S OF LIFE AND LITERATURE

CHAPTER I

FAMILY ANTECEDENTS

The Mallocks of Cockington--Some Old Devonshire Houses--A
Child's Outlook on Life

"Memoirs" is a word which, as commonly used, includes books of very
various kinds, ranging from St. Augustine's _Confessions_ to the gossip
of Lady Dorothy Nevill. Such books, however, have all one family
likeness. They all of them represent life as seen by the writers from a
personal point of view; and in this sense it is to the family of Memoirs
that the present book belongs.

But the incidents or aspects of life which a book of memoirs describes
represent something more than themselves. Whether the writer is
conscious of the fact or no, they represent a circle of circumstances,
general as well as private, to which his individual character reacts;
and his reactions, as he records them, may in this way acquire a meaning
and unity which have their origin in the age--in the general conditions
and movements which his personal recollections cover--rather than in
any qualities or adventures which happen to be exclusively his own. Thus
if any writer attempts to do what I have done myself--namely, to examine
or depict in books of widely different kinds such aspects and problems
of life--social, philosophical, religious, and economic--as have in turn
engrossed his special attention, he may venture to hope that a memoir of
his own activities will be taken as representing an age, rather than a
personal story, his personal story being little more than a variant of
one which many readers will recognize as common to themselves and him.

Now for all reflecting persons whose childhood reaches back to the
middle of the nineteenth century, the most remarkable feature of the
period which constitutes the age for themselves cannot fail to be a
sequence of remarkable and momentous changes--changes alike in the
domains of science, religion, and society; and if any one of such
persons should be asked, "Changes from what?" his answer will be, if he
knows how to express himself, "Changes from the things presented to him
by his first remembered experiences, and by him taken for granted," such
as the teaching, religious or otherwise, received by him, and the
general constitution of society as revealed to him by his own
observation and the ways and conversation of his elders. These are the
things which provide the child's life with its starting point, and these
are determined by the f