that at some future stage of our being man will be so conscious of the
indwelling and inworking of Deity, that he will ascribe every movement,
whether of his body or mind, to the One Will, the One _Vernunft_, the
One Life, and thus think of himself as swallowed up by and absorbed, as
it were, in that Being.”
These extracts will show what a priceless debt I owe to the early
contact with his mind.
How strange and far-back all that early life seems now—and yet so
vivid—I can see it all in brightest detail! Of an evening, after dinner
or supper, how we sat round the drawing-room table, or in scattered
chairs, reading. My father would get out his Fichte or his Hartmann and
soon become lost in their perusal. Occasionally he would, when he came
to a striking passage, play a sort of devil’s tattoo with his fingers on
the table, or, getting up, would walk to and fro quarter-deck fashion,
with creaky boots, and reciting his authors to himself. Then my mother
or perhaps my eldest sister would remonstrate, and after a time he would
settle down again. Sometimes if he was very quiet one might look up from
one’s book and see from his upturned eyes and half-open lips that he had
lapsed into inner communion and meditation.
His was a very religious nature, and it was his habit to think of the
divinity as clearly present—as he would say: “When I am taking my bath
or even when I am breathing I say to myself, ‘This is God working within
and around me.’” In later years, however, his liability to extreme worry
and anxiety would return; and there were times when even his books
failed to save him from the sleepless nights and despondent days
occasioned by the failure or possible failure of some Stock Exchange
speculation. At such times reports of railway companies, maps,
gazetteers, newspaper cuttings, etc., were got out and studied and
restudied; I was called in to take part in the investigations (“put in
the stocks” as I used to call it), and had to sit up till the small
hours of the morning in attitudes of painful suspense and tension. The
troubles, however, would pass away in due time, and on the whole my
father was (owing chiefly to the care and thought he gave to them) very
successful over his “investments.”
The rest of the family spent the evening, as a rule, in reading—of which
we were all fond. My sisters would play or sing a little; and when they
ceased, the sound of the near sea would reassert itself, or the roaring
of the wind in the chimney. My mother sat on a low chair, with a book on
her knee and some knitting in her hands, but occasionally, tired with
the work of the day, would drop asleep; at ten o’clock the servant
brought up wine and biscuits, and shortly afterwards we would all—except
my father—retire.
Of my mother’s life how can I say anything? That which is so vital to
one, so intimate, how can one disengage it from oneself? There was an
unspoken tragedy in those beautiful gazelle-like eyes—the tragedy as of
dumbness itself. The tender loving spirit which beamed forth from them
never found direct utterance in this world. It was the look of a
prisoner. Her mother was a Scotchwoman. A baneful parental
influence—Scottish pride and puritanism—had rested on my mother’s young
life, making all expression of tender feeling little short of a sin; and
this reserve, inculcated in youth, became in later days involuntary and
inevitable. My mother had a sister to whom she was much attached, but
who had offended my grandmother by marrying a man who was considered
undesirable. The sister was never forgiven, nor even acknowledged again.
She died soon after her marriage; and her death, with all the
accompanying circumstances, was a great blow to my mother; but of it—as
of other things which touched her nearly—she would never speak.
Her nature was not so much intellectual or imaginative as practical and
prompt to act, with a kingly sense of duty and courage. Her life was one
long self-sacrifice—first to her parents, then to her husband and
children. All day and much of the night, without haste and without rest,
she went about the house attending to our young wants, to my father’s
comfort, and to the organization of a large household—wearing herself
daily to a thinner and slighter frame, which even in age seemed by this
means to maintain its activity—till at last when her children were grown
up, and her husband’s growing infirmities demanded the services of a
trained nurse, there came upon her the grievous sense—not the less
grievous because wholly unwarranted—that she was “no longer of any use
in the world.” Twice, I remember, she repeated these fatal words; and
then, not long after, a brief attack of bronchitis parted easily the
thread of life, already worn so fine. The manner of her death was as
heroic as that of her life, with thought in lucid intervals for all
around her, servants, and everybody in the house; and with closing
smile, and words of calm, “All is as it should be.”
When my mother died (in January 1881) my father—who had been for the
most part absorbed in business or philosophic speculations, and who had
given indeed too little time to personal matters—suddenly became aware
of the greatness of the loss he had sustained. He woke up from dreamland
when it was too late. My mother’s silent and untiring forethought had
unconsciously to himself been the great support and directing power of
his life; and now he ceased not to say, “The mainspring is broken, the
mainspring is broken.” His infirmities, which at eighty-three years of
age were the natural ills of senile decay, rapidly gained upon him, and
a year afterwards, in April 1882, he died and was laid in the same grave
with her—in Hove cemetery, between the sea and the Downs, close to the
little church to which, years before, we as children had trudged with
these our parents every Sunday by the fields and footpaths which then
separated the village of Hove from the growing West of Brighton.
My mother had very gracious manners, of gently-smiling dignity, yet her
inflexible sense of truth and justice—inflexible especially as regards
her own life and conduct—was easily apparent beneath the gentle
exterior. Her ideas of social demarcation, etc., were of course of the
old school; and she looked upon it quite as a duty to keep up a certain
position in society—as the phrase is. Indeed, though much of the social
life of Brighton was in reality irksome to her, I think that she never
questioned the duty of conforming to it. But then—unlike many modern
mistresses—she never questioned the duty of attending to the wants of
dependents; and her care for the interests of the household servants,
and others whom misfortune might bring to her door, was most unfailing
and most sincere. The servants in fact were as a rule much devoted to
her—though she was by no means lax in matters of discipline and daily
superintendence.
A great feature of my mother’s character was her love of animals,
especially dogs and horses. Outdoor and garden occupations she was also
fond of—and I believe her natural inclination would have led her to a
rural life. But Brighton offered nothing in this direction—and here
again the promptings of her nature were destined only to be thwarted.
[Illustration:
MY MOTHER: SOPHIA WILSON CARPENTER (ABOUT 1864).
]
III
CAMBRIDGE
Between school and College days I went to Germany for some months. I was
already nineteen when I left school, full old enough to go to College,
but it did not seem to be decided what was to become of me. I inclined
to go into Orders. Possibly my father, dreading this, thought Heidelberg
would be an antidote! At any rate I could learn German there. So off I
went, lodged with a professor and his Frau for five months, wandered
through the woods and over the hills of Heidelberg, heard Bunsen and
Kirchhoff lecture on Physics and Chemistry, attended the English church
on Sundays, and ate sausages with the Professor and his friends on
weekdays. An odd secluded life, seeing but little of the Germans and
less of the English, what I chiefly remember of it is those long moony
rambles through the woods—not very clearly thinking about anything that
I can make out, but wondering, and just waiting—and every now and then
chancing in some secluded glade or gorgeous sunset scene upon something
that caught my breath and held me still. Indeed on one occasion I
perpetrated some rhymes in German about the Neckar—the first verses that
I ever wrote. The Professor and his wife chaffed me about my odd ways. I
even wore a tall hat to the English church on Sundays! He argued with me
about the Bible and about the idiotic habits of my countrymen and women.
I resisted his arguments, but secretly they touched me. Ultimately I
gave up attending the church, and became so disgusted with my tall hat
that when I returned to England I placed it in my carpet-bag! So I
learned something besides German at Heidelberg.
Then came Cambridge. When my father after some hesitation consented to
let me go to Cambridge, and asked me which College I would prefer, I
said “Trinity Hall,” and for my reason that it was a _gentlemanly_
college. My father laughed, as he certainly was justified in doing—and I
can only wonder now what sort of animal I was then. At any rate the
answer shows that notwithstanding all my sufferings at Brighton I had
not yet realized what was the true cause of them. There were however
other reasons for my choice. One was that Romer, the last Senior
Wrangler, was a “Hall” man; the other was that the same College was now
Head of the River. Both events had brought Trinity Hall into notice.
So thither I went, and found myself immediately in the thick of a
boating set. The whole College was given up to boating. Not to row or
help in the rowing in some way or other was rank apostasy. A few might
read besides, and a few—a dozen or two at most—did so. I boated and
talked boating slang; was made stroke of the second boat, and it went
down several places; became Secretary of the Boat Club; and for two
years wore out the seat of my breeches and the cuticle beneath with
incessant aquatic service. At the end of that time I got sadly bored
with the business, and gave it up. Indeed I was obliged to give it up;
for reading pretty hard for my degree, as I was later on, the two
strains together were too much, and my health was breaking down. But so
far perhaps boating had not been a bad thing. It was healthy exercise,
and brought me in with healthy muscular companions who bothered their
heads about no abstruse problems, and for the most part rarely read a
book. Fives and rackets too occupied some of my time; but in athletic
sports I was not so successful as I had been at school. At Brighton I
had been a good high-jumper, having cleared 5 ft. 3 or 4, a good height
in those days—but at Cambridge, probably owing to the relaxing quality
of the air, I failed to make any mark. Thus, with games and wine parties
and boat suppers, life slid easily onward.
Certainly nothing could be more unlike what I had expected. I had
imagined a university where folk would talk Latin naturally and where I,
lamely taught at school and late coming from loafing in Germany, would
be an outcast and an object of contumely. I found myself at the end of
the first term easily head of my year in the College examinations.
Myself and another. He, Yate, was the son of a country doctor—keen on
boating, but a fellow of some originality and thought as well and of
singular gentleness and candour. A friendship sprang up between us; and
for the next year or two we were always together. In examination honours
(such as they were) we were quits, and it was sincerely I believe a
matter of indifference to both of us which might win the prize. Then he
fell ill of rheumatic fever, and ultimately died without taking his
degree—my first experience of loss of this kind.
Other friends of this period were Ernest Gray—a very dear and
affectionate creature who afterwards became the Vicar and very fatherly
pastor of a country parish; Harry Spedding, son of Anthony Spedding of
Bassenthwaite, and nephew of James Spedding of Baconian fame; and
Francis Hyett of Painswick, who afterwards became my brother-in-law.
Harry Spedding was one of those extraordinary beings who though quite
unable to row himself cherished an immense enthusiasm for boating. Long
and thin and weak-chested, hard work in the boats would probably have
been fatal to him, but on the banks, running beside the boats and
cheering the crews in the races, his pluck and lively humour never
failed. Hyett did not take to the river, but kept to racquets and his
law-studies, and was really one of the few undergraduates who took any
interest in political affairs. In later years he has done much
administrative and literary work in connection with his own county.
In coming up to Cambridge it had never occurred to me at the outset to
go in for an honour degree; my opinion of the university was too high
for that. But after a term or two the tutor to my surprise seriously
recommended me to read for the mathematical tripos. I was of course
frightfully behindhand in my subjects, but I took a private ‘coach,’
went through the routine of cram, and ultimately obtained a fellowship.
Mathematics interested me and I read them with a good deal of
pleasure—but I have sometimes regretted that three years of my life
should have been—as far as study was concerned—nearly entirely absorbed
by so special and on the whole so unfruitful a subject. I think every
boy (and girl) ought to learn some Geometry and Mechanics; without these
the mind lacks form and definiteness, and its grip on the external world
is not as strong as it should be; but the higher mathematics (certainly
as they are read at Cambridge) are for the most part a mere gymnastic
exercise unapplied to actual life and facts, and easily liable to become
unhealthy, as all such exercises are.
After my degree, though retaining a certain general interest in the
subject, I never again opened a mathematical book with the intention of
seriously pursuing its study. I worked however at one time on “Taylor’s
theorem” in the Differential Calculus, with the object of finding a
simpler and more direct proof than Homersham Cox’s (the one usually
adopted). But not being able to complete the proof, I handed it over to
my friend Robert Muirhead, who has adopted and worked it to its
conclusion in a contribution to the Proceedings of the Edinburgh
Mathematical Society (Vol. 12, Session 1893–4).
It was just about this time of my degree (and curiously late) that my
attention began to be turned towards literary production. I had won as
an undergraduate—and to my surprise—two College prizes for English
Essays (one, by the way, on Civilization); and shortly after my degree,
in 1870, I was awarded a university prize (the Burney), £100, for an
essay on “The Religious Influence of Art.” Meanwhile I kept scribbling,
just for my own satisfaction, quantities of verse, very formless and
incoherent—but which formed an outlet for my own feelings in the absence
of any more tangible way of expressing them.
How well I remember going down, as I so frequently did, alone to the
riverside at night, amid the hushed reserve and quiet grace of the old
College gardens, and pouring my little soul out to the silent trees and
clouds and waters! I don’t know what kind of longing it was—something
partly sexual, partly religious, and both, owing to my strangely
slow-growing temperament, still very obscure and undefined; but anyhow
it was something that brooded about and enveloped my life, and makes
those hours still stand out for me as the most pregnant of my then
existence.
Here are some verses (written in ’68) which I give as a specimen of the
kind of thought and the half-formed emotional atmosphere in which I
brooded, as well as of their juvenile style.
O pale and wan with watching, starless night!
Far, far beyond thy cloudy banks
Pass and repass in serried ranks
The flaming watchfires of the infinite—
Gliding and streaming through the realm of space
In breathless adoration round
The burning throne whose base profound
Knoweth no resting-place.
To thy deep silence through the moving years
Cometh no cry of misery,
No sound of all the things that be,
Upborne from this dark field of feverish tears;
But all the myriad worlds thou dost enfold
Move on before their Monarch hushed,
And, looking forth, my soul is crushed
Beneath a weight untold.
O great Humanity, that liest spread
Beneath the gaze of the sleepless night,
Who is there who will dare to fight
To raise the tresses of thy drooping head?
Who cares through the immensity of suns?
Which of the angels shall arise?
Oh! heavy and dark the burden lies
On all thy noblest ones.
Far off the morning stars may shout and sing,
For there is Love and Joy and Peace,
And Life—true life that cannot cease—
But here the ghastly shuddering of Death’s wing.
And here faint whispers only come to die
Upon the threshold of our hearts,
Voices at which the sad soul starts
With a half-uttered sigh.
O hanging cloud, O scarcely stirring trees,
O velvet waters moved to sound
By the gliding fishes’ bound,
O Willow, whispering to the fitful breeze,
O gentle touch of the sweet summer air,
O solitary owl, alone,
Nursing thy joy in low weird tone
Within thy leafy lair!
O one and all, unveil! and let us see
The flaming soul of world-wide Love
Burning behind you, far above,
Beneath, deep-fountained life, strange mystery!
Unveil! O night that washest Earth’s dark shore,
O suns, through space that ever roll,
O Love, clasping us body and soul
For evermore!
Curiously enough, as it happened, I was practically offered a Fellowship
before I took my degree. The College was in want of an assistant
Lecturer. There were three clerical Fellowships (the others being
connected with the Bar as a profession), and one of these clerical
Fellowships had lately become vacant by Leslie Stephen, who held it,
relinquishing his Orders. It was understood that I was going into the
Church; it seemed probable that I should take a fair degree; and for the
rest, who could be found so suitable—so mild, so docile, so decently
mannered and generally unaggressive—as the young man in question!
Accordingly one day the tutor (Henry Latham) sounded me on the subject.
I conveyed to him that I had not changed my intention of being ordained,
and that I rather liked the prospect of staying on at Cambridge in
connection with the College; and it became practically understood that
if things turned out favorably that should be my destiny.
And things turned out accordingly. In the Mathematical Tripos of 1868 I
came out tenth wrangler, which was a sufficiently high degree to justify
a Fellowship at a small College; and in the autumn of that year I came
into residence at Trinity Hall as a Lecturer; shortly afterwards I was
elected to a clerical Fellowship; and in June ’69 I was ordained Deacon
by the Bishop of Ely.
The story of my connection with the Church may be soon told. Brought up
in the philosophical Broad Churchism of my father, with an
ever-expanding horizon, my mind had at no time undergone any revulsion
of feeling such as could be called a religious crisis; no sense of
antagonism to the Church and its teachings had been developed. Though
quite aware that my opinions were vastly different from those of the
ordinary Churchman, I perhaps hardly appreciated _how_ far I had
drifted; and with an easy faith in progress, such as I had, it seemed to
me that anyhow in a few years the Church, widening and growing from
within, would become adapted to the times, and be a perfectly habitable
and a useful institution.
As soon as I was ordained I had services in the College Chapel to read,
and sermons to preach—with the usual accompaniment of winks and grins
from the fellow-students, shufflings of hassocks, racings half-dressed
through the prayers on winter mornings, with clicks of watches timing
the performance, and all the gaping signs of unconcealed boredom; but I
thought I would like to see something more satisfactory and more
definite in the way of Church work than that, and accordingly took a
curacy at St. Edward’s under a dry evangelical of the steel-knife and
lemon-juice type, named Pearson.
If I had nursed in my mind any sentiment of romance in connection with
ecclesiastical affairs, it was soon expelled by these experiences. A
peep behind the scenes was enough. The deadly Philistinism of a little
provincial congregation; the tradesmen and shopkeepers in their sleek
Sunday best; the petty vulgarities and hypocrisies; the discordant music
of the choir; the ignoble scenes in the vestry and the resumed saintly
expression on returning into the church; the hollow ring and the sour
edge of the incumbent’s voice; and the fatuous faces upturned to receive
the communion at the altar steps—all these were worse, considerably
worse, than the undisguised heathenism of the chapel performance.
It was not long before I began to have serious misgivings about the step
I had taken. Still I did not torment myself; and when in the following
June (1870) the time arrived for my ordination as a priest, I prepared
myself quite philosophically to go through the ceremony.
But here an interesting hitch occurred. In the Bishop’s examination
preparatory to the ordination, the candidates had among other things to
write a Life of Abraham; and such was my optimistic confidence in the
breadth of the episcopal mind that I quite candidly and without any
particular misgiving committed to paper the view which I had picked up,
I think from Bunsen the historian, and which is also adopted by Dean
Stanley in his _Jewish Church_—that Abraham’s intended immolation of
Isaac was a relic of Moloch-worship, and of the old practice of human
sacrifices, and that the “voice of God” which bade him substitute the
ram did indeed figure the evolution of the human conscience to a higher
ideal of worship than that in vogue among savage nations. This paper,
containing so dreadful a heresy, I sent up without a qualm! But on
arriving myself some days later at the Palace at Ely, the Bishop (Harold
Browne) soon after the first greetings called me into his study and
confronted me with the offending passage. At first I had some difficulty
in understanding what the trouble was, but when the Bishop in grave
tones began to remind me that the sacrifice of Isaac was a type—a type
and a prefigurement of that greater sacrifice of Jesus, and that the
whole Biblical scheme of salvation rested four-square upon this incident
(not forgetting the ram), I immediately saw that the fat was in the
fire, and that there was now no escaping a solemn discussion on the
Atonement.
And to that it came. Our conversation, interrupted by dinner, was
resumed again late in the evening; and when all the other clerics and
candidates had gone to bed the reverend Father-in-God and I sat up till
past twelve discussing all the main and side issues of Theology! On the
latter he was easy enough. I told him plainly that I did not believe in
the historical accuracy of the Old Testament; and he admitted that there
were gaps! Even the Thirty-nine Articles were to be swallowed in the
lump, and not in detail, so to speak. But on the Atonement the
discussion narrowed. Here was a vital point. My views were woolly in
outline, sadly blurred by the Broad Church mysticism of F. D. Maurice,
and I confess I had some difficulty in formulating them. The Bishop
merely shook his head, asked me to “say that again,” and declared that
he could not understand. It ended by his requesting me to _write out_ my
doctrine; and going to bed himself he left me sitting up for a couple of
hours more for this purpose! In the morning I handed him, before
breakfast, my mystic script. After breakfast he once more called me into
his study, said he had read the paper, that it was thoughtful and all
that, but that he could not say that he really followed it, and that he
was sure it was _not_ the doctrine of the Church of England.