Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments

That I might die in my early childhood was a thought which frequently recurred to the mind of my Mother.  She endeavoured, with a Roman fortitude, to face it without apprehension.  Soon after I had completed my fifth year, she had written as follows in her secret journal: 

’Should we be called on to weep over the early grave of the dear one whom now we are endeavouring to train for heaven, may we be able to remember that we never ceased to pray for and watch over him.  It is easy, comparatively, to watch over an infant.  Yet shall I be sufficient for these things?  I am not.  But God is sufficient.  In his strength I have begun the warfare, in his strength I will persevere, and I will faint not until either I myself or my little one is beyond the reach of earthly solicitude.’

That either she or I would be called away from earth, and that our physical separation was at hand, seems to have been always vaguely present in my Mother’s dreams, as an obstinate conviction to be carefully recognized and jealously guarded against.

It was not, however, until the course of my seventh year that the tragedy occurred, which altered the whole course of our family existence.  My Mother had hitherto seemed strong and in good health; she had even made the remark to my Father, that ’sorrow and pain, the badges of Christian discipleship’, appeared to be withheld from her.  On her birthday, which was to be her last, she had written these ejaculations in her locked diary: 

’Lord, forgive the sins of the past, and help me to be faithful in future!  May this be a year of much blessing, a year of jubilee!  May I be kept lowly, trusting, loving!  May I have more blessing than in all former years combined!  May I be happier as a wife, mother, sister, writer, mistress, friend!’

But a symptom began to alarm her, and in the beginning of May, having consulted a local physician without being satisfied, she went to see a specialist in a northern suburb in whose judgement she had great confidence.  This occasion I recollect with extreme vividness.  I had been put to bed by my Father, in itself a noteworthy event.  My crib stood near a window overlooking the street; my parents’ ancient four-poster, a relic of the eighteenth century, hid me from the door, but I could see the rest of the room.  After falling asleep on this particular evening, I awoke silently, surprised to see two lighted candles on the table, and my Father seated writing by them.  I also saw a little meal arranged.

While I was wondering at all this, the door opened, and my Mother entered the room; she emerged from behind the bed-curtains, with her bonnet on, having returned from her expedition.  My Father rose hurriedly, pushing back his chair.  There was a pause, while my Mother seemed to be steadying her voice, and then she replied, loudly and distinctly, ‘He says it is—­’ and she mentioned one of the most cruel maladies by which our poor mortal nature can be tormented.  Then I saw them hold one another in a silent long embrace, and presently sink together out of sight on their knees, at the farther side of the bed, whereupon my Father lifted up his voice in prayer.  Neither of them had noticed me, and now I lay back on my pillow and fell asleep.

Next morning, when we three sat at breakfast, my mind reverted to the scene of the previous night.  With my eyes on my plate, as I was cutting up my food, I asked, casually, ‘What is—?’ mentioning the disease whose unfamiliar name I had heard from my bed.  Receiving no reply, I looked up to discover why my question was not answered, and I saw my parents gazing at each other with lamentable eyes.  In some way, I know not how, I was conscious of the presence of an incommunicable mystery, and I kept silence, though tortured with curiosity, nor did I ever repeat my inquiry.

About a fortnight later, my Mother began to go three times a week all the long way from Islington to Pimlico, in order to visit a certain practitioner, who undertook to apply a special treatment to her case.  This involved great fatigue and distress to her, but so far as I was personally concerned it did me a great deal of good.  I invariably accompanied her, and when she was very tired and weak, I enjoyed the pride of believing that I protected her.  The movement, the exercise, the occupation, lifted my morbid fears and superstitions like a cloud.  The medical treatment to which my poor Mother was subjected was very painful, and she had a peculiar sensitiveness to pain.  She carried on her evangelical work as long as she possibly could, continuing to converse with her fellow passengers on spiritual matters.  It was wonderful that a woman, so reserved and proud as she by nature was, could conquer so completely her natural timidity.  In those last months, she scarcely ever got into a railway carriage or into an omnibus, without presently offering tracts to the persons sitting within reach of her, or endeavouring to begin a conversation with some one of the sufficiency of the Blood of Jesus to cleanse the human heart from sin.  Her manners were so gentle and persuasive, she looked so innocent, her small, sparkling features were lighted up with so much benevolence, that I do not think she ever met with discourtesy or roughness.  Imitative imp that I was, I sometimes took part in these strange conversations, and was mightily puffed up by compliments paid, in whispers, to my infant piety.  But my Mother very properly discouraged this, as tending in me to spiritual pride.

If my parents, in their desire to separate themselves from the world, had regretted that through their happiness they seemed to have forfeited the Christian privilege of affliction, they could not continue to complain of any absence of temporal adversity.  Everything seemed to combine, in the course of this fatal year 1856, to harass and alarm them.  Just at the moment when illness created a special drain upon their resources, their slender income, instead of being increased, was seriously diminished.  There is little sympathy felt in this world of rhetoric for the silent sufferings of the genteel poor, yet there is no class that deserves a more charitable commiseration.

At the best of times, the money which my parents had to spend was an exiguous and an inelastic sum.  Strictly economical, proud—­in an old-fashioned mode now quite out of fashion—­to conceal the fact of their poverty, painfully scrupulous to avoid giving inconvenience to shop-people, tradesmen or servants, their whole financial career had to be carried on with the adroitness of a campaign through a hostile country.  But now, at the moment when fresh pressing claims were made on their resources, my Mother’s small capital suddenly disappeared.  It had been placed, on bad advice (they were as children in such matters), in a Cornish mine, the grotesque name of which, Wheal Maria, became familiar to my ears.  One day the river Tamar, in a playful mood, broke into Wheal Maria, and not a penny more was ever lifted from that unfortunate enterprise.  About the same time, a small annuity which my Mother had inherited also ceased to be paid.

On my Father’s books and lectures, therefore, the whole weight now rested, and that at a moment when he was depressed and unnerved by anxiety.  It was contrary to his principles to borrow money, so that it became necessary to pay doctor’s and chemist’s bills punctually, and yet to carry on the little household with the very small margin.  Each artifice of economy was now exercised to enable this to be done without falling into debt, and every branch of expenditure was cut down, clothes, books, the little garden which was my Father’s pride, all felt the pressure of new poverty.  Even our food, which had always been simple, now became Spartan indeed, and I am sure that my Mother often pretended to have no appetite that there might remain enough to satisfy my hunger.  Fortunately my Father was able to take us away in the autumn for six weeks by the sea in Wales, the expenses of this tour being paid for by a professional engagement, so that my seventh birthday was spent in an ecstasy of happiness, on golden sands, under a brilliant sky, and in sight of the glorious azure ocean beating in from an infinitude of melting horizons.  Here, too, my Mother, perched in a nook of the high rocks, surveyed the west, and forgot for a little while her weakness and the gnawing, grinding pain.

But in October, our sorrows seemed to close in upon us.  We went back to London, and for the first time in their married life, my parents were divided.  My Mother was now so seriously weaker that the omnibus journeys to Pimlico became impossible.  My Father could not leave his work and so my Mother and I had to take a gloomy lodging close to the doctor’s house.  The experiences upon which I presently entered were of a nature in which childhood rarely takes a part.  I was now my Mother’s sole and ceaseless companion; the silent witness of her suffering, of her patience, of her vain and delusive attempts to obtain alleviation of her anguish.  For nearly three months I breathed the atmosphere of pain, saw no other light, heard no other sounds, thought no other thoughts than those which accompany physical suffering and weariness.  To my memory these weeks seem years; I have no measure of their monotony.  The lodgings were bare and yet tawdry; out of dingy windows we looked from a second storey upon a dull small street, drowned in autumnal fog.  My Father came to see us when he could, but otherwise, save when we made our morning expedition to the doctor, or when a slatternly girl waited upon us with our distasteful meals, we were alone, without any other occupation than to look forward to that occasional abatement of suffering which was what we hoped for most.

It is difficult for me to recollect how these interminable hours were spent.  But I read aloud in a great part of them.  I have now in my mind’s cabinet a picture of my chair turned towards the window, partly that I might see the book more distinctly, partly not to see quite so distinctly that dear patient figure rocking on her sofa, or leaning, like a funeral statue, like a muse upon a monument, with her head on her arms against the mantelpiece.  I read the Bible every day, and at much length; also,—­with I cannot but think some praiseworthy patience,—­a book of incommunicable dreariness, called Newton’s ’Thoughts on the Apocalypse’.  Newton bore a great resemblance to my old aversion, Jukes, and I made a sort of playful compact with my Mother that if I read aloud a certain number of pages out of ’Thoughts on the Apocalypse’, as a reward I should be allowed to recite ’my own favourite hymns’.  Among these there was one which united her suffrages with mine.  Both of us extremely admired the piece by Toplady which begins: 

  What though my frail eyelids refuse
    Continual watchings to keep,
  And, punctual as midnight renews,
    Demand the refreshment of sleep.

To this day, I cannot repeat this hymn without a sense of poignant emotion, nor can I pretend to decide how much of this is due to its merit and how much to the peculiar nature of the memories it recalls.  But it might be as rude as I genuinely think it to be skilful, and I should continue to regard it as a sacred poem.  Among all my childish memories none is clearer than my looking up,—­after reading, in my high treble,

  Kind Author and Ground of my hope,
    Thee, Thee for my God I avow;
  My glad Ebenezer set up,
    And own Thou hast help’d me till now;
  I muse on the years that are past,
    Wherein my defence Thou hast prov’d,
  Nor wilt Thou relinquish at last
    A sinner so signally lov’d,—­

and hearing my Mother, her eyes brimming with tears and her alabastrine fingers tightly locked together, murmur in unconscious repetition: 

  Nor wilt Thou relinquish at last
    A sinner so signally lov’d.

In our lodgings at Pimlico I came across a piece of verse which exercised a lasting influence on my taste.  It was called ’The Cameronian’s Dream’, and it had been written by a certain James Hyslop, a schoolmaster on a man-of-war.  I do not know how it came into my possession, but I remember it was adorned by an extremely dim and ill-executed wood-cut of a lake surrounded by mountains, with tombstones in the foreground.  This lugubrious frontispiece positively fascinated me, and lent a further gloomy charm to the ballad itself.  It was in this copy of mediocre verses that the sense of romance first appealed to me, the kind of nature-romance which is connected with hills, and lakes, and the picturesque costumes of old times.  The following stanza, for instance, brought a revelation to me: 

  ’Twas a dream of those ages of darkness and blood,
  When the minister’s home was the mountain and wood;
  When in Wellwood’s dark valley the standard of Zion,
  All bloody and torn, ’mong the heather was lying.

I persuaded my Mother to explain to me what it was all about, and she told me of the affliction of the Scottish saints, their flight to the waters and the wilderness, their cruel murder while they were singing ‘their last song to the God of Salvation’.  I was greatly fired, and the following stanza, in particular, reached my ideal of the Sublime: 

  The muskets were flashing, the blue swords were gleaming,
  The helmets were cleft, and the red blood was streaming,
  The heavens grew dark, and the thunder was rolling,
  When in Wellwood’s dark muirlands the mighty were falling.

Twenty years later I met with the only other person whom I have ever encountered who had even heard of ‘The Cameronian’s Dream’.  This was Robert Louis Stevenson, who had been greatly struck by it when he was about my age.  Probably the same ephemeral edition of it reached, at the same time, each of our pious households.

As my Mother’s illness progressed, she could neither sleep, save by the use of opiates, nor rest, except in a sloping posture, propped up by many pillows.  It was my great joy, and a pleasant diversion, to be allowed to shift, beat up, and rearrange these pillows, a task which I learned to accomplish not too awkwardly.  Her sufferings, I believe, were principally caused by the violence of the medicaments to which her doctor, who was trying a new and fantastic ‘cure’, thought it proper to subject her.  Let those who take a pessimistic view of our social progress ask themselves whether such tortures could today be inflicted on a delicate patient, or whether that patient would be allowed to exist, in the greatest misery in a lodging with no professional nurse to wait upon her, and with no companion but a little helpless boy of seven years of age.  Time passes smoothly and swiftly, and we do not perceive the mitigations which he brings in his hands.  Everywhere, in the whole system of human life, improvements, alleviations, ingenious appliances and humane inventions are being introduced to lessen the great burden of suffering.

If we were suddenly transplanted into the world of only fifty years ago, we should be startled and even horror-stricken by the wretchedness to which the step backwards would reintroduce us.  It was in the very year of which I am speaking, a year of which my personal memories are still vivid, that Sir James Simpson received the Monthyon prize as a recognition of his discovery of the use of anaesthetics.  Can our thoughts embrace the mitigation of human torment which the application of chloroform alone has caused?  My early experiences, I confess, made me singularly conscious, at an age when one should know nothing about these things, of that torrent of sorrow and anguish and terror which flows under all footsteps of man.  Within my childish conscience, already, some dim inquiry was awake as to the meaning of this mystery of pain—­

  The floods of the tears meet and gather;
    The sound of them all grows like thunder;
    Oh into what bosom, I wonder,
  Is poured the whole sorrow of years? 
    For Eternity only seems keeping
    Account of the great human weeping;
  May God then, the Maker and Father,
    May He find a place for the tears!

In my Mother’s case, the savage treatment did no good; it had to be abandoned, and a day or two before Christmas, while the fruits were piled in the shop-fronts and the butchers were shouting outside their forests of carcases, my Father brought us back in a cab through the streets to Islington, a feeble and languishing company.  Our invalid bore the journey fairly well, enjoying the air, and pointing out to me the glittering evidences of the season, but we paid heavily for her little entertainment, since, at her earnest wish the window of the cab having been kept open, she caught a cold, which became, indeed, the technical cause of a death that no applications could now have long delayed.

Yet she lingered with us six weeks more, and during this time I again relapsed, very naturally, into solitude.  She now had the care of a practised woman, one of the ‘saints’ from the Chapel, and I was only permitted to pay brief visits to her bedside.  That I might not be kept indoors all day and everyday, a man, also connected with the meeting-house, was paid a trifle to take me out for a walk each morning.  This person, who was by turns familiar and truculent, was the object of my intense dislike.  Our relations became, in the truest sense, ‘forced’; I was obliged to walk by his side, but I held that I had no further responsibility to be agreeable, and after a while I ceased to speak to him, or to answer his remarks.  On one occasion, poor dreary man, he met a friend and stopped to chat with him.  I considered this act to have dissolved the bond; I skipped lightly from his side, examined several shop-windows which I had been forbidden to look into, made several darts down courts and up passages, and finally, after a delightful morning, returned home, having known my directions perfectly.  My official conductor, in a shocking condition of fear, was crouching by the area-rails looking up and down the street.  He darted upon me, in a great rage, to know ‘what I meant by it?’ I drew myself up as tall as I could, hissed ‘Blind leader of the blind!’ at him, and, with this inappropriate but very effective Parthian shot, slipped into the house.

When it was quite certain that no alleviations and no medical care could prevent, or even any longer postpone the departure of my Mother, I believe that my future conduct became the object of her greatest and her most painful solicitude.  She said to my Father that the worst trial of her faith came from the feeling that she was called upon to leave that child whom she had so carefully trained from his earliest infancy for the peculiar service of the Lord, without any knowledge of what his further course would be.  In many conversations, she most tenderly and closely urged my Father, who, however, needed no urging, to watch with unceasing care over my spiritual welfare.  As she grew nearer her end, it was observed that she became calmer, and less troubled by fears about me.  The intensity of her prayers and hopes seemed to have a prevailing force; it would have been a sin to doubt that such supplications, such confidence and devotion, such an emphasis of will, should not be rewarded by an answer from above in the affirmative.  She was able, she said, to leave me ‘in the hands of her loving Lord’, or, on another occasion, ‘to the care of her covenant God’.

Although her faith was so strong and simple, my Mother possessed no quality of the mystic.  She never pretended to any visionary gifts, believed not at all in dreams or portents, and encouraged nothing in herself or others which was superstitious or fantastic.  In order to realize her condition of mind, it is necessary, I think, to accept the view that she had formed a definite conception of the absolute, unmodified and historical veracity, in its direct and obvious sense, of every statement contained within the covers of the Bible.  For her, and for my Father, nothing was symbolic, nothing allegorical or allusive in any part of Scripture, except what was, in so many words, proffered as a parable or a picture.  Pushing this to its extreme limit, and allowing nothing for the changes of scene or time or race, my parents read injunctions to the Corinthian converts without any suspicion that what was apposite in dealing with half-breed Achaian colonists of the first century might not exactly apply to respectable English men and women of the nineteenth.  They took it, text by text, as if no sort of difference existed between the surroundings of Trimalchion’s feast and those of a City dinner.  Both my parents, I think, were devoid of sympathetic imagination; in my Father, I am sure, it was singularly absent.  Hence, although their faith was so strenuous that many persons might have called it fanatical, there was no mysticism about them.  They went rather to the opposite extreme, to the cultivation of a rigid and iconoclastic literalness.

This was curiously exemplified in the very lively interest which they both took in what is called ’the interpretation of prophecy’, and particularly in unwrapping the dark sayings bound up in the Book of Revelation.  In their impartial survey of the Bible, they came to this collection of solemn and splendid visions, sinister and obscure, and they had no intention of allowing these to be merely stimulating to the fancy, or vaguely doctrinal in symbol.  When they read of seals broken and of vials poured forth, of the star which was called Wormwood that fell from Heaven, and of men whose hair was as the hair of women and their teeth as the teeth of lions, they did not admit for a moment that these vivid mental pictures were of a poetic character, but they regarded them as positive statements, in guarded language, describing events which were to happen, and could be recognized when they did happen.  It was the explanation, the perfectly prosaic and positive explanation, of all these wonders which drew them to study the Habershons and the Newtons whose books they so much enjoyed.  They were helped by these guides to recognize in wild Oriental visions direct statements regarding Napoleon III and Pope Pius IX and the King of Piedmont, historic figures which they conceived as foreshadowed, in language which admitted of plain interpretation, under the names of denizens of Babylon and companions of the Wild Beast.

My Father was in the habit of saying, in later years, that no small element in his wedded happiness had been the fact that my Mother and he were of one mind in the interpretation of Sacred Prophecy.  Looking back, it appears to me that this unusual mental exercise was almost their only relaxation, and that in their economy it took the place which is taken, in profaner families, by cards or the piano.  It was a distraction; it took them completely out of themselves.  During those melancholy weeks at Pimlico, I read aloud another work of the same nature as those of Habershon and Jukes, the Horae Apocalypticae of a Mr. Elliott.  This was written, I think, in a less disagreeable style, and certainly it was less opaquely obscure to me.  My recollection distinctly is that when my Mother could endure nothing else, the arguments of this book took her thoughts away from her pain and lifted her spirits.  Elliott saw ‘the queenly arrogance of Popery’ everywhere, and believed that the very last days of Babylon the Great were came.  Lest I say what may be thought extravagant, let me quote what my Father wrote in his diary at the time of my Mother’s death.  He said that the thought that Rome was doomed (as seemed not impossible in 1857) so affected my Mother that it ‘irradiated’ her dying hours with an assurance that was like ’the light of the Morning Star, the harbinger of the rising sun’.

After our return to Islington, there was a complete change in my relation to my Mother.  At Pimlico, I had been all-important, her only companion, her friend, her confidant.  But now that she was at home again, people and things combined to separate me from her.  Now, and for the first time in my life, I no longer slept in her room, no longer sank to sleep under her kiss, no longer saw her mild eyes smile on me with the earliest sunshine.  Twice a day, after breakfast and before I went to rest, I was brought to her bedside; but we were never alone; other people, sometimes strange people, were there.  We had no cosy talk; often she was too weak to do more than pat my hand; her loud and almost constant cough terrified and harassed me.  I felt, as I stood, awkwardly and shyly, by her high bed, that I had shrunken into a very small and insignificant figure, that she was floating out of my reach, that all things, but I knew not what nor how, were corning to an end.  She herself was not herself; her head, that used to be held so erect, now rolled or sank upon the pillow; the sparkle was all extinguished from those bright, dear eyes.  I could not understand it; I meditated long, long upon it all in my infantile darkness, in the garret, or in the little slip of a cold room where my bed was now placed; and a great, blind anger against I knew not what awakened in my soul.

The two retreats which I have mentioned were now all that were left to me.  In the back-parlour someone from outside gave me occasional lessons of a desultory character.  The breakfast-room was often haunted by visitors, unknown to me by face or name,—­ ladies, who used to pity me and even to pet me, until I became nimble in escaping from their caresses.  Everything seemed to be unfixed, uncertain; it was like being on the platform of a railway-station waiting for a train.  In all this time, the agitated, nervous presence of my Father, whose pale face was permanently drawn with anxiety, added to my perturbation, and I became miserable, stupid—­as if I had lost my way in a cold fog.

Had I been older and more intelligent, of course, it might have been of him and not of myself that I should have been thinking.  As I now look back upon that tragic time, it is for him that my heart bleeds,—­for them both, so singularly fitted as they were to support and cheer one another in an existence which their own innate and cultivated characteristics had made little hospitable to other sources of comfort.  This is not to be dwelt on here.  But what must be recorded was the extraordinary tranquillity, the serene and sensible resignation, with which at length my parents faced the awful hour.  Language cannot utter what they suffered, but there was no rebellion, no repining; in their case even an atheist might admit that the overpowering miracle of grace was mightily efficient.

It seems almost cruel to the memory of their opinions that the only words which rise to my mind, the only ones which seem in the least degree adequate to describe the attitude of my parents, had fallen from the pen of one whom, in their want of imaginative sympathy, they had regarded as anathema.  But John Henry Newman might have come from the contemplation of my Mother’s death-bed when he wrote:  ’All the trouble which the world inflicts upon us, and which flesh cannot but feel,—­sorrow, pain, care, bereavement,—­these avail not to disturb the tranquillity and the intensity with which faith gazes at the Divine Majesty.’  It was ‘tranquillity’, it was not the rapture of the mystic.  Almost in the last hour of her life, urged to confess her ‘joy’ in the Lord, my Mother, rigidly honest, meticulous in self-analysis, as ever, replied:  ’I have peace, but not joy.  It would not do to go into eternity with a lie in my mouth.’

When the very end approached, and her mind was growing clouded, she gathered her strength together to say to my Father, ’I shall walk with Him in white.  Won’t you take your lamb and walk with me?’ Confused with sorrow and alarm, my Father failed to understand her meaning.  She became agitated, and she repeated two or three times:  ‘Take our lamb, and walk with me!’ Then my Father comprehended, and pressed me forward; her hand fell softly upon mine and she seemed content.  Thus was my dedication, that had begun in my cradle, sealed with the most solemn, the most poignant and irresistible insistence, at the death-bed of the holiest and purest of women.  But what a weight, intolerable as the burden of Atlas, to lay on the shoulders of a little fragile child!