Transcribed from the 1913 Hodder and Stoughton edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org
THE
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF
MARK RUTHERFORD
* * * * *
EDITED BY HIS FRIEND
REUBEN SHAPCOTT
* * * * *
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
* * * * *
[_All rights reserved_]
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD 13
CHAPTER II
PREPARATION 33
CHAPTER III
WATER LANE 57
CHAPTER IV
EDWARD GIBBON MARDON 84
CHAPTER V
MISS ARBOUR 107
CHAPTER VI
ELLEN AND MARY 138
CHAPTER VII
EMANCIPATION 173
CHAPTER VIII
PROGRESS IN EMANCIPATION 194
CHAPTER IX
OXFORD STREET 215
PREFACE
TO THE SECOND EDITION
THE present edition is a reprint of the first, with corrections of
several mistakes which had been overlooked.
There is one observation which I may perhaps be permitted to make on
re-reading after some years this autobiography. Rutherford, at any rate
in his earlier life, was an example of the danger and the folly of
cultivating thoughts and reading books to which he was not equal, and
which tend to make a man lonely.
It is all very well that remarkable persons should occupy themselves with
exalted subjects, which are out of the ordinary road which ordinary
humanity treads; but we who are not remarkable make a very great mistake
if we have anything to do with them. If we wish to be happy, and have to
live with average men and women, as most of us have to live, we must
learn to take an interest in the topics which concern average men and
women. We think too much of ourselves. We ought not to sacrifice a
single moment’s pleasure in our attempt to do something which is too big
for us, and as a rule, men and women are always attempting what is too
big for them. To ninety-nine young men out of a hundred, or perhaps
ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a hundred
thousand, the wholesome healthy doctrine is, “Don’t bother yourselves
with what is beyond you; try to lead a sweet, clean, wholesome life, keep
yourselves in health above everything, stick to your work, and when your
day is done amuse and refresh yourselves.”
It is not only a duty to ourselves, but it is a duty to others to take
this course. Great men do the world much good, but not without some
harm, and we have no business to be troubling ourselves with their dreams
if we have duties which lie nearer home amongst persons to whom these
dreams are incomprehensible. Many a man goes into his study, shuts
himself up with his poetry or his psychology, comes out, half
understanding what he has read, is miserable because he cannot find
anybody with whom he can talk about it, and misses altogether the far
more genuine joy which he could have obtained from a game with his
children or listening to what his wife had to tell him about her
neighbours.
“Lor, miss, you haven’t looked at your new bonnet to-day,” said a servant
girl to her young mistress.
“No, why should I? I did not want to go out.”
“Oh, how can you? why, I get mine out and look at it every night.”
She was happy for a whole fortnight with a happiness cheap at a very high
price.
That same young mistress was very caustic upon the women who block the
pavement outside drapers’ shops, but surely she was unjust. They always
seem unconscious, to be enjoying themselves intensely and most
innocently, more so probably than an audience at a Wagner concert. Many
persons with refined minds are apt to depreciate happiness, especially if
it is of “a low type.” Broadly speaking, it is the one thing worth
having, and low or high, if it does no mischief, is better than the most
spiritual misery.
Metaphysics and theology, including all speculations on the why and the
wherefore, optimism, pessimism, freedom, necessity, causality, and so
forth, are not only for the most part loss of time, but frequently
ruinous. It is no answer to say that these things force themselves upon
us, and that to every question we are bound to give or try to give an
answer. It is true, although strange, that there are multitudes of
burning questions which we must do our best to ignore, to forget their
existence; and it is not more strange, after all, than many other facts
in this wonderfully mysterious and defective existence of ours. One
fourth of life is intelligible, the other three-fourths is unintelligible
darkness; and our earliest duty is to cultivate the habit of not looking
round the corner.
“Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry
heart; for God hath already accepted thy works. Let thy garments be
always white, and let not thy head lack ointment. Live joyfully with the
wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which He
hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity: for that is
thy portion in life.”
R. S.
* * * * *
_This is the night when I must die_,
_And great Orion walketh high_
_In silent glory overhead_:
_He’ll set just after I am dead_.
_A week this night_, _I’m in my grave_:
_Orion walketh o’er the wave_:
_Down in the dark damp earth I lie_,
_While he doth march in majesty_.
_A few weeks hence and spring will come_;
_The earth will bright array put on_
_Of daisy and of primrose bright_,
_And everything which loves the light_.
_And some one to my child will say_,
“_You’ll soon forget that you could play_
_Beethoven_; _let us hear a strain_
_From that slow movement once again_.”
_And so she’ll play that melody_,
_While I among the worms do lie_;
_Dead to them all_, _for ever dead_;
_The churchyard clay dense overhead_.
_I once did think there might be mine_
_One friendship perfect and divine_;
_Alas_! _that dream dissolved in tears_
_Before I’d counted twenty years_.
_For I was ever commonplace_;
_Of genius never had a trace_;
_My thoughts the world have never fed_,
_Mere echoes of the book last read_.
_Those whom I knew I cannot blame_:
_If they are cold_, _I am the same_:
_How could they ever show to me_
_More than a common courtesy_?
_There is no deed which I have done_;
_There is no love which I have won_,
_To make them for a moment grieve_
_That I this night their earth must leave_.
Thus, moaning at the break of day,
A man upon his deathbed lay;
A moment more and all was still;
The Morning Star came o’er the hill.
But when the dawn lay on his face,
It kindled an immortal grace;
As if in death that Life were shown
Which lives not in the great alone.
Orion sank down in the west
Just as he sank into his rest;
I closed in solitude his eyes,
And watched him till the sun’s uprise.
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD
NOW that I have completed my autobiography up to the present year, I
sometimes doubt whether it is right to publish it. Of what use is it,
many persons will say, to present to the world what is mainly a record of
weaknesses and failures? If I had any triumphs to tell; if I could show
how I had risen superior to poverty and suffering; if, in short, I were a
hero of any kind whatever, I might perhaps be justified in communicating
my success to mankind, and stimulating them to do as I have done. But
mine is the tale of a commonplace life, perplexed by many problems I have
never solved; disturbed by many difficulties I have never surmounted; and
blotted by ignoble concessions which are a constant regret.
I have decided, however, to let the manuscript remain. I will not
destroy it, although I will not take the responsibility of printing it.
Somebody may think it worth preserving; and there are two reasons why
they may think so, if there are no others. In the first place it has
some little historic value, for I feel increasingly that the race to
which I belonged is fast passing away, and that the Dissenting minister
of the present day is a different being altogether from the Dissenting
minister of forty years ago.
In the next place, I have observed that the mere knowing that other
people have been tried as we have been tried is a consolation to us, and
that we are relieved by the assurance that our sufferings are not special
and peculiar, but common to us with many others. Death has always been a
terror to me, and at times, nay generally, religion and philosophy have
been altogether unavailing to mitigate the terror in any way. But it has
been a comfort to me to reflect that whatever death may be, it is the
inheritance of the whole human race; that I am not singled out, but shall
merely have to pass through what the weakest have had to pass through
before me. In the worst of maladies, worst at least to me, those which
are hypochondriacal, the healing effect which is produced by the visit of
a friend who can simply say, “I have endured all that,” is most marked.
So it is not impossible that some few whose experience has been like mine
may, by my example, be freed from that sense of solitude which they find
so depressing.
I was born, just before the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was opened,
in a small country town in one of the Midland shires. It is now
semi-manufacturing, at the junction of three or four lines of railway,
with hardly a trace left of what it was fifty years ago. It then
consisted of one long main street, with a few other streets branching
from it at right-angles. Through this street the mail-coach rattled at
night, and the huge waggon rolled through it, drawn by four horses, which
twice a week travelled to and from London and brought us what we wanted
from the great and unknown city.
My father and mother belonged to the ordinary English middle class of
well-to-do shop-keepers. My mother’s family came from a little distance,
but my father’s had lived in those parts for centuries. I remember
perfectly well how business used to be carried on in those days. There
was absolutely no competition, and although nobody in the town who was in
trade got rich, except the banker and the brewer, nearly everybody was
tolerably well off, and certainly not pressed with care as their
successors are now. The draper, who lived a little way above us, was a
deacon in our chapel, and every morning, soon after breakfast, he would
start off for his walk of about four miles, stopping by the way to talk
to his neighbours about the events of the day. At eleven o’clock or
thereabouts he would return and would begin work. Everybody took an hour
for dinner—between one and two—and at that time, especially on a hot July
afternoon, the High Street was empty from end to end, and the profoundest
peace reigned.
My life as a child falls into two portions, sharply divided—week-day and
Sunday. During the week-day I went to the public school, where I learned
little or nothing that did me much good. The discipline of the school
was admirable, and the headmaster was penetrated with a most lofty sense
of duty, but the methods of teaching were very imperfect. In Latin we
had to learn the Eton Latin Grammar till we knew every word of it by
heart, but we did scarcely any retranslation from English into Latin.
Much of our time was wasted on the merest trifles, such as learning to
write, for example, like copperplate, and, still more extraordinary, in
copying the letters of the alphabet as they are used in printing.
But we had two half-holidays in the week, which seem to me now to have
been the happiest part of my life. A river ran through the town, and on
summer Wednesdays and Saturdays we wandered along its banks for miles,
alternately fishing and bathing. I remember whole afternoons in June,
July, and August, passed half-naked or altogether naked in the solitary
meadows and in the water; I remember the tumbling weir with the deep pool
at the bottom in which we dived; I remember, too, the place where we used
to swim across the river with our clothes on our heads, because there was
no bridge near, and the frequent disaster of a slip of the braces in the
middle of the water, so that shirt, jacket, and trousers were soaked, and
we had to lie on the grass in the broiling sun without a rag on us till
everything was dry again.
In winter our joys were of a different kind but none the less delightful.
If it was a frost, we had skating; not like skating on a London pond, but
over long reaches, and if the locks had not intervened, we might have
gone a day’s journey on the ice without a stoppage. If there was no ice,
we had football, and what was still better, we could get up a
steeplechase—on foot straight across hedge and ditch.
In after-years, when I lived in London, I came to know children who went
to school in Gower Street, and travelled backwards and forwards by
omnibus—children who had no other recreation than an occasional visit to
the Zoological Gardens, or a somewhat sombre walk up to Hampstead to see
their aunt; and I have often regretted that they never had any experience
of those perfect poetic pleasures which the boy enjoys whose childhood is
spent in the country, and whose home is there. A country boarding-school
is something altogether different.
On the Sundays, however, the compensation came. It was a season of
unmixed gloom. My father and mother were rigid Calvinistic Independents,
and on that day no newspaper nor any book more secular than the
Evangelical Magazine was tolerated. Every preparation for the Sabbath
had been made on the Saturday, to avoid as much as possible any work.
The meat was cooked beforehand, so that we never had a hot dinner even in
the coldest weather; the only thing hot which was permitted was a boiled
suet pudding, which cooked itself while we were at chapel, and some
potatoes which were prepared after we came home. Not a letter was opened
unless it was clearly evident that it was not on business, and for
opening these an apology was always offered that it was possible they
might contain some announcement of sickness. If on cursory inspection
they appeared to be ordinary letters, although they might be from
relations or friends, they were put away.
After family prayer and breakfast the business of the day began with the
Sunday-school at nine o’clock. We were taught our Catechism and Bible
there till a quarter past ten. We were then marched across the road into
the chapel, a large old-fashioned building dating from the time of
Charles II. The floor was covered with high pews. The roof was
supported by three or four tall wooden pillars which ran from the ground
to the ceiling, and the galleries by shorter pillars. There was a large
oak pulpit on one side against the wall, and down below, immediately
under the minister, was the “singing pew,” where the singers and
musicians sat, the musicians being performers on the clarionet, flute,
violin, and violoncello. Right in front was a long enclosure, called the
communion pew, which was usually occupied by a number of the poorer
members of the congregation.
There were three services every Sunday, besides intermitting
prayer-meetings, but these I did not as yet attend. Each service
consisted of a hymn, reading the Bible, another hymn, a prayer, the
sermon, a third hymn, and a short final prayer. The reading of the Bible
was unaccompanied with any observations or explanations, and I do not
remember that I ever once heard a mistranslation corrected.
The first, or long prayer, as it was called, was a horrible hypocrisy,
and it was a sore tax on the preacher to get through it. Anything more
totally unlike the model recommended to us in the New Testament cannot
well be imagined. It generally began with a confession that we were all
sinners, but no individual sins were ever confessed, and then ensued a
kind of dialogue with God, very much resembling the speeches which in
later years I have heard in the House of Commons from the movers and
seconders of addresses to the Crown at the opening of Parliament.
In all the religion of that day nothing was falser than the long prayer.
Direct appeal to God can only be justified when it is passionate. To
come maundering into His presence when we have nothing particular to say
is an insult, upon which we should never presume if we had a petition to
offer to any earthly personage. We should not venture to take up His
time with commonplaces or platitudes; but our minister seemed to consider
that the Almighty, who had the universe to govern, had more leisure at
His command that the idlest lounger at a club. Nobody ever listened to
this performance. I was a good child on the whole, but I am sure I did
not; and if the chapel were now in existence, there might be traced on
the flap of the pew in which we sat many curious designs due to these
dreary performances.
The sermon was not much better. It generally consisted of a text, which
was a mere peg for a discourse, that was pretty much the same from
January to December. The minister invariably began with the fall of man;
propounded the scheme of redemption, and ended by depicting in the
morning the blessedness of the saints, and in the evening the doom of the
lost. There was a tradition that in the morning there should be
“experience”—that is to say, comfort for the elect, and that the evening
should be appropriated to their less fortunate brethren.
The evening service was the most trying to me of all these. I never
could keep awake, and knew that to sleep under the Gospel was a sin. The
chapel was lighted in winter by immense chandeliers with tiers of candles
all round. These required perpetual snuffing, and I can see the old man
going round the chandeliers in the middle of the service with a mighty
pair of snuffers which opened and shut with a loud click. How I envied
him because he had semi-secular occupation which prevented that terrible
drowsiness! How I envied the pew-opener, who was allowed to stand at the
vestry door, and could slip into the vestry every now and then, or even
into the burial-ground if he heard irreverent boys playing there! The
atmosphere of the chapel on hot nights was most foul, and this added to
my discomfort. Oftentimes in winter, when no doors or windows were open,
I have seen the glass panes streaming with wet inside, and women carried
out fainting.
On rare occasions I was allowed to go with my father when he went into
the villages to preach. As a deacon he was also a lay-preacher, and I
had the ride in the gig out and home, and tea at a farm-house.
Perhaps I shall not have a better opportunity to say that, with all these
drawbacks, my religious education did confer upon me some positive
advantages. The first was a rigid regard for truthfulness. My parents
never would endure a lie or the least equivocation. The second was
purity of life, and I look upon this as a simply incalculable gain.
Impurity was not an excusable weakness in the society in which I lived;
it was a sin for which dreadful punishment was reserved. The reason for
my virtue may have been a wrong reason, but, anyhow, I was saved, and
being saved, much more was saved than health and peace of mind.
To this day I do not know where to find a weapon strong enough to subdue
the tendency to impurity in young men; and although I cannot tell them
what I do not believe, I hanker sometimes after the old prohibitions and
penalties. Physiological penalties are too remote, and the subtler
penalties—the degradation, the growth of callousness to finer pleasures,
the loss of sensitiveness to all that is most nobly attractive in
woman—are too feeble to withstand temptation when it lies in ambush like
a garrotter, and has the reason stunned in a moment.
The only thing that can be done is to make the conscience of a boy
generally tender, so that he shrinks instinctively from the monstrous
injustice of contributing for the sake of his own pleasure to the ruin of
another. As soon as manhood dawns, he must also have his attention
absorbed on some object which will divert his thoughts intellectually or
ideally; and by slight yet constant pressure, exercised not by fits and
starts, but day after day, directly and indirectly, his father must form
an antipathy in him to brutish, selfish sensuality. Above all, there
must be no toying with passion, and no books permitted, without
condemnation and warning, which are not of a heroic turn. When the boy
becomes a man he may read Byron without danger. To a youth he is fatal.
Before leaving this subject I may observe, that parents greatly err by
not telling their children a good many things which they ought to know.
Had I been taught when I was young a few facts about myself, which I only
learned accidentally long afterwards, a good deal of misery might have
been spared me.
Nothing particular happened to me till I was about fourteen, when I was
told it was time I became converted. Conversion, amongst the
Independents and other Puritan sects, is supposed to be a kind of miracle
wrought in the heart by the influence of the Holy Spirit, by which the
man becomes something altogether different to what he was previously. It
affects, or should affect, his character; that is to say, he ought after
conversion to be better in every way than he was before; but this is not
considered as its main consequence. In its essence it is a change in the
emotions and increased vividness of belief. It is now altogether untrue.
Yet it is an undoubted fact that in earlier days, and, indeed, in rare
cases, as late as the time of my childhood, it was occasionally a
reality.
It is possible to imagine that under the preaching of Paul sudden
conviction of a life misspent may have been produced with sudden personal
attachment to the Galilean who, until then, had been despised. There may
have been prompt release of unsuspected powers, and as prompt an
imprisonment for ever of meaner weaknesses and tendencies; the result
being literally a putting off of the old, and a putting on of the new
man. Love has always been potent to produce such a transformation, and
the exact counterpart of conversion, as it was understood by the
apostles, may be seen whenever a man is redeemed from vice by attachment
to some woman whom he worships, or when a girl is reclaimed from idleness
and vanity by becoming a mother.
But conversion, as it was understood by me and as it is now understood,
is altogether unmeaning. I knew that I had to be “a child of God,” and
after a time professed myself to be one, but I cannot call to mind that I
was anything else than I always had been, save that I was perhaps a
little more hypocritical; not in the sense that I professed to others
what I knew I did not believe, but in the sense that I professed it to
myself. I was obliged to declare myself convinced of sin; convinced of
the efficacy of the atonement; convinced that I was forgiven; convinced
that the Holy Ghost was shed abroad in my heart; and convinced of a great
many other things which were the merest phrases.
However, the end of it was, that I was proposed for acceptance, and two
deacons were deputed, in accordance with the usual custom, to wait upon
me and ascertain my fitness for membership. What they said and what I
said has now altogether vanished; but I remember with perfect
distinctness the day on which I was admitted. It was the custom to
demand of each candidate a statement of his or her experience. I had no
experience to give; and I was excused on the grounds that I had been the
child of pious parents, and consequently had not undergone that
convulsion which those, not favoured like myself, necessarily underwent
when they were called.
I was now expected to attend all those extra services which were
specially for the church. I stayed to the late prayer-meeting on Sunday;
I went to the prayer-meeting on week-days, and also to private
prayer-meetings. These services were not interesting to me for their own
sake. I thought they were, but what I really liked was clanship and the
satisfaction of belonging to a society marked off from the great world.
It must also be added that the evening meetings afforded us many
opportunities for walking home with certain young women, who, I am sorry
to say, were a more powerful attraction, not to me only, but to others,
than the prospect of hearing brother Holderness, the travelling draper,
confess crimes which, to say the truth, although they were many according
to his own account, were never given in that detail which would have made
his confession of some value. He never prayed without telling all of us
that there was no health in him, and that his soul was a mass of
putrefying sores; but everybody thought the better of him for his
self-humiliation. One actual indiscretion, however, brought home to him
would have been visited by suspension or expulsion.