As my mental horizon widened, my Father followed the direction of
my spiritual eyes with some bewilderment, and knew not at what I
gazed. Nor could I have put into words, nor can I even now
define, the visions which held my vague and timid attention. As a
child develops, those who regard it with tenderness or impatience
are seldom even approximately correct in their analysis of its
intellectual movements, largely because, if there is anything to
record, it defies adult definition. One curious freak of
mentality I must now mention, because it took a considerable part
in the enfranchisement of my mind, or rather in the formation of
my thinking habits. But neither my Father nor my stepmother knew
what to make of it, and to tell the truth I hardly know what to
make of it myself.
Among the books which my new mother had brought with her were
certain editions of the poets, an odd assortment. Campbell was
there, and Burns, and Keats, and the 'Tales' of Byron. Each of
these might have been expected to appeal to me; but my emotion
was too young, and I did not listen to them yet. Their imperative
voices called me later. By the side of these romantic classics
stood a small, thick volume, bound in black morocco, and
comprising four reprinted works of the eighteenth century,
gloomy, funereal poems of an order as wholly out of date as are
the crossbones and ruffled cherubim on the gravestones in a
country churchyard. The four--and in this order, as I never shall
forget--were 'The Last Day' of Dr Young, Blair's 'Grave', 'Death'
by Bishop Beilby Porteus, and 'The Deity' of Samuel Boyse. These
lugubrious effusions, all in blank verse or in the heroic
couplet, represented, in its most redundant form, the artistic
theology of the middle of the eighteenth century. They were
steeped in such vengeful and hortatory sentiments as passed for
elegant piety in the reign of George II.
How I came to open this solemn volume is explained by the
oppressive exclusiveness of our Sundays. On the afternoon of the
Lord's Day, as I have already explained, I might neither walk,
nor talk, nor explore our scientific library, nor indulge in
furious feats of water-colour painting. The Plymouth-Brother
theology which alone was open to me produced, at length, and
particularly on hot afternoons, a faint physical nausea, a kind
of secret headache. But, hitting one day upon the doleful book of
verses, and observing its religious character, I asked 'May I
read that?' and after a brief, astonished glance at the contents,
received 'Oh certainly--if you can!'
The lawn sloped directly from a verandah at our drawing-room
window, and it contained two immense elm trees, which had
originally formed part of the hedge of a meadow. In our trim and
polished garden they then remained--they were soon afterwards cut
down--rude and obtuse, with something primeval about them,
something autochthonous; they were like two peasant ancestors
surviving in a family that had advanced to gentility. They rose
each out of a steep turfed hillock, and the root of one of them
was long my favourite summer reading-desk; for I could lie
stretched on the lawn, with my head and shoulders supported by
the elm-tree hillock, and the book in a fissure of the rough
turf. Thither then I escaped with my graveyard poets, and who
shall explain the rapture with which I followed their austere
morality?
Whether I really read consecutively in my black-bound volume I
can no longer be sure, but it became a companion whose society I
valued, and at worst it was a thousand times more congenial to me
than Jukes' 'On the Pentateuch' or than a perfectly excruciating
work ambiguously styled 'The Javelin of Phineas', which lay
smouldering in a dull red cover on the drawing-room table. I
dipped my bucket here and there into my poets, and I brought up
strange things. I brought up out of the depths of 'The Last Day'
the following ejaculation of a soul roused by the trump of
resurrection:
Father of mercies! Why from silent earth
Didst thou awake, and curse me into birth?
Tear me from quiet, ravish me from night,
And make a thankless present of thy light?
Push into being a reverse of thee,
And animate a clod with misery?
I read these lines with a shiver of excitement, and in a sense I
suppose little intended by the sanctimonious rector of Welwyn. I
also read in the same piece the surprising description of how
Now charnels rattle, scattered limbs, and all
The various bones, obsequious to the call,
Self-mov'd, advance--the neck perhaps to meet
The distant head, the distant legs the feet,
but rejected it as not wholly supported by the testimony of
Scripture. I think that the rhetoric and vigorous advance of
Young's verse were pleasant to me. Beilby Porteus I discarded
from the first as impenetrable. In 'The Deity',--I knew nothing
then of the life of its extravagant and preposterous author,--I
took a kind of persistent, penitential pleasure, but it was
Blair's 'Grave' that really delighted me, and I frightened myself
with its melodious doleful images in earnest.
About this time there was a great flow of tea-table hospitality
in the village, and my friends and their friends used to be asked
out, by respective parents and by more than one amiable spinster,
to faint little entertainments where those sang who were
ambitious to sing, and where all played post and forfeits after a
rich tea. My Father was constantly exercised in mind as to
whether I should or should not accept these glittering
invitations. There hovered before him a painful sense of danger
in resigning the soul to pleasures which savoured of 'the world'.
These, though apparently innocent in themselves, might give an
appetite for yet more subversive dissipations. I remember, on one
occasion,--when the Browns, a family of Baptists who kept a large
haberdashery shop in the neighbouring town, asked for the
pleasure of my company 'to tea and games', and carried
complacency so far as to offer to send that local vehicle, 'the
midge', to fetch me and bring me back,--my Father's conscience
was so painfully perplexed, that he desired me to come up with
him to the now-deserted 'boudoir' of the departed Marks, that we
might 'lay the matter before the Lord'. We did so, kneeling side
by side, with our backs to the window and our foreheads pressed
upon the horsehair cover of the small, coffin-like sofa. My
Father prayed aloud, with great fervour, that it might be
revealed to me, by the voice of God, whether it was or was not
the Lord's will that I should attend the Browns' party. My
Father's attitude seemed to me to be hardly fair, since he did
not scruple to remind the Deity of various objections to a life
of pleasure and of the snakes that lie hidden in the grass of
evening parties. It would have been more scrupulous, I thought,
to give no sort of hint of the kind of answer he desired and
expected.
It will be justly said that my life was made up of very trifling
things, since I have to confess that this incident of the Browns'
invitation was one of its landmarks. As I knelt, feeling very
small, by the immense bulk of my Father, there gushed though my
veins like a wine the determination to rebel. Never before, in
all these years of my vocation, had I felt my resistance take
precisely this definite form. We rose presently from the sofa, my
forehead and the backs of my hands still chafed by the texture of
the horsehair, and we faced one another in the dreary light. My
Father, perfectly confident in the success of what had really
been a sort of incantation, asked me in a loud wheedling voice,
'Well, and what is the answer which our Lord vouchsafes?' I said
nothing, and so my Father, more sharply, continued, 'We have
asked Him to direct you to a true knowledge of His will. We have
desired Him to let you know whether it is, or is not, in
accordance with His wishes that you should accept this invitation
from the Browns.' He positively beamed down at me; he had no
doubt of the reply. He was already, I believe, planning some
little treat to make up to me for the material deprivation. But
my answer came, in the high-piping accents of despair: 'The Lord
says I may go to the Browns.' My Father gazed at me in speechless
horror. He was caught in his own trap, and though he was certain
that the Lord had said nothing of the kind, there was no road
open for him but just sheer retreat. Yet surely it was an error
in tactics to slam the door.
It was at this party at the Browns--to which I duly went,
although in sore disgrace--that my charnel poets played me a mean
trick. It was proposed that 'our young friends' should give their
elders the treat of repeating any pretty pieces that they knew by
heart. Accordingly a little girl recited 'Casabianca', and
another little girl 'We are Seven', and various children were
induced to repeat hymns, 'some rather long', as Calverley says,
but all very mild and innocuously evangelical. I was then asked
by Mrs. Brown's maiden sister, a gushing lady in corkscrew curls,
who led the revels, whether I also would not indulge them 'by
repeating some sweet stanzas'. No one more ready than I. Without
a moment's hesitation, I stood forth, and in a loud voice I began
one of my favourite passages from Blair's 'Grave':
If death were nothing, and nought after death--
If when men died at once they ceased to be,--
Returning to the barren Womb of Nothing
Whence first they sprung, then might the debauchee...
'Thank you, dear, that will do nicely!' interrupted the lady with
the curls. 'But that's only the beginning of it,' I cried. 'Yes.
dear, but that will quite do! We won't ask you to repeat any more
of it,' and I withdrew to the borders of the company in
bewilderment. Nor did the Browns or their visitors ever learn
what it was the debauchee might have said or done in more
favourable circumstances.
The growing eagerness which I displayed for the society of
selected schoolfellows and for such gentle dissipations as were
within my reach exercised my Father greatly. His fancy rushed
forward with the pace of a steam-engine, and saw me the life and
soul of a gambling club, or flaunting it at the Mabille. He had
no confidence in the action of moderating powers, and he was fond
of repeating that the downward path is easy. If one fretted to be
bathing with one's companions on the shingle, and preferred this
exercise to the study of God's Word, it was a symbol of a
terrible decline, the angle of which would grow steeper and
steeper, until one plunged into perdition. He was, himself, timid
and reclusive, and he shrank from all avoidable companionship
with others, except on the footing of a master and teacher. My
stepmother and I, who neither taught nor ruled, yearned for a
looser chain and lighter relationships. With regard to myself, my
Father about this time hit on a plan from which he hoped much,
but from which little resulted. He looked to George to supply
what my temperament seemed to require of congenial juvenile
companionship.
If I have not mentioned 'George' until now, it is not that he was
a new acquaintance. When we first came down into the country, our
sympathy had been called forth by an accident to a little boy,
who was knocked over by a horse, and whose thigh was broken.
Somebody (I suppose Mary Grace, since my Father could rarely
bring himself to pay these public visits) went to see the child
in the infirmary, and accidentally discovered that he was exactly
the same age that I was. This, and the fact that he was a
meditative and sober little boy, attracted us all still further
to George, who became converted under one of my Father's sermons.
He attended my public baptism, and was so much moved by this
ceremony that he passionately desired to be baptized also, and
was in fact so immersed, a few months later, slightly to my
chagrin, since I thereupon ceased to be the only infant prodigy
in communion. When we were both in our thirteenth year, George
became an outdoor servant to us, and did odd jobs under the
gardener. My Father, finding him, as he said, 'docile, obedient
and engaging', petted George a good deal, and taught him a little
botany. He called George, by a curious contortion of thought, my
'spiritual foster-brother', and anticipated for him, I think, a
career, like mine, in the Ministry.
Our garden suffered from an incursion of slugs, which laid the
verbenas in the dust, and shore off the carnations as if with
pairs of scissors. To cope with this plague we invested in a
drake and a duck, who were christened Philemon and Baucis. Every
night large cabbage-leaves, containing the lees of beer, were
spread about the flower-beds as traps, and at dawn these had
become green parlours crammed with intoxicated slugs. One of
George's earliest morning duties was to free Philemon and Baucis
from their coop, and, armed with a small wand, to guide their
footsteps to the feast in one cabbage-leaf after another. My
Father used to watch this performance from an upper window, and,
in moments of high facetiousness, he was wont to parody the poet
Gray:
How jocund doth George drive his team afield!
This is all, or almost all, that I remember about George's
occupations, but he was singularly blameless.
My Father's plan now was that I should form a close intimacy with
George, as a boy of my own age, of my own faith, of my own
future. My stepmother, still in bondage to the social
conventions, was passionately troubled at this, and urged the
barrier of class-differences. My Father replied that such an
intimacy would keep me 'lowly', and that from so good a boy as
George I could learn nothing undesirable. 'He will encourage him
not to wipe his boots when he comes into the house,' said my
stepmother, and my Father sighed to think how narrow is the
horizon of Woman's view of heavenly things.
In this caprice, if I may call it so, I think that my Father had
before him the fine republican example of 'Sandford and Merton',
some parts of which book he admired extremely. Accordingly George
and I were sent out to take walks together, and as we started, my
Father, with an air of great benevolence, would suggest some
passage of Scripture, or 'some aspect of God's bountiful scheme
in creation, on which you may profitably meditate together.'
George and I never pursued the discussion of the text with which
my Father started us for more than a minute or two; then we fell
into silence, or investigated current scenes and rustic topics.
As is natural among the children of the poor, George was
precocious where I was infantile, and undeveloped where I was
elaborate. Our minds could hardly find a point at which to touch.
He gave me, however, under cross-examination, interesting hints
about rural matters, and I liked him, although I felt his company
to be insipid. Sometimes he carried my books by my side to the
larger and more distant school which I now attended, but I was
always in a fever of dread lest my schoolfellows should see
him, and should accuse me of having to be 'brought' to school. To
explain to them that the companionship of this wholesome and
rather blunt young peasant was part of my spiritual discipline
would have been all beyond my powers.
It was soon after this that my stepmother made her one vain
effort to break though the stillness of our lives. My Father's
energy seemed to decline, to become more fitful, to take
unseasonable directions. My mother instinctively felt that his
peculiarities were growing upon him; he would scarcely stir from
his microscope, except to go to the chapel, and he was visible to
fewer and fewer visitors. She had taken a pleasure in his
literary eminence, and she was aware that this, too, would slip
from him; that, so persistently kept out of sight, he must soon
be out of mind. I know not how she gathered courage for her
tremendous effort, but she took me, I recollect, into her
counsels. We were to unite to oblige my Father to start to his
feet and face the world. Alas! we might as well have attempted to
rouse the summit of Yes Tor into volcanic action. To my mother's
arguments, my Father--with that baffling smile of his--replied:
'I esteem the reproach of Christ greater riches than the
treasures of Egypt!' and that this answer was indirect made it
none the less conclusive. My mother wished him to give lectures,
to go to London, to read papers before the Royal Society, to
enter into controversy with foreign savants, to conduct classes
of outdoor zoology at fashionable watering-places. I held my
breath with admiration as she poured forth her scheme, so daring,
so brilliant, so sure to cover our great man with glory. He
listened to her with an ambiguous smile, and shook his head at
us, and resumed the reading of his Bible.
At the date of which I write these pages, the arts of
illustration are so universally diffused that it is difficult to
realize the darkness in which a remote English village was
plunged half a century ago. No opportunity was offered to us
dwellers in remote places of realizing the outward appearances of
unfamiliar persons, scenes or things. Although ours was perhaps
the most cultivated household in the parish, I had never seen so
much as a representation of a work of sculpture until I was
thirteen. My mother then received from her earlier home certain
volumes, among which was a gaudy gift-book of some kind,
containing a few steel engravings of statues.
These attracted me violently, and here for the first time I gazed
on Apollo with his proud gesture, Venus in her undulations, the
kirtled shape of Diana, and Jupiter voluminously bearded. Very
little information, and that tome not intelligible, was given in
the text, but these were said to be figures of the old Greek
gods. I asked my Father to tell me about these 'old Greek gods'.
His answer was direct and disconcerting. He said--how I recollect
the place and time, early in the morning, as I stood beside the
window in our garish breakfast-room--he said that the so-called
gods of the Greeks were the shadows cast by the vices of the
heathen, and reflected their infamous lives; 'it was for such
things as these that God poured down brimstone and fire on the
Cities of the Plain, and there is nothing in the legends of these
gods, or rather devils, that it is not better for a Christian not
to know.' His face blazed white with Puritan fury as he said
this--I see him now in my mind's eye, in his violent emotion. You
might have thought that he had himself escaped with horror from
some Hellenic hippodrome.
My Father's prestige was by this time considerably lessened in my
mind, and though I loved and admired him, I had now long ceased
to hold him infallible. I did not accept his condemnation of the
Greeks, although I bowed to it. In private I returned to examine
my steel engravings of the statues, and I reflected that they
were too beautiful to be so wicked as my Father thought they
were. The dangerous and pagan notion that beauty palliates evil
budded in my mind, without any external suggestion, and by this
reflection alone I was still further sundered from the faith in
which I had been trained. I gathered very diligently all I could
pick up about the Greek gods and their statues; it was not much,
it was indeed ludicrously little and false, but it was a germ.
And at this aesthetic juncture I was drawn into what was really
rather an extraordinary circle of incidents.
Among the 'Saints' in our village there lived a shoemaker and his
wife, who had one daughter, Susan Flood. She was a flighty,
excited young creature, and lately, during the passage of some
itinerary revivalists, she had been 'converted' in the noisiest
way, with sobs, gasps and gurglings. When this crisis passed, she
came with her parents to our meetings, and was received quietly
enough to the breaking of bread. But about the time I speak of,
Susan Flood went up to London to pay a visit to an unconverted
uncle and aunt. It was first whispered amongst us, and then
openly stated, that these relatives had taken her to the Crystal
Palace, where, in passing through the Sculpture Gallery, Susan's
sense of decency had been so grievously affronted, that she had
smashed the naked figures with the handle of her parasol, before
her horrified companions could stop her. She had, in fact, run
amok among the statuary, and had, to the intense chagrin of her
uncle and aunt, very worthy persons, been arrested and brought
before a magistrate, who dismissed her with a warning to her
relations that she had better be sent home to Devonshire and
'looked after'. Susan Flood's return to us, however, was a
triumph; she had no sense of having acted injudiciously or
unbecomingly; she was ready to recount to every one, in vague and
veiled language, how she had been able to testify for the Lord
'in the very temple of Belial', for so she poetically described
the Crystal Palace. She was, of course, in a state of unbridled
hysteria, but such physical explanations were not encouraged
amongst us, and the case of Susan Flood awakened a great deal of
sympathy.
There was held a meeting of the elders in our drawing-room to
discuss it, and I contrived to be present, though out of
observation. My Father, while he recognized the purity of Susan
Flood's zeal, questioned its wisdom. He noted that the statuary
was not her property, but that of the Crystal Palace. Of the
other communicants, none, I think, had the very slightest notion
what the objects were that Susan had smashed, or tried to smash,
and frankly maintained that they thought her conduct magnificent.
As for me, I had gathered by persistent inquiry enough
information to know that what her sacrilegious parasol had
attacked were bodies of my mysterious friends, the Greek gods,
and if all the rest of the village applauded iconoclastic Susan,
I at least would be ardent on the other side.
But I was conscious that there was nobody in the world to whom I
could go for sympathy. If I had ever read 'Hellas' I should have
murmured
Apollo, Pan and Love,
And even Olympian Jove,
Grew weak, when killing Susan glared on them.
On the day in question, I was unable to endure the drawing-room
meeting to its close, but, clutching my volume of the Funereal
Poets, I made a dash for the garden. In the midst of a mass of
laurels, a clearing had been hollowed out, where ferns were grown
and a garden-seat was placed. There was no regular path to this
asylum; one dived under the snake-like boughs of the laurel and
came up again in absolute seclusion.
Into this haunt I now fled to meditate about the savage godliness
of that vandal, Susan Flood. So extremely ignorant was I that I
supposed her to have destroyed the originals of the statues,
marble and unique. I knew nothing about plaster casts, and I
thought the damage (it is possible that there had really been no
damage whatever) was of an irreparable character. I sank into the
seat, with the great wall of laurels whispering around me, and I
burst into tears. There was something, surely, quaint and
pathetic in the figure of a little Plymouth Brother sitting in
that advanced year of grace, weeping bitterly for indignities
done to Hermes and to Aphrodite. Then I opened my book for
consolation, and I read a great block of pompous verse out of
'The Deity', in the midst of which exercise, yielding to the
softness of the hot and aromatic air, I fell fast asleep.
Among those who applauded the zeal of Susan Flood's parasol, the
Pagets were prominent. These were a retired Baptist minister and
his wife, from Exmouth, who had lately settled amongst us, and
joined in the breaking of bread. Mr. Paget was a fat old man,
whose round pale face was clean-shaven, and who carried a full
crop of loose white hair above it; his large lips were always
moving, whether he spoke or not. He resembled, as I now perceive,
the portraits of S. T. Coleridge in age, but with all the
intellect left out of them. He lived in a sort of trance of
solemn religious despondency. He had thrown up his cure of souls,
because he became convinced that he had committed the Sin against
the Holy Ghost. His wife was younger than he, very small, very
tight, very active, with black eyes like pin-pricks at the base
of an extremely high and narrow forehead, bordered with glossy
ringlets. He was very cross to her, and it was murmured that
'dear Mrs. Paget had often had to pass through the waters of
affliction'. They were very poor, but rigidly genteel, and she
was careful, so far as she could, to conceal from the world the
caprices of her poor lunatic husband.
In our circle, it was never for a moment admitted that Mr. Paget
was a lunatic. It was said that he had gravely sinned, and was
under the Lord's displeasure; prayers were abundantly offered up
that he might be led back into the pathway of light, and that the
Smiling Face might be drawn forth for him from behind the
Frowning Providence. When the man had an epileptic seizure in the
High Street, he was not taken to a hospital, but we repeated to
one another, with shaken heads, that Satan, that crooked Serpent,
had been unloosed for a season. Mr. Paget was fond of talking, in
private and in public, of his dreadful spiritual condition and he
would drop his voice while he spoke of having committed the
Unpardonable Sin, with a sort of shuddering exultation, such as
people sometimes feel in the possession of a very unusual
disease.
It might be thought that the position held in any community by
persons so afflicted and eccentric as the Pagets would be very
precarious. But it was not so with us; on the contrary, they took
a prominent place at once. Mr. Paget, in spite of his spiritual
bankruptcy, was only too anxious to help my Father in his
ministrations, and used to beg to be allowed to pray and exhort.
In the latter case he took the tone of a wounded veteran, who,
though fallen on the bloody field himself, could still encourage
younger warriors to march forward to victory. Everybody longed to
know what the exact nature had been of that sin against the Holy
Ghost which had deprived Mr. Paget of every glimmer of hope for
time or for eternity. It was whispered that even my Father
himself was not precisely acquainted with the character of it.
This mysterious disability clothed Mr. Paget for us with a kind of
romance. We watched him as the women watched Dante in Verona,
whispering:
Behold him how Hell's reek
Has crisped his hair and singed his cheek!
His person lacked, it is true, something of the dignity of
Dante's, for it was his caprice to walk up and down the High
Street at noonday with one of those cascades of coloured paper
which were known as 'ornaments for your fireplace' slung over the
back and another over the front of his body. These he
manufactured for sale, and he adopted the quaint practice of
wearing the exuberant objects as a means for their advertisement.
Mrs. Paget had been accustomed to rule in the little ministry
from which Mr. Paget's celebrated Sin had banished them, and she
was inclined to clutch at the sceptre now. She was the only
person I ever met with who was not afraid of the displeasure of
my Father. She would fix her viper-coloured eyes on his, and say
with a kind of gimlet firmness, 'I hardly think that is the true
interpretation, Brother G.', or, 'But let us turn to Colossians,
and see what the Holy Ghost says there upon this matter.' She
fascinated my Father, who was not accustomed to this kind of
interruption, and as she was not to be softened by any flattery
(such as:--'Marvellous indeed, Sister, is your acquaintance with
the means of grace!') she became almost a terror to him.
She abused her powers by taking great liberties, which culminated
in her drawing his attention to the fact that my poor stepmother
displayed 'an overweening love of dress'. The accusation was
perfectly false; my stepmother was, if rather richly, always,
plainly dressed, in the sober Quaker mode; almost her only
ornament was a large carnelian brooch, set in flowered flat gold.
To this the envenomed Paget drew my Father's attention as 'likely
to lead "the little ones of the flock" into temptation'. My poor
Father felt it his duty, thus directly admonished, to speak to my
mother. 'Do you not think, my Love, that you should, as one who
sets an example to others, discard the wearing of that gaudy
brooch?' 'One must fasten one's collar with something, I suppose?'
'Well, but how does Sister Paget fasten her collar?' 'Sister
Paget,' replied my Mother, stung at last into rejoinder, 'fastens
her collar with a pin,--and that is a thing which I would rather
die than do!'
Nor did I escape the attentions of this zealous reformer. Mrs.
Paget was good enough to take a great interest in me, and she was
not satisfied with the way in which I was being brought up. Her
presence seemed to pervade the village, and I could neither come
in nor go out without seeing her hard bonnet and her pursed-up
lips. She would hasten to report to my Father that she saw me
laughing and talking 'with a lot of unconverted boys', these
being the companions with whom I had full permission to bathe and
boat. She urged my Father to complete my holy vocation by some
definite step, by which he would dedicate me completely to the
Lord's service. Further schooling she thought needless, and
merely likely to foster intellectual pride. Mr. Paget, she
remarked, had troubled very little in his youth about worldly
knowledge, and yet how blessed he had been in the conversion of
souls until he had incurred the displeasure of the Holy Ghost!
I do not know exactly what she wanted my Father to do with me;
perhaps she did not know herself; she was meddlesome, ignorant
and fanatical, and she liked to fancy that she was exercising
influence. But the wonderful, the inexplicable thing is that my
Father,--who, with all his limitations, was so distinguished and
high-minded,--should listen to her for a moment, and still more
wonderful is it that he really allowed her, grim vixen that she
was, to disturb his plans and retard his purposes. I think the
explanation lay in the perfectly logical position she took up. My
Father found himself brought face to face at last, not with a
disciple, but with a trained expert in his own peculiar scheme of
religion. At every point she was armed with arguments the source
of which he knew and the validity of which he recognized. He
trembled before Mrs. Paget as a man in a dream may tremble before
a parody of his own central self, and he could not blame her
without laying himself open somewhere to censure.
But my stepmother's instincts were more primitive and her actions
less wire-drawn than my Father's. She disliked Mrs. Paget as much
as one earnest believer can bring herself to dislike a sister in
the Lord. My stepmother had quietly devoted herself to what she
thought the best way of bringing me up, and she did not propose
now to be thwarted by the wife of a lunatic Baptist. At this time
I was a mixture of childishness and priggishness, of curious
knowledge and dense ignorance. Certain portions of my intellect
were growing with unwholesome activity, while others were
stunted, or had never stirred at all. I was like a plant on which
a pot has been placed, with the effect that the centre is crushed
and arrested, while shoots are straggling up to the light on all
sides. My Father himself was aware of this, and in a spasmodic
way he wished to regulate my thoughts. But all he did was to try
to straighten the shoots, without removing the pot which kept
them resolutely down.
It was my stepmother who decided that I was now old enough to go
to boarding-school, and my Father, having discovered that an
elderly couple of Plymouth Brethren kept an 'academy for young
gentlemen' in a neighbouring seaport town,--in the prospectus of
which the knowledge and love of the Lord were mentioned as
occupying the attention of the head--master and his assistants
far more closely than any mere considerations of worldly
tuition,--was persuaded to entrust me to its care. He stipulated,
however, that I should always come home from Saturday night to
Monday morning, not, as he said, that I might receive any carnal
indulgence, but that there might be no cessation of my communion
as a believer with the Saints in our village on Sundays. To this
school, therefore, I presently departed, gawky and homesick, and
the rift between my soul and that of my Father widened a little
more.