The Lifted Veil | Page 5

at other times; a circumstance which, perhaps,
helped to confirm him in the intention to educate me on a different plan
from the prescriptive one with which he had complied in the case of my
elder brother, already a tall youth at Eton. My brother was to be his
representative and successor; he must go to Eton and Oxford, for the
sake of making connexions, of course: my father was not a man to
underrate the bearing of Latin satirists or Greek dramatists on the
attainment of an aristocratic position. But, intrinsically, he had slight
esteem for "those dead but sceptred spirits"; having qualified himself
for forming an independent opinion by reading Potter's AEschylus, and
dipping into Francis's Horace. To this negative view he added a
positive one, derived from a recent connexion with mining speculations;
namely, that a scientific education was the really useful training for a
younger son. Moreover, it was clear that a shy, sensitive boy like me
was not fit to encounter the rough experience of a public school. Mr.
Letherall had said so very decidedly. Mr. Letherall was a large man in
spectacles, who one day took my small head between his large hands,
and pressed it here and there in an exploratory, auspicious
manner--then placed each of his great thumbs on my temples, and
pushed me a little way from him, and stared at me with glittering
spectacles. The contemplation appeared to displease him, for he
frowned sternly, and said to my father, drawing his thumbs across my
eyebrows -
"The deficiency is there, sir--there; and here," he added, touching the
upper sides of my head, "here is the excess. That must be brought out,
sir, and this must be laid to sleep."

I was in a state of tremor, partly at the vague idea that I was the object
of reprobation, partly in the agitation of my first hatred-- hatred of this
big, spectacled man, who pulled my head about as if he wanted to buy
and cheapen it.
I am not aware how much Mr. Letherall had to do with the system
afterwards adopted towards me, but it was presently clear that private
tutors, natural history, science, and the modern languages, were the
appliances by which the defects of my organization were to be
remedied. I was very stupid about machines, so I was to be greatly
occupied with them; I had no memory for classification, so it was
particularly necessary that I should study systematic zoology and
botany; I was hungry for human deeds and humane motions, so I was to
be plentifully crammed with the mechanical powers, the elementary
bodies, and the phenomena of electricity and magnetism. A
better-constituted boy would certainly have profited under my
intelligent tutors, with their scientific apparatus; and would, doubtless,
have found the phenomena of electricity and magnetism as fascinating
as I was, every Thursday, assured they were. As it was, I could have
paired off, for ignorance of whatever was taught me, with the worst
Latin scholar that was ever turned out of a classical academy. I read
Plutarch, and Shakespeare, and Don Quixote by the sly, and supplied
myself in that way with wandering thoughts, while my tutor was
assuring me that "an improved man, as distinguished from an ignorant
one, was a man who knew the reason why water ran downhill." I had
no desire to be this improved man; I was glad of the running water; I
could watch it and listen to it gurgling among the pebbles, and bathing
the bright green water-plants, by the hour together. I did not want to
know WHY it ran; I had perfect confidence that there were good
reasons for what was so very beautiful.
There is no need to dwell on this part of my life. I have said enough to
indicate that my nature was of the sensitive, unpractical order, and that
it grew up in an uncongenial medium, which could never foster it into
happy, healthy development. When I was sixteen I was sent to Geneva
to complete my course of education; and the change was a very happy
one to me, for the first sight of the Alps, with the setting sun on them,

as we descended the Jura, seemed to me like an entrance into heaven;
and the three years of my life there were spent in a perpetual sense of
exaltation, as if from a draught of delicious wine, at the presence of
Nature in all her awful loveliness. You will think, perhaps, that I must
have been a poet, from this early sensibility to Nature. But my lot was
not so happy as that. A poet pours forth his song and BELIEVES in the
listening ear and answering soul, to which his song will be floated
sooner or later.