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CONSTABLE'S MISCELLANY
OF ORIGINAL & SELECTED
PUBLICATIONS IN LITERATURE
SPIRITUAL
ADVENTURES
BY
ARTHUR
SYMONS
CONSTABLE.AND.CO.LIMITED.LONDON
_First Published_ 1905.
_Constable's Miscellany_ 1928.
Printed in Great Britain by
Lowe & Brydone Printers Limited. Park Street, N.W.1.
TO
THOMAS HARDY
CONTENTS
PAGE
A PRELUDE TO LIFE 3
ESTHER KAHN 57
CHRISTIAN TREVALGA 91
THE CHILDHOOD OF LUCY NEWCOME 125
THE DEATH OF PETER WAYDELIN 157
AN AUTUMN CITY 189
SEAWARD LACKLAND 213
EXTRACTS FROM THE JOURNAL OF HENRY LUXULYAN 253
A PRELUDE TO LIFE.
I
I am afraid I must begin a good way back if I am to explain myself to
myself at all satisfactorily. I can see how the queer child I was laid
the foundation of the man I became, and yet I remember singularly little
of my childhood. My parents were never very long in one place, and I
have never known what it was to have a home, as most children know it; a
home that has been lived in so long that it has got into the ways, the
bodily creases, of its inhabitants, like an old, comfortable garment,
warmed through and through by the same flesh. I left the town where I
was born when I was one year old, and I have never seen it since. I do
not even remember in what part of England my eyes first became conscious
of the things about them. I remember the hammering of iron on wood, when
a great ship was launched in a harbour; the terrifying sound of cannons,
as they burst into smoke on a great plain near an ancient castle, while
the soldiers rode in long lines across the grass; the clop-clop of a
cripple with a wooden leg; with my intense terror at the toppling wagons
of hay, as I passed them in the road. I remember absolutely nothing else
out of my very early childhood; I have not even been told many things
about it, except that I once wakened my mother, as I lay in a little cot
at her side, to listen to the nightingales, and that Victor Hugo once
stopped the nurse to smile at me, as she walked with me in her arms at
Fermain Bay, in Guernsey. If I have been a vagabond, and have never been
able to root myself in any one place in the world, it is because I have
no early memories of any one sky or soil. It has freed me from many
prejudices in giving me its own unresting kind of freedom; but it has
cut me off from whatever is stable, of long growth in the world.
I could not read until I was nine years old, and I could not read
because I resolutely refused to learn. I declared that it was
impossible; that I, at all events, never could do it; and I made the
most of a slight weakness in my eyes, saying that it hurt them, and
drawing tears out of my eyes at the sight of a book. I liked being read
to, and I used to sit on the bed while my sister, who often had to lie
down to rest, read out stories to me. I had a theory that a boy must
never show any emotion, and the pathetic parts of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'
tried me greatly. On one occasion I felt my sobs choking me, and the
passion of sorrow, mingled with the certainty that my emotion would
betray itself, sent me into a paroxysm of rage, in which I tore the book
from my sister's hands, and attacked her with my fists.
I never learned to read properly until I went to school at the age of
nine. I had been for a little while to a dame's school, and learned
nothing. I could only read easy words, out of large print books, and I
was totally ignorant of everything in the world, when I suddenly found I
had to go to school. I was taken to see the schoolmaster, whom I hated,
because I had been told he had only one lung, and I heard them
explaining to him how backward I was, and how carefully I had to be
treated. When the day came I left the house as if I were going to the
scaffold, walked very slowly until I had nearly reached the door of the
school, and then, when I saw the other boys hurrying in with their
satchels, and realised that I was to be in their company, to sit on a
form side by side with strangers, who knew all the things I did not
know, I turned round and walked away much more quickly than I had come.
I took some time in getting home, and I had to admit that I had not been
to school. In the afternoon I was sent back, not alone. I have no
recollection of more than the obscure horror of that first day at
school. I went home in the evening with lessons that I knew had to be
learned. Life seemed suddenly to have become serious. Up to then I had
always fancied that the grave things people said to me had no particular
meaning for me; for other people, no doubt, but not for me. I had played
with other boys on the terrace facing the sea; I had seen them going off
to school, and I had not had to go with them. Now everything had
changed. There was no longer any sea; I had to live in a street; I had
lessons to learn, and other people were to be conscious how well I
learned them.
It was that which taught me to read. What had seemed to me not worth
doing when I had only myself to please, for I could never realise that
my parents, so to speak, counted, became all at once a necessity,
because now there were others to reckon with. It was discovered that in
the midst of my unfathomable ignorance I had one natural talent; I could
spell, without ever being taught. I saw other boys poring over the
columns of their spelling-books, trying in vain to get the order of the
letters into their heads. I never even read them through; they came to
me by ear, instinctively. Finding myself able to do without trying
something that the others could not succeed in doing at all, I felt that
I could be hardly less intelligent than they, and I felt the little
triumph of outdoing others. I began to learn greedily.
The second day I was at school I found the schoolroom door shut when I
came into the playground, and I was told that I could not come in. I
climbed the gymnasium ladder and looked through the window. Two boys
were having a furious fight, and the bigger boys of the school were
gravely watching it. I was completely fascinated; it was a new
sensation. That day a boy bigger than myself jeered at me. I struck him.
There was a rapid fight before all the school, and I knocked him down. I
never needed to fight again, nor did I.
When I had once begun to learn, I learned certain things very quickly,
and others not at all. I never understood a single proposition of
Euclid; I never could learn geography, or draw a map. Arithmetic and
algebra I could do moderately, so long as I merely had to follow the
rules; the moment common sense was required I was helpless. History I
found entertaining, and I could even remember the dates, because they
had to do with facts which were like stories. French and Latin I picked
up easily, Greek with more difficulty. German I was never able to
master; I had an instinctive aversion to the mere sound of it, and I
could not remember the words; there were no pegs in my memory for them
to hang upon, as there were for the words of all the Romance languages.
When a thing did not interest me, nothing could make me learn it. I was
not obstinate, I was helpless. I have never been able to make out why
geography was so completely beyond my power. I have travelled since then
over most of Europe, and I have learned geography with the sight of my
eyes. But with all my passion for places I have never been able to find
my way in them until I have come to find it instinctively, and I suppose
that is why the names in the book or on the map said nothing to me. At
an examination when I was easily taking half the prizes, I have read
through my papers in geography and in Euclid, and taken them up to the
head-master's desk, and handed them back to him, calmly telling him that
I could not answer a single question. I was never able to go in for
matriculation, or any sort of general public examination, to the great
dissatisfaction of my masters, because, while I could have come out
easily at the top in most of the subjects, there were always one or two
in which I could do nothing.
I was not popular, at any of my schools, either with the boys or with
the masters, but I was not disliked. I neither hated out-of-door games
nor particularly cared for them. I rather liked cricket, but never
played football. I was terribly afraid of making a mistake before other
people, and would never attempt anything unless I was sure that I could
do it. I did not make friends readily, and I was somewhat indifferent to
my friends. I cannot now recollect a single school-friend at all
definitely, except one strange little creature, with the look and the
intelligence of a grown man; and I remember him chiefly because he
seemed to care very much for me, not because I ever cared much for him.
He had a mathematical talent which I was told was a kind of genius, but,
even then, he was only just kept alive, and he died in boyhood. He
seemed to me different from any one else I knew, more like a girl than a
boy; some one to be pitied. I remember his saying good-bye to me when
they took him away to die.
What the masters really thought of me I never quite knew. I looked upon
them as a kind of machine, not essentially different from the blackboard
on which they wrote figures in chalk. They sometimes made mistakes about
things which I knew, and this gave me a general distrust of them. I took
their praise coolly, as a thing which was my due, and I was quite
indifferent to their anger. I took no pains to conceal my critical
attitude towards them, and one classical master in particular was in
terror of me. He was not a sound scholar, and he knew that I knew it.
Every day he watched me out of the corner of his eye to see if I was
going to expose him, and he bribed me by lending me books which I wanted
to read. I loathed him, and left him alone. One day he carried his
deceit too far; there was an inquiry, and he disappeared. I have no
doubt my criticism was often unjust; I had the insolence of the parvenu
in learning. It had come to me too late for me to be able to take it
lightly. I corrected the dictation, put Marechal for 'Marshal' because
the word was used in reference to Ney, who I knew was a Frenchman; and
was furious when my pedantry lost me a mark.
During all this time I was living in the country, in small country towns
in the South of England, places to which Blackmore and Kingsley had
given a sort of minor fame. I remember long drives by night over
Dartmoor, and the sea at Westward Ho. Dartmoor had always a singular
fascination for me, partly because of its rocky loneliness, the abrupt
tors on which one could so easily be surprised in the mist, and partly
because there was a convict prison there, in a little town which we
often had occasion to visit. The most exquisite sensation of pleasure
which the drinking of water has ever given me was one hot day on
Dartmoor, when I drank the coldest water there ever was in the world out
of the hollow of my hand under a little Roman bridge that we had to
cross in driving to Princetown. The convict settlement was at
Princetown, and as we came near we could see gangs of convicts at work
on the road. Warders with loaded muskets walked up and down, and the
men, in their drab clothes marked in red with the broad-arrow, shovelled
and dug sullenly, like slaves. I thought every one of them had been a
murderer, and when one of them lifted his head from his work to look at
us as we passed I seemed to see some diabolical intention in his eyes. I
still remember one horrible grimace, done, I suppose, to frighten me. I
feared them, but I pitied them; I felt certain that some one was
plotting how to escape, and that he would suddenly drop his shovel and
begin to run, and that I should see the musket pointed at him and hear
the shot, and see the man fall. Once there was an alarm that two
convicts had escaped, and I expected at every moment to see them jump
out from behind a rock as we drove back at night. The warders had been
hurrying through the streets, I had seen the bloodhounds in leash; I
sickened at the thought of the poor devils who would be captured and
brought back between two muskets. Once I saw an escaped convict being
led back to prison; his arms were tied with cords, he had a bloody scar
on his forehead, his face was swollen with heat and helpless rage.
But I have another association with Princetown besides the convicts. It
was in the house of one of the warders that I first saw 'Don Quixote.'
We had gone in to get some tea, and, as we waited in the parlour, and my
father talked with the man, a grave, powerful person dressed in
dark-blue clothes, I came upon a book and opened it, and began to read.
I thought it the most wonderful book I had ever seen; I could not put it
down, I refused to be separated from it, and the warder said he would
lend it to me, and I might take it back with me that night. There was a
thunderstorm as we drove back over the moor in the black darkness; I
remember the terror of the horse, my father's cautious driving, for the
road was narrow and there was a ditch on each side; the rain poured, and
the flashes of lightning lit up the solid darkness of the moor for an
instant, and then left us in the hollow of a deeper darkness. I clutched
the book tight under my overcoat; the majesty of the storm mingled in
my head with the heroic figure of which I had just caught a glimpse in
the book; I sat motionless, inexpressibly happy, and when we reached
home I had to waken myself out of a dream.
The dream lasted until I had finished the book, and after. I cannot
remember how I felt, I only know that no book had ever meant so much to
me. It was 'Don Quixote' which wakened in me the passion for reading.
From that time I read incessantly, and I read everything. The first
verse I read was Scott, and from Scott I turned to Byron, at twelve or
thirteen, as to a kind of forbidden fruit, which must be delicious
because it is forbidden. I had been told that Byron was a very, very
great poet, and a very, very wicked man, an atheist, a writer whom it
was dangerous to read. At school I managed to get hold of a Byron, which
I read surreptitiously at the same moment that I was reading 'The
Headless Horseman.' I thought 'The Headless Horseman' very fine and
gory, but I was disappointed in the Byron, because I could not find
'Don Juan' in it. I knew, through reading a religious paper which
condemned wickedness in great detail, that 'Don Juan' was in some way
appallingly wicked. I wanted to see for myself, but I never, at that
time, succeeded in finding an edition immodest enough to contain it.
II.
While all this, and much more that I have forgotten, was building up
about me the house of life that I was to live in, I was but imperfectly
conscious of more than a very few things in the external world, and but
half awake to more than a very few things in the world within me. I
lived in the country, or at all events with lanes and fields always
about me; I took long walks, and liked walking; but I never was able to
distinguish oats from barley, or an oak from a maple; I never cared for
flowers, except slightly for their colour, when I saw many of them
growing together; I could not distinguish a blackbird from a thrush; I
was never conscious in my blood of the difference between spring and
autumn. I always loved the winter wind and the sunlight, and to plunge
through crisp snow, and to watch the rain through leaves. But I would
walk for hours without looking about me, or caring much for what I saw;
I was never tired, and the mere physical delight of walking shut my
eyes and my ears. I was always thinking, but never to much purpose; I
hated to think, because thinking troubled me, and whenever I thought
long my thoughts were sure to come round to one of two things: the
uncertainty of life, and the uncertainty of what might be life after
death. I was terribly afraid of death; I did not know exactly what held
me to life, but I wanted it to last for ever. I had always been
delicate, but never with any definite sickness; I was uneasy about
myself because I saw that others were uneasy about me, and my voracious
appetite for life was partly a kind of haste to eat and drink my fill at
a feast from which I might at any time be called away. And then I was
still more uneasy about hell.
My parents were deeply religious; we all went to church, a Nonconformist
church, twice on Sunday; I was not allowed to read any but pious books
or play anything but hymns or oratorios on Sunday; I was taught that
this life, which seemed so real and so permanent to me, was but an
episode in existence, a little finite part of eternity. We had grace
before and after meals; we had family prayers night and morning; we
seemed to live in continual communication with the other world. And yet,
for the most part, the other world meant nothing to me. I believed, but
could not interest myself in the matter. I read the Bible with keen
admiration, especially Ecclesiastes; the Old Testament seemed to me
wholly delightful, but I cared less for the New Testament; there was so
much doctrine in it, it was so explicit about duties, about the conduct
of life. I was taught to pray to God the Father, in the name of God the
Son, for the inspiration of God the Holy Ghost. I said my prayers
regularly; I was absolutely sincere in saying them; I begged hard for
whatever I wanted, and thought that if I begged hard enough my prayer
would be answered. But I found it very difficult to pray. It seemed to
me that prayer was useless unless it were uttered with an intimate
apprehension of God, unless an effort of will brought one mentally into
His presence. I tried hard to hypnotise myself into that condition, but
I rarely succeeded. Other thoughts drifted through my mind while my
lips were articulating words of supplication. I said, over and over
again, 'O Lord, for Jesus' sake!' and even while I was saying the words
with fervour I seemed to lose hold of their meaning. I was taught that
being clever mattered little, but that being good mattered infinitely. I
wanted to want to be good, but all I really wanted was to be clever. I
felt that this in itself was a wickedness. I could not help it, but I
believed that I should be punished for not being able to help it. I was
told that if I was very good I should go to heaven, but that if I was
wicked I should go to hell. I saw but one alternative.
And so the thought of hell was often in my mind, for the most part very
much in the background, but always ready to come forward at any external
suggestion. Once or twice it came to me with such vividness that I
rolled over on the ground in a paroxysm of agony, trying to pray God
that I might not be sent to hell, but unable to fix my mind on the words
of the prayer. I felt the eternal flames taking hold on me, and some
foretaste of their endlessness seemed to enter into my being. I never
once had the least sensation of heaven, or any desire for it. Never at
any time did it seem to me probable that I should get there.
I remember once in church, as I was looking earnestly at the face of a
child for whom I had a boyish admiration, that the thought suddenly shot
across my mind: 'Emma will die, Emma will go to heaven, and I shall
never see her again.' I shivered all through my body, I seemed to see
her vanishing away from me, and I turned my eyes aside, so that I could
not see her. But the thought gnawed at me so fiercely that a prayer
broke out of me, silently, like sweat: 'O God, let me be with her! O
God, let me be with her!' When I came out into the open air, and felt
the cold breeze on my forehead, the thought had begun to relax its hold
on me, and I never felt it again, with that certainty; but it was as if
a veil had been withdrawn for an instant, the veil which renders life
possible, and, for that instant, I had seen.
When my mother talked to me about pious things, I felt that they were
extraordinarily real to her, and this impressed me the more because her
thirst for this life was even greater than mine, and her hold on
external things far stronger. My father was a dryly intellectual,
despondent person, whose whole view of life was coloured by the
dyspepsia which he was never without, and the sick headaches which laid
him up for a whole day, every week or every fortnight. He was quite
unimaginative, cautious in his affairs, a great reader of the newspaper;
but he never seemed to me to have had the same sense of life as my
mother and myself. I respected him, for his ability, his scholarship,
and his character; but we had nothing akin, he never interested me. He
was severely indulgent to me; I never knew him to be unkind, or even
unreasonable. But I took all such things for granted, I felt no
gratitude for them, and I was only conscious that my father bored me. I
had no dislike for him; an indifference, rather; perhaps a little more
than indifference, for if he came into the room, and I did not happen to
be absorbed in reading, I usually went out of it. We might sit together
for an hour, and it never occurred to either of us to speak. So when he
spoke to me of my soul, which he did seriously, sadly, with an undertone
of reproach, my whole nature rose up against him. If to be good was to
be like him, I did not wish to be good.
With my mother, it was quite different. She had the joy of life, she was
sensitive to every aspect of the world; she felt the sunshine before it
came, and knew from what quarter the wind was blowing when she awoke in
the morning. I think she was never indifferent to any moment that ever
passed her by; I think no moment ever passed her by without being seized
in all the eagerness of acceptance. I never knew her when she was not
delicate, so delicate that she could rarely go out of doors in the
winter; but I never heard her complain, she was always happy, with a
natural gaiety which had only been strengthened into a kind of vivid
peace by the continual presence of a religion at once calm and
passionate. She was as sure of God as of my father; heaven was always as
real to her as the room in which she laughed and prayed. Sometimes, as
she read her Bible, her face quickened to an ecstasy. She was ready at
any moment to lay down the book and attend to the meanest household
duties; she never saw any gulf between meditation and action; her
meditations were all action. When a child, she had lain awake, longing
to see a ghost; she had never seen one, but if a ghost had entered the
room she would have talked with it as tranquilly as with a living
friend. To her the past, the present, and the future were but moments of
one existence; life was everything to her, and life was indestructible.
Her own personal life was so vivid that it never ceased, even in sleep.
She dreamed every night, precise, elaborate dreams, which she would tell
us in the morning with the same clearness as if she were telling us of
something that had really happened. She was never drowsy, she went to
sleep the moment her head was laid on the pillow, she awoke instantly
wide awake. There were things that she knew and things that she did not
know, but she was never vague. A duty was as clear to her as a fact;
infinitely tolerant to others, she expected from herself perfection,
the utmost perfection of which her nature was capable. It was because my
mother talked to me of the other world that I felt, in spite of myself,
that there was another world. Her certainty helped to make me the more
afraid.
She did not often talk to me of the other world. She preferred that I
should see it reflected in her celestial temper and in a capability as
of the angels. She sorrowed at my indifference, but she was content to
wait; she was sure of me, she never doubted that, sooner or later, I
should be saved. This, too, troubled me. I did not want to be saved. It
is true that I did not want to go to hell, but the thought of what my
parents meant by salvation had no attraction for me. It seemed to be the
giving up of all that I cared for. There was a sort of humiliation in
it. Jesus Christ seemed to me a hard master.
Sometimes there were revival services at the church, and I was never
quite at my ease until they were over. I was afraid of some appeal to my
emotions, which for the moment I should not be able to resist. I knew
that it would mean nothing, but I did not want to give in, even for a
moment. I felt that I might have to resist with more than my customary
indifference, and I did not like to admit to myself that any active
resistance could be necessary. I knelt, as a stormy prayer shook the
people about me into tears, rigid, forcing myself to think of something
else. I saw the preacher move about the church, speaking to one after
another, and I saw one after another get up and walk to the communion
rail, in sign of conversion. I wondered that they could do it, whatever
they felt; I wondered what they felt; I dreaded lest the preacher should
come up to me with some irresistible power, and beckon me up to that
rail. If he did come, I knelt motionless, with my face in my hands, not
answering his questions, not seeming to take the slightest notice of
him; but my heart was trembling, I did not know what was going to
happen; I felt nothing but that horrible uneasiness, but I feared it
might leave me helpless, at the man's mercy, or at God's perhaps.
As we walked home afterwards, I could see the others looking at me,
wondering at my spiritual stubbornness, wondering if at last I had felt
something. To them, I knew, I was like a man who shut his eyes and
declared that he could not see. 'You have only to open your eyes,' they
said to the man. But the man said, 'I prefer being blind.' It was
inexplicable to them. But they were not less inexplicable to me.
III.
From the time when 'Don Quixote' first opened my eyes to an imaginative
world outside myself, I had read hungrily; but another world was also
opened to me when I was about sixteen. I had been taught scales and
exercises on the piano; I had tried to learn music, with very little
success, when one day the head-master of the school asked me to go into
his drawing-room and copy out something for him. As I sat there copying,
the music-master, a German, came in and sat down at the piano. He played
something which I had never heard before, something which seemed to me
the most wonderful thing I had ever heard. I tried to go on copying, but
I did not know what I was writing down; I was caught into an ecstasy,
the sound seemed to envelop me like a storm, and then to trickle through
me like raindrops shaken from wet leaves, and then to wrap me again in a
tempest which was like a tempest of grief. When he had finished I said,
'Will you play that over again?' As he played it again I began to
distinguish it more clearly; I heard a slow, heavy trampling of feet,
marching in order, then what might have been the firing of cannon over a
grave, and the trampling again. When he told me that it was Chopin's
Funeral March, I understood why it was that the feet had moved so
slowly, and why the cannon had been fired; and I saw that the melody
which had soothed me was the timid, insinuating consolation which love
or hope sometimes brings to the mourner. I asked him if he would teach
me music and if he would teach me that piece. He promised to teach me
that piece, and I learned it. I learned no more scales and exercises; I
learned a few more pieces; but in a little while I could read at sight;
and when I was not reading a book I was reading a piece of music at the
piano. I never acquired the technique to play a single piece correctly,
but I learned to touch the piano as if one were caressing a living
being, and it answered me in an intimate and affectionate voice.
Books and music, then, together with my solitary walks, were the only
means of escape which I was able to find from the tedium of things as
they were. I was passionately in love with life, but the life I lived
was not the life I wanted. I did not know quite what I wanted, but I
knew that what I wanted was something very different from what I
endured. We were very poor, and I hated the constraints of poverty. We
were surrounded by commonplace, middle-class people, and I hated
commonplace and the middle classes. Sometimes we were too poor even to
have a servant, and I was expected to clean my own boots. I could not
endure getting my hands or my shirt-cuffs dirty; the thought of having
to do it disgusted me every day. Sometimes my mother, without saying
anything to me, had cleaned my boots for me. I was scarcely conscious of
the sacrifices which she and the others were continually making. I made
none, of my own accord, and I felt aggrieved if I had to share the
smallest of their privations.
From as early a time as I can remember, I had no very clear
consciousness of anything external to myself; I never realised that
others had the right to expect from me any return for the kindness which
they might show me or refuse to me, at their choice. I existed, others
also existed; but between us there was an impassable gulf, and I had
rarely any desire to cross it. I was very fond of my mother, but I felt
no affection towards any one else, nor any desire for the affection of
others. To be let alone, and to live my own life for ever, that was what
I wanted; and I raged because I could never entirely escape from the
contact of people who bored me and things which depressed me. If people
called, I went out of the room before they were shown in; if I had not
time to get away, I shook hands hurriedly, and slipped out as soon as I
could. I remember a cousin who used to come to tea every Sunday for two
or three years. My aversion to her was so great that I could hardly
answer her if she spoke to me, and I used to think of Shelley, and how
he too, like me, would 'lie back and languish into hate.' The woman was
quite inoffensive, but I am still unable to see her or hear her speak
without that sickness of aversion which used to make the painfulness of
Sunday more painful.
People in general left me no more than indifferent; they could be
quietly avoided. They meant no more to me than the chairs on which they
sat; I was untouched by their fortunes; I was unconscious of my human
relationship to them. To my mother every person in the world became, for
the moment of contact, the only person in the world; if she merely
talked with any one for five minutes she was absorbed to the exclusion
of every other thought; she saw no one else, she heard nothing else. I
watched her, with astonishment, with admiration; I felt that she was in
the right and I in the wrong; that she gained a pleasure and conferred a
benefit, while I only wearied myself and offended others; but I could
not help it. I felt nothing, I saw nothing, outside myself.
I always had a room upstairs, which I called my study, where I could sit
alone, reading or thinking. No one was allowed to enter the room; only,
in winter, as I always let the fire go out, my mother would now and then
steal in gently without speaking, and put more coals on the fire. I used
to look up from my books furiously, and ask why I could not be left
alone; my mother would smile, say nothing, and go out as quietly as she
had come in. I was only happy when I was in my study, but, when I had
shut the door behind me, I forgot all about the tedious people who were
calling downstairs, the covers of the book I was reading seemed to
broaden out into an enclosing rampart, and I was alone with myself.
At my last school there was one master, a young man, who wrote for a
provincial newspaper, of which he afterwards became the editor, with
whom I made friends. He had read a great deal, and he knew a few
literary people; he was equally fond of literature and of music. Some
school composition of mine had interested him in me, and he began to
lend me books, and to encourage me in trying to express myself in
writing. I had already run through Scott and Byron, with a very little
Shelley, and had come to Browning, whom he detested. When I was laid up
with scarlatina he sent me over a packet of books to read; one of them
was Swinburne's 'Poems and Ballads,' which seemed to give voice to all
the fever that I felt just then in my blood. I read 'Wuthering Heights'
at the same time and Rabelais a little time afterwards. I read all the
bound volumes of the 'Cornhill Magazine' from the beginning right
through, stories, essays, and poems, and I remember my delight in 'Harry
Richmond,' at a time when I had never heard the name of George Meredith.
I read essays signed 'R. L. S.', from which I got my first taste of a
sort of gipsy element in literature which was to become a passion when,
later on, 'Lavengro' fell into my hands. The reading of 'Lavengro' did
many things for me. It absorbed me from the first page, with a curiously
personal appeal, as of some one akin to me, and when I came to the place
where Lavengro learns Welsh in a fortnight, I laid down the book with a
feeling of fierce emulation. I had often thought of learning Italian: I
immediately bought an Italian Bible, and a grammar; I worked all day
long, not taking up 'Lavengro' again, until, at the end of the fortnight
which I had given myself, I could read Italian. Then I finished
'Lavengro.'
'Lavengro' took my thoughts into the open air, and gave me my first
conscious desire to wander. I learned a little Romany, and was always on
the lookout for gipsies. I realised that there were other people in the
world besides the conventional people I knew, who wore prim and shabby
clothes, and went to church twice on Sundays, and worked at business and
professions, and sat down to the meal of tea at five o'clock in the
afternoon. And I realised that there was another escape from these
people besides a solitary flight in books; that if a book could be so
like a man, there were men and women, after all, who had the interest of
a book as well as the warm advantage of being alive. Humanity began to
exist for me.
But with this discovery of a possible interest in real people, there
came a deeper loathing of the people by whom I was surrounded. I had
for the most part been able to ignore them; now I wanted to get away, so
that I could live my own life, and choose my own companions. My vague
notions of sex became precise, became a torture.
When I first read Rabelais and the 'Poems and Ballads,' I was ignorant
of my own body; I looked upon the relationship of man and woman as
something essentially wicked; my imagination took fire, but I was hardly
conscious of any physical reality connected with it. I was irrepressibly
timid in the presence of a woman; I hardly ever met young people of my
own age; and I had a feeling of the deepest reverence for women, from
which I endeavoured to banish the slightest consciousness of sex. I
thought it an inexcusable disrespect; and in my feeling towards the one
or two much older women who at one time or another had a certain
attraction for me, there was nothing, conscious at least, but a purely
romantic admiration. At the same time I had a guilty delight in reading
books which told me about the sensations of physical love, and I
trembled with ecstasy as I read them. Thoughts of them haunted me; I put
them out of my head by an effort, I called them back, they ended by
never leaving me.
I think it was a little earlier than this that I began to walk in my
sleep, and to have nightmares; but it was just then that I suffered most
from those obscure terrors of the night. Once, when I was a child, I
remember waking up in my nightshirt on the drawing-room sofa, and being
wrapped up in a shawl and carried upstairs by my father, and put back
into bed. I had come down in my sleep, opened the door, and walked into
the room without seeing any one, and laid myself down on the sofa. I did
not often dream, but, whenever I dreamed, it was of infinite spirals, up
which I had to climb, or of ladders, whose rungs dropped away from me as
my feet left them, or of slimy stone stairways into cold pits of
darkness, or of the tightening of a snake's coils around me, or of
walking with bare feet across a floor curdling with snakes. I awoke,
stifling a scream, my hair damp with sweat, out of impossible tasks in
which time shrank and swelled in some deadly game with life; something
had to be done in a second, and all eternity passed, lingering, while
the second poised over me like a drop of water always about to drip: it
fell, and I was annihilated into depth under depth of blackness.
Into these dreams of abstract horror there began to come a disturbing
element of sex. My books and my thoughts haunted me; I was restless and
ignorant, physically innocent, but with a sort of naive corruption of
mind. All the interest which I had never been able to find in the soul,
I found in what I only vaguely apprehended of the body. To me it was
something remote, evil, mainly inexplicable; but nothing I had ever felt
had meant so much to me. I never realised that there was any honesty in
sex, that nature was after all natural. I reached stealthily after some
stealthy delight of the senses, which I valued the more because it was a
forbidden thing. Love I never associated with the senses, it was not
even passion that I wanted; it was a conscious, subtle, elaborate
sensuality, which I knew not how to procure. And there was an infinite
curiosity, which I hardly even dared dream of satisfying; a curiosity
which was like a fever. I was scarcely conscious of any external
temptations. The ideas in which I had been trained, little as they had
seemed consciously to affect me, had given me the equivalent of what I
may call virtue, in a form of good taste. I was ashamed of my desires,
of my sensations, though I made no serious effort to escape them; but I
knew that, even if the opportunity were offered, something, some scruple
of physical refinement, some timidity, some unattached sense of fitness,
would step in to prevent me from carrying them into practice.
IV.
Every now and then my father used to talk to me seriously, saying that I
should have to choose some profession, and make my own living. I always
replied that there was nothing I could possibly do, that I hated every
profession, that I would rather starve than soil my hands with business,
and that so long as I could just go on living as I was then living, I
wanted nothing more. I did not want to be a rich man, I was never able
to realise money as a tangible thing, I wanted to have just enough to
live on, only not at home; in London. My father did not press the
matter; I could see that he dreaded my leaving home, and he knew that,
for the time, going to London was out of the question.
One summer I went down to a remote part of England to stay with some of
my relations. I had seen none of them since I was a child, I knew
nothing about them, except that some were farmers, some business people;
there was an astronomer, an old sea-captain, and a mad uncle who lived
in a cottage by himself on a moor near the sea, and grew marvellous
flowers in a vast garden. I stayed with a maiden aunt, who was like a
very old and very gaunt little bird; she was deaf, wrinkled, and bent,
but her hair was still yellow, her voice a high piping treble, and she
ran about with the tireless vivacity of a young girl. She had been
pretty, and had all the little vanities of a coquette; she wore bright,
semi-fashionable clothes, and conspicuous hats. She had much of the
natural gaiety of my mother, who was her elder sister; and she was
infinitely considerate to me, turning out one of her little rooms that I
might have it for a study. She liked me to play to her, and would sit by
the side of the old piano listening eagerly. The mad uncle was her
brother, and he would come in sometimes from his cottage, bringing great
bundles of flowers. He was very kind and gentle, and he would sometimes
tell me of the letters he had been writing to the Prince of Wales on the
subject of sewage, and of how the Prince of Wales had acknowledged his
communications. He had many theories about sewage; I have heard that
some of them were plausible and ingenious; and he was convinced that his
theories would some day be accepted, and that he would become famous. I
believe his brain had been turned by an unlucky passion for a beautiful
girl; he was only in an asylum for a short time; and for the most part
lived happily in his cottage among his flowers, developing theories of
sewage, and taking sun-baths naked in the garden.
The people of whom I saw most were some cousins: the father kept a shop,
and they all helped in the business. They were very kind, and did all
they could for me by feeding me plentifully and taking me for long
drives in the country, which was very hilly and wooded, and sometimes to
the sea, which was not too far off to reach by driving. We had not an
idea in common, and I always wondered how it was possible that my aunt,
who was my mother's eldest sister, could ever have married my uncle. He
was a kind man, and, in his way, intelligent; but he talked incessantly,
insistently, and with something unctuous in his voice and manner; he
came close to me while he spoke, and tapped my shoulder with his fingers
or my leg with his stick. I could not bear him to touch me; sometimes he
dropped his h's, and, as I heard them drop, I saw the old man looking
fixedly into my face with his large, keen, shifting eyes.
One of the daughters had something inquiring in her mind, a touch of
rebellious refinement; she had enough instinct for another kind of life
to be at least discontented with her own; with her I could talk. But the
others fitted into their environment without a crease or a ruffle. They
went to the shop early in the morning, slaved there all day, taught in
the Sunday-School on Sundays, said the obvious things to one another all
day long, were perfectly content to be where they were, do what they
did, think what they thought, and say what they said. Their house
reflected them like a mirror. Everything was clean and new, there was
plenty of everything; and I used to sit in their drawing-room looking
round it in a vain attempt to find a single thing which I could have
lived with, in a house of my own.
I went home from the visit gladly, glad to be at home again. We were
living then in the Midlands, and I used to spend whole days at
Kenilworth, at Warwick, at Coventry; I knew them from Scott's novels,
but I had never seen a ruined castle, a city with ancient buildings, and
I began to feel that there was something else to be seen in the world
besides the things I had dreamed of seeing. I took a boat at Leamington,
and rowed up the river as far as the chain underneath Warwick Castle. I
do not know why I have always remembered that moment, as if it marked a
date to me. It was with a full enjoyment of the contrast that I found
them busy preparing for a _fete_ when I got back to Leamington;
stringing up the Chinese lanterns to the branches of the trees, and
putting out little tables on the grass. At Coventry I loved going
through the narrow streets, looking up at the windows which leaned
together under their gabled roofs. I saw Lady Godiva borne through the
streets, more clothed than she appears in the pictures, in the midst of
a gay and solemn procession, tricked out in old-fashioned frippery. And
I spent a long day there, one of the days of the five-day fair, which
feasted me with sensations on which I lived for weeks. It was the first
time I had ever plunged boldly into what Baudelaire calls 'the bath of
multitude'; it intoxicated me, and seemed, for the first time in my
life, to carry me outside myself. I pushed my way through the crowds in
those old and narrow streets, in an ecstasy of delight at all that
movement, noise, colour, and confusion. I seemed suddenly to have become
free, in contact with life. I had no desire to touch it too closely, no
fear of being soiled at its contact; a vivid spirit of life seemed to
come to me, in my solitude, releasing me from thought, from daily
realities.
Once I went as far as Chester. It was the Cup day, and there was an
excursion. I watched the race, feeling a momentary excitement as the
horses passed close to me, and the pellets of turf shot from their heels
into the air above my head; the crowd was more varied than any crowd I
had ever seen, and I discovered a blonde gipsy girl, in charge of a
cocoanut-shy, who let me talk a little Romany with her. I thought
Chester, with its arcades and its city-walls, the most wonderful old
place I had ever seen. As I walked round the wall, a woman leaned out of
a window and called to me: I thought of Rahab in the Bible, and went
home dreaming romantically about the harlot on the wall.
One day, as I was walking along a country road, I was stopped by a
sailor, who asked me how far it was to some distant place. He was
carrying a small bundle, and was walking, he told me, until he came to a
certain sea-port. He did not beg, but accepted gladly enough what I gave
him. He had been on many voyages, and had picked up a good many words of
different languages, which he mispronounced in a scarcely intelligible
jargon of his own. He had been left behind by his ship in Russia, where
he had stayed on account of a woman: she could speak no English, and he
but little Russian; but it did not seem to have mattered. It was the
first time I had seemed to come so close to the remote parts of the
world; and as he went on his way, he turned back to urge me to go on
some voyage which he seemed to remember with more pleasure than any
other: to the West Indies, I think. I began to pore over maps, and plan
to what parts of the world I would go.
Meanwhile, little by little, I was beginning to live my own life at
home; I played the piano on Sundays, to whatever tune I liked; I read
whatever I liked on Sundays; and, finally, I ceased to go to church.
Latterly I had come to put my boredom there to some purpose: I followed
the lessons word by word in Bibles and Testaments in many languages,
and, while the sermon was going on I kept my Bible quietly open on my
knees, and read on, chapter after chapter, while the preacher preached I
knew not what: I never heard a word of it, not even the text. I read,
not for the Bible's sake, but to learn the language in which I was
reading it. My parents knew this, but after all it was the Bible, and
they could hardly object to my reading the Bible. Sometimes I scribbled
down ideas that came into my head; sometimes I merely sat there, with a
stony inattention, showing, I fancy, in my face, all the fierce disgust
that I felt. During the sermon I always found it quite easy to abstract
my attention; during the hymns I amused myself by criticising the bad
rhymes and false metaphors; but during prayer-time, though I kept my
eyes wide open, and sat as upright as I dared, I could hardly help
hearing what was said. What was said, very often, made me ashamed, as if
I were unconsciously helping to repeat absurdities to God.
When I told my parents that I could go to church no longer, I had no
definite reason to allege, except that the matter did not interest me. I
did not doubt the truth of the Christian religion; I neither affirmed
nor denied; it was something, to me, beside the question. I could argue
about dogma; I defended a liberal interpretation of doctrines; I
insisted that there were certain questions which we were bound to leave
open. But I was not alienated from Christianity by intellectual
difficulties; it had never taken hold of me, and I gave up nothing but a
pretence in giving up the sign of outward respect for it. My parents
were deeply grieved, but, then as always, they respected my liberty.
The first time I remember going to London, for I had been there when a
child, was by an excursion, which brought me back the same night. Of the
day, or of what I did then, I can recall nothing; daylight never meant
so much to me as the first lighting of the lamps. I found my way back to
King's Cross, in some bewilderment, to find that one train had gone, and
that the next would leave me an hour or two more in London. I walked
among the lights, through hurrying crowds of people, in long, dingy
streets, not knowing where I was going, till I found myself outside a
great building which seemed to be a kind of music-hall. I went in; it
was the Agricultural Hall, and some show was being given there. There
were acrobats, gymnasts, equilibrists, performing beasts; there was a
vast din, concentrating all the noises of a fair within four walls;
people swarmed to and fro over the long floor, paying more heed to one
another than to the performance. I scrutinised the show and the people,
a little uneasily; it was very new to me, and I was not yet able to feel
at home in London. I found my way to the station like one who comes
home, half dizzy and half ashamed, after a debauch.