CHAPTER XII

LITTLE boys from quiet, pious households, commonly found, in

those days, a chasm yawning at the feet of their inexperience

when they arrived at Boarding-school. But the fact that I still

slept at home on Saturday and Sunday nights preserved me, I

fancy, from many surprises. There was a crisis, but it was broad

and slow for me. On the other hand, for my Father I am inclined

to think that it was definite and sharp. Permission for me to

desert the parental hearth, even for five days in certain weeks,

was tantamount, in his mind, to admitting that the great scheme,

so long caressed, so passionately fostered, must in its primitive

bigness be now dropped.

The Great Scheme (I cannot resist giving it the mortuary of

capital letters) had been, as my readers know, that I should be

exclusively and consecutively dedicated through the whole of my

life, 'to the manifest and uninterrupted and uncompromised

service of the Lord'. That had been the aspiration of my Mother,

and at her death she had bequeathed that desire to my Father,

like a dream of the Promised Land. In their ecstasy, my parents

had taken me, as Elkanah and Hannah had long ago taken Samuel,

from their mountain-home of Ramathaim-Zophim down to sacrifice to

the Lord of Hosts in Shiloh. They had girt me about with a linen

ephod, and had hoped to leave me there; 'as long as he liveth,'

they had said, 'he shall be lent unto the Lord.'

Doubtless in the course of these fourteen years it had

occasionally flashed upon my Father, as he overheard some speech

of mine, or detected some idiosyncrasy, that I was not one of

those whose temperament points them out as ultimately fitted for

an austere life of religion. What he hoped, however, was that

when the little roughnesses of childhood were rubbed away, there

would pass a deep mellowness over my soul. He had a touching way

of condoning my faults of conduct, directly after reproving them,

and he would softly deprecate my frailty, saying, in a tone of

harrowing tenderness, 'Are you not the child of many prayers?' He

continued to think that prayer, such passionate importunate

prayer as his, must prevail. Faith could move mountains; should

it not be able to mould the little ductile heart of a child,

since he was sure that his own faith was unfaltering? He had

yearned and waited for a son who should be totally without human

audacities, who should be humble, pure, not troubled by worldly

agitations, a son whose life should be cleansed and straightened

from above, _in custodiendo sermones Dei_; in whom everything

should be sacrificed except the one thing needful to salvation.

How such a marvel of lowly piety was to earn a living had never,

I think, occurred to him. My Father was singularly indifferent

about money. Perhaps his notion was that, totally devoid of

ambitions as I was to be, I should quietly become adult, and

continue his ministrations among the poor of the Christian flock.

He had some dim dream, I think, of there being just enough for us

all without my having to take up any business or trade. I believe

it was immediately after my first term at boarding-school, that I

was a silent but indignant witness of a conversation between my

Father and Mr. Thomas Brightwen, my stepmother's brother, who was

a banker in one of the Eastern Counties.

This question, 'What is he to be?' in a worldly sense, was being

discussed, and I am sure that it was for the first time, at all

events in my presence. Mr. Brightwen, I fancy, had been worked

upon by my stepmother, whose affection for me was always on the

increase, to suggest, or faintly to stir the air in the

neighbourhood of suggesting, a query about my future. He was

childless and so was she, and I think a kind impulse led them to

'feel the way', as it is called. I believe he said that the

banking business, wisely and honourably conducted, sometimes led,

as we know that it is apt to lead, to affluence. To my horror, my

Father, with rising emphasis, replied that 'if there were offered

to his beloved child what is called "an opening" that would lead

to an income of L10,000 a year, and that would divert his

thoughts and interest from the Lord's work he would reject it on

his child's behalf.' Mr. Brightwen, a precise and polished

gentleman who evidently never made an exaggerated statement in

his life, was, I think, faintly scandalized; he soon left us, and

I do not recollect his paying us a second visit.

For my silent part, I felt very much like Gehazi, and I would

fain have followed after the banker if I had dared to do so, into

the night. I would have excused to him the ardour of my Elisha,

and I would have reminded him of the sons of the prophets--'Give

me, I pray thee,' I would have said, 'a talent of silver and two

changes of garments.' It seemed to me very hard that my Father

should dispose of my possibilities of wealth in so summary a

fashion, but the fact that I did resent it, and regretted what I

supposed to be my 'chance', shows how far apart we had already

swung. My Father, I am convinced, thought that he gave words to

my inward instincts when he repudiated the very mild and

inconclusive benevolence of his brother-in-law. But he certainly

did not do so. I was conscious of a sharp and instinctive

disappointment at having had, as I fancied, wealth so near my

grasp, and at seeing it all cast violently into the sea of my

Father's scruples.

Not one of my village friends attended the boarding-school to

which I was now attached, and I arrived there without an

acquaintance. I should soon, however, have found a corner of my

own if my Father had not unluckily stipulated that I was not to

sleep in the dormitory with the boys of my own age, but in the

room occupied by the two elder sons of a prominent Plymouth

Brother whom he knew. From a social point of view this was an

unfortunate arrangement, since these youths were some years older

and many years riper than I; the eldest, in fact, was soon to

leave; they had enjoyed their independence, and they now greatly

resented being saddled with the presence of an unknown urchin.

The supposition had been that they would protect and foster my

religious practices; would encourage me, indeed, as my Father put

it, to approach the Throne of Grace with them at morning and

evening prayer. They made no pretence, however, to be considered

godly; they looked upon me as an intruder; and after a while the

younger, and ruder, of them openly let me know that they believed

I had been put into their room to 'spy upon' them; it had been a

plot, they knew, between their father and mine: and he darkly

warned me that I should suffer if 'anything got out'. I had,

however, no wish to trouble them, nor any faint interest in their

affairs. I soon discovered that they were absorbed in a silly

kind of amorous correspondence with the girls of a neighbouring

academy, but 'what were all such toys to me?'

These young fellows, who ought long before to have left the

school, did nothing overtly unkind to me, but they condemned me

to silence. They ceased to address me except with an occasional

command. By reason of my youth, I was in bed and asleep before my

companions arrived upstairs, and in the morning I was always

routed up and packed about my business while they still were

drowsing. But the fact that I had been cut off from my coevals by

night, cut me off from them also by day--so that I was nothing to

them, neither a boarder nor a day-scholar, neither flesh, fish

nor fowl. The loneliness of my life was extreme, and that I

always went home on Saturday afternoon and returned on Monday

morning still further checked my companionships at school. For a

long time, round the outskirts of that busy throng of opening

lives, I 'wandered lonely as a cloud', and sometimes I was more

unhappy than I had ever been before. No one, however, bullied me,

and though I was dimly and indefinably witness to acts of

uncleanness and cruelty, I was the victim of no such acts and the

recipient of no dangerous confidences. I suppose that my queer

reputation for sanctity, half dreadful, half ridiculous,

surrounded me with a non-conducting atmosphere.

We are the victims of hallowed proverbs, and one of the most

classic of these tells us that 'the child is father of the man'.

But in my case I cannot think that this was true. In mature years

I have always been gregarious, a lover of my kind, dependent upon

the company of friends for the very pulse of moral life. To be

marooned, to be shut up in a solitary cell, to inhabit a

lighthouse, or to camp alone in a forest, these have always

seemed to me afflictions too heavy to be borne, even in

imagination. A state in which conversation exists not, is for me

an air too empty of oxygen for my lungs to breathe it.

Yet when I look back upon my days at boarding-school, I see

myself unattracted by any of the human beings around me. My

grown-up years are made luminous to me in memory by the ardent

faces of my friends, but I can scarce recall so much as the names

of more than two or three of my schoolfellows. There is not one

of them whose mind or whose character made any lasting impression

upon me. In later life, I have been impatient of solitude, and

afraid of it; at school, I asked for no more than to slip out of

the hurly-burly and be alone with my reflections and my fancies.

That magnetism of humanity which has been the agony of mature

years, of this I had not a trace when I was a boy. Of those

fragile loves to which most men look back with tenderness and

passion, emotions to be explained only as Montaigne explained

them, _parceque c'etait lui, parceque c'etait moi_, I knew nothing.

I, to whom friendship has since been like sunlight and like

sleep, left school unbrightened and unrefreshed by commerce with

a single friend.

If I had been clever, I should doubtless have attracted the

jealousy of my fellows, but I was spared this by the mediocrity

of my success in the classes. One little fact I may mention,

because it exemplifies the advance in observation which has been

made in forty years. I was extremely nearsighted, and in

consequence was placed at a gross disadvantage, by being unable

to see the slate or the black-board on which our tasks were

explained. It seems almost incredible, when one reflects upon it,

but during the whole of my school life, this fact was never

commented upon or taken into account by a single person, until

the Polish lady who taught us the elements of German and French

drew someone's attention to it in my sixteenth year. I was not

quick, but I passed for being denser than I was because of the

myopic haze that enveloped me. But this is not an autobiography,

and with the cold and shrouded details of my uninteresting school

life I will not fatigue the reader.

I was not content, however, to be the cipher that I found myself,

and when I had been at school for about a year, I 'broke out',

greatly, I think, to my own surprise, in a popular act. We had a

young usher whom we disliked. I suppose, poor half-starved

phthisic lad, that he was the most miserable of us all. He was, I

think, unfitted for the task which had been forced upon him; he

was fretful, unsympathetic, agitated. The school-house, an old

rambling place, possessed a long cellar-like room that opened

from our general corridor and was lighted by deep windows,

carefully barred, which looked into an inner garden. This vault

was devoted to us and to our play-boxes: by a tacit law, no

master entered it. One evening, just at dusk, a great number of

us were here when the bell for night-school rang, and many of us

dawdled at the summons. Mr. B., tactless in his anger, bustled in

among us, scolding in a shrill voice, and proceeded to drive us

forth. I was the latest to emerge, and as he turned away to see

if any other truant might not be hiding, I determined upon

action. With a quick movement, I drew the door behind me and

bolted it, just in time to hear the imprisoned usher scream with

vexation. We boys all trooped upstairs and it is characteristic

of my isolation that I had not one 'chum' to whom I could confide

my feat.

That Mr. B. had been shut in became, however, almost instantly

known, and the night-class, usually so unruly, was awed by the

event into exemplary decorum. There, with no master near us, in a

silence rarely broken by a giggle or a catcall, we sat diligently

working, or pretending to work. Through my brain, as I hung over

my book a thousand new thoughts began to surge. I was the

liberator, the tyrannicide; I had freed all my fellows from the

odious oppressor. Surely, when they learned that it was I, they

would cluster round me; surely, now, I should be somebody in the

school-life, no longer a mere trotting shadow or invisible

presence. The interval seemed long; at length Mr. B. was released

by a servant, and he came up into the school-room to find us in

that ominous condition of suspense.

At first he said nothing. He sank upon a chair in a half-fainting

attitude, while he pressed his hand to his side; his distress and

silence redoubled the boys' surprise, and filled me with

something like remorse. For the first time, I reflected that he

was human, that perhaps he suffered. He rose presently and took a

slate, upon which he wrote two questions: 'Did you do it?' 'Do

you know who did?' and these he propounded to each boy in

rotation. The prompt, redoubled 'No' in every case seemed to pile

up his despair.

One of the last to whom he held, in silence, the trembling slate

was the perpetrator. As I saw the moment approach, an unspeakable

timidity swept over me. I reflected that no one had seen me, that

no one could accuse me. Nothing could be easier or safer than to

deny, nothing more perplexing to the enemy, nothing less perilous

for the culprit. A flood of plausible reasons invaded my brain; I

seemed to see this to be a case in which to tell the truth would

be not merely foolish, it would be wrong. Yet when the usher

stood before me, holding the slate out in his white and shaking

hand, I seized the pencil, and, ignoring the first question, I

wrote 'Yes' firmly against the second. I suppose that the

ambiguity of this action puzzled Mr. B. He pressed me to answer:

'Did you do it?' but to that I was obstinately dumb; and away I

was hurried to an empty bed-room, where for the whole of that

night and the next day I was held a prisoner, visited at

intervals by the headmaster and other inquisitorial persons,

until I was gradually persuaded to make a full confession and

apology.

This absurd little incident had one effect, it revealed me to my

schoolfellows as an existence. From that time forth I lay no

longer under the stigma of invisibility; I had produced my

material shape and had thrown my shadow for a moment into a

legend. But, in other respects, things went on much as before.

Curiously uninfluenced by my surroundings, I in my turn failed to

exercise influence, and my practical isolation was no less than

it had been before. It was thus that it came about that my social

memories of my boarding-school life are monotonous and vague. It

was a period during which, as it appears to me now on looking

back, the stream of my spiritual nature spread out into a shallow

pool which was almost stagnant. I was labouring to gain those

elements of conventional knowledge, which had, in many cases, up

to that time been singularly lacking. But my brain was starved,

and my intellectual perceptions were veiled. Elder persons who in

later years would speak to me frankly of my school-days assured

me that, while I had often struck them as a smart and quaint and

even interesting child, all promise seemed to fade out of me as a

schoolboy, and that those who were most inclined to be indulgent

gave up the hope that I should prove a man in a way remarkable.

This was particularly the case with the most indulgent of my

protectors, my refined and gentle stepmother.

As this record can, however, have no value that is not based on

its rigorous adhesion to the truth, I am bound to say that the

dreariness and sterility of my school-life were more apparent

than real. I was pursuing certain lines of moral and mental

development all the time, and since my schoolmasters and my

schoolfellows combined in thinking me so dull, I will display a

tardy touch of 'proper spirit' and ask whether it may not partly

have been because they were themselves so commonplace. I think

that if some drops of sympathy, that magic dew of Paradise, had

fallen upon my desert, it might have blossomed like the rose, or,

at all events, like that chimerical flower, the Rose of Jericho.

As it was, the conventionality around me, the intellectual

drought, gave me no opportunity of outward growth. They did not

destroy, but they cooped up, and rendered slow and inefficient,

that internal life which continued, as I have said, to live on

unseen. This took the form of dreams and speculations, in the

course of which I went through many tortuous processes of the

mind, the actual aims of which were futile, although the

movements themselves were useful. If I may more minutely define

my meaning, I would say that in my schooldays, without possessing

thoughts, I yet prepared my mind for thinking, and learned how to

think.

The great subject of my curiosity at this time was words, as

instruments of expression. I was incessant in adding to my

vocabulary, and in finding accurate and individual terms for

things. Here, too, the exercise preceded the employment, since I

was busy providing myself with words before I had any ideas to

express with them. When I read Shakespeare and came upon the

passage in which Prospero tells Caliban that he had no thoughts

until his master taught him words, I remember starting with

amazement at the poet's intuition, for such a Caliban had I been:

I pitied thee,

Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour

One thing or other, when thou didst not, savage,

Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble, like

A thing most brutish; I endow'd thy purposes

With words that made them know.

For my Prosperos I sought vaguely in such books as I had access

to, and I was conscious that as the inevitable word seized hold

of me, with it out of the darkness into strong light came the

image and the idea.

My Father possessed a copy of Bailey's 'Etymological Dictionary', a

book published early in the eighteenth century. Over this I would

pore for hours, playing with the words in a fashion which I can

no longer reconstruct, and delighting in the savour of the rich,

old-fashioned country phrases. My Father finding me thus

employed, fell to wondering at the nature of my pursuit, and I

could offer him, indeed, no very intelligible explanation of it.

He urged me to give up such idleness, and to make practical use

of language. For this purpose he conceived an exercise which he

obliged me to adopt, although it was hateful to me. He sent me

forth, it might be, up the lane to Warbury Hill and round home by

the copses; or else down one chine to the sea and along the

shingle to the next cutting in the cliff, and so back by way of

the village; and he desired me to put down, in language as full

as I could, all that I had seen in each excursion. As I have

said, this practice was detestable and irksome to me, but, as I

look back, I am inclined to believe it to have been the most

salutary, the most practical piece of training which my Father

ever gave me. It forced me to observe sharply and clearly, to

form visual impressions, to retain them in the brain, and to

clothe them in punctilious and accurate language.

It was in my fifteenth year that I became again, this time

intelligently, acquainted with Shakespeare. I got hold of a

single play, _The Tempest_, in a school edition, prepared, I

suppose, for one of the university examinations which were then

being instituted in the provinces. This I read through and

through, not disdaining the help of the notes, and revelling in

the glossary. I studied _The Tempest_ as I had hitherto studied no

classic work, and it filled my whole being with music and

romance. This book was my own hoarded possession; the rest of

Shakespeare's works were beyond my hopes. But gradually I

contrived to borrow a volume here and a volume there. I completed

_The Merchant of Venice_, read _Cymbeline_, _Julius Caesar_ and _Much

Ado_; most of the others, I think, remained closed to me for a

long time. But these were enough to steep my horizon with all the

colours of sunrise. It was due, no doubt, to my bringing up, that

the plays never appealed to me as bounded by the exigencies of a

stage or played by actors. The images they raised in my mind were

of real people moving in the open air, and uttering, in the

natural play of life, sentiments that were clothed in the most

lovely, and yet, as it seemed to me, the most obvious and the

most inevitable language.

It was while I was thus under the full spell of the Shakespearean

necromancy that a significant event occurred. My Father took me

up to London for the first time since my infancy. Our visit was

one of a few days only, and its purpose was that we might take

part in some enormous Evangelical conference. We stayed in a dark

hotel off the Strand, where I found the noise by day and night

very afflicting. When we were not at the conference, I spent long

hours, among crumbs and bluebottle flies, in the coffee-room of

this hotel, my Father being busy at the British Museum and the

Royal Society. The conference was held in an immense hall,

somewhere in the north of London. I remember my short-sighted

sense of the terrible vastness of the crowd, with rings on rings

of dim white faces fading in the fog. My Father, as a privileged

visitor, was obliged with seats on the platform, and we were in

the heart of the first really large assemblage of persons that I

had ever seen.

The interminable ritual of prayers, hymns and addresses left no

impression on my memory, but my attention was suddenly stung into

life by a remark. An elderly man, fat and greasy, with a voice

like a bassoon, and an imperturbable assurance, was denouncing

the spread of infidelity, and the lukewarmness of professing

Christians, who refrained from battling with the wickedness at

their doors. They were like the Laodiceans, whom the angel of the

Apocalypse spewed out of his mouth. For instance, who, the orator

asked, is now rising to check the outburst of idolatry in our

midst? 'At this very moment,' he went on, 'there is proceeding,

unreproved, a blasphemous celebration of the birth of

Shakespeare, a lost soul now suffering for his sins in hell!' My

sensation was that of one who has suddenly been struck on the

head; stars and sparks beat around me. If some person I loved had

been grossly insulted in my presence, I could not have felt more

powerless in anguish. No one in that vast audience raised a word

of protest, and my spirits fell to their nadir. This, be it

remarked, was the earliest intimation that had reached me of the

tercentenary of the Birth at Stratford, and I had not the least

idea what could have provoked the outburst of outraged godliness.

But Shakespeare was certainly in the air. When we returned to the

hotel that noon, my Father of his own accord reverted to the

subject. I held my breath, prepared to endure fresh torment. What

he said, however, surprised and relieved me. 'Brother So and So,'

he remarked, 'was not, in my judgement, justified in saying what

he did. The uncovenanted mercies of God are not revealed to us.

Before so rashly speaking of Shakespeare as "a lost soul in

hell", he should have remembered how little we know of the poet's

history. The light of salvation was widely disseminated in the

land during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and we cannot know that

Shakespeare did not accept the atonement of Christ in simple

faith before he came to die.' The concession will today seem

meagre to gay and worldly spirits, but words cannot express how

comfortable it was to me. I gazed at my Father with loving eyes

across the cheese and celery, and if the waiter had not been

present I believe I might have hugged him in my arms.

This anecdote may serve to illustrate the attitude of my

conscience, at this time, with regard to theology. I was not

consciously in any revolt against the strict faith in which I had

been brought up, but I could not fail to be aware of the fact

that literature tempted me to stray up innumerable paths which

meandered in directions at right angles to that direct strait way

which leadeth to salvation. I fancied, if I may pursue the image,

that I was still safe up these pleasant lanes if I did not stray

far enough to lose sight of the main road. If, for instance, it

had been quite certain that Shakespeare had been irrecoverably

damnable and damned, it would scarcely have been possible for me

to have justified myself in going on reading _Cymbeline_. One who

broke bread with the Saints every Sunday morning, who 'took a

class' at Sunday school, who made, as my Father loved to remind

me, a public weekly confession of his willingness to bear the

Cross of Christ, such an one could hardly, however bewildering

and torturing the thought, continue to admire a lost soul. But

that happy possibility of an ultimate repentance, how it eased

me! I could always console myself with the belief that when

Shakespeare wrote any passage of intoxicating beauty, it was just

then that he was beginning to breathe the rapture that faith in

Christ brings to the anointed soul. And it was with a like

casuistry that I condoned my other intellectual and personal

pleasures.

My Father continued to be under the impression that my boarding-

school, which he never again visited after originally leaving me

there, was conducted upon the same principles as his own

household. I was frequently tempted to enlighten him, but I never

found the courage to do so. As a matter of fact the piety of the

establishment, which collected to it the sons of a large number

of evangelically minded parents throughout that part of the

country, resided mainly in the prospectus. It proceeded no

further than the practice of reading the Bible aloud, each boy in

successive order one verse, in the early morning before

breakfast. There was no selection and no exposition; where the

last boy sat, there the day's reading ended, even if it were in

the middle of a sentence, and there it began next morning.

Such reading of 'the chapter' was followed by a long dry prayer.

I do not know that this morning service would appear more

perfunctory than usual to other boys, but it astounded and

disgusted me, accustomed as I was to the ministrations at home,

where my Father read 'the word of God' in a loud passionate

voice, with dramatic emphasis, pausing for commentary and

paraphrase, and treating every phrase as if it were part of a

personal message or of thrilling family history. At school,

'morning prayer' was a dreary, unintelligible exercise, and with

this piece of mumbo-jumbo, religion for the day began and ended.

The discretion of little boys is extraordinary. I am quite

certain no one of us ever revealed this fact to our godly parents

at home.

If any one was to do this, it was of course I who should first of

all have 'testified'. But I had grown cautious about making

confidences. One never knew how awkwardly they might develop or

to what disturbing excesses of zeal they might precipitously

lead. I was on my guard against my Father, who was, all the time,

only too openly yearning that I should approach him for help, for

comfort, for ghostly counsel. Still 'delicate', though steadily

gaining in solidity of constitution, I was liable to severe

chills and to fugitive neuralgic pangs. My Father was, almost

maddeningly, desirous that these afflictions should be sanctified

to me, and it was in my bed, often when I was much bowed in

spirit by indisposition, that he used to triumph over me most

pitilessly. He retained the singular superstition, amazing in a

man of scientific knowledge and long human experience, that all

pains and ailments were directly sent by the Lord in chastisement

for some definite fault, and not in relation to any physical

cause. The result was sometimes quite startling, and in

particular I recollect that my stepmother and I exchanged

impressions of astonishment at my Father's action when Mrs.

Goodyer, who was one of the 'Saints' and the wife of a young

journeyman cobbler, broke her leg. My Father, puzzled for an

instant as to the meaning of this accident, since Mrs. Goodyer

was the gentlest and most inoffensive of our church members,

decided that it must be because she had made an idol of her

husband, and he reduced the poor thing to tears by standing at

her bed-side and imploring the Holy Spirit to bring this sin home

to her conscience.

When, therefore, I was ill at home with one of my trifling

disorders, the problem of my spiritual state always pressed

violently upon my Father, and this caused me no little mental

uneasiness. He would appear at my bedside, with solemn

solicitude, and sinking on his knees would earnestly pray aloud

that the purpose of the Lord in sending me this affliction might

graciously be made plain to me; and then, rising, and standing by

my pillow, he would put me through a searching spiritual inquiry

as to the fault which was thus divinely indicated to me as

observed and reprobated on high.

It was not on points of moral behaviour that he thus cross-

examined me; I think he disdained such ignoble game as that. But

uncertainties of doctrine, relinquishment of faith in the purity

of this dogma or of that, lukewarm zeal in 'taking up the cross

of Christ', growth of intellectual pride,--such were the

insidious offences in consequence of which, as he supposed, the

cold in the head or the toothache had been sent as heavenly

messengers to recall my straggling conscience to its plain path

of duty.

What made me very uncomfortable on these occasions was my

consciousness that confinement to bed was hardly an affliction at

all. It kept me from the boredom of school, in a fire-lit bedroom

at home, with my pretty, smiling stepmother lavishing luxurious

attendance upon me, and it gave me long, unbroken days for

reading. I was awkwardly aware that I simply had not the

effrontery to 'approach the Throne of Grace' with a request to

know for what sin I was condemned to such a very pleasant

disposition of my hours.

The current of my life ran, during my schooldays, most merrily

and fully in the holidays, when I resumed my outdoor exercises

with those friends in the village of whom I have spoken earlier.

I think they were more refined and better bred than any of my

schoolfellows, at all events it was among these homely companions

alone that I continued to form congenial and sympathetic

relations. In one of these boys,--one of whom I have heard or

seen nothing now for nearly a generation,--I found tastes

singularly parallel to my own, and we scoured the horizon in

search of books in prose and verse, but particularly in verse.

As I grew stronger in muscle, I was capable of adding

considerably to my income by an exercise of my legs. I was

allowed money for the railway ticket between the town where the

school lay and the station nearest to my home. But, if I chose to

walk six or seven miles along the coast, thus more than halving

the distance by rail from school house to home, I might spend as

pocket money the railway fare I thus saved. Such considerable

sums I fostered in order to buy with them editions of the poets.

These were not in those days, as they are now, at the beck and

call of every purse, and the attainment of each little

masterpiece was a separate triumph. In particular I shall never

forget the excitement of reaching at length the exorbitant price

the bookseller asked for the only, although imperfect, edition of

the poems of S. T. Coleridge. At last I could meet his demand,

and my friend and I went down to consummate the solemn purchase.

Coming away with our treasure, we read aloud from the orange

coloured volume, in turns, as we strolled along, until at last we

sat down on the bulging root of an elm tree in a secluded lane.

Here we stayed, in a sort of poetical nirvana, reading, reading,

forgetting the passage of time, until the hour of our neglected

mid-day meal was a long while past, and we had to hurry home to

bread and cheese and a scolding.

There was occasionally some trouble about my reading, but now not

much nor often. I was rather adroit, and careful not to bring

prominently into sight anything of a literary kind which could

become a stone of stumbling. But, when I was nearly sixteen, I

made a purchase which brought me into sad trouble, and was the

cause of a permanent wound to my self-respect. I had long coveted

in the bookshop window a volume in which the poetical works of

Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe were said to be combined. This

I bought at length, and I carried it with me to devour as I trod

the desolate road that brought me along the edge of the cliff on

Saturday afternoons. Of Ben Jonson I could make nothing, but when

I turned to 'Hero and Leander', I was lifted to a heaven of

passion and music. It was a marvellous revelation of romantic

beauty to me, and as I paced along that lonely and exquisite

highway, with its immense command of the sea, and its peeps every

now and then, through slanting thickets, far down to the snow-

white shingle, I lifted up my voice, singing the verses, as I

strolled along:

Buskins of shells, all silver'd, used she,

And branch'd with blushing coral to the knee,

Where sparrows perched, of hollow pearl and gold,

Such as the world would wonder to behold,--

so it went on, and I thought I had never read anything so

lovely,--

Amorous Leander, beautiful and young,

Whose tragedy divine Musaeus sung,--

it all seemed to my fancy intoxicating beyond anything I had ever

even dreamed of, since I had not yet become acquainted with any

of the modern romanticists.

When I reached home, tired out with enthusiasm and exercise, I

must needs, so soon as I had eaten, search out my stepmother that

she might be a partner in my joys. It is remarkable to me now,

and a disconcerting proof of my still almost infantile innocence,

that, having induced her to settle to her knitting, I began,

without hesitation, to read Marlowe's voluptuous poem aloud to

that blameless Christian gentlewoman. We got on very well in the

opening, but at the episode of Cupid's pining, my stepmother's

needles began nervously to clash, and when we launched on the

description of Leander's person, she interrupted me by saying,

rather sharply, 'Give me that book, please, I should like to read

the rest to myself.' I resigned the reading in amazement, and was

stupefied to see her take the volume, shut it with a snap and

hide it under her needlework. Nor could I extract from her

another word on the subject.

The matter passed from my mind, and I was therefore extremely

alarmed when, soon after my going to bed that night, my Father

came into my room with a pale face and burning eyes, the prey of

violent perturbation. He set down the candle and stood by the

bed, and it was some time before he could resolve on a form of

speech. Then he denounced me, in unmeasured terms, for bringing

into the house, for possessing at all or reading, so abominable a

book. He explained that my stepmother had shown it to him, and

that he had looked through it, and had burned it.

The sentence in his tirade which principally affected me was

this. He said, 'You will soon be leaving us, and going up to

lodgings in London, and if your landlady should come into your

room, and find such a book lying about, she would immediately set

you down as a profligate.' I did not understand this at all, and

it seems to me now that the fact that I had so very simply and

childishly volunteered to read the verses to my stepmother should

have proved to my Father that I connected it with no ideas of an

immoral nature.

I was greatly wounded and offended, but my indignation was

smothered up in the alarm and excitement which followed the news

that I was to go up to live in lodgings, and, as it was evident,

alone, in London. Of this no hint or whisper had previously

reached me. On reflection, I can but admit that my Father, who

was little accustomed to seventeenth-century literature, must

have come across some startling exposures in Ben Jonson, and

probably never reached 'Hero and Leander' at all. The artistic

effect of such poetry on an innocently pagan mind did not come

within the circle of his experience. He judged the outspoken

Elizabethan poets, no doubt, very much in the spirit of the

problematical landlady.

Of the world outside, of the dim wild whirlpool of London, I was

much afraid, but I was now ready to be willing to leave the

narrow Devonshire circle, to see the last of the red mud, of the

dreary village street, of the plethoric elders, to hear the last

of the drawling voices of the 'Saints'. Yet I had a great

difficulty in persuading myself that I could ever be happy away

from home, and again I compared my lot with that of one of the

speckled soldier-crabs that roamed about in my Father's aquarium,

dragging after them great whorl-shells. They, if by chance they

were turned out of their whelk-habitations, trailed about a pale

soft body in search of another house, visibly broken-hearted and

the victims of every ignominious accident.

My spirits were divided pathetically between the wish to stay on,

a guarded child, and to proceed into the world, a budding man,

and, in my utter ignorance, I sought in vain to conjure up what

my immediate future would be. My Father threw no light upon the

subject, for he had not formed any definite idea of what I could

possibly do to earn an honest living. As a matter of fact I was

to stay another year at school and home.

This last year of my boyish life passed rapidly and pleasantly.

My sluggish brain waked up at last and I was able to study with

application. In the public examinations I did pretty well, and

may even have been thought something of a credit to the school.

Yet I formed no close associations, and I even contrived to

avoid, as I had afterwards occasion to regret, such lessons as

were distasteful to me, and therefore particularly valuable. But

I read with unchecked voracity, and in several curious

directions. Shakespeare now passed into my possession entire, in

the shape of a reprint more hideous and more offensive to the

eyesight than would in these days appear conceivable. I made

acquaintance with Keats, who entirely captivated me; with

Shelley, whose 'Queen Mab' at first repelled me from the

threshold of his edifice; and with Wordsworth, for the exercise

of whose magic I was still far too young. My Father presented me

with the entire bulk of Southey's stony verse, which I found it

impossible to penetrate, but my stepmother lent me _The Golden

Treasury_, in which almost everything seemed exquisite.

Upon this extension of my intellectual powers, however, there did

not follow any spirit of doubt or hostility to the faith. On the

contrary, at first there came a considerable quickening of

fervour. My prayers became less frigid and mechanical; I no

longer avoided as far as possible the contemplation of religious

ideas; I began to search the Scriptures for myself with interest

and sympathy, if scarcely with ardour. I began to perceive,

without animosity, the strange narrowness of my Father's system,

which seemed to take into consideration only a selected circle of

persons, a group of disciples peculiarly illuminated, and to have

no message whatever for the wider Christian community.

On this subject I had some instructive conversations with my

Father, whom I found not reluctant to have his convictions pushed

to their logical extremity. He did not wish to judge, he

protested; but he could not admit that a single Unitarian (or

'Socinian', as he preferred to say) could possibly be redeemed;

and he had no hope of eternal salvation for the inhabitants of

Catholic countries. I recollect his speaking of Austria. He

questioned whether a single Austrian subject, except, as he said,

here and there a pious and extremely ignorant individual, who had

not comprehended the errors of the Papacy, but had humbly studied

his Bible, could hope to find eternal life. He thought that the

ordinary Chinaman or savage native of Fiji had a better chance of

salvation than any cardinal in the Vatican. And even in the

priesthood of the Church of England he believed that while many

were called, few indeed would be found to have been chosen.

I could not sympathize, even in my then state of ignorance, with

so rigid a conception of the Divine mercy. Little inclined as I

was to be sceptical, I still thought it impossible, that a secret

of such stupendous importance should have been entrusted to a

little group of Plymouth Brethren, and have been hidden from

millions of disinterested and pious theologians. That the leaders

of European Christianity were sincere, my Father did not attempt

to question. But they were all of them wrong, _incorrect_; and no

matter how holy their lives, how self-sacrificing their actions,

they would have to suffer for their inexactitude through aeons of

undefined torment. He would speak with a solemn complacency of

the aged nun, who, after a long life of renunciation and

devotion, died at last, 'only to discover her mistake'.

He who was so tender-hearted that he could not bear to witness

the pain or distress of any person, however disagreeable or

undeserving, was quite acquiescent in believing that God would

punish human beings, in millions, for ever, for a purely

intellectual error of comprehension. My Father's inconsistencies

of perception seem to me to have been the result of a curious

irregularity of equipment. Taking for granted, as he did, the

absolute integrity of the Scriptures, and applying to them his

trained scientific spirit, he contrived to stifle, with a

deplorable success, alike the function of the imagination, the

sense of moral justice, and his own deep and instinctive

tenderness of heart.

There presently came over me a strong desire to know what

doctrine indeed it was that the other Churches taught. I

expressed a wish to be made aware of the practices of Rome, or at

least of Canterbury, and I longed to attend the Anglican and the

Roman services. But to do so was impossible. My Father did not,

indeed, forbid me to enter the fine parish church of our village,

or the stately Puginesque cathedral which Rome had just erected

at its side, but I knew that I could not be seen at either

service without his immediately knowing it, or without his being

deeply wounded. Although I was sixteen years of age, and although

I was treated with indulgence and affection, I was still but a

bird fluttering in the net-work of my Father's will, and

incapable of the smallest independent action. I resigned all

thought of attending any other services than those at our 'Room',

but I did no longer regard this exclusion as a final one. I

bowed, but it was in the house of Rimmon, from which I now knew

that I must inevitably escape. All the liberation, however, which

I desired or dreamed of was only just so much as would bring me

into communion with the outer world of Christianity without

divesting me of the pure and simple principles of faith.

Of so much emancipation, indeed, I now became ardently desirous,

and in the contemplation of it I rose to a more considerable

degree of religious fervour than I had ever reached before or was

ever to experience later. Our thoughts were at this time

abundantly exercised with the expectation of the immediate coming

of the Lord, who, as my Father and those who thought with him

believed, would suddenly appear, without the least warning, and

would catch up to be with Him in everlasting glory all whom

acceptance of the Atonement had sealed for immortality. These

were, on the whole, not numerous, and our belief was that the

world, after a few days' amazement at the total disappearance of

these persons, would revert to its customary habits of life,

merely sinking more rapidly into a moral corruption due to the

removal of these souls of salt. This event an examination of

prophecy had led my Father to regard as absolutely imminent, and

sometimes, when we parted for the night, he would say with a

sparkling rapture in his eyes, 'Who knows? We may meet next in

the air, with all the cohorts of God's saints!'

This conviction I shared, without a doubt; and, indeed,--in

perfect innocency, I hope, but perhaps with a touch of slyness

too,--I proposed at the end of the summer holidays that I should

stay at home. 'What is the use of my going to school? Let me be

with you when we rise to meet the Lord in the air!' To this my

Father sharply and firmly replied that it was our duty to carry

on our usual avocations to the last, for we knew not the moment

of His coming, and we should be together in an instant on that

day, how far soever we might be parted upon earth. I was ashamed,

but his argument was logical, and, as it proved, judicious. My

Father lived for nearly a quarter of a century more, never losing

the hope of 'not tasting death', and as the last moments of

mortality approached, he was bitterly disappointed at what he

held to be a scanty reward of his long faith and patience. But if

my own life's work had been, as I proposed, shelved in

expectation of the Lord's imminent advent, I should have cumbered

the ground until this day.

To school, therefore, I returned with a brain full of strange

discords, in a huddled mixture of 'Endymion' and the Book of

Revelation, John Wesley's hymns and 'Midsummer Night's Dream'.

Few boys of my age, I suppose, carried about with them such a

confused throng of immature impressions and contradictory hopes.

I was at one moment devoutly pious, at the next haunted by

visions of material beauty and longing for sensuous impressions.

In my hot and silly brain, Jesus and Pan held sway together, as

in a wayside chapel discordantly and impishly consecrated to

Pagan and to Christian rites. But for the present, as in the

great chorus which so marvellously portrays our double nature,

'the folding-star of Bethlehem' was still dominant. I became more

and more pietistic. Beginning now to versify, I wrote a tragedy

in pale imitation of Shakespeare, but on a Biblical and

evangelistic subject; and odes that were parodies of those in

'Prometheus Unbound', but dealt with the approaching advent of

our Lord and the rapture of His saints. My unwholesome

excitement, bubbling up in this violent way, reached at last a

climax and foamed over.

It was a summer afternoon, and, being now left very free in my

movements, I had escaped from going out with the rest of my

schoolfellows in their formal walk in charge of an usher. I had

been reading a good deal of poetry, but my heart had translated

Apollo and Bacchus into terms of exalted Christian faith. I was

alone, and I lay on a sofa, drawn across a large open window at

the top of the school-house, in a room which was used as a study

by the boys who were 'going up for examination'. I gazed down on

a labyrinth of garden sloping to the sea, which twinkled faintly

beyond the towers of the town. Each of these gardens held a villa

in it, but all the near landscape below me was drowned in

foliage. A wonderful warm light of approaching sunset modelled

the shadows and set the broad summits of the trees in a rich

glow. There was an absolute silence below and around me; a magic

of suspense seemed to keep every topmost twig from waving.

Over my soul there swept an immense wave of emotion. Now, surely,

now the great final change must be approaching. I gazed up into

the tenderly-coloured sky, and I broke irresistibly into speech.

'Come now, Lord Jesus,' I cried, 'come now and take me to be for

ever with Thee in Thy Paradise. I am ready to come. My heart is

purged from sin, there is nothing that keeps me rooted to this

wicked world. Oh, come now, now, and take me before I have known

the temptations of life, before I have to go to London and all

the dreadful things that happen there!' And I raised myself on

the sofa, and leaned upon the window-sill, and waited for the

glorious apparition.

This was the highest moment of my religious life, the apex of my

striving after holiness. I waited awhile, watching; and then I

felt a faint shame at the theatrical attitude I had adopted,

although I was alone. Still I gazed and still I hoped. Then a

little breeze sprang up and the branches danced. Sounds began to

rise from the road beneath me. Presently the colour deepened, the

evening came on. From far below there rose to me the chatter of

the boys returning home. The tea-bell rang,--last word of prose

to shatter my mystical poetry. 'The Lord has not come, the Lord

will never come,' I muttered, and in my heart the artificial

edifice of extravagant faith began to totter and crumble. From

that moment forth my Father and I, though the fact was long

successfully concealed from him and even from myself, walked in

opposite hemispheres of the soul, with 'the thick o' the world

between us'.

EPILOGUE

THIS narrative, however, must not be allowed to close with the

Son in the foreground of the piece. If it has a value, that value

consists in what light it may contrive to throw upon the unique

and noble figure of the Father. With the advance of years, the

characteristics of this figure became more severely outlined,

more rigorously confined within settled limits. In relation to

the Son--who presently departed, at a very immature age, for the

new life in London--the attitude of the Father continued to be

one of extreme solicitude, deepening by degrees into

disappointment and disenchantment. He abated no jot or tittle of

his demands upon human frailty. He kept the spiritual cord drawn

tight; the Biblical bearing-rein was incessantly busy, jerking

into position the head of the dejected neophyte. That young soul,

removed from the Father's personal inspection, began to blossom

forth crudely and irregularly enough, into new provinces of

thought, through fresh layers of experience. To the painful

mentor at home in the West, the centre of anxiety was still the

meek and docile heart, dedicated to the Lord's service, which

must, at all hazards and with all defiance of the rules of life,

be kept unspotted from the world.

The torment of a postal inquisition began directly I was settled

in my London lodgings. To my Father--with his ample leisure, his

palpitating apprehension, his ready pen--the flow of

correspondence offered no trouble at all; it was a grave but

gratifying occupation. To me the almost daily letter of

exhortation, with its string of questions about conduct, its

series of warnings, grew to be a burden which could hardly be

borne, particularly because it involved a reply as punctual and

if possible as full as itself. At the age of seventeen, the

metaphysics of the soul are shadowy, and it is a dreadful thing

to be forced to define the exact outline of what is so undulating

and so shapeless. To my Father there seemed no reason why I

should hesitate to give answers of full metallic ring to his hard

and oft-repeated questions; but to me this correspondence was

torture. When I feebly expostulated, when I begged to be left a

little to myself, these appeals of mine automatically stimulated,

and indeed blew up into fierce flames, the ardour of my Father's

alarm.

The letter, the only too-confidently expected letter, would lie

on the table as I descended to breakfast. It would commonly be,

of course, my only letter, unless tempered by a cosy and chatty

note from my dear and comfortable stepmother, dealing with such

perfectly tranquillizing subjects as the harvest of roses in the

garden or the state of health of various neighbours. But the

other, the solitary letter, in its threatening whiteness, with

its exquisitely penned address--there it would lie awaiting me,

destroying the taste of the bacon, reducing the flavour of the

tea to insipidity. I might fatuously dally with it, I might

pretend not to observe it, but there it lay. Before the morning's

exercise began, I knew that it had to be read, and what was

worse, that it had to be answered. Useless the effort to conceal

from myself what it contained. Like all its precursors, like all

its followers, it would insist, with every variety of appeal, on

a reiterated declaration that I still fully intended, as in the

days of my earliest childhood, 'to be on the Lord's side' in

everything.

In my replies, I would sometimes answer precisely as I was

desired to answer; sometimes I would evade the queries, and write

about other things; sometimes I would turn upon the tormentor,

and urge that my tender youth might be let alone. It little

mattered what form of weakness I put forth by way of baffling my

Father's direct, firm, unflinching strength. To an appeal against

the bondage of a correspondence of such unbroken solemnity I

would receive--with what a paralysing promptitude!--such a reply

as this:--

'Let me say that the 'solemnity' you complain of has only been the

expression of tender anxiousness of a father's heart, that his

only child, just turned out upon the world, and very far out of

his sight and hearing, should be walking in God's way. Recollect

that it is not now as it was when you were at school, when we had

personal communication with you at intervals of five days--we

now know absolutely nothing of you, save from your letters, and

if they do not indicate your spiritual prosperity, the deepest

solicitudes of our hearts have nothing to feed on. But I will try

henceforth to trust you, and lay aside my fears; for you are

worthy of my confidence; and your own God and your father's God

will hold you with His right hand.'

Over such letters as these I am not ashamed to say that I

sometimes wept; the old paper I have just been copying shows

traces of tears shed upon it more than forty years ago, tears

commingled of despair at my own feebleness, distraction, at my

want of will, pity for my Father's manifest and pathetic

distress. He would 'try henceforth to trust' me, he said. Alas!

the effort would be in vain; after a day or two, after a hollow

attempt to write of other things, the importunate subject would

recur; there would intrude again the inevitable questions about

the Atonement and the Means of Grace, the old anxious fears lest

I was 'yielding' my intimacy to agreeable companions who were not

'one with me in Christ', fresh passionate entreaties to be

assured, in every letter, that I was walking in the clear light

of God's presence.

It seems to me now profoundly strange, although I knew too little

of the world to remark it at the time, that these incessant

exhortations dealt, not with conduct, but with faith. Earlier in

this narrative I have noted how disdainfully, with what an

austere pride, my Father refused to entertain the subject of

personal shortcomings in my behaviour. There were enough of them

to blame, Heaven knows, but he was too lofty-minded a gentleman

to dwell upon them, and, though by nature deeply suspicious of

the possibility of frequent moral lapses, even in the very elect,

he refused to stoop to anything like espionage.

I owe him a deep debt of gratitude for his beautiful faith in me

in this respect, and now that I was alone in London, at this

tender time of life, 'exposed', as they say, to all sorts of

dangers, as defenceless as a fledgling that has been turned out

of its nest, yet my Father did not, in his uplifted Quixotism,

allow himself to fancy me guilty of any moral misbehaviour, but

concentrated his fears entirely upon my faith.

'Let me know more of your inner light. Does the candle of the

Lord shine on your soul?' This would be the ceaseless inquiry.

Or, again, 'Do you get any spiritual companionship with young

men? You passed over last Sunday without even a word, yet this

day is the most interesting to me in your whole week. Do you find

the ministry of the Word pleasant, and, above all, profitable?

Does it bring your soul into exercise before God? The Coming of

Christ draweth nigh. Watch, therefore and pray always, that you

may be counted worthy to stand before the Son of Man.'

If I quote such passages as this from my Father's letters to me,

it is not that I seek entertainment in a contrast between his

earnestness and the casuistical inattention and provoked

distractedness of a young man to whom the real world now offered

its irritating and stimulating scenes of animal and intellectual

life, but to call out sympathy, and perhaps wonder, at the

spectacle of so blind a Roman firmness as my Father's spiritual

attitude displayed.

His aspirations were individual and metaphysical. At the present

hour, so complete is the revolution which has overturned the

puritanism of which he was perhaps the latest surviving type,

that all classes of religious persons combine in placing

philanthropic activity, the objective attitude, in the

foreground. It is extraordinary how far-reaching the change has

been, so that nowadays a religion which does not combine with its

subjective faith a strenuous labour for the good of others is

hardly held to possess any religious principle worth proclaiming.

This propaganda of beneficence, this constant attention to the

moral and physical improvement of persons who have been

neglected, is quite recent as a leading feature of religion,

though indeed it seems to have formed some part of the Saviour's

original design. It was unknown to the great preachers of the

seventeenth century, whether Catholic or Protestant, and it

offered but a shadowy attraction to my Father, who was the last

of their disciples. When Bossuet desired his hearers to listen to

the _cri de misere l'entour de nous, qui devrait nous fondre le

coeur_, he started a new thing in the world of theology. We may

search the famous 'Rule and Exercises of Holy Living' from cover

to cover, and not learn that Jeremy Taylor would have thought

that any activity of the district-visitor or the Salvation lassie

came within the category of saintliness.

My Father, then, like an old divine, concentrated on thoughts

upon the intellectual part of faith. In his obsession about me,

he believed that if my brain could be kept unaffected by any of

the seductive errors of the age, and my heart centred in the

adoring love of God, all would be well with me in perpetuity. He

was still convinced that by intensely directing my thoughts, he

could compel them to flow in a certain channel, since he had not

begun to learn the lesson, so mournful for saintly men of his

complexion, that 'virtue would not be virtue, could it be given

by one fellow creature to another'. He had recognized, with

reluctance, that holiness was not hereditary, but he continued to

hope that it might be compulsive. I was still 'the child of many

prayers', and it was not to be conceded that these prayers could

remain unanswered.

The great panacea was now, as always, the study of the Bible, and

this my Father never ceased to urge upon me. He presented to me a

copy of Dean Alford's edition of the Greek New Testament, in four

great volumes, and these he had had so magnificently bound in

full morocco that the work shone on my poor shelf of sixpenny

poets like a duchess among dairy maids. He extracted from me a

written promise that I would translate and meditate upon a

portion of the Greek text every morning before I started for

business. This promise I presently failed to keep, my good

intentions being undermined by an invincible _ennui_; I concealed

the dereliction from him, and the sense that I was deceiving my

Father ate into my conscience like a canker. But the dilemma was

now before me that I must either deceive my Father in such things

or paralyse my own character.

My growing distaste for the Holy Scriptures began to occupy my

thoughts, and to surprise as much as it scandalized me. My desire

was to continue to delight in those sacred pages, for which I

still had an instinctive veneration. Yet I could not but observe

the difference between the zeal with which I snatched at a volume

of Carlyle or Ruskin--since these magicians were now first

revealing themselves to me--and the increasing languor with which

I took up Alford for my daily 'passage'. Of course, although I

did not know it, and believed my reluctance to be sinful, the

real reason why I now found the Bible so difficult to read was my

familiarity with its contents. These had the colourless triteness

of a story retold a hundred times. I longed for something new,

something that would gratify curiosity and excite surprise.

Whether the facts and doctrines contained in the Bible were true

or false was not the question that appealed to me; it was rather

that they had been presented to me so often and had sunken into

me so far that, as someone has said, they 'lay bedridden in the

dormitory of the soul', and made no impression of any kind upon

me.

It often amazed me, and I am still unable to understand the fact,

that my Father, through his long life--or until nearly the close

of it--continued to take an eager pleasure in the text of the

Bible. As I think I have already said, before he reached middle

life, he had committed practically the whole of it to memory, and

if started anywhere, even in a Minor Prophet, he could go on

without a break as long as ever he was inclined for that

exercise. He, therefore, at no time can have been assailed by the

satiety of which I have spoken, and that it came so soon to me I

must take simply as an indication of difference of temperament.

It was not possible, even through the dark glass of

correspondence, to deceive his eagle eye in this matter, and his

suspicions accordingly took another turn. He conceived me to have

become, or to be becoming, a victim of 'the infidelity of the

age.'

In this new difficulty, he appealed to forms of modern literature

by the side of which the least attractive pages of Leviticus or

Deuteronomy struck me as even thrilling. In particular, he urged

upon me a work, then just published, called _The Continuity of

Scripture_ by William Page Wood, afterwards Lord Chancellor

Hatherley. I do not know why he supposed that the lucubrations of

an exemplary lawyer, delivered in a style that was like the

trickling of sawdust, would succeed in rousing emotions which the

glorious rhetoric of the Orient had failed to awaken; but Page

Wood had been a Sunday School teacher for thirty years, and my

Father was always unduly impressed by the acumen of pious

barristers.

As time went on, and I grew older and more independent in mind,

my Father's anxiety about what he called 'the pitfalls and snares

which surround on every hand the thoughtless giddy youth of

London' became extremely painful to himself. By harping in

private upon these 'pitfalls'--which brought to my imagination a

funny rough woodcut in an old edition of Bunyan, where a devil

was seen capering over a sort of box let neatly into the ground--

he worked himself up into a frame of mind which was not a little

irritating to his hapless correspondent, who was now 'snared'

indeed, limed by the pen like a bird by the feet, and could not

by any means escape. To a peck or a flutter from the bird the

implacable fowler would reply:

'You charge me with being suspicious, and I fear I cannot deny the

charge. But I can appeal to your own sensitive and thoughtful

mind for a considerable allowance. My deep and tender love for

you; your youth and inexperience; the examples of other young

men; your distance from parental counsel; our absolute and

painful ignorance of all the details of your daily life, except

what you yourself tell us:--try to throw yourself into the

standing of a parent, and say if my suspiciousness is

unreasonable. I rejoicingly acknowledge that from all I see you

are pursuing a virtuous, steady, worthy course. One good thing my

suspiciousness does:--ever and anon it brings out from you

assurances, which greatly refresh and comfort me. And again, it

carries me ever to God's Throne of Grace on your behalf Holy Job

suspected that his sons might have sinned, and cursed God in

their heart. Was not his suspicion much like mine, grounded on

the same reasons and productive of the same results? For it drove

him to God in intercession. I have adduced the example of this

Patriarch before, and he will endure being looked at again.'

In fact, Holy Job continued to be frequently looked at, and for

this Patriarch I came to experience a hatred which was as

venomous as it was undeserved. But what youth of eighteen would

willingly be compared with the sons of Job? And indeed, for my

part, I felt much more like that justly exasperated character,

Elihu the Buzite, of the kindred of Ram.

As time went on, the peculiar strain of inquisition was relaxed,

and I endured fewer and fewer of the torments of religious

correspondence. Nothing abides in one tense projection, and my

Father, resolute as he was, had other preoccupations. His

orchids, his microscope, his physiological researches, his

interpretations of prophecy, filled up the hours of his active

and strenuous life, and, out of his sight, I became not indeed

out of his mind, but no longer ceaselessly in the painful

foreground of it. Yet, although the reiteration of his anxiety

might weary him a little as it had wearied me well nigh to groans

of despair, there was not the slightest change in his real

attitude towards the subject or towards me.

I have already had occasion to say that he had nothing of the

mystic or the visionary about him. At certain times and on

certain points, he greatly desired that signs and wonders, such

as had astonished and encouraged the infancy of the Christian

Church, might again be vouchsafed to it, but he did not pretend

to see such miracles himself, nor give the slightest credence to

others who asserted that they did. He often congratulated himself

on the fact that although his mind dwelt so constantly on

spiritual matters it was never betrayed into any suspension of

the rational functions.

Cross-examination by letter slackened, but on occasion of my

brief and usually summer visits to Devonshire I suffered acutely

from my Father's dialectical appetites. He was surrounded by

peasants, on whom the teeth of his arguments could find no

purchase. To him, in that intellectual Abdera, even an unwilling

youth from London offered opportunities of pleasant contest. He

would declare himself ready, nay eager, for argument. With his

mental sleeves turned up, he would adopt a fighting attitude, and

challenge me to a round on any portion of the Scheme of Grace.

His alacrity was dreadful to me, his well-aimed blows fell on

what was rather a bladder or a pillow than a vivid antagonist.

He was, indeed, most unfairly handicapped,--I was naked, he in a

suit of chain armour,--for he had adopted a method which I

thought, and must still think, exceedingly unfair. He assumed

that he had private knowledge of the Divine Will, and he would

meet my temporizing arguments by asseverations,--'So sure as my

God liveth!' or by appeals to a higher authority,--'But what does

_my_ Lord tell me in Paul's Letter to the Philippians?' It was the

prerogative of his faith to know, and of his character to

overpower objection; between these two millstones I was rapidly

ground to powder.

These 'discussions', as they were rather ironically called,

invariably ended for me in disaster. I was driven out of my

_papier-mache_ fastnesses, my canvas walls rocked at the first peal

from my Father's clarion, and the foe pursued me across the

plains of Jericho until I lay down ignominiously and covered my

face. I seemed to be pushed with horns of iron, such as those

which Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah prepared for the

encouragement of Ahab.

When I acknowledged defeat and cried for quarter, my Father would

become radiant, and I still seem to hear the sound of his full

voice, so thrilling, so warm, so painful to my over-strained

nerves, bursting forth in a sort of benediction at the end of

each of these one-sided contentions, with 'I bow my knees unto

the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, that He would grant you,

according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with

might by His Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in

your heart by faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love,

may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth,

and length, and depth, and height, and to know the love of Christ

which passeth knowledge, that you might be filled with the

fullness of God.'

Thus solemn and thus ceremonious was my Father apt to become,

without a moment's warning, on plain and domestic occasions;

abruptly brimming over with emotion like a basin which an unseen

flow of water has filled and over-filled.

I earnestly desire that no trace of that absurd self-pity which

is apt to taint recollections of this nature should give falsity

to mine. My Father, let me say once more, had other interests

than those of his religion. In particular, at this time, he took

to painting in water-colours in the open air, and he resumed the

assiduous study of botany. He was no fanatical monomaniac.

Nevertheless, there was, in everything he did and said, the

central purpose present. He acknowledged it plainly; 'with me,'

he confessed, 'every question assumes a Divine standpoint and is

not adequately answered if the judgement-seat of Christ is not

kept in sight.'

This was maintained whether the subject under discussion was

poetry, or society, or the Prussian war with Austria, or the

stamen of a wild flower. Once, at least, he was himself conscious

of the fatiguing effect on my temper of this insistency, for,

raising his great brown eyes with a flash of laughter in them, he

closed the Bible suddenly after a very lengthy disquisition, and

quoted his Virgil to startling effect:--

Claudite jam rivos, pueri: Sat prata biberunt.

The insistency of his religious conversation was, probably, the

less incomprehensible to me on account of the evangelical

training to which I had been so systematically subjected. It was,

however, none the less intolerably irksome, and would have been

exasperating, I believe, even to a nature in which a powerful and

genuine piety was inherent. To my own, in which a feeble and

imitative faith was expiring, it was deeply vexatious. It led,

alas! to a great deal of bowing in the house of Rimmon, to much

hypocritical ingenuity in drawing my Father's attention away, if

possible, as the terrible subject was seen to be looming and

approaching. In this my stepmother would aid and abet, sometimes

producing incongruous themes, likely to attract my Father aside,

with a skill worthy of a parlour conjurer, and much to my

admiration. If, however, she was not unwilling to come, in this

way, to the support of my feebleness, there was no open collusion

between us. She always described my Father, when she was alone

with me, admiringly, as one 'whose trumpet gave no uncertain

sound'. There was not a tinge of infidelity upon her candid mind,

but she was human, and I think that now and then she was

extremely bored.

My Father was entirely devoid of the prudence which turns away

its eyes and passes as rapidly as possible in the opposite

direction. The peculiar kind of drama in which every sort of

social discomfort is welcomed rather than that the characters

should be happy when guilty of 'acting a lie', was not invented

in those days, and there can hardly be imagined a figure more

remote from my Father than Ibsen. Yet when I came, at a far later

date, to read _The Wild Duck_, memories of the embarrassing

household of my infancy helped me to realize Gregers Werle, with

his determination to pull the veil of illusion away from every

compromise that makes life bearable.

I was docile, I was plausible, I was anything but combative; if

my Father could have persuaded himself to let me alone, if he

could merely have been willing to leave my subterfuges and my

explanations unanalysed, all would have been well. But he refused

to see any difference in temperament between a lad of twenty and

a sage of sixty. He had no vital sympathy for youth, which in

itself had no charm for him. He had no compassion for the

weaknesses of immaturity, and his one and only anxiety was to be

at the end of his spiritual journey, safe with me in the house

where there are many mansions. The incidents of human life upon

the road to glory were less than nothing to him.

My Father was very fond of defining what was his own attitude at

this time, and he was never tired of urging the same ambition

upon me. He regarded himself as the faithful steward of a Master

who might return at any moment, and who would require to find

everything ready for his convenience. That master was God, with

whom my Father seriously believed himself to be in relations much

more confidential than those vouchsafed to ordinary pious

persons. He awaited, with anxious hope, 'the coming of the Lord',

an event which he still frequently believed to be imminent. He

would calculate, by reference to prophecies in the Old and New

Testament, the exact date of this event; the date would pass,

without the expected Advent, and he would be more than

disappointed,--he would be incensed. Then he would understand

that he must have made some slight error in calculation, and the

pleasures of anticipation would recommence.

Me in all this he used as a kind of inferior coadjutor, much as a

responsible and upper servant might use a footboy. I, also, must

be watching; it was not important that I should be seriously

engaged in any affairs of my own. I must be ready for the

Master's coming; and my Father's incessant cross-examination was

made in the spirit of a responsible servant who fidgets lest some

humble but essential piece of household work has been neglected.

My holidays, however, and all my personal relations with my

Father were poisoned by this insistency. I was never at my ease

in his company; I never knew when I might not be subjected to a

series of searching questions which I should not be allowed to

evade. Meanwhile, on every other stage of experience I was

gaining the reliance upon self and the respect for the opinion of

others which come naturally to a young man of sober habits who

earns his own living and lives his own life. For this kind of

independence my Father had no respect or consideration, when

questions of religion were introduced, although he handsomely

conceded it on other points. And now first there occurred to me

the reflection, which in years to come I was to repeat over and

over, with an ever sadder emphasis,--what a charming companion,

what a delightful parent, what a courteous and engaging friend my

Father would have been, and would pre-eminently have been to me,

if it had not been for this stringent piety which ruined it all.

Let me speak plainly. After my long experience, after my patience

and forbearance, I have surely the right to protest against the

untruth (would that I could apply to it any other word!) that

evangelical religion, or any religion in a violent form, is a

wholesome or valuable or desirable adjunct to human life. It

divides heart from heart. It sets up a vain, chimerical ideal, in

the barren pursuit of which all the tender, indulgent affections,

all the genial play of life, all the exquisite pleasures and soft

resignations of the body, all that enlarges and calms the soul

are exchanged for what is harsh and void and negative. It

encourages a stern and ignorant spirit of condemnation; it throws

altogether out of gear the healthy movement of the conscience; it

invents virtues which are sterile and cruel; it invents sins

which are no sins at all, but which darken the heaven of innocent

joy with futile clouds of remorse. There is something horrible,

if we will bring ourselves to face it, in the fanaticism that can

do nothing with this pathetic and fugitive existence of ours but

treat it as if it were the uncomfortable ante-chamber to a palace

which no one has explored and of the plan of which we know

absolutely nothing. My Father, it is true, believed that he was

intimately acquainted with the form and furniture of this

habitation, and he wished me to think of nothing else but of the

advantages of an eternal residence in it.

Then came a moment when my self-sufficiency revolted against the

police-inspection to which my 'views' were incessantly subjected.

There was a morning, in the hot-house at home, among the gorgeous

waxen orchids which reminded my Father of the tropics in his

youth, when my forbearance or my timidity gave way. The enervated

air, soaked with the intoxicating perfumes of all those

voluptuous flowers, may have been partly responsible for my

outburst. My Father had once more put to me the customary

interrogatory. Was I 'walking closely with God'? Was my sense of

the efficacy of the Atonement clear and sound? Had the Holy

Scriptures still their full authority with me? My replies on this

occasion were violent and hysterical. I have no clear

recollection what it was that I said,--I desire not to recall the

whimpering sentences in which I begged to be let alone, in which

I demanded the right to think for myself, in which I repudiated

the idea that my Father was responsible to God for my secret

thoughts and my most intimate convictions.

He made no answer; I broke from the odorous furnace of the

conservatory, and buried my face in the cold grass upon the lawn.

My visit to Devonshire, already near its close, was hurried to an

end. I had scarcely arrived in London before the following

letter, furiously despatched in the track of the fugitive, buried

itself like an arrow in my heart:

'When your sainted Mother died, she not only tenderly committed

you to God, but left you also as a solemn charge to me, to bring

you up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. That

responsibility I have sought constantly to keep before me: I can

truly aver that it has been ever before me--in my choice of a

housekeeper, in my choice of a school, in my ordering of your

holidays, in my choice of a second wife, in my choice of an

occupation for you, in my choice of a residence for you; and in

multitudes of lesser things--I have sought to act for you, not in

the light of this present world, but with a view to Eternity.

'Before your childhood was past, there seemed God's manifest

blessing on our care; for you seemed truly converted to Him; you

confessed, in solemn baptism, that you had died and had been

raised with Christ; and you were received with joy into the bosom

of the Church of God, as one alive from the dead.

'All this filled my heart with thankfulness and joy, whenever I

thought of you:--how could it do otherwise? And when I left you

in London, on that dreary winter evening, my heart, full of

sorrowing love, found its refuge and its resource in this

thought,--that you were one of the lambs of Christ's flock;

sealed with the Holy Spirit as His; renewed in heart to holiness,

in the image of God.

'For a while, all appeared to go on fairly well: we yearned,

indeed, to discover more of heart in your allusions to religious

matters, but your expressions towards us were filial and

affectionate; your conduct, so far as we could see, was moral and

becoming; you mingled with the people of God, spoke of occasional

delight and profit in His ordinances; and employed your talents

in service to Him.

'But of late, and specially during the past year, there has become

manifest a rapid progress towards evil. (I must beg you here to

pause, and again to look to God for grace to weigh what I am

about to say; or else wrath will rise.)

'When you came to us in the summer, the heavy blow fell full upon

me; and I discovered how very far you had departed from God. It

was not that you had yielded to the strong tide of youthful

blood, and had fallen a victim to fleshly lusts; in that case,

however sad, your enlightened conscience would have spoken

loudly, and you would have found your way back to the blood which

cleanseth us from all sin, to humble confession and self-

abasement, to forgiveness and to recommunion with God. It was not

this; it was worse. It was that horrid, insidious infidelity,

which had already worked in your mind and heart with terrible

energy. Far worse, I say, because this was sapping the very

foundations of faith, on which all true godliness, all real

religion, must rest.

'Nothing seemed left to which I could appeal. We had, I found, no

common ground. The Holy Scriptures had no longer any authority:

you had taught yourself to evade their inspiration. Any

particular Oracle of God which pressed you, you could easily

explain away; even the very character of God you weighed in your

balance of fallen reason, and fashioned it accordingly. You were

thus sailing down the rapid tide of time towards Eternity,

without a single authoritative guide (having cast your chart

overboard), except what you might fashion and forge on your own

anvil,--except what you might _guess_, in fact.

'Do not think I am speaking in passion, and using unwarrantable

strength of words. If the written Word is not absolutely

authoritative, what do we know of God? What more than we can

infer, that is, guess,--as the thoughtful heathens guessed,--

Plato, Socrates, Cicero,--from dim and mute surrounding

phenomena? What do we know of Eternity? Of our relations to God?

Especially of the relations of a sinner to God? What of

reconciliation? What of the capital question--How can a God of

perfect spotless rectitude deal with me, a corrupt sinner, who

have trampled on those of His laws which were even written on my

conscience?...

'This dreadful conduct of yours I had intended, after much prayer,

to pass by in entire silence; but your apparently sincere

inquiries after the cause of my sorrow have led me to go to the

root of the matter, and I could not stop short of the development

contained in this letter. It is with pain, not in anger, that I

send it; hoping that you may be induced to review the whole

course, of which this is only a stage, before God. If this grace

were granted to you, oh! how joyfully should I bury all the past,

and again have sweet and tender fellowship with my beloved Son,

as of old.'

The reader who has done me the favour to follow this record of

the clash of two temperaments will not fail to perceive the

crowning importance of the letter from which I have just made a

long quotation. It sums up, with the closest logic, the whole

history of the situation, and I may leave it to form the epigraph

of this little book.

All that I need further say is to point out that when such

defiance is offered to the intelligence of a thoughtful and

honest young man with the normal impulses of his twenty-one

years, there are but two alternatives. Either he must cease to

think for himself; or his individualism must be instantly

confirmed, and the necessity of religious independence must be

emphasized.

No compromise, it is seen, was offered; no proposal of a truce

would have been acceptable. It was a case of 'Everything or

Nothing'; and thus desperately challenged, the young man's

conscience threw off once for all the yoke of his 'dedication',

and, as respectfully as he could, without parade or remonstrance,

he took a human being's privilege to fashion his inner life for

himself.