longed exceedingly to excel in cricket or with the racquet, was allowed to know
nothing of them. He remembers at nineteen never to have had a lesson in
writing, arithmetic, French, or German. He knew his masters by their ferules and
they him. He believes that he has "been flogged oftener than any human being
alive. It was just possible to obtain five scourgings in one day at Winchester, and
I have often boasted that I have obtained them all." Prizes were distributed
prodigally, but he never got one. For twelve years of tuition, he says, "I do not
remember that I ever knew a lesson."
At this age he describes himself as "an idle, desolate, hanger on ... without an
idea of a career or a profession or a trade," but he was tolerably happy because
he could fancy himself in love with pretty girls and had been removed from the
real misery of school, but had not a single aspiration regarding his future. Three
of his household were dying of consumption, and his mother was day nurse,
night nurse, and divided her time between pill-boxes and the ink-bottle, for when
she was seventy-six she had written one hundred and forty volumes, the first of
which was not written till she was fifty.
Gradually the boy became alive to the blighted ambition of his father's life and
the strain his mother was enduring, nursing the dying household and writing
novels to provide a decent roof for them to die under. Anthony got a position at
the post-office without an examination. He knew no French nor science; was a
bad speller and worse writer and could not have sustained an examination on any
subject. Still he could not bear idleness, and was always going about with some
castle in the air finely built in his mind, carrying on for weeks and years the
same continuous story; binding himself down to certain laws, proprieties, and
unities; always his own hero, excluding everything violently improbable. To this
practise, which he calls dangerous and which began six or seven years before he
went to the post-office, he ascribes his power to maintain an interest in a
fictitious story and to live in a entirely outside imaginative life. During these
seven years he acquired a character of irregularity and grew reckless.
Mark Pattison[34] shows us how his real life began in the middle teens, when his
energy was "directed to one end, to improve myself"; "to form my own mind; to
sound things thoroughly; to be free from the bondage of unreason and the
traditional prejudices which, when I first began to think, constituted the whole of
my mental fabric." He entered upon life with a "hide-bound and contracted
intellect," and depicts "something of the steps by which I emerged from that
frozen condition." He believes that to "remember the dreams and confusions of