by Edmund Gosse
But the other visitors who came in Kingsley’s wake and without his excuse, how they disturbed us! We used to be seated, my Father at his microscope, I with my map or book, in the downstairs room we called the study. There would be a hush around us in which you could hear a sea-anemone sigh. Then, abruptly, would come a ring at the front door; my Father would bend at me a corrugated brow, and murmur, under his breath, ‘What’s that?’ and then, at the sound of footsteps, would bolt into the verandah, and round the garden into the potting-shed. If it was no visitor more serious than the postman or the tax-gatherer, I used to go forth and coax the timid wanderer home. If it was a caller, above all a female caller, it was my privilege to prevaricate, remarking innocently that ‘Papa is out!’
Into a paradise so carefully guarded, I know not how that serpent Miss Wilkes could penetrate, but there she was. She ‘broke bread’ with the Brethren at the adjacent town, from which she carried on strategical movements, which were, up to a certain point, highly successful. She professed herself deeply interested in microscopy, and desired that some of her young ladies should study it also. She came attended by an unimportant mamma, and by pupils to whom I had sometimes, very unwillingly, to show our ‘natural objects.’ They would invade us, and fill our quietness with chattering noise; I could bear none of them, and I was singularly drawn to Miss Marks by finding that she disliked them too.
By whatever arts she worked, Miss Wilkes certainly achieved a certain ascendency. When the knocks came at the front door, I was now instructed to see whether the visitor were not she, before my Father bolted to the potting-shed. She was an untiring listener, and my Father had a genius for instruction. Miss Wilkes was never weary of expressing what a revelation of the wonderful works of God in creation her acquaintance with us had been. She would gaze through the microscope at awful forms, and would persevere until the silver rim which marked the confines of the drop of water under inspection would ripple inwards with a flash of light and vanish, because the drop itself had evaporated. ‘Well, I can only say, how marvellous are Thy doings!’ was a frequent ejaculation of Miss Wilkes, and one that was very well received. She learned the Latin names of many of the species, and it seems quite pathetic to me, looking back, to realise how much trouble the poor woman took. She ‘hung,’ as the expression is, upon my Father’s every word, and one instance of this led to a certain revelation.
My Father, who had an extraordinary way of saying anything that came up into his mind, stated one day,—the fashions, I must suppose, being under discussion,—that he thought white the only becoming colour for a lady’s stockings. The stockings of Miss Wilkes had up to that hour been of a deep violet, but she wore white ones in future whenever she came to our house. This delicacy would have been beyond my unaided infant observation, but I heard Miss Marks mention the matter, in terms which they supposed to be secret, to her confidante, and I verified it at the ankles of the lady. Miss Marks continued by saying, in confidence, and ‘quite as between you and me, dear Mary Grace,’ that Miss Wilkes was a ‘minx.’ I had the greatest curiosity about words, and as this was a new one, I looked it up in our large English Dictionary. But there the definition of the term was this:—‘Minx: the female of minnock; a pert wanton.’ I was as much in the dark as ever.
Whether she was the female of a minnock (whatever that may be) or whether she was only a very well-meaning schoolmistress desirous of enlivening a monotonous existence, Miss Wilkes certainly took us out of ourselves a good deal. Did my Father know what danger he ran? It was the opinion of Miss Marks and of Mary Grace that he did not, and in the back-kitchen, a room which served those ladies as a private oratory in the summer-time, much prayer was offered up that his eyes might be opened ere it was too late. But I am inclined to think that they were open all the time, that, at all events, they were what the French call entr’ouvert, that enough light for practical purposes came sifted in through his eyelashes. At a later time, being reminded of Miss Wilkes, he said with a certain complaisance, ‘Ah, yes! she proffered much entertainment during my widowed years!’ He used to go down to her boarding-school, the garden of which had been the scene of a murder, and was romantically situated on the edge of a quarried cliff; he always took me with him, and kept me at his side all through these visits, notwithstanding Miss Wilkes’ solicitude that the fatigue and excitement would be too much for the dear child’s strength, unless I rested a little on the parlour sofa.
About this time, the question of my education came up for discussion in the household, as indeed it well might. Miss Marks had long proved practically inadequate in this respect, her slender acquirements evaporating, I suppose, like the drops of water under the microscope, while the field of her general duties became wider. The subjects in which I took pleasure, and upon which I possessed books, I sedulously taught myself; the other subjects, which formed the vast majority, I did not learn at all. Like Aurora Leigh,
I brushed with extreme flounce
The circle of the universe,
especially zoology, botany and astronomy, but with the explicit exception of geology, which my Father regarded as tending directly to the encouragement of infidelity. I copied a great quantity of maps, and read all the books of travels that I could find. But I acquired no mathematics, no languages, no history, so that I was in danger of gross illiteracy in these important departments.
My Father grudged the time, but he felt it a duty to do something to fill up these deficiencies and we now started Latin, in a little eighteenth-century reading-book, out of which my Grandfather had been taught. It consisted of strings of words, and of grim arrangements of conjunction and declension, presented in a manner appallingly unattractive. I used to be set down in the study, under my Father’s eye, to learn a solid page of this compilation, while he wrote or painted. The window would be open in summer, and my seat was close to it. Outside, a bee was shaking the clematis-blossom, or a red-admiral butterfly was opening and shutting his wings on the hot concrete of the verandah, or a blackbird was racing across the lawn. It was almost more than human nature could bear to have to sit holding up to my face the dreary little Latin book, with its sheep-skin cover that smelt of mildewed paste.
But out of this strength there came an unexpected sudden sweetness. The exercise of hearing me repeat my strings of nouns and verbs, had revived in my Father his memories of the classics. In the old solitary years, a long time ago, by the shores of Canadian rapids, on the edge of West Indian swamps, his Virgil had been an inestimable solace to him. To extremely devout persons, there is something objectionable in most of the great writers of antiquity. Horace, Lucretius, Terence, Catullus, Juvenal,—in each there is one quality or another definitely repulsive to a reader who is determined to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified. From time immemorial, however, it has been recognised in the Christian church that this objection does not apply to Virgil. He is the most evangelical of the classics; he is the one who can be enjoyed with least to explain away and least to excuse. One evening my Father took down his Virgil from an upper shelf, and his thoughts wandered away from surrounding things; he travelled in the past again. The book was a Delphin edition of 1798, which had followed him in all his wanderings; there was a great scratch on the sheep-skin cover that a thorn had made in a forest of Alabama. And then, in the twilight, as he shut the volume at last, oblivious of my presence, he began to murmur and to chant the adorable verses by memory.
Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi,
he warbled; and I stopped my play, and listened
as if to a nightingale, till he reached
tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra
Formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas.
‘O Papa, what is that?’ I could not prevent myself from asking. He translated the verses, he explained their meaning, but his exposition gave me little interest. What to me was beautiful Amaryllis? She and her lovesick Tityrus awakened no image whatever in my mind.
But a miracle had been revealed to me, the inca
lculable, the amazing beauty which could exist in the sound of verses. My prosodical instinct was awakened, quite suddenly that dim evening, as my Father and I sat alone in the breakfast-room after tea, serenely accepting the hour, for once, with no idea of exhortation or profit. Verse, ‘a breeze mid blossoms playing,’ as Coleridge says, descended from the roses as a moth might have done, and the magic of it took hold of my heart for ever. I persuaded my Father, who was a little astonished at my insistence, to repeat the lines over and over again. At last my brain caught them, and as I walked in Benny’s garden, or as I hung over the tidal pools at the edge of the sea, all my inner being used to ring out with the sound of
Formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas.
Chapter 8
IN THE PREVIOUS chapter I have dwelt on some of the lighter conditions of our life at this time; I must now turn to it in a less frivolous aspect. As my tenth year advanced, the development of my character gave my Father, I will not say, anxiety, but matter for serious reflection. My intelligence was now perceived to be taking a sudden start; visitors drew my Father’s attention to the fact that I was ‘coming out so much.’ I grew rapidly in stature, having been a little shrimp of a thing up to that time, and I no longer appeared much younger than my years. Looking back, I do not think that there was any sudden mental development, but that the change was mainly a social one. I had been reserved, timid and taciturn; I had disliked the company of strangers. But with my tenth year, I certainly unfolded, so far as to become sociable and talkative, and perhaps I struck those around me as grown ‘clever,’ because I said the things which I had previously only thought. There was a change, no doubt, yet I believe that it was mainly physical, rather than mental. My excessive fragility—or apparent fragility, for I must have been always wiry—decreased; I slept better, and therefore grew less nervous; I ate better, and therefore put on flesh. If I preserved a delicate look—people still used to say in my presence, ‘That dear child is not long for this world!’—it was in consequence of a sort of habit into which my body had grown; it was a transparency which did not speak of what was in store for me, but of what I had already passed through.
The increased activity of my intellectual system now showed itself in what I believe to be a very healthy form, direct imitation. The rage for what is called ‘originality’ is pushed to such a length in these days that even children are not considered promising, unless they attempt things preposterous and unparalleled. From his earliest hour, the ambitious person is told that to make a road where none has walked before, to do easily what it is impossible for others to do at all, to create new forms of thought and expression, are the only recipes for genius; and in trying to escape on all sides from every resemblance to his predecessors, he adopts at once an air of eccentricity and pretentiousness. This continues to be the accepted view of originality; but, in spite of this conventional opinion, I hold that the healthy sign of an activity of mind in early youth is not to be striving after unheard of miracles, but to imitate closely and carefully what is being said and done in the vicinity. The child of a great sculptor will hang about the studio, and will try to hammer a head out of a waste piece of marble with a nail; it does not follow that he too will be a sculptor. The child of a politician will sit in committee with a row of empty chairs, and will harangue an imaginary senate from behind the curtains. I, the son of a man who looked through a microscope and painted what he saw there, would fain observe for myself, and paint my observations. It did not follow, alas! that I was built to be a miniature-painter or a savant, but the activity of a childish intelligence was shown by my desire to copy the results of such energy as I saw nearest at hand.
In the secular direction, this now took the form of my preparing little monographs on seaside creatures, which were arranged, tabulated and divided as exactly as possible on the pattern of those which my Father was composing for his ‘Actinologia Britannica.’ I wrote these out upon sheets of paper of the same size as his printed page, and I adorned them with water-colour plates, meant to emulate his precise and exquisite illustrations. One or two of these ludicrous pastiches are still preserved, and in glancing at them now I wonder, not at any skill that they possess, but at the perseverance and the patience, the evidence of close and persistent labour. I was not set to these tasks by my Father, who, in fact, did not much approve of them. He was touched, too, with the ‘originality’ heresy, and exhorted me not to copy him, but to go out into the garden or the shore and describe something new, in a new way. That was quite impossible; I possessed no initiative. But I can now well understand why my Father, very indulgently and good-temperedly, deprecated these exercises of mine. They took up, and, as he might well think, wasted, an enormous quantity of time; and they were, moreover, parodies, rather than imitations, of his writings, for I invented new species, with sapphire spots and crimson tentacles and amber bands, which were close enough to his real species to be disconcerting. He came from conscientiously shepherding the flocks of ocean, and I do not wonder that my ring-straked, speckled and spotted varieties put him out of countenance. If I had not been so innocent and solemn, he might have fancied I was mocking him.
These extraordinary excursions into science, falsely so called, occupied a large part of my time. There was a little spare room at the back of our house, dedicated to lumber and to empty portmanteaux. There was a table in it already, and I added a stool; this cheerless apartment now became my study. I spent so many hours here, in solitude and without making a sound, that my Father’s curiosity, if not his suspicion, was occasionally roused, and he would make a sudden raid on me. I was always discovered, doubled up over the table, with my pen and ink, or else my box of colours and tumbler of turbid water by my hand, working away like a Chinese student shut up in his matriculating box.
It might have been done for a wager, if anything so sinful had ever been dreamed of in our pious household. The apparatus was slow and laboured. In order to keep my uncouth handwriting in bounds, I was obliged to rule not lines only, but borders to my pages. The subject did not lend itself to any flow of language, and I was obliged incessantly to borrow sentences, word for word, from my Father’s published books. Discouraged by every one around me, daunted by the laborious effort needful to carry out the scheme, it seems odd to me now that I persisted in so strange and wearisome an employment, but it became an absorbing passion, and was indulged in to the neglect of other lessons and other pleasures.
My Father, as the spring advanced, used to come up to the Box-room, as my retreat was called, and hunt me out into the sunshine. But I soon crept back to my mania. It gave him much trouble, and Miss Marks, who thought it sheer idleness, was vociferous in objection. She would gladly have torn up all my writings and paintings, and have set me to a useful task. My Father, with his strong natural individualism, could not take this view. He was interested in this strange freak of mine, and he could not wholly condemn it. But he must have thought it a little crazy, and it is evident to me now that it led to the revolution in domestic polity by which he began to encourage my acquaintance with other young people as much as he had previously discouraged it. He saw that I could not be allowed to spend my whole time in a little stuffy room making solemn and ridiculous imitations of Papers read before the Linnaean Society. He was grieved, moreover, at the badness of my pictures, for I had no native skill; and he tried to teach me his own system of miniature-painting as applied to natural history. I was forced, in deep depression of spirits, to turn from my grotesque monographs, and paint under my Father’s eye, and from a finished drawing of his, a gorgeous tropic bird in flight. Aided by my habit of imitation, I did at length produce something which might have shown promise, if it had not been wrung from me, touch by touch, pigment by pigment, under the orders of a task-master.
All this had its absurd side, but I seem to perceive that it had also its value. It is, surely, a mistake to look too near at hand for the benefits of education. What is actually taught in early childhood is often that part of training
which makes least impression on the character, and is of the least permanent importance. My labours failed to make me a zoologist, and the multitude of my designs and my descriptions have left me helplessly ignorant of the anatomy of a sea-anemone. Yet I cannot look upon the mental discipline as useless. It taught me to concentrate my attention, to define the nature of distinctions, to see accurately, and to name what I saw. Moreover, it gave me the habit of going on with any piece of work I had in hand, not flagging because the interest or picturesqueness of the theme had declined, but pushing forth towards a definite goal, well foreseen and limited beforehand. For almost any intellectual employment in later life, it seems to me that this discipline was valuable. I am, however, not the less conscious how ludicrous was the mode in which, in my tenth year, I obtained it.
My spiritual condition occupied my Father’s thoughts very insistently at this time. Closing as he did, most of the doors of worldly pleasure and energy upon his conscience, he had continued to pursue his scientific investigations without any sense of sin. Most fortunate it was, that the collecting of marine animals in the tidal pools, and the description of them in pages which were addressed to the wide scientific public, at no time occurred to him as in any way inconsistent with his holy calling. His conscience was so delicate, and often so morbid in its delicacy, that if that had occurred to him, he would certainly have abandoned his investigations, and have been left without an employment. But happily he justified his investigation by regarding it as a glorification of God’s created works. In the introduction to his ‘Actinologia Britannica,’ written at the time which I have now reached in this narrative, he sent forth his labours, with a phrase which I should think unparalleled in connection with a learned and technical biological treatise. He stated concerning that book, that he published it ‘as one more tribute humbly offered to the glory of the Triune God, who is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in working.’ Scientific investigation sincerely carried out in that spirit became a kind of weekday interpretation of the current creed of Sundays.
