As I grew older I observed that the place of honour was upon the right-hand side: I understood that God had made the world and ruled it with His right hand! I was wrong, then, in preferring my left hand. I determined to change over. It was very difficult to do: so deep was the instinct that it took me some years to eradicate the love for my left side and transfer it to my right, and when I had at last accomplished it I was still liable to go back to my first preference. No one ever detected my peculiarity.
I was already eighteen or nineteen years old when one day I entered my father's room, ready dressed to go out. I had on both my gloves. Suddenly I remembered that I had put on my left glove first. Immediately I took off both my gloves—then I replaced the right one, and then the left. My father was watching me and asked me for an explanation. I gave it him, and he looked very grave, almost alarmed. After a moment of silence he said, "I want you to give that habit up—I want you to break yourself of it immediately. I had it myself as a youth: it took me years to conquer. No one should permit himself to be the slave of any habit."
I asked him which side he had loved. "The left side," he said. At five-and-twenty he had conquered the habit, and I was not born till he was almost sixty-one! yet I had inherited it. We never referred to it again, and in two years I, also, had conquered it.
We spent the winter of the year in which I was seventeen in Italy, to which country a near relative was Ambassador, and there I went to my first ball. That night—and how often afterwards!—I knew the surging exultation, the intoxication of the joy of life. How often in social life, in brilliant scenes of light and laughter, music and love, I seemed to ride on the crest of a wave, in the marvellous glamour of youth!
This love of the world and of social life was a very strong feeling for many years: at the same time and running, as it were, in double harness with it was a necessity for solitude. My mind imperatively demanded this, and indeed my heart too.
It was during this year that I first commenced a new form of mental pleasure through looking at the beautiful in Nature. Not only solitude, but total silence was necessary for this pastime, and, if possible, beauty and a distant view: failing a view I could accomplish it by means of the beauties of the sky. This form of mental pleasure was the exact opposite of my previous dreamings, for all imagination absolutely ceased, all forms, all pictures, all activities disappeared—the very scene at which I looked had to vanish before I could know the pleasure of this occupation in which, in some mysterious manner, I inhaled the very essence of the Beautiful.
At first I was only able to remain in this condition for a few moments at a time, but that satisfied me—or, rather, did not satisfy me, for through it all ran a strange unaccountable anguish—a pain of longing—which, like a high, fine, tremulous nerve, ran through the joy. What induced me to pursue this habit, I never asked myself. That it was a form of the spirit's struggle towards the Eternal—of the soul's great quest of God—never occurred to me. I was worshipping the Beautiful without giving sufficient thought to Him from Whom all beauty proceeds. Half a lifetime was to go by before I realised to what this habit was leading me—that it was the first step towards the acquirement of that most exquisite of all blessings—the gift of the Contemplation of God. Ah, if anyone knows in his heart the call of the Beautiful, let him use it towards this glorious end! Love, and the Beautiful—these are the twin golden paths that lead us all to God.
III
Certainly we were not a religious family. One attendance at church upon Sunday—if it did not rain!—and occasionally the Communion, this was the extent of any outward religious feeling. But my father's daily life and acts were full of Christianity. A man of a naturally somewhat violent temper, he had so brought himself under control that towards everyone, high and low, he had become all that was sweet and patient, sympathetic and gentle.
About this time a devouring curiosity for knowledge commenced to possess me. What was the truth—what was the truth about every single thing I saw? Astronomy, Biology, Geology—in these things I discovered a new and marvellous interest: here at last I found my natural bent. History had small attraction for me: it spoke of the doings of people mostly vain or cruel, and untruthful. I wanted truth—irrefutable facts! No scientific work seemed too difficult for me; but I never, then or later, read anything upon the subject of religion, philosophy, or psychology. I had a healthy, wholesome young intelligence with a voracious appetite: it would carry me a long way, I thought. It did—it landed me in Atheism.