MY CHILDHOOD AND SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL INCIDENTS
And now for the child who was so happy in his surroundings, and, above
all, in those who were to care for him.
There were naturally certain nursery traditions about me of the
magnifying kind, but, taken as a whole, I don't think I can claim to
have been anything but a normal child, with health fair to moderate and
an intelligence which was reasonably quick and responsive. I had,
however, no educational precociousness; I did not read till I was nearly
nine, and even then did not use the power of reading. The book habit did
not come till I was twelve or thirteen-though then it came, as far as
poetry was concerned, with a rush. By fifteen I had read all the older
English poets and most of the new. In reading poetry I showed a devotion
which I am thankful to say I have always maintained. In this matter at
least I am the opposite of Darwin. He confessed that the power to read
poetry left him entirely in middle life. The older I grow, the more I
love verse.
The actual study of metre was a source of acute satisfaction. It is said
of me, indeed, that when, at a little more than two and a half years
old, we were starting for a long journey to Pau, where my mother had
been ordered to winter, I insisted on my father not packing, but taking
with him in his hand, Spenser's _Faerie Queen_. He had been reading
it to us that autumn. I did not know what a journey meant, but I was
determined the readings should not be broken. I also could not have
known what Spenser meant, but his stanza fed ear, and heart, and mind
with melody.
It was at this age, too, that I seem to have made two theological
observations which greatly amused my family. I was discovered one day
digging with tempestuous energy in the garden. When asked what I was
doing, I replied, "Digging for hell-fire!" That was especially curious
because my father, as a strong Broad Churchman and a devoted friend and
disciple of Frederick Maurice, was a wholehearted disbeliever in hell
and its flames. He had "dismissed Hell with costs," as Lord Westbury
said, ever since he came to man's estate. How I derived my knowledge on
this point was never cleared up. Demons with three-pronged forks and
curly tails are, of course, universally regarded as "the friends of
little children" by natural right, and my preference I must suppose was
transferred to their flaming home.
My other early piece of theological criticism was characteristic. Either
my father or my mother, I forget which, was explaining to me the story
of the Crucifixion and our Lord's arrest by the armed men of the High
Priest. Greatly surprised and perturbed by the fact that Christ did not
resist and make a fight of it I energetically enquired, "Hadn't He a
gun?" I was told No. "Hadn't He a sword?" No. And then: "Hadn't He even
a stick with a point?" Though not naturally combative, I have always
been a strong believer in the virtue of the counterattack as the best,
or, indeed, the only efficient form of self-defence.
I was, I believe, an easy-going, contented child, with no tendency to be
frightened either by strangers, by imaginary terrors, or by the dark. I
jogged easily along the Nursery high-road. There was, however, a family
tradition that, though as a rule I was perfectly willing to let other
children have my toys, and would not take the trouble to do what nurses
call "stand up for myself," I did occasionally astonish my playmates and
my guardians by super-passionate outbursts. These, however, were very
rare indeed, for all my life I have had a great dislike or even horror
of anything in the shape of losing my temper, an unconscious
recognition, as it were, of the wisdom of the Roman saying, "Anger is a
short madness." Instinctively I felt with Beaumont and Fletcher:
Oh, what a beast in uncollected man!
My general psychology, as far as I can tell from memory, was plain and
straightforward when a child. I have no recollection of feeling any
general depression or disappointment, of thinking that I was
misunderstood, _i.e._ of entertaining what is now called "an
inferiority complex." I never gave way to any form of childish
melancholy. I did not even have alarming, or mysterious, or metaphysical
dreams! What makes this more curious is the fact that I very much
outgrew my strength, about the age of nine or ten. I was not allowed to
play active games, or run about, or do any of the things in which I
delighted.
Though without great physical strength, I was all my life exceedingly
fond of the joys of bodily exercise, whether swimming, rowing, riding,
walking, mountaineering, skating, playing tennis or racquets or whatever
game was going.
In none of these pastimes did I reach anything approaching excellence,
but from all of them I got intense enjoyment. I tasted, indeed, almost
every form of athleticism and genuinely smacked my lips at the flavour
of each in turn, yet never bothered about the super-pleasure which
comes from doing such things as well as they can be done.
Though my bodily health did not give me an unhappy or depressed
childhood, or make me suffer from any sort of morbid reaction, I had
occasionally a very curious and somewhat rare experience--one which,
though it has been noted and discussed, has never, as far as I know,
been fully explained by physicians either of the body or of the soul.
The condition to which I refer is that which the musician Berlioz called
"_isolement_"--the sense of spiritual isolation, which seizes on
those who experience it with a poignancy amounting to awe. Wordsworth's
_Ode to Immortality_ affords the _locus classicus_ in the way
of description:
Fallings from us, vanishings,
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realised.
I once amused myself by getting together a large number of descriptions
of "_isolement_" and found that, though they may differ considerably,
they have in common the characteristics enumerated by the Ode.
The first thing to be noted about the sense of _isolement_ is that
it comes, not in sleeping, but in waking hours, and that, whether truly
or not, it brings with it the feeling that it is the result of some
external impulse. The best form of explanation, however, is to describe
as exactly as I can my own sensations. Though the sense of
_isolement_ has been experienced by me as a little child, as a lad,
as a young man, and even up to the age of forty or forty-five, the
recollections of my first visitation, which occurred when I could not
have been more, at the very most, than six years of age, are very much
more vivid and keener-edged than those of the later occasions.
Outside the two doors of the nurseries at Sutton Court there is a long
passage, and in this is something unusual--a little fire-place and
grate. I was one day standing in that passage, quite close to the grate,
and expecting nothing in particular. Then suddenly there came over me a
feeling so strange and so different from anything I had ever felt before
as to be almost terrifying. It was _overwhelming_ in the true
meaning of the word. Incredible as it seems in the case of so small a
child, I had the clearest and most poignant feeling of being left
completely, utterly alone, not merely in the world, but in something
far, far bigger--in the universe, in a vastness infinite and
unutterable.
As with Wordsworth, everything seemed to vanish and fall away from me,
even my own body. I was literally "beside myself." I stood a naked soul
in the sight of what I must _now_, though of course did not then,
call for want of better explanatory expressions, the All, the Only, the
Whole, the Everlasting. It was no annihilation, no temporary absorption
into the Universal Consciousness, no ingression into the Divine Shadow,
that the child experienced. Rather it was the amplest exaltation and
magnification of the Ego which it is possible to conceive. I gained, not
lost, by discarding the "lendings" of life. Something that was from one
point of view a void, and from another a rounded completeness, hemmed me
in.
Here I should perhaps interpolate yet another caveat. I did not, of
course, as a child, use or even know of the vocabulary of the
metaphysicians. I did, however, entertain thoughts which I could not
then express, but which the words given above most nearly represent.
There is one exception. In talking about "a naked soul" I am not
_interpreting_ my childish thrill of deep emotion into a later
vocabulary. I have always remembered the emotion in those very words. It
is so recorded on my memory. Of that I am sure.
The effect on me was intensely awe-inspiring--so awe-inspiring, indeed,
as to be disturbing in a high degree. Though it did not in the least
terrify me or torture me, or make me have anything approaching a dread
of its repetition, I experienced a kind of rawness and sensitiveness of
soul such as when, to put it pathologically, a super-sensitive mucous
membrane surface is touched roughly by a hand or instrument. One is not
exactly pained, but one quivers to the impact. So quivered my soul,
though not my brain or my body, for there was no suggestion of any
bodily faintness, or of any agitation of "grey matter," in the
experience. For example, I was not in the least dizzy. I was outside my
bodily self and far away from the world of matter.
In addition to this awe and sensitiveness, and what one might call
spiritual discomfort, there was something altogether curious and
unexpected, something that still remains for me as much the most vivid
and also much the most soul-shaking part of the experience, something
which many people will regard as impossible to have occupied the mind of
a child of six. I can best describe it, though very inadequately, as a
sudden realisation of the appalling greatness of the issues of living. I
avoid saying "life and death" deliberately, for Death was nowhere in the
picture. I was confronted in an instant, and without any preparation, or
gradation of emotion, not only with the immanence but with the ineffable
greatness of that whole of which I was a part. Though it may be a little
difficult to make the distinction clear, this feeling had nothing to do
with the sense of isolation. It was an entirely separate experience. I
felt, with a conviction which I know not how to translate into words,
that what I was "in for" by being a sentient human being was
immeasurably great. It was thence that the sense of awe came, thence the
extraordinary sensitiveness, thence the painful exhilaration, the
spiritual sublimation. "Oh! what a tremendous thing it is to be a living
person! Oh, how dreadfully great!" That is the way the child felt. That
was what kept ringing in my ears.
Though I was isolated, I had no sense of smallness or of utter
insignificance in face of the Universe. I did not feel myself a
miserable, fortuitous atom, a grain of cosmic dust. I felt, though,
again, I am interpreting rather than recording, that I was fully equal
to my fate. As a human being I was not only immortal, but _capax
imperii_,--a creature worthy of a heritage so tremendous.
From that day to this, talk about the unimportance, the futility of man
and his destiny has left me quite cold.
Though, as a small child, I was by no means without religious feeling,
and had, as I have always had, a deep and instinctive sense of the
Divine existence, I had not the least desire to translate my vision of
the universal into the terms of theology.
That is a very odd fact, but a fact it is. The vision remained, and
remains, isolated, immutable, and apart. Though I had perfect confidence
in my father and mother, and often talked to them of spiritual matters,
I did not at the time feel any impulse to relate my experience either to
them or to anyone else. I had no desire to unload my mind--a remarkable
thing for so eager a talker and expounder as I have always been. This
reticence, I am sure, came not from a fear of being laughed at, or of
shocking anyone, or again from a fear of a repetition of the experience.
It simply did not occur to me to talk. The experience was solely mine, I
was satisfied and even a little perturbed by the result. Probably some
sense of the great difficulty of finding words to fit my thoughts also
held me back.
It was only after two or three similar visitations that I casually told
the story of this "ecstasy" to my younger brother. I was then about
twenty-four and he twenty. I was much surprised to find that he had
never had any experiences of this particular kind, for I supposed them
common. He, however, became much interested, and some little time after
showed me the passage to which I have referred in Berlioz'
_Memoirs_.
This set me investigating, and I soon found examples of states of
ecstasy similar to, if not exactly like, my own. Tennyson supplied one
in the visional passages in the _Princess_. Kinglake had a
visitation akin to _isolement_. Wordsworth, however, came nearest
to my sensations. Indeed, he describes them exactly.
My later manifestations of _isolement_ were similar to my first,
though not so vivid. As I write at the age of sixty-two, my impression
is that the last occasion on which I experienced the sense of
_isolement_ was about twenty years ago. How welcome would be a
repetition! I do not, however, expect another ecstasy, any more than did
Wordsworth, and for very much the same reasons. I do not think that the
vision was due to any morbid or irregular working of the brain, or to
any other pathological or corporeal mal-functioning. I believe that the
experience was purely an experience of the spirit. That is why I
attribute to it a psychological and even metaphysical value.
At any rate, it corresponds with my personal metaphysic of existence.
Further, I think with Wordsworth that in all probability the fact that
it was most vivid in early childhood and gradually ceased when I grew
up, is a proof that in some way or other it was based on a spiritual
memory. Wordsworth, after the description I have already given, goes
on:--
High instincts, before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised;
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us--cherish--and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence; truths that wake
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor man nor boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
That seems to me the explanation which can most reasonably be applied to
the mental phenomena which I have described. It satisfied me completely.
Wordsworth struck the exact balance between mental exaltation and the
trembling "like a guilty thing surprised," of which I have given a more
prosaic account.
I must add here that the _Ode to Immorality_ is not a poem which my
father used to read to us as children, and as far as I can remember I
did not take to reading it, or know anything about it, till I was
seventeen or eighteen; that is, ten or twelve years later. Even when it
became a favourite with me, for some reason or other I did not dwell
upon the _isolement_ part of it, but rather upon the earlier
passages. Curiously enough, it was a quotation in Clough's _Amours de
Voyages_ which first made me realise that Wordsworth was dealing with
_isolement_.
I hope no one will think that in describing my experiences of
_isolement_ in my own mind I was exaggerating the importance of the
incident. I know that similar waking trances are very common. I also
know that modern psychology, or, I should say, certain schools of modern
psychology, regard them merely as manifestations or outcrops of the
unconscious self. If I understand the argument rightly, they hold that
just as in dreams the unconscious self gets possession of one's
personality and the consciousness is for a certain time deposed or
exiled, the same thing may happen, and does happen in our waking hours.
Therefore _isolement_ must not be regarded as anything wonderful or
mystic, but merely as a day-dream. I admit that this seems at first
sight a plausible explanation. Yet I can say with Gibbon, "this
statement is probable; but certainly false."
Anyone who has experienced the feeling as I experienced it would think
it by no means unlikely that it represented something far deeper, and
was due to some impulse external to oneself. Certainly to me the feeling
was essentially one of revelation, of being suddenly made to see and
understand things which before had been dark or unknown. I realised that
what I should now call the materialistic hypothesis would not help me to
a solution. No "fanciful shapes of a plastic earth" were in my vision.
My _Ego_, whatever it was or was to be, was, I perceived, a spirit
and not a creature of flesh-and-blood, and also not a hypothesis, but a
reality.
Since it is appropriate to my account of the phenomenon of
_isolement_, I may add a curious passage in Walt Whitman's
_Specimen Days and Collect_, which shows that the poet knew this
form of ecstasy:
Even for the treatment of the universal, in politics, metaphysics, or
anything, sooner or later we come down to our single, solitary soul.
There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises,
independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining,
eternal. This is the thought of identity--yours for you, whoever you
are, as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most
spiritual and vaguest of earth's dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and
only entrance to all facts. In such devout hours, in the midst of the
significant wonders of heaven and earth (significant only because of the
Me in the centre), creeds, conventions fall away and become of no
account before this simple idea. Under the luminousness of real vision,
it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the
fable, once liberated and look'd upon, it expands over the whole earth
and spreads to the roof of heaven. The quality of BEING, in the object's
self, according to its own central idea and purpose, and of growing
therefrom and thereto--not criticism by other standards and adjustments
thereto--is the lesson of Nature.
Who knows whether this may not be Walt Whitman's "secret," or, at any
rate, the spiritual experience of which the poet's latest biographer,
Mr. Emory Holloway, writes? His interesting account of Walt Whitman's
Manuscript Note-Books is preceded by the following statement:
The first of these (The MS. Note-Books) begins with a sense of
suppressed, half-articulate power in the language of a novel ecstasy.
Some mystical experience, some great if not sudden access of
intellectual power, some enlargement and clarifying of vision, some
selfless throb of cosmic sympathy, has come to Walt Whitman. At first he
can only ejaculate his wonder, and pray for the advent of a perfect man
who will be worthy to communicate to the world this new vision of
humanity. Then, like the prophet Isaiah, whose great book he is wont to
carry in his pocket to Coney Island, he suddenly realises that a vision
is itself a commission; and from this moment he dedicates himself to a
life task as audacious as it seems divine.
Though the subject, I admit, fascinates me, I must say no more on it,
lest my autobiography should become "a sort of a commentary" on "the
ecstasy," featuring Plotinus!
Though always intensely interested in things psychical, and a copious
reader of all the phenomena of the unseen world, I have only had one
other psychic adventure in the whole of my life, and that an
insignificant one. It is, however, worth recording shortly. It happened
that in the early autumn of the year 1920, while my son was away from
home, learning French in a family at Versailles, I went to my dressing-
room to sleep, at about three o'clock in the afternoon. I woke up at
four o'clock--an hour's sleep is my ration--with a start and the
recollection that I had just dreamt a dream of a very alarming kind. In
my dream my wife had come to me with a telegram in her hand, and had
told me that our son had been killed in a hunting accident in France.
The impression was extremely vivid, and for a moment I was greatly
perturbed. This, however, did not last. A little reflection soon made me
feel that it could be nothing but a bad dream--a nightmare. People do
not hunt in August, or at Versailles, and therefore there was no reason
whatever to regard the dream seriously. Still, as a faithful member of
the Psychical Society, I thought I must take notice of the incident,
even though it seemed ridiculous. No scientific investigator ever dares
to say that any "odd" observed fact is not worth considering.
Accordingly I sat down and wrote to my son, mentioning the dream and
asking whether between three and four on that day he was in any kind of
mental trouble or anxiety--anything that by an imperfect telephonic
message might have got through to me as a hunting accident. To my
astonishment, I received by return a letter from Versailles telling me
that about three-fifteen on the day in question he had been in a small
railway accident, which, though not resulting in any deaths, had injured
several people, and had given him a fairly severe shaking.
Considering how seldom I dream, and if I do dream, how seldom the dream
concerns anybody else, it is difficult to account for this as a mere
coincidence. My dreams, when I have them, are practically all of the
pure nightmare description and of the usual sealed-pattern. I am worried
by the sense of not being able to pack in time to catch my train, or
else I am compelled to go back to Oxford and try to pass an examination
under impossible and humiliating conditions. Indeed, I don't think I can
ever remember a dream, except this one about my son, which was of a non-
egotistical kind, that is, in which somebody else speaks, and of which I
am not the centre. In a word, it seems to me that, though my son had no
recollection of thinking of me (the accident was not important enough
for that), his unconscious self got busy and, as I was in a light sleep,
it was able to telephone an excited message to its nearest relation, my
unconscious self.