OUT of the darkness of my infancy there comes only one flash of
memory. I am seated alone, in my baby-chair, at a dinner-table
set for several people. Somebody brings in a leg of mutton, puts
it down close to me, and goes out. I am again alone, gazing at
two low windows, wide open upon a garden. Suddenly, noiselessly,
a large, long animal (obviously a greyhound) appears at one
window-sill, slips into the room, seizes the leg of mutton and
slips out again. When this happened I could not yet talk. The
accomplishment of speech came to me very late, doubtless because
I never heard young voices. Many years later, when I mentioned
this recollection, there was a shout of laughter and surprise:
'That, then, was what became of the mutton! It was not you, who,
as your Uncle A. pretended, ate it up, in the twinkling of an
eye, bone and all!'
I suppose that it was the startling intensity of this incident
which stamped it upon a memory from which all other impressions
of this early date have vanished.
The adventure of the leg of mutton occurred, evidently, at the
house of my Mother's brothers, for my parents, at this date,
visited no other. My uncles were not religious men, but they had
an almost filial respect for my Mother, who was several years
senior to the elder of them. When the catastrophe of my
grandfather's fortune had occurred, they had not yet left school.
My Mother, in spite of an extreme dislike of teaching, which was
native to her, immediately accepted the situation of a governess
in the family of an Irish nobleman. The mansion was only to be
approached, as Miss Edgeworth would have said, 'through eighteen
sloughs, at the imminent peril of one's life', and when one had
reached it, the mixture of opulence and squalor, of civility and
savagery, was unspeakable. But my Mother was well paid, and she
stayed in this distasteful environment, doing the work she hated
most, while with the margin of her salary she helped first one of
her brothers and then the other through his Cambridge course.
They studied hard and did well at the university. At length their
sister received, in her 'ultima Thule', news that her younger
brother had taken his degree, and then and there, with a sigh of
intense relief, she resigned her situation and came straight back
to England.
It is not to be wondered at, then, that my uncles looked up to
their sister with feelings of especial devotion. They were not
inclined, they were hardly in a position, to criticize her modes
of thought. They were easy-going, cultured and kindly gentlemen,
rather limited in their views, without a trace of their sister's
force of intellect or her strenuous temper. E. resembled her in
person, he was tall, fair, with auburn curls; he cultivated a
certain tendency to the Byronic type, fatal and melancholy. A.
was short, brown and jocose, with a pretension to common sense;
bluff and chatty. As a little child, I adored my Uncle E., who
sat silent by the fireside holding me against his knee, saying
nothing, but looking unutterably sad, and occasionally shaking
his warm-coloured tresses. With great injustice, on the other
hand, I detested my Uncle A., because he used to joke in a manner
very displeasing to me, and because he would so far forget
himself as to chase, and even, if it will be credited, to tickle
me. My uncles, who remained bachelors to the end of their lives,
earned a comfortable living; E. by teaching, A. as 'something in
the City', and they rented an old rambling house in Clapton, that
same in which I saw the greyhound. Their house had a strange,
delicious smell, so unlike anything I smelt anywhere else, that
it used to fill my eyes with tears of mysterious pleasure. I know
now that this was the odour of cigars, tobacco being a species of
incense tabooed at home on the highest religious grounds.
It has been recorded that I was slow in learning to speak. I used
to be told that having met all invitations to repeat such words
as 'Papa' and 'Mamma' with gravity and indifference, I one day
drew towards me a volume, and said 'book' with startling
distinctness. I was not at all precocious, but at a rather early
age, I think towards the beginning of my fourth year, I learned
to read. I cannot recollect a time when a printed page of English
was closed to me. But perhaps earlier still my Mother used to
repeat to me a poem which I have always taken for granted that
she had herself composed, a poem which had a romantic place in my
early mental history. It ran thus, I think:
O pretty Moon, you shine so bright!
I'll go to bid Mamma good-night,
And then I'll lie upon my bed
And watch you move above my head.
Ah! there, a cloud has hidden you!
But I can see your light shine thro';
It tries to hide you--quite in vain,
For--there you quickly come again!
It's God, I know, that makes you shine
Upon this little bed of mine;
But I shall all about you know
When I can read and older grow.
Long, long after the last line had become an anachronism, I used
to shout this poem from my bed before I went to sleep, whether
the night happened to be moonlit or no.
It must have been my Father who taught me my letters. To my
Mother, as I have said, it was distasteful to teach, though she
was so prompt and skillful to learn. My Father, on the contrary,
taught cheerfully, by fits and starts. In particular, he had a
scheme for rationalizing geography, which I think was admirable.
I was to climb upon a chair, while, standing at my side, with a
pencil and a sheet of paper, he was to draw a chart of the
markings on the carpet. Then, when I understood the system,
another chart on a smaller scale of the furniture in the room,
then of a floor of the house, then of the back-garden, then of a
section of the street. The result of this was that geography came
to me of itself, as a perfectly natural miniature arrangement of
objects, and to this day has always been the science which gives
me least difficulty. My father also taught me the simple rules of
arithmetic, a little natural history, and the elements of
drawing; and he laboured long and unsuccessfully to make me learn
by heart hymns, psalms and chapters of Scripture, in which I
always failed ignominiously and with tears. This puzzled and
vexed him, for he himself had an extremely retentive textual
memory. He could not help thinking that I was naughty, and would
not learn the chapters, until at last he gave up the effort. All
this sketch of an education began, I believe, in my fourth year,
and was not advanced or modified during the rest of my Mother's
life.
Meanwhile, capable as I was of reading, I found my greatest
pleasure in the pages of books. The range of these was limited,
for story-books of every description were sternly excluded. No
fiction of any kind, religious or secular, was admitted into the
house. In this it was to my Mother, not to my Father, that the
prohibition was due. She had a remarkable, I confess to me still
somewhat unaccountable impression that to 'tell a story', that
is, to compose fictitious narrative of any kind, was a sin. She
carried this conviction to extreme lengths. My Father, in later
years, gave me some interesting examples of her firmness. As a
young man in America, he had been deeply impressed by
'Salathiel', a pious prose romance by that then popular writer,
the Rev. George Croly. When he first met my Mother, he
recommended it to her, but she would not consent to open it. Nor
would she read the chivalrous tales in verse of Sir Walter Scott,
obstinately alleging that they were not 'true'. She would read
none but lyrical and subjective poetry. Her secret diary reveals
the history of this singular aversion to the fictitious, although
it cannot be said to explain the cause of it. As a child,
however, she had possessed a passion for making up stories, and
so considerable a skill in it that she was constantly being
begged to indulge others with its exercise. But I will, on so
curious a point, leave her to speak for herself:
'When I was a very little child, I used to amuse myself and my
brothers with inventing stories, such as I read. Having, as I
suppose, naturally a restless mind and busy imagination, this
soon became the chief pleasure of my life. Unfortunately, my
brothers were always fond of encouraging this propensity, and I
found in Taylor, my maid, a still greater tempter. I had not
known there was any harm in it, until Miss Shore [a Calvinist
governess], finding it out, lectured me severely, and told me it
was wicked. From that time forth I considered that to invent a
story of any kind was a sin. But the desire to do so was too
deeply rooted in my affections to be resisted in my own strength
[she was at that time nine years of age], and unfortunately I knew
neither my corruption nor my weakness, nor did I know where to
gain strength. The longing to invent stories grew with violence;
everything I heard or read became food for my distemper. The
simplicity of truth was not sufficient for me; I must needs
embroider imagination upon it, and the folly, vanity and
wickedness which disgraced my heart are more than I am able to
express. Even now [at the age of twenty-nine], tho' watched,
prayed and striven against, this is still the sin that most
easily besets me. It has hindered my prayers and prevented my
improvement, and therefore, has humbled me very much.'
This is, surely, a very painful instance of the repression of an
instinct. There seems to have been, in this case, a vocation such
as is rarely heard, and still less often wilfully disregarded and
silenced. Was my Mother intended by nature to be a novelist? I
have often thought so, and her talents and vigour of purpose,
directed along the line which was ready to form 'the chief
pleasure of her life', could hardly have failed to conduct her to
great success. She was a little younger than Bulwer Lytton, a
little older than Mrs. Gaskell--but these are vain and trivial
speculations!
My own state, however, was, I should think, almost unique among
the children of cultivated parents. In consequence of the stern
ordinance which I have described, not a single fiction was read
or told to me during my infancy. The rapture of the child who
delays the process of going to bed by cajoling 'a story' out of
his mother or his nurse, as he sits upon her knee, well tucked
up, at the corner of the nursery fire--this was unknown to me.
Never in all my early childhood did anyone address to me the
affecting preamble, 'Once upon a time!' I was told about
missionaries, but never about pirates; I was familiar with
hummingbirds, but I had never heard of fairies--Jack the Giant-
Killer, Rumpelstiltskin and Robin Hood were not of my
acquaintance; and though I understood about wolves, Little Red
Ridinghood was a stranger even by name. So far as my 'dedication'
was concerned, I can but think that my parents were in error thus
to exclude the imaginary from my outlook upon facts. They desired
to make me truthful; the tendency was to make me positive and
sceptical. Had they wrapped me in the soft folds of supernatural
fancy, my mind might have been longer content to follow their
traditions in an unquestioning spirit.
Having easily said what, in those early years, I did not read, I
have great difficulty in saying what I did read. But a queer
variety of natural history, some of it quite indigestible by my
undeveloped mind; many books of travels, mainly of a scientific
character, among them voyages of discovery in the South Seas, by
which my brain was dimly filled with splendour; some geography
and astronomy, both of them sincerely enjoyed; much theology,
which I desired to appreciate but could never get my teeth into
(if I may venture to say so), and over which my eye and tongue
learned to slip without penetrating, so that I would read, and
read aloud, and with great propriety of emphasis, page after page
without having formed an idea or retained an expression. There
was, for instance, a writer on prophecy called Jukes, of whose
works each of my parents was inordinately fond, and I was early
set to read Jukes aloud to them. I did it glibly, like a machine,
but the sight of Jukes' volumes became an abomination to me, and
I never formed the outline of a notion what they were about.
Later on, a publication called _The Penny Cyclopaedia_ became my
daily, and for a long time almost my sole study; to the subject
of this remarkable work I may presently return.
It is difficult to keep anything like chronological order in
recording fragments of early recollection, and in speaking of my
reading I have been led too far ahead. My memory does not,
practically, begin till we returned from certain visits, made
with a zoological purpose, to the shores of Devon and Dorset, and
settled, early in my fifth year, in a house at Islington, in the
north of London. Our circumstances were now more easy; my Father
had regular and well-paid literary work; and the house was larger
and more comfortable than ever before, though still very simple
and restricted. My memories, some of which are exactly dated by
certain facts, now become clear and almost abundant. What I do
not remember, except from having it very often repeated to me,
is what may be considered the only 'clever' thing that I said
during an otherwise unillustrious childhood. It was not
startlingly 'clever', but it may pass. A lady--when I was just
four--rather injudiciously showed me a large print of a human
skeleton, saying, 'There! you don't know what that is, do you?'
Upon which, immediately and very archly, I replied, 'Isn't it a
man with the meat off?' This was thought wonderful, and, as it is
supposed that I had never had the phenomenon explained to me, it
certainly displays some quickness in seizing an analogy. I had
often watched my Father, while he soaked the flesh off the bones
of fishes and small mammals. If I venture to repeat this trifle,
it is only to point out that the system on which I was being
educated deprived all things, human life among the rest, of their
mystery. The 'bare-grinning skeleton of death' was to me merely a
prepared specimen of that featherless plantigrade vertebrate,
'homo sapiens'.
As I have said that this anecdote was thought worth repeating, I
ought to proceed to say that there was, so far as I can
recollect, none of that flattery of childhood which is so often
merely a backhanded way of indulging the vanity of parents. My
Mother, indeed, would hardly have been human if she had not
occasionally entertained herself with the delusion that her
solitary duckling was a cygnet. This my Father did not encourage,
remarking, with great affection, and chucking me under the chin,
that I was 'a nice little ordinary boy'. My Mother, stung by this
want of appreciation, would proceed so far as to declare that she
believed that in future times the F.R.S. would be chiefly known
as his son's father! (This is a pleasantry frequent in
professional families.)
To this my Father, whether convinced or not, would make no demur,
and the couple would begin to discuss, in my presence, the
direction which my shining talents would take. In consequence of
my dedication to 'the Lord's Service', the range of possibilities
was much restricted. My Father, who had lived long in the
Tropics, and who nursed a perpetual nostalgia for 'the little
lazy isles where the trumpet-orchids blow', leaned towards the
field of missionary labour. My Mother, who was cold about foreign
missions, preferred to believe that I should be the Charles
Wesley of my age, 'or perhaps', she had the candour to admit,
'merely the George Whitefield'. I cannot recollect the time when
I did not understand that I was going to be a minister of the
Gospel.
It is so generally taken for granted that a life strictly
dedicated to religion is stiff and dreary, that I may have some
difficulty in persuading my readers that, as a matter of fact, in
these early days of my childhood, before disease and death had
penetrated to our slender society, we were always cheerful and
often gay. My parents were playful with one another, and there
were certain stock family jests which seldom failed to enliven
the breakfast table. My Father and Mother lived so completely in
the atmosphere of faith, and were so utterly convinced of their
intercourse with God, that, so long as that intercourse was not
clouded by sin, to which they were delicately sensitive, they
could afford to take the passing hour very lightly. They would
even, to a certain extent, treat the surroundings of their
religion as a subject of jest, joking very mildly and gently
about such things as an attitude at prayer or the nature of a
supplication. They were absolutely indifferent to forms. They
prayed, seated in their chairs, as willingly as, reversed, upon
their knees; no ritual having any significance for them. My
Mother was sometimes extremely gay, laughing with a soft, merry
sound. What I have since been told of the guileless mirth of nuns
in a convent has reminded me of the gaiety of my parents during
my early childhood.
So long as I was a mere part of them, without individual
existence, and swept on, a satellite, in their atmosphere, I was
mirthful when they were mirthful, and grave when they were grave.
The mere fact that I had no young companions, no storybooks, no
outdoor amusements, none of the thousand and one employments
provided for other children in more conventional surroundings,
did not make me discontented or fretful, because I did not know
of the existence of such entertainments. In exchange, I became
keenly attentive to the limited circle of interests open to me.
Oddly enough, I have no recollection of any curiosity about other
children, nor of any desire to speak to them or play with them.
They did not enter into my dreams, which were occupied entirely
with grown-up people and animals. I had three dolls, to whom my
attitude was not very intelligible. Two of these were female, one
with a shapeless face of rags, the other in wax. But, in my fifth
year, when the Crimean War broke out, I was given a third doll, a
soldier, dressed very smartly in a scarlet cloth tunic. I used to
put the dolls on three chairs, and harangue them aloud, but my
sentiment to them was never confidential, until our maid-servant
one day, intruding on my audience, and misunderstanding the
occasion of it, said: 'What? a boy, and playing with a soldier
when he's got two lady-dolls to play with?' I had never thought
of my dolls as confidants before, but from that time forth I paid
a special attention to the soldier, in order to make up to him
for Lizzie's unwarrantable insult.
The declaration of war with Russia brought the first breath of
outside life into our Calvinist cloister. My parents took in a
daily newspaper, which they had never done before, and events in
picturesque places, which my Father and I looked out on the map,
were eagerly discussed. One of my vividest early memories can be
dated exactly. I was playing about the house, and suddenly burst
into the breakfast-room, where, close to the door, sat an amazing
figure, a very tall young man, as stiff as my doll, in a gorgeous
scarlet tunic. Quite far away from him, at her writing-table, my
Mother sat with her Bible open before her, and was urging the
gospel plan of salvation on his acceptance. She promptly told me
to run away and play, but I had seen a great sight. This
guardsman was in the act of leaving for the Crimea, and his
adventures,--he was converted in consequence of my Mother's
instruction,--were afterwards told by her in a tract, called 'The
Guardsman of the Alma', of which I believe that more than half a
million copies were circulated. He was killed in that battle, and
this added an extraordinary lustre to my dream of him. I see him
still in my mind's eye, large, stiff, and unspeakably brilliant,
seated, from respect, as near as possible to our parlour door.
This apparition gave reality to my subsequent conversations with
the soldier doll.
That same victory of the Alma, which was reported in London on my
fifth birthday, is also marked very clearly in my memory by a
family circumstance. We were seated at breakfast, at our small
round table drawn close up to the window, my Father with his back
to the light. Suddenly, he gave a sort of cry, and read out the
opening sentences from _The Times_ announcing a battle in the
valley of the Alma. No doubt the strain of national anxiety had
been very great, for both he and my Mother seemed deeply excited.
He broke off his reading when the fact of the decisive victory
was assured, and he and my Mother sank simultaneously on their
knees in front of their tea and bread-and-butter, while in a loud
voice my Father gave thanks to the God of Battles. This
patriotism was the more remarkable, in that he had schooled
himself, as he believed, to put his 'heavenly citizenship' above
all earthly duties. To those who said: 'Because you are a
Christian, surely you are not less an Englishman?' he would reply
by shaking his head, and by saying: 'I am a citizen of no earthly
State'. He did not realize that, in reality, and to use a cant
phrase not yet coined in 1854, there existed in Great Britain no
more thorough 'Jingo' than he.
Another instance of the remarkable way in which the interests of
daily life were mingled in our strange household, with the
practice of religion, made an impression upon my memory. We had
all three been much excited by a report that a certain dark
geometer-moth, generated in underground stables, had been met
with in Islington. Its name, I think is, 'Boletobia fuliginaria',
and I believe that it is excessively rare in England. We were
sitting at family prayers, on a summer morning, I think in 1855,
when through the open window a brown moth came sailing. My Mother
immediately interrupted the reading of the Bible by saying to my
Father, 'O! Henry, do you think that can be "Boletobia"?' My
Father rose up from the sacred book, examined the insect, which
had now perched, and replied: 'No! it is only the common
Vapourer, "Orgyia antiqua"!', resuming his seat, and the
exposition of the Word, without any apology or embarrassment.
In the course of this, my sixth year, there happened a series of
minute and soundless incidents which, elementary as they may seem
when told, were second in real importance to none in my mental
history. The recollection of them confirms me in the opinion that
certain leading features in each human soul are inherent to it,
and cannot be accounted for by suggestion or training. In my own
case, I was most carefully withdrawn, like Princess Blanchefleur
in her marble fortress, from every outside influence whatever,
yet to me the instinctive life came as unexpectedly as her lover
came to her in the basket of roses. What came to me was the
consciousness of self, as a force and as a companion, and it came
as the result of one or two shocks, which I will relate.
In consequence of hearing so much about an Omniscient God, a
being of supernatural wisdom and penetration who was always with
us, who made, in fact, a fourth in our company, I had come to
think of Him, not without awe, but with absolute confidence. My
Father and Mother, in their serene discipline of me, never argued
with one another, never even differed; their wills seemed
absolutely one. My Mother always deferred to my Father, and in
his absence spoke of him to me, as if he were all-wise. I
confused him in some sense with God; at all events I believed
that my Father knew everything and saw everything. One morning in
my sixth year, my Mother and I were alone in the morning-room,
when my Father came in and announced some fact to us. I was
standing on the rug, gazing at him, and when he made this
statement, I remember turning quickly, in embarrassment, and
looking into the fire. The shock to me was as that of a
thunderbolt, for what my Father had said 'was not true'. My
Mother and I, who had been present at the trifling incident, were
aware that it had not happened exactly as it had been reported to
him. My Mother gently told him so, and he accepted the
correction. Nothing could possibly have been more trifling to my
parents, but to me it meant an epoch. Here was the appalling
discovery, never suspected before, that my Father was not as God,
and did not know everything. The shock was not caused by any
suspicion that he was not telling the truth, as it appeared to
him, but by the awful proof that he was not, as I had supposed,
omniscient.
This experience was followed by another, which confirmed the
first, but carried me a great deal further. In our little
back-garden, my Father had built up a rockery for ferns and mosses
and from the water-supply of the house he had drawn a leaden pipe
so that it pierced upwards through the rockery and produced, when
a tap was turned, a pretty silvery parasol of water. The pipe was
exposed somewhere near the foot of the rockery. One day, two
workmen, who were doing some repairs, left their tools during the
dinner-hour in the back-garden, and as I was marching about I
suddenly thought that to see whether one of these tools could
make a hole in the pipe would be attractive. It did make such a
hole, quite easily, and then the matter escaped my mind. But a
day or two afterwards, when my Father came in to dinner, he was
very angry. He had turned the tap, and instead of the fountain
arching at the summit, there had been a rush of water through a
hole at the foot. The rockery was absolutely ruined.
Of course I realized in a moment what I had done, and I sat
frozen with alarm, waiting to be denounced. But my Mother
remarked on the visit of the plumbers two or three days before,
and my Father instantly took up the suggestion. No doubt that was
it; the mischievous fellows had thought it amusing to stab the
pipe and spoil the fountain. No suspicion fell on me; no question
was asked of me. I sat there, turned to stone within, but
outwardly sympathetic and with unchecked appetite.
We attribute, I believe, too many moral ideas to little children.
It is obvious that in this tremendous juncture I ought to have
been urged forward by good instincts, or held back by naughty
ones. But I am sure that the fear which I experienced for a short
time, and which so unexpectedly melted away, was a purely
physical one. It had nothing to do with the motions of a contrite
heart. As to the destruction of the fountain, I was sorry about
that, for my own sake, since I admired the skipping water
extremely and had had no idea that I was spoiling its display.
But the emotions which now thronged within me, and which led me,
with an almost unwise alacrity, to seek solitude in the back-
garden, were not moral at all, they were intellectual. I was not
ashamed of having successfully--and so surprisingly--deceived my
parents by my crafty silence; I looked upon that as a
providential escape, and dismissed all further thought of it. I
had other things to think of.
In the first place, the theory that my Father was omniscient or
infallible was now dead and buried. He probably knew very little;
in this case he had not known a fact of such importance that if
you did not know that, it could hardly matter what you knew. My
Father, as a deity, as a natural force of immense prestige, fell
in my eyes to a human level. In future, his statements about
things in general need not be accepted implicitly. But of all the
thoughts which rushed upon my savage and undeveloped little brain
at this crisis, the most curious was that I had found a companion
and a confidant in myself. There was a secret in this world and
it belonged to me and to a somebody who lived in the same body
with me. There were two of us, and we could talk with one
another. It is difficult to define impressions so rudimentary,
but it is certain that it was in this dual form that the sense of
my individuality now suddenly descended upon me, and it is
equally certain that it was a great solace to me to find a
sympathizer in my own breast.
About this time, my Mother, carried away by the current of her
literary and her philanthropic work, left me more and more to my
own devices. She was seized with a great enthusiasm; as one of
her admirers and disciples has written, 'she went on her way,
sowing beside all waters'. I would not for a moment let it be
supposed that I regard her as a Mrs. Jellyby, or that I think she
neglected me. But a remarkable work had opened up before her;
after her long years in a mental hermitage, she was drawn forth
into the clamorous harvest-field of souls. She developed an
unexpected gift of persuasion over strangers whom she met in the
omnibus or in the train, and with whom she courageously grappled.
This began by her noting, with deep humility and joy, that 'I
have reason to judge the sound conversion to God of three young
persons within a few weeks, by the instrumentality of my
conversations with them'. At the same time, as another of her
biographers has said, 'those testimonies to the Blood of Christ,
the fruits of her pen, began to be spread very widely, even to
the most distant parts of the globe'. My Father, too, was at this
time at the height of his activity. After breakfast, each of them
was amply occupied, perhaps until night-fall; our evenings we
still always spent together. Sometimes my Mother took me with her
on her 'unknown day's employ'; I recollect pleasant rambles
through the City by her side, and the act of looking up at her
figure soaring above me. But when all was done, I had hours and
hours of complete solitude, in my Father's study, in the back-
garden, above all in the garret.
The garret was a fairy place. It was a low lean-to, lighted from
the roof. It was wholly unfurnished, except for two objects, an
ancient hat-box and a still more ancient skin-trunk. The hat-box
puzzled me extremely, till one day, asking my Father what it was,
I got a distracted answer which led me to believe that it was
itself a sort of hat, and I made a laborious but repeated effort
to wear it. The skin-trunk was absolutely empty, but the inside
of the lid of it was lined with sheets of what I now know to have
been a sensational novel. It was, of course, a fragment, but I
read it, kneeling on the bare floor, with indescribable rapture.
It will be recollected that the idea of fiction, of a
deliberately invented story, had been kept from me with entire
success. I therefore implicitly believed the tale in the lid of
the trunk to be a true account of the sorrows of a lady of title,
who had to flee the country, and who was pursued into foreign
lands by enemies bent upon her ruin. Somebody had an interview
with a 'minion' in a 'mask'; I went downstairs and looked up
these words in Bailey's 'English Dictionary', but was left in
darkness as to what they had to do with the lady of title. This
ridiculous fragment filled me with delicious fears; I fancied
that my Mother, who was out so much, might be threatened by
dangers of the same sort; and the fact that the narrative came
abruptly to an end, in the middle of one of its most thrilling
sentences, wound me up almost to a disorder of wonder and
romance.
The preoccupation of my parents threw me more and more upon my
own resources. But what are the resources of a solitary child of
six? I was never inclined to make friends with servants, nor did
our successive maids proffer, so far as I recollect, any
advances. Perhaps, with my 'dedication' and my grown-up ways of
talking, I did not seem to them at all an attractive little boy.
I continued to have no companions, or even acquaintances of my
own age. I am unable to recollect exchanging two words with
another child till after my Mother's death.
The abundant energy which my Mother now threw into her public
work did not affect the quietude of our private life. We had some
visitors in the daytime, people who came to consult one parent
or the other. But they never stayed to a meal, and we never
returned their visits. I do not quite know how it was that
neither of my parents took me to any of the sights of London,
although I am sure it was a question of principle with them.
Notwithstanding all our study of natural history, I was never
introduced to live wild beasts at the Zoo, nor to dead ones at
the British Museum. I can understand better why we never visited
a picture-gallery or a concert-room. So far as I can recollect,
the only time I was ever taken to any place of entertainment was
when my Father and I paid a visit, long anticipated, to the Great
Globe in Leicester Square. This was a huge structure, the
interior of which one ascended by means of a spiral staircase. It
was a poor affair; that was concave in it which should have been
convex, and my imagination was deeply affronted. I could invent a
far better Great Globe than that in my mind's eye in the garret.
Being so restricted, then, and yet so active, my mind took refuge
in an infantile species of natural magic. This contended with the
definite ideas of religion which my parents were continuing, with
too mechanical a persistency, to force into my nature, and it ran
parallel with them. I formed strange superstitions, which I can
only render intelligible by naming some concrete examples. I
persuaded myself that, if I could only discover the proper words
to say or the proper passes to make, I could induce the gorgeous
birds and butterflies in my Father's illustrated manuals to come
to life, and fly out of the book, leaving holes behind them. I
believed that, when, at the Chapel, we sang, drearily and slowly,
loud hymns of experience and humiliation, I could boom forth with
a sound equal to that of dozens of singers, if I could only hit
upon the formula. During morning and evening prayers, which were
extremely lengthy and fatiguing, I fancied that one of my two
selves could flit up, and sit clinging to the cornice, and look
down on my other self and the rest of us, if I could only find
the key. I laboured for hours in search of these formulas,
thinking to compass my ends by means absolutely irrational. For
example, I was convinced that if I could only count consecutive
numbers long enough, without losing one, I should suddenly, on
reaching some far-distant figure, find myself in possession of
the great secret. I feel quite sure that nothing external
suggested these ideas of magic, and I think it probable that they
approached the ideas of savages at a very early stage of
development.
All this ferment of mind was entirely unobserved by my parents.
But when I formed the belief that it was necessary, for the
success of my practical magic, that I should hurt myself, and
when, as a matter of fact, I began, in extreme secrecy, to run
pins into my flesh and bang my joints with books, no one will be
surprised to hear that my Mother's attention was drawn to the
fact that I was looking 'delicate'. The notice nowadays
universally given to the hygienic rules of life was rare fifty
years ago and among deeply religious people, in particular,
fatalistic views of disease prevailed. If anyone was ill, it
showed that 'the Lord's hand was extended in chastisement', and
much prayer was poured forth in order that it might be explained
to the sufferer, or to his relations, in what he or they had
sinned. People would, for instance, go on living over a cess-
pool, working themselves up into an agony to discover how they
had incurred the displeasure of the Lord, but never moving away.
As I became very pale and nervous, and slept badly at nights,
with visions and loud screams in my sleep, I was taken to a
physician, who stripped me and tapped me all over (this gave me
some valuable hints for my magical practices), but could find
nothing the matter. He recommended,--whatever physicians in such
cases always recommend,--but nothing was done. If I was feeble it
was the Lord's will, and we must acquiesce.
It culminated in a sort of fit of hysterics, when I lost all
self-control, and sobbed with tears, and banged my head on the
table. While this was proceeding, I was conscious of that dual
individuality of which I have already spoken, since while one
part of me gave way, and could not resist, the other part in some
extraordinary sense seemed standing aloof, much impressed. I was
alone with my Father when this crisis suddenly occurred, and I
was interested to see that he was greatly alarmed. It was a very
long time since we had spent a day out of London, and I said, on
being coaxed back to calmness, that I wanted 'to go into the
country'. Like the dying Falstaff, I babbled of green fields. My
Father, after a little reflection, proposed to take me to
Primrose Hill. I had never heard of the place, and names have
always appealed directly to my imagination. I was in the highest
degree delighted, and could hardly restrain my impatience. As
soon as possible we set forth westward, my hand in my Father's,
with the liveliest anticipations. I expected to see a mountain
absolutely carpeted with primroses, a terrestrial galaxy like
that which covered the hill that led up to Montgomery Castle in
Donne's poem. But at length, as we walked from the Chalk Farm
direction, a miserable acclivity stole into view--surrounded,
even in those days, on most sides by houses, with its grass worn
to the buff by millions of boots, and resembling what I meant by
'the country' about as much as Poplar resembles Paradise. We sat
down on a bench at its inglorious summit, whereupon I burst into
tears, and in a heart-rending whisper sobbed, 'Oh! Papa, let us
go home!'
This was the lachrymose epoch in a career not otherwise given to
weeping, for I must tell one more tale of tears. About this
time,--the autumn of 1855,--my parents were disturbed more than
once in the twilight, after I had been put to bed, by shrieks
from my crib. They would rush up to my side, and find me in great
distress, but would be unable to discover the cause of it. The
fact was that I was half beside myself with ghostly fears,
increased and pointed by the fact that there had been some daring
burglaries on our street. Our servant-maid, who slept at the top
of the house, had seen, or thought she saw, upon a moonlight
night the figure of a crouching man, silhouetted against the sky,
slip down from the roof and leap into her room. She screamed, and
he fled away. Moreover, as if this were not enough for my tender
nerves, there had been committed a horrid murder at a baker's
shop just around the corner in the Caledonian Road, to which
murder actuality was given to us by the fact that my Mother had
been 'just thinking' of getting her bread from this shop.
Children, I think, were not spared the details of these affairs
fifty years ago; at least, I was not, and my nerves were a packet
of spilikins.
But what made me scream at nights was that when my Mother had
tucked me up in bed, and had heard me say my prayer, and had
prayed aloud on her knees at my side, and had stolen downstairs--
noises immediately began in the room. There was a rustling of
clothes, and a slapping of hands, and a gurgling, and a sniffing,
and a trotting. These horrible muffled sounds would go on, and
die away, and be resumed; I would pray very fervently to God to
save me from my enemies; and sometimes I would go to sleep. But
on other occasions, my faith and fortitude alike gave way, and I
screamed 'Mama! Mama!' Then would my parents come bounding up the
stairs, and comfort me, and kiss me, and assure me it was nothing.
And nothing it was while they were there, but no sooner had they
gone than the ghostly riot recommenced. It was at last discovered
by my Mother that the whole mischief was due to a card of framed
texts, fastened by one nail to the wall; this did nothing when
the bedroom door was shut, but when it was left open (in order that
my parents might hear me call), the card began to gallop in the
draught, and made the most intolerable noises.
Several things tended at this time to alienate my conscience from
the line which my Father had so rigidly traced for it. The
question of the efficacy of prayer, which has puzzled wiser heads
than mine was, began to trouble me. It was insisted on in our
household that if anything was desired, you should not, as my
Mother said, 'lose any time in seeking for it, but ask God to
guide you to it'. In many junctures of life this is precisely
what, in sober fact, they did. I will not dwell here on their
theories, which my Mother put forth, with unflinching directness,
in her published writings. But I found that a difference was made
between my privileges in this matter and theirs, and this led to
many discussions. My parents said: 'Whatever you need, tell Him
and He will grant it, if it is His will.' Very well; I had need
of a large painted humming-top which I had seen in a shop-window
in the Caledonian Road. Accordingly, I introduced a supplication
for this object into my evening prayer, carefully adding the
words: 'If it is Thy will.' This, I recollect, placed my Mother
in a dilemma, and she consulted my Father. Taken, I suppose, at a
disadvantage, my Father told me I must not pray for 'things like
that'. To which I answered by another query, 'Why?' And I added
that he said we ought to pray for things we needed, and that I
needed the humming-top a great deal more than I did the conversion
of the heathen or the restitution of Jerusalem to the Jews, two
objects of my nightly supplication which left me very cold.
I have reason to believe, looking back upon this scene conducted
by candlelight in the front parlour, that my Mother was much
baffled by the logic of my argument. She had gone so far as to
say publicly that no 'things or circumstances are too
insignificant to bring before the God of the whole earth'. I
persisted that this covered the case of the humming-top, which
was extremely significant to me. I noticed that she held aloof
from the discussion, which was carried on with some show of
annoyance by my Father. He had never gone quite so far as she did
in regard to this question of praying for material things. I am
not sure that she was convinced that I ought to have been
checked; but he could not help seeing that it reduced their
favourite theory to an absurdity for a small child to exercise
the privilege. He ceased to argue, and told me peremptorily that
it was not right for me to pray for things like humming-tops, and
that I must do it no more. His authority, of course, was Paramount,
and I yielded; but my faith in the efficacy of prayer was a good
deal shaken. The fatal suspicion had crossed my mind that the reason
why I was not to pray for the top was because it was too expensive
for my parents to buy, that being the usual excuse for not getting
things I wished for.
It was about the date of my sixth birthday that I did something
very naughty, some act of direct disobedience, for which my
Father, after a solemn sermon, chastised me, sacrificially, by
giving me several cuts with a cane. This action was justified, as
everything he did was justified, by reference to Scripture 'Spare
the rod and spoil the child'. I suppose that there are some
children, of a sullen and lymphatic temperament, who are
smartened up and made more wide-awake by a whipping. It is
largely a matter of convention, the exercise being endured (I am
told) with pride by the infants of our aristocracy, but not
tolerated by the lower classes. I am afraid that I proved my
inherent vulgarity by being made, not contrite or humble, but
furiously angry by this caning. I cannot account for the flame of
rage which it awakened in my bosom. My dear, excellent Father had
beaten me, not very severely, without ill-temper, and with the
most genuine desire to improve me. But he was not well-advised
especially so far as the 'dedication to the Lord's service' was
concerned. This same 'dedication' had ministered to my vanity,
and there are some natures which are not improved by being
humiliated. I have to confess with shame that I went about the
house for some days with a murderous hatred of my Father locked
within my bosom. He did not suspect that the chastisement had not
been wholly efficacious, and he bore me no malice; so that after
a while, I forgot and thus forgave him. But I do not regard
physical punishment as a wise element in the education of proud
and sensitive children.
My theological misdeeds culminated, however, in an act so puerile
and preposterous that I should not venture to record it if it did
not throw some glimmering of light on the subject which I have
proposed to myself in writing these pages. My mind continued to
dwell on the mysterious question of prayer. It puzzled me greatly
to know why, if we were God's children, and if he was watching
over us by night and day, we might not supplicate for toys and
sweets and smart clothes as well as for the conversion of the
heathen. Just at this juncture, we had a special service at the
Room, at which our attention was particularly called to what we
always spoke of as 'the field of missionary labour'. The East was
represented among 'the saints' by an excellent Irish peer, who
had, in his early youth, converted and married a lady of colour;
this Asiatic shared in our Sunday morning meetings, and was an
object of helpless terror to me; I shrank from her amiable
caresses, and vaguely identified her with a personage much spoken
of in our family circle, the 'Personal Devil'.
All these matters drew my thoughts to the subject of idolatry,
which was severely censured at the missionary meeting. I cross-
examined my Father very closely as to the nature of this sin, and
pinned him down to the categorical statement that idolatry
consisted in praying to anyone or anything but God himself. Wood
and stone, in the words of the hymn, were peculiarly liable to be
bowed down to by the heathen in their blindness. I pressed my
Father further on this subject, and he assured me that God would
be very angry, and would signify His anger, if anyone, in a
Christian country, bowed down to wood and stone. I cannot recall
why I was so pertinacious on this subject, but I remember that my
Father became a little restive under my cross-examination. I
determined, however, to test the matter for myself, and one
morning, when both my parents were safely out of the house, I
prepared for the great act of heresy. I was in the morning-room
on the ground-floor, where, with much labour, I hoisted a small
chair on to the table close to the window. My heart was now
beating as if it would leap out of my side, but I pursued my
experiment. I knelt down on the carpet in front of the table and
looking up I said my daily prayer in a loud voice, only
substituting the address 'Oh Chair!' for the habitual one.
Having carried this act of idolatry safely through, I waited to
see what would happen. It was a fine day, and I gazed up at the
slip of white sky above the houses opposite, and expected
something to appear in it. God would certainly exhibit his anger
in some terrible form, and would chastise my impious and willful
action. I was very much alarmed, but still more excited; I
breathed the high, sharp air of defiance. But nothing happened;
there was not a cloud in the sky, not an unusual sound in the
street. Presently, I was quite sure that nothing would happen. I
had committed idolatry, flagrantly and deliberately, and God did
not care.
The result of this ridiculous act was not to make me question the
existence and power of God; those were forces which I did not
dream of ignoring. But what it did was to lessen still further my
confidence in my Father's knowledge of the Divine mind. My Father
had said, positively, that if I worshipped a thing made of wood,
God would manifest his anger. I had then worshipped a chair, made
(or partly made) of wood, and God had made no sign whatever. My
Father, therefore, was not really acquainted with the Divine
practice in cases of idolatry. And with that, dismissing the
subject, I dived again into the unplumbed depths of the _Penny
Cyclopaedia_.