Among the delights of Summer were picnics to the woods. There would be
several during the course of the season. When the weather seemed to
inspire confidence, a few phaetons would be engaged for the family and
their relations and friends, and some Sunday morning the seat of each
carriage would be packed full of good things. We took tablecloth and
serviettes with us, bread, butter, eggs and salmon, sausages, cold meat
and coffee, as well as a few bottles of wine. Then we drove to some
keeper's house, where for money and fair words they scalded the tea for
us, and the day's meal was seasoned with the good appetite which the
outdoor air gave us.
As a child I preserved an uncomfortable and instructive recollection of
one of these expeditions. The next day my mother said to me: "You
behaved very ridiculously yesterday, and made a laughing stock of
yourself." "How?" "You went on in front of the grown-up people all the
time, and sang at the top of your voice. In the first place, you ought
not to go in front, and in the next place, you should not disturb other
people by singing." These words made an indelible impression upon me,
for I was conscious that I had not in the least intended to push myself
forward or put on airs. I could only dimly recollect that I had been
singing, and I had done it for my own pleasure, not to draw attention
to myself.
I learnt from this experience that it was possible, without being
naughty or conceited, to behave in an unpleasing manner, understood
that the others, whom I had not been thinking about, had looked on me
with disfavour, had thought me a nuisance and ridiculous, my mother in
particular; and I was deeply humiliated at the thought.
It gradually dawned upon me that there was no one more difficult to
please than my mother. No one was more chary of praise than she, and
she had a horror of all sentimentality. She met me with superior
intelligence, corrected me, and brought me up by means of satire. It
was possible to impress my aunts, but not her. The profound dread she
had of betraying her feelings or talking about them, the shrewdness
that dwelt behind that forehead of hers, her consistently critical and
clear-sighted nature, the mocking spirit that was so conspicuous in
her, especially in her younger days, gave me, with regard to her, a
conviction that had a stimulating effect on my character--namely, that
not only had she a mother's affection for me, but that the two shrewd
and scrutinising eyes of a very clever head were looking down upon me.
Rational as she was through and through, she met my visionary
inclinations, both religious and philosophical, with unshaken common
sense, and if I were sometimes tempted, by lesser people's
over-estimating of my abilities, to over-estimate them myself, it was
she who, with inflexible firmness, urged her conviction of the
limitations of my nature. None of my weaknesses throve in my mother's
neighbourhood.
This was the reason why, during the transitional years between boyhood
and adolescence, the years in which a boy feels a greater need of
sympathy than of criticism and of indulgence than of superiority, I
looked for and found comprehension as much from a somewhat younger
sister of my mother's as from the latter herself. This aunt was all
heart. She had an ardent, enthusiastic brain, was full of tenderness
and goodness and the keenest feeling for everything deserving of
sympathy, not least for me, while she had not my mother's critical
understanding. Her judgment might be obscured by passion; she sometimes
allowed herself to be carried to imprudent extremes; she had neither
Mother's equilibrium nor her satirical qualities. She was thus
admirably adapted to be the confidant of a big boy whom she gave to
understand that she regarded as extraordinarily gifted. When these
transitional years were over, Mother resumed undisputed sway, and the
relations between us remained in all essentials the same, even after I
had become much her superior in knowledge and she in some things my
pupil. So that it affected me very much when, many years after, my
younger brother said to me somewhat sadly: "Has it struck you, too,
that Mother is getting old?" "No, not at all," I replied. "What do you
think a sign of it?" "I think, God help me, that she is beginning to
admire us."