by Edmund Gosse
This was a very painful incident, and it is easy to see how compromising, how cruel, it was in its effect upon our communion; what occasion it gave to our enemies to blaspheme. No one, in either meeting, could or would raise a voice to defend Mr Dormant. We had to bow our heads when we met our enemies in the gate. The blow fell more heavily on the meeting of which he had been a prominent and communicating member, but it fell on us too, and my Father felt it severely. For many years he would never mention the man’s name, and he refused all discussion of the incident.
Yet I was never sure and I am not sure now, that the wretched being was a hypocrite. There are as many vulgar fanatics as there are distinguished ones, and I am not convinced that Dormant, coarse and narrow as he was, may not have sincerely believed that it was better for the money to be used in religious propaganda than in the pleasures of the world, of which he doubtless formed a very vague idea. On this affair I meditated much, and it awakened in my mind, for the first time, a doubt whether our exclusive system of ethics was an entirely salutary one, if it could lead the conscience of a believer to tolerate such acts as these, acts which my Father himself had denounced as dishonourable and disgraceful.
My stepmother brought with her a little library of such books as we had not previously seen, but which yet were known to all the world except us. Prominent among these was a set of the poems of Walter Scott, and in his unwonted geniality and provisional spirit of compromise, my Father must do no less than read these works aloud to my stepmother in the quiet spring evenings. This was a sort of aftermath of courtship, a tribute of song to his bride, very sentimental and pretty. She would sit, sedately, at her work-box, while he, facing her, poured forth the verses at her like a blackbird. I was not considered in this arrangement, which was wholly matrimonial, but I was present, and the exercise made more impression upon me than it did upon either of the principal agents.
My Father read the verse admirably, with a full,—some people (but not I) might say with a too full—perception of the metre as well as of the rhythm, rolling out the rhymes, and glorying in the proper names. He began, and it was a happy choice, with ‘The Lady of the Lake.’ It gave me singular pleasure to hear his large voice do justice to ‘Duncrannon’ and ‘Cambus-Kenneth,’ and wake the echoes with ‘Roderigh Vich Alphine dhu, ho! ieroe!’ I almost gasped with excitement, while a shudder floated down my backbone, when we came to:
A sharp and shrieking echo gave,
Coir-Uriskin, thy goblin cave!
And the grey pass where birches wave,
On Beala-nam-bo,
a passage which seemed to me to achieve the ideal of sublime romance. My thoughts were occupied all day long with the adventures of Fitzjames and the denizens of Ellen’s Isle. It became an obsession, and when I was asked whether I remembered the name of the cottage where the minister of the Bible Christians lodged, I answered, dreamily, ‘Yes,—Beala-nam-bo.’
Seeing me so much fascinated, thrown indeed into a temporary frenzy, by the epic poetry of Sir Walter Scott, my stepmother asked my Father whether I might not start reading the Waverley Novels. But he refused to permit this, on the ground that those tales gave false and disturbing pictures of life, and would lead away my attention from heavenly things. I do not fully apprehend what distinction he drew between the poems, which he permitted, and the novels, which he refused. But I suppose he regarded a work in verse as more artificial, and therefore less likely to make a realistic impression, than one in prose. There is something quaint in the conscientious scruple which allows ‘The Lord of the Isles’ and excludes ‘Rob Roy.’
But stranger still, and amounting almost to a whim, was his sudden decision that, although I might not touch the novels of Scott, I was free to read those of Dickens. I recollect that my stepmother showed some surprise at this, and that my Father explained to her that Dickens ‘exposes the passion of love in a ridiculous light.’ She did not seem to follow this recommendation, which indeed tends to the ultra-subtle, but she procured for me a copy of ‘Pickwick,’ by which I was instantly and gloriously enslaved. My shouts of laughing at the richer passages were almost scandalous, and led to my being reproved for disturbing my Father while engaged, in an upper room, in the study of God’s Word. I must have expended months on the perusal of ‘Pickwick,’ for I used to rush through a chapter, and then read it over again very slowly, word for word, and then shut my eyes to realise the figures and the action.
I suppose no child will ever again enjoy that rapture of unresisting humorous appreciation of ‘Pickwick.’ I felt myself to be in the company of a gentleman so extremely funny that I began to laugh before he began to speak; no sooner did he remark ‘the sky was dark and gloomy, the air was damp and raw,’ than I was in fits of hilarity. My retirement in our sequestered corner of life made me, perhaps, even in this matter, somewhat old-fashioned, and possibly I was the latest of the generation who accepted Mr Pickwick with an unquestioning and hysterical abandonment. Certainly few young people now seem sensitive, as I was, and as thousands before me had been, to the quality of his fascination.
It was curious that living in a household where a certain delicate art of painting was diligently cultivated, I had yet never seen a real picture, and was scarcely familiar with the design of one in engraving. My stepmother, however, brought a flavour of the fine arts with her; a kind of aesthetic odour, like that of lavender, clung to her as she moved. She had known authentic artists in her youth; she had watched Old Crome painting, and had taken a course of drawing-lessons from no less a person than Cotman. She painted small water-colour landscapes herself, with a delicate economy of means and a graceful Norwich convention; her sketch-books were filled with abbeys gently washed in, river-banks in sepia by which the elect might be dimly reminded of Liber Studiorum, and woodland scenes over which the ghost of Creswick had faintly breathed. It was not exciting art, but it was, so far as it went, in its lady-like reserve, the real thing. Our sea-anemones, our tropic birds, our bits of spongy rock frilled and sprayed with corallines, had been very conscientious and skilful, but, essentially, so far as art was concerned, the wrong thing.
Thus I began to acquire, without understanding the value of it, some conception of the elegant phases of early English water-colour painting, and there was one singular piece of a marble well brimming with water, and a greyish-blue sky over it, and dark-green poplars, shaped like wet brooms, menacing the middle distance, which Cotman himself had painted; and this seemed beautiful and curious to me in its dim, flat frame, when it was hoisted to a place on our drawing-room wall.
But still I had never seen a subject-picture, although my stepmother used to talk of the joys of the Royal Academy, and it was therefore with a considerable sense of excitement that I went, with my Father, to examine Mr Holman Hunt’s Finding of Christ in the Temple, which at this time was announced to be on public show at our neighbouring town. We paid our shillings and ascended with others to an upper room, bare of every disturbing object, in which a strong top-light raked the large and uncompromising picture. We looked at it for some time in silence, and then my Father pointed out to me various details, such as the phylacteries and the mitres, and the robes which distinguished the high priest.
Some of the other visitors, as I recollect, expressed astonishment and dislike of what they called the ‘Preraphaelite’ treatment, but we were not affected by that. Indeed, if anything, the exact, minute and hard execution of Mr Hunt was in sympathy with the methods we ourselves were in the habit of using when we painted butterflies and seaweeds, placing perfectly pure pigments side by side, without any nonsense about chiaroscuro. This large, bright, comprehensive picture made a very deep impression upon me, not exactly as a work of art, but as a brilliant natural specimen. I was pleased to have seen it, as I was pleased to have seen the comet, and the whale which was brought to our front door on a truck. It was a prominent addition to my experience.
The slender expansions of my interest which were now budding hither and thither do not se
em to have alarmed my Father at all. His views were short; if I appeared to be contented and obedient, if I responded pleasantly when he appealed to me, he was not concerned to discover the source of my cheerfulness. He put it down to my happy sense of joy in Christ, a reflection of the sunshine of grace beaming upon me through no intervening clouds of sin or doubt. The ‘saints’ were, as a rule, very easy to comprehend; their emotions lay upon the surface. If they were gay it was because they had no burden on their consciences, while, if they were depressed, the symptom might be depended upon as showing that their consciences were troubling them, and if they were indifferent and cold, it was certain that they were losing their faith and becoming hostile to godliness. It was almost a mechanical matter with these simple souls. But although I was so much younger, I was more complex and more crafty than the peasant ‘saints.’ My Father, not a very subtle psychologist, applied to me the same formulas which served him well at the meeting, but in my case the results were less uniformly successful.
The excitement of school-life and the enlargement of my circle of interests, combined to make Sunday, by contrast, a very tedious occasion. The absence of every species of recreation on the Lord’s Day grew to be a burden which might scarcely be borne. I have said that my freedom during the week had now become considerable; if I was at home punctually at meal-times, the rest of my leisure was not challenged. But this liberty, which in the summer holidays came to surpass that of ‘fishes that tipple in the deep,’ was put into more and more painful contrast with the unbroken servitude of Sunday.
My Father objected very strongly to the expression Sabbath-day, as it is commonly used by Presbyterians and others. He said, quite justly, that it was an inaccurate modern innovation, that Sabbath was Saturday, the seventh day of the week, not the first, a Jewish festival and not a Christian commemoration. Yet his exaggerated view with regard to the observance of the First Day, namely, that it must be exclusively occupied with public and private exercises of divine worship, was based much more upon a Jewish than upon a Christian law. In fact, I do not remember that my Father ever produced a definite argument from the New Testament in support of his excessive passivity on the Lord’s Day. He followed the early Puritan practice, except that he did not extend his observance, as I believe the old Puritans did, from sunset on Saturday to sunset on Sunday.
The observance of the Lord’s Day has already become universally so lax that I think there may be some value in preserving an accurate record of how our Sundays were spent five and forty years ago. We came down to breakfast at the usual time. My Father prayed briefly before we began the meal; after it, the bell was rung, and, before the breakfast was cleared away, we had a lengthy service of exposition and prayer with the servants. If the weather was fine, we then walked about the garden, doing nothing, for about half an hour. We then sat, each in a separate room, with our Bibles open and some commentary on the text beside us, and prepared our minds for the morning service. A little before 11 A.M. we sallied forth, carrying our Bibles and hymn-books, and went through the morning service of two hours at the Room; this was the central event of Sunday.
We then came back to dinner,—curiously enough to a hot dinner, always, with a joint, vegetables and puddings, so that the cook at least must have been busily at work,—and after it my Father and my stepmother took a nap, each in a different room, while I slipped out into the garden for a little while, but never venturing further afield. In the middle of the afternoon, my stepmother and I proceeded up the village to Sunday School, where I was early promoted to the tuition of a few very little boys. We returned in time for tea, immediately after which we all marched forth, again armed, as in the morning, with Bibles and hymn-books, and we went through the evening service, at which my father preached. The hour was now already past my weekday bedtime, but we had another service to attend, the Believers’ Prayer Meeting, which commonly occupied forty minutes more. Then we used to creep home, I often so tired that the weariness was like physical pain, and I was permitted, without further ‘worship,’ to slip upstairs to bed.
What made these Sundays, the observance of which was absolutely uniform, so peculiarly trying was that I was not permitted the indulgence of any secular respite. I might not open a scientific book, nor make a drawing, nor examine a specimen. I was not allowed to go into the road, except to proceed with my parents to the Room, nor to discuss worldly subjects at meals, nor to enter the little chamber where I kept my treasures. I was hotly and tightly dressed in black, all day long, as though ready at any moment to attend a funeral with decorum. Sometimes, towards evening, I used to feel the monotony and weariness of my position to be almost unendurable, but at this time I was meek, and I bowed to what I supposed to be the order of the universe.
Chapter 11
AS MY MENTAL horizon widened, my Father followed the direction of my spiritual eyes with some bewilderment, and knew not at what I gazed. Nor could I have put into words, nor can I even now define, the visions which held my vague and timid attention As a child develops, those who regard it with tenderness or impatience are seldom even approximately correct in their analysis of its intellectual movements, largely because, if there is anything to record, it defies adult definition. One curious freak of mentality I must now mention, because it took a considerable part in the enfranchisement of my mind, or rather in the formation of my thinking habits. But neither my Father nor my stepmother knew what to make of it, and to tell the truth I hardly know what to make of it myself.
Among the books which my new mother had brought with her were certain editions of the poets, an odd assortment. Campbell was there and Burns, and Keats, and the ‘Tales’ of Byron. Each of these might have been expected to appeal to me; but my emotion was too young, and I did not listen to them yet. Their imperative voices called me later. By the side of these romantic classics stood a small, thick volume, bound in black morocco, and comprising four reprinted works of the eighteenth century, gloomy, funereal poems of an order as wholly out of date as are the cross-bones and ruffled cherubim on the gravestones in a country churchyard. The four—and in this order, as I never shall forget—were ‘The Last Day’ of Dr Young, Blair’s ‘Grave,’ ‘Death’ by Bishop Beilby Porteus, and ‘The Deity’ of Samuel Boyse. These lugubrious effusions, all in blank verse or in the heroic couplet, represented, in its most redundant form, the artistic theology of the middle of the eighteenth century. They were steeped in such vengeful and hortatory sentiments as passed for elegant piety in the reign of George II.
How I came to open this solemn volume is explained by the oppressive exclusiveness of our Sundays. On the afternoon of the Lord’s Day, as I have already explained, I might neither walk, nor talk, nor explore our scientific library, nor indulge in furious feats of water-colour painting. The Plymouth-Brother theology which alone was open to me produced, at length, and particularly on hot afternoons, a faint physical nausea, a kind of secret headache. But, hitting one day upon the doleful book of verses, and observing its religious character, I asked ‘May I read that?’ and after a brief, astonished glance at the contents, I received ‘O certainly—if you can!’
The lawn sloped directly from a verandah at our drawing-room window, and it contained two immense elm-trees, which had originally formed part of the hedge of a meadow. In our trim and polished garden they then remained—they were soon afterwards cut down—rude and obtuse, with something primeval about them, something autochthonous; they were like two peasant ancestors surviving in a family that had advanced to gentility. They rose each out of a steep turfed hillock, and the root of one of them was long my favourite summer reading-desk; for I could lie stretched on the lawn, with my head and shoulders supported by the elm-tree hillock, and the book in a fissure of the rough turf. Thither then I escaped with my graveyard poets, and who shall explain the rapture with which I followed their austere morality?
Whether I really read consecutively in my black-bound volume I can no longer be sure, but it became a companion whose society I value
d, and at worst it was a thousand times more congenial to me than Jukes’ ‘On the Pentateuch’ or than a perfectly excruciating work ambiguously styled ‘The Javelin of Phineas,’ which lay smouldering in a dull red cover on the drawing-room table. I dipped my bucket here and there into my poets, and I brought up strange things. I brought up out of the depths of ‘The Last Day’ the following ejaculation of a soul roused by the trump of resurrection:—
Father of mercies! Why from silent earth
Didst thou awake, and curse me into birth?
Tear me from quiet, ravish me from night,
And make a thankless present of thy light?
Push into being a reverse of thee,
And animate a clod with misery?
I read these lines with a shiver of excitement, and in a sense I suppose little intended by the sanctimonious rector of Welwyn. I also read in the same piece the surprising description of how:—
