewildered air, I feel a deep sympathy for him that would I know insult him were I to suggest it.
The worst of it was that during all those seven years I learned nothing whatever. I do not wish here to attack our English public school system that has been often enough attacked in the last few years. I simply repeat the statement that I learned nothing of any sort or kind. I am therefore today one of the most ignorant human beings in the world. I will suddenly say something in conversation so naïve and simple that I seem to my better educated companions little more than a lunatic. Three hours a week for seven years I was supposed to learn French. When I went up to Cambridge, nearly twenty years of age, I could not speak a French sentence accurately nor read the simplest French book. For three hours a week for seven years I was supposed to learn chemistry and physics. To this day I know nothing of either. The war taught me some geography — I certainly learned none at school. I was kept in, half holiday after half holiday, over the business of Greek accents. I cannot remember that, on a single occasion, anyone worried at all as to whether I could spell accurately in my own language or work out a simple sum in mathematics.
The English are I suppose the most unimaginative race in the whole world, and that is one of the reasons why they are at the same time so great and so irritating a people. Our self-satisfaction comes not so much from the pride attributed to us by foreigners, as from a
national inability to imagine the virtues of qualities that we do not possess. The masters at Durham school during my time were perhaps as unimaginative a group of men as were to be found in the whole of Europe. Honest, courageous, upright, neither mean nor intriguing, they did not afford the studies for the figures in “The Gods and Mr. Perrin”. But they simply believed in doing things as they had always been done.