Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments

LITTLE boys from quiet, pious households, commonly found, in those days, a chasm yawning at the feet of their inexperience when they arrived at Boarding-school.  But the fact that I still slept at home on Saturday and Sunday nights preserved me, I fancy, from many surprises.  There was a crisis, but it was broad and slow for me.  On the other hand, for my Father I am inclined to think that it was definite and sharp.  Permission for me to desert the parental hearth, even for five days in certain weeks, was tantamount, in his mind, to admitting that the great scheme, so long caressed, so passionately fostered, must in its primitive bigness be now dropped.

The Great Scheme (I cannot resist giving it the mortuary of capital letters) had been, as my readers know, that I should be exclusively and consecutively dedicated through the whole of my life, ’to the manifest and uninterrupted and uncompromised service of the Lord’.  That had been the aspiration of my Mother, and at her death she had bequeathed that desire to my Father, like a dream of the Promised Land.  In their ecstasy, my parents had taken me, as Elkanah and Hannah had long ago taken Samuel, from their mountain-home of Ramathaim-Zophim down to sacrifice to the Lord of Hosts in Shiloh.  They had girt me about with a linen ephod, and had hoped to leave me there; ‘as long as he liveth,’ they had said, ‘he shall be lent unto the Lord.’

Doubtless in the course of these fourteen years it had occasionally flashed upon my Father, as he overheard some speech of mine, or detected some idiosyncrasy, that I was not one of those whose temperament points them out as ultimately fitted for an austere life of religion.  What he hoped, however, was that when the little roughnesses of childhood were rubbed away, there would pass a deep mellowness over my soul.  He had a touching way of condoning my faults of conduct, directly after reproving them, and he would softly deprecate my frailty, saying, in a tone of harrowing tenderness, ‘Are you not the child of many prayers?’ He continued to think that prayer, such passionate importunate prayer as his, must prevail.  Faith could move mountains; should it not be able to mould the little ductile heart of a child, since he was sure that his own faith was unfaltering?  He had yearned and waited for a son who should be totally without human audacities, who should be humble, pure, not troubled by worldly agitations, a son whose life should be cleansed and straightened from above, in custodiendo sermones Dei; in whom everything should be sacrificed except the one thing needful to salvation.

How such a marvel of lowly piety was to earn a living had never, I think, occurred to him.  My Father was singularly indifferent about money.  Perhaps his notion was that, totally devoid of ambitions as I was to be, I should quietly become adult, and continue his ministrations among the poor of the Christian flock.  He had some dim dream, I think, of there being just enough for us all without my having to take up any business or trade.  I believe it was immediately after my first term at boarding-school, that I was a silent but indignant witness of a conversation between my Father and Mr. Thomas Brightwen, my stepmother’s brother, who was a banker in one of the Eastern Counties.

This question, ‘What is he to be?’ in a worldly sense, was being discussed, and I am sure that it was for the first time, at all events in my presence.  Mr. Brightwen, I fancy, had been worked upon by my stepmother, whose affection for me was always on the increase, to suggest, or faintly to stir the air in the neighbourhood of suggesting, a query about my future.  He was childless and so was she, and I think a kind impulse led them to ‘feel the way’, as it is called.  I believe he said that the banking business, wisely and honourably conducted, sometimes led, as we know that it is apt to lead, to affluence.  To my horror, my Father, with rising emphasis, replied that ’if there were offered to his beloved child what is called “an opening” that would lead to an income of L10,000 a year, and that would divert his thoughts and interest from the Lord’s work he would reject it on his child’s behalf.’  Mr. Brightwen, a precise and polished gentleman who evidently never made an exaggerated statement in his life, was, I think, faintly scandalized; he soon left us, and I do not recollect his paying us a second visit.

For my silent part, I felt very much like Gehazi, and I would fain have followed after the banker if I had dared to do so, into the night.  I would have excused to him the ardour of my Elisha, and I would have reminded him of the sons of the prophets—­’Give me, I pray thee,’ I would have said, ’a talent of silver and two changes of garments.’  It seemed to me very hard that my Father should dispose of my possibilities of wealth in so summary a fashion, but the fact that I did resent it, and regretted what I supposed to be my ‘chance’, shows how far apart we had already swung.  My Father, I am convinced, thought that he gave words to my inward instincts when he repudiated the very mild and inconclusive benevolence of his brother-in-law.  But he certainly did not do so.  I was conscious of a sharp and instinctive disappointment at having had, as I fancied, wealth so near my grasp, and at seeing it all cast violently into the sea of my Father’s scruples.

Not one of my village friends attended the boarding-school to which I was now attached, and I arrived there without an acquaintance.  I should soon, however, have found a corner of my own if my Father had not unluckily stipulated that I was not to sleep in the dormitory with the boys of my own age, but in the room occupied by the two elder sons of a prominent Plymouth Brother whom he knew.  From a social point of view this was an unfortunate arrangement, since these youths were some years older and many years riper than I; the eldest, in fact, was soon to leave; they had enjoyed their independence, and they now greatly resented being saddled with the presence of an unknown urchin.  The supposition had been that they would protect and foster my religious practices; would encourage me, indeed, as my Father put it, to approach the Throne of Grace with them at morning and evening prayer.  They made no pretence, however, to be considered godly; they looked upon me as an intruder; and after a while the younger, and ruder, of them openly let me know that they believed I had been put into their room to ‘spy upon’ them; it had been a plot, they knew, between their father and mine:  and he darkly warned me that I should suffer if ‘anything got out’.  I had, however, no wish to trouble them, nor any faint interest in their affairs.  I soon discovered that they were absorbed in a silly kind of amorous correspondence with the girls of a neighbouring academy, but ‘what were all such toys to me?’

These young fellows, who ought long before to have left the school, did nothing overtly unkind to me, but they condemned me to silence.  They ceased to address me except with an occasional command.  By reason of my youth, I was in bed and asleep before my companions arrived upstairs, and in the morning I was always routed up and packed about my business while they still were drowsing.  But the fact that I had been cut off from my coevals by night, cut me off from them also by day—­so that I was nothing to them, neither a boarder nor a day-scholar, neither flesh, fish nor fowl.  The loneliness of my life was extreme, and that I always went home on Saturday afternoon and returned on Monday morning still further checked my companionships at school.  For a long time, round the outskirts of that busy throng of opening lives, I ‘wandered lonely as a cloud’, and sometimes I was more unhappy than I had ever been before.  No one, however, bullied me, and though I was dimly and indefinably witness to acts of uncleanness and cruelty, I was the victim of no such acts and the recipient of no dangerous confidences.  I suppose that my queer reputation for sanctity, half dreadful, half ridiculous, surrounded me with a non-conducting atmosphere.

We are the victims of hallowed proverbs, and one of the most classic of these tells us that ‘the child is father of the man’.  But in my case I cannot think that this was true.  In mature years I have always been gregarious, a lover of my kind, dependent upon the company of friends for the very pulse of moral life.  To be marooned, to be shut up in a solitary cell, to inhabit a lighthouse, or to camp alone in a forest, these have always seemed to me afflictions too heavy to be borne, even in imagination.  A state in which conversation exists not, is for me an air too empty of oxygen for my lungs to breathe it.

Yet when I look back upon my days at boarding-school, I see myself unattracted by any of the human beings around me.  My grown-up years are made luminous to me in memory by the ardent faces of my friends, but I can scarce recall so much as the names of more than two or three of my schoolfellows.  There is not one of them whose mind or whose character made any lasting impression upon me.  In later life, I have been impatient of solitude, and afraid of it; at school, I asked for no more than to slip out of the hurly-burly and be alone with my reflections and my fancies.  That magnetism of humanity which has been the agony of mature years, of this I had not a trace when I was a boy.  Of those fragile loves to which most men look back with tenderness and passion, emotions to be explained only as Montaigne explained them, parceque c’etait lui, parceque c’etait moi, I knew nothing.  I, to whom friendship has since been like sunlight and like sleep, left school unbrightened and unrefreshed by commerce with a single friend.

If I had been clever, I should doubtless have attracted the jealousy of my fellows, but I was spared this by the mediocrity of my success in the classes.  One little fact I may mention, because it exemplifies the advance in observation which has been made in forty years.  I was extremely nearsighted, and in consequence was placed at a gross disadvantage, by being unable to see the slate or the black-board on which our tasks were explained.  It seems almost incredible, when one reflects upon it, but during the whole of my school life, this fact was never commented upon or taken into account by a single person, until the Polish lady who taught us the elements of German and French drew someone’s attention to it in my sixteenth year.  I was not quick, but I passed for being denser than I was because of the myopic haze that enveloped me.  But this is not an autobiography, and with the cold and shrouded details of my uninteresting school life I will not fatigue the reader.

I was not content, however, to be the cipher that I found myself, and when I had been at school for about a year, I ‘broke out’, greatly, I think, to my own surprise, in a popular act.  We had a young usher whom we disliked.  I suppose, poor half-starved phthisic lad, that he was the most miserable of us all.  He was, I think, unfitted for the task which had been forced upon him; he was fretful, unsympathetic, agitated.  The school-house, an old rambling place, possessed a long cellar-like room that opened from our general corridor and was lighted by deep windows, carefully barred, which looked into an inner garden.  This vault was devoted to us and to our play-boxes:  by a tacit law, no master entered it.  One evening, just at dusk, a great number of us were here when the bell for night-school rang, and many of us dawdled at the summons.  Mr. B., tactless in his anger, bustled in among us, scolding in a shrill voice, and proceeded to drive us forth.  I was the latest to emerge, and as he turned away to see if any other truant might not be hiding, I determined upon action.  With a quick movement, I drew the door behind me and bolted it, just in time to hear the imprisoned usher scream with vexation.  We boys all trooped upstairs and it is characteristic of my isolation that I had not one ‘chum’ to whom I could confide my feat.

That Mr. B. had been shut in became, however, almost instantly known, and the night-class, usually so unruly, was awed by the event into exemplary decorum.  There, with no master near us, in a silence rarely broken by a giggle or a catcall, we sat diligently working, or pretending to work.  Through my brain, as I hung over my book a thousand new thoughts began to surge.  I was the liberator, the tyrannicide; I had freed all my fellows from the odious oppressor.  Surely, when they learned that it was I, they would cluster round me; surely, now, I should be somebody in the school-life, no longer a mere trotting shadow or invisible presence.  The interval seemed long; at length Mr. B. was released by a servant, and he came up into the school-room to find us in that ominous condition of suspense.

At first he said nothing.  He sank upon a chair in a half-fainting attitude, while he pressed his hand to his side; his distress and silence redoubled the boys’ surprise, and filled me with something like remorse.  For the first time, I reflected that he was human, that perhaps he suffered.  He rose presently and took a slate, upon which he wrote two questions:  ‘Did you do it?’ ’Do you know who did?’ and these he propounded to each boy in rotation.  The prompt, redoubled ‘No’ in every case seemed to pile up his despair.

One of the last to whom he held, in silence, the trembling slate was the perpetrator.  As I saw the moment approach, an unspeakable timidity swept over me.  I reflected that no one had seen me, that no one could accuse me.  Nothing could be easier or safer than to deny, nothing more perplexing to the enemy, nothing less perilous for the culprit.  A flood of plausible reasons invaded my brain; I seemed to see this to be a case in which to tell the truth would be not merely foolish, it would be wrong.  Yet when the usher stood before me, holding the slate out in his white and shaking hand, I seized the pencil, and, ignoring the first question, I wrote ‘Yes’ firmly against the second.  I suppose that the ambiguity of this action puzzled Mr. B. He pressed me to answer:  ‘Did you do it?’ but to that I was obstinately dumb; and away I was hurried to an empty bed-room, where for the whole of that night and the next day I was held a prisoner, visited at intervals by the headmaster and other inquisitorial persons, until I was gradually persuaded to make a full confession and apology.

This absurd little incident had one effect, it revealed me to my schoolfellows as an existence.  From that time forth I lay no longer under the stigma of invisibility; I had produced my material shape and had thrown my shadow for a moment into a legend.  But, in other respects, things went on much as before.

Curiously uninfluenced by my surroundings, I in my turn failed to exercise influence, and my practical isolation was no less than it had been before.  It was thus that it came about that my social memories of my boarding-school life are monotonous and vague.  It was a period during which, as it appears to me now on looking back, the stream of my spiritual nature spread out into a shallow pool which was almost stagnant.  I was labouring to gain those elements of conventional knowledge, which had, in many cases, up to that time been singularly lacking.  But my brain was starved, and my intellectual perceptions were veiled.  Elder persons who in later years would speak to me frankly of my school-days assured me that, while I had often struck them as a smart and quaint and even interesting child, all promise seemed to fade out of me as a schoolboy, and that those who were most inclined to be indulgent gave up the hope that I should prove a man in a way remarkable.  This was particularly the case with the most indulgent of my protectors, my refined and gentle stepmother.

As this record can, however, have no value that is not based on its rigorous adhesion to the truth, I am bound to say that the dreariness and sterility of my school-life were more apparent than real.  I was pursuing certain lines of moral and mental development all the time, and since my schoolmasters and my schoolfellows combined in thinking me so dull, I will display a tardy touch of ‘proper spirit’ and ask whether it may not partly have been because they were themselves so commonplace.  I think that if some drops of sympathy, that magic dew of Paradise, had fallen upon my desert, it might have blossomed like the rose, or, at all events, like that chimerical flower, the Rose of Jericho.  As it was, the conventionality around me, the intellectual drought, gave me no opportunity of outward growth.  They did not destroy, but they cooped up, and rendered slow and inefficient, that internal life which continued, as I have said, to live on unseen.  This took the form of dreams and speculations, in the course of which I went through many tortuous processes of the mind, the actual aims of which were futile, although the movements themselves were useful.  If I may more minutely define my meaning, I would say that in my schooldays, without possessing thoughts, I yet prepared my mind for thinking, and learned how to think.

The great subject of my curiosity at this time was words, as instruments of expression.  I was incessant in adding to my vocabulary, and in finding accurate and individual terms for things.  Here, too, the exercise preceded the employment, since I was busy providing myself with words before I had any ideas to express with them.  When I read Shakespeare and came upon the passage in which Prospero tells Caliban that he had no thoughts until his master taught him words, I remember starting with amazement at the poet’s intuition, for such a Caliban had I been: 

                                     I pitied thee,
  Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
  One thing or other, when thou didst not, savage,
  Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble, like
  A thing most brutish; I endow’d thy purposes
  With words that made them know.

For my Prosperos I sought vaguely in such books as I had access to, and I was conscious that as the inevitable word seized hold of me, with it out of the darkness into strong light came the image and the idea.

My Father possessed a copy of Bailey’s ‘Etymological Dictionary’, a book published early in the eighteenth century.  Over this I would pore for hours, playing with the words in a fashion which I can no longer reconstruct, and delighting in the savour of the rich, old-fashioned country phrases.  My Father finding me thus employed, fell to wondering at the nature of my pursuit, and I could offer him, indeed, no very intelligible explanation of it.  He urged me to give up such idleness, and to make practical use of language.  For this purpose he conceived an exercise which he obliged me to adopt, although it was hateful to me.  He sent me forth, it might be, up the lane to Warbury Hill and round home by the copses; or else down one chine to the sea and along the shingle to the next cutting in the cliff, and so back by way of the village; and he desired me to put down, in language as full as I could, all that I had seen in each excursion.  As I have said, this practice was detestable and irksome to me, but, as I look back, I am inclined to believe it to have been the most salutary, the most practical piece of training which my Father ever gave me.  It forced me to observe sharply and clearly, to form visual impressions, to retain them in the brain, and to clothe them in punctilious and accurate language.

It was in my fifteenth year that I became again, this time intelligently, acquainted with Shakespeare.  I got hold of a single play, The Tempest, in a school edition, prepared, I suppose, for one of the university examinations which were then being instituted in the provinces.  This I read through and through, not disdaining the help of the notes, and revelling in the glossary.  I studied The Tempest as I had hitherto studied no classic work, and it filled my whole being with music and romance.  This book was my own hoarded possession; the rest of Shakespeare’s works were beyond my hopes.  But gradually I contrived to borrow a volume here and a volume there.  I completed The Merchant of Venice, read Cymbeline, Julius Caesar and Much Ado; most of the others, I think, remained closed to me for a long time.  But these were enough to steep my horizon with all the colours of sunrise.  It was due, no doubt, to my bringing up, that the plays never appealed to me as bounded by the exigencies of a stage or played by actors.  The images they raised in my mind were of real people moving in the open air, and uttering, in the natural play of life, sentiments that were clothed in the most lovely, and yet, as it seemed to me, the most obvious and the most inevitable language.

It was while I was thus under the full spell of the Shakespearean necromancy that a significant event occurred.  My Father took me up to London for the first time since my infancy.  Our visit was one of a few days only, and its purpose was that we might take part in some enormous Evangelical conference.  We stayed in a dark hotel off the Strand, where I found the noise by day and night very afflicting.  When we were not at the conference, I spent long hours, among crumbs and bluebottle flies, in the coffee-room of this hotel, my Father being busy at the British Museum and the Royal Society.  The conference was held in an immense hall, somewhere in the north of London.  I remember my short-sighted sense of the terrible vastness of the crowd, with rings on rings of dim white faces fading in the fog.  My Father, as a privileged visitor, was obliged with seats on the platform, and we were in the heart of the first really large assemblage of persons that I had ever seen.

The interminable ritual of prayers, hymns and addresses left no impression on my memory, but my attention was suddenly stung into life by a remark.  An elderly man, fat and greasy, with a voice like a bassoon, and an imperturbable assurance, was denouncing the spread of infidelity, and the lukewarmness of professing Christians, who refrained from battling with the wickedness at their doors.  They were like the Laodiceans, whom the angel of the Apocalypse spewed out of his mouth.  For instance, who, the orator asked, is now rising to check the outburst of idolatry in our midst?  ‘At this very moment,’ he went on, ’there is proceeding, unreproved, a blasphemous celebration of the birth of Shakespeare, a lost soul now suffering for his sins in hell!’ My sensation was that of one who has suddenly been struck on the head; stars and sparks beat around me.  If some person I loved had been grossly insulted in my presence, I could not have felt more powerless in anguish.  No one in that vast audience raised a word of protest, and my spirits fell to their nadir.  This, be it remarked, was the earliest intimation that had reached me of the tercentenary of the Birth at Stratford, and I had not the least idea what could have provoked the outburst of outraged godliness.

But Shakespeare was certainly in the air.  When we returned to the hotel that noon, my Father of his own accord reverted to the subject.  I held my breath, prepared to endure fresh torment.  What he said, however, surprised and relieved me.  ‘Brother So and So,’ he remarked, ’was not, in my judgement, justified in saying what he did.  The uncovenanted mercies of God are not revealed to us.  Before so rashly speaking of Shakespeare as “a lost soul in hell”, he should have remembered how little we know of the poet’s history.  The light of salvation was widely disseminated in the land during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and we cannot know that Shakespeare did not accept the atonement of Christ in simple faith before he came to die.’  The concession will today seem meagre to gay and worldly spirits, but words cannot express how comfortable it was to me.  I gazed at my Father with loving eyes across the cheese and celery, and if the waiter had not been present I believe I might have hugged him in my arms.

This anecdote may serve to illustrate the attitude of my conscience, at this time, with regard to theology.  I was not consciously in any revolt against the strict faith in which I had been brought up, but I could not fail to be aware of the fact that literature tempted me to stray up innumerable paths which meandered in directions at right angles to that direct strait way which leadeth to salvation.  I fancied, if I may pursue the image, that I was still safe up these pleasant lanes if I did not stray far enough to lose sight of the main road.  If, for instance, it had been quite certain that Shakespeare had been irrecoverably damnable and damned, it would scarcely have been possible for me to have justified myself in going on reading Cymbeline.  One who broke bread with the Saints every Sunday morning, who ’took a class’ at Sunday school, who made, as my Father loved to remind me, a public weekly confession of his willingness to bear the Cross of Christ, such an one could hardly, however bewildering and torturing the thought, continue to admire a lost soul.  But that happy possibility of an ultimate repentance, how it eased me!  I could always console myself with the belief that when Shakespeare wrote any passage of intoxicating beauty, it was just then that he was beginning to breathe the rapture that faith in Christ brings to the anointed soul.  And it was with a like casuistry that I condoned my other intellectual and personal pleasures.

My Father continued to be under the impression that my boarding-school, which he never again visited after originally leaving me there, was conducted upon the same principles as his own household.  I was frequently tempted to enlighten him, but I never found the courage to do so.  As a matter of fact the piety of the establishment, which collected to it the sons of a large number of evangelically minded parents throughout that part of the country, resided mainly in the prospectus.  It proceeded no further than the practice of reading the Bible aloud, each boy in successive order one verse, in the early morning before breakfast.  There was no selection and no exposition; where the last boy sat, there the day’s reading ended, even if it were in the middle of a sentence, and there it began next morning.

Such reading of ‘the chapter’ was followed by a long dry prayer.  I do not know that this morning service would appear more perfunctory than usual to other boys, but it astounded and disgusted me, accustomed as I was to the ministrations at home, where my Father read ‘the word of God’ in a loud passionate voice, with dramatic emphasis, pausing for commentary and paraphrase, and treating every phrase as if it were part of a personal message or of thrilling family history.  At school, ‘morning prayer’ was a dreary, unintelligible exercise, and with this piece of mumbo-jumbo, religion for the day began and ended.  The discretion of little boys is extraordinary.  I am quite certain no one of us ever revealed this fact to our godly parents at home.

If any one was to do this, it was of course I who should first of all have ‘testified’.  But I had grown cautious about making confidences.  One never knew how awkwardly they might develop or to what disturbing excesses of zeal they might precipitously lead.  I was on my guard against my Father, who was, all the time, only too openly yearning that I should approach him for help, for comfort, for ghostly counsel.  Still ‘delicate’, though steadily gaining in solidity of constitution, I was liable to severe chills and to fugitive neuralgic pangs.  My Father was, almost maddeningly, desirous that these afflictions should be sanctified to me, and it was in my bed, often when I was much bowed in spirit by indisposition, that he used to triumph over me most pitilessly.  He retained the singular superstition, amazing in a man of scientific knowledge and long human experience, that all pains and ailments were directly sent by the Lord in chastisement for some definite fault, and not in relation to any physical cause.  The result was sometimes quite startling, and in particular I recollect that my stepmother and I exchanged impressions of astonishment at my Father’s action when Mrs. Goodyer, who was one of the ‘Saints’ and the wife of a young journeyman cobbler, broke her leg.  My Father, puzzled for an instant as to the meaning of this accident, since Mrs. Goodyer was the gentlest and most inoffensive of our church members, decided that it must be because she had made an idol of her husband, and he reduced the poor thing to tears by standing at her bed-side and imploring the Holy Spirit to bring this sin home to her conscience.

When, therefore, I was ill at home with one of my trifling disorders, the problem of my spiritual state always pressed violently upon my Father, and this caused me no little mental uneasiness.  He would appear at my bedside, with solemn solicitude, and sinking on his knees would earnestly pray aloud that the purpose of the Lord in sending me this affliction might graciously be made plain to me; and then, rising, and standing by my pillow, he would put me through a searching spiritual inquiry as to the fault which was thus divinely indicated to me as observed and reprobated on high.

It was not on points of moral behaviour that he thus cross-examined me; I think he disdained such ignoble game as that.  But uncertainties of doctrine, relinquishment of faith in the purity of this dogma or of that, lukewarm zeal in ’taking up the cross of Christ’, growth of intellectual pride,—­such were the insidious offences in consequence of which, as he supposed, the cold in the head or the toothache had been sent as heavenly messengers to recall my straggling conscience to its plain path of duty.

What made me very uncomfortable on these occasions was my consciousness that confinement to bed was hardly an affliction at all.  It kept me from the boredom of school, in a fire-lit bedroom at home, with my pretty, smiling stepmother lavishing luxurious attendance upon me, and it gave me long, unbroken days for reading.  I was awkwardly aware that I simply had not the effrontery to ‘approach the Throne of Grace’ with a request to know for what sin I was condemned to such a very pleasant disposition of my hours.

The current of my life ran, during my schooldays, most merrily and fully in the holidays, when I resumed my outdoor exercises with those friends in the village of whom I have spoken earlier.  I think they were more refined and better bred than any of my schoolfellows, at all events it was among these homely companions alone that I continued to form congenial and sympathetic relations.  In one of these boys,—­one of whom I have heard or seen nothing now for nearly a generation,—­I found tastes singularly parallel to my own, and we scoured the horizon in search of books in prose and verse, but particularly in verse.

As I grew stronger in muscle, I was capable of adding considerably to my income by an exercise of my legs.  I was allowed money for the railway ticket between the town where the school lay and the station nearest to my home.  But, if I chose to walk six or seven miles along the coast, thus more than halving the distance by rail from school house to home, I might spend as pocket money the railway fare I thus saved.  Such considerable sums I fostered in order to buy with them editions of the poets.  These were not in those days, as they are now, at the beck and call of every purse, and the attainment of each little masterpiece was a separate triumph.  In particular I shall never forget the excitement of reaching at length the exorbitant price the bookseller asked for the only, although imperfect, edition of the poems of S. T. Coleridge.  At last I could meet his demand, and my friend and I went down to consummate the solemn purchase.  Coming away with our treasure, we read aloud from the orange coloured volume, in turns, as we strolled along, until at last we sat down on the bulging root of an elm tree in a secluded lane.  Here we stayed, in a sort of poetical nirvana, reading, reading, forgetting the passage of time, until the hour of our neglected mid-day meal was a long while past, and we had to hurry home to bread and cheese and a scolding.

There was occasionally some trouble about my reading, but now not much nor often.  I was rather adroit, and careful not to bring prominently into sight anything of a literary kind which could become a stone of stumbling.  But, when I was nearly sixteen, I made a purchase which brought me into sad trouble, and was the cause of a permanent wound to my self-respect.  I had long coveted in the bookshop window a volume in which the poetical works of Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe were said to be combined.  This I bought at length, and I carried it with me to devour as I trod the desolate road that brought me along the edge of the cliff on Saturday afternoons.  Of Ben Jonson I could make nothing, but when I turned to ‘Hero and Leander’, I was lifted to a heaven of passion and music.  It was a marvellous revelation of romantic beauty to me, and as I paced along that lonely and exquisite highway, with its immense command of the sea, and its peeps every now and then, through slanting thickets, far down to the snow-white shingle, I lifted up my voice, singing the verses, as I strolled along: 

  Buskins of shells, all silver’d, used she,
  And branch’d with blushing coral to the knee,
  Where sparrows perched, of hollow pearl and gold,
  Such as the world would wonder to behold,—­

so it went on, and I thought I had never read anything so lovely,—­

  Amorous Leander, beautiful and young,
  Whose tragedy divine Musaeus sung,—­

it all seemed to my fancy intoxicating beyond anything I had ever even dreamed of, since I had not yet become acquainted with any of the modern romanticists.

When I reached home, tired out with enthusiasm and exercise, I must needs, so soon as I had eaten, search out my stepmother that she might be a partner in my joys.  It is remarkable to me now, and a disconcerting proof of my still almost infantile innocence, that, having induced her to settle to her knitting, I began, without hesitation, to read Marlowe’s voluptuous poem aloud to that blameless Christian gentlewoman.  We got on very well in the opening, but at the episode of Cupid’s pining, my stepmother’s needles began nervously to clash, and when we launched on the description of Leander’s person, she interrupted me by saying, rather sharply, ’Give me that book, please, I should like to read the rest to myself.’  I resigned the reading in amazement, and was stupefied to see her take the volume, shut it with a snap and hide it under her needlework.  Nor could I extract from her another word on the subject.

The matter passed from my mind, and I was therefore extremely alarmed when, soon after my going to bed that night, my Father came into my room with a pale face and burning eyes, the prey of violent perturbation.  He set down the candle and stood by the bed, and it was some time before he could resolve on a form of speech.  Then he denounced me, in unmeasured terms, for bringing into the house, for possessing at all or reading, so abominable a book.  He explained that my stepmother had shown it to him, and that he had looked through it, and had burned it.

The sentence in his tirade which principally affected me was this.  He said, ’You will soon be leaving us, and going up to lodgings in London, and if your landlady should come into your room, and find such a book lying about, she would immediately set you down as a profligate.’  I did not understand this at all, and it seems to me now that the fact that I had so very simply and childishly volunteered to read the verses to my stepmother should have proved to my Father that I connected it with no ideas of an immoral nature.

I was greatly wounded and offended, but my indignation was smothered up in the alarm and excitement which followed the news that I was to go up to live in lodgings, and, as it was evident, alone, in London.  Of this no hint or whisper had previously reached me.  On reflection, I can but admit that my Father, who was little accustomed to seventeenth-century literature, must have come across some startling exposures in Ben Jonson, and probably never reached ‘Hero and Leander’ at all.  The artistic effect of such poetry on an innocently pagan mind did not come within the circle of his experience.  He judged the outspoken Elizabethan poets, no doubt, very much in the spirit of the problematical landlady.

Of the world outside, of the dim wild whirlpool of London, I was much afraid, but I was now ready to be willing to leave the narrow Devonshire circle, to see the last of the red mud, of the dreary village street, of the plethoric elders, to hear the last of the drawling voices of the ‘Saints’.  Yet I had a great difficulty in persuading myself that I could ever be happy away from home, and again I compared my lot with that of one of the speckled soldier-crabs that roamed about in my Father’s aquarium, dragging after them great whorl-shells.  They, if by chance they were turned out of their whelk-habitations, trailed about a pale soft body in search of another house, visibly broken-hearted and the victims of every ignominious accident.

My spirits were divided pathetically between the wish to stay on, a guarded child, and to proceed into the world, a budding man, and, in my utter ignorance, I sought in vain to conjure up what my immediate future would be.  My Father threw no light upon the subject, for he had not formed any definite idea of what I could possibly do to earn an honest living.  As a matter of fact I was to stay another year at school and home.

This last year of my boyish life passed rapidly and pleasantly.  My sluggish brain waked up at last and I was able to study with application.  In the public examinations I did pretty well, and may even have been thought something of a credit to the school.  Yet I formed no close associations, and I even contrived to avoid, as I had afterwards occasion to regret, such lessons as were distasteful to me, and therefore particularly valuable.  But I read with unchecked voracity, and in several curious directions.  Shakespeare now passed into my possession entire, in the shape of a reprint more hideous and more offensive to the eyesight than would in these days appear conceivable.  I made acquaintance with Keats, who entirely captivated me; with Shelley, whose ‘Queen Mab’ at first repelled me from the threshold of his edifice; and with Wordsworth, for the exercise of whose magic I was still far too young.  My Father presented me with the entire bulk of Southey’s stony verse, which I found it impossible to penetrate, but my stepmother lent me The Golden Treasury, in which almost everything seemed exquisite.

Upon this extension of my intellectual powers, however, there did not follow any spirit of doubt or hostility to the faith.  On the contrary, at first there came a considerable quickening of fervour.  My prayers became less frigid and mechanical; I no longer avoided as far as possible the contemplation of religious ideas; I began to search the Scriptures for myself with interest and sympathy, if scarcely with ardour.  I began to perceive, without animosity, the strange narrowness of my Father’s system, which seemed to take into consideration only a selected circle of persons, a group of disciples peculiarly illuminated, and to have no message whatever for the wider Christian community.

On this subject I had some instructive conversations with my Father, whom I found not reluctant to have his convictions pushed to their logical extremity.  He did not wish to judge, he protested; but he could not admit that a single Unitarian (or ‘Socinian’, as he preferred to say) could possibly be redeemed; and he had no hope of eternal salvation for the inhabitants of Catholic countries.  I recollect his speaking of Austria.  He questioned whether a single Austrian subject, except, as he said, here and there a pious and extremely ignorant individual, who had not comprehended the errors of the Papacy, but had humbly studied his Bible, could hope to find eternal life.  He thought that the ordinary Chinaman or savage native of Fiji had a better chance of salvation than any cardinal in the Vatican.  And even in the priesthood of the Church of England he believed that while many were called, few indeed would be found to have been chosen.

I could not sympathize, even in my then state of ignorance, with so rigid a conception of the Divine mercy.  Little inclined as I was to be sceptical, I still thought it impossible, that a secret of such stupendous importance should have been entrusted to a little group of Plymouth Brethren, and have been hidden from millions of disinterested and pious theologians.  That the leaders of European Christianity were sincere, my Father did not attempt to question.  But they were all of them wrong, incorrect; and no matter how holy their lives, how self-sacrificing their actions, they would have to suffer for their inexactitude through aeons of undefined torment.  He would speak with a solemn complacency of the aged nun, who, after a long life of renunciation and devotion, died at last, ‘only to discover her mistake’.

He who was so tender-hearted that he could not bear to witness the pain or distress of any person, however disagreeable or undeserving, was quite acquiescent in believing that God would punish human beings, in millions, for ever, for a purely intellectual error of comprehension.  My Father’s inconsistencies of perception seem to me to have been the result of a curious irregularity of equipment.  Taking for granted, as he did, the absolute integrity of the Scriptures, and applying to them his trained scientific spirit, he contrived to stifle, with a deplorable success, alike the function of the imagination, the sense of moral justice, and his own deep and instinctive tenderness of heart.

There presently came over me a strong desire to know what doctrine indeed it was that the other Churches taught.  I expressed a wish to be made aware of the practices of Rome, or at least of Canterbury, and I longed to attend the Anglican and the Roman services.  But to do so was impossible.  My Father did not, indeed, forbid me to enter the fine parish church of our village, or the stately Puginesque cathedral which Rome had just erected at its side, but I knew that I could not be seen at either service without his immediately knowing it, or without his being deeply wounded.  Although I was sixteen years of age, and although I was treated with indulgence and affection, I was still but a bird fluttering in the net-work of my Father’s will, and incapable of the smallest independent action.  I resigned all thought of attending any other services than those at our ‘Room’, but I did no longer regard this exclusion as a final one.  I bowed, but it was in the house of Rimmon, from which I now knew that I must inevitably escape.  All the liberation, however, which I desired or dreamed of was only just so much as would bring me into communion with the outer world of Christianity without divesting me of the pure and simple principles of faith.

Of so much emancipation, indeed, I now became ardently desirous, and in the contemplation of it I rose to a more considerable degree of religious fervour than I had ever reached before or was ever to experience later.  Our thoughts were at this time abundantly exercised with the expectation of the immediate coming of the Lord, who, as my Father and those who thought with him believed, would suddenly appear, without the least warning, and would catch up to be with Him in everlasting glory all whom acceptance of the Atonement had sealed for immortality.  These were, on the whole, not numerous, and our belief was that the world, after a few days’ amazement at the total disappearance of these persons, would revert to its customary habits of life, merely sinking more rapidly into a moral corruption due to the removal of these souls of salt.  This event an examination of prophecy had led my Father to regard as absolutely imminent, and sometimes, when we parted for the night, he would say with a sparkling rapture in his eyes, ’Who knows?  We may meet next in the air, with all the cohorts of God’s saints!’

This conviction I shared, without a doubt; and, indeed,—­in perfect innocency, I hope, but perhaps with a touch of slyness too,—­I proposed at the end of the summer holidays that I should stay at home.  ’What is the use of my going to school?  Let me be with you when we rise to meet the Lord in the air!’ To this my Father sharply and firmly replied that it was our duty to carry on our usual avocations to the last, for we knew not the moment of His coming, and we should be together in an instant on that day, how far soever we might be parted upon earth.  I was ashamed, but his argument was logical, and, as it proved, judicious.  My Father lived for nearly a quarter of a century more, never losing the hope of ‘not tasting death’, and as the last moments of mortality approached, he was bitterly disappointed at what he held to be a scanty reward of his long faith and patience.  But if my own life’s work had been, as I proposed, shelved in expectation of the Lord’s imminent advent, I should have cumbered the ground until this day.

To school, therefore, I returned with a brain full of strange discords, in a huddled mixture of ‘Endymion’ and the Book of Revelation, John Wesley’s hymns and ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’.  Few boys of my age, I suppose, carried about with them such a confused throng of immature impressions and contradictory hopes.  I was at one moment devoutly pious, at the next haunted by visions of material beauty and longing for sensuous impressions.  In my hot and silly brain, Jesus and Pan held sway together, as in a wayside chapel discordantly and impishly consecrated to Pagan and to Christian rites.  But for the present, as in the great chorus which so marvellously portrays our double nature, ‘the folding-star of Bethlehem’ was still dominant.  I became more and more pietistic.  Beginning now to versify, I wrote a tragedy in pale imitation of Shakespeare, but on a Biblical and evangelistic subject; and odes that were parodies of those in ‘Prometheus Unbound’, but dealt with the approaching advent of our Lord and the rapture of His saints.  My unwholesome excitement, bubbling up in this violent way, reached at last a climax and foamed over.

It was a summer afternoon, and, being now left very free in my movements, I had escaped from going out with the rest of my schoolfellows in their formal walk in charge of an usher.  I had been reading a good deal of poetry, but my heart had translated Apollo and Bacchus into terms of exalted Christian faith.  I was alone, and I lay on a sofa, drawn across a large open window at the top of the school-house, in a room which was used as a study by the boys who were ‘going up for examination’.  I gazed down on a labyrinth of garden sloping to the sea, which twinkled faintly beyond the towers of the town.  Each of these gardens held a villa in it, but all the near landscape below me was drowned in foliage.  A wonderful warm light of approaching sunset modelled the shadows and set the broad summits of the trees in a rich glow.  There was an absolute silence below and around me; a magic of suspense seemed to keep every topmost twig from waving.

Over my soul there swept an immense wave of emotion.  Now, surely, now the great final change must be approaching.  I gazed up into the tenderly-coloured sky, and I broke irresistibly into speech.  ‘Come now, Lord Jesus,’ I cried, ’come now and take me to be for ever with Thee in Thy Paradise.  I am ready to come.  My heart is purged from sin, there is nothing that keeps me rooted to this wicked world.  Oh, come now, now, and take me before I have known the temptations of life, before I have to go to London and all the dreadful things that happen there!’ And I raised myself on the sofa, and leaned upon the window-sill, and waited for the glorious apparition.

This was the highest moment of my religious life, the apex of my striving after holiness.  I waited awhile, watching; and then I felt a faint shame at the theatrical attitude I had adopted, although I was alone.  Still I gazed and still I hoped.  Then a little breeze sprang up and the branches danced.  Sounds began to rise from the road beneath me.  Presently the colour deepened, the evening came on.  From far below there rose to me the chatter of the boys returning home.  The tea-bell rang,—­last word of prose to shatter my mystical poetry.  ’The Lord has not come, the Lord will never come,’ I muttered, and in my heart the artificial edifice of extravagant faith began to totter and crumble.  From that moment forth my Father and I, though the fact was long successfully concealed from him and even from myself, walked in opposite hemispheres of the soul, with ‘the thick o’ the world between us’.