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Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments

by Edmund Gosse · English · Gutenberg #2540 · 464,763 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments

Author: Edmund Gosse


        
Release date: November 28, 2004 [eBook #2540]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

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Father and Son

A study of two temperaments

by Edmund Gosse



Der Glaube ist wie der Liebe:
Er Lasst sich nicht erzwingen.

Schopenhauer


PREFACE

AT the present hour, when fiction takes forms so ingenious and so
specious, it is perhaps necessary to say that the following
narrative, in all its parts, and so far as the punctilious
attention of the writer has been able to keep it so, is
scrupulously true. If it were not true, in this strict sense, to
publish it would be to trifle with all those who may be induced
to read it. It is offered to them as a _document_, as a record of
educational and religious conditions which, having passed away,
will never return. In this respect, as the diagnosis of a dying
Puritanism, it is hoped that the narrative will not be altogether
without significance.

It offers, too, in a subsidiary sense, a study of the development
of moral and intellectual ideas during the progress of infancy.
These have been closely and conscientiously noted, and may have
some value in consequence of the unusual conditions in which they
were produced. The author has observed that those who have
written about the facts of their own childhood have usually
delayed to note them down until age has dimmed their
recollections. Perhaps an even more common fault in such
autobiographies is that they are sentimental, and are falsified
by self-admiration and self-pity. The writer of these
recollections has thought that if the examination of his earliest
years was to be undertaken at all, it should be attempted while
his memory is still perfectly vivid and while he is still
unbiased by the forgetfulness or the sensibility of advancing
years.

At one point only has there been any tampering with precise fact.
It is believed that, with the exception of the Son, there is but
one person mentioned in this book who is still alive.
Nevertheless, it has been thought well, in order to avoid any
appearance of offence, to alter the majority of the proper names
of the private persons spoken of.

It is not usual, perhaps, that the narrative of a spiritual
struggle should mingle merriment and humour with a discussion of
the most solemn subjects. It has, however, been inevitable that
they should be so mingled in this narrative. It is true that most
funny books try to be funny throughout, while theology is
scandalized if it awakens a single smile. But life is not
constituted thus, and this book is nothing if it is not a genuine
slice of life. There was an extraordinary mixture of comedy and
tragedy in the situation which is here described, and those who
are affected by the pathos of it will not need to have it
explained to them that the comedy was superficial and the tragedy
essential.

September 1907

CHAPTER I

THIS book is the record of a struggle between two temperaments,
two consciences and almost two epochs. It ended, as was
inevitable, in disruption. Of the two human beings here
described, one was born to fly backward, the other could not help
being carried forward. There came a time when neither spoke the
same language as the other, or encompassed the same hopes, or was
fortified by the same desires. But, at least, it is some
consolation to the survivor, that neither, to the very last hour,
ceased to respect the other, or to regard him with a sad
indulgence.

The affection of these two persons was assailed by forces in
comparison with which the changes that health or fortune or place
introduce are as nothing. It is a mournful satisfaction, but yet
a satisfaction, that they were both of them able to obey the law
which says that ties of close family relationship must be
honoured and sustained. Had it not been so, this story would
never have been told.

The struggle began soon, yet of course it did not begin in early
infancy. But to familiarize my readers with the conditions of the
two persons (which were unusual) and with the outlines of their
temperaments (which were, perhaps innately, antagonistic), it is
needful to open with some account of all that I can truly and
independently recollect, as well as with some statements which
are, as will be obvious, due to household tradition.

My parents were poor gentlefolks; not young; solitary, sensitive,
and although they did not know it, proud. They both belonged to
what is called the Middle Class, and there was this further
resemblance between them that they each descended from families
which had been more than well-to-do in the eighteenth century,
and had gradually sunken in fortune. In both houses there had
been a decay of energy which had led to decay in wealth. In the
case of my Father's family it had been a slow decline; in that of
my Mother's, it had been rapid. My maternal grandfather was born
wealthy, and in the opening years of the nineteenth century,
immediately after his marriage, he bought a little estate in
North Wales, on the slopes of Snowdon. Here he seems to have
lived in a pretentious way, keeping a pack of hounds and
entertaining on an extravagant scale. He had a wife who
encouraged him in this vivid life, and three children, my Mother
and her two brothers. His best trait was his devotion to the
education of his children, in which he proclaimed himself a
disciple of Rousseau. But he can hardly have followed the
teaching of 'Emile' very closely, since he employed tutors to
teach his daughter, at an extremely early age, the very subjects
which Rousseau forbade, such as history, literature and foreign
languages.

My Mother was his special favourite, and his vanity did its best
to make a bluestocking of her. She read Greek, Latin and even a
little Hebrew, and, what was more important, her mind was trained
to be self-supporting. But she was diametrically opposed in
essential matters to her easy-going, luxurious and self-indulgent
parents. Reviewing her life in her thirtieth year, she remarked
in some secret notes: 'I cannot recollect the time when I did not
love religion.' She used a still more remarkable expression: 'If
I must date my conversion from my first wish and trial to be
holy, I may go back to infancy; if I am to postpone it till after
my last wilful sin, it is scarcely yet begun.' The irregular
pleasures of her parents' life were deeply distasteful to her, as
such were to many young persons in those days of the wide revival
of Conscience, and when my grandfather, by his reckless
expenditure, which he never checked till ruin was upon him, was
obliged to sell his estate, and live in penury, my Mother was the
only member of the family who did not regret the change. For my
own part, I believe I should have liked my reprobate maternal
grandfather, but his conduct was certainly very vexatious. He
died, in his eightieth year, when I was nine months old.

It was a curious coincidence that life had brought both my
parents along similar paths to an almost identical position in
respect to religious belief. She had started from the Anglican
standpoint, he from the Wesleyan, and each, almost without
counsel from others, and after varied theological experiments,
had come to take up precisely the same attitude towards all
divisions of the Protestant Church--that, namely, of detached and
unbiased contemplation. So far as the sects agreed with my Father
and my Mother, the sects were walking in the light; wherever they
differed from them, they had slipped more or less definitely into
a penumbra of their own making, a darkness into which neither of
my parents would follow them. Hence, by a process of selection,
my Father and my Mother alike had gradually, without violence,
found themselves shut outside all Protestant communions, and at
last they met only with a few extreme Calvinists like themselves,
on terms of what may almost be called negation--with no priest, no
ritual, no festivals, no ornament of any kind, nothing but the
Lord's Supper and the exposition of Holy Scripture drawing these
austere spirits into any sort of cohesion. They called themselves
'the Brethren', simply; a title enlarged by the world outside
into 'Plymouth Brethren'.

It was accident and similarity which brought my parents together
at these meetings of the Brethren. Each was lonely, each was
poor, each was accustomed to a strenuous intellectual self-
support. He was nearly thirty-eight, she was past forty-two, when
they married. From a suburban lodging, he brought her home to his
mother's little house in the northeast of London without a
single day's honeymoon. My Father was a zoologist, and a writer
of books on natural history; my Mother also was a writer, author
already of two slender volumes of religious verse--the earlier of
which, I know not how, must have enjoyed some slight success,
since a second edition was printed--afterwards she devoted her
pen to popular works of edification. But how infinitely removed
in their aims, their habits, their ambitions from 'literary'
people of the present day, words are scarcely adequate to
describe. Neither knew nor cared about any manifestation of
current literature. For each there had been no poet later than
Byron, and neither had read a romance since, in childhood, they
had dipped into the Waverley Novels as they appeared in
succession. For each the various forms of imaginative and
scientific literature were merely means of improvement and
profit, which kept the student 'out of the world', gave him full
employment, and enabled him to maintain himself. But pleasure was
found nowhere but in the Word of God, and to the endless
discussion of the Scriptures each hurried when the day's work was
over.

In this strange household the advent of a child was not welcomed,
but was borne with resignation. The event was thus recorded in my
Father's diary:

'E. delivered of a son. Received green swallow from Jamaica.'

This entry has caused amusement, as showing that he was as much
interested in the bird as in the boy. But this does not follow;
what the wording exemplifies is my Father's extreme punctilio.
The green swallow arrived later in the day than the son, and the
earlier visitor was therefore recorded first; my Father was
scrupulous in every species of arrangement.

Long afterwards, my Father told me that my Mother suffered much
in giving birth to me, and that, uttering no cry, I appeared to
be dead. I was laid, with scant care, on another bed in the room,
while all anxiety and attention were concentrated on my Mother.
An old woman who happened to be there, and who was unemployed,
turned her thoughts to me, and tried to awake in me a spark of
vitality. She succeeded, and she was afterwards complimented by
the doctor on her cleverness. My Father could not--when he told
me the story--recollect the name of my preserver. I have often
longed to know who she was. For all the rapture of life, for all
its turmoils, its anxious desires, its manifold pleasures, and
even for its sorrow and suffering, I bless and praise that
anonymous old lady from the bottom of my heart.

It was six weeks before my Mother was able to leave her room. The
occasion was made a solemn one, and was attended by a species of
Churching. Mr. Balfour, a valued minister of the denomination,
held a private service in the parlour, and 'prayed for our child,
that he may be the Lord's'. This was the opening act of that
'dedication' which was never henceforward forgotten, and of which
the following pages will endeavour to describe the results.
Around my tender and unconscious spirit was flung the luminous
web, the light and elastic but impermeable veil, which it was
hoped would keep me 'unspotted from the world'.

Until this time my Father's mother had lived in the house and
taken the domestic charges of it on her own shoulders. She now
consented to leave us to ourselves. There is no question that her
exodus was a relief to my Mother, since my paternal grandmother
was a strong and masterful woman, buxom, choleric and practical,
for whom the interests of the mind did not exist. Her daughter-
in-law, gentle as she was, and ethereal in manner and appearance--
strangely contrasted (no doubt), in her tinctures of gold hair
and white skin, with my grandmother's bold carnations and black
tresses--was yet possessed of a will like tempered steel. They
were better friends apart, with my grandmother lodged hard by, in
a bright room, her household gods and bits of excellent
eighteenth-century furniture around her, her miniatures and
sparkling china arranged on shelves.

Left to my Mother's sole care, I became the centre of her
solicitude. But there mingled with those happy animal instincts
which sustain the strength and patience of every human mother and
were fully present with her--there mingled with these certain
spiritual determinations which can be but rare. They are, in
their outline, I suppose, vaguely common to many religious
mothers, but there are few indeed who fill up the sketch with so
firm a detail as she did. Once again I am indebted to her secret
notes, in a little locked volume, seen until now, nearly sixty
years later, by no eye save her own. Thus she wrote when I was
two months old:

'We have given him to the Lord; and we trust that He will really
manifest him to be His own, if he grow up; and if the Lord take
him early, we will not doubt that he is taken to Himself. Only,
if it please the Lord to take him, I do trust we may be spared
seeing him suffering in lingering illness and much pain. But in
this as in all things His will is better than what we can choose.
Whether his life be prolonged or not, it has already been a
blessing to us, and to the saints, in leading us to much prayer,
and bringing us into varied need and some trial.'

The last sentence is somewhat obscure to me. How, at that tender
age, I contrived to be a blessing 'to the saints' may surprise
others and puzzles myself. But 'the saints' was the habitual term
by which were indicated the friends who met on Sunday mornings
for Holy Communion, and at many other times in the week for
prayer and discussion of the Scriptures, in the small hired hall
at Hackney, which my parents attended. I suppose that the solemn
dedication of me to the Lord, which was repeated in public in my
Mother's arms, being by no means a usual or familiar ceremony
even among the Brethren, created a certain curiosity and fervour
in the immediate services, or was imagined so to do by the fond,
partial heart of my Mother. She, however, who had been so much
isolated, now made the care of her child an excuse for retiring
still further into silence. With those religious persons who met
at the Room, as the modest chapel was called, she had little
spiritual, and no intellectual, sympathy. She noted:

'I do not think it would increase my happiness to be in the midst
of the saints at Hackney. I have made up my mind to give myself
up to Baby for the winter, and to accept no invitations. To go
when I can to the Sunday morning meetings and to see my own
Mother.'

The monotony of her existence now became extreme, but she seems
to have been happy. Her days were spent in taking care of me, and
in directing one young servant. My Father was forever in his
study, writing, drawing, dissecting; sitting, no doubt, as I grew
afterwards accustomed to see him, absolutely motionless, with his
eye glued to the microscope, for twenty minutes at a time. So the
greater part of every weekday was spent, and on Sunday he
usually preached one, and sometimes two extempore sermons. His
workday labours were rewarded by the praise of the learned
world, to which he was indifferent, but by very little money,
which he needed more. For over three years after their marriage,
neither of my parents left London for a single day, not being
able to afford to travel. They received scarcely any visitors,
never ate a meal away from home, never spent an evening in social
intercourse abroad. At night they discussed theology, read aloud
to one another, or translated scientific brochures from French or
German. It sounds a terrible life of pressure and deprivation,
and that it was physically unwholesome there can be no shadow of
a doubt. But their contentment was complete and unfeigned. In the
midst of this, materially, the hardest moment of their lives,
when I was one year old, and there was a question of our leaving
London, my Mother recorded in her secret notes:

'We are happy and contented, having all things needful and
pleasant, and our present habitation is hallowed by many sweet
associations. We have our house to ourselves and enjoy each
other's society. If we move we shall no longer be alone. The
situation may be more favourable, however, for Baby, as being
more in the country. I desire to have no choice in the matter,
but as I know not what would be for our good, and God knows, so I
desire to leave it with Him, and if it is not His will we should
move, He will raise objections and difficulties, and if it is His
will He will make Henry [my Father] desirous and anxious to take
the step, and then, whatever the result, let us leave all to Him
and not regret it.'

No one who is acquainted with the human heart will mistake this
attitude of resignation for weakness of purpose. It was not
poverty of will, it was abnegation, it was a voluntary act. My
Mother, underneath an exquisite amenity of manner, concealed a
rigour of spirit which took the form of a constant self-denial.
For it to dawn upon her consciousness that she wished for
something, was definitely to renounce that wish, or, more
exactly, to subject it in every thing to what she conceived to be
the will of God.

This is perhaps the right moment for me to say that at this time,
and indeed until the hour of her death, she exercised, without
suspecting it, a magnetic power over the will and nature of my
Father. Both were strong, but my Mother was unquestionably the
stronger of the two; it was her mind which gradually drew his to
take up a certain definite position, and this remained permanent
although she, the cause of it, was early removed. Hence, while it
was with my Father that the long struggle which I have to narrate
took place, behind my Father stood the ethereal memory of my
Mother's will, guiding him, pressing him, holding him to the
unswerving purpose which she had formed and defined. And when the
inevitable disruption came, what was unspeakably painful was to
realize that it was not from one, but from both parents that the
purpose of the child was separated.

My Mother was a Puritan in grain, and never a word escaped her,
not a phrase exists in her diary, to suggest that she had any
privations to put up with. She seemed strong and well, and so did
I; the one of us who broke down was my Father. With his attack of
acute nervous dyspepsia came an unexpected small accession of
money, and we were able, in my third year, to take a holiday of
nearly ten months in Devonshire. The extreme seclusion, the
unbroken strain, were never repeated, and when we returned to
London, it was to conditions of greater amenity and to a less
rigid practice of 'the world forgetting by the world forgot'.
That this relaxation was more relative than positive, and that
nothing ever really tempted either of my parents from their
cavern in an intellectual Thebaid, my recollections will amply
prove. But each of them was forced by circumstances into a more
or less public position, and neither could any longer quite
ignore the world around.

It is not my business here to re-write the biographies of my
parents. Each of them became, in a certain measure, celebrated,
and each was the subject of a good deal of contemporary
discussion. Each was prominent before the eyes of a public of his
or her own, half a century ago. It is because their minds were
vigorous and their accomplishments distinguished that the
contrast between their spiritual point of view and the aspect of
a similar class of persons today is interesting and may, I hope,
be instructive. But this is not another memoir of public
individuals, each of whom has had more than one biographer. My
serious duty, as I venture to hold it, is other;

                     that's the world's side,
  Thus men saw them, praised them, thought they knew them!
  There, in turn, I stood aside and praised them!
  Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it.

But this is a different inspection, this is a study of

              the other side, the novel
  Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of,

the record of a state of soul once not uncommon in Protestant
Europe, of which my parents were perhaps the latest consistent
exemplars among people of light and leading.

The peculiarities of a family life, founded upon such principles,
are, in relation to a little child, obvious; but I may be
permitted to recapitulate them. Here was perfect purity, perfect
intrepidity, perfect abnegation; yet there was also narrowness,
isolation, an absence of perspective, let it be boldly admitted,
an absence of humanity. And there was a curious mixture of
humbleness and arrogance; entire resignation to the will of God
and not less entire disdain of the judgement and opinion of man.
My parents founded every action, every attitude, upon their
interpretation of the Scriptures, and upon the guidance of the
Divine Will as revealed to them by direct answer to prayer. Their
ejaculation in the face of any dilemma was, 'Let us cast it
before the Lord!'

So confident were they of the reality of their intercourse with
God, that they asked for no other guide. They recognized no
spiritual authority among men, they subjected themselves to no
priest or minister, they troubled their consciences about no
current manifestation of 'religious opinion'. They lived in an
intellectual cell, bounded at its sides by the walls of their own
house, but open above to the very heart of the uttermost heavens.

This, then, was the scene in which the soul of a little child was
planted, not as in an ordinary open flower-border or carefully
tended social _parterre_, but as on a ledge, split in the granite
of some mountain. The ledge was hung between night and the snows
on one hand, and the dizzy depths of the world upon the other;
was furnished with just soil enough for a gentian to struggle
skywards and open its stiff azure stars; and offered no
lodgement, no hope of salvation, to any rootlet which should
stray beyond its inexorable limits.


CHAPTER II

OUT of the darkness of my infancy there comes only one flash of
memory. I am seated alone, in my baby-chair, at a dinner-table
set for several people. Somebody brings in a leg of mutton, puts
it down close to me, and goes out. I am again alone, gazing at
two low windows, wide open upon a garden. Suddenly, noiselessly,
a large, long animal (obviously a greyhound) appears at one
window-sill, slips into the room, seizes the leg of mutton and
slips out again. When this happened I could not yet talk. The
accomplishment of speech came to me very late, doubtless because
I never heard young voices. Many years later, when I mentioned
this recollection, there was a shout of laughter and surprise:
'That, then, was what became of the mutton! It was not you, who,
as your Uncle A. pretended, ate it up, in the twinkling of an
eye, bone and all!'

I suppose that it was the startling intensity of this incident
which stamped it upon a memory from which all other impressions
of this early date have vanished.

The adventure of the leg of mutton occurred, evidently, at the
house of my Mother's brothers, for my parents, at this date,
visited no other. My uncles were not religious men, but they had
an almost filial respect for my Mother, who was several years
senior to the elder of them. When the catastrophe of my
grandfather's fortune had occurred, they had not yet left school.
My Mother, in spite of an extreme dislike of teaching, which was
native to her, immediately accepted the situation of a governess
in the family of an Irish nobleman. The mansion was only to be
approached, as Miss Edgeworth would have said, 'through eighteen
sloughs, at the imminent peril of one's life', and when one had
reached it, the mixture of opulence and squalor, of civility and
savagery, was unspeakable. But my Mother was well paid, and she
stayed in this distasteful environment, doing the work she hated
most, while with the margin of her salary she helped first one of
her brothers and then the other through his Cambridge course.
They studied hard and did well at the university. At length their
sister received, in her 'ultima Thule', news that her younger
brother had taken his degree, and then and there, with a sigh of
intense relief, she resigned her situation and came straight back
to England.

It is not to be wondered at, then, that my uncles looked up to
their sister with feelings of especial devotion. They were not
inclined, they were hardly in a position, to criticize her modes
of thought. They were easy-going, cultured and kindly gentlemen,
rather limited in their views, without a trace of their sister's
force of intellect or her strenuous temper. E. resembled her in
person, he was tall, fair, with auburn curls; he cultivated a
certain tendency to the Byronic type, fatal and melancholy. A.
was short, brown and jocose, with a pretension to common sense;
bluff and chatty. As a little child, I adored my Uncle E., who
sat silent by the fireside holding me against his knee, saying
nothing, but looking unutterably sad, and occasionally shaking
his warm-coloured tresses. With great injustice, on the other
hand, I detested my Uncle A., because he used to joke in a manner
very displeasing to me, and because he would so far forget
himself as to chase, and even, if it will be credited, to tickle
me. My uncles, who remained bachelors to the end of their lives,
earned a comfortable living; E. by teaching, A. as 'something in
the City', and they rented an old rambling house in Clapton, that
same in which I saw the greyhound. Their house had a strange,
delicious smell, so unlike anything I smelt anywhere else, that
it used to fill my eyes with tears of mysterious pleasure. I know
now that this was the odour of cigars, tobacco being a species of
incense tabooed at home on the highest religious grounds.

It has been recorded that I was slow in learning to speak. I used
to be told that having met all invitations to repeat such words
as 'Papa' and 'Mamma' with gravity and indifference, I one day
drew towards me a volume, and said 'book' with startling
distinctness. I was not at all precocious, but at a rather early
age, I think towards the beginning of my fourth year, I learned
to read. I cannot recollect a time when a printed page of English
was closed to me. But perhaps earlier still my Mother used to
repeat to me a poem which I have always taken for granted that
she had herself composed, a poem which had a romantic place in my
early mental history. It ran thus, I think:

  O pretty Moon, you shine so bright!
  I'll go to bid Mamma good-night,
  And then I'll lie upon my bed
  And watch you move above my head.

  Ah! there, a cloud has hidden you!
  But I can see your light shine thro';
  It tries to hide you--quite in vain,
  For--there you quickly come again!

  It's God, I know, that makes you shine
  Upon this little bed of mine;
  But I shall all about you know
  When I can read and older grow.

Long, long after the last line had become an anachronism, I used
to shout this poem from my bed before I went to sleep, whether
the night happened to be moonlit or no.

It must have been my Father who taught me my letters. To my
Mother, as I have said, it was distasteful to teach, though she
was so prompt and skillful to learn. My Father, on the contrary,
taught cheerfully, by fits and starts. In particular, he had a
scheme for rationalizing geography, which I think was admirable.
I was to climb upon a chair, while, standing at my side, with a
pencil and a sheet of paper, he was to draw a chart of the
markings on the carpet. Then, when I understood the system,
another chart on a smaller scale of the furniture in the room,
then of a floor of the house, then of the back-garden, then of a
section of the street. The result of this was that geography came
to me of itself, as a perfectly natural miniature arrangement of
objects, and to this day has always been the science which gives
me least difficulty. My father also taught me the simple rules of
arithmetic, a little natural history, and the elements of
drawing; and he laboured long and unsuccessfully to make me learn
by heart hymns, psalms and chapters of Scripture, in which I
always failed ignominiously and with tears. This puzzled and
vexed him, for he himself had an extremely retentive textual
memory. He could not help thinking that I was naughty, and would
not learn the chapters, until at last he gave up the effort. All
this sketch of an education began, I believe, in my fourth year,
and was not advanced or modified during the rest of my Mother's
life.

Meanwhile, capable as I was of reading, I found my greatest
pleasure in the pages of books. The range of these was limited,
for story-books of every description were sternly excluded. No
fiction of any kind, religious or secular, was admitted into the
house. In this it was to my Mother, not to my Father, that the
prohibition was due. She had a remarkable, I confess to me still
somewhat unaccountable impression that to 'tell a story', that
is, to compose fictitious narrative of any kind, was a sin. She
carried this conviction to extreme lengths. My Father, in later
years, gave me some interesting examples of her firmness. As a
young man in America, he had been deeply impressed by
'Salathiel', a pious prose romance by that then popular writer,
the Rev. George Croly. When he first met my Mother, he
recommended it to her, but she would not consent to open it. Nor
would she read the chivalrous tales in verse of Sir Walter Scott,
obstinately alleging that they were not 'true'. She would read
none but lyrical and subjective poetry. Her secret diary reveals
the history of this singular aversion to the fictitious, although
it cannot be said to explain the cause of it. As a child,
however, she had possessed a passion for making up stories, and
so considerable a skill in it that she was constantly being
begged to indulge others with its exercise. But I will, on so
curious a point, leave her to speak for herself:

'When I was a very little child, I used to amuse myself and my
brothers with inventing stories, such as I read. Having, as I
suppose, naturally a restless mind and busy imagination, this
soon became the chief pleasure of my life. Unfortunately, my
brothers were always fond of encouraging this propensity, and I
found in Taylor, my maid, a still greater tempter. I had not
known there was any harm in it, until Miss Shore [a Calvinist
governess], finding it out, lectured me severely, and told me it
was wicked. From that time forth I considered that to invent a
story of any kind was a sin. But the desire to do so was too
deeply rooted in my affections to be resisted in my own strength
[she was at that time nine years of age], and unfortunately I knew
neither my corruption nor my weakness, nor did I know where to
gain strength. The longing to invent stories grew with violence;
everything I heard or read became food for my distemper. The
simplicity of truth was not sufficient for me; I must needs
embroider imagination upon it, and the folly, vanity and
wickedness which disgraced my heart are more than I am able to
express. Even now [at the age of twenty-nine], tho' watched,
prayed and striven against, this is still the sin that most
easily besets me. It has hindered my prayers and prevented my
improvement, and therefore, has humbled me very much.'

This is, surely, a very painful instance of the repression of an
instinct. There seems to have been, in this case, a vocation such
as is rarely heard, and still less often wilfully disregarded and
silenced. Was my Mother intended by nature to be a novelist? I
have often thought so, and her talents and vigour of purpose,
directed along the line which was ready to form 'the chief
pleasure of her life', could hardly have failed to conduct her to
great success. She was a little younger than Bulwer Lytton, a
little older than Mrs. Gaskell--but these are vain and trivial
speculations!

My own state, however, was, I should think, almost unique among
the children of cultivated parents. In consequence of the stern
ordinance which I have described, not a single fiction was read
or told to me during my infancy. The rapture of the child who
delays the process of going to bed by cajoling 'a story' out of
his mother or his nurse, as he sits upon her knee, well tucked
up, at the corner of the nursery fire--this was unknown to me.
Never in all my early childhood did anyone address to me the
affecting preamble, 'Once upon a time!' I was told about
missionaries, but never about pirates; I was familiar with
hummingbirds, but I had never heard of fairies--Jack the Giant-
Killer, Rumpelstiltskin and Robin Hood were not of my
acquaintance; and though I understood about wolves, Little Red
Ridinghood was a stranger even by name. So far as my 'dedication'
was concerned, I can but think that my parents were in error thus
to exclude the imaginary from my outlook upon facts. They desired
to make me truthful; the tendency was to make me positive and
sceptical. Had they wrapped me in the soft folds of supernatural
fancy, my mind might have been longer content to follow their
traditions in an unquestioning spirit.

Having easily said what, in those early years, I did not read, I
have great difficulty in saying what I did read. But a queer
variety of natural history, some of it quite indigestible by my
undeveloped mind; many books of travels, mainly of a scientific
character, among them voyages of discovery in the South Seas, by
which my brain was dimly filled with splendour; some geography
and astronomy, both of them sincerely enjoyed; much theology,
which I desired to appreciate but could never get my teeth into
(if I may venture to say so), and over which my eye and tongue
learned to slip without penetrating, so that I would read, and
read aloud, and with great propriety of emphasis, page after page
without having formed an idea or retained an expression. There
was, for instance, a writer on prophecy called Jukes, of whose
works each of my parents was inordinately fond, and I was early
set to read Jukes aloud to them. I did it glibly, like a machine,
but the sight of Jukes' volumes became an abomination to me, and
I never formed the outline of a notion what they were about.
Later on, a publication called _The Penny Cyclopaedia_ became my
daily, and for a long time almost my sole study; to the subject
of this remarkable work I may presently return.

It is difficult to keep anything like chronological order in
recording fragments of early recollection, and in speaking of my
reading I have been led too far ahead. My memory does not,
practically, begin till we returned from certain visits, made
with a zoological purpose, to the shores of Devon and Dorset, and
settled, early in my fifth year, in a house at Islington, in the
north of London. Our circumstances were now more easy; my Father
had regular and well-paid literary work; and the house was larger
and more comfortable than ever before, though still very simple
and restricted. My memories, some of which are exactly dated by
certain facts, now become clear and almost abundant. What I do
not remember, except from having it very often repeated to me,
is what may be considered the only 'clever' thing that I said
during an otherwise unillustrious childhood. It was not
startlingly 'clever', but it may pass. A lady--when I was just
four--rather injudiciously showed me a large print of a human
skeleton, saying, 'There! you don't know what that is, do you?'
Upon which, immediately and very archly, I replied, 'Isn't it a
man with the meat off?' This was thought wonderful, and, as it is
supposed that I had never had the phenomenon explained to me, it
certainly displays some quickness in seizing an analogy. I had
often watched my Father, while he soaked the flesh off the bones
of fishes and small mammals. If I venture to repeat this trifle,
it is only to point out that the system on which I was being
educated deprived all things, human life among the rest, of their
mystery. The 'bare-grinning skeleton of death' was to me merely a
prepared specimen of that featherless plantigrade vertebrate,
'homo sapiens'.

As I have said that this anecdote was thought worth repeating, I
ought to proceed to say that there was, so far as I can
recollect, none of that flattery of childhood which is so often
merely a backhanded way of indulging the vanity of parents. My
Mother, indeed, would hardly have been human if she had not
occasionally entertained herself with the delusion that her
solitary duckling was a cygnet. This my Father did not encourage,
remarking, with great affection, and chucking me under the chin,
that I was 'a nice little ordinary boy'. My Mother, stung by this
want of appreciation, would proceed so far as to declare that she
believed that in future times the F.R.S. would be chiefly known
as his son's father! (This is a pleasantry frequent in
professional families.)

To this my Father, whether convinced or not, would make no demur,
and the couple would begin to discuss, in my presence, the
direction which my shining talents would take. In consequence of
my dedication to 'the Lord's Service', the range of possibilities
was much restricted. My Father, who had lived long in the
Tropics, and who nursed a perpetual nostalgia for 'the little
lazy isles where the trumpet-orchids blow', leaned towards the
field of missionary labour. My Mother, who was cold about foreign
missions, preferred to believe that I should be the Charles
Wesley of my age, 'or perhaps', she had the candour to admit,
'merely the George Whitefield'. I cannot recollect the time when
I did not understand that I was going to be a minister of the
Gospel.

It is so generally taken for granted that a life strictly
dedicated to religion is stiff and dreary, that I may have some
difficulty in persuading my readers that, as a matter of fact, in
these early days of my childhood, before disease and death had
penetrated to our slender society, we were always cheerful and
often gay. My parents were playful with one another, and there
were certain stock family jests which seldom failed to enliven
the breakfast table. My Father and Mother lived so completely in
the atmosphere of faith, and were so utterly convinced of their
intercourse with God, that, so long as that intercourse was not
clouded by sin, to which they were delicately sensitive, they
could afford to take the passing hour very lightly. They would
even, to a certain extent, treat the surroundings of their
religion as a subject of jest, joking very mildly and gently
about such things as an attitude at prayer or the nature of a
supplication. They were absolutely indifferent to forms. They
prayed, seated in their chairs, as willingly as, reversed, upon
their knees; no ritual having any significance for them. My
Mother was sometimes extremely gay, laughing with a soft, merry
sound. What I have since been told of the guileless mirth of nuns
in a convent has reminded me of the gaiety of my parents during
my early childhood.

So long as I was a mere part of them, without individual
existence, and swept on, a satellite, in their atmosphere, I was
mirthful when they were mirthful, and grave when they were grave.
The mere fact that I had no young companions, no storybooks, no
outdoor amusements, none of the thousand and one employments
provided for other children in more conventional surroundings,
did not make me discontented or fretful, because I did not know
of the existence of such entertainments. In exchange, I became
keenly attentive to the limited circle of interests open to me.
Oddly enough, I have no recollection of any curiosity about other
children, nor of any desire to speak to them or play with them.
They did not enter into my dreams, which were occupied entirely
with grown-up people and animals. I had three dolls, to whom my
attitude was not very intelligible. Two of these were female, one
with a shapeless face of rags, the other in wax. But, in my fifth
year, when the Crimean War broke out, I was given a third doll, a
soldier, dressed very smartly in a scarlet cloth tunic. I used to
put the dolls on three chairs, and harangue them aloud, but my
sentiment to them was never confidential, until our maid-servant
one day, intruding on my audience, and misunderstanding the
occasion of it, said: 'What? a boy, and playing with a soldier
when he's got two lady-dolls to play with?' I had never thought
of my dolls as confidants before, but from that time forth I paid
a special attention to the soldier, in order to make up to him
for Lizzie's unwarrantable insult.

The declaration of war with Russia brought the first breath of
outside life into our Calvinist cloister. My parents took in a
daily newspaper, which they had never done before, and events in
picturesque places, which my Father and I looked out on the map,
were eagerly discussed. One of my vividest early memories can be
dated exactly. I was playing about the house, and suddenly burst
into the breakfast-room, where, close to the door, sat an amazing
figure, a very tall young man, as stiff as my doll, in a gorgeous
scarlet tunic. Quite far away from him, at her writing-table, my
Mother sat with her Bible open before her, and was urging the
gospel plan of salvation on his acceptance. She promptly told me
to run away and play, but I had seen a great sight. This
guardsman was in the act of leaving for the Crimea, and his
adventures,--he was converted in consequence of my Mother's
instruction,--were afterwards told by her in a tract, called 'The
Guardsman of the Alma', of which I believe that more than half a
million copies were circulated. He was killed in that battle, and
this added an extraordinary lustre to my dream of him. I see him
still in my mind's eye, large, stiff, and unspeakably brilliant,
seated, from respect, as near as possible to our parlour door.
This apparition gave reality to my subsequent conversations with
the soldier doll.

That same victory of the Alma, which was reported in London on my
fifth birthday, is also marked very clearly in my memory by a
family circumstance. We were seated at breakfast, at our small
round table drawn close up to the window, my Father with his back
to the light. Suddenly, he gave a sort of cry, and read out the
opening sentences from _The Times_ announcing a battle in the
valley of the Alma. No doubt the strain of national anxiety had
been very great, for both he and my Mother seemed deeply excited.
He broke off his reading when the fact of the decisive victory
was assured, and he and my Mother sank simultaneously on their
knees in front of their tea and bread-and-butter, while in a loud
voice my Father gave thanks to the God of Battles. This
patriotism was the more remarkable, in that he had schooled
himself, as he believed, to put his 'heavenly citizenship' above
all earthly duties. To those who said: 'Because you are a
Christian, surely you are not less an Englishman?' he would reply
by shaking his head, and by saying: 'I am a citizen of no earthly
State'. He did not realize that, in reality, and to use a cant
phrase not yet coined in 1854, there existed in Great Britain no
more thorough 'Jingo' than he.

Another instance of the remarkable way in which the interests of
daily life were mingled in our strange household, with the
practice of religion, made an impression upon my memory. We had
all three been much excited by a report that a certain dark
geometer-moth, generated in underground stables, had been met
with in Islington. Its name, I think is, 'Boletobia fuliginaria',
and I believe that it is excessively rare in England. We were
sitting at family prayers, on a summer morning, I think in 1855,
when through the open window a brown moth came sailing. My Mother
immediately interrupted the reading of the Bible by saying to my
Father, 'O! Henry, do you think that can be "Boletobia"?' My
Father rose up from the sacred book, examined the insect, which
had now perched, and replied: 'No! it is only the common
Vapourer, "Orgyia antiqua"!', resuming his seat, and the
exposition of the Word, without any apology or embarrassment.

In the course of this, my sixth year, there happened a series of
minute and soundless incidents which, elementary as they may seem
when told, were second in real importance to none in my mental
history. The recollection of them confirms me in the opinion that
certain leading features in each human soul are inherent to it,
and cannot be accounted for by suggestion or training. In my own
case, I was most carefully withdrawn, like Princess Blanchefleur
in her marble fortress, from every outside influence whatever,
yet to me the instinctive life came as unexpectedly as her lover
came to her in the basket of roses. What came to me was the
consciousness of self, as a force and as a companion, and it came
as the result of one or two shocks, which I will relate.

In consequence of hearing so much about an Omniscient God, a
being of supernatural wisdom and penetration who was always with
us, who made, in fact, a fourth in our company, I had come to
think of Him, not without awe, but with absolute confidence. My
Father and Mother, in their serene discipline of me, never argued
with one another, never even differed; their wills seemed
absolutely one. My Mother always deferred to my Father, and in
his absence spoke of him to me, as if he were all-wise. I
confused him in some sense with God; at all events I believed
that my Father knew everything and saw everything. One morning in
my sixth year, my Mother and I were alone in the morning-room,
when my Father came in and announced some fact to us. I was
standing on the rug, gazing at him, and when he made this
statement, I remember turning quickly, in embarrassment, and
looking into the fire. The shock to me was as that of a
thunderbolt, for what my Father had said 'was not true'. My
Mother and I, who had been present at the trifling incident, were
aware that it had not happened exactly as it had been reported to
him. My Mother gently told him so, and he accepted the
correction. Nothing could possibly have been more trifling to my
parents, but to me it meant an epoch. Here was the appalling
discovery, never suspected before, that my Father was not as God,
and did not know everything. The shock was not caused by any
suspicion that he was not telling the truth, as it appeared to
him, but by the awful proof that he was not, as I had supposed,
omniscient.

This experience was followed by another, which confirmed the
first, but carried me a great deal further. In our little
back-garden, my Father had built up a rockery for ferns and mosses
and from the water-supply of the house he had drawn a leaden pipe
so that it pierced upwards through the rockery and produced, when
a tap was turned, a pretty silvery parasol of water. The pipe was
exposed somewhere near the foot of the rockery. One day, two
workmen, who were doing some repairs, left their tools during the
dinner-hour in the back-garden, and as I was marching about I
suddenly thought that to see whether one of these tools could
make a hole in the pipe would be attractive. It did make such a
hole, quite easily, and then the matter escaped my mind. But a
day or two afterwards, when my Father came in to dinner, he was
very angry. He had turned the tap, and instead of the fountain
arching at the summit, there had been a rush of water through a
hole at the foot. The rockery was absolutely ruined.

Of course I realized in a moment what I had done, and I sat
frozen with alarm, waiting to be denounced. But my Mother
remarked on the visit of the plumbers two or three days before,
and my Father instantly took up the suggestion. No doubt that was
it; the mischievous fellows had thought it amusing to stab the
pipe and spoil the fountain. No suspicion fell on me; no question
was asked of me. I sat there, turned to stone within, but
outwardly sympathetic and with unchecked appetite.

We attribute, I believe, too many moral ideas to little children.
It is obvious that in this tremendous juncture I ought to have
been urged forward by good instincts, or held back by naughty
ones. But I am sure that the fear which I experienced for a short
time, and which so unexpectedly melted away, was a purely
physical one. It had nothing to do with the motions of a contrite
heart. As to the destruction of the fountain, I was sorry about
that, for my own sake, since I admired the skipping water
extremely and had had no idea that I was spoiling its display.
But the emotions which now thronged within me, and which led me,
with an almost unwise alacrity, to seek solitude in the back-
garden, were not moral at all, they were intellectual. I was not
ashamed of having successfully--and so surprisingly--deceived my
parents by my crafty silence; I looked upon that as a
providential escape, and dismissed all further thought of it. I
had other things to think of.

In the first place, the theory that my Father was omniscient or
infallible was now dead and buried. He probably knew very little;
in this case he had not known a fact of such importance that if
you did not know that, it could hardly matter what you knew. My
Father, as a deity, as a natural force of immense prestige, fell
in my eyes to a human level. In future, his statements about
things in general need not be accepted implicitly. But of all the
thoughts which rushed upon my savage and undeveloped little brain
at this crisis, the most curious was that I had found a companion
and a confidant in myself. There was a secret in this world and
it belonged to me and to a somebody who lived in the same body
with me. There were two of us, and we could talk with one
another. It is difficult to define impressions so rudimentary,
but it is certain that it was in this dual form that the sense of
my individuality now suddenly descended upon me, and it is
equally certain that it was a great solace to me to find a
sympathizer in my own breast.

About this time, my Mother, carried away by the current of her
literary and her philanthropic work, left me more and more to my
own devices. She was seized with a great enthusiasm; as one of
her admirers and disciples has written, 'she went on her way,
sowing beside all waters'. I would not for a moment let it be
supposed that I regard her as a Mrs. Jellyby, or that I think she
neglected me. But a remarkable work had opened up before her;
after her long years in a mental hermitage, she was drawn forth
into the clamorous harvest-field of souls. She developed an
unexpected gift of persuasion over strangers whom she met in the
omnibus or in the train, and with whom she courageously grappled.
This began by her noting, with deep humility and joy, that 'I
have reason to judge the sound conversion to God of three young
persons within a few weeks, by the instrumentality of my
conversations with them'. At the same time, as another of her
biographers has said, 'those testimonies to the Blood of Christ,
the fruits of her pen, began to be spread very widely, even to
the most distant parts of the globe'. My Father, too, was at this
time at the height of his activity. After breakfast, each of them
was amply occupied, perhaps until night-fall; our evenings we
still always spent together. Sometimes my Mother took me with her
on her 'unknown day's employ'; I recollect pleasant rambles
through the City by her side, and the act of looking up at her
figure soaring above me. But when all was done, I had hours and
hours of complete solitude, in my Father's study, in the back-
garden, above all in the garret.

The garret was a fairy place. It was a low lean-to, lighted from
the roof. It was wholly unfurnished, except for two objects, an
ancient hat-box and a still more ancient skin-trunk. The hat-box
puzzled me extremely, till one day, asking my Father what it was,
I got a distracted answer which led me to believe that it was
itself a sort of hat, and I made a laborious but repeated effort
to wear it. The skin-trunk was absolutely empty, but the inside
of the lid of it was lined with sheets of what I now know to have
been a sensational novel. It was, of course, a fragment, but I
read it, kneeling on the bare floor, with indescribable rapture.
It will be recollected that the idea of fiction, of a
deliberately invented story, had been kept from me with entire
success. I therefore implicitly believed the tale in the lid of
the trunk to be a true account of the sorrows of a lady of title,
who had to flee the country, and who was pursued into foreign
lands by enemies bent upon her ruin. Somebody had an interview
with a 'minion' in a 'mask'; I went downstairs and looked up
these words in Bailey's 'English Dictionary', but was left in
darkness as to what they had to do with the lady of title. This
ridiculous fragment filled me with delicious fears; I fancied
that my Mother, who was out so much, might be threatened by
dangers of the same sort; and the fact that the narrative came
abruptly to an end, in the middle of one of its most thrilling
sentences, wound me up almost to a disorder of wonder and
romance.

The preoccupation of my parents threw me more and more upon my
own resources. But what are the resources of a solitary child of
six? I was never inclined to make friends with servants, nor did
our successive maids proffer, so far as I recollect, any
advances. Perhaps, with my 'dedication' and my grown-up ways of
talking, I did not seem to them at all an attractive little boy.
I continued to have no companions, or even acquaintances of my
own age. I am unable to recollect exchanging two words with
another child till after my Mother's death.

The abundant energy which my Mother now threw into her public
work did not affect the quietude of our private life. We had some
visitors in the daytime, people who came to consult one parent
or the other. But they never stayed to a meal, and we never
returned their visits. I do not quite know how it was that
neither of my parents took me to any of the sights of London,
although I am sure it was a question of principle with them.
Notwithstanding all our study of natural history, I was never
introduced to live wild beasts at the Zoo, nor to dead ones at
the British Museum. I can understand better why we never visited
a picture-gallery or a concert-room. So far as I can recollect,
the only time I was ever taken to any place of entertainment was
when my Father and I paid a visit, long anticipated, to the Great
Globe in Leicester Square. This was a huge structure, the
interior of which one ascended by means of a spiral staircase. It
was a poor affair; that was concave in it which should have been
convex, and my imagination was deeply affronted. I could invent a
far better Great Globe than that in my mind's eye in the garret.

Being so restricted, then, and yet so active, my mind took refuge
in an infantile species of natural magic. This contended with the
definite ideas of religion which my parents were continuing, with
too mechanical a persistency, to force into my nature, and it ran
parallel with them. I formed strange superstitions, which I can
only render intelligible by naming some concrete examples. I
persuaded myself that, if I could only discover the proper words
to say or the proper passes to make, I could induce the gorgeous
birds and butterflies in my Father's illustrated manuals to come
to life, and fly out of the book, leaving holes behind them. I
believed that, when, at the Chapel, we sang, drearily and slowly,
loud hymns of experience and humiliation, I could boom forth with
a sound equal to that of dozens of singers, if I could only hit
upon the formula. During morning and evening prayers, which were
extremely lengthy and fatiguing, I fancied that one of my two
selves could flit up, and sit clinging to the cornice, and look
down on my other self and the rest of us, if I could only find
the key. I laboured for hours in search of these formulas,
thinking to compass my ends by means absolutely irrational. For
example, I was convinced that if I could only count consecutive
numbers long enough, without losing one, I should suddenly, on
reaching some far-distant figure, find myself in possession of
the great secret. I feel quite sure that nothing external
suggested these ideas of magic, and I think it probable that they
approached the ideas of savages at a very early stage of
development.

All this ferment of mind was entirely unobserved by my parents.
But when I formed the belief that it was necessary, for the
success of my practical magic, that I should hurt myself, and
when, as a matter of fact, I began, in extreme secrecy, to run
pins into my flesh and bang my joints with books, no one will be
surprised to hear that my Mother's attention was drawn to the
fact that I was looking 'delicate'. The notice nowadays
universally given to the hygienic rules of life was rare fifty
years ago and among deeply religious people, in particular,
fatalistic views of disease prevailed. If anyone was ill, it
showed that 'the Lord's hand was extended in chastisement', and
much prayer was poured forth in order that it might be explained
to the sufferer, or to his relations, in what he or they had
sinned. People would, for instance, go on living over a cess-
pool, working themselves up into an agony to discover how they
had incurred the displeasure of the Lord, but never moving away.
As I became very pale and nervous, and slept badly at nights,
with visions and loud screams in my sleep, I was taken to a
physician, who stripped me and tapped me all over (this gave me
some valuable hints for my magical practices), but could find
nothing the matter. He recommended,--whatever physicians in such
cases always recommend,--but nothing was done. If I was feeble it
was the Lord's will, and we must acquiesce.

It culminated in a sort of fit of hysterics, when I lost all
self-control, and sobbed with tears, and banged my head on the
table. While this was proceeding, I was conscious of that dual
individuality of which I have already spoken, since while one
part of me gave way, and could not resist, the other part in some
extraordinary sense seemed standing aloof, much impressed. I was
alone with my Father when this crisis suddenly occurred, and I
was interested to see that he was greatly alarmed. It was a very
long time since we had spent a day out of London, and I said, on
being coaxed back to calmness, that I wanted 'to go into the
country'. Like the dying Falstaff, I babbled of green fields. My
Father, after a little reflection, proposed to take me to
Primrose Hill. I had never heard of the place, and names have
always appealed directly to my imagination. I was in the highest
degree delighted, and could hardly restrain my impatience. As
soon as possible we set forth westward, my hand in my Father's,
with the liveliest anticipations. I expected to see a mountain
absolutely carpeted with primroses, a terrestrial galaxy like
that which covered the hill that led up to Montgomery Castle in
Donne's poem. But at length, as we walked from the Chalk Farm
direction, a miserable acclivity stole into view--surrounded,
even in those days, on most sides by houses, with its grass worn
to the buff by millions of boots, and resembling what I meant by
'the country' about as much as Poplar resembles Paradise. We sat
down on a bench at its inglorious summit, whereupon I burst into
tears, and in a heart-rending whisper sobbed, 'Oh! Papa, let us
go home!'

This was the lachrymose epoch in a career not otherwise given to
weeping, for I must tell one more tale of tears. About this
time,--the autumn of 1855,--my parents were disturbed more than
once in the twilight, after I had been put to bed, by shrieks
from my crib. They would rush up to my side, and find me in great
distress, but would be unable to discover the cause of it. The
fact was that I was half beside myself with ghostly fears,
increased and pointed by the fact that there had been some daring
burglaries on our street. Our servant-maid, who slept at the top
of the house, had seen, or thought she saw, upon a moonlight
night the figure of a crouching man, silhouetted against the sky,
slip down from the roof and leap into her room. She screamed, and
he fled away. Moreover, as if this were not enough for my tender
nerves, there had been committed a horrid murder at a baker's
shop just around the corner in the Caledonian Road, to which
murder actuality was given to us by the fact that my Mother had
been 'just thinking' of getting her bread from this shop.
Children, I think, were not spared the details of these affairs
fifty years ago; at least, I was not, and my nerves were a packet
of spilikins.

But what made me scream at nights was that when my Mother had
tucked me up in bed, and had heard me say my prayer, and had
prayed aloud on her knees at my side, and had stolen downstairs--
noises immediately began in the room. There was a rustling of
clothes, and a slapping of hands, and a gurgling, and a sniffing,
and a trotting. These horrible muffled sounds would go on, and
die away, and be resumed; I would pray very fervently to God to
save me from my enemies; and sometimes I would go to sleep. But
on other occasions, my faith and fortitude alike gave way, and I
screamed 'Mama! Mama!' Then would my parents come bounding up the
stairs, and comfort me, and kiss me, and assure me it was nothing.
And nothing it was while they were there, but no sooner had they
gone than the ghostly riot recommenced. It was at last discovered
by my Mother that the whole mischief was due to a card of framed
texts, fastened by one nail to the wall; this did nothing when
the bedroom door was shut, but when it was left open (in order that
my parents might hear me call), the card began to gallop in the
draught, and made the most intolerable noises.

Several things tended at this time to alienate my conscience from
the line which my Father had so rigidly traced for it. The
question of the efficacy of prayer, which has puzzled wiser heads
than mine was, began to trouble me. It was insisted on in our
household that if anything was desired, you should not, as my
Mother said, 'lose any time in seeking for it, but ask God to
guide you to it'. In many junctures of life this is precisely
what, in sober fact, they did. I will not dwell here on their
theories, which my Mother put forth, with unflinching directness,
in her published writings. But I found that a difference was made
between my privileges in this matter and theirs, and this led to
many discussions. My parents said: 'Whatever you need, tell Him
and He will grant it, if it is His will.' Very well; I had need
of a large painted humming-top which I had seen in a shop-window
in the Caledonian Road. Accordingly, I introduced a supplication
for this object into my evening prayer, carefully adding the
words: 'If it is Thy will.' This, I recollect, placed my Mother
in a dilemma, and she consulted my Father. Taken, I suppose, at a
disadvantage, my Father told me I must not pray for 'things like
that'. To which I answered by another query, 'Why?' And I added
that he said we ought to pray for things we needed, and that I
needed the humming-top a great deal more than I did the conversion
of the heathen or the restitution of Jerusalem to the Jews, two
objects of my nightly supplication which left me very cold.

I have reason to believe, looking back upon this scene conducted
by candlelight in the front parlour, that my Mother was much
baffled by the logic of my argument. She had gone so far as to
say publicly that no 'things or circumstances are too
insignificant to bring before the God of the whole earth'. I
persisted that this covered the case of the humming-top, which
was extremely significant to me. I noticed that she held aloof
from the discussion, which was carried on with some show of
annoyance by my Father. He had never gone quite so far as she did
in regard to this question of praying for material things. I am
not sure that she was convinced that I ought to have been
checked; but he could not help seeing that it reduced their
favourite theory to an absurdity for a small child to exercise
the privilege. He ceased to argue, and told me peremptorily that
it was not right for me to pray for things like humming-tops, and
that I must do it no more. His authority, of course, was Paramount,
and I yielded; but my faith in the efficacy of prayer was a good
deal shaken. The fatal suspicion had crossed my mind that the reason
why I was not to pray for the top was because it was too expensive
for my parents to buy, that being the usual excuse for not getting
things I wished for.

It was about the date of my sixth birthday that I did something
very naughty, some act of direct disobedience, for which my
Father, after a solemn sermon, chastised me, sacrificially, by
giving me several cuts with a cane. This action was justified, as
everything he did was justified, by reference to Scripture 'Spare
the rod and spoil the child'. I suppose that there are some
children, of a sullen and lymphatic temperament, who are
smartened up and made more wide-awake by a whipping. It is
largely a matter of convention, the exercise being endured (I am
told) with pride by the infants of our aristocracy, but not
tolerated by the lower classes. I am afraid that I proved my
inherent vulgarity by being made, not contrite or humble, but
furiously angry by this caning. I cannot account for the flame of
rage which it awakened in my bosom. My dear, excellent Father had
beaten me, not very severely, without ill-temper, and with the
most genuine desire to improve me. But he was not well-advised
especially so far as the 'dedication to the Lord's service' was
concerned. This same 'dedication' had ministered to my vanity,
and there are some natures which are not improved by being
humiliated. I have to confess with shame that I went about the
house for some days with a murderous hatred of my Father locked
within my bosom. He did not suspect that the chastisement had not
been wholly efficacious, and he bore me no malice; so that after
a while, I forgot and thus forgave him. But I do not regard
physical punishment as a wise element in the education of proud
and sensitive children.

My theological misdeeds culminated, however, in an act so puerile
and preposterous that I should not venture to record it if it did
not throw some glimmering of light on the subject which I have
proposed to myself in writing these pages. My mind continued to
dwell on the mysterious question of prayer. It puzzled me greatly
to know why, if we were God's children, and if he was watching
over us by night and day, we might not supplicate for toys and
sweets and smart clothes as well as for the conversion of the
heathen. Just at this juncture, we had a special service at the
Room, at which our attention was particularly called to what we
always spoke of as 'the field of missionary labour'. The East was
represented among 'the saints' by an excellent Irish peer, who
had, in his early youth, converted and married a lady of colour;
this Asiatic shared in our Sunday morning meetings, and was an
object of helpless terror to me; I shrank from her amiable
caresses, and vaguely identified her with a personage much spoken
of in our family circle, the 'Personal Devil'.

All these matters drew my thoughts to the subject of idolatry,
which was severely censured at the missionary meeting. I cross-
examined my Father very closely as to the nature of this sin, and
pinned him down to the categorical statement that idolatry
consisted in praying to anyone or anything but God himself. Wood
and stone, in the words of the hymn, were peculiarly liable to be
bowed down to by the heathen in their blindness. I pressed my
Father further on this subject, and he assured me that God would
be very angry, and would signify His anger, if anyone, in a
Christian country, bowed down to wood and stone. I cannot recall
why I was so pertinacious on this subject, but I remember that my
Father became a little restive under my cross-examination. I
determined, however, to test the matter for myself, and one
morning, when both my parents were safely out of the house, I
prepared for the great act of heresy. I was in the morning-room
on the ground-floor, where, with much labour, I hoisted a small
chair on to the table close to the window. My heart was now
beating as if it would leap out of my side, but I pursued my
experiment. I knelt down on the carpet in front of the table and
looking up I said my daily prayer in a loud voice, only
substituting the address 'Oh Chair!' for the habitual one.

Having carried this act of idolatry safely through, I waited to
see what would happen. It was a fine day, and I gazed up at the
slip of white sky above the houses opposite, and expected
something to appear in it. God would certainly exhibit his anger
in some terrible form, and would chastise my impious and willful
action. I was very much alarmed, but still more excited; I
breathed the high, sharp air of defiance. But nothing happened;
there was not a cloud in the sky, not an unusual sound in the
street. Presently, I was quite sure that nothing would happen. I
had committed idolatry, flagrantly and deliberately, and God did
not care.

The result of this ridiculous act was not to make me question the
existence and power of God; those were forces which I did not
dream of ignoring. But what it did was to lessen still further my
confidence in my Father's knowledge of the Divine mind. My Father
had said, positively, that if I worshipped a thing made of wood,
God would manifest his anger. I had then worshipped a chair, made
(or partly made) of wood, and God had made no sign whatever. My
Father, therefore, was not really acquainted with the Divine
practice in cases of idolatry. And with that, dismissing the
subject, I dived again into the unplumbed depths of the _Penny
Cyclopaedia_.

CHAPTER III

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!



CHAPTER IV

CERTAINLY the preceding year, the seventh of my life, had been
weighted for us with comprehensive disaster. I have not yet
mentioned that, at the beginning of my Mother's fatal illness,
misfortune came upon her brothers. I have never known the
particulars of their ruin, but, I believe in consequence of A.'s
unsuccessful speculations, and of the fact that E. had allowed
the use of his name as a surety, both my uncles were obliged to
fly from their creditors, and take refuge in Paris. This happened
just when our need was the sorest, and this, together with the
poignancy of knowing that their sister's devoted labours for them
had been all in vain, added to their unhappiness. It was
doubtless also the reason why, having left England, they wrote to
us no more, carefully concealing from us even their address, so
that when my Mother died, my Father was unable to communicate
with them. I fear that they fell into dire distress; before very
long we learned that A. had died, but it was fifteen years more
before we heard anything of E., whose life had at length been
preserved by the kindness of an old servant, but whose mind was
now so clouded that he could recollect little or nothing of the
past; and soon he also died. Amiable, gentle, without any species
of practical ability, they were quite unfitted to struggle with
the world, which had touched them only to wreck them.

The flight of my uncles at this particular juncture left me
without a relative on my Mother's side at the time of her death.
This isolation threw my Father into a sad perplexity. His only
obvious source of income--but it happened to be a remarkably
hopeful one--was an engagement to deliver a long series of
lectures on marine natural history throughout the north and
centre of England. These lectures were an entire novelty; nothing
like them had been offered to the provincial public before; and
the fact that the newly-invented marine aquarium was the
fashionable toy of the moment added to their attraction. My
Father was bowed down by sorrow and care, but he was not broken.
His intellectual forces were at their height, and so was his
popularity as an author. The lectures were to begin in march; my
Mother was buried on 13 February. It seemed at first, in the
inertia of bereavement, to be all beyond his powers to make the
supreme effort, but the wholesome prick of need urged him on. It
was a question of paying for food and clothes, of keeping a roof
above our heads. The captain of a vessel in a storm must navigate
his ship, although his wife lies dead in the cabin. That was my
Father's position in the spring of 1857; he had to stimulate,
instruct, amuse large audiences of strangers, and seem gay,
although affliction and loneliness had settled in his heart. He
had to do this, or starve.

But the difficulty still remained. During these months what was
to become of me? My Father could not take me with him from hotel
to hotel and from lecture-hall to lecture-hall. Nor could he
leave me, as people leave the domestic cat, in an empty house for
the neighbours to feed at intervals. The dilemma threatened to be
insurmountable, when suddenly there descended upon us a kind, but
little-known, paternal cousin from the west of England, who had
heard of our calamities. This lady had a large family of her own
at Bristol; she offered to find room in it for me so long as ever
my Father should be away in the north; and when my Father,
bewildered by so much goodness, hesitated, she came up to London
and carried me forcibly away in a whirlwind of good-nature. Her
benevolence was quite spontaneous; and I am not sure that she had
not added to it already by helping to nurse our beloved sufferer
through part of her illness. Of that I am not positive, but I
recollect very clearly her snatching me from our cold and
desolate hearthstone, and carrying me off to her cheerful house
at Clifton.

Here, for the first time, when half through my eighth year, I was
thrown into the society of young people. My cousins were none of
them, I believe, any longer children, but they were youths and
maidens busily engaged in various personal interests, all
collected in a hive of wholesome family energy. Everybody was
very kind to me, and I sank back, after the strain of so many
months, into mere childhood again. This long visit to my cousins
at Clifton must have been very delightful; I am dimly aware that
it was--yet I remember but few of its incidents. My memory, so
clear and vivid about earlier solitary times, now in all this
society becomes blurred and vague. I recollect certain pleasures;
being taken, for instance, to a menagerie, and having a practical
joke, in the worst taste, played upon me by the pelican. One of
my cousins, who was a medical student, showed me a pistol, and
helped me to fire it; he smoked a pipe, and I was oddly conscious
that both the firearm and the tobacco were definitely hostile to
my 'dedication'. My girl-cousins took turns in putting me to bed,
and on cold nights, or when they were in a hurry, allowed me to
say my prayer under the bed-clothes instead of kneeling at a
chair. The result of this was further spiritual laxity, because I
could not help going to sleep before the prayer was ended.

The visit to Clifton was, in fact, a blessed interval in my
strenuous childhood. It probably prevented my nerves from
breaking down under the pressure of the previous months. The
Clifton family was God-fearing, in a quiet, sensible way, but
there was a total absence of all the intensity and compulsion of
our religious life at Islington. I was not encouraged--I even
remember that I was gently snubbed--when I rattled forth, parrot-
fashion, the conventional phraseology of 'the saints'. For a
short, enchanting period of respite, I lived the life of an
ordinary little boy, relapsing, to a degree which would have
filled my Father with despair, into childish thoughts and
childish language. The result was that of this little happy
breathing-space I have nothing to report. Vague, half-blind
remembrances of walks, with my tall cousins waving like trees
above me, pleasant noisy evenings in a great room on the ground-
floor, faint silver-points of excursions into the country, all
this is the very pale and shadowy testimony to a brief interval
of healthy, happy child-life, when my hard-driven soul was
allowed to have, for a little while, no history.

The life of a child is so brief, its impressions are so illusory
and fugitive, that it is as difficult to record its history as it
would be to design a morning cloud sailing before the wind. It is
short, as we count shortness in after years, when the drag of
lead pulls down to earth the foot that used to flutter with a
winged impetuosity, and to float with the pulse of Hermes. But in
memory, my childhood was long, long with interminable hours,
hours with the pale cheek pressed against the windowpane, hours
of mechanical and repeated lonely 'games', which had lost their
savour, and were kept going by sheer inertness. Not unhappy, not
fretful, but long,--long, long. It seems to me, as I look back to
the life in the motherless Islington house, as I resumed it in
that slow eighth year of my life, that time had ceased to move.
There was a whole age between one tick of the eight-day clock in
the hall, and the next tick. When the milkman went his rounds in
our grey street, with his eldritch scream over the top of each
set of area railings, it seemed as though he would never
disappear again. There was no past and no future for me, and the
present felt as though it were sealed up in a Leyden jar. Even my
dreams were interminable, and hung stationary from the nightly
sky.

At this time, the street was my theatre, and I spent long
periods, as I have said, leaning against the window. I feel now
that coldness of the pane, and the feverish heat that was
produced, by contrast, in the orbit round the eye. Now and then
amusing things happened. The onion-man was a joy long waited for.
This worthy was a tall and bony Jersey Protestant with a raucous
voice, who strode up our street several times a week, carrying a
yoke across his shoulders, from the ends of which hung ropes of
onions. He used to shout, at abrupt intervals, in a tone which
might wake the dead:

    Here's your rope . . . .
    To hang the Pope . . . .
  And a penn'orth of cheese to choke him.

The cheese appeared to be legendary; he sold only onions. My
Father did not eat onions, but he encouraged this terrible
fellow, with his wild eyes and long strips of hair, because of
his godly attitude towards the 'Papacy', and I used to watch him
dart out of the front door, present his penny, and retire,
graciously waving back the proffered onion. On the other hand, my
Father did not approve of a fat sailor, who was a constant
passer-by. This man, who was probably crazed, used to wall very
slowly up the centre of our street, vociferating with the voice
of a bull,

  Wa-a-atch and pray-hay!
  Night and day-hay!

This melancholy admonition was the entire business of his life.
He did nothing at all but walk up and down the streets of
Islington exhorting the inhabitants to watch and pray. I do not
recollect that this sailor-man stopped to collect pennies, and my
impression is that he was, after his fashion, a volunteer
evangelist.

The tragedy of Mr. Punch was another, and a still greater
delight. I was never allowed to go out into the street to mingle
with the little crowd which gathered under the stage, and as I
was extremely near-sighted, the impression I received was vague.
But when, by happy chance, the show stopped opposite our door, I
saw enough of that ancient drama to be thrilled with terror and
delight. I was much affected by the internal troubles of the
Punch family; I thought that with a little more tact on the part
of Mrs. Punch and some restraint held over a temper, naturally
violent, by Mr. Punch, a great deal of this sad misunderstanding
might have been prevented.

The momentous close, when a figure of shapeless horror appears on
the stage, and quells the hitherto undaunted Mr. Punch, was to me
the bouquet of the entire performance. When Mr. Punch, losing his
nerve, points to this shape and says in an awestruck, squeaking
whisper, 'Who's that? Is it the butcher?' and the stern answer
comes, 'No, Mr. Punch!' And then, 'Is it the baker?' 'No, Mr.
Punch!' 'Who is it then?' (this in a squeak trembling with emotion
and terror); and then the full, loud reply, booming like a
judgement-bell, 'It is the Devil come to take you down to Hell,'
and the form of Punch, with kicking legs, sunken in epilepsy on
the floor,--all this was solemn and exquisite to me beyond
words. I was not amused--I was deeply moved and exhilarated,
'purged', as the old phrase hath it, 'with pity and terror'.

Another joy, in a lighter key, was watching a fantastic old man
who came slowly up the street, hung about with drums and flutes
and kites and coloured balls, and bearing over his shoulders a
great sack. Children and servant-girls used to bolt up out of
areas, and chaffer with this gaudy person, who would presently
trudge on, always repeating the same set of words--

    Here's your toys
    For girls and boys,
    For bits of brass
    And broken glass,
  (these four lines being spoken in a breathless hurry)
    A penny or a vial-bottell . . . .
  (this being drawled out in an endless wail).

I was not permitted to go forth and trade with this old person,
but sometimes our servant-maid did, thereby making me feel that
if I did not hold the rose of merchandise, I was very near it. My
experiences with my cousins at Clifton had given me the habit of
looking out into the world--even though it was only into the
pale world of our quiet street.

My Father and I were now great friends. I do not doubt that he
felt his responsibility to fill as far as might be the gap which
the death of my Mother had made in my existence. I spent a large
portion of my time in his study while he was writing or drawing,
and though very little conversation passed between us, I think
that each enjoyed the companionship of the other. There were two,
and sometimes three aquaria in the room, tanks of sea-water, with
glass sides, inside which all sorts of creatures crawled and
swam; these were sources of endless pleasure to me, and at this
time began to be laid upon me the occasional task of watching and
afterwards reporting the habits of animals.

At other times, I dragged a folio volume of the _Penny Cyclopaedia_
up to the study with me, and sat there reading successive
articles on such subjects as Parrots, Parthians, Passion-flowers,
Passover and Pastry, without any invidious preferences, all
information being equally welcome, and equally fugitive. That
something of all this loose stream of knowledge clung to odd
cells of the back of my brain seems to be shown by the fact that
to this day, I occasionally find myself aware of some stray
useless fact about peonies or pemmican or pepper, which I can
only trace back to the _Penny Cyclopaedia_ of my infancy.

It will be asked what the attitude of my Father's mind was to me,
and of mine to his, as regards religion, at this time, when we
were thrown together alone so much. It is difficult to reply with
exactitude. But so far as the former is concerned, I thinly that
the extreme violence of the spiritual emotions to which my Father
had been subjected, had now been followed by a certain reaction.
He had not changed his views in any respect, and he was prepared
to work out the results of them with greater zeal than ever, but
just at present his religious nature, like his physical nature,
was tired out with anxiety and sorrow. He accepted the
supposition that I was entirely with him in all respects, so far,
that is to say, as a being so rudimentary and feeble as a little
child could be. My Mother, in her last hours, had dwelt on our
unity in God; we were drawn together, she said, elect from the
world, in a triplicity of faith and joy. She had constantly
repeated the words: 'We shall be one family, one song. One song!
one family!' My Father, I think, accepted this as a prophecy, he
felt no doubt of our triple unity; my Mother had now merely
passed before us, through a door, into a world of light, where we
should presently join her, where all things would be radiant and
blissful, but where we three would, in some unknown way, be
particularly drawn together in a tie of inexpressible beatitude.
He fretted at the delay; he would have taken me by the hand, and
have joined her in the realms of holiness and light, at once,
without this dreary dalliance with earthly cares.

He held this confidence and vision steadily before him, but
nothing availed against the melancholy of his natural state. He
was conscious of his dull and solitary condition, and he saw,
too, that it enveloped me. I think his heart was, at this time,
drawn out towards me in an immense tenderness. Sometimes, when
the early twilight descended upon us in the study, and he could
no longer peer with advantage into the depths of his microscope,
he would beckon me to him silently, and fold me closely in his
arms. I used to turn my face up to his, patiently and
wonderingly, while the large, unwilling tears gathered in the
corners of his eyelids. My training had given me a preternatural
faculty of stillness, and we would stay so, without a word or a
movement, until the darkness filled the room. And then, with my
little hand in his, we would walk sedately downstairs to the
parlour, where we would find that the lamp was lighted, and that
our melancholy vigil was ended. I do not think that at any part
of our lives my Father and I were drawn so close to one another
as we were in that summer of 1857. Yet we seldom spoke of what
lay so warm and fragrant between us, the flower-like thought of
our Departed.

The visit to my cousins had made one considerable change in me.
Under the old solitary discipline, my intelligence had grown at
the expense of my sentiment. I was innocent, but inhuman. The
long suffering and the death of my Mother had awakened my heart,
had taught me what pain was, but had left me savage and morose. I
had still no idea of the relations of human beings to one
another; I had learned no word of that philosophy which comes to
the children of the poor in the struggle of the street and to the
children of the well-to-do in the clash of the nursery. In other
words, I had no humanity; I had been carefully shielded from the
chance of 'catching' it, as though it were the most dangerous of
microbes. But now that I had enjoyed a little of the common
experience of childhood, a great change had come upon me. Before
I went to Clifton, my mental life was all interior, a rack of
baseless dream upon dream. But, now, I was eager to look out of
the window, to go out in the streets; I was taken with a
curiosity about human life. Even from my vantage of the window-
pane, I watched boys and girls go by with an interest which began
to be almost wistful.

Still I continued to have no young companions. But on summer
evenings I used to drag my Father out, taking the initiative
myself, stamping in playful impatience at his irresolution,
fetching his hat and stick, and waiting. We used to sally forth
at last together, hand in hand, descending the Caledonian Road,
with all its shops, as far as Mother Shipton, or else winding
among the semi-genteel squares and terraces westward by
Copenhagen Street, or, best of all, mounting to the Regent's
Canal, where we paused to lean over the bridge and watch
flotillas of ducks steer under us, or little white dogs dash,
impotently furious, from stem to stern of the great, lazy barges
painted in a crude vehemence of vermilion and azure. These were
happy hours, when the spectre of Religion ceased to overshadow us
for a little while, when my Father forgot the Apocalypse and
dropped his austere phraseology, and when our bass and treble
voices used to ring out together over some foolish little jest or
some mirthful recollection of his past experiences. Little soft
oases these, in the hard desert of our sandy spiritual life at
home.

There was an unbending, too, when we used to sing together, in my
case very tunelessly. I had inherited a plentiful lack of musical
genius from my Mother, who had neither ear nor voice, and who had
said, in the course of her last illness, 'I shall sing His
praise, _at length_, in strains I never could master here below'.
My Father, on the other hand, had some knowledge of the
principles of vocal music, although not, I am afraid, much taste.
He had at least great fondness for singing hymns, in the manner
then popular with the Evangelicals, very loudly, and so slowly
that I used to count how many words I could read silently,
between one syllable of the singing and another. My lack of skill
did not prevent me from being zealous at these vocal exercises,
and my Father and I used to sing lustily together. The Wesleys,
Charlotte Elliott ('Just as I am, without one plea'), and James
Montgomery ('Forever with the Lord') represented his predilection
in hymnology. I acquiesced, although that would not have been my
independent choice. These represented the devotional verse which
made its direct appeal to the evangelical mind, and served in
those 'Puseyite' days to counteract the High Church poetry
founded on 'The Christian Year'. Of that famous volume I never met
with a copy until I was grown up, and equally unknown in our
circle were the hymns of Newman, Faber and Neale.

It was my Father's plan from the first to keep me entirely
ignorant of the poetry of the High Church, which deeply offended
his Calvinism; he thought that religious truth could be sucked
in, like mother's milk, from hymns which were godly and sound,
and yet correctly versified; and I was therefore carefully
trained in this direction from an early date. But my spirit had
rebelled against some of these hymns, especially against those
written--a mighty multitude--by Horatius Bonar; naughtily
refusing to read Bonar's 'I heard the voice of Jesus say' to my
Mother in our Pimlico lodgings. A secret hostility to this
particular form of effusion was already, at the age of seven,
beginning to define itself in my brain, side by side with an
unctuous infantile conformity.

I find a difficulty in recalling the precise nature of the
religious instruction which my Father gave me at this time. It
was incessant, and it was founded on the close inspection of the
Bible, particularly of the epistles of the New Testament. This
summer, as my eighth year advanced, we read the 'Epistle to the
Hebrews', with very great deliberation, stopping every moment,
that my Father might expound it, verse by verse. The
extraordinary beauty of the language--for instance, the matchless
cadences and images of the first chapter--made a certain
impression upon my imagination, and were (I think) my earliest
initiation into the magic of literature. I was incapable of
defining what I felt, but I certainly had a grip in the throat,
which was in its essence a purely aesthetic emotion, when my
Father read, in his pure, large, ringing voice, such passages as
'The heavens are the works of Thy hands. They shall perish, but
Thou remainest, and they all shall wax old as doth a garment, and
as a vesture shalt Thou fold them up, and they shall be changed;
but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall not fail.' But the
dialectic parts of the Epistle puzzled and confused me. Such
metaphysical ideas as 'laying again the foundation of repentance
from dead works' and 'crucifying the Son of God afresh' were not
successfully brought down to the level of my understanding.

My Father's religious teaching to me was almost exclusively
doctrinal. He did not observe the value of negative education,
that is to say, of leaving Nature alone to fill up the gaps which
it is her design to deal with at a later and riper date. He did
not, even, satisfy himself with those moral injunctions which
should form the basis of infantile discipline. He was in a
tremendous hurry to push on my spiritual growth, and he fed me
with theological meat which it was impossible for me to digest.
Some glimmer of a suspicion that he was sailing on the wrong tack
must, I should suppose, have broken in upon him when we had
reached the eighth and ninth chapters of Hebrews, where,
addressing readers who had been brought up under the Jewish
dispensation, and had the formalities of the Law of Moses in
their very blood, the apostle battles with their dangerous
conservatism. It is a very noble piece of spiritual casuistry,
but it is signally unfitted for the comprehension of a child.
Suddenly by my flushing up with anger and saying, 'Oh how I do
hate that Law,' my Father perceived, and paused in amazement to
perceive, that I took the Law to be a person of malignant temper
from whose cruel bondage, and from whose intolerable tyranny and
unfairness, some excellent person was crying out to be delivered.
I wished to hit Law with my fist, for being so mean and
unreasonable.

Upon this, of course, it was necessary to reopen the whole line
of exposition. My Father, without realizing it, had been talking
on his own level, not on mine, and now he condescended to me. But
without very great success. The melodious language, the divine
forensic audacities, the magnificent ebb and flow of argument
which make the 'Epistle to the Hebrews' such a miracle, were far
and away beyond my reach, and they only bewildered me. Some
evangelical children of my generation, I understand, were brought
up on a work called 'Line upon Line: Here a Little, and there a
Little'. My Father's ambition would not submit to anything
suggested by such a title as that, and he committed, from his own
point of view, a fatal mistake when he sought to build spires and
battlements without having been at the pains to settle a
foundation beneath them.

We were not always reading the 'Epistle to the Hebrews', however;
not always was my flesh being made to creep by having it insisted
upon that 'almost all things are by the Law purged with blood,
and without blood is no remission of sin'. In our lighter moods,
we turned to the 'Book of Revelation', and chased the phantom of
Popery through its fuliginous pages. My Father, I think, missed
my Mother's company almost more acutely in his researches into
prophecy than in anything else. This had been their unceasing
recreation, and no third person could possibly follow the curious
path which they had hewn for themselves through this jungle of
symbols. But, more and more, my Father persuaded himself that I,
too, was initiated, and by degrees I was made to share in all
his speculations and interpretations.

Hand in hand we investigated the number of the Beast, which
number is six hundred three score and six. Hand in hand we
inspected the nations, to see whether they had the mark of
Babylon in their foreheads. Hand in hand we watched the spirits
of devils gathering the kings of the earth into the place which
is called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon. Our unity in these
excursions was so delightful, that my Father was lulled in any
suspicion he might have formed that I did not quite understand
what it was all about. Nor could he have desired a pupil more
docile or more ardent than I was in my flaming denunciations of
the Papacy.

If there was one institution more than another which, at this
early stage of my history, I loathed and feared, it was what we
invariably spoke of as 'the so-called Church of Rome'. In later
years, I have met with stout Protestants, gallant 'Down-with-the-
Pope' men from County Antrim, and ladies who see the hand of the
Jesuits in every public and private misfortune. It is the habit
of a loose and indifferent age to consider this dwindling body of
enthusiasts with suspicion, and to regard their attitude towards
Rome as illiberal. But my own feeling is that they are all too
mild, that their denunciations err on the side of the anodyne. I
have no longer the slightest wish myself to denounce the Roman
communion, but, if it is to be done, I have an idea that the
latter-day Protestants do not know how to do it. In Lord
Chesterfield's phrase, these anti-Pope men 'don't understand
their own silly business'. They make concessions and allowances,
they put on gloves to touch the accursed thing.

Not thus did we approach the Scarlet Woman in the 'fifties. We
palliated nothing, we believed in no good intentions, we used (I
myself used, in my tender innocency) language of the seventeenth
century such as is now no longer introduced into any species of
controversy. As a little boy, when I thought, with intense
vagueness, of the Pope, I used to shut my eyes tight and clench
my fists. We welcomed any social disorder in any part of Italy,
as likely to be annoying to the Papacy. If there was a custom-
house officer stabbed in a fracas at Sassari, we gave loud thanks
that liberty and light were breaking in upon Sardinia. If there
was an unsuccessful attempt to murder the Grand Duke, we lifted
up our voices to celebrate the faith and sufferings of the dear
persecuted Tuscans, and the record of some apocryphal monstrosity
in Naples would only reveal to us a glorious opening for Gospel
energy. My Father celebrated the announcement in the newspapers
of a considerable emigration from the Papal Dominions by
rejoicing at 'this outcrowding of many, throughout the harlot's
domain, from her sins and her plagues'.

No, the Protestant League may consider itself to be an earnest
and active body, but I can never look upon its efforts as
anything but lukewarm, standing, as I do, with the light of other
days around me. As a child, whatever I might question, I never
doubted the turpitude of Rome. I do not think I had formed any
idea whatever of the character or pretensions or practices of the
Catholic Church, or indeed of what it consisted, or its nature;
but I regarded it with a vague terror as a wild beast, the only
good point about it being that it was very old and was soon to
die. When I turned to Jukes or Newton for further detail, I could
not understand what they said. Perhaps, on the whole, there was
no disadvantage in that.

It is possible that someone may have observed to my Father that
the conditions of our life were unfavourable to our health,
although I hardly think that he would have encouraged any such
advice. As I look back upon this far-away time, I am surprised at
the absence in it of any figures but our own. He and I together,
now in the study among the sea-anemones and starfishes; now on
the canal-bridge, looking down at the ducks; now at our hard
little meals, served up as those of a dreamy widower are likely
to be when one maid-of-all-work provides them, now under the lamp
at the maps we both loved so much, this is what I see--no third
presence is ever with us. Whether it occurred to himself that
such a solitude _a deux_ was excellent, in the long run, for
neither of us, or whether any chance visitor or one of the
'Saints', who used to see me at the Room every Sunday morning,
suggested that a female influence might put a little rose-colour
into my pasty cheeks, I know not. All I am sure of is that one
day, towards the close of the summer, as I was gazing into the
street, I saw a four-wheeled cab stop outside our door, and
deposit, with several packages, a strange lady, who was shown up
into my Father's study and was presently brought down and
introduced to me.

Miss Marks, as I shall take the liberty of calling this person,
was so long a part of my life that I must pause to describe her.
She was tall, rather gaunt, with high cheek-bones; her teeth were
prominent and very white; her eyes were china-blue, and were
always absolutely fixed, wide open, on the person she spoke to;
her nose was inclined to be red at the tip. She had a kind,
hearty, sharp mode of talking, but did not exercise it much,
being on the whole taciturn. She was bustling and nervous, not
particularly refined, not quite, I imagine, what is called 'a
lady'. I supposed her, if I thought of the matter at all, to be
very old, but perhaps she may have been, when we knew her first,
some forty-five summers. Miss Marks was an orphan, depending upon
her work for her living; she would not, in these days of
examinations, have come up to the necessary educational
standards, but she had enjoyed experience in teaching, and was
prepared to be a conscientious and careful governess, up to her
lights. I was now informed by my Father that it was in this
capacity that she would in future take her place in our
household. I was not informed, what I gradually learned by
observation, that she would also act in it as housekeeper.

Miss Marks was a somewhat grotesque personage, and might easily
be painted as a kind of eccentric Dickens character, a mixture of
Mrs. Pipchin and Miss Sally Brass. I will confess that when, in
years to come, I read 'Dombey and Son', certain features of Mrs.
Pipchin did irresistibly remind me of my excellent past
governess. I can imagine Miss Marks saying, but with a facetious
intent, that children who sniffed would not go to heaven. But I
was instantly ashamed of the parallel, because my gaunt old
friend was a thoroughly good and honest woman, not intelligent
and not graceful, but desirous in every way to do her duty. Her
duty to me she certainly did, and I am afraid I hardly rewarded
her with the devotion she deserved. From the first, I was
indifferent to her wishes, and, as much as was convenient, I
ignored her existence. She held no power over my attention, and
if I accepted her guidance along the path of instruction, it was
because, odd as it may sound, I really loved knowledge. I
accepted her company without objection, and though there were
occasional outbreaks of tantrums on both sides, we got on very
well together for several years. I did not, however, at any time
surrender my inward will to the wishes of Miss Marks.

In the circle of our life the religious element took so
preponderating a place, that it is impossible to avoid
mentioning, what might otherwise seem unimportant, the
theological views of Miss Marks. How my Father had discovered
her, or from what field of educational enterprise he plucked her
in her prime, I never knew, but she used to mention that my
Father's ministrations had 'opened her eyes', from which 'scales'
had fallen. She had accepted, on their presentation to her, the
entire gamut of his principles. Miss Marks was accustomed, while
putting me to bed, to dwell darkly on the incidents of her past,
which had, I fear, been an afflicted one. I believe I do her
rather limited intelligence no injury when I say that it was
prepared to swallow, at one mouthful, whatever my Father
presented to it, so delighted was its way-worn possessor to find
herself in a comfortable, or, at least, an independent position.
She soon bowed, if there was indeed any resistance from the
first, very contentedly in the House of Rimmon, learning to
repeat, with marked fluency, the customary formulas and
shibboleths. On my own religious development she had no great
influence. Any such guttering theological rushlight as Miss Marks
might dutifully exhibit faded for me in the blaze of my Father's
glaring beacon-lamp of faith.

Hardly was Miss Marks settled in the family, than my Father left
us on an expedition about which my curiosity was exercised, but
not until later, satisfied. He had gone, as we afterwards found,
to South Devon, to a point on the coast which he had known of
old. Here he had hired a horse, and had ridden about until he saw
a spot he liked, where a villa was being built on speculation.
Nothing equals the courage of these recluse men; my Father got
off his horse, and tied it to the gate, and then he went in and
bought the house on a ninety-nine years' lease. I need hardly say
that he had made the matter a subject of the most earnest prayer,
and had entreated the Lord for guidance. When he felt attracted
to this particular villa, he did not doubt that he was directed
to it in answer to his supplication, and he wasted no time in
further balancing or inquiring. On my eighth birthday, with bag
and baggage complete, we all made the toilful journey down into
Devonshire, and I was a town-child no longer.



CHAPTER V

A NEW element now entered into my life, a fresh rival arose to
compete for me with my Father's dogmatic theology. This rival was
the Sea. When Wordsworth was a little child, the presence of the
mountains and the clouds lighted up his spirit with gleams that
were like the flashing of a shield. He has described, in the
marvellous pages of the 'Prelude', the impact of nature upon the
infant soul, but he has described it vaguely and faintly, with
some 'infirmity of love for days disowned by memory',--I think
because he was brought up in the midst of spectacular beauty, and
could name no moment, mark no 'here' or 'now', when the wonder
broke upon him. It was at the age of twice five summers, he
thought, that he began to hold unconscious intercourse with
nature, 'drinking in a pure organic pleasure' from the floating
mists and winding waters. Perhaps, in his anxiety to be truthful,
and in the absence of any record, he put the date of this
conscious rapture too late rather than too early. Certainly my
own impregnation with the obscurely-defined but keenly-felt
loveliness of the open sea dates from the first week of my ninth
year.

The village, on the outskirts of which we had taken up our abode,
was built parallel to the cliff line above the shore, but half a
mile inland. For a long time after the date I have now reached,
no other form of natural scenery than the sea had any effect upon
me at all. The tors of the distant moor might be drawn in deep
blue against the pallor of our morning or our evening sky, but I
never looked at them. It was the Sea, always the sea, nothing but
the sea. From our house, or from the field at the back of our
house, or from any part of the village itself, there was no
appearance to suggest that there could lie anything in an
easterly direction to break the infinitude of red ploughed
fields. But on that earliest morning, how my heart remembers we
hastened,--Miss Marks, the maid, and I between them, along a
couple of high-walled lanes, when suddenly, far below us, in an
immense arc of light, there stretched the enormous plain of
waters. We had but to cross a step or two of downs, when the
hollow sides of the great limestone cove yawned at our feet,
descending, like a broken cup, down, down to the moon of snow-
white shingle and the expanse of blue-green sea.

In these twentieth-century days, a careful municipality has
studded the down with rustic seats and has shut its dangers out
with railings, has cut a winding carriage-drive round the curves
of the cove down to the shore, and has planted sausage-laurels at
intervals in clearings made for that aesthetic purpose. When last
I saw the place, thus smartened and secured, with its hair in
curl-papers and its feet in patent-leathers, I turned from it in
anger and disgust, and could almost have wept. I suppose that to
those who knew it in no other guise, it may still have beauty. No
parish councils, beneficent and shrewd, can obscure the lustre of
the waters or compress the vastness of the sky. But what man
could do to make wild beauty ineffectual, tame and empty, has
amply been performed at Oddicombe.

Very different was it fifty years ago, in its uncouth majesty. No
road, save the merest goat-path, led down its concave wilderness,
in which loose furze-bushes and untrimmed brambles wantoned into
the likeness of trees, each draped in audacious tissue of wild
clematis. Through this fantastic maze the traveller wound his
way, led by little other clue than by the instinct of descent.
For me, as a child, it meant the labour of a long, an endless
morning, to descend to the snow-white pebbles, to sport at the
edge of the cold, sharp sea, and then to climb up home again,
slipping in the sticky red mud, clutching at the smooth boughs of
the wild ash, toiling, toiling upwards into flat land out of that
hollow world of rocks.

On the first occasion I recollect, our Cockney housemaid,
enthusiastic young creature that she was, flung herself down upon
her knees, and drank of the salt waters. Miss Marks, more
instructed in phenomena, refrained, but I, although I was
perfectly aware what the taste would be, insisted on sipping a
few drops from the palm of my hand. This was a slight recurrence
of what I have called my 'natural magic' practices, which had
passed into the background of my mind, but had not quite
disappeared. I recollect that I thought I might secure some power
of walking on the sea, if I drank of it--a perfectly irrational
movement of mind, like those of savages.

My great desire was to walk out over the sea as far as I could,
and then lie flat on it, face downwards, and peer into the
depths. I was tormented with this ambition, and, like many grown-
up people, was so fully occupied by these vain and ridiculous
desires that I neglected the actual natural pleasures around me.
The idea was not quite so demented as it may seem, because we
were in the habit of singing, as well as reading, of those
enraptured beings who spend their days in 'flinging down their
golden crowns upon the jasper sea'. Why, I argued, should I not
be able to fling down my straw hat upon the tides of Oddicombe?
And, without question, a majestic scene upon the Lake of
Gennesaret had also inflamed my fancy. Of all these things, of
course, I was careful to speak to no one.

It was not with Miss Marks, however, but with my Father, that I
became accustomed to make the laborious and exquisite journeys
down to the sea and back again. His work as a naturalist
eventually took him, laden with implements, to the rock-pools on
the shore, and I was in attendance as an acolyte. But our
earliest winter in South Devon was darkened for us both by
disappointments, the cause of which lay, at the time, far out of
my reach. In the spirit of my Father were then running, with
furious velocity, two hostile streams of influence. I was
standing, just now, thinking of these things, where the Cascine
ends in the wooded point which is carved out sharply by the lion-
coloured swirl of the Arno on the one side and by the pure flow
of the Mugnone on the other. The rivers meet, and run parallel,
but there comes a moment when the one or the other must conquer,
and it is the yellow vehemence that drowns the purer tide.

So, through my Father's brain, in that year of scientific crisis,
1857, there rushed two kinds of thought, each absorbing, each
convincing, yet totally irreconcilable. There is a peculiar agony
in the paradox that truth has two forms, each of them
indisputable, yet each antagonistic to the other. It was this
discovery, that there were two theories of physical life, each of
which was true, but the truth of each incompatible with the truth
of the other, which shook the spirit of my Father with
perturbation. It was not, really, a paradox, it was a fallacy, if
he could only have known it, but he allowed the turbid volume of
superstition to drown the delicate stream of reason. He took one
step in the service of truth, and then he drew back in an agony,
and accepted the servitude of error.

This was the great moment in the history of thought when the
theory of the mutability of species was preparing to throw a
flood of light upon all departments of human speculation and
action. It was becoming necessary to stand emphatically in one
army or the other. Lyell was surrounding himself with disciples,
who were making strides in the direction of discovery. Darwin had
long been collecting facts with regard to the variation of
animals and plants. Hooker and Wallace, Asa Gray and even
Agassiz, each in his own sphere, were coming closer and closer to
a perception of that secret which was first to reveal itself
clearly to the patient and humble genius of Darwin. In the year
before, in 1856, Darwin, under pressure from Lyell, had begun
that modest statement of the new revelation, that 'abstract of an
essay', which developed so mightily into 'The Origin of Species'.
Wollaston's 'Variation of Species' had just appeared, and had
been a nine days' wonder in the wilderness.

On the other side, the reactionaries, although never dreaming of
the fate which hung over them, had not been idle. In 1857 the
astounding question had for the first time been propounded with
contumely, 'What, then, did we come from an orang-outang?' The
famous 'Vestiges of Creation' had been supplying a sugar-and-
water panacea for those who could not escape from the trend of
evidence, and who yet clung to revelation. Owen was encouraging
reaction by resisting, with all the strength of his prestige, the
theory of the mutability of species.

In this period of intellectual ferment, as when a great political
revolution is being planned, many possible adherents were
confidentially tested with hints and encouraged to reveal their
bias in a whisper. It was the notion of Lyell, himself a great
mover of men, that, before the doctrine of natural selection was
given to a world which would be sure to lift up at it a howl of
execration, a certain bodyguard of sound and experienced
naturalists, expert in the description of species, should be
privately made aware of its tenor. Among those who were thus
initiated, or approached with a view towards possible
illumination, was my Father. He was spoken to by Hooker, and
later on by Darwin, after meetings of the Royal Society in the
summer of 1857.

My Father's attitude towards the theory of natural selection was
critical in his career, and oddly enough, it exercised an immense
influence on my own experience as a child. Let it be admitted at
once, mournful as the admission is, that every instinct in his
intelligence went out at first to greet the new light. It had
hardly done so, when a recollection of the opening chapter of
'Genesis' checked it at the outset. He consulted with Carpenter, a
great investigator, but one who was fully as incapable as himself
of remodelling his ideas with regard to the old, accepted
hypotheses. They both determined, on various grounds, to have
nothing to do with the terrible theory, but to hold steadily to
the law of the fixity of species. It was exactly at this juncture
that we left London, and the slight and occasional but always
extremely salutary personal intercourse with men of scientific
leading which my Father had enjoyed at the British Museum and at
the Royal Society came to an end. His next act was to burn his
ships down to the last beam and log out of which a raft could
have been made. By a strange act of wilfulness, he closed the
doors upon himself forever.

My Father had never admired Sir Charles Lyell. I think that the
famous 'Lord Chancellor manner' of the geologist intimidated him,
and we undervalue the intelligence of those whose conversation
puts us at a disadvantage. For Darwin and Hooker, on the other
hand, he had a profound esteem, and I know not whether this had
anything to do with the fact that he chose, for his impetuous
experiment in reaction, the field of geology, rather than that of
zoology or botany. Lyell had been threatening to publish a book
on the geological history of Man, which was to be a bombshell
flung into the camp of the catastrophists. My Father, after long
reflection, prepared a theory of his own, which, as he fondly
hoped, would take the wind out of Lyell's sails, and justify
geology to godly readers of 'Genesis'. It was, very briefly, that
there had been no gradual modification of the surface of the
earth, or slow development of organic forms, but that when the
catastrophic act of creation took place, the world presented,
instantly, the structural appearance of a planet on which life
had long existed.

The theory, coarsely enough, and to my Father's great
indignation, was defined by a hasty press as being this--that God
hid the fossils in the rocks in order to tempt geologists into
infidelity. In truth, it was the logical and inevitable
conclusion of accepting, literally, the doctrine of a sudden act
of creation; it emphasized the fact that any breach in the
circular course of nature could be conceived only on the
supposition that the object created bore false witness to past
processes, which had never taken place. For instance, Adam would
certainly possess hair and teeth and bones in a condition which
it must have taken many years to accomplish, yet he was created
full-grown yesterday. He would certainly--though Sir Thomas
Browne denied it--display an 'omphalos', yet no umbilical cord
had ever attached him to a mother.

Never was a book cast upon the waters with greater anticipations
of success than was this curious, this obstinate, this fanatical
volume. My Father lived in a fever of suspense, waiting for the
tremendous issue. This 'Omphalos' of his, he thought, was to
bring all the turmoil of scientific speculation to a close, fling
geology into the arms of Scripture, and make the lion eat grass
with the lamb. It was not surprising, he admitted, that there had
been experienced an ever-increasing discord between the facts
which geology brings to light and the direct statements of the
early chapters of 'Genesis'. Nobody was to blame for that. My
Father, and my Father alone, possessed the secret of the enigma;
he alone held the key which could smoothly open the lock of
geological mystery. He offered it, with a glowing gesture, to
atheists and Christians alike. This was to be the universal
panacea; this the system of intellectual therapeutics which could
not but heal all the maladies of the age. But, alas! atheists and
Christians alike looked at it, and laughed, and threw it away.

In the course of that dismal winter, as the post began to bring
in private letters, few and chilly, and public reviews, many and
scornful, my Father looked in vain for the approval of the
churches, and in vain for the acquiescence of the scientific
societies, and in vain for the gratitude of those 'thousands of
thinking persons', which he had rashly assured himself of
receiving. As his reconciliation of Scripture statements and
geological deductions was welcomed nowhere, as Darwin continued
silent, and the youthful Huxley was scornful, and even Charles
Kingsley, from whom my Father had expected the most instant
appreciation, wrote that he could not 'give up the painful and
slow conclusion of five and twenty years' study of geology, and
believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and
superfluous lie',--as all this happened or failed to happen, a
gloom, cold and dismal, descended upon our morning teacups. It
was what the poets mean by an 'inspissated' gloom; it thickened
day by day, as hope and self-confidence evaporated in thin clouds
of disappointment. My Father was not prepared for such a fate. He
had been the spoiled darling of the public, the constant
favourite of the press, and now, like the dark angels of old,

            so huge a rout
  Encumbered him with ruin.

He could not recover from amazement at having offended everybody
by an enterprise which had been undertaken in the cause of
universal reconciliation.

During that grim season, my Father was no lively companion, and
circumstance after circumstance combined to drive him further
from humanity. He missed more than ever the sympathetic ear of my
Mother; there was present to support him nothing of that artful,
female casuistry which insinuates into the wounded consciousness
of a man the conviction that, after all, he is right and all the
rest of the world is wrong. My Father used to tramp in solitude
around and around the red ploughed field which was going to be
his lawn, or sheltering himself from the thin Devonian rain, pace
up and down the still-naked verandah where blossoming creepers
were to be. And I think that there was added to his chagrin with
all his fellow mortals a first tincture of that heresy which was
to attack him later on. It was now that, I fancy, he began, in
his depression, to be angry with God. How much devotion had he
given, how many sacrifices had he made, only to be left storming
around this red morass with no one in all the world to care for
him except one pale-faced child with its cheek pressed to the
window!

After one or two brilliant excursions to the sea, winter, in its
dampest, muddiest, most languid form, had fallen upon us and shut
us in. It was a dreary winter for the wifeless man and the
motherless boy. We had come into the house, in precipitate
abandonment to that supposed answer to prayer, a great deal too
soon. In order to rake together the lump sum for buying it, my
Father had denuded himself of almost everything, and our sticks
of chairs and tables filled but two or three rooms. Half the
little house, or 'villa' as we called it, was not papered, two-
thirds were not furnished. The workmen were still finishing the
outside when we arrived, and in that connection I recall a little
incident which exhibits my Father's morbid delicacy of
conscience. He was accustomed in his brighter moments--and this
was before the publication of his 'Omphalos'--occasionally to
sing loud Dorsetshire songs of his early days, in a strange,
broad Wessex lingo that I loved. One October afternoon he and I
were sitting on the verandah, and my Father was singing; just
around the corner, out of sight, two carpenters were putting up
the framework of a greenhouse. In a pause, one of them said to
his fellow: 'He can zing a zong, zo well's another, though he be
a minister.' My Father, who was holding my hand loosely, clutched
it, and looking up, I saw his eyes darken. He never sang a
secular song again during the whole of his life.

Later in the year, and after his literary misfortune, his
conscience became more troublesome than ever. I think he
considered the failure of his attempt at the reconciliation of
science with religion to have been intended by God as a
punishment for something he had done or left undone. In those
brooding tramps around and around the garden, his soul was on its
knees searching the corners of his conscience for some sin of
omission or commission, and one by one every pleasure, every
recreation, every trifle scraped out of the dust of past
experience, was magnified into a huge offence. He thought that
the smallest evidence of levity, the least unbending to human
instinct, might be seized by those around him as evidence of
inconsistency, and might lead the weaker brethren into offence.
The incident of the carpenters and the comic song is typical of a
condition of mind which now possessed my Father, in which act
after act became taboo, not because each was sinful in itself,
but because it might lead others into sin.

I have the conviction that Miss Marks was now mightily afraid of
my Father. Whenever she could, she withdrew to the room she
called her 'boudoir', a small, chilly apartment, sparsely
furnished, looking over what was in process of becoming the
vegetable garden. Very properly, that she might have some
sanctuary, Miss Marks forbade me to enter this virginal bower,
which, of course, became to me an object of harrowing curiosity.
Through the key-hole I could see practically nothing; one day I
contrived to slip inside, and discovered that there was nothing
to see but a plain bedstead and a toilet-table, void of all
attraction. In this 'boudoir', on winter afternoons, a fire would
be lighted, and Miss Marks would withdraw to it, not seen by us
anymore between high-tea and the apocalyptic exercise known as
'worship'--in less strenuous households much less austerely
practised under the name of 'family prayers'. Left meanwhile to
our own devices, my Father would mainly be reading his book or
paper held close up to the candle, while his lips and heavy
eyebrows occasionally quivered and palpitated, with literary
ardour, in a manner strangely exciting to me. Miss Marks, in a
very high cap, and her large teeth shining, would occasionally
appear in the doorway, desiring, with spurious geniality, to know
how we were 'getting on'. But on these occasions neither of us
replied to Miss Marks.

Sometimes in the course of this winter, my Father and I had long
cosy talks together over the fire. Our favourite subject was
murders. I wonder whether little boys of eight, soon to go
upstairs alone at night, often discuss violent crime with a
widower-papa? The practice, I cannot help thinking, is unusual;
it was, however, consecutive with us. We tried other secular
subjects, but we were sure to come around at last to 'what do you
suppose they really did with the body?' I was told, a thrilled
listener, the adventure of Mrs. Manning, who killed a gentleman on
the stairs and buried him in quick-lime in the back-kitchen, and
it was at this time that I learned the useful historical fact,
which abides with me after half a century, that Mrs. Manning was
hanged in black satin, which thereupon went wholly out of fashion
in England. I also heard about Burke and Hare, whose story nearly
froze me into stone with horror.

These were crimes which appear in the chronicles. But who will
tell me what 'the Carpet-bag Mystery' was, which my Father and I
discussed evening after evening? I have never come across a
whisper of it since, and I suspect it of having been a hoax. As I
recall the details, people in a boat, passing down the Thames,
saw a carpet-bag hung high in air, on one of the projections of a
pier of Waterloo Bridge. Being with difficulty dragged down--or
perhaps up--this bag was found to be full of human remains,
dreadful butcher's business of joints and fragments. Persons were
missed, were identified, were again denied--the whole is a vapour
in my memory which shifts as I try to define it. But clear enough
is the picture I hold of myself, in a high chair, on the left-
hand side of the sitting-room fireplace, the leaping flames
reflected in the glass-case of tropical insects on the opposite
wall, and my Father, leaning anxiously forward, with uplifted
finger, emphasizing to me the pros and cons of the horrible
carpet-bag evidence.

I suppose that my interest in these discussions--and Heaven knows
I was animated enough--amused and distracted my Father, whose
idea of a suitable theme for childhood's ear now seems to me
surprising. I soon found that these subjects were not welcome to
everybody, for, starting the Carpet-bag Mystery one morning with
Miss Marks, in the hope of delaying my arithmetic lesson, she
fairly threw her apron over her ears, and told me, from that
vantage, that if I did not desist at once, she should scream.

Occasionally we took winter walks together, my Father and I, down
some lane that led to a sight of the sea, or over the rolling
downs. We tried to recapture the charm of those delightful
strolls in London, when we used to lean over the bridges and
watch the ducks. But we could not recover this pleasure. My
Father was deeply enwoven in the chain of his own thoughts, and
would stalk on, without a word, buried in angry reverie. If he
spoke to me, on these excursions, it was a pain to me to answer
him. I could talk on easy terms with him indoors, seated in my
high chair, with our heads on a level, but it was intolerably
laborious to look up into the firmament and converse with a dark
face against the sky. The actual exercise of walking, too, was
very exhausting to me; the bright red mud, to the strange colour
of which I could not for a long while get accustomed, becoming
caked about my little shoes, and wearying me extremely. I would
grow petulant and cross, contradict my Father, and oppose his
whims. These walks were distressing to us both, yet he did not
like to walk alone, and he had no other friend. However, as the
winter advanced, they had to be abandoned, and the habit of our
taking a 'constitutional' together was never resumed.

I look back upon myself at this time as upon a cantankerous, ill-
tempered and unobliging child. The only excuse I can offer is
that I really was not well. The change to Devonshire had not
suited me; my health gave the excellent Miss Marks some anxiety,
but she was not ready in resource. The dampness of the house was
terrible; indoors and out, the atmosphere seemed soaked in chilly
vapours. Under my bed-clothes at night I shook like a jelly,
unable to sleep for cold, though I was heaped with coverings,
while my skin was all puckered with gooseflesh. I could eat
nothing solid, without suffering immediately from violent
hiccough, so that much of my time was spent lying prone on my
back upon the hearthrug, awakening the echoes like a cuckoo. Miss
Marks, therefore, cut off all food but milk-sop, a loathly bowl
of which appeared at every meal. In consequence the hiccough
lessened, but my strength declined with it. I languished in a
perpetual catarrh. I was roused to a conscious-ness that I was
not considered well by the fact that my Father prayed publicly at
morning and evening 'worship' that if it was the Lord's will to
take me to himself there might be no doubt whatever about my
being a sealed child of God and an inheritor of glory. I was
partly disconcerted by, partly vain of, this open advertisement
of my ailments.

Of our dealings with the 'Saints', a fresh assortment of whom met
us on our arrival in Devonshire, I shall speak presently. My
Father's austerity of behaviour was, I think, perpetually
accentuated by his fear of doing anything to offend the
consciences of these persons, whom he supposed, no doubt, to be
more sensitive than they really were. He was fond of saying that
'a very little stain upon the conscience makes a wide breach in
our communion with God', and he counted possible errors of
conduct by hundreds and by thousands. It was in this winter that
his attention was particularly drawn to the festival of
Christmas, which, apparently, he had scarcely noticed in London.

On the subject of all feasts of the Church he held views of an
almost grotesque peculiarity. He looked upon each of them as
nugatory and worthless, but the keeping of Christmas appeared to
him by far the most hateful, and nothing less than an act of
idolatry. 'The very word is Popish', he used to exclaim,
'Christ's Mass!' pursing up his lips with the gesture of one who
tastes assafoetida by accident. Then he would adduce the
antiquity of the so-called feast, adapted from horrible heathen
rites, and itself a soiled relic of the abominable Yule-Tide. He
would denounce the horrors of Christmas until it almost made me
blush to look at a holly-berry.

On Christmas Day of this year 1857 our villa saw a very unusual
sight. My Father had given strictest charge that no difference
whatever was to be made in our meals on that day; the dinner was
to be neither more copious than usual nor less so. He was obeyed,
but the servants, secretly rebellious, made a small plum-pudding
for themselves. (I discovered afterwards, with pain, that Miss
Marks received a slice of it in her boudoir.) Early in the
afternoon, the maids,--of whom we were now advanced to keeping
two,--kindly remarked that 'the poor dear child ought to have a
bit, anyhow', and wheedled me into the kitchen, where I ate a
slice of plum-pudding. Shortly I began to feel that pain inside
which in my frail state was inevitable, and my conscience smote
me violently. At length I could bear my spiritual anguish no
longer, and bursting into the study I called out: 'Oh! Papa,
Papa, I have eaten of flesh offered to idols!' It took some time,
between my sobs, to explain what had happened. Then my Father
sternly said: 'Where is the accursed thing?' I explained that as
much as was left of it was still on the kitchen table. He took me
by the hand, and ran with me into the midst of the startled
servants, seized what remained of the pudding, and with the plate
in one hand and me still tight in the other, ran until we reached
the dust-heap, when he flung the idolatrous confectionery on to
the middle of the ashes, and then raked it deep down into the
mass. The suddenness, the violence, the velocity of this
extraordinary act made an impression on my memory which nothing
will ever efface.

The key is lost by which I might unlock the perverse malady from
which my Father's conscience seemed to suffer during the whole of
this melancholy winter. But I think that a dislocation of his
intellectual system had a great deal to do with it. Up to this
point in his career, he had, as we have seen, nourished the
delusion that science and revelation could be mutually justified,
that some sort of compromise was possible. With great and ever
greater distinctness, his investigations had shown him that in
all departments of organic nature there are visible the evidences
of slow modification of forms, of the type developed by the
pressure and practice of aeons. This conviction had been borne
in upon him until it was positively irresistible. Where was his
place, then, as a sincere and accurate observer? Manifestly, it
was with the pioneers of the new truth, it was with Darwin,
Wallace and Hooker. But did not the second chapter of 'Genesis'
say that in six days the heavens and earth were finished, and the
host of them, and that on the seventh day God ended his work
which he had made?

Here was a dilemma! Geology certainly seemed to be true, but the
Bible, which was God's word, was true. If the Bible said that all
things in Heaven and Earth were created in six days, created in
six days they were,--in six literal days of twenty-four hours
each. The evidences of spontaneous variation of form, acting,
over an immense space of time, upon ever-modifying organic
structures, seemed overwhelming, but they must either be brought
into line with the six-day labour of creation, or they must be
rejected. I have already shown how my Father worked out the
ingenious 'Omphalos' theory in order to justify himself as a
strictly scientific observer who was also a humble slave of
revelation. But the old convention and the new rebellion would
alike have none of his compromise.

To a mind so acute and at the same time so narrow as that of my
Father--a mind which is all logical and positive without breadth,
without suppleness and without imagination--to be subjected to a
check of this kind is agony. It has not the relief of a smaller
nature, which escapes from the dilemma by some foggy formula; nor
the resolution of a larger nature to take to its wings and
surmount the obstacle. My Father, although half suffocated by the
emotion of being lifted, as it were, on the great biological
wave, never dreamed of letting go his clutch of the ancient
tradition, but hung there, strained and buffeted. It is
extraordinary that he--an 'honest hodman of science', as Huxley
once called him--should not have been content to allow others,
whose horizons were wider than his could be, to pursue those
purely intellectual surveys for which he had no species of
aptitude. As a collector of facts and marshaller of observations,
he had not a rival in that age; his very absence of imagination
aided him in this work. But he was more an attorney than
philosopher, and he lacked that sublime humility which is the
crown of genius. For, this obstinate persuasion that he alone
knew the mind of God, that he alone could interpret the designs
of the Creator, what did it result from if not from a congenital
lack of that highest modesty which replies 'I do not know' even
to the questions which Faith, with menacing forger, insists on
having most positively answered?

CHAPTER VI

DURING the first year of our life in Devonshire, the ninth year
of my age, my Father's existence, and therefore mine, was almost
entirely divided between attending to the little community of
'Saints' in the village and collecting, examining and describing
marine creatures from the seashore. In the course of these twelve
months, we had scarcely any social distractions of any kind, and
I never once crossed the bounds of the parish. After the worst of
the winter was over, my Father recovered much of his spirits and
his power of work, and the earliest sunshine soothed and
refreshed us both. I was still almost always with him, but we had
now some curious companions.

The village, at the southern end of which our villa stood, was
not pretty. It had no rural picturesqueness of any kind. The only
pleasant feature of it, the handsome and ancient parish church
with its umbrageous churchyard, was then almost entirely
concealed by a congress of mean shops, which were ultimately,
before the close of my childhood, removed. The village consisted
of two parallel lines of contiguous houses, all white-washed and
most of them fronted by a trifling shop-window; for half a mile
this street ascended to the church, and then descended for
another half-mile, ending suddenly in fields, the hedges of which
displayed, at intervals, the inevitable pollard elm-tree.

The walk through the village, which we seemed make incessantly,
was very wearisome to me. I dreaded the rudeness of the children,
and there was nothing in the shops to amuse me. Walking on the
inch or two of broken pavement in front of the houses was
disagreeable and tiresome, and the odor which breathed on close
days from the open doors and windows made me feel faint. But this
walk was obligatory, since the 'Public Room', as our little
chapel was called, lay at the farther extremity of the dreary
street.

We attended this place of worship immediately on our arrival, and
my Father, uninvited but unresisted, immediately assumed the
administration of it. It was a square, empty room, built, for I
know not what purpose, over a stable. Ammoniac odours used to
rise through the floor as we sat there at our long devotions.
Before our coming, a little flock of persons met in the Room, a
community of the indefinite sort just then becoming frequent in
the West of England, pious rustics connected with no other
recognized body of Christians, and depending directly on the
independent study of the Bible. They were largely women, but
there was more than a sprinkling of men, poor, simple and
generally sickly. In later days, under my Father's ministration,
the body increased and positively flourished. It came to include
retired professional men, an admiral, nay, even the brother of a
peer. But in those earliest years the 'brethren' and 'sisters'
were all of them ordinary peasants. They were jobbing gardeners
and journeymen carpenters, masons and tailors, washerwomen and
domestic servants. I wish that I could paint, in colours so vivid
that my readers could perceive what their little society
consisted of, this quaint collection of humble, conscientious,
ignorant and gentle persons. In chronicle or fiction I have never
been fortunate enough to meet with anything which resembled them.
The caricatures of enmity and worldly scorn are as crude, to my
memory, as the unction of religious conventionality is
featureless.

The origin of the meeting had been odd. A few years before we
came, a crew of Cornish fishermen, quite unknown to the
villagers, were driven by stress of weather into the haven under
the cliff. They landed, and, instead of going to a public-house,
they looked about for a room where they could hold a prayer-
meeting. They were devout Wesleyans; they had come from the open
sea, they were far from home, and they had been starved by lack
of their customary religious privileges. As they stood about in
the street before their meeting, they challenged the respectable
girls who came out to stare at them, with the question, 'Do you
love the Lord Jesus, my maid?' Receiving dubious answers, they
pressed the inhabitants to come in and pray with them, which
several did. Ann Burmington, who long afterwards told me about
it, was one of those girls, and she repeated that the fishermen
said, 'What a dreadful thing it will be, at the Last Day, when
the Lord says, "Come, ye blessed", and says it not to you, and
then, "Depart ye cursed", and you maidens have to depart.' They
were finely-built young men, with black beards and shining eyes,
and I do not question that some flash of sex unconsciously
mingled with the curious episode, although their behaviour was in
all respects discreet. It was, perhaps, not wholly a coincidence
that almost all those particular girls remained unmarried to the
end of their lives. After two or three days, the fishermen went
off to sea again. They prayed and sailed away, and the girls, who
had not even asked their names, never heard of them again. But
several of the young women were definitely converted, and they
formed the nucleus of our little gathering.

My Father preached, standing at a desk; or celebrated the
communion in front of a deal table, with a white napkin spread
over it. Sometimes the audience was so small, generally so
unexhilarating, that he was discouraged, but he never flagged in
energy and zeal. Only those who had given evidence of intelligent
acceptance of the theory of simple faith in their atonement
through the Blood of Jesus were admitted to the communion, or, as
it was called, 'the Breaking of Bread'. It was made a very strong
point that no one should 'break bread', unless for good reason
shown--until he or she had been baptized, that is to say,
totally immersed, in solemn conclave, by the ministering brother.
This rite used, in our earliest days, to be performed, with
picturesque simplicity, in the sea on the Oddicombe beach, but to
this there were, even in those quiet years, extreme objections. A
jeering crowd could scarcely be avoided, and women, in
particular, shrank from the ordeal. This used to be a practical
difficulty, and my Father, when communicants confessed that they
had not yet been baptized, would shake his head and say gravely,
'Ah! ah! you shun the Cross of Christ!' But that baptism in the
sea on the open beach _was_ a 'cross', he would not deny, and when
we built our own little chapel, a sort of font, planked over, was
arranged in the room itself.

Among these quiet, taciturn people, there were several whom I
recall with affection. In this remote corner of Devonshire, on
the road nowhither, they had preserved much of the air of that
eighteenth century which the elders among them perfectly
remembered. There was one old man, born before the French
Revolution, whose figure often recurs to me. This was James
Petherbridge, the Nestor of our meeting, extremely tall and
attenuated; he came on Sundays in a full, white smockfrock,
smartly embroidered down the front, and when he settled himself
to listen, he would raise this smock like a skirt, and reveal a
pair of immensely long thin legs, cased in tight leggings, and
ending in shoes with buckles. As the sacred message fell from my
Father's lips the lantern jaws of Mr. Petherbridge slowly fell
apart, while his knees sloped to so immense a distance from one
another that it seemed as though they never could meet again. He
had been pious all his life, and he would tell us, in some modest
pride, that when he was a lad, the farmer's wife who was his
mistress used to say, 'I think our Jem is going to be a Methody,
he do so hanker after godly discoursings.' Mr. Petherbridge was
accustomed to pray orally at our prayer-meetings, in a funny old
voice like wind in a hollow tree, and he seldom failed to express
a hope that 'the Lord would support Miss Lafroy'-- who was the
village schoolmistress, and one of our congregation,--'in her
labour of teaching the young idea how to shoot'. I, not
understanding this literary allusion, long believed the school to
be addicted to some species of pistol-practice.

The key of the Room was kept by Richard Moxhay, the mason, who
was of a generation younger than Mr. Petherbridge, but yet
'getting on in years'. Moxhay, I cannot tell why, was always
dressed in white corduroy, on which any stain of Devonshire
scarlet mud was painfully conspicuous; when he was smartened up,
his appearance suggested that somebody had given him a coating of
that rich Western whitewash which looks like Devonshire cream.
His locks were long and sparse, and as deadly black as his
clothes were white. He was a modest, gentle man, with a wife even
more meek and gracious than himself. They never, to my
recollection, spoke unless they were spoken to, and their
melancholy impassiveness used to vex my Father, who once,
referring to the Moxhays, described them, sententiously but
justly, as being 'laborious, but it would be an exaggeration to
say happy, Christians'. Indeed, my memory pictures almost all the
'saints' of that early time as sad and humble souls, lacking
vitality, yet not complaining of anything definite. A quite
surprising number of them, it is true, male and female, suffered
from different forms of consumption, so that the Room rang in
winter evenings with a discord of hacking coughs. But it seems to
me that, when I was quite young, half the inhabitants of our
rural district were affected with phthisis. No doubt, our
peculiar religious community was more likely to attract the
feeble members of a population, than to tempt the flush and the
fair.

Miss Marks, patient pilgrim that she was, accepted this quaint
society without a murmur, although I do not think it was much to
her taste. But in a very short time it was sweetened to her by
the formation of a devoted and romantic friendship for one of the
'sisters', who was, indeed, if my childish recollection does not
fail me, a very charming person. The consequence of this
enthusiastic alliance was that I was carried into the bosom of
the family to which Miss Marks' new friend belonged, and of these
excellent people I must give what picture I can.

Almost opposite the Room, therefore at the far end of the
village, across one of the rare small gardens (in which this
first winter I discovered with rapture the magenta stars of a new
flower, hepatica)--a shop-window displayed a thin row of plates
and dishes, cups and saucers; above it was painted the name of
Burmington. This china-shop was the property of three orphan
sisters, Ann, Mary Grace, and Bess, the latter lately married to
a carpenter, who was 'elder' at our meeting; the other two,
resolute old maids. Ann, whom I have already mentioned, had been
one of the girls converted by the Cornish fishermen. She was
about ten years older than Bess, and Mary Grace came halfway
between them. Ann was a very worthy woman, but masterful and
passionate, suffering from an ungovernable temper, which at
calmer moments she used to refer to, not without complacency, as
'the sin which doth most easily beset me'. Bess was
insignificant, and vulgarized by domestic cares. But Mary Grace
was a delightful creature. The Burmingtons lived in what was
almost the only old house surviving in the village. It was an
extraordinary construction of two storeys, with vast rooms, and
winding passages, and surprising changes of level. The sisters
were poor, but very industrious, and never in anything like want;
they sold, as I have said, crockery, and they took in washing,
and did a little fine needlework, and sold the produce of a
great, vague garden at the back. In process of time, the elder
sisters took a young woman, whose name was Drusilla Elliott, to
live with them as servant and companion; she was a converted
person, worshipping with a kindred sect, the Bible Christians. I
remember being much interested in hearing how Bess, before her
marriage, became converted. Mary Grace, on account of her infirm
health, slept alone in one room; in another, of vast size, stood
a family fourposter, where Ann slept with Drusilla Elliott, and
another bed in the same room took Bess. The sisters and their
friend had been constantly praying that Bess might 'find peace',
for she was still a stranger to salvation. One night, she
suddenly called out, rather crossly, 'What are you two whispering
about? Do go to sleep,' to which Ann replied: 'We are praying for
you.' 'How do you know,' answered Bess, 'that I don't believe?' And
then she told them that, that very night, when she was sitting in
the shop, she had closed with God's offer of redemption. Late in
the night as it was, Ann and Drusilla could do no less than go in
and waken Mary Grace, whom, however, they found awake, praying,
she too, for the conversion of Bess. They told her the good news,
and all four, kneeling in the darkness, gave thanks aloud to God
for his infinite mercy.

It was Mary Grace Burmington who now became the romantic friend
of Miss Marks, and a sort of second benevolence to me. She must
have been under thirty years of age; she wax very small, and she
was distressingly deformed in the spine, but she had an animated,
almost a sparkling countenance. When we first arrived in the
village, Mary Grace was only just recovering from a gastric fever
which had taken her close to the grave. I remember hearing that
the vicar, a stout and pompous man at whom we always glared
defiance, went, in Mary Grace's supposed extremity, to the
Burmingtons' shop-door, and shouted: 'Peace be to this house,'
intending to offer his ministrations, but that Ann, who was in
one of her tantrums, positively hounded him from the doorstep and
down the garden, in her passionate nonconformity. Mary Grace,
however, recovered, and soon became, not merely Miss Marks'
inseparable friend, but my Father's spiritual factotum. He found
it irksome to visit the 'saints' from house to house, and Mary
Grace Burmington gladly assumed this labour. She proved a most
efficient coadjutor; searched out, cherished and confirmed any of
those, especially the young, who were attracted by my Father's
preaching, and for several years was a great joy and comfort to
us all. Even when her illness so increased that she could no
longer rise from her bed, she was a centre of usefulness and
cheerfulness from that retreat, where she 'received', in a kind
of rustic state, under a patchwork coverlid that was like a
basket of flowers.

My Father, ever reflecting on what could be done to confirm my
spiritual vocation, to pin me down, as it were, beyond any
possibility of escape, bethought him that it would accustom me to
what he called 'pastoral work in the Lord's service', if I
accompanied Mary Grace on her visits from house to house. If it
is remembered that I was only eight and a half when this scheme
was carried into practice, it will surprise no one to hear that
it was not crowned with success. I disliked extremely this
visitation of the poor. I felt shy, I had nothing to say, with
difficulty could I understand their soft Devonian patois, and
most of all--a signal perhaps of my neurotic condition--I dreaded
and loathed the smells of their cottages. One had to run over the
whole gamut of odours, some so faint that they embraced the
nostril with a fairy kiss, others bluntly gross, of the 'knock-
you-down' order; some sweet, with a dreadful sourness; some
bitter, with a smack of rancid hair-oil. There were fine manly
smells of the pigsty and the open drain, and these prided
themselves on being all they seemed to be; but there were also
feminine odours, masquerading as you knew not what, in which
penny whiffs, vials of balm and opoponax, seemed to have become
tainted, vaguely, with the residue of the slop-pail. It was not,
I think, that the villagers were particularly dirty, but those
were days before the invention of sanitary science, and my poor
young nose was morbidly, nay ridiculously sensitive. I often came
home from 'visiting the saints' absolutely incapable of eating
the milk-sop, with brown sugar strewn over it, which was my
evening meal.

There was one exception to my unwillingness to join in the
pastoral labours of Mary Grace. When she announced, on a fine
afternoon, that we were going to Pavor and Barton, I was always
agog to start. These were two hamlets in our parish, and, I
should suppose, the original home of its population. Pavor was,
even then, decayed almost to extinction, but Barton preserved its
desultory street of ancient, detached cottages. Each, however
poor, had a wild garden around it, and, where the inhabitants
possessed some pride in their surroundings, the roses and the
jasmines and that distinguished creeper,--which one sees nowhere
at its best but in Devonshire cottage-gardens,--the stately
cotoneaster, made the whole place a bower. Barton was in vivid
contrast to our own harsh, open, squalid village, with its mean
modern houses, its absence of all vegetation. The ancient
thatched cottages of Barton were shut in by moist hills, and
canopied by ancient trees; they were approached along a deep lane
which was all a wonder and a revelation to me that spring, since,
in the very words of Shelley:

  There in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine,
    Green cow-bind and the moonlight-coloured may,
  And cherry blossoms, and white cups, whose wine
    Was the bright dew yet drained not by the day;
  And wild roses, and ivy serpentine
    With its dark buds and leaves, wandering astray.

Around and beyond Barton there lay fairyland. All was mysterious,
unexplored, rich with infinite possibilities. I should one day
enter it, the sword of make-believe in my hand, the cap of
courage on my head, 'when you are a big boy', said the oracle of
Mary Grace. For the present, we had to content ourselves with
being an unadventurous couple--a little woman, bent half-double,
and a preternaturally sedate small boy--as we walked very
slowly, side by side, conversing on terms of high familiarity, in
which Biblical and colloquial phrases were quaintly jumbled,
through the sticky red mud of the Pavor lanes with Barton as a
bourne before us.

When we came home, my Father would sometimes ask me for
particulars. Where had we been, whom had we found at home, what
testimony had those visited been able to give of the Lord's
goodness to them, what had Mary Grace replied in the way of
exhortation, reproof or condolence? These questions I hated at
the time, but they were very useful to me, since they gave me the
habit of concentrating my attention on what was going on in the
course of our visits, in case I might be called upon to give a
report. My Father was very kind in the matter; he cultivated my
powers of expression, he did not snub me when I failed to be
intelligent. But I overheard Miss Marks and Mary Grace discussing
the whole question under the guise of referring to 'you know
whom, not a hundred miles hence', fancying that I could not
recognize their little ostrich because its head was in a bag of
metaphor. I understood perfectly, and gathered that they both of
them thought this business of my going into undrained cottages
injudicious. Accordingly, I was by degrees taken 'visiting' only
when Mary Grace was going into the country-hamlets, and then I
was usually left outside, to skip among the flowers and stalk the
butterflies.

I must not, however, underestimate the very prominent part taken
all through this spring and summer of 1858 by the collection of
specimens on the seashore. My Father had returned, the chagrin of
his failure in theorizing now being mitigated, to what was his
real work in life, the practical study of animal forms in detail.
He was not a biologist, in the true sense of the term. That
luminous indication which Flaubert gives of what the action of
the scientific mind should be, _affranchissant esprit et pesant
les mondes, sans haine, sans peur, sans pitie, sans amour et sans
Dieu_, was opposed in every segment to the attitude of my Father,
who, nevertheless, was a man of very high scientific attainment.

But, again I repeat, he was not a philosopher; he was incapable,
by temperament and education, of forming broad generalizations
and of escaping in a vast survey from the troublesome pettiness
of detail. He saw everything through a lens, nothing in the
immensity of nature. Certain senses were absent in him; I think
that, with all his justice, he had no conception of the
importance of liberty; with all his intelligence, the boundaries
of the atmosphere in which his mind could think at all were
always close about him; with all his faith in the Word of God, he
had no confidence in the Divine Benevolence; and with all his
passionate piety, he habitually mistook fear for love.

It was down on the shore, tramping along the pebbled terraces of
the beach, clambering over the great blocks of fallen
conglomerate which broke the white curve with rufous promontories
that jutted into the sea, or, finally, bending over those shallow
tidal pools in the limestone rocks which were our proper hunting-
ground,--it was in such circumstances as these that my Father
became most easy, most happy, most human. That hard look across
his brows, which it wearied me to see, the look that came from
sleepless anxiety of conscience, faded away, and left the dark
countenance still always stern indeed, but serene and
unupbraiding. Those pools were our mirrors, in which, reflected
in the dark hyaline and framed by the sleek and shining fronds of
oar-weed there used to appear the shapes of a middle-aged man and
a funny little boy, equally eager, and, I almost find the
presumption to say, equally well prepared fog business.

If anyone goes down to those shores now, if man or boy seeks to
follow in our traces, let him realize at once, before he takes
the trouble to roll up his sleeves, that his zeal will end in
labour lost. There is nothing, now, where in our days there was
so much. Then the rocks between tide and tide were submarine
gardens of a beauty that seemed often to be fabulous, and was
positively delusive, since, if we delicately lifted the
weedcurtains of a windless pool, though we might for a moment see
its sides and floor paven with living blossoms, ivory-white,
rosy-red, grange and amethyst, yet all that panoply would melt
away, furled into the hollow rock, if we so much as dropped a
pebble in to disturb the magic dream.

Half a century ago, in many parts of the coast of Devonshire and
Cornwall, where the limestone at the water's edge is wrought into
crevices and hollows, the tideline was, like Keats' Grecian vase,
'a still unravished bride of quietness'. These cups and basins
were always full, whether the tide was high or low, and the only
way in which they were affected was that twice in the twenty-four
hours they were replenished by cold streams from the great sea,
and then twice were left brimming to be vivified by the temperate
movement of the upper air. They were living flower-beds, so
exquisite in their perfection, that my Father, in spite of his
scientific requirements, used not seldom to pause before he began
to rifle them, ejaculating that it was indeed a pity to disturb
such congregated beauty. The antiquity of these rock-pools, and
the infinite succession of the soft and radiant forms, sea-
anemones, seaweeds, shells, fishes, which had inhabited them,
undisturbed since the creation of the world, used to occupy my
Father's fancy. We burst in, he used to say, where no one had
ever thought of intruding before; and if the Garden of Eden had
been situate in Devonshire, Adam and Eve, stepping lightly down
to bathe in the rainbow-coloured spray, would have seen the
identical sights that we now saw,--the great prawns gliding like
transparent launches, anthea waving in the twilight its thick
white waxen tentacles, and the fronds of the duke faintly
streaming on the water like huge red banners in some reverted
atmosphere.

All this is long over and done with. The ring of living beauty
drawn about our shores was a very thin and fragile one. It had
existed all those centuries solely in consequence of the
indifference, the blissful ignorance of man. These rockbasins,
fringed by corallines, filled with still water almost as pellucid
as the upper air itself, thronged with beautiful sensitive forms
of life, they exist no longer, they are all profaned, and
emptied, and vulgarized. An army of 'collectors' has passed over
them, and ravaged every corner of them. The fairy paradise has
been violated, the exquisite product of centuries of natural
selection has been crushed under the rough paw of well-meaning,
idle-minded curiosity. That my Father, himself so reverent, so
conservative, had by the popularity of his books acquired the
direct responsibility for a calamity that he had never
anticipated became clear enough to himself before many years had
passed, and cost him great chagrin. No one will see again on the
shore of England what I saw in my early childhood, the submarine
vision of dark rocks, speckled and starred with an infinite
variety of colour, and streamed over by silken flags of royal
crimson and purple.

In reviving these impressions, I am unable to give any exact
chronological sequence to them. These particular adventures began
early in 1858, they reached their greatest intensity in the
summer of 1859, and they did not altogether cease, so far as my
Father was concerned, until nearly twenty years later. But it was
while he was composing what, as I am told by scientific men of
today, continues to be his most valuable contribution to
knowledge, his _History of the British Sea-Anemones and Corals_,
that we worked together on the shore for a definite purpose, and
the last instalment of that still-classic volume was ready for
press by the close of 1859.

The way in which my Father worked, in his most desperate
escapades, was to wade breast-high into one of the huge pools,
and examine the worm-eaten surface of the rock above and below
the brim. In such remote places--spots where I could never
venture being left, a slightly timorous Andromeda, chained to a
safer level of the cliff--in these extreme basins, there used
often to lurk a marvellous profusion of animal and vegetable
forms. My Father would search for the roughest and most corroded
points of rock, those offering the best refuge for a variety of
creatures, and would then chisel off fragments as low down in the
water as he could. These pieces of rock were instantly plunged in
the saltwater of jars which we had brought with us for the
purpose. When as much had been collected as we could carry away--
my Father always dragged about an immense square basket, the
creak of whose handles I can still fancy that I hear--we turned
to trudge up the long climb home. Then all our prizes were spread
out, face upward, in shallow pans of clean sea-water.

In a few hours, when all dirt had subsided, and what living
creatures we had brought seemed to have recovered their
composure, my work began. My eyes were extremely keen and
powerful, though they were vexatiously near-sighted. Of no use in
examining objects at any distance, in investigating a minute
surface, my vision was trained to be invaluable. The shallow pan,
with our spoils, would rest on a table near the window, and I,
kneeling on a chair opposite the light, would lean over the
surface until everything was within an inch or two of my eyes.
Often I bent, in my zeal, so far forward that the water touched
the tip of my nose and gave me a little icy shock. In this
attitude, an idle spectator might have formed the impression that
I was trying to wash my head and could not quite summon up
resolution enough to plunge. In this odd pose I would remain for
a long time, holding my breath and examining with extreme care
every atom of rock, every swirl of detritus. This was a task
which my Father could only perform by the help of a lens, with
which, of course, he took care to supplement my examination. But
that my survey was of use, he has himself most handsomely
testified in his _Actinologia Britannica_, where he expresses his
debt to the 'keen and well-practised eye of my little son'. Nor,
if boasting is not to be excluded, is it every eminent biologist,
every proud and masterful F.R.S., who can lay his hand on his
heart and swear that, before reaching the age of ten years, he
had added, not merely a new species, but a new genus to the
British fauna. That however, the author of these pages can do,
who, on 29 June 1859, discovered a tiny atom,--and ran in the
greatest agitation to announce the discovery of that object 'as a
form with which he was unacquainted',--which figures since then
on all lists of sea-anemones as phellia murocincta, or the walled
corklet. Alas! that so fair a swallow should have made no
biological summer in after-life.

These delicious agitations by the edge of the salt-sea wave must
have greatly improved my health, which however was still looked
upon as fragile. I was loaded with coats and comforters, and
strolled out between Miss Marks and Mary Grace Burmington, a
muffled ball of flannel. This alone was enough to give me a look
of delicacy which the 'saints', in their blunt way, made no
scruple of commenting upon to my face. I was greatly impressed by
a conversation held over my bed one evening by the servants. Our
cook, Susan, a person of enormous size, and Kate, the tattling,
tiresome parlour-maid who waited upon us, on the summer evening I
speak of were standing--I cannot tell why--on each side of my
bed. I shut my eyes, and lay quite still, in order to escape
conversing with them, and they spoke to one another. 'Ah, poor
lamb,' Kate said trivially, '_he's_ not long for this world; going
home to Jesus, he is,--in a jiffy, I should say by the look of
'un.' But Susan answered: 'Not so. I dreamed about 'un, and I
know for sure that he is to be spared for missionary service.'
'Missionary service?' repeated Kate, impressed. 'Yes,' Susan went
on, with solemn emphasis, 'he'll bleed for his Lord in heathen
parts, that's what the future have in store for _'im_.' When they
were gone, I beat upon the coverlid with my fists, and I
determined that whatever happened, I would not, not, _not_, go out
to preach the Gospel among horrid, tropical niggers.

CHAPTER VII

IN the history of an infancy so cloistered and uniform as mine,
such a real adventure as my being publicly and successfully
kidnapped cannot be overlooked. There were several 'innocents' in
our village--harmless eccentrics who had more or less
unquestionably crossed the barrier which divides the sane from
the insane. They were not discouraged by public opinion; indeed,
several of them were favoured beings, suspected by my Father of
exaggerating their mental density in order to escape having to
work, like dogs, who, as we all know, could speak as well as we
do, were they not afraid of being made to fetch and carry. Miss
Mary Flaw was not one of these imbeciles. She was what the French
call a _detraquee_; she had enjoyed good intelligence and an active
mind, but her wits had left the rails and were careening about
the country. Miss Flaw was the daughter of a retired Baptist
minister, and she lived, with I remember not what relations, in a
little solitary house high up at Barton Cross, whither Mary Grace
and I would sometimes struggle when our pastoral duties were
over. In later years, when I met with those celebrated verses in
which the philosopher expresses the hope

  In the downhill of life, when I find I'm declining,
    May my lot no less fortunate be
  Than a snug elbow-chair can afford for reclining,
    And a cot that o'erlooks the wide sea

my thoughts returned instinctively, and they still return, to the
high abode of Miss Flaw. There was a porch at her door, both for
shelter and shade, and it was covered with jasmine; but the charm
of the place was a summer-house close by, containing a table,
encrusted with cowry-shells, and seats from which one saw the
distant waters of the bay. At the entrance to this grotto there
was always set a 'snug elbow-chair', destined, I suppose, for the
Rev. Mr. Flaw, or else left there in pious memory of him, since I
cannot recollect whether he was alive or dead.

I delighted in these visits to Mary Flaw. She always received us
with effusion, tripping forward to meet us, and leading us, each
by a hand held high, with a dancing movement which I thought
infinitely graceful, to the cowry-shell bower, where she would
regale us with Devonshire cream and with small hard biscuits that
were like pebbles. The conversation of Mary Flaw was a great
treat to me. I enjoyed its irregularities, its waywardness; it
was like a tune that wandered into several keys. As Mary Grace
Burmington put it, one never knew what dear Mary Flaw would say
next, and that she did not herself know added to the charm. She
had become crazed, poor thing, in consequence of a disappointment
in love, but of course I did not know that, nor that she was
crazed at all. I thought her brilliant and original, and I liked
her very much. In the light of coming events, it would be
affectation were I to pretend that she did not feel a similar
partiality for me.

Miss Flaw was, from the first, devoted to my Father's
ministrations, and it was part of our odd village indulgence that
no one ever dreamed of preventing her from coming to the Room. On
Sunday evenings the bulk of the audience was arranged on forms,
with backs to them, set in the middle of the floor, with a
passage round them, while other forms were placed against the
walls. My Father preached from a lectern, facing the audience. If
darkness came on in the course of the service, Richard Moxhay,
glimmering in his cream-white corduroys, used to go slowly
around, lighting groups of tallow candles by the help of a box of
lucifers. Mary Flaw always assumed the place of honour, on the
left extremity of the front bench, immediately opposite my
Father. Miss Marks and Mary Grace, with me ensconced and almost
buried between them, occupied the right of the same bench. While
the lighting proceeded, Miss Flaw used to direct it from her
seat, silently, by pointing out to Moxhay, who took no notice,
what groups of candles he should light next. She did this just as
the clown in the circus directs the grooms how to move the
furniture, and Moxhay paid no more attention to her than the
grooms do to the clown. Miss Flaw had another peculiarity: she
silently went through a service exactly similar to ours, but much
briefer. The course of our evening service was this: My Father
prayed, and we all knelt down; then he gave out a hymn and most
of us stood up to sing; then he preached for about an hour, while
we sat and listened; then a hymn again; then prayer and the
valediction.

Mary Flaw went through this ritual, but on a smaller scale. We
all knelt down together, but when we rose from our knees, Miss
Flaw was already standing up, and was pretending, without 

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