The third memory was aroused by a remark that Mary had made about her expectation that I would have gone on to university, or at least to some other kind of education. As indeed, considering myself, I would have expected, too. I tried to trace back in myself the streak of flippant gloss that had ended up with my exposure to such things as Sophy Brent: my more than exposure, my positive attraction towards. Was it some superficiality in myself, or some obsequious provincial desire for fastness and smartness that had got me where I was? I looked back at the people I had liked and the things I had done, and the earliest memory I could find that seemed relevant was from a classroom at my first school in Cambridge, when I was, I should imagine, eleven years old. As homework we had been told to learn Tennyson’s Break, break, break, and in class we all had to get up, one by one, and recite the thing. I had liked the poem, I had learned it with enthusiasm, I thought it was most touching and poetic. But the frightful thing was that so apparently did everyone else. I can remember most distinctly the expressions of sanctimonious sorrow and world-weariness on the faces of little girls whose judgement I usually thought atrocious. “‘I would that my heart could utter,’” they said, “‘the thoughts that arise in me,’” and I said to myself then and there that unless I could utter the thoughts that arouse in me I would try to keep my mouth shut rather than make such an exhibition of myself. What annoyed me most of all was the way they all started off, so reverentially, saying, “‘Break, break, break,’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson,” just as it was printed in Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury, as though to omit one syllable of that “Alfred Lord” would somehow detract from the poem’s magical incantation.
This is the first instance I can remember of my own revulsion from what I most liked, and my first desire to give it a good kick in the teeth for the sake of human independence. It was all very well for Alfred Lord Tennyson to say Oh well for the fisherman’s boy, but whose fault was it but my own if I could not find it in my life to say Oh well for Emma Evans? Poetry is one thing and living another, I said to myself at the age of eleven, and I steered clear of poetry for the sake, or so I thought, of the other thing.