The Early Life of Mark Rutherford | Page 7

shiftiness even worse
than downright lying. The only time he gave me a thrashing was for
prevarication. He had a plain, but not a dull mind, and loved poetry of a
sublime cast, especially Milton. I can hear him even now repeat

passages from the Comus, which was a special favourite. Elsewhere I
have told how when he was young and stood at the composing desk in
his printing office, he used to declaim Byron by heart. That a Puritan
printer, one of the last men in the world to be carried away by a fashion,
should be vanquished by Byron, is as genuine a testimony as any I
know to the reality of his greatness. Up to 1849 or thereabouts, my
father in religion was Independent and Calvinist, the creed which, as he
thought then, best suited him. But a change was at hand. His political
opinions remained unaltered to his death, but in 1851 he had completed
his discovery that the "simple gospel" which Calvinism preached was
by no means simple, but remarkably abstruse. It was the Heroes and
Hero Worship and the Sartor Resartus which drew him away from the
meeting-house. There is nothing in these two books directly hostile
either to church or dissent, but they laid hold on him as no books had
ever held, and the expansion they wrought in him could not possibly
tolerate the limitations of orthodoxy. He was not converted to any other
religion. He did not run for help to those who he knew could not give it.
His portrait; erect, straightforward-looking, firmly standing, one foot a
little in advance, helps me and decides me when I look at it. Of all
types of humanity the one which he represents would be the most
serviceable to the world at the present day. He was generous,
open-hearted, and if he had a temper, a trifle explosive at times, nobody
for whom he cared ever really suffered from it, and occasionally it did
him good service. The chief obituary notice of him declared with truth
that he was the best public speaker Bedford ever had, and the
committee of the well-known public library resolved unanimously
"That this institution records with regret the death of Mr. W. White,
formerly and for many years an active and most valuable member of
the committee, whose special and extensive knowledge of books was
always at its service, and to whom the library is indebted for the
acquisition of its most rare and valuable books." The first event in my
own life is the attack by the mob upon our house, at the general
election in 1832, to which I have referred. My cradle--as I have been
told--had to be carried from the front bedroom into the back, so that my
head might not be broken by the stones which smashed the windows.
The first thing I can really see is the coronation of Queen Victoria and a
town's dinner in St. Paul's Square. About this time, or soon after, I was

placed in a "young ladies'" school. At the front door of this polite
seminary I appeared one morning in a wheelbarrow. I had persuaded a
shop boy to give me a lift.
It was when I was about ten years old--surely it must have been very
early on some cloudless summer morning--that Nurse Jane came to us.
She was a faithful servant and a dear friend for many years--I cannot
say how many. Till her death, not so long ago, I was always her "dear
boy". She was as familiar with me as if I were her own child. She left
us when she married, but came back on her husband's death. Her father
and mother lived in a little thatched cottage at Oakley. They were very
poor, but her mother was a Scotch girl, and knew how to make a little
go a long way. Jane had not infrequent holidays, and she almost always
took my sister and myself to spend them at Oakley. This was a delight
as keen as any which could be given me. No entertainment, no special
food was provided. As to entertainment there was just the escape to a
freer life, to a room in which we cooked our food, ate it, and altogether
lived during waking hours when we were indoors. Oh, for a house with
this one room, a Homeric house! How much easier and how much more
natural should we be if we watched the pot or peeled the potatoes as we
talked, than it is now in a drawing-room, where we do not know what
chair to choose amongst a dozen scattered about aimlessly; where there
is no table to hide the legs or support the arms; a room which compels
an uncomfortable awkwardness, and forced conversation.