Father and Son

by Edmund Gosse

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

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

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

  Buskins of shells, all silver’d, used she,

  And branch’d with blushing coral to the knee,

  Where sparrows perched, of hollow pearl and gold,

  Such as the world would wonder to behold,—

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

  Amorous Leander, beautiful and young,

  Whose tragedy divine Musaeus sung,—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Epilogue

  THIS NARRATIVE, HOWEVER, must not be allowed to close with the Son in the foreground of the piece. If it has a value, that value consists in what light it may contrive to throw upon the unique and noble figure of the Father. With the advance of years, the characteristics of this figure became more severely outlined, more rigorously confined within settled limits. In relation to the Son—who presently departed at a very immature age, for the new life in London—the attitude of the Father continued to be one of extreme solicitude, deepening by degrees into disappointment and disenchantment. He abated no jot or tittle of his demands upon human frailty. He kept the spiritual cord drawn tight; the Biblical bearing-rein was incessantly busy, jerking into position the head of the dejected neophyte.