E-Text created by Martin Adamson
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Father and Son
A study of two temperaments
by Edmund Gosse
Der Glaube ist wie der Liebe:
Er Lasst sich nicht erzwingen.
Schopenhauer
PREFACE
AT the present hour, when fiction takes forms so ingenious and so
specious, it is perhaps necessary to say that the following
narrative, in all its parts, and so far as the punctilious
attention of the writer has been able to keep it so, is
scrupulously true. If it were not true, in this strict sense, to
publish it would be to trifle with all those who may be induced
to read it. It is offered to them as a _document_, as a record of
educational and religious conditions which, having passed away,
will never return. In this respect, as the diagnosis of a dying
Puritanism, it is hoped that the narrative will not be altogether
without significance.
It offers, too, in a subsidiary sense, a study of the development
of moral and intellectual ideas during the progress of infancy.
These have been closely and conscientiously noted, and may have
some value in consequence of the unusual conditions in which they
were produced. The author has observed that those who have
written about the facts of their own childhood have usually
delayed to note them down until age has dimmed their
recollections. Perhaps an even more common fault in such
autobiographies is that they are sentimental, and are falsified
by self-admiration and self-pity. The writer of these
recollections has thought that if the examination of his earliest
years was to be undertaken at all, it should be attempted while
his memory is still perfectly vivid and while he is still
unbiased by the forgetfulness or the sensibility of advancing
years.
At one point only has there been any tampering with precise fact.
It is believed that, with the exception of the Son, there is but
one person mentioned in this book who is still alive.
Nevertheless, it has been thought well, in order to avoid any
appearance of offence, to alter the majority of the proper names
of the private persons spoken of.
It is not usual, perhaps, that the narrative of a spiritual
struggle should mingle merriment and humour with a discussion of
the most solemn subjects. It has, however, been inevitable that
they should be so mingled in this narrative. It is true that most
funny books try to be funny throughout, while theology is
scandalized if it awakens a single smile. But life is not
constituted thus, and this book is nothing if it is not a genuine
slice of life. There was an extraordinary mixture of comedy and
tragedy in the situation which is here described, and those who
are affected by the pathos of it will not need to have it
explained to them that the comedy was superficial and the tragedy
essential.
September 1907
CHAPTER I
THIS book is the record of a struggle between two temperaments,
two consciences and almost two epochs. It ended, as was
inevitable, in disruption. Of the two human beings here
described, one was born to fly backward, the other could not help
being carried forward. There came a time when neither spoke the
same language as the other, or encompassed the same hopes, or was
fortified by the same desires. But, at least, it is some
consolation to the survivor, that neither, to the very last hour,
ceased to respect the other, or to regard him with a sad
indulgence.
The affection of these two persons was assailed by forces in
comparison with which the changes that health or fortune or place
introduce are as nothing. It is a mournful satisfaction, but yet
a satisfaction, that they were both of them able to obey the law
which says that ties of close family relationship must be
honoured and sustained. Had it not been so, this story would
never have been told.
The struggle began soon, yet of course it did not begin in early
infancy. But to familiarize my readers with the conditions of the
two persons (which were unusual) and with the outlines of their
temperaments (which were, perhaps innately, antagonistic), it is
needful to open with some account of all that I can truly and
independently recollect, as well as with some statements which
are, as will be obvious, due to household tradition.
My parents were poor gentlefolks; not young; solitary, sensitive,
and although they did not know it, proud. They both belonged to
what is called the Middle Class, and there was this further
resemblance between them that they each descended from families
which had been more than well-to-do in the eighteenth century,
and had gradually sunken in fortune. In both houses there had
been a decay of energy which had led to decay in wealth. In the
case of my Father's family it had been a slow decline; in that of
my Mother's, it had been rapid. My maternal grandfather was born
wealthy, and in the opening years of the nineteenth century,
immediately after his marriage, he bought a little estate in
North Wales, on the slopes of Snowdon. Here he seems to have
lived in a pretentious way, keeping a pack of hounds and
entertaining on an extravagant scale. He had a wife who
encouraged him in this vivid life, and three children, my Mother
and her two brothers. His best trait was his devotion to the
education of his children, in which he proclaimed himself a
disciple of Rousseau. But he can hardly have followed the
teaching of 'Emile' very closely, since he employed tutors to
teach his daughter, at an extremely early age, the very subjects
which Rousseau forbade, such as history, literature and foreign
languages.
My Mother was his special favourite, and his vanity did its best
to make a bluestocking of her. She read Greek, Latin and even a
little Hebrew, and, what was more important, her mind was trained
to be self-supporting. But she was diametrically opposed in
essential matters to her easy-going, luxurious and self-indulgent
parents. Reviewing her life in her thirtieth year, she remarked
in some secret notes: 'I cannot recollect the time when I did not
love religion.' She used a still more remarkable expression: 'If
I must date my conversion from my first wish and trial to be
holy, I may go back to infancy; if I am to postpone it till after
my last wilful sin, it is scarcely yet begun.' The irregular
pleasures of her parents' life were deeply distasteful to her, as
such were to many young persons in those days of the wide revival
of Conscience, and when my grandfather, by his reckless
expenditure, which he never checked till ruin was upon him, was
obliged to sell his estate, and live in penury, my Mother was the
only member of the family who did not regret the change. For my
own part, I believe I should have liked my reprobate maternal
grandfather, but his conduct was certainly very vexatious. He
died, in his eightieth year, when I was nine months old.
It was a curious coincidence that life had brought both my
parents along similar paths to an almost identical position in
respect to religious belief. She had started from the Anglican
standpoint, he from the Wesleyan, and each, almost without
counsel from others, and after varied theological experiments,
had come to take up precisely the same attitude towards all
divisions of the Protestant Church--that, namely, of detached and
unbiased contemplation. So far as the sects agreed with my Father
and my Mother, the sects were walking in the light; wherever they
differed from them, they had slipped more or less definitely into
a penumbra of their own making, a darkness into which neither of
my parents would follow them. Hence, by a process of selection,
my Father and my Mother alike had gradually, without violence,
found themselves shut outside all Protestant communions, and at
last they met only with a few extreme Calvinists like themselves,
on terms of what may almost be called negation--with no priest, no
ritual, no festivals, no ornament of any kind, nothing but the
Lord's Supper and the exposition of Holy Scripture drawing these
austere spirits into any sort of cohesion. They called themselves
'the Brethren', simply; a title enlarged by the world outside
into 'Plymouth Brethren'.
It was accident and similarity which brought my parents together
at these meetings of the Brethren. Each was lonely, each was
poor, each was accustomed to a strenuous intellectual self-
support. He was nearly thirty-eight, she was past forty-two, when
they married. From a suburban lodging, he brought her home to his
mother's little house in the northeast of London without a
single day's honeymoon. My Father was a zoologist, and a writer
of books on natural history; my Mother also was a writer, author
already of two slender volumes of religious verse--the earlier of
which, I know not how, must have enjoyed some slight success,
since a second edition was printed--afterwards she devoted her
pen to popular works of edification. But how infinitely removed
in their aims, their habits, their ambitions from 'literary'
people of the present day, words are scarcely adequate to
describe. Neither knew nor cared about any manifestation of
current literature. For each there had been no poet later than
Byron, and neither had read a romance since, in childhood, they
had dipped into the Waverley Novels as they appeared in
succession. For each the various forms of imaginative and
scientific literature were merely means of improvement and
profit, which kept the student 'out of the world', gave him full
employment, and enabled him to maintain himself. But pleasure was
found nowhere but in the Word of God, and to the endless
discussion of the Scriptures each hurried when the day's work was
over.
In this strange household the advent of a child was not welcomed,
but was borne with resignation. The event was thus recorded in my
Father's diary:
'E. delivered of a son. Received green swallow from Jamaica.'
This entry has caused amusement, as showing that he was as much
interested in the bird as in the boy. But this does not follow;
what the wording exemplifies is my Father's extreme punctilio.
The green swallow arrived later in the day than the son, and the
earlier visitor was therefore recorded first; my Father was
scrupulous in every species of arrangement.
Long afterwards, my Father told me that my Mother suffered much
in giving birth to me, and that, uttering no cry, I appeared to
be dead. I was laid, with scant care, on another bed in the room,
while all anxiety and attention were concentrated on my Mother.
An old woman who happened to be there, and who was unemployed,
turned her thoughts to me, and tried to awake in me a spark of
vitality. She succeeded, and she was afterwards complimented by
the doctor on her cleverness. My Father could not--when he told
me the story--recollect the name of my preserver. I have often
longed to know who she was. For all the rapture of life, for all
its turmoils, its anxious desires, its manifold pleasures, and
even for its sorrow and suffering, I bless and praise that
anonymous old lady from the bottom of my heart.
It was six weeks before my Mother was able to leave her room. The
occasion was made a solemn one, and was attended by a species of
Churching. Mr. Balfour, a valued minister of the denomination,
held a private service in the parlour, and 'prayed for our child,
that he may be the Lord's'. This was the opening act of that
'dedication' which was never henceforward forgotten, and of which
the following pages will endeavour to describe the results.
Around my tender and unconscious spirit was flung the luminous
web, the light and elastic but impermeable veil, which it was
hoped would keep me 'unspotted from the world'.
Until this time my Father's mother had lived in the house and
taken the domestic charges of it on her own shoulders. She now
consented to leave us to ourselves. There is no question that her
exodus was a relief to my Mother, since my paternal grandmother
was a strong and masterful woman, buxom, choleric and practical,
for whom the interests of the mind did not exist. Her daughter-
in-law, gentle as she was, and ethereal in manner and appearance--
strangely contrasted (no doubt), in her tinctures of gold hair
and white skin, with my grandmother's bold carnations and black
tresses--was yet possessed of a will like tempered steel. They
were better friends apart, with my grandmother lodged hard by, in
a bright room, her household gods and bits of excellent
eighteenth-century furniture around her, her miniatures and
sparkling china arranged on shelves.
Left to my Mother's sole care, I became the centre of her
solicitude. But there mingled with those happy animal instincts
which sustain the strength and patience of every human mother and
were fully present with her--there mingled with these certain
spiritual determinations which can be but rare. They are, in
their outline, I suppose, vaguely common to many religious
mothers, but there are few indeed who fill up the sketch with so
firm a detail as she did. Once again I am indebted to her secret
notes, in a little locked volume, seen until now, nearly sixty
years later, by no eye save her own. Thus she wrote when I was
two months old:
'We have given him to the Lord; and we trust that He will really
manifest him to be His own, if he grow up; and if the Lord take
him early, we will not doubt that he is taken to Himself. Only,
if it please the Lord to take him, I do trust we may be spared
seeing him suffering in lingering illness and much pain. But in
this as in all things His will is better than what we can choose.
Whether his life be prolonged or not, it has already been a
blessing to us, and to the saints, in leading us to much prayer,
and bringing us into varied need and some trial.'
The last sentence is somewhat obscure to me. How, at that tender
age, I contrived to be a blessing 'to the saints' may surprise
others and puzzles myself. But 'the saints' was the habitual term
by which were indicated the friends who met on Sunday mornings
for Holy Communion, and at many other times in the week for
prayer and discussion of the Scriptures, in the small hired hall
at Hackney, which my parents attended. I suppose that the solemn
dedication of me to the Lord, which was repeated in public in my
Mother's arms, being by no means a usual or familiar ceremony
even among the Brethren, created a certain curiosity and fervour
in the immediate services, or was imagined so to do by the fond,
partial heart of my Mother. She, however, who had been so much
isolated, now made the care of her child an excuse for retiring
still further into silence. With those religious persons who met
at the Room, as the modest chapel was called, she had little
spiritual, and no intellectual, sympathy. She noted:
'I do not think it would increase my happiness to be in the midst
of the saints at Hackney. I have made up my mind to give myself
up to Baby for the winter, and to accept no invitations. To go
when I can to the Sunday morning meetings and to see my own
Mother.'
The monotony of her existence now became extreme, but she seems
to have been happy. Her days were spent in taking care of me, and
in directing one young servant. My Father was forever in his
study, writing, drawing, dissecting; sitting, no doubt, as I grew
afterwards accustomed to see him, absolutely motionless, with his
eye glued to the microscope, for twenty minutes at a time. So the
greater part of every weekday was spent, and on Sunday he
usually preached one, and sometimes two extempore sermons. His
workday labours were rewarded by the praise of the learned
world, to which he was indifferent, but by very little money,
which he needed more. For over three years after their marriage,
neither of my parents left London for a single day, not being
able to afford to travel. They received scarcely any visitors,
never ate a meal away from home, never spent an evening in social
intercourse abroad. At night they discussed theology, read aloud
to one another, or translated scientific brochures from French or
German. It sounds a terrible life of pressure and deprivation,
and that it was physically unwholesome there can be no shadow of
a doubt. But their contentment was complete and unfeigned. In the
midst of this, materially, the hardest moment of their lives,
when I was one year old, and there was a question of our leaving
London, my Mother recorded in her secret notes:
'We are happy and contented, having all things needful and
pleasant, and our present habitation is hallowed by many sweet
associations. We have our house to ourselves and enjoy each
other's society. If we move we shall no longer be alone. The
situation may be more favourable, however, for Baby, as being
more in the country. I desire to have no choice in the matter,
but as I know not what would be for our good, and God knows, so I
desire to leave it with Him, and if it is not His will we should
move, He will raise objections and difficulties, and if it is His
will He will make Henry [my Father] desirous and anxious to take
the step, and then, whatever the result, let us leave all to Him
and not regret it.'
No one who is acquainted with the human heart will mistake this
attitude of resignation for weakness of purpose. It was not
poverty of will, it was abnegation, it was a voluntary act. My
Mother, underneath an exquisite amenity of manner, concealed a
rigour of spirit which took the form of a constant self-denial.
For it to dawn upon her consciousness that she wished for
something, was definitely to renounce that wish, or, more
exactly, to subject it in every thing to what she conceived to be
the will of God.
This is perhaps the right moment for me to say that at this time,
and indeed until the hour of her death, she exercised, without
suspecting it, a magnetic power over the will and nature of my
Father. Both were strong, but my Mother was unquestionably the
stronger of the two; it was her mind which gradually drew his to
take up a certain definite position, and this remained permanent
although she, the cause of it, was early removed. Hence, while it
was with my Father that the long struggle which I have to narrate
took place, behind my Father stood the ethereal memory of my
Mother's will, guiding him, pressing him, holding him to the
unswerving purpose which she had formed and defined. And when the
inevitable disruption came, what was unspeakably painful was to
realize that it was not from one, but from both parents that the
purpose of the child was separated.
My Mother was a Puritan in grain, and never a word escaped her,
not a phrase exists in her diary, to suggest that she had any
privations to put up with. She seemed strong and well, and so did
I; the one of us who broke down was my Father. With his attack of
acute nervous dyspepsia came an unexpected small accession of
money, and we were able, in my third year, to take a holiday of
nearly ten months in Devonshire. The extreme seclusion, the
unbroken strain, were never repeated, and when we returned to
London, it was to conditions of greater amenity and to a less
rigid practice of 'the world forgetting by the world forgot'.
That this relaxation was more relative than positive, and that
nothing ever really tempted either of my parents from their
cavern in an intellectual Thebaid, my recollections will amply
prove. But each of them was forced by circumstances into a more
or less public position, and neither could any longer quite
ignore the world around.
It is not my business here to re-write the biographies of my
parents. Each of them became, in a certain measure, celebrated,
and each was the subject of a good deal of contemporary
discussion. Each was prominent before the eyes of a public of his
or her own, half a century ago. It is because their minds were
vigorous and their accomplishments distinguished that the
contrast between their spiritual point of view and the aspect of
a similar class of persons today is interesting and may, I hope,
be instructive. But this is not another memoir of public
individuals, each of whom has had more than one biographer. My
serious duty, as I venture to hold it, is other;
that's the world's side,
Thus men saw them, praised them, thought they knew them!
There, in turn, I stood aside and praised them!
Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it.
But this is a different inspection, this is a study of
the other side, the novel
Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of,
the record of a state of soul once not uncommon in Protestant
Europe, of which my parents were perhaps the latest consistent
exemplars among people of light and leading.
The peculiarities of a family life, founded upon such principles,
are, in relation to a little child, obvious; but I may be
permitted to recapitulate them. Here was perfect purity, perfect
intrepidity, perfect abnegation; yet there was also narrowness,
isolation, an absence of perspective, let it be boldly admitted,
an absence of humanity. And there was a curious mixture of
humbleness and arrogance; entire resignation to the will of God
and not less entire disdain of the judgement and opinion of man.
My parents founded every action, every attitude, upon their
interpretation of the Scriptures, and upon the guidance of the
Divine Will as revealed to them by direct answer to prayer. Their
ejaculation in the face of any dilemma was, 'Let us cast it
before the Lord!'
So confident were they of the reality of their intercourse with
God, that they asked for no other guide. They recognized no
spiritual authority among men, they subjected themselves to no
priest or minister, they troubled their consciences about no
current manifestation of 'religious opinion'. They lived in an
intellectual cell, bounded at its sides by the walls of their own
house, but open above to the very heart of the uttermost heavens.
This, then, was the scene in which the soul of a little child was
planted, not as in an ordinary open flower-border or carefully
tended social _parterre_, but as on a ledge, split in the granite
of some mountain. The ledge was hung between night and the snows
on one hand, and the dizzy depths of the world upon the other;
was furnished with just soil enough for a gentian to struggle
skywards and open its stiff azure stars; and offered no
lodgement, no hope of salvation, to any rootlet which should
stray beyond its inexorable limits.