A Writers Recollections, vol 1 | Page 3

Van Diemen's Land, as it was then generally called, became very much attached to the colony, and filled the post of Registrar of Deeds for many years under its successive Governors. I just remember him, as a gentle, affectionate, upright being, a gentleman of an old, punctilious school, strictly honorable and exact, content with a small sphere, and much loved within it. He would sometimes talk to his children of early days in Bath, of his father's young successes and promotions, and of his grandfather, General Sorell, who, as Adjutant of the Coldstream Guards from 1744 to 1758, and associated with all the home and foreign service of that famous regiment during those years, through the Seven Years' War, and up to the opening of the American War of Independence, played a vaguely brilliant part in his grandson's recollections. But he himself was quite content with the modest affairs of an infant colony, which even in its earliest days achieved, whether in its landscape or its life, a curiously English effect; as though an English midland county had somehow got loose and, drifting to the Southern seas, had there set up--barring a few black aborigines, a few convicts, its mimosas, and its tree-ferns--another quiet version of the quiet English life it had left behind.
But the Sorells, all the same, had some foreign and excitable blood in them. Their story of themselves was that they were French Huguenots, expelled in 1685, who had settled in England and, coming of a military stock, had naturally sought careers in the English army. There are points in this story which are puzzling; but the foreign touch in my mother, and in the Governor--to judge from the only picture of him which remains--was unmistakable. Delicate features, small, beautifully shaped hands and feet, were accompanied in my mother by a French vivacity and quickness, an overflowing energy, which never forsook her through all her trials and misfortunes. In the Governor, the same physical characteristics make a rather decadent and foppish impression--as of an old stock run to seed. The stock had been reinvigorated in my mother, and one of its original elements which certainly survived in her temperament and tradition was of great importance both for her own life and for her children's. This was the Protestant--the French Protestant--element; which no doubt represented in the family from which she came a history of long suffering at the hands of Catholicism. Looking back upon her Protestantism, I see that it was not the least like English Evangelicalism, whether of the Anglican or dissenting type. There was nothing emotional or "enthusiastic" in it--no breath of Wesley or Wilberforce; but rather something drawn from deep wells of history, instinctive and invincible. Had some direct Calvinist ancestor of hers, with a soul on fire, fought the tyranny of Bossuet and Madame de Maintenon, before--eternally hating and resenting "Papistry"--he abandoned his country and kinsfolk, in the search for religious liberty? That is the impression which--looking back upon her life--it often makes upon me. All the more strange that to her it fell, unwittingly, imagining, indeed, that by her marriage with a son of Arnold of Rugby she was taking a step precisely in the opposite direction, to be, by a kind of tragic surprise, which yet was no one's fault, the wife of a Catholic.
And that brings me to my father, whose character and story were so important to all his children that I must try and draw them, though I cannot pretend to any impartiality in doing so--only to the insight that affection gives; its one abiding advantage over the critic and the stranger.
He was the second son of Doctor Arnold of Rugby, and the younger brother--by only eleven months--of Matthew Arnold. On that morning of June 12, 1842, when the headmaster who in fourteen years' rule at Rugby had made himself so conspicuous a place, not merely in the public-school world, but in English life generally[1] arose, in the words of his poet son--to tread--
In the summer morning, the road-- Of death, at a call unforeseen-- Sudden--
My father, a boy of eighteen, was in the house, and witnessed the fatal attack of angina pectoris which, in two hours, cut short a memorable career, and left those who till then, under a great man's shelter and keeping, had--
Rested as under the boughs Of a mighty oak.... Bare, unshaded, alone.
[Footnote 1: At the moment of correcting these proofs, my attention has been called to a foolish essay on my grandfather by Mr. Lytton Strachey, none the less foolish because it is the work of an extremely clever man. If Mr. Strachey imagines that the effect of my grandfather's life and character upon men like Stanley and Clough, or a score of others who could be named, can be accounted for by