This is, surely, a very painful instance of the repression of an instinct. There seems to have been, in this case, a vocation such as is rarely heard, and still less often wilfully disregarded and silenced. Was my Mother intended by nature to be a novelist? I have often thought so, and her talents and vigour of purpose, directed along the line which was ready to form 'the chief pleasure of her life', could hardly have failed to conduct her to great success. She was a little younger than Bulwer Lytton, a little older than Mrs. Gaskell—but these are vain and trivial speculations!
My own state, however, was, I should think, almost unique among the children of cultivated parents. In consequence of the stern ordinance which I have described, not a single fiction was read or told to me during my infancy. The rapture of the child who delays the process of going to bed by cajoling 'a story' out of his mother or his nurse, as he sits upon her knee, well tucked up, at the corner of the nursery fire—this was unknown to me. Never in all my early childhood did anyone address to me the affecting preamble, 'Once upon a time!' I was told about missionaries, but never about pirates; I was familiar with hummingbirds, but I had never heard of fairies—Jack the Giant- Killer, Rumpelstiltskin and Robin Hood were not of my acquaintance; and though I understood about wolves, Little Red Ridinghood was a stranger even by name. So far as my 'dedication' was concerned, I can but think that my parents were in error thus to exclude the imaginary from my outlook upon facts. They desired to make me truthful; the tendency was to make me positive and sceptical. Had they wrapped me in the soft folds of supernatural fancy, my mind might have been longer content to follow their traditions in an unquestioning spirit.
Having easily said what, in those early years, I did not read, I have great difficulty in saying what I did read. But a queer variety of natural history, some of it quite indigestible by my undeveloped mind; many books of travels, mainly of a scientific character, among them voyages of discovery in the South Seas, by which my brain was dimly filled with splendour; some geography and astronomy, both of them sincerely enjoyed; much theology, which I desired to appreciate but could never get my teeth into (if I may venture to say so), and over which my eye and tongue learned to slip without penetrating, so that I would read, and read aloud, and with great propriety of emphasis, page after page without having formed an idea or retained an expression. There was, for instance, a writer on prophecy called Jukes, of whose works each of my parents was inordinately fond, and I was early set to read Jukes aloud to them. I did it glibly, like a machine, but the sight of Jukes' volumes became an abomination to me, and I never formed the outline of a notion what they were about. Later on, a publication called The Penny Cyclopaedia became my daily, and for a long time almost my sole study; to the subject of this remarkable work I may presently return.
It is difficult to keep anything like chronological order in recording fragments of early recollection, and in speaking of my reading I have been led too far ahead. My memory does not, practically, begin till we returned from certain visits, made with a zoological purpose, to the shores of Devon and Dorset, and settled, early in my fifth year, in a house at Islington, in the north of London. Our circumstances were now more easy; my Father had regular and well-paid literary work; and the house was larger and more comfortable than ever before, though still very simple and restricted. My memories, some of which are exactly dated by certain facts, now become clear and almost abundant. What I do not remember, except from having it very often repeated to me, is what may be considered the only 'clever' thing that I said during an otherwise unillustrious childhood. It was not startlingly 'clever', but it may pass. A lady—when I was just four—rather injudiciously showed me a large print of a human skeleton, saying, 'There! you don't know what that is, do you?' Upon which, immediately and very archly, I replied, 'Isn't it a man with the meat off?' This was thought wonderful, and, as it is supposed that I had never had the phenomenon explained to me, it certainly displays some quickness in seizing an analogy. I had often watched my Father, while he soaked the flesh off the bones of fishes and small mammals. If I venture to repeat this trifle, it is only to point out that the system on which I was being educated deprived all things, human life among the rest, of their mystery. The 'bare-grinning skeleton of death' was to me merely a prepared specimen of that featherless plantigrade vertebrate, 'homo sapiens'.
As I have said that this anecdote was thought worth repeating, I ought to proceed to say that there was, so far as I can recollect, none of that flattery of childhood which is so often merely a backhanded way of indulging the vanity of parents. My Mother, indeed, would hardly have been human if she had not occasionally entertained herself with the delusion that her solitary duckling was a cygnet. This my Father did not encourage, remarking, with great affection, and chucking me under the chin, that I was 'a nice little ordinary boy'. My Mother, stung by this want of appreciation, would proceed so far as to declare that she believed that in future times the F.R.S. would be chiefly known as his son's father! (This is a pleasantry frequent in professional families.)
To this my Father, whether convinced or not, would make no demur, and the couple would begin to discuss, in my presence, the direction which my shining talents would take. In consequence of my dedication to 'the Lord's Service', the range of possibilities was much restricted. My Father, who had lived long in the Tropics, and who nursed a perpetual nostalgia for 'the little lazy isles where the trumpet-orchids blow', leaned towards the field of missionary labour. My Mother, who was cold about foreign missions, preferred to believe that I should be the Charles Wesley of my age, 'or perhaps', she had the candour to admit, 'merely the George Whitefield'. I cannot recollect the time when I did not understand that I was going to be a minister of the Gospel.
It is so generally taken for granted that a life strictly dedicated to religion is stiff and dreary, that I may have some difficulty in persuading my readers that, as a matter of fact, in these early days of my childhood, before disease and death had penetrated to our slender society, we were always cheerful and often gay. My parents were playful with one another, and there were certain stock family jests which seldom failed to enliven the breakfast table. My Father and Mother lived so completely in the atmosphere of faith, and were so utterly convinced of their intercourse with God, that, so long as that intercourse was not clouded by sin, to which they were delicately sensitive, they could afford to take the passing hour very lightly. They would even, to a certain extent, treat the surroundings of their religion as a subject of jest, joking very mildly and gently about such things as an attitude at prayer or the nature of a supplication. They were absolutely indifferent to forms. They prayed, seated in their chairs, as willingly as, reversed, upon their knees; no ritual having any significance for them. My Mother was sometimes extremely gay, laughing with a soft, merry sound. What I have since been told of the guileless mirth of nuns in a convent has reminded me of the gaiety of my parents during my early childhood.
So long as I was a mere part of them, without individual existence, and swept on, a satellite, in their atmosphere, I was mirthful when they were mirthful, and grave when they were grave. The mere fact that I had no young companions, no storybooks, no outdoor amusements, none of the thousand and one employments provided for other children in more conventional surroundings, did not make me discontented or fretful, because I did not know of the existence of such entertainments. In exchange, I became keenly attentive to the limited circle of interests open to me. Oddly enough, I have no recollection of any curiosity about other children, nor of any desire to speak to them or play with them. They did not enter into my dreams, which were occupied entirely with grown-up people and animals. I had three dolls, to whom my attitude was not very intelligible. Two of these were female, one with a shapeless face of rags, the other in wax. But, in my fifth year, when the Crimean War broke out, I was given a third doll, a soldier, dressed very smartly in a scarlet cloth tunic. I used to put the dolls on three chairs, and harangue them aloud, but my sentiment to them was never confidential, until our maid-servant one day, intruding on my audience, and misunderstanding the occasion of it, said: 'What? a boy, and playing with a soldier when he's got two lady-dolls to play with?' I had never thought of my dolls as confidants before, but from that time forth I paid a special attention to the soldier, in order to make up to him for Lizzie's unwarrantable insult.
The declaration of war with Russia brought the first breath of outside life into our Calvinist cloister. My parents took in a daily newspaper, which they had never done before, and events in picturesque places, which my Father and I looked out on the map, were eagerly discussed. One of my vividest early memories can be dated exactly. I was playing about the house, and suddenly burst into the breakfast-room, where, close to the door, sat an amazing figure, a very tall young man, as stiff as my doll, in a gorgeous scarlet tunic. Quite far away from him, at her writing-table, my Mother sat with her Bible open before her, and was urging the gospel plan of salvation on his acceptance. She promptly told me to run away and play, but I had seen a great sight. This guardsman was in the act of leaving for the Crimea, and his adventures,—he was converted in consequence of my Mother's instruction,—were afterwards told by her in a tract, called 'The Guardsman of the Alma', of which I believe that more than half a million copies were circulated. He was killed in that battle, and this added an extraordinary lustre to my dream of him. I see him still in my mind's eye, large, stiff, and unspeakably brilliant, seated, from respect, as near as possible to our parlour door. This apparition gave reality to my subsequent conversations with the soldier doll.
That same victory of the Alma, which was reported in London on my fifth birthday, is also marked very clearly in my memory by a family circumstance. We were seated at breakfast, at our small round table drawn close up to the window, my Father with his back to the light. Suddenly, he gave a sort of cry, and read out the opening sentences from The Times announcing a battle in the valley of the Alma. No doubt the strain of national anxiety had been very great, for both he and my Mother seemed deeply excited. He broke off his reading when the fact of the decisive victory was assured, and he and my Mother sank simultaneously on their knees in front of their tea and bread-and-butter, while in a loud voice my Father gave thanks to the God of Battles. This patriotism was the more remarkable, in that he had schooled himself, as he believed, to put his 'heavenly citizenship' above all earthly duties. To those who said: 'Because you are a Christian, surely you are not less an Englishman?' he would reply by shaking his head, and by saying: 'I am a citizen of no earthly State'. He did not realize that, in reality, and to use a cant phrase not yet coined in 1854, there existed in Great Britain no more thorough 'Jingo' than he.
Another instance of the remarkable way in which the interests of daily life were mingled in our strange household, with the practice of religion, made an impression upon my memory. We had all three been much excited by a report that a certain dark geometer-moth, generated in underground stables, had been met with in Islington. Its name, I think is, 'Boletobia fuliginaria', and I believe that it is excessively rare in England. We were sitting at family prayers, on a summer morning, I think in 1855, when through the open window a brown moth came sailing. My Mother immediately interrupted the reading of the Bible by saying to my Father, 'O! Henry, do you think that can be "Boletobia"?' My Father rose up from the sacred book, examined the insect, which had now perched, and replied: 'No! it is only the common Vapourer, "Orgyia antiqua"!', resuming his seat, and the exposition of the Word, without any apology or embarrassment.
In the course of this, my sixth year, there happened a series of minute and soundless incidents which, elementary as they may seem when told, were second in real importance to none in my mental history. The recollection of them confirms me in the opinion that certain leading features in each human soul are inherent to it, and cannot be accounted for by suggestion or training. In my own case, I was most carefully withdrawn, like Princess Blanchefleur in her marble fortress, from every outside influence whatever, yet to me the instinctive life came as unexpectedly as her lover came to her in the basket of roses. What came to me was the consciousness of self, as a force and as a companion, and it came as the result of one or two shocks, which I will relate.
In consequence of hearing so much about an Omniscient God, a being of supernatural wisdom and penetration who was always with us, who made, in fact, a fourth in our company, I had come to think of Him, not without awe, but with absolute confidence. My Father and Mother, in their serene discipline of me, never argued with one another, never even differed; their wills seemed absolutely one. My Mother always deferred to my Father, and in his absence spoke of him to me, as if he were all-wise. I confused him in some sense with God; at all events I believed that my Father knew everything and saw everything. One morning in my sixth year, my Mother and I were alone in the morning-room, when my Father came in and announced some fact to us. I was standing on the rug, gazing at him, and when he made this statement, I remember turning quickly, in embarrassment, and looking into the fire. The shock to me was as that of a thunderbolt, for what my Father had said 'was not true'. My Mother and I, who had been present at the trifling incident, were aware that it had not happened exactly as it had been reported to him. My Mother gently told him so, and he accepted the correction. Nothing could possibly have been more trifling to my parents, but to me it meant an epoch. Here was the appalling discovery, never suspected before, that my Father was not as God, and did not know everything. The shock was not caused by any suspicion that he was not telling the truth, as it appeared to him, but by the awful proof that he was not, as I had supposed, omniscient.
This experience was followed by another, which confirmed the first, but carried me a great deal further. In our little back-garden, my Father had built up a rockery for ferns and mosses and from the water-supply of the house he had drawn a leaden pipe so that it pierced upwards through the rockery and produced, when a tap was turned, a pretty silvery parasol of water. The pipe was exposed somewhere near the foot of the rockery. One day, two workmen, who were doing some repairs, left their tools during the dinner-hour in the back-garden, and as I was marching about I suddenly thought that to see whether one of these tools could make a hole in the pipe would be attractive. It did make such a hole, quite easily, and then the matter escaped my mind. But a day or two afterwards, when my Father came in to dinner, he was very angry. He had turned the tap, and instead of the fountain arching at the summit, there had been a rush of water through a hole at the foot. The rockery was absolutely ruined.
Of course I realized in a moment what I had done, and I sat frozen with alarm, waiting to be denounced. But my Mother remarked on the visit of the plumbers two or three days before, and my Father instantly took up the suggestion. No doubt that was it; the mischievous fellows had thought it amusing to stab the pipe and spoil the fountain. No suspicion fell on me; no question was asked of me. I sat there, turned to stone within, but outwardly sympathetic and with unchecked appetite.
We attribute, I believe, too many moral ideas to little children. It is obvious that in this tremendous juncture I ought to have been urged forward by good instincts, or held back by naughty ones. But I am sure that the fear which I experienced for a short time, and which so unexpectedly melted away, was a purely physical one. It had nothing to do with the motions of a contrite heart. As to the destruction of the fountain, I was sorry about that, for my own sake, since I admired the skipping water extremely and had had no idea that I was spoiling its display. But the emotions which now thronged within me, and which led me, with an almost unwise alacrity, to seek solitude in the back- garden, were not moral at all, they were intellectual. I was not ashamed of having successfully—and so surprisingly—deceived my parents by my crafty silence; I looked upon that as a providential escape, and dismissed all further thought of it. I had other things to think of.
In the first place, the theory that my Father was omniscient or infallible was now dead and buried. He probably knew very little; in this case he had not known a fact of such importance that if you did not know that, it could hardly matter what you knew. My Father, as a deity, as a natural force of immense prestige, fell in my eyes to a human level. In future, his statements about things in general need not be accepted implicitly. But of all the thoughts which rushed upon my savage and undeveloped little brain at this crisis, the most curious was that I had found a companion and a confidant in myself. There was a secret in this world and it belonged to me and to a somebody who lived in the same body with me. There were two of us, and we could talk with one another. It is difficult to define impressions so rudimentary, but it is certain that it was in this dual form that the sense of my individuality now suddenly descended upon me, and it is equally certain that it was a great solace to me to find a sympathizer in my own breast.
About this time, my Mother, carried away by the current of her literary and her philanthropic work, left me more and more to my own devices. She was seized with a great enthusiasm; as one of her admirers and disciples has written, 'she went on her way, sowing beside all waters'. I would not for a moment let it be supposed that I regard her as a Mrs. Jellyby, or that I think she neglected me. But a remarkable work had opened up before her; after her long years in a mental hermitage, she was drawn forth into the clamorous harvest-field of souls. She developed an unexpected gift of persuasion over strangers whom she met in the omnibus or in the train, and with whom she courageously grappled. This began by her noting, with deep humility and joy, that 'I have reason to judge the sound conversion to God of three young persons within a few weeks, by the instrumentality of my conversations with them'. At the same time, as another of her biographers has said, 'those testimonies to the Blood of Christ, the fruits of her pen, began to be spread very widely, even to the most distant parts of the globe'. My Father, too, was at this time at the height of his activity. After breakfast, each of them was amply occupied, perhaps until night-fall; our evenings we still always spent together. Sometimes my Mother took me with her on her 'unknown day's employ'; I recollect pleasant rambles through the City by her side, and the act of looking up at her figure soaring above me. But when all was done, I had hours and hours of complete solitude, in my Father's study, in the back- garden, above all in the garret.
The garret was a fairy place. It was a low lean-to, lighted from the roof. It was wholly unfurnished, except for two objects, an ancient hat-box and a still more ancient skin-trunk. The hat-box puzzled me extremely, till one day, asking my Father what it was, I got a distracted answer which led me to believe that it was itself a sort of hat, and I made a laborious but repeated effort to wear it. The skin-trunk was absolutely empty, but the inside of the lid of it was lined with sheets of what I now know to have been a sensational novel. It was, of course, a fragment, but I read it, kneeling on the bare floor, with indescribable rapture. It will be recollected that the idea of fiction, of a deliberately invented story, had been kept from me with entire success. I therefore implicitly believed the tale in the lid of the trunk to be a true account of the sorrows of a lady of title, who had to flee the country, and who was pursued into foreign lands by enemies bent upon her ruin. Somebody had an interview with a 'minion' in a 'mask'; I went downstairs and looked up these words in Bailey's 'English Dictionary', but was left in darkness as to what they had to do with the lady of title. This ridiculous fragment filled me with delicious fears; I fancied that my Mother, who was out so much, might be threatened by dangers of the same sort; and the fact that the narrative came abruptly to an end, in the middle of one of its most thrilling sentences, wound me up almost to a disorder of wonder and romance.
The preoccupation of my parents threw me more and more upon my own resources. But what are the resources of a solitary child of six? I was never inclined to make friends with servants, nor did our successive maids proffer, so far as I recollect, any advances. Perhaps, with my 'dedication' and my grown-up ways of talking, I did not seem to them at all an attractive little boy. I continued to have no companions, or even acquaintances of my own age. I am unable to recollect exchanging two words with another child till after my Mother's death.
The abundant energy which my Mother now threw into her public work did not affect the quietude of our private life. We had some visitors in the daytime, people who came to consult one parent or the other. But they never stayed to a meal, and we never returned their visits. I do not quite know how it was that neither of my parents took me to any of the sights of London, although I am sure it was a question of principle with them. Notwithstanding all our study of natural history, I was never introduced to live wild beasts at the Zoo, nor to dead ones at the British Museum. I can understand better why we never visited a picture-gallery or a concert-room. So far as I can recollect, the only time I was ever taken to any place of entertainment was when my Father and I paid a visit, long anticipated, to the Great Globe in Leicester Square. This was a huge structure, the interior of which one ascended by means of a spiral staircase. It was a poor affair; that was concave in it which should have been convex, and my imagination was deeply affronted. I could invent a far better Great Globe than that in my mind's eye in the garret.
Being so restricted, then, and yet so active, my mind took refuge in an infantile species of natural magic. This contended with the definite ideas of religion which my parents were continuing, with too mechanical a persistency, to force into my nature, and it ran parallel with them. I formed strange superstitions, which I can only render intelligible by naming some concrete examples. I persuaded myself that, if I could only discover the proper words to say or the proper passes to make, I could induce the gorgeous birds and butterflies in my Father's illustrated manuals to come to life, and fly out of the book, leaving holes behind them. I believed that, when, at the Chapel, we sang, drearily and slowly, loud hymns of experience and humiliation, I could boom forth with a sound equal to that of dozens of singers, if I could only hit upon the formula. During morning and evening prayers, which were extremely lengthy and fatiguing, I fancied that one of my two selves could flit up, and sit clinging to the cornice, and look down on my other self and the rest of us, if I could only find the key. I laboured for hours in search of these formulas, thinking to compass my ends by means absolutely irrational. For example, I was convinced that if I could only count consecutive numbers long enough, without losing one, I should suddenly, on reaching some far-distant figure, find myself in possession of the great secret. I feel quite sure that nothing external suggested these ideas of magic, and I think it probable that they approached the ideas of savages at a very early stage of development.
All this ferment of mind was entirely unobserved by my parents. But when I formed the belief that it was necessary, for the success of my practical magic, that I should hurt myself, and when, as a matter of fact, I began, in extreme secrecy, to run pins into my flesh and bang my joints with books, no one will be surprised to hear that my Mother's attention was drawn to the fact that I was looking 'delicate'. The notice nowadays universally given to the hygienic rules of life was rare fifty years ago and among deeply religious people, in particular, fatalistic views of disease prevailed. If anyone was ill, it showed that 'the Lord's hand was extended in chastisement', and much prayer was poured forth in order that it might be explained to the sufferer, or to his relations, in what he or they had sinned. People would, for instance, go on living over a cess- pool, working themselves up into an agony to discover how they had incurred the displeasure of the Lord, but never moving away. As I became very pale and nervous, and slept badly at nights, with visions and loud screams in my sleep, I was taken to a physician, who stripped me and tapped me all over (this gave me some valuable hints for my magical practices), but could find nothing the matter. He recommended,—whatever physicians in such cases always recommend,—but nothing was done. If I was feeble it was the Lord's will, and we must acquiesce.
It culminated in a sort of fit of hysterics, when I lost all self-control, and sobbed with tears, and banged my head on the table. While this was proceeding, I was conscious of that dual individuality of which I have already spoken, since while one part of me gave way, and could not resist, the other part in some extraordinary sense seemed standing aloof, much impressed. I was alone with my Father when this crisis suddenly occurred, and I was interested to see that he was greatly alarmed. It was a very long time since we had spent a day out of London, and I said, on being coaxed back to calmness, that I wanted 'to go into the country'. Like the dying Falstaff, I babbled of green fields. My Father, after a little reflection, proposed to take me to Primrose Hill. I had never heard of the place, and names have always appealed directly to my imagination. I was in the highest degree delighted, and could hardly restrain my impatience. As soon as possible we set forth westward, my hand in my Father's, with the liveliest anticipations. I expected to see a mountain absolutely carpeted with primroses, a terrestrial galaxy like that which covered the hill that led up to Montgomery Castle in Donne's poem. But at length, as we walked from the Chalk Farm direction, a miserable acclivity stole into view—surrounded, even in those days, on most sides by houses, with its grass worn to the buff by millions of boots, and resembling what I meant by 'the country' about as much as Poplar resembles Paradise. We sat down on a bench at its inglorious summit, whereupon I burst into tears, and in a heart-rending whisper sobbed, 'Oh! Papa, let us go home!'
This was the lachrymose epoch in a career not otherwise given to weeping, for I must tell one more tale of tears. About this time,—the autumn of 1855,—my parents were disturbed more than once in the twilight, after I had been put to bed, by shrieks from my crib. They would rush up to my side, and find me in great distress, but would be unable to discover the cause of it. The fact was that I was half beside myself with ghostly fears, increased and pointed by the fact that there had been some daring burglaries on our street. Our servant-maid, who slept at the top of the house, had seen, or thought she saw, upon a moonlight night the figure of a crouching man, silhouetted against the sky, slip down from the roof and leap into her room. She screamed, and he fled away. Moreover, as if this were not enough for my tender nerves, there had been committed a horrid murder at a baker's shop just around the corner in the Caledonian Road, to which murder actuality was given to us by the fact that my Mother had been 'just thinking' of getting her bread from this shop. Children, I think, were not spared the details of these affairs fifty years ago; at least, I was not, and my nerves were a packet of spilikins.
But what made me scream at nights was that when my Mother had tucked me up in bed, and had heard me say my prayer, and had prayed aloud on her knees at my side, and had stolen downstairs— noises immediately began in the room. There was a rustling of clothes, and a slapping of hands, and a gurgling, and a sniffing, and a trotting. These horrible muffled sounds would go on, and die away, and be resumed; I would pray very fervently to God to save me from my enemies; and sometimes I would go to sleep. But on other occasions, my faith and fortitude alike gave way, and I screamed 'Mama! Mama!' Then would my parents come bounding up the stairs, and comfort me, and kiss me, and assure me it was nothing. And nothing it was while they were there, but no sooner had they gone than the ghostly riot recommenced. It was at last discovered by my Mother that the whole mischief was due to a card of framed texts, fastened by one nail to the wall; this did nothing when the bedroom door was shut, but when it was left open (in order that my parents might hear me call), the card began to gallop in the draught, and made the most intolerable noises.
Several things tended at this time to alienate my conscience from the line which my Father had so rigidly traced for it. The question of the efficacy of prayer, which has puzzled wiser heads than mine was, began to trouble me. It was insisted on in our household that if anything was desired, you should not, as my Mother said, 'lose any time in seeking for it, but ask God to guide you to it'. In many junctures of life this is precisely what, in sober fact, they did. I will not dwell here on their theories, which my Mother put forth, with unflinching directness, in her published writings. But I found that a difference was made between my privileges in this matter and theirs, and this led to many discussions. My parents said: 'Whatever you need, tell Him and He will grant it, if it is His will.' Very well; I had need of a large painted humming-top which I had seen in a shop-window in the Caledonian Road. Accordingly, I introduced a supplication for this object into my evening prayer, carefully adding the words: 'If it is Thy will.' This, I recollect, placed my Mother in a dilemma, and she consulted my Father. Taken, I suppose, at a disadvantage, my Father told me I must not pray for 'things like that'. To which I answered by another query, 'Why?' And I added that he said we ought to pray for things we needed, and that I needed the humming-top a great deal more than I did the conversion of the heathen or the restitution of Jerusalem to the Jews, two objects of my nightly supplication which left me very cold.
I have reason to believe, looking back upon this scene conducted by candlelight in the front parlour, that my Mother was much baffled by the logic of my argument. She had gone so far as to say publicly that no 'things or circumstances are too insignificant to bring before the God of the whole earth'. I persisted that this covered the case of the humming-top, which was extremely significant to me. I noticed that she held aloof from the discussion, which was carried on with some show of annoyance by my Father. He had never gone quite so far as she did in regard to this question of praying for material things. I am not sure that she was convinced that I ought to have been checked; but he could not help seeing that it reduced their favourite theory to an absurdity for a small child to exercise the privilege. He ceased to argue, and told me peremptorily that it was not right for me to pray for things like humming-tops, and that I must do it no more. His authority, of course, was Paramount, and I yielded; but my faith in the efficacy of prayer was a good deal shaken. The fatal suspicion had crossed my mind that the reason why I was not to pray for the top was because it was too expensive for my parents to buy, that being the usual excuse for not getting things I wished for.
It was about the date of my sixth birthday that I did something very naughty, some act of direct disobedience, for which my Father, after a solemn sermon, chastised me, sacrificially, by giving me several cuts with a cane. This action was justified, as everything he did was justified, by reference to Scripture 'Spare the rod and spoil the child'. I suppose that there are some children, of a sullen and lymphatic temperament, who are smartened up and made more wide-awake by a whipping. It is largely a matter of convention, the exercise being endured (I am told) with pride by the infants of our aristocracy, but not tolerated by the lower classes. I am afraid that I proved my inherent vulgarity by being made, not contrite or humble, but furiously angry by this caning. I cannot account for the flame of rage which it awakened in my bosom. My dear, excellent Father had beaten me, not very severely, without ill-temper, and with the most genuine desire to improve me. But he was not well-advised especially so far as the 'dedication to the Lord's service' was concerned. This same 'dedication' had ministered to my vanity, and there are some natures which are not improved by being humiliated. I have to confess with shame that I went about the house for some days with a murderous hatred of my Father locked within my bosom. He did not suspect that the chastisement had not been wholly efficacious, and he bore me no malice; so that after a while, I forgot and thus forgave him. But I do not regard physical punishment as a wise element in the education of proud and sensitive children.
My theological misdeeds culminated, however, in an act so puerile and preposterous that I should not venture to record it if it did not throw some glimmering of light on the subject which I have proposed to myself in writing these pages. My mind continued to dwell on the mysterious question of prayer. It puzzled me greatly to know why, if we were God's children, and if he was watching over us by night and day, we might not supplicate for toys and sweets and smart clothes as well as for the conversion of the heathen. Just at this juncture, we had a special service at the Room, at which our attention was particularly called to what we always spoke of as 'the field of missionary labour'. The East was represented among 'the saints' by an excellent Irish peer, who had, in his early youth, converted and married a lady of colour; this Asiatic shared in our Sunday morning meetings, and was an object of helpless terror to me; I shrank from her amiable caresses, and vaguely identified her with a personage much spoken of in our family circle, the 'Personal Devil'.
All these matters drew my thoughts to the subject of idolatry, which was severely censured at the missionary meeting. I cross- examined my Father very closely as to the nature of this sin, and pinned him down to the categorical statement that idolatry consisted in praying to anyone or anything but God himself. Wood and stone, in the words of the hymn, were peculiarly liable to be bowed down to by the heathen in their blindness. I pressed my Father further on this subject, and he assured me that God would be very angry, and would signify His anger, if anyone, in a Christian country, bowed down to wood and stone. I cannot recall why I was so pertinacious on this subject, but I remember that my Father became a little restive under my cross-examination. I determined, however, to test the matter for myself, and one morning, when both my parents were safely out of the house, I prepared for the great act of heresy. I was in the morning-room on the ground-floor, where, with much labour, I hoisted a small chair on to the table close to the window. My heart was now beating as if it would leap out of my side, but I pursued my experiment. I knelt down on the carpet in front of the table and looking up I said my daily prayer in a loud voice, only substituting the address 'Oh Chair!' for the habitual one.
Having carried this act of idolatry safely through, I waited to see what would happen. It was a fine day, and I gazed up at the slip of white sky above the houses opposite, and expected something to appear in it. God would certainly exhibit his anger in some terrible form, and would chastise my impious and willful action. I was very much alarmed, but still more excited; I breathed the high, sharp air of defiance. But nothing happened; there was not a cloud in the sky, not an unusual sound in the street. Presently, I was quite sure that nothing would happen. I had committed idolatry, flagrantly and deliberately, and God did not care.
The result of this ridiculous act was not to make me question the existence and power of God; those were forces which I did not dream of ignoring. But what it did was to lessen still further my confidence in my Father's knowledge of the Divine mind. My Father had said, positively, that if I worshipped a thing made of wood, God would manifest his anger. I had then worshipped a chair, made (or partly made) of wood, and God had made no sign whatever. My Father, therefore, was not really acquainted with the Divine practice in cases of idolatry. And with that, dismissing the subject, I dived again into the unplumbed depths of the Penny Cyclopaedia.
CHAPTER III
THAT I might die in my early childhood was a thought which frequently recurred to the mind of my Mother. She endeavoured, with a Roman fortitude, to face it without apprehension. Soon after I had completed my fifth year, she had written as follows in her secret journal:
'Should we be called on to weep over the early grave of the dear one whom now we are endeavouring to train for heaven, may we be able to remember that we never ceased to pray for and watch over him. It is easy, comparatively, to watch over an infant. Yet shall I be sufficient for these things? I am not. But God is sufficient. In his strength I have begun the warfare, in his strength I will persevere, and I will faint not until either I myself or my little one is beyond the reach of earthly solicitude.'
That either she or I would be called away from earth, and that our physical separation was at hand, seems to have been always vaguely present in my Mother's dreams, as an obstinate conviction to be carefully recognized and jealously guarded against.
It was not, however, until the course of my seventh year that the tragedy occurred, which altered the whole course of our family existence. My Mother had hitherto seemed strong and in good health; she had even made the remark to my Father, that 'sorrow and pain, the badges of Christian discipleship', appeared to be withheld from her. On her birthday, which was to be her last, she had written these ejaculations in her locked diary:
'Lord, forgive the sins of the past, and help me to be faithful in future! May this be a year of much blessing, a year of jubilee! May I be kept lowly, trusting, loving! May I have more blessing than in all former years combined! May I be happier as a wife, mother, sister, writer, mistress, friend!'
But a symptom began to alarm her, and in the beginning of May, having consulted a local physician without being satisfied, she went to see a specialist in a northern suburb in whose judgement she had great confidence. This occasion I recollect with extreme vividness. I had been put to bed by my Father, in itself a noteworthy event. My crib stood near a window overlooking the street; my parents' ancient four-poster, a relic of the eighteenth century, hid me from the door, but I could see the rest of the room. After falling asleep on this particular evening, I awoke silently, surprised to see two lighted candles on the table, and my Father seated writing by them. I also saw a little meal arranged.
While I was wondering at all this, the door opened, and my Mother entered the room; she emerged from behind the bed-curtains, with her bonnet on, having returned from her expedition. My Father rose hurriedly, pushing back his chair. There was a pause, while my Mother seemed to be steadying her voice, and then she replied, loudly and distinctly, 'He says it is—' and she mentioned one of the most cruel maladies by which our poor mortal nature can be tormented. Then I saw them hold one another in a silent long embrace, and presently sink together out of sight on their knees, at the farther side of the bed, whereupon my Father lifted up his voice in prayer. Neither of them had noticed me, and now I lay back on my pillow and fell asleep.
Next morning, when we three sat at breakfast, my mind reverted to the scene of the previous night. With my eyes on my plate, as I was cutting up my food, I asked, casually, 'What is—?' mentioning the disease whose unfamiliar name I had heard from my bed. Receiving no reply, I looked up to discover why my question was not answered, and I saw my parents gazing at each other with lamentable eyes. In some way, I know not how, I was conscious of the presence of an incommunicable mystery, and I kept silence, though tortured with curiosity, nor did I ever repeat my inquiry.
About a fortnight later, my Mother began to go three times a week all the long way from Islington to Pimlico, in order to visit a certain practitioner, who undertook to apply a special treatment to her case. This involved great fatigue and distress to her, but so far as I was personally concerned it did me a great deal of good. I invariably accompanied her, and when she was very tired and weak, I enjoyed the pride of believing that I protected her. The movement, the exercise, the occupation, lifted my morbid fears and superstitions like a cloud. The medical treatment to which my poor Mother was subjected was very painful, and she had a peculiar sensitiveness to pain. She carried on her evangelical work as long as she possibly could, continuing to converse with her fellow passengers on spiritual matters. It was wonderful that a woman, so reserved and proud as she by nature was, could conquer so completely her natural timidity. In those last months, she scarcely ever got into a railway carriage or into an omnibus, without presently offering tracts to the persons sitting within reach of her, or endeavouring to begin a conversation with some one of the sufficiency of the Blood of Jesus to cleanse the human heart from sin. Her manners were so gentle and persuasive, she looked so innocent, her small, sparkling features were lighted up with so much benevolence, that I do not think she ever met with discourtesy or roughness. Imitative imp that I was, I sometimes took part in these strange conversations, and was mightily puffed up by compliments paid, in whispers, to my infant piety. But my Mother very properly discouraged this, as tending in me to spiritual pride.
If my parents, in their desire to separate themselves from the world, had regretted that through their happiness they seemed to have forfeited the Christian privilege of affliction, they could not continue to complain of any absence of temporal adversity. Everything seemed to combine, in the course of this fatal year 1856, to harass and alarm them. Just at the moment when illness created a special drain upon their resources, their slender income, instead of being increased, was seriously diminished. There is little sympathy felt in this world of rhetoric for the silent sufferings of the genteel poor, yet there is no class that deserves a more charitable commiseration.
At the best of times, the money which my parents had to spend was an exiguous and an inelastic sum. Strictly economical, proud—in an old-fashioned mode now quite out of fashion—to conceal the fact of their poverty, painfully scrupulous to avoid giving inconvenience to shop-people, tradesmen or servants, their whole financial career had to be carried on with the adroitness of a campaign through a hostile country. But now, at the moment when fresh pressing claims were made on their resources, my Mother's small capital suddenly disappeared. It had been placed, on bad advice (they were as children in such matters), in a Cornish mine, the grotesque name of which, Wheal Maria, became familiar to my ears. One day the river Tamar, in a playful mood, broke into Wheal Maria, and not a penny more was ever lifted from that unfortunate enterprise. About the same time, a small annuity which my Mother had inherited also ceased to be paid.
On my Father's books and lectures, therefore, the whole weight now rested, and that at a moment when he was depressed and unnerved by anxiety. It was contrary to his principles to borrow money, so that it became necessary to pay doctor's and chemist's bills punctually, and yet to carry on the little household with the very small margin. Each artifice of economy was now exercised to enable this to be done without falling into debt, and every branch of expenditure was cut down, clothes, books, the little garden which was my Father's pride, all felt the pressure of new poverty. Even our food, which had always been simple, now became Spartan indeed, and I am sure that my Mother often pretended to have no appetite that there might remain enough to satisfy my hunger. Fortunately my Father was able to take us away in the autumn for six weeks by the sea in Wales, the expenses of this tour being paid for by a professional engagement, so that my seventh birthday was spent in an ecstasy of happiness, on golden sands, under a brilliant sky, and in sight of the glorious azure ocean beating in from an infinitude of melting horizons. Here, too, my Mother, perched in a nook of the high rocks, surveyed the west, and forgot for a little while her weakness and the gnawing, grinding pain.
But in October, our sorrows seemed to close in upon us. We went back to London, and for the first time in their married life, my parents were divided. My Mother was now so seriously weaker that the omnibus journeys to Pimlico became impossible. My Father could not leave his work and so my Mother and I had to take a gloomy lodging close to the doctor's house. The experiences upon which I presently entered were of a nature in which childhood rarely takes a part. I was now my Mother's sole and ceaseless companion; the silent witness of her suffering, of her patience, of her vain and delusive attempts to obtain alleviation of her anguish. For nearly three months I breathed the atmosphere of pain, saw no other light, heard no other sounds, thought no other thoughts than those which accompany physical suffering and weariness. To my memory these weeks seem years; I have no measure of their monotony. The lodgings were bare and yet tawdry; out of dingy windows we looked from a second storey upon a dull small street, drowned in autumnal fog. My Father came to see us when he could, but otherwise, save when we made our morning expedition to the doctor, or when a slatternly girl waited upon us with our distasteful meals, we were alone, without any other occupation than to look forward to that occasional abatement of suffering which was what we hoped for most.
It is difficult for me to recollect how these interminable hours were spent. But I read aloud in a great part of them. I have now in my mind's cabinet a picture of my chair turned towards the window, partly that I might see the book more distinctly, partly not to see quite so distinctly that dear patient figure rocking on her sofa, or leaning, like a funeral statue, like a muse upon a monument, with her head on her arms against the mantelpiece. I read the Bible every day, and at much length; also,—with I cannot but think some praiseworthy patience,—a book of incommunicable dreariness, called Newton's 'Thoughts on the Apocalypse'. Newton bore a great resemblance to my old aversion, Jukes, and I made a sort of playful compact with my Mother that if I read aloud a certain number of pages out of 'Thoughts on the Apocalypse', as a reward I should be allowed to recite 'my own favourite hymns'. Among these there was one which united her suffrages with mine. Both of us extremely admired the piece by Toplady which begins:
What though my frail eyelids refuse
Continual watchings to keep,
And, punctual as midnight renews,
Demand the refreshment of sleep.
To this day, I cannot repeat this hymn without a sense of poignant emotion, nor can I pretend to decide how much of this is due to its merit and how much to the peculiar nature of the memories it recalls. But it might be as rude as I genuinely think it to be skilful, and I should continue to regard it as a sacred poem. Among all my childish memories none is clearer than my looking up,—after reading, in my high treble,
Kind Author and Ground of my hope,
Thee, Thee for my God I avow;
My glad Ebenezer set up,
And own Thou hast help'd me till now;
I muse on the years that are past,
Wherein my defence Thou hast prov'd,
Nor wilt Thou relinquish at last
A sinner so signally lov'd,—
and hearing my Mother, her eyes brimming with tears and her alabastrine fingers tightly locked together, murmur in unconscious repetition:
Nor wilt Thou relinquish at last
A sinner so signally lov'd.
In our lodgings at Pimlico I came across a piece of verse which exercised a lasting influence on my taste. It was called 'The Cameronian's Dream', and it had been written by a certain James Hyslop, a schoolmaster on a man-of-war. I do not know how it came into my possession, but I remember it was adorned by an extremely dim and ill-executed wood-cut of a lake surrounded by mountains, with tombstones in the foreground. This lugubrious frontispiece positively fascinated me, and lent a further gloomy charm to the ballad itself. It was in this copy of mediocre verses that the sense of romance first appealed to me, the kind of nature-romance which is connected with hills, and lakes, and the picturesque costumes of old times. The following stanza, for instance, brought a revelation to me:
'Twas a dream of those ages of darkness and blood,
When the minister's home was the mountain and wood;
When in Wellwood's dark valley the standard of Zion,
All bloody and torn, 'mong the heather was lying.
I persuaded my Mother to explain to me what it was all about, and she told me of the affliction of the Scottish saints, their flight to the waters and the wilderness, their cruel murder while they were singing 'their last song to the God of Salvation'. I was greatly fired, and the following stanza, in particular, reached my ideal of the Sublime:
The muskets were flashing, the blue swords were gleaming,
The helmets were cleft, and the red blood was streaming,
The heavens grew dark, and the thunder was rolling,
When in Wellwood's dark muirlands the mighty were falling.
Twenty years later I met with the only other person whom I have ever encountered who had even heard of 'The Cameronian's Dream'. This was Robert Louis Stevenson, who had been greatly struck by it when he was about my age. Probably the same ephemeral edition of it reached, at the same time, each of our pious households.
As my Mother's illness progressed, she could neither sleep, save by the use of opiates, nor rest, except in a sloping posture, propped up by many pillows. It was my great joy, and a pleasant diversion, to be allowed to shift, beat up, and rearrange these pillows, a task which I learned to accomplish not too awkwardly. Her sufferings, I believe, were principally caused by the violence of the medicaments to which her doctor, who was trying a new and fantastic 'cure', thought it proper to subject her. Let those who take a pessimistic view of our social progress ask themselves whether such tortures could today be inflicted on a delicate patient, or whether that patient would be allowed to exist, in the greatest misery in a lodging with no professional nurse to wait upon her, and with no companion but a little helpless boy of seven years of age. Time passes smoothly and swiftly, and we do not perceive the mitigations which he brings in his hands. Everywhere, in the whole system of human life, improvements, alleviations, ingenious appliances and humane inventions are being introduced to lessen the great burden of suffering.
If we were suddenly transplanted into the world of only fifty years ago, we should be startled and even horror-stricken by the wretchedness to which the step backwards would reintroduce us. It was in the very year of which I am speaking, a year of which my personal memories are still vivid, that Sir James Simpson received the Monthyon prize as a recognition of his discovery of the use of anaesthetics. Can our thoughts embrace the mitigation of human torment which the application of chloroform alone has caused? My early experiences, I confess, made me singularly conscious, at an age when one should know nothing about these things, of that torrent of sorrow and anguish and terror which flows under all footsteps of man. Within my childish conscience, already, some dim inquiry was awake as to the meaning of this mystery of pain—
The floods of the tears meet and gather;
The sound of them all grows like thunder;
Oh into what bosom, I wonder,
Is poured the whole sorrow of years?
For Eternity only seems keeping
Account of the great human weeping;
May God then, the Maker and Father,
May He find a place for the tears!
In my Mother's case, the savage treatment did no good; it had to be abandoned, and a day or two before Christmas, while the fruits were piled in the shop-fronts and the butchers were shouting outside their forests of carcases, my Father brought us back in a cab through the streets to Islington, a feeble and languishing company. Our invalid bore the journey fairly well, enjoying the air, and pointing out to me the glittering evidences of the season, but we paid heavily for her little entertainment, since, at her earnest wish the window of the cab having been kept open, she caught a cold, which became, indeed, the technical cause of a death that no applications could now have long delayed.
Yet she lingered with us six weeks more, and during this time I again relapsed, very naturally, into solitude. She now had the care of a practised woman, one of the 'saints' from the Chapel, and I was only permitted to pay brief visits to her bedside. That I might not be kept indoors all day and everyday, a man, also connected with the meeting-house, was paid a trifle to take me out for a walk each morning. This person, who was by turns familiar and truculent, was the object of my intense dislike. Our relations became, in the truest sense, 'forced'; I was obliged to walk by his side, but I held that I had no further responsibility to be agreeable, and after a while I ceased to speak to him, or to answer his remarks. On one occasion, poor dreary man, he met a friend and stopped to chat with him. I considered this act to have dissolved the bond; I skipped lightly from his side, examined several shop-windows which I had been forbidden to look into, made several darts down courts and up passages, and finally, after a delightful morning, returned home, having known my directions perfectly. My official conductor, in a shocking condition of fear, was crouching by the area-rails looking up and down the street. He darted upon me, in a great rage, to know 'what I meant by it?' I drew myself up as tall as I could, hissed 'Blind leader of the blind!' at him, and, with this inappropriate but very effective Parthian shot, slipped into the house.
When it was quite certain that no alleviations and no medical care could prevent, or even any longer postpone the departure of my Mother, I believe that my future conduct became the object of her greatest and her most painful solicitude. She said to my Father that the worst trial of her faith came from the feeling that she was called upon to leave that child whom she had so carefully trained from his earliest infancy for the peculiar service of the Lord, without any knowledge of what his further course would be. In many conversations, she most tenderly and closely urged my Father, who, however, needed no urging, to watch with unceasing care over my spiritual welfare. As she grew nearer her end, it was observed that she became calmer, and less troubled by fears about me. The intensity of her prayers and hopes seemed to have a prevailing force; it would have been a sin to doubt that such supplications, such confidence and devotion, such an emphasis of will, should not be rewarded by an answer from above in the affirmative. She was able, she said, to leave me 'in the hands of her loving Lord', or, on another occasion, 'to the care of her covenant God'.
Although her faith was so strong and simple, my Mother possessed no quality of the mystic. She never pretended to any visionary gifts, believed not at all in dreams or portents, and encouraged nothing in herself or others which was superstitious or fantastic. In order to realize her condition of mind, it is necessary, I think, to accept the view that she had formed a definite conception of the absolute, unmodified and historical veracity, in its direct and obvious sense, of every statement contained within the covers of the Bible. For her, and for my Father, nothing was symbolic, nothing allegorical or allusive in any part of Scripture, except what was, in so many words, proffered as a parable or a picture. Pushing this to its extreme limit, and allowing nothing for the changes of scene or time or race, my parents read injunctions to the Corinthian converts without any suspicion that what was apposite in dealing with half-breed Achaian colonists of the first century might not exactly apply to respectable English men and women of the nineteenth. They took it, text by text, as if no sort of difference existed between the surroundings of Trimalchion's feast and those of a City dinner. Both my parents, I think, were devoid of sympathetic imagination; in my Father, I am sure, it was singularly absent. Hence, although their faith was so strenuous that many persons might have called it fanatical, there was no mysticism about them. They went rather to the opposite extreme, to the cultivation of a rigid and iconoclastic literalness.
This was curiously exemplified in the very lively interest which they both took in what is called 'the interpretation of prophecy', and particularly in unwrapping the dark sayings bound up in the Book of Revelation. In their impartial survey of the Bible, they came to this collection of solemn and splendid visions, sinister and obscure, and they had no intention of allowing these to be merely stimulating to the fancy, or vaguely doctrinal in symbol. When they read of seals broken and of vials poured forth, of the star which was called Wormwood that fell from Heaven, and of men whose hair was as the hair of women and their teeth as the teeth of lions, they did not admit for a moment that these vivid mental pictures were of a poetic character, but they regarded them as positive statements, in guarded language, describing events which were to happen, and could be recognized when they did happen. It was the explanation, the perfectly prosaic and positive explanation, of all these wonders which drew them to study the Habershons and the Newtons whose books they so much enjoyed. They were helped by these guides to recognize in wild Oriental visions direct statements regarding Napoleon III and Pope Pius IX and the King of Piedmont, historic figures which they conceived as foreshadowed, in language which admitted of plain interpretation, under the names of denizens of Babylon and companions of the Wild Beast.
My Father was in the habit of saying, in later years, that no small element in his wedded happiness had been the fact that my Mother and he were of one mind in the interpretation of Sacred Prophecy. Looking back, it appears to me that this unusual mental exercise was almost their only relaxation, and that in their economy it took the place which is taken, in profaner families, by cards or the piano. It was a distraction; it took them completely out of themselves. During those melancholy weeks at Pimlico, I read aloud another work of the same nature as those of Habershon and Jukes, the Horae Apocalypticae of a Mr. Elliott. This was written, I think, in a less disagreeable style, and certainly it was less opaquely obscure to me. My recollection distinctly is that when my Mother could endure nothing else, the arguments of this book took her thoughts away from her pain and lifted her spirits. Elliott saw 'the queenly arrogance of Popery' everywhere, and believed that the very last days of Babylon the Great were came. Lest I say what may be thought extravagant, let me quote what my Father wrote in his diary at the time of my Mother's death. He said that the thought that Rome was doomed (as seemed not impossible in 1857) so affected my Mother that it 'irradiated' her dying hours with an assurance that was like 'the light of the Morning Star, the harbinger of the rising sun'.
After our return to Islington, there was a complete change in my relation to my Mother. At Pimlico, I had been all-important, her only companion, her friend, her confidant. But now that she was at home again, people and things combined to separate me from her. Now, and for the first time in my life, I no longer slept in her room, no longer sank to sleep under her kiss, no longer saw her mild eyes smile on me with the earliest sunshine. Twice a day, after breakfast and before I went to rest, I was brought to her bedside; but we were never alone; other people, sometimes strange people, were there. We had no cosy talk; often she was too weak to do more than pat my hand; her loud and almost constant cough terrified and harassed me. I felt, as I stood, awkwardly and shyly, by her high bed, that I had shrunken into a very small and insignificant figure, that she was floating out of my reach, that all things, but I knew not what nor how, were corning to an end. She herself was not herself; her head, that used to be held so erect, now rolled or sank upon the pillow; the sparkle was all extinguished from those bright, dear eyes. I could not understand it; I meditated long, long upon it all in my infantile darkness, in the garret, or in the little slip of a cold room where my bed was now placed; and a great, blind anger against I knew not what awakened in my soul.
The two retreats which I have mentioned were now all that were left to me. In the back-parlour someone from outside gave me occasional lessons of a desultory character. The breakfast-room was often haunted by visitors, unknown to me by face or name,— ladies, who used to pity me and even to pet me, until I became nimble in escaping from their caresses. Everything seemed to be unfixed, uncertain; it was like being on the platform of a railway-station waiting for a train. In all this time, the agitated, nervous presence of my Father, whose pale face was permanently drawn with anxiety, added to my perturbation, and I became miserable, stupid—as if I had lost my way in a cold fog.
Had I been older and more intelligent, of course, it might have been of him and not of myself that I should have been thinking. As I now look back upon that tragic time, it is for him that my heart bleeds,—for them both, so singularly fitted as they were to support and cheer one another in an existence which their own innate and cultivated characteristics had made little hospitable to other sources of comfort. This is not to be dwelt on here. But what must be recorded was the extraordinary tranquillity, the serene and sensible resignation, with which at length my parents faced the awful hour. Language cannot utter what they suffered, but there was no rebellion, no repining; in their case even an atheist might admit that the overpowering miracle of grace was mightily efficient.
It seems almost cruel to the memory of their opinions that the only words which rise to my mind, the only ones which seem in the least degree adequate to describe the attitude of my parents, had fallen from the pen of one whom, in their want of imaginative sympathy, they had regarded as anathema. But John Henry Newman might have come from the contemplation of my Mother's death-bed when he wrote: 'All the trouble which the world inflicts upon us, and which flesh cannot but feel,—sorrow, pain, care, bereavement,—these avail not to disturb the tranquillity and the intensity with which faith gazes at the Divine Majesty.' It was 'tranquillity', it was not the rapture of the mystic. Almost in the last hour of her life, urged to confess her 'joy' in the Lord, my Mother, rigidly honest, meticulous in self-analysis, as ever, replied: 'I have peace, but not joy. It would not do to go into eternity with a lie in my mouth.'
When the very end approached, and her mind was growing clouded, she gathered her strength together to say to my Father, 'I shall walk with Him in white. Won't you take your lamb and walk with me?' Confused with sorrow and alarm, my Father failed to understand her meaning. She became agitated, and she repeated two or three times: 'Take our lamb, and walk with me!' Then my Father comprehended, and pressed me forward; her hand fell softly upon mine and she seemed content. Thus was my dedication, that had begun in my cradle, sealed with the most solemn, the most poignant and irresistible insistence, at the death-bed of the holiest and purest of women. But what a weight, intolerable as the burden of Atlas, to lay on the shoulders of a little fragile child!
CHAPTER IV
CERTAINLY the preceding year, the seventh of my life, had been weighted for us with comprehensive disaster. I have not yet mentioned that, at the beginning of my Mother's fatal illness, misfortune came upon her brothers. I have never known the particulars of their ruin, but, I believe in consequence of A.'s unsuccessful speculations, and of the fact that E. had allowed the use of his name as a surety, both my uncles were obliged to fly from their creditors, and take refuge in Paris. This happened just when our need was the sorest, and this, together with the poignancy of knowing that their sister's devoted labours for them had been all in vain, added to their unhappiness. It was doubtless also the reason why, having left England, they wrote to us no more, carefully concealing from us even their address, so that when my Mother died, my Father was unable to communicate with them. I fear that they fell into dire distress; before very long we learned that A. had died, but it was fifteen years more before we heard anything of E., whose life had at length been preserved by the kindness of an old servant, but whose mind was now so clouded that he could recollect little or nothing of the past; and soon he also died. Amiable, gentle, without any species of practical ability, they were quite unfitted to struggle with the world, which had touched them only to wreck them.
The flight of my uncles at this particular juncture left me without a relative on my Mother's side at the time of her death. This isolation threw my Father into a sad perplexity. His only obvious source of income—but it happened to be a remarkably hopeful one—was an engagement to deliver a long series of lectures on marine natural history throughout the north and centre of England. These lectures were an entire novelty; nothing like them had been offered to the provincial public before; and the fact that the newly-invented marine aquarium was the fashionable toy of the moment added to their attraction. My Father was bowed down by sorrow and care, but he was not broken. His intellectual forces were at their height, and so was his popularity as an author. The lectures were to begin in march; my Mother was buried on 13 February. It seemed at first, in the inertia of bereavement, to be all beyond his powers to make the supreme effort, but the wholesome prick of need urged him on. It was a question of paying for food and clothes, of keeping a roof above our heads. The captain of a vessel in a storm must navigate his ship, although his wife lies dead in the cabin. That was my Father's position in the spring of 1857; he had to stimulate, instruct, amuse large audiences of strangers, and seem gay, although affliction and loneliness had settled in his heart. He had to do this, or starve.
But the difficulty still remained. During these months what was to become of me? My Father could not take me with him from hotel to hotel and from lecture-hall to lecture-hall. Nor could he leave me, as people leave the domestic cat, in an empty house for the neighbours to feed at intervals. The dilemma threatened to be insurmountable, when suddenly there descended upon us a kind, but little-known, paternal cousin from the west of England, who had heard of our calamities. This lady had a large family of her own at Bristol; she offered to find room in it for me so long as ever my Father should be away in the north; and when my Father, bewildered by so much goodness, hesitated, she came up to London and carried me forcibly away in a whirlwind of good-nature. Her benevolence was quite spontaneous; and I am not sure that she had not added to it already by helping to nurse our beloved sufferer through part of her illness. Of that I am not positive, but I recollect very clearly her snatching me from our cold and desolate hearthstone, and carrying me off to her cheerful house at Clifton.
Here, for the first time, when half through my eighth year, I was thrown into the society of young people. My cousins were none of them, I believe, any longer children, but they were youths and maidens busily engaged in various personal interests, all collected in a hive of wholesome family energy. Everybody was very kind to me, and I sank back, after the strain of so many months, into mere childhood again. This long visit to my cousins at Clifton must have been very delightful; I am dimly aware that it was—yet I remember but few of its incidents. My memory, so clear and vivid about earlier solitary times, now in all this society becomes blurred and vague. I recollect certain pleasures; being taken, for instance, to a menagerie, and having a practical joke, in the worst taste, played upon me by the pelican. One of my cousins, who was a medical student, showed me a pistol, and helped me to fire it; he smoked a pipe, and I was oddly conscious that both the firearm and the tobacco were definitely hostile to my 'dedication'. My girl-cousins took turns in putting me to bed, and on cold nights, or when they were in a hurry, allowed me to say my prayer under the bed-clothes instead of kneeling at a chair. The result of this was further spiritual laxity, because I could not help going to sleep before the prayer was ended.
The visit to Clifton was, in fact, a blessed interval in my strenuous childhood. It probably prevented my nerves from breaking down under the pressure of the previous months. The Clifton family was God-fearing, in a quiet, sensible way, but there was a total absence of all the intensity and compulsion of our religious life at Islington. I was not encouraged—I even remember that I was gently snubbed—when I rattled forth, parrot- fashion, the conventional phraseology of 'the saints'. For a short, enchanting period of respite, I lived the life of an ordinary little boy, relapsing, to a degree which would have filled my Father with despair, into childish thoughts and childish language. The result was that of this little happy breathing-space I have nothing to report. Vague, half-blind remembrances of walks, with my tall cousins waving like trees above me, pleasant noisy evenings in a great room on the ground- floor, faint silver-points of excursions into the country, all this is the very pale and shadowy testimony to a brief interval of healthy, happy child-life, when my hard-driven soul was allowed to have, for a little while, no history.
The life of a child is so brief, its impressions are so illusory and fugitive, that it is as difficult to record its history as it would be to design a morning cloud sailing before the wind. It is short, as we count shortness in after years, when the drag of lead pulls down to earth the foot that used to flutter with a winged impetuosity, and to float with the pulse of Hermes. But in memory, my childhood was long, long with interminable hours, hours with the pale cheek pressed against the windowpane, hours of mechanical and repeated lonely 'games', which had lost their savour, and were kept going by sheer inertness. Not unhappy, not fretful, but long,—long, long. It seems to me, as I look back to the life in the motherless Islington house, as I resumed it in that slow eighth year of my life, that time had ceased to move. There was a whole age between one tick of the eight-day clock in the hall, and the next tick. When the milkman went his rounds in our grey street, with his eldritch scream over the top of each set of area railings, it seemed as though he would never disappear again. There was no past and no future for me, and the present felt as though it were sealed up in a Leyden jar. Even my dreams were interminable, and hung stationary from the nightly sky.
At this time, the street was my theatre, and I spent long periods, as I have said, leaning against the window. I feel now that coldness of the pane, and the feverish heat that was produced, by contrast, in the orbit round the eye. Now and then amusing things happened. The onion-man was a joy long waited for. This worthy was a tall and bony Jersey Protestant with a raucous voice, who strode up our street several times a week, carrying a yoke across his shoulders, from the ends of which hung ropes of onions. He used to shout, at abrupt intervals, in a tone which might wake the dead:
Here's your rope . . . .
To hang the Pope . . . .
And a penn'orth of cheese to choke him.
The cheese appeared to be legendary; he sold only onions. My Father did not eat onions, but he encouraged this terrible fellow, with his wild eyes and long strips of hair, because of his godly attitude towards the 'Papacy', and I used to watch him dart out of the front door, present his penny, and retire, graciously waving back the proffered onion. On the other hand, my Father did not approve of a fat sailor, who was a constant passer-by. This man, who was probably crazed, used to wall very slowly up the centre of our street, vociferating with the voice of a bull,
Wa-a-atch and pray-hay!
Night and day-hay!
This melancholy admonition was the entire business of his life. He did nothing at all but walk up and down the streets of Islington exhorting the inhabitants to watch and pray. I do not recollect that this sailor-man stopped to collect pennies, and my impression is that he was, after his fashion, a volunteer evangelist.
The tragedy of Mr. Punch was another, and a still greater delight. I was never allowed to go out into the street to mingle with the little crowd which gathered under the stage, and as I was extremely near-sighted, the impression I received was vague. But when, by happy chance, the show stopped opposite our door, I saw enough of that ancient drama to be thrilled with terror and delight. I was much affected by the internal troubles of the Punch family; I thought that with a little more tact on the part of Mrs. Punch and some restraint held over a temper, naturally violent, by Mr. Punch, a great deal of this sad misunderstanding might have been prevented.
The momentous close, when a figure of shapeless horror appears on the stage, and quells the hitherto undaunted Mr. Punch, was to me the bouquet of the entire performance. When Mr. Punch, losing his nerve, points to this shape and says in an awestruck, squeaking whisper, 'Who's that? Is it the butcher?' and the stern answer comes, 'No, Mr. Punch!' And then, 'Is it the baker?' 'No, Mr. Punch!' 'Who is it then?' (this in a squeak trembling with emotion and terror); and then the full, loud reply, booming like a judgement-bell, 'It is the Devil come to take you down to Hell,' and the form of Punch, with kicking legs, sunken in epilepsy on the floor,—all this was solemn and exquisite to me beyond words. I was not amused—I was deeply moved and exhilarated, 'purged', as the old phrase hath it, 'with pity and terror'.
Another joy, in a lighter key, was watching a fantastic old man who came slowly up the street, hung about with drums and flutes and kites and coloured balls, and bearing over his shoulders a great sack. Children and servant-girls used to bolt up out of areas, and chaffer with this gaudy person, who would presently trudge on, always repeating the same set of words—
Here's your toys
For girls and boys,
For bits of brass
And broken glass,
(these four lines being spoken in a breathless hurry)
A penny or a vial-bottell . . . .
(this being drawled out in an endless wail).
I was not permitted to go forth and trade with this old person, but sometimes our servant-maid did, thereby making me feel that if I did not hold the rose of merchandise, I was very near it. My experiences with my cousins at Clifton had given me the habit of looking out into the world—even though it was only into the pale world of our quiet street.
My Father and I were now great friends. I do not doubt that he felt his responsibility to fill as far as might be the gap which the death of my Mother had made in my existence. I spent a large portion of my time in his study while he was writing or drawing, and though very little conversation passed between us, I think that each enjoyed the companionship of the other. There were two, and sometimes three aquaria in the room, tanks of sea-water, with glass sides, inside which all sorts of creatures crawled and swam; these were sources of endless pleasure to me, and at this time began to be laid upon me the occasional task of watching and afterwards reporting the habits of animals.
At other times, I dragged a folio volume of the Penny Cyclopaedia up to the study with me, and sat there reading successive articles on such subjects as Parrots, Parthians, Passion-flowers, Passover and Pastry, without any invidious preferences, all information being equally welcome, and equally fugitive. That something of all this loose stream of knowledge clung to odd cells of the back of my brain seems to be shown by the fact that to this day, I occasionally find myself aware of some stray useless fact about peonies or pemmican or pepper, which I can only trace back to the Penny Cyclopaedia of my infancy.
It will be asked what the attitude of my Father's mind was to me, and of mine to his, as regards religion, at this time, when we were thrown together alone so much. It is difficult to reply with exactitude. But so far as the former is concerned, I thinly that the extreme violence of the spiritual emotions to which my Father had been subjected, had now been followed by a certain reaction. He had not changed his views in any respect, and he was prepared to work out the results of them with greater zeal than ever, but just at present his religious nature, like his physical nature, was tired out with anxiety and sorrow. He accepted the supposition that I was entirely with him in all respects, so far, that is to say, as a being so rudimentary and feeble as a little child could be. My Mother, in her last hours, had dwelt on our unity in God; we were drawn together, she said, elect from the world, in a triplicity of faith and joy. She had constantly repeated the words: 'We shall be one family, one song. One song! one family!' My Father, I think, accepted this as a prophecy, he felt no doubt of our triple unity; my Mother had now merely passed before us, through a door, into a world of light, where we should presently join her, where all things would be radiant and blissful, but where we three would, in some unknown way, be particularly drawn together in a tie of inexpressible beatitude. He fretted at the delay; he would have taken me by the hand, and have joined her in the realms of holiness and light, at once, without this dreary dalliance with earthly cares.
He held this confidence and vision steadily before him, but nothing availed against the melancholy of his natural state. He was conscious of his dull and solitary condition, and he saw, too, that it enveloped me. I think his heart was, at this time, drawn out towards me in an immense tenderness. Sometimes, when the early twilight descended upon us in the study, and he could no longer peer with advantage into the depths of his microscope, he would beckon me to him silently, and fold me closely in his arms. I used to turn my face up to his, patiently and wonderingly, while the large, unwilling tears gathered in the corners of his eyelids. My training had given me a preternatural faculty of stillness, and we would stay so, without a word or a movement, until the darkness filled the room. And then, with my little hand in his, we would walk sedately downstairs to the parlour, where we would find that the lamp was lighted, and that our melancholy vigil was ended. I do not think that at any part of our lives my Father and I were drawn so close to one another as we were in that summer of 1857. Yet we seldom spoke of what lay so warm and fragrant between us, the flower-like thought of our Departed.
The visit to my cousins had made one considerable change in me. Under the old solitary discipline, my intelligence had grown at the expense of my sentiment. I was innocent, but inhuman. The long suffering and the death of my Mother had awakened my heart, had taught me what pain was, but had left me savage and morose. I had still no idea of the relations of human beings to one another; I had learned no word of that philosophy which comes to the children of the poor in the struggle of the street and to the children of the well-to-do in the clash of the nursery. In other words, I had no humanity; I had been carefully shielded from the chance of 'catching' it, as though it were the most dangerous of microbes. But now that I had enjoyed a little of the common experience of childhood, a great change had come upon me. Before I went to Clifton, my mental life was all interior, a rack of baseless dream upon dream. But, now, I was eager to look out of the window, to go out in the streets; I was taken with a curiosity about human life. Even from my vantage of the window- pane, I watched boys and girls go by with an interest which began to be almost wistful.
Still I continued to have no young companions. But on summer evenings I used to drag my Father out, taking the initiative myself, stamping in playful impatience at his irresolution, fetching his hat and stick, and waiting. We used to sally forth at last together, hand in hand, descending the Caledonian Road, with all its shops, as far as Mother Shipton, or else winding among the semi-genteel squares and terraces westward by Copenhagen Street, or, best of all, mounting to the Regent's Canal, where we paused to lean over the bridge and watch flotillas of ducks steer under us, or little white dogs dash, impotently furious, from stem to stern of the great, lazy barges painted in a crude vehemence of vermilion and azure. These were happy hours, when the spectre of Religion ceased to overshadow us for a little while, when my Father forgot the Apocalypse and dropped his austere phraseology, and when our bass and treble voices used to ring out together over some foolish little jest or some mirthful recollection of his past experiences. Little soft oases these, in the hard desert of our sandy spiritual life at home.
There was an unbending, too, when we used to sing together, in my case very tunelessly. I had inherited a plentiful lack of musical genius from my Mother, who had neither ear nor voice, and who had said, in the course of her last illness, 'I shall sing His praise, at length, in strains I never could master here below'. My Father, on the other hand, had some knowledge of the principles of vocal music, although not, I am afraid, much taste. He had at least great fondness for singing hymns, in the manner then popular with the Evangelicals, very loudly, and so slowly that I used to count how many words I could read silently, between one syllable of the singing and another. My lack of skill did not prevent me from being zealous at these vocal exercises, and my Father and I used to sing lustily together. The Wesleys, Charlotte Elliott ('Just as I am, without one plea'), and James Montgomery ('Forever with the Lord') represented his predilection in hymnology. I acquiesced, although that would not have been my independent choice. These represented the devotional verse which made its direct appeal to the evangelical mind, and served in those 'Puseyite' days to counteract the High Church poetry founded on 'The Christian Year'. Of that famous volume I never met with a copy until I was grown up, and equally unknown in our circle were the hymns of Newman, Faber and Neale.
It was my Father's plan from the first to keep me entirely ignorant of the poetry of the High Church, which deeply offended his Calvinism; he thought that religious truth could be sucked in, like mother's milk, from hymns which were godly and sound, and yet correctly versified; and I was therefore carefully trained in this direction from an early date. But my spirit had rebelled against some of these hymns, especially against those written—a mighty multitude—by Horatius Bonar; naughtily refusing to read Bonar's 'I heard the voice of Jesus say' to my Mother in our Pimlico lodgings. A secret hostility to this particular form of effusion was already, at the age of seven, beginning to define itself in my brain, side by side with an unctuous infantile conformity.
I find a difficulty in recalling the precise nature of the religious instruction which my Father gave me at this time. It was incessant, and it was founded on the close inspection of the Bible, particularly of the epistles of the New Testament. This summer, as my eighth year advanced, we read the 'Epistle to the Hebrews', with very great deliberation, stopping every moment, that my Father might expound it, verse by verse. The extraordinary beauty of the language—for instance, the matchless cadences and images of the first chapter—made a certain impression upon my imagination, and were (I think) my earliest initiation into the magic of literature. I was incapable of defining what I felt, but I certainly had a grip in the throat, which was in its essence a purely aesthetic emotion, when my Father read, in his pure, large, ringing voice, such passages as 'The heavens are the works of Thy hands. They shall perish, but Thou remainest, and they all shall wax old as doth a garment, and as a vesture shalt Thou fold them up, and they shall be changed; but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall not fail.' But the dialectic parts of the Epistle puzzled and confused me. Such metaphysical ideas as 'laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works' and 'crucifying the Son of God afresh' were not successfully brought down to the level of my understanding.
My Father's religious teaching to me was almost exclusively doctrinal. He did not observe the value of negative education, that is to say, of leaving Nature alone to fill up the gaps which it is her design to deal with at a later and riper date. He did not, even, satisfy himself with those moral injunctions which should form the basis of infantile discipline. He was in a tremendous hurry to push on my spiritual growth, and he fed me with theological meat which it was impossible for me to digest. Some glimmer of a suspicion that he was sailing on the wrong tack must, I should suppose, have broken in upon him when we had reached the eighth and ninth chapters of Hebrews, where, addressing readers who had been brought up under the Jewish dispensation, and had the formalities of the Law of Moses in their very blood, the apostle battles with their dangerous conservatism. It is a very noble piece of spiritual casuistry, but it is signally unfitted for the comprehension of a child. Suddenly by my flushing up with anger and saying, 'Oh how I do hate that Law,' my Father perceived, and paused in amazement to perceive, that I took the Law to be a person of malignant temper from whose cruel bondage, and from whose intolerable tyranny and unfairness, some excellent person was crying out to be delivered. I wished to hit Law with my fist, for being so mean and unreasonable.
Upon this, of course, it was necessary to reopen the whole line of exposition. My Father, without realizing it, had been talking on his own level, not on mine, and now he condescended to me. But without very great success. The melodious language, the divine forensic audacities, the magnificent ebb and flow of argument which make the 'Epistle to the Hebrews' such a miracle, were far and away beyond my reach, and they only bewildered me. Some evangelical children of my generation, I understand, were brought up on a work called 'Line upon Line: Here a Little, and there a Little'. My Father's ambition would not submit to anything suggested by such a title as that, and he committed, from his own point of view, a fatal mistake when he sought to build spires and battlements without having been at the pains to settle a foundation beneath them.
We were not always reading the 'Epistle to the Hebrews', however; not always was my flesh being made to creep by having it insisted upon that 'almost all things are by the Law purged with blood, and without blood is no remission of sin'. In our lighter moods, we turned to the 'Book of Revelation', and chased the phantom of Popery through its fuliginous pages. My Father, I think, missed my Mother's company almost more acutely in his researches into prophecy than in anything else. This had been their unceasing recreation, and no third person could possibly follow the curious path which they had hewn for themselves through this jungle of symbols. But, more and more, my Father persuaded himself that I, too, was initiated, and by degrees I was made to share in all his speculations and interpretations.
Hand in hand we investigated the number of the Beast, which number is six hundred three score and six. Hand in hand we inspected the nations, to see whether they had the mark of Babylon in their foreheads. Hand in hand we watched the spirits of devils gathering the kings of the earth into the place which is called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon. Our unity in these excursions was so delightful, that my Father was lulled in any suspicion he might have formed that I did not quite understand what it was all about. Nor could he have desired a pupil more docile or more ardent than I was in my flaming denunciations of the Papacy.
If there was one institution more than another which, at this early stage of my history, I loathed and feared, it was what we invariably spoke of as 'the so-called Church of Rome'. In later years, I have met with stout Protestants, gallant 'Down-with-the- Pope' men from County Antrim, and ladies who see the hand of the Jesuits in every public and private misfortune. It is the habit of a loose and indifferent age to consider this dwindling body of enthusiasts with suspicion, and to regard their attitude towards Rome as illiberal. But my own feeling is that they are all too mild, that their denunciations err on the side of the anodyne. I have no longer the slightest wish myself to denounce the Roman communion, but, if it is to be done, I have an idea that the latter-day Protestants do not know how to do it. In Lord Chesterfield's phrase, these anti-Pope men 'don't understand their own silly business'. They make concessions and allowances, they put on gloves to touch the accursed thing.
Not thus did we approach the Scarlet Woman in the 'fifties. We palliated nothing, we believed in no good intentions, we used (I myself used, in my tender innocency) language of the seventeenth century such as is now no longer introduced into any species of controversy. As a little boy, when I thought, with intense vagueness, of the Pope, I used to shut my eyes tight and clench my fists. We welcomed any social disorder in any part of Italy, as likely to be annoying to the Papacy. If there was a custom- house officer stabbed in a fracas at Sassari, we gave loud thanks that liberty and light were breaking in upon Sardinia. If there was an unsuccessful attempt to murder the Grand Duke, we lifted up our voices to celebrate the faith and sufferings of the dear persecuted Tuscans, and the record of some apocryphal monstrosity in Naples would only reveal to us a glorious opening for Gospel energy. My Father celebrated the announcement in the newspapers of a considerable emigration from the Papal Dominions by rejoicing at 'this outcrowding of many, throughout the harlot's domain, from her sins and her plagues'.
No, the Protestant League may consider itself to be an earnest and active body, but I can never look upon its efforts as anything but lukewarm, standing, as I do, with the light of other days around me. As a child, whatever I might question, I never doubted the turpitude of Rome. I do not think I had formed any idea whatever of the character or pretensions or practices of the Catholic Church, or indeed of what it consisted, or its nature; but I regarded it with a vague terror as a wild beast, the only good point about it being that it was very old and was soon to die. When I turned to Jukes or Newton for further detail, I could not understand what they said. Perhaps, on the whole, there was no disadvantage in that.
It is possible that someone may have observed to my Father that the conditions of our life were unfavourable to our health, although I hardly think that he would have encouraged any such advice. As I look back upon this far-away time, I am surprised at the absence in it of any figures but our own. He and I together, now in the study among the sea-anemones and starfishes; now on the canal-bridge, looking down at the ducks; now at our hard little meals, served up as those of a dreamy widower are likely to be when one maid-of-all-work provides them, now under the lamp at the maps we both loved so much, this is what I see—no third presence is ever with us. Whether it occurred to himself that such a solitude a deux was excellent, in the long run, for neither of us, or whether any chance visitor or one of the 'Saints', who used to see me at the Room every Sunday morning, suggested that a female influence might put a little rose-colour into my pasty cheeks, I know not. All I am sure of is that one day, towards the close of the summer, as I was gazing into the street, I saw a four-wheeled cab stop outside our door, and deposit, with several packages, a strange lady, who was shown up into my Father's study and was presently brought down and introduced to me.
Miss Marks, as I shall take the liberty of calling this person, was so long a part of my life that I must pause to describe her. She was tall, rather gaunt, with high cheek-bones; her teeth were prominent and very white; her eyes were china-blue, and were always absolutely fixed, wide open, on the person she spoke to; her nose was inclined to be red at the tip. She had a kind, hearty, sharp mode of talking, but did not exercise it much, being on the whole taciturn. She was bustling and nervous, not particularly refined, not quite, I imagine, what is called 'a lady'. I supposed her, if I thought of the matter at all, to be very old, but perhaps she may have been, when we knew her first, some forty-five summers. Miss Marks was an orphan, depending upon her work for her living; she would not, in these days of examinations, have come up to the necessary educational standards, but she had enjoyed experience in teaching, and was prepared to be a conscientious and careful governess, up to her lights. I was now informed by my Father that it was in this capacity that she would in future take her place in our household. I was not informed, what I gradually learned by observation, that she would also act in it as housekeeper.
Miss Marks was a somewhat grotesque personage, and might easily be painted as a kind of eccentric Dickens character, a mixture of Mrs. Pipchin and Miss Sally Brass. I will confess that when, in years to come, I read 'Dombey and Son', certain features of Mrs. Pipchin did irresistibly remind me of my excellent past governess. I can imagine Miss Marks saying, but with a facetious intent, that children who sniffed would not go to heaven. But I was instantly ashamed of the parallel, because my gaunt old friend was a thoroughly good and honest woman, not intelligent and not graceful, but desirous in every way to do her duty. Her duty to me she certainly did, and I am afraid I hardly rewarded her with the devotion she deserved. From the first, I was indifferent to her wishes, and, as much as was convenient, I ignored her existence. She held no power over my attention, and if I accepted her guidance along the path of instruction, it was because, odd as it may sound, I really loved knowledge. I accepted her company without objection, and though there were occasional outbreaks of tantrums on both sides, we got on very well together for several years. I did not, however, at any time surrender my inward will to the wishes of Miss Marks.
In the circle of our life the religious element took so preponderating a place, that it is impossible to avoid mentioning, what might otherwise seem unimportant, the theological views of Miss Marks. How my Father had discovered her, or from what field of educational enterprise he plucked her in her prime, I never knew, but she used to mention that my Father's ministrations had 'opened her eyes', from which 'scales' had fallen. She had accepted, on their presentation to her, the entire gamut of his principles. Miss Marks was accustomed, while putting me to bed, to dwell darkly on the incidents of her past, which had, I fear, been an afflicted one. I believe I do her rather limited intelligence no injury when I say that it was prepared to swallow, at one mouthful, whatever my Father presented to it, so delighted was its way-worn possessor to find herself in a comfortable, or, at least, an independent position. She soon bowed, if there was indeed any resistance from the first, very contentedly in the House of Rimmon, learning to repeat, with marked fluency, the customary formulas and shibboleths. On my own religious development she had no great influence. Any such guttering theological rushlight as Miss Marks might dutifully exhibit faded for me in the blaze of my Father's glaring beacon-lamp of faith.
Hardly was Miss Marks settled in the family, than my Father left us on an expedition about which my curiosity was exercised, but not until later, satisfied. He had gone, as we afterwards found, to South Devon, to a point on the coast which he had known of old. Here he had hired a horse, and had ridden about until he saw a spot he liked, where a villa was being built on speculation. Nothing equals the courage of these recluse men; my Father got off his horse, and tied it to the gate, and then he went in and bought the house on a ninety-nine years' lease. I need hardly say that he had made the matter a subject of the most earnest prayer, and had entreated the Lord for guidance. When he felt attracted to this particular villa, he did not doubt that he was directed to it in answer to his supplication, and he wasted no time in further balancing or inquiring. On my eighth birthday, with bag and baggage complete, we all made the toilful journey down into Devonshire, and I was a town-child no longer.
CHAPTER V
A NEW element now entered into my life, a fresh rival arose to compete for me with my Father's dogmatic theology. This rival was the Sea. When Wordsworth was a little child, the presence of the mountains and the clouds lighted up his spirit with gleams that were like the flashing of a shield. He has described, in the marvellous pages of the 'Prelude', the impact of nature upon the infant soul, but he has described it vaguely and faintly, with some 'infirmity of love for days disowned by memory',—I think because he was brought up in the midst of spectacular beauty, and could name no moment, mark no 'here' or 'now', when the wonder broke upon him. It was at the age of twice five summers, he thought, that he began to hold unconscious intercourse with nature, 'drinking in a pure organic pleasure' from the floating mists and winding waters. Perhaps, in his anxiety to be truthful, and in the absence of any record, he put the date of this conscious rapture too late rather than too early. Certainly my own impregnation with the obscurely-defined but keenly-felt loveliness of the open sea dates from the first week of my ninth year.
The village, on the outskirts of which we had taken up our abode, was built parallel to the cliff line above the shore, but half a mile inland. For a long time after the date I have now reached, no other form of natural scenery than the sea had any effect upon me at all. The tors of the distant moor might be drawn in deep blue against the pallor of our morning or our evening sky, but I never looked at them. It was the Sea, always the sea, nothing but the sea. From our house, or from the field at the back of our house, or from any part of the village itself, there was no appearance to suggest that there could lie anything in an easterly direction to break the infinitude of red ploughed fields. But on that earliest morning, how my heart remembers we hastened,—Miss Marks, the maid, and I between them, along a couple of high-walled lanes, when suddenly, far below us, in an immense arc of light, there stretched the enormous plain of waters. We had but to cross a step or two of downs, when the hollow sides of the great limestone cove yawned at our feet, descending, like a broken cup, down, down to the moon of snow- white shingle and the expanse of blue-green sea.
In these twentieth-century days, a careful municipality has studded the down with rustic seats and has shut its dangers out with railings, has cut a winding carriage-drive round the curves of the cove down to the shore, and has planted sausage-laurels at intervals in clearings made for that aesthetic purpose. When last I saw the place, thus smartened and secured, with its hair in curl-papers and its feet in patent-leathers, I turned from it in anger and disgust, and could almost have wept. I suppose that to those who knew it in no other guise, it may still have beauty. No parish councils, beneficent and shrewd, can obscure the lustre of the waters or compress the vastness of the sky. But what man could do to make wild beauty ineffectual, tame and empty, has amply been performed at Oddicombe.
Very different was it fifty years ago, in its uncouth majesty. No road, save the merest goat-path, led down its concave wilderness, in which loose furze-bushes and untrimmed brambles wantoned into the likeness of trees, each draped in audacious tissue of wild clematis. Through this fantastic maze the traveller wound his way, led by little other clue than by the instinct of descent. For me, as a child, it meant the labour of a long, an endless morning, to descend to the snow-white pebbles, to sport at the edge of the cold, sharp sea, and then to climb up home again, slipping in the sticky red mud, clutching at the smooth boughs of the wild ash, toiling, toiling upwards into flat land out of that hollow world of rocks.
On the first occasion I recollect, our Cockney housemaid, enthusiastic young creature that she was, flung herself down upon her knees, and drank of the salt waters. Miss Marks, more instructed in phenomena, refrained, but I, although I was perfectly aware what the taste would be, insisted on sipping a few drops from the palm of my hand. This was a slight recurrence of what I have called my 'natural magic' practices, which had passed into the background of my mind, but had not quite disappeared. I recollect that I thought I might secure some power of walking on the sea, if I drank of it—a perfectly irrational movement of mind, like those of savages.
My great desire was to walk out over the sea as far as I could, and then lie flat on it, face downwards, and peer into the depths. I was tormented with this ambition, and, like many grown- up people, was so fully occupied by these vain and ridiculous desires that I neglected the actual natural pleasures around me. The idea was not quite so demented as it may seem, because we were in the habit of singing, as well as reading, of those enraptured beings who spend their days in 'flinging down their golden crowns upon the jasper sea'. Why, I argued, should I not be able to fling down my straw hat upon the tides of Oddicombe? And, without question, a majestic scene upon the Lake of Gennesaret had also inflamed my fancy. Of all these things, of course, I was careful to speak to no one.
It was not with Miss Marks, however, but with my Father, that I became accustomed to make the laborious and exquisite journeys down to the sea and back again. His work as a naturalist eventually took him, laden with implements, to the rock-pools on the shore, and I was in attendance as an acolyte. But our earliest winter in South Devon was darkened for us both by disappointments, the cause of which lay, at the time, far out of my reach. In the spirit of my Father were then running, with furious velocity, two hostile streams of influence. I was standing, just now, thinking of these things, where the Cascine ends in the wooded point which is carved out sharply by the lion- coloured swirl of the Arno on the one side and by the pure flow of the Mugnone on the other. The rivers meet, and run parallel, but there comes a moment when the one or the other must conquer, and it is the yellow vehemence that drowns the purer tide.
So, through my Father's brain, in that year of scientific crisis, 1857, there rushed two kinds of thought, each absorbing, each convincing, yet totally irreconcilable. There is a peculiar agony in the paradox that truth has two forms, each of them indisputable, yet each antagonistic to the other. It was this discovery, that there were two theories of physical life, each of which was true, but the truth of each incompatible with the truth of the other, which shook the spirit of my Father with perturbation. It was not, really, a paradox, it was a fallacy, if he could only have known it, but he allowed the turbid volume of superstition to drown the delicate stream of reason. He took one step in the service of truth, and then he drew back in an agony, and accepted the servitude of error.
This was the great moment in the history of thought when the theory of the mutability of species was preparing to throw a flood of light upon all departments of human speculation and action. It was becoming necessary to stand emphatically in one army or the other. Lyell was surrounding himself with disciples, who were making strides in the direction of discovery. Darwin had long been collecting facts with regard to the variation of animals and plants. Hooker and Wallace, Asa Gray and even Agassiz, each in his own sphere, were coming closer and closer to a perception of that secret which was first to reveal itself clearly to the patient and humble genius of Darwin. In the year before, in 1856, Darwin, under pressure from Lyell, had begun that modest statement of the new revelation, that 'abstract of an essay', which developed so mightily into 'The Origin of Species'. Wollaston's 'Variation of Species' had just appeared, and had been a nine days' wonder in the wilderness.
On the other side, the reactionaries, although never dreaming of the fate which hung over them, had not been idle. In 1857 the astounding question had for the first time been propounded with contumely, 'What, then, did we come from an orang-outang?' The famous 'Vestiges of Creation' had been supplying a sugar-and- water panacea for those who could not escape from the trend of evidence, and who yet clung to revelation. Owen was encouraging reaction by resisting, with all the strength of his prestige, the theory of the mutability of species.
In this period of intellectual ferment, as when a great political revolution is being planned, many possible adherents were confidentially tested with hints and encouraged to reveal their bias in a whisper. It was the notion of Lyell, himself a great mover of men, that, before the doctrine of natural selection was given to a world which would be sure to lift up at it a howl of execration, a certain bodyguard of sound and experienced naturalists, expert in the description of species, should be privately made aware of its tenor. Among those who were thus initiated, or approached with a view towards possible illumination, was my Father. He was spoken to by Hooker, and later on by Darwin, after meetings of the Royal Society in the summer of 1857.
My Father's attitude towards the theory of natural selection was critical in his career, and oddly enough, it exercised an immense influence on my own experience as a child. Let it be admitted at once, mournful as the admission is, that every instinct in his intelligence went out at first to greet the new light. It had hardly done so, when a recollection of the opening chapter of 'Genesis' checked it at the outset. He consulted with Carpenter, a great investigator, but one who was fully as incapable as himself of remodelling his ideas with regard to the old, accepted hypotheses. They both determined, on various grounds, to have nothing to do with the terrible theory, but to hold steadily to the law of the fixity of species. It was exactly at this juncture that we left London, and the slight and occasional but always extremely salutary personal intercourse with men of scientific leading which my Father had enjoyed at the British Museum and at the Royal Society came to an end. His next act was to burn his ships down to the last beam and log out of which a raft could have been made. By a strange act of wilfulness, he closed the doors upon himself forever.
My Father had never admired Sir Charles Lyell. I think that the famous 'Lord Chancellor manner' of the geologist intimidated him, and we undervalue the intelligence of those whose conversation puts us at a disadvantage. For Darwin and Hooker, on the other hand, he had a profound esteem, and I know not whether this had anything to do with the fact that he chose, for his impetuous experiment in reaction, the field of geology, rather than that of zoology or botany. Lyell had been threatening to publish a book on the geological history of Man, which was to be a bombshell flung into the camp of the catastrophists. My Father, after long reflection, prepared a theory of his own, which, as he fondly hoped, would take the wind out of Lyell's sails, and justify geology to godly readers of 'Genesis'. It was, very briefly, that there had been no gradual modification of the surface of the earth, or slow development of organic forms, but that when the catastrophic act of creation took place, the world presented, instantly, the structural appearance of a planet on which life had long existed.
The theory, coarsely enough, and to my Father's great indignation, was defined by a hasty press as being this—that God hid the fossils in the rocks in order to tempt geologists into infidelity. In truth, it was the logical and inevitable conclusion of accepting, literally, the doctrine of a sudden act of creation; it emphasized the fact that any breach in the circular course of nature could be conceived only on the supposition that the object created bore false witness to past processes, which had never taken place. For instance, Adam would certainly possess hair and teeth and bones in a condition which it must have taken many years to accomplish, yet he was created full-grown yesterday. He would certainly—though Sir Thomas Browne denied it—display an 'omphalos', yet no umbilical cord had ever attached him to a mother.
Never was a book cast upon the waters with greater anticipations of success than was this curious, this obstinate, this fanatical volume. My Father lived in a fever of suspense, waiting for the tremendous issue. This 'Omphalos' of his, he thought, was to bring all the turmoil of scientific speculation to a close, fling geology into the arms of Scripture, and make the lion eat grass with the lamb. It was not surprising, he admitted, that there had been experienced an ever-increasing discord between the facts which geology brings to light and the direct statements of the early chapters of 'Genesis'. Nobody was to blame for that. My Father, and my Father alone, possessed the secret of the enigma; he alone held the key which could smoothly open the lock of geological mystery. He offered it, with a glowing gesture, to atheists and Christians alike. This was to be the universal panacea; this the system of intellectual therapeutics which could not but heal all the maladies of the age. But, alas! atheists and Christians alike looked at it, and laughed, and threw it away.
In the course of that dismal winter, as the post began to bring in private letters, few and chilly, and public reviews, many and scornful, my Father looked in vain for the approval of the churches, and in vain for the acquiescence of the scientific societies, and in vain for the gratitude of those 'thousands of thinking persons', which he had rashly assured himself of receiving. As his reconciliation of Scripture statements and geological deductions was welcomed nowhere, as Darwin continued silent, and the youthful Huxley was scornful, and even Charles Kingsley, from whom my Father had expected the most instant appreciation, wrote that he could not 'give up the painful and slow conclusion of five and twenty years' study of geology, and believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie',—as all this happened or failed to happen, a gloom, cold and dismal, descended upon our morning teacups. It was what the poets mean by an 'inspissated' gloom; it thickened day by day, as hope and self-confidence evaporated in thin clouds of disappointment. My Father was not prepared for such a fate. He had been the spoiled darling of the public, the constant favourite of the press, and now, like the dark angels of old,
so huge a rout Encumbered him with ruin.
He could not recover from amazement at having offended everybody by an enterprise which had been undertaken in the cause of universal reconciliation.
During that grim season, my Father was no lively companion, and circumstance after circumstance combined to drive him further from humanity. He missed more than ever the sympathetic ear of my Mother; there was present to support him nothing of that artful, female casuistry which insinuates into the wounded consciousness of a man the conviction that, after all, he is right and all the rest of the world is wrong. My Father used to tramp in solitude around and around the red ploughed field which was going to be his lawn, or sheltering himself from the thin Devonian rain, pace up and down the still-naked verandah where blossoming creepers were to be. And I think that there was added to his chagrin with all his fellow mortals a first tincture of that heresy which was to attack him later on. It was now that, I fancy, he began, in his depression, to be angry with God. How much devotion had he given, how many sacrifices had he made, only to be left storming around this red morass with no one in all the world to care for him except one pale-faced child with its cheek pressed to the window!
After one or two brilliant excursions to the sea, winter, in its dampest, muddiest, most languid form, had fallen upon us and shut us in. It was a dreary winter for the wifeless man and the motherless boy. We had come into the house, in precipitate abandonment to that supposed answer to prayer, a great deal too soon. In order to rake together the lump sum for buying it, my Father had denuded himself of almost everything, and our sticks of chairs and tables filled but two or three rooms. Half the little house, or 'villa' as we called it, was not papered, two- thirds were not furnished. The workmen were still finishing the outside when we arrived, and in that connection I recall a little incident which exhibits my Father's morbid delicacy of conscience. He was accustomed in his brighter moments—and this was before the publication of his 'Omphalos'—occasionally to sing loud Dorsetshire songs of his early days, in a strange, broad Wessex lingo that I loved. One October afternoon he and I were sitting on the verandah, and my Father was singing; just around the corner, out of sight, two carpenters were putting up the framework of a greenhouse. In a pause, one of them said to his fellow: 'He can zing a zong, zo well's another, though he be a minister.' My Father, who was holding my hand loosely, clutched it, and looking up, I saw his eyes darken. He never sang a secular song again during the whole of his life.
Later in the year, and after his literary misfortune, his conscience became more troublesome than ever. I think he considered the failure of his attempt at the reconciliation of science with religion to have been intended by God as a punishment for something he had done or left undone. In those brooding tramps around and around the garden, his soul was on its knees searching the corners of his conscience for some sin of omission or commission, and one by one every pleasure, every recreation, every trifle scraped out of the dust of past experience, was magnified into a huge offence. He thought that the smallest evidence of levity, the least unbending to human instinct, might be seized by those around him as evidence of inconsistency, and might lead the weaker brethren into offence. The incident of the carpenters and the comic song is typical of a condition of mind which now possessed my Father, in which act after act became taboo, not because each was sinful in itself, but because it might lead others into sin.
I have the conviction that Miss Marks was now mightily afraid of my Father. Whenever she could, she withdrew to the room she called her 'boudoir', a small, chilly apartment, sparsely furnished, looking over what was in process of becoming the vegetable garden. Very properly, that she might have some sanctuary, Miss Marks forbade me to enter this virginal bower, which, of course, became to me an object of harrowing curiosity. Through the key-hole I could see practically nothing; one day I contrived to slip inside, and discovered that there was nothing to see but a plain bedstead and a toilet-table, void of all attraction. In this 'boudoir', on winter afternoons, a fire would be lighted, and Miss Marks would withdraw to it, not seen by us anymore between high-tea and the apocalyptic exercise known as 'worship'—in less strenuous households much less austerely practised under the name of 'family prayers'. Left meanwhile to our own devices, my Father would mainly be reading his book or paper held close up to the candle, while his lips and heavy eyebrows occasionally quivered and palpitated, with literary ardour, in a manner strangely exciting to me. Miss Marks, in a very high cap, and her large teeth shining, would occasionally appear in the doorway, desiring, with spurious geniality, to know how we were 'getting on'. But on these occasions neither of us replied to Miss Marks.
Sometimes in the course of this winter, my Father and I had long cosy talks together over the fire. Our favourite subject was murders. I wonder whether little boys of eight, soon to go upstairs alone at night, often discuss violent crime with a widower-papa? The practice, I cannot help thinking, is unusual; it was, however, consecutive with us. We tried other secular subjects, but we were sure to come around at last to 'what do you suppose they really did with the body?' I was told, a thrilled listener, the adventure of Mrs. Manning, who killed a gentleman on the stairs and buried him in quick-lime in the back-kitchen, and it was at this time that I learned the useful historical fact, which abides with me after half a century, that Mrs. Manning was hanged in black satin, which thereupon went wholly out of fashion in England. I also heard about Burke and Hare, whose story nearly froze me into stone with horror.
These were crimes which appear in the chronicles. But who will tell me what 'the Carpet-bag Mystery' was, which my Father and I discussed evening after evening? I have never come across a whisper of it since, and I suspect it of having been a hoax. As I recall the details, people in a boat, passing down the Thames, saw a carpet-bag hung high in air, on one of the projections of a pier of Waterloo Bridge. Being with difficulty dragged down—or perhaps up—this bag was found to be full of human remains, dreadful butcher's business of joints and fragments. Persons were missed, were identified, were again denied—the whole is a vapour in my memory which shifts as I try to define it. But clear enough is the picture I hold of myself, in a high chair, on the left- hand side of the sitting-room fireplace, the leaping flames reflected in the glass-case of tropical insects on the opposite wall, and my Father, leaning anxiously forward, with uplifted finger, emphasizing to me the pros and cons of the horrible carpet-bag evidence.
I suppose that my interest in these discussions—and Heaven knows I was animated enough—amused and distracted my Father, whose idea of a suitable theme for childhood's ear now seems to me surprising. I soon found that these subjects were not welcome to everybody, for, starting the Carpet-bag Mystery one morning with Miss Marks, in the hope of delaying my arithmetic lesson, she fairly threw her apron over her ears, and told me, from that vantage, that if I did not desist at once, she should scream.
Occasionally we took winter walks together, my Father and I, down some lane that led to a sight of the sea, or over the rolling downs. We tried to recapture the charm of those delightful strolls in London, when we used to lean over the bridges and watch the ducks. But we could not recover this pleasure. My Father was deeply enwoven in the chain of his own thoughts, and would stalk on, without a word, buried in angry reverie. If he spoke to me, on these excursions, it was a pain to me to answer him. I could talk on easy terms with him indoors, seated in my high chair, with our heads on a level, but it was intolerably laborious to look up into the firmament and converse with a dark face against the sky. The actual exercise of walking, too, was very exhausting to me; the bright red mud, to the strange colour of which I could not for a long while get accustomed, becoming caked about my little shoes, and wearying me extremely. I would grow petulant and cross, contradict my Father, and oppose his whims. These walks were distressing to us both, yet he did not like to walk alone, and he had no other friend. However, as the winter advanced, they had to be abandoned, and the habit of our taking a 'constitutional' together was never resumed.
I look back upon myself at this time as upon a cantankerous, ill- tempered and unobliging child. The only excuse I can offer is that I really was not well. The change to Devonshire had not suited me; my health gave the excellent Miss Marks some anxiety, but she was not ready in resource. The dampness of the house was terrible; indoors and out, the atmosphere seemed soaked in chilly vapours. Under my bed-clothes at night I shook like a jelly, unable to sleep for cold, though I was heaped with coverings, while my skin was all puckered with gooseflesh. I could eat nothing solid, without suffering immediately from violent hiccough, so that much of my time was spent lying prone on my back upon the hearthrug, awakening the echoes like a cuckoo. Miss Marks, therefore, cut off all food but milk-sop, a loathly bowl of which appeared at every meal. In consequence the hiccough lessened, but my strength declined with it. I languished in a perpetual catarrh. I was roused to a conscious-ness that I was not considered well by the fact that my Father prayed publicly at morning and evening 'worship' that if it was the Lord's will to take me to himself there might be no doubt whatever about my being a sealed child of God and an inheritor of glory. I was partly disconcerted by, partly vain of, this open advertisement of my ailments.
Of our dealings with the 'Saints', a fresh assortment of whom met us on our arrival in Devonshire, I shall speak presently. My Father's austerity of behaviour was, I think, perpetually accentuated by his fear of doing anything to offend the consciences of these persons, whom he supposed, no doubt, to be more sensitive than they really were. He was fond of saying that 'a very little stain upon the conscience makes a wide breach in our communion with God', and he counted possible errors of conduct by hundreds and by thousands. It was in this winter that his attention was particularly drawn to the festival of Christmas, which, apparently, he had scarcely noticed in London.
On the subject of all feasts of the Church he held views of an almost grotesque peculiarity. He looked upon each of them as nugatory and worthless, but the keeping of Christmas appeared to him by far the most hateful, and nothing less than an act of idolatry. 'The very word is Popish', he used to exclaim, 'Christ's Mass!' pursing up his lips with the gesture of one who tastes assafoetida by accident. Then he would adduce the antiquity of the so-called feast, adapted from horrible heathen rites, and itself a soiled relic of the abominable Yule-Tide. He would denounce the horrors of Christmas until it almost made me blush to look at a holly-berry.
On Christmas Day of this year 1857 our villa saw a very unusual sight. My Father had given strictest charge that no difference whatever was to be made in our meals on that day; the dinner was to be neither more copious than usual nor less so. He was obeyed, but the servants, secretly rebellious, made a small plum-pudding for themselves. (I discovered afterwards, with pain, that Miss Marks received a slice of it in her boudoir.) Early in the afternoon, the maids,—of whom we were now advanced to keeping two,—kindly remarked that 'the poor dear child ought to have a bit, anyhow', and wheedled me into the kitchen, where I ate a slice of plum-pudding. Shortly I began to feel that pain inside which in my frail state was inevitable, and my conscience smote me violently. At length I could bear my spiritual anguish no longer, and bursting into the study I called out: 'Oh! Papa, Papa, I have eaten of flesh offered to idols!' It took some time, between my sobs, to explain what had happened. Then my Father sternly said: 'Where is the accursed thing?' I explained that as much as was left of it was still on the kitchen table. He took me by the hand, and ran with me into the midst of the startled servants, seized what remained of the pudding, and with the plate in one hand and me still tight in the other, ran until we reached the dust-heap, when he flung the idolatrous confectionery on to the middle of the ashes, and then raked it deep down into the mass. The suddenness, the violence, the velocity of this extraordinary act made an impression on my memory which nothing will ever efface.
The key is lost by which I might unlock the perverse malady from which my Father's conscience seemed to suffer during the whole of this melancholy winter. But I think that a dislocation of his intellectual system had a great deal to do with it. Up to this point in his career, he had, as we have seen, nourished the delusion that science and revelation could be mutually justified, that some sort of compromise was possible. With great and ever greater distinctness, his investigations had shown him that in all departments of organic nature there are visible the evidences of slow modification of forms, of the type developed by the pressure and practice of aeons. This conviction had been borne in upon him until it was positively irresistible. Where was his place, then, as a sincere and accurate observer? Manifestly, it was with the pioneers of the new truth, it was with Darwin, Wallace and Hooker. But did not the second chapter of 'Genesis' say that in six days the heavens and earth were finished, and the host of them, and that on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made?
Here was a dilemma! Geology certainly seemed to be true, but the Bible, which was God's word, was true. If the Bible said that all things in Heaven and Earth were created in six days, created in six days they were,—in six literal days of twenty-four hours each. The evidences of spontaneous variation of form, acting, over an immense space of time, upon ever-modifying organic structures, seemed overwhelming, but they must either be brought into line with the six-day labour of creation, or they must be rejected. I have already shown how my Father worked out the ingenious 'Omphalos' theory in order to justify himself as a strictly scientific observer who was also a humble slave of revelation. But the old convention and the new rebellion would alike have none of his compromise.
To a mind so acute and at the same time so narrow as that of my Father—a mind which is all logical and positive without breadth, without suppleness and without imagination—to be subjected to a check of this kind is agony. It has not the relief of a smaller nature, which escapes from the dilemma by some foggy formula; nor the resolution of a larger nature to take to its wings and surmount the obstacle. My Father, although half suffocated by the emotion of being lifted, as it were, on the great biological wave, never dreamed of letting go his clutch of the ancient tradition, but hung there, strained and buffeted. It is extraordinary that he—an 'honest hodman of science', as Huxley once called him—should not have been content to allow others, whose horizons were wider than his could be, to pursue those purely intellectual surveys for which he had no species of aptitude. As a collector of facts and marshaller of observations, he had not a rival in that age; his very absence of imagination aided him in this work. But he was more an attorney than philosopher, and he lacked that sublime humility which is the crown of genius. For, this obstinate persuasion that he alone knew the mind of God, that he alone could interpret the designs of the Creator, what did it result from if not from a congenital lack of that highest modesty which replies 'I do not know' even to the questions which Faith, with menacing forger, insists on having most positively answered?
CHAPTER VI
DURING the first year of our life in Devonshire, the ninth year of my age, my Father's existence, and therefore mine, was almost entirely divided between attending to the little community of 'Saints' in the village and collecting, examining and describing marine creatures from the seashore. In the course of these twelve months, we had scarcely any social distractions of any kind, and I never once crossed the bounds of the parish. After the worst of the winter was over, my Father recovered much of his spirits and his power of work, and the earliest sunshine soothed and refreshed us both. I was still almost always with him, but we had now some curious companions.
The village, at the southern end of which our villa stood, was not pretty. It had no rural picturesqueness of any kind. The only pleasant feature of it, the handsome and ancient parish church with its umbrageous churchyard, was then almost entirely concealed by a congress of mean shops, which were ultimately, before the close of my childhood, removed. The village consisted of two parallel lines of contiguous houses, all white-washed and most of them fronted by a trifling shop-window; for half a mile this street ascended to the church, and then descended for another half-mile, ending suddenly in fields, the hedges of which displayed, at intervals, the inevitable pollard elm-tree.
The walk through the village, which we seemed make incessantly, was very wearisome to me. I dreaded the rudeness of the children, and there was nothing in the shops to amuse me. Walking on the inch or two of broken pavement in front of the houses was disagreeable and tiresome, and the odor which breathed on close days from the open doors and windows made me feel faint. But this walk was obligatory, since the 'Public Room', as our little chapel was called, lay at the farther extremity of the dreary street.
We attended this place of worship immediately on our arrival, and my Father, uninvited but unresisted, immediately assumed the administration of it. It was a square, empty room, built, for I know not what purpose, over a stable. Ammoniac odours used to rise through the floor as we sat there at our long devotions. Before our coming, a little flock of persons met in the Room, a community of the indefinite sort just then becoming frequent in the West of England, pious rustics connected with no other recognized body of Christians, and depending directly on the independent study of the Bible. They were largely women, but there was more than a sprinkling of men, poor, simple and generally sickly. In later days, under my Father's ministration, the body increased and positively flourished. It came to include retired professional men, an admiral, nay, even the brother of a peer. But in those earliest years the 'brethren' and 'sisters' were all of them ordinary peasants. They were jobbing gardeners and journeymen carpenters, masons and tailors, washerwomen and domestic servants. I wish that I could paint, in colours so vivid that my readers could perceive what their little society consisted of, this quaint collection of humble, conscientious, ignorant and gentle persons. In chronicle or fiction I have never been fortunate enough to meet with anything which resembled them. The caricatures of enmity and worldly scorn are as crude, to my memory, as the unction of religious conventionality is featureless.
The origin of the meeting had been odd. A few years before we came, a crew of Cornish fishermen, quite unknown to the villagers, were driven by stress of weather into the haven under the cliff. They landed, and, instead of going to a public-house, they looked about for a room where they could hold a prayer- meeting. They were devout Wesleyans; they had come from the open sea, they were far from home, and they had been starved by lack of their customary religious privileges. As they stood about in the street before their meeting, they challenged the respectable girls who came out to stare at them, with the question, 'Do you love the Lord Jesus, my maid?' Receiving dubious answers, they pressed the inhabitants to come in and pray with them, which several did. Ann Burmington, who long afterwards told me about it, was one of those girls, and she repeated that the fishermen said, 'What a dreadful thing it will be, at the Last Day, when the Lord says, "Come, ye blessed", and says it not to you, and then, "Depart ye cursed", and you maidens have to depart.' They were finely-built young men, with black beards and shining eyes, and I do not question that some flash of sex unconsciously mingled with the curious episode, although their behaviour was in all respects discreet. It was, perhaps, not wholly a coincidence that almost all those particular girls remained unmarried to the end of their lives. After two or three days, the fishermen went off to sea again. They prayed and sailed away, and the girls, who had not even asked their names, never heard of them again. But several of the young women were definitely converted, and they formed the nucleus of our little gathering.
My Father preached, standing at a desk; or celebrated the communion in front of a deal table, with a white napkin spread over it. Sometimes the audience was so small, generally so unexhilarating, that he was discouraged, but he never flagged in energy and zeal. Only those who had given evidence of intelligent acceptance of the theory of simple faith in their atonement through the Blood of Jesus were admitted to the communion, or, as it was called, 'the Breaking of Bread'. It was made a very strong point that no one should 'break bread', unless for good reason shown—until he or she had been baptized, that is to say, totally immersed, in solemn conclave, by the ministering brother. This rite used, in our earliest days, to be performed, with picturesque simplicity, in the sea on the Oddicombe beach, but to this there were, even in those quiet years, extreme objections. A jeering crowd could scarcely be avoided, and women, in particular, shrank from the ordeal. This used to be a practical difficulty, and my Father, when communicants confessed that they had not yet been baptized, would shake his head and say gravely, 'Ah! ah! you shun the Cross of Christ!' But that baptism in the sea on the open beach was a 'cross', he would not deny, and when we built our own little chapel, a sort of font, planked over, was arranged in the room itself.
Among these quiet, taciturn people, there were several whom I recall with affection. In this remote corner of Devonshire, on the road nowhither, they had preserved much of the air of that eighteenth century which the elders among them perfectly remembered. There was one old man, born before the French Revolution, whose figure often recurs to me. This was James Petherbridge, the Nestor of our meeting, extremely tall and attenuated; he came on Sundays in a full, white smockfrock, smartly embroidered down the front, and when he settled himself to listen, he would raise this smock like a skirt, and reveal a pair of immensely long thin legs, cased in tight leggings, and ending in shoes with buckles. As the sacred message fell from my Father's lips the lantern jaws of Mr. Petherbridge slowly fell apart, while his knees sloped to so immense a distance from one another that it seemed as though they never could meet again. He had been pious all his life, and he would tell us, in some modest pride, that when he was a lad, the farmer's wife who was his mistress used to say, 'I think our Jem is going to be a Methody, he do so hanker after godly discoursings.' Mr. Petherbridge was accustomed to pray orally at our prayer-meetings, in a funny old voice like wind in a hollow tree, and he seldom failed to express a hope that 'the Lord would support Miss Lafroy'— who was the village schoolmistress, and one of our congregation,—'in her labour of teaching the young idea how to shoot'. I, not understanding this literary allusion, long believed the school to be addicted to some species of pistol-practice.
The key of the Room was kept by Richard Moxhay, the mason, who was of a generation younger than Mr. Petherbridge, but yet 'getting on in years'. Moxhay, I cannot tell why, was always dressed in white corduroy, on which any stain of Devonshire scarlet mud was painfully conspicuous; when he was smartened up, his appearance suggested that somebody had given him a coating of that rich Western whitewash which looks like Devonshire cream. His locks were long and sparse, and as deadly black as his clothes were white. He was a modest, gentle man, with a wife even more meek and gracious than himself. They never, to my recollection, spoke unless they were spoken to, and their melancholy impassiveness used to vex my Father, who once, referring to the Moxhays, described them, sententiously but justly, as being 'laborious, but it would be an exaggeration to say happy, Christians'. Indeed, my memory pictures almost all the 'saints' of that early time as sad and humble souls, lacking vitality, yet not complaining of anything definite. A quite surprising number of them, it is true, male and female, suffered from different forms of consumption, so that the Room rang in winter evenings with a discord of hacking coughs. But it seems to me that, when I was quite young, half the inhabitants of our rural district were affected with phthisis. No doubt, our peculiar religious community was more likely to attract the feeble members of a population, than to tempt the flush and the fair.
Miss Marks, patient pilgrim that she was, accepted this quaint society without a murmur, although I do not think it was much to her taste. But in a very short time it was sweetened to her by the formation of a devoted and romantic friendship for one of the 'sisters', who was, indeed, if my childish recollection does not fail me, a very charming person. The consequence of this enthusiastic alliance was that I was carried into the bosom of the family to which Miss Marks' new friend belonged, and of these excellent people I must give what picture I can.
Almost opposite the Room, therefore at the far end of the village, across one of the rare small gardens (in which this first winter I discovered with rapture the magenta stars of a new flower, hepatica)—a shop-window displayed a thin row of plates and dishes, cups and saucers; above it was painted the name of Burmington. This china-shop was the property of three orphan sisters, Ann, Mary Grace, and Bess, the latter lately married to a carpenter, who was 'elder' at our meeting; the other two, resolute old maids. Ann, whom I have already mentioned, had been one of the girls converted by the Cornish fishermen. She was about ten years older than Bess, and Mary Grace came halfway between them. Ann was a very worthy woman, but masterful and passionate, suffering from an ungovernable temper, which at calmer moments she used to refer to, not without complacency, as 'the sin which doth most easily beset me'. Bess was insignificant, and vulgarized by domestic cares. But Mary Grace was a delightful creature. The Burmingtons lived in what was almost the only old house surviving in the village. It was an extraordinary construction of two storeys, with vast rooms, and winding passages, and surprising changes of level. The sisters were poor, but very industrious, and never in anything like want; they sold, as I have said, crockery, and they took in washing, and did a little fine needlework, and sold the produce of a great, vague garden at the back. In process of time, the elder sisters took a young woman, whose name was Drusilla Elliott, to live with them as servant and companion; she was a converted person, worshipping with a kindred sect, the Bible Christians. I remember being much interested in hearing how Bess, before her marriage, became converted. Mary Grace, on account of her infirm health, slept alone in one room; in another, of vast size, stood a family fourposter, where Ann slept with Drusilla Elliott, and another bed in the same room took Bess. The sisters and their friend had been constantly praying that Bess might 'find peace', for she was still a stranger to salvation. One night, she suddenly called out, rather crossly, 'What are you two whispering about? Do go to sleep,' to which Ann replied: 'We are praying for you.' 'How do you know,' answered Bess, 'that I don't believe?' And then she told them that, that very night, when she was sitting in the shop, she had closed with God's offer of redemption. Late in the night as it was, Ann and Drusilla could do no less than go in and waken Mary Grace, whom, however, they found awake, praying, she too, for the conversion of Bess. They told her the good news, and all four, kneeling in the darkness, gave thanks aloud to God for his infinite mercy.
It was Mary Grace Burmington who now became the romantic friend of Miss Marks, and a sort of second benevolence to me. She must have been under thirty years of age; she wax very small, and she was distressingly deformed in the spine, but she had an animated, almost a sparkling countenance. When we first arrived in the village, Mary Grace was only just recovering from a gastric fever which had taken her close to the grave. I remember hearing that the vicar, a stout and pompous man at whom we always glared defiance, went, in Mary Grace's supposed extremity, to the Burmingtons' shop-door, and shouted: 'Peace be to this house,' intending to offer his ministrations, but that Ann, who was in one of her tantrums, positively hounded him from the doorstep and down the garden, in her passionate nonconformity. Mary Grace, however, recovered, and soon became, not merely Miss Marks' inseparable friend, but my Father's spiritual factotum. He found it irksome to visit the 'saints' from house to house, and Mary Grace Burmington gladly assumed this labour. She proved a most efficient coadjutor; searched out, cherished and confirmed any of those, especially the young, who were attracted by my Father's preaching, and for several years was a great joy and comfort to us all. Even when her illness so increased that she could no longer rise from her bed, she was a centre of usefulness and cheerfulness from that retreat, where she 'received', in a kind of rustic state, under a patchwork coverlid that was like a basket of flowers.
My Father, ever reflecting on what could be done to confirm my spiritual vocation, to pin me down, as it were, beyond any possibility of escape, bethought him that it would accustom me to what he called 'pastoral work in the Lord's service', if I accompanied Mary Grace on her visits from house to house. If it is remembered that I was only eight and a half when this scheme was carried into practice, it will surprise no one to hear that it was not crowned with success. I disliked extremely this visitation of the poor. I felt shy, I had nothing to say, with difficulty could I understand their soft Devonian patois, and most of all—a signal perhaps of my neurotic condition—I dreaded and loathed the smells of their cottages. One had to run over the whole gamut of odours, some so faint that they embraced the nostril with a fairy kiss, others bluntly gross, of the 'knock- you-down' order; some sweet, with a dreadful sourness; some bitter, with a smack of rancid hair-oil. There were fine manly smells of the pigsty and the open drain, and these prided themselves on being all they seemed to be; but there were also feminine odours, masquerading as you knew not what, in which penny whiffs, vials of balm and opoponax, seemed to have become tainted, vaguely, with the residue of the slop-pail. It was not, I think, that the villagers were particularly dirty, but those were days before the invention of sanitary science, and my poor young nose was morbidly, nay ridiculously sensitive. I often came home from 'visiting the saints' absolutely incapable of eating the milk-sop, with brown sugar strewn over it, which was my evening meal.
There was one exception to my unwillingness to join in the pastoral labours of Mary Grace. When she announced, on a fine afternoon, that we were going to Pavor and Barton, I was always agog to start. These were two hamlets in our parish, and, I should suppose, the original home of its population. Pavor was, even then, decayed almost to extinction, but Barton preserved its desultory street of ancient, detached cottages. Each, however poor, had a wild garden around it, and, where the inhabitants possessed some pride in their surroundings, the roses and the jasmines and that distinguished creeper,—which one sees nowhere at its best but in Devonshire cottage-gardens,—the stately cotoneaster, made the whole place a bower. Barton was in vivid contrast to our own harsh, open, squalid village, with its mean modern houses, its absence of all vegetation. The ancient thatched cottages of Barton were shut in by moist hills, and canopied by ancient trees; they were approached along a deep lane which was all a wonder and a revelation to me that spring, since, in the very words of Shelley:
There in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine,
Green cow-bind and the moonlight-coloured may,
And cherry blossoms, and white cups, whose wine
Was the bright dew yet drained not by the day;
And wild roses, and ivy serpentine
With its dark buds and leaves, wandering astray.
Around and beyond Barton there lay fairyland. All was mysterious, unexplored, rich with infinite possibilities. I should one day enter it, the sword of make-believe in my hand, the cap of courage on my head, 'when you are a big boy', said the oracle of Mary Grace. For the present, we had to content ourselves with being an unadventurous couple—a little woman, bent half-double, and a preternaturally sedate small boy—as we walked very slowly, side by side, conversing on terms of high familiarity, in which Biblical and colloquial phrases were quaintly jumbled, through the sticky red mud of the Pavor lanes with Barton as a bourne before us.
When we came home, my Father would sometimes ask me for particulars. Where had we been, whom had we found at home, what testimony had those visited been able to give of the Lord's goodness to them, what had Mary Grace replied in the way of exhortation, reproof or condolence? These questions I hated at the time, but they were very useful to me, since they gave me the habit of concentrating my attention on what was going on in the course of our visits, in case I might be called upon to give a report. My Father was very kind in the matter; he cultivated my powers of expression, he did not snub me when I failed to be intelligent. But I overheard Miss Marks and Mary Grace discussing the whole question under the guise of referring to 'you know whom, not a hundred miles hence', fancying that I could not recognize their little ostrich because its head was in a bag of metaphor. I understood perfectly, and gathered that they both of them thought this business of my going into undrained cottages injudicious. Accordingly, I was by degrees taken 'visiting' only when Mary Grace was going into the country-hamlets, and then I was usually left outside, to skip among the flowers and stalk the butterflies.
I must not, however, underestimate the very prominent part taken all through this spring and summer of 1858 by the collection of specimens on the seashore. My Father had returned, the chagrin of his failure in theorizing now being mitigated, to what was his real work in life, the practical study of animal forms in detail. He was not a biologist, in the true sense of the term. That luminous indication which Flaubert gives of what the action of the scientific mind should be, affranchissant esprit et pesant les mondes, sans haine, sans peur, sans pitie, sans amour et sans Dieu, was opposed in every segment to the attitude of my Father, who, nevertheless, was a man of very high scientific attainment.
But, again I repeat, he was not a philosopher; he was incapable, by temperament and education, of forming broad generalizations and of escaping in a vast survey from the troublesome pettiness of detail. He saw everything through a lens, nothing in the immensity of nature. Certain senses were absent in him; I think that, with all his justice, he had no conception of the importance of liberty; with all his intelligence, the boundaries of the atmosphere in which his mind could think at all were always close about him; with all his faith in the Word of God, he had no confidence in the Divine Benevolence; and with all his passionate piety, he habitually mistook fear for love.
It was down on the shore, tramping along the pebbled terraces of the beach, clambering over the great blocks of fallen conglomerate which broke the white curve with rufous promontories that jutted into the sea, or, finally, bending over those shallow tidal pools in the limestone rocks which were our proper hunting- ground,—it was in such circumstances as these that my Father became most easy, most happy, most human. That hard look across his brows, which it wearied me to see, the look that came from sleepless anxiety of conscience, faded away, and left the dark countenance still always stern indeed, but serene and unupbraiding. Those pools were our mirrors, in which, reflected in the dark hyaline and framed by the sleek and shining fronds of oar-weed there used to appear the shapes of a middle-aged man and a funny little boy, equally eager, and, I almost find the presumption to say, equally well prepared fog business.
If anyone goes down to those shores now, if man or boy seeks to follow in our traces, let him realize at once, before he takes the trouble to roll up his sleeves, that his zeal will end in labour lost. There is nothing, now, where in our days there was so much. Then the rocks between tide and tide were submarine gardens of a beauty that seemed often to be fabulous, and was positively delusive, since, if we delicately lifted the weedcurtains of a windless pool, though we might for a moment see its sides and floor paven with living blossoms, ivory-white, rosy-red, grange and amethyst, yet all that panoply would melt away, furled into the hollow rock, if we so much as dropped a pebble in to disturb the magic dream.
Half a century ago, in many parts of the coast of Devonshire and Cornwall, where the limestone at the water's edge is wrought into crevices and hollows, the tideline was, like Keats' Grecian vase, 'a still unravished bride of quietness'. These cups and basins were always full, whether the tide was high or low, and the only way in which they were affected was that twice in the twenty-four hours they were replenished by cold streams from the great sea, and then twice were left brimming to be vivified by the temperate movement of the upper air. They were living flower-beds, so exquisite in their perfection, that my Father, in spite of his scientific requirements, used not seldom to pause before he began to rifle them, ejaculating that it was indeed a pity to disturb such congregated beauty. The antiquity of these rock-pools, and the infinite succession of the soft and radiant forms, sea- anemones, seaweeds, shells, fishes, which had inhabited them, undisturbed since the creation of the world, used to occupy my Father's fancy. We burst in, he used to say, where no one had ever thought of intruding before; and if the Garden of Eden had been situate in Devonshire, Adam and Eve, stepping lightly down to bathe in the rainbow-coloured spray, would have seen the identical sights that we now saw,—the great prawns gliding like transparent launches, anthea waving in the twilight its thick white waxen tentacles, and the fronds of the duke faintly streaming on the water like huge red banners in some reverted atmosphere.
All this is long over and done with. The ring of living beauty drawn about our shores was a very thin and fragile one. It had existed all those centuries solely in consequence of the indifference, the blissful ignorance of man. These rockbasins, fringed by corallines, filled with still water almost as pellucid as the upper air itself, thronged with beautiful sensitive forms of life, they exist no longer, they are all profaned, and emptied, and vulgarized. An army of 'collectors' has passed over them, and ravaged every corner of them. The fairy paradise has been violated, the exquisite product of centuries of natural selection has been crushed under the rough paw of well-meaning, idle-minded curiosity. That my Father, himself so reverent, so conservative, had by the popularity of his books acquired the direct responsibility for a calamity that he had never anticipated became clear enough to himself before many years had passed, and cost him great chagrin. No one will see again on the shore of England what I saw in my early childhood, the submarine vision of dark rocks, speckled and starred with an infinite variety of colour, and streamed over by silken flags of royal crimson and purple.
In reviving these impressions, I am unable to give any exact chronological sequence to them. These particular adventures began early in 1858, they reached their greatest intensity in the summer of 1859, and they did not altogether cease, so far as my Father was concerned, until nearly twenty years later. But it was while he was composing what, as I am told by scientific men of today, continues to be his most valuable contribution to knowledge, his History of the British Sea-Anemones and Corals, that we worked together on the shore for a definite purpose, and the last instalment of that still-classic volume was ready for press by the close of 1859.
The way in which my Father worked, in his most desperate escapades, was to wade breast-high into one of the huge pools, and examine the worm-eaten surface of the rock above and below the brim. In such remote places—spots where I could never venture being left, a slightly timorous Andromeda, chained to a safer level of the cliff—in these extreme basins, there used often to lurk a marvellous profusion of animal and vegetable forms. My Father would search for the roughest and most corroded points of rock, those offering the best refuge for a variety of creatures, and would then chisel off fragments as low down in the water as he could. These pieces of rock were instantly plunged in the saltwater of jars which we had brought with us for the purpose. When as much had been collected as we could carry away— my Father always dragged about an immense square basket, the creak of whose handles I can still fancy that I hear—we turned to trudge up the long climb home. Then all our prizes were spread out, face upward, in shallow pans of clean sea-water.
In a few hours, when all dirt had subsided, and what living creatures we had brought seemed to have recovered their composure, my work began. My eyes were extremely keen and powerful, though they were vexatiously near-sighted. Of no use in examining objects at any distance, in investigating a minute surface, my vision was trained to be invaluable. The shallow pan, with our spoils, would rest on a table near the window, and I, kneeling on a chair opposite the light, would lean over the surface until everything was within an inch or two of my eyes. Often I bent, in my zeal, so far forward that the water touched the tip of my nose and gave me a little icy shock. In this attitude, an idle spectator might have formed the impression that I was trying to wash my head and could not quite summon up resolution enough to plunge. In this odd pose I would remain for a long time, holding my breath and examining with extreme care every atom of rock, every swirl of detritus. This was a task which my Father could only perform by the help of a lens, with which, of course, he took care to supplement my examination. But that my survey was of use, he has himself most handsomely testified in his Actinologia Britannica, where he expresses his debt to the 'keen and well-practised eye of my little son'. Nor, if boasting is not to be excluded, is it every eminent biologist, every proud and masterful F.R.S., who can lay his hand on his heart and swear that, before reaching the age of ten years, he had added, not merely a new species, but a new genus to the British fauna. That however, the author of these pages can do, who, on 29 June 1859, discovered a tiny atom,—and ran in the greatest agitation to announce the discovery of that object 'as a form with which he was unacquainted',—which figures since then on all lists of sea-anemones as phellia murocincta, or the walled corklet. Alas! that so fair a swallow should have made no biological summer in after-life.
These delicious agitations by the edge of the salt-sea wave must have greatly improved my health, which however was still looked upon as fragile. I was loaded with coats and comforters, and strolled out between Miss Marks and Mary Grace Burmington, a muffled ball of flannel. This alone was enough to give me a look of delicacy which the 'saints', in their blunt way, made no scruple of commenting upon to my face. I was greatly impressed by a conversation held over my bed one evening by the servants. Our cook, Susan, a person of enormous size, and Kate, the tattling, tiresome parlour-maid who waited upon us, on the summer evening I speak of were standing—I cannot tell why—on each side of my bed. I shut my eyes, and lay quite still, in order to escape conversing with them, and they spoke to one another. 'Ah, poor lamb,' Kate said trivially, 'he's not long for this world; going home to Jesus, he is,—in a jiffy, I should say by the look of 'un.' But Susan answered: 'Not so. I dreamed about 'un, and I know for sure that he is to be spared for missionary service.' 'Missionary service?' repeated Kate, impressed. 'Yes,' Susan went on, with solemn emphasis, 'he'll bleed for his Lord in heathen parts, that's what the future have in store for 'im.' When they were gone, I beat upon the coverlid with my fists, and I determined that whatever happened, I would not, not, not, go out to preach the Gospel among horrid, tropical niggers.
CHAPTER VII
IN the history of an infancy so cloistered and uniform as mine, such a real adventure as my being publicly and successfully kidnapped cannot be overlooked. There were several 'innocents' in our village—harmless eccentrics who had more or less unquestionably crossed the barrier which divides the sane from the insane. They were not discouraged by public opinion; indeed, several of them were favoured beings, suspected by my Father of exaggerating their mental density in order to escape having to work, like dogs, who, as we all know, could speak as well as we do, were they not afraid of being made to fetch and carry. Miss Mary Flaw was not one of these imbeciles. She was what the French call a detraquee; she had enjoyed good intelligence and an active mind, but her wits had left the rails and were careening about the country. Miss Flaw was the daughter of a retired Baptist minister, and she lived, with I remember not what relations, in a little solitary house high up at Barton Cross, whither Mary Grace and I would sometimes struggle when our pastoral duties were over. In later years, when I met with those celebrated verses in which the philosopher expresses the hope
In the downhill of life, when I find I'm declining,
May my lot no less fortunate be
Than a snug elbow-chair can afford for reclining,
And a cot that o'erlooks the wide sea
my thoughts returned instinctively, and they still return, to the high abode of Miss Flaw. There was a porch at her door, both for shelter and shade, and it was covered with jasmine; but the charm of the place was a summer-house close by, containing a table, encrusted with cowry-shells, and seats from which one saw the distant waters of the bay. At the entrance to this grotto there was always set a 'snug elbow-chair', destined, I suppose, for the Rev. Mr. Flaw, or else left there in pious memory of him, since I cannot recollect whether he was alive or dead.
I delighted in these visits to Mary Flaw. She always received us with effusion, tripping forward to meet us, and leading us, each by a hand held high, with a dancing movement which I thought infinitely graceful, to the cowry-shell bower, where she would regale us with Devonshire cream and with small hard biscuits that were like pebbles. The conversation of Mary Flaw was a great treat to me. I enjoyed its irregularities, its waywardness; it was like a tune that wandered into several keys. As Mary Grace Burmington put it, one never knew what dear Mary Flaw would say next, and that she did not herself know added to the charm. She had become crazed, poor thing, in consequence of a disappointment in love, but of course I did not know that, nor that she was crazed at all. I thought her brilliant and original, and I liked her very much. In the light of coming events, it would be affectation were I to pretend that she did not feel a similar partiality for me.
Miss Flaw was, from the first, devoted to my Father's ministrations, and it was part of our odd village indulgence that no one ever dreamed of preventing her from coming to the Room. On Sunday evenings the bulk of the audience was arranged on forms, with backs to them, set in the middle of the floor, with a passage round them, while other forms were placed against the walls. My Father preached from a lectern, facing the audience. If darkness came on in the course of the service, Richard Moxhay, glimmering in his cream-white corduroys, used to go slowly around, lighting groups of tallow candles by the help of a box of lucifers. Mary Flaw always assumed the place of honour, on the left extremity of the front bench, immediately opposite my Father. Miss Marks and Mary Grace, with me ensconced and almost buried between them, occupied the right of the same bench. While the lighting proceeded, Miss Flaw used to direct it from her seat, silently, by pointing out to Moxhay, who took no notice, what groups of candles he should light next. She did this just as the clown in the circus directs the grooms how to move the furniture, and Moxhay paid no more attention to her than the grooms do to the clown. Miss Flaw had another peculiarity: she silently went through a service exactly similar to ours, but much briefer. The course of our evening service was this: My Father prayed, and we all knelt down; then he gave out a hymn and most of us stood up to sing; then he preached for about an hour, while we sat and listened; then a hymn again; then prayer and the valediction.
Mary Flaw went through this ritual, but on a smaller scale. We all knelt down together, but when we rose from our knees, Miss Flaw was already standing up, and was pretending, without a sound, to sing a hymn; in the midst of our hymn, she sat down, opened her Bible, found a text, and then leaned back, her eyes fixed in space, listening to an imaginary sermon which our own real one soon caught up, and coincided with for about three- quarters of an hour. Then, while our sermon went peacefully on, Miss Flaw would rise, and sing in silence (if I am permitted to use such an expression) her own visionary hymn; then she would kneel down and pray, then rise, collect her belongings, and sweep, in fairy majesty, out of the chapel, my Father still rounding his periods from the pulpit. Nobody ever thought of preventing these movements, or of checking the poor creature in her innocent flightiness, until the evening of the great event.
It was all my own fault. Mary Flaw had finished her imaginary service earlier than usual. She had stood up alone with her hymn- book before her; she had flung herself on her knees alone, in the attitude of devotion; she had risen; she had seated herself for a moment to put on her gloves, and to collect her Bible, her hymn- book and her pocket-handkerchief in her reticule. She was ready to start, and she looked around her with a pleasant air; my Father, all undisturbed, booming away meanwhile over our heads. I know not why the manoeuvres of Miss Flaw especially attracted me that evening, but I leaned out across Miss Marks and I caught Miss Flaw's eye. She nodded, I nodded; and the amazing deed was done, I hardly know how. Miss Flaw, with incredible swiftness, flew along the line, plucked me by the coat-collar from between my paralysed protectresses, darted with me down the chapel and out into the dark, before anyone had time to say 'Jack Robinson'.
My Father gazed from the pulpit and the stream of exhortation withered on his lips. No one in the body of the audience stirred; no one but himself had clearly seen what had happened. Vague rows of 'saints' with gaping countenances stared up at him, while he shouted, 'Will nobody stop them? as we whisked out through the doorway. Forth into the moist night we went, and up the lampless village, where, a few minutes later, the swiftest of the congregation, with my Father at their head, found us sitting on the doorstep of the butcher's shop. My captor was now quite quiet, and made no objection to my quitting her,—'without a single kiss or a goodbye', as the poet says.
Although I had scarcely felt frightened at the time, doubtless my nerves were shaken by this escapade, and it may have had something to do with the recurrence of the distressing visions from which I had suffered as a very little child. These came back, with a force and expansion due to my increased maturity. I had hardly laid my head down on the pillow, than, as it seemed to me, I was taking part in a mad gallop through space. Some force, which had tight hold of me, so that I felt myself an atom in its grasp, was hurrying me on over an endless slender bridge, under which on either side a loud torrent rushed at a vertiginous depth below. At first our helpless flight,—for I was bound hand and foot like Mazeppa,—proceeded in a straight line, but presently it began to curve, and we raced and roared along, in what gradually became a monstrous vortex, reverberant with noises, loud with light, while, as we proceeded, enormous concentric circles engulfed us, and wheeled above and about us. It seemed as if we,—I, that is, and the undefined force which carried me,— were pushing feverishly on towards a goal which our whole concentrated energies were bent on reaching, but which a frenzied despair in my heart told me we never could reach, yet the attainment of which alone could save us from destruction. Far away, in the pulsation of the great luminous whorls, I could just see that goal, a ruby-coloured point waxing and waning, and it bore, or to be exact it consisted of the letters of the word CARMINE.
This agitating vision recurred night after night, and filled me with inexpressible distress. The details of it altered very little, and I knew what I had to expect when I crept into bed. I knew that for a few minutes I should be battling with the chill of the linen sheets, and trying to keep awake, but that then, without a pause, I should slip into that terrible realm of storm and stress in which I was bound hand and foot, and sent galloping through infinity. Often have I wakened, with unutterable joy, to find my Father and Miss Marks, whom my screams had disturbed, standing one on each side of my bed. They could release me from my nightmare, which seldom assailed me twice a night—but how to preserve me from its original attack passed their understanding. My Father, in his tenderness, thought to exorcize the demon by prayer. He would appear in the bedroom, just as I was first slipping into bed, and he would kneel at my side. The light from a candle on the mantel-shelf streamed down upon his dark head of hair while his face was buried in the coverlid, from which a loud voice came up, a little muffled, begging that I might be preserved against all the evil spirits that walk in darkness and that the deep might not swallow me up.
This little ceremony gave a distraction to my thoughts, and may have been useful in that way. But it led to an unfortunate circumstance. My Father began to enjoy these orisons at my bedside, and to prolong them. Perhaps they lasted a little too long, but I contrived to keep awake through them, sometimes by a great effort. On one unhappy night, however, I gave even worse offense than slumber would have given. My Father was praying aloud, in the attitude I have described, and I was half sitting, half lying in bed, with the clothes sloping from my chin. Suddenly a rather large insect—dark and flat, with more legs than a self-respecting insect ought to need—appeared at the bottom of the counterpane, and slowly advanced. I think it was nothing worse than a beetle. It walked successfully past my Father's sleek black ball of a head, and climbed straight up at me, nearer, nearer, until it seemed all a twinkle of horns and joints. I bore it in silent fascination until it almost tickled my chin, and then I screamed 'Papa! Papa!' My Father rose in great dudgeon, removed the insect (what were insects to him!) and then gave me a tremendous lecture.
The sense of desperation which this incident produced I shall not easily forget. Life seemed really to be very harassing when to visions within and beetles without there was joined the consciousness of having grievously offended God by an act of disrespect. It is difficult for me to justify to myself the violent jobation which my Father gave me in consequence of my scream, except by attributing to him something of the human weakness of vanity. I cannot help thinking that he liked to hear himself speak to God in the presence of an admiring listener. He prayed with fervour and animation, in pure Johnsonian English, and I hope I am not undutiful if I add my impression that he was not displeased with the sound of his own devotions. My cry for help had needlessly, as he thought, broken in upon this holy and seemly performance. 'You, the child of a naturalist,' he remarked in awesome tones, 'you to pretend to feel terror at the advance of an insect?' It could but be a pretext, he declared, for avoiding the testimony of faith in prayer. 'If your heart were fixed, if it panted after the Lord, it would take more than the movements of a beetle to make you disturb oral supplication at His footstool. Beware! for God is a jealous God and He consumes them in wrath who make a noise like a dog.'
My Father took at all times a singular pleasure in repeating that 'our God is a jealous God'. He liked the word, which I suppose he used in an antiquated sense. He was accustomed to tell the 'saints' at the Room,—in a very genial manner, and smiling at them as he said it,—'I am jealous over you, my beloved brothers and sisters, with a godly jealousy.' I know that this was interpreted by some of the saints,—for I heard Mary Grace say so to Miss Marks—as meaning that my Father was resentful because some of them attended the service at the Wesleyan chapel on Thursday evenings. But my Father was utterly incapable of such littleness as this, and when he talked of 'jealousy' he meant a lofty solicitude, a careful watchfulness. He meant that their spiritual honour was a matter of anxiety to him. No doubt when he used to tell me to remember that our God is a jealous God, he meant that my sins and shortcomings were not matters of indifference to the Divine Being. But I think, looking back, that it was very extraordinary for a man, so instructed and so intelligent as he, to dwell so much on the possible anger of the Lord, rather than on his pity and love. The theory of extreme Puritanism can surely offer no quainter example of its fallacy than this idea that the omnipotent Jehovah—could be seriously offended, and could stoop to revenge, because a little, nervous child of nine had disturbed a prayer by being frightened at a beetle.
The fact that the word 'Carmine' appeared as the goal of my visionary pursuits is not so inexplicable as it may seem. My Father was at this time producing numerous water-colour drawings of minute and even of microscopic forms of life. These he executed in the manner of miniature, with an amazing fidelity of form and with a brilliancy of colour which remains unfaded after fifty years. By far the most costly of his pigments was the intense crimson which is manufactured out of the very spirit and, essence of cochineal. I had lately become a fervent imitator of his works of art, and I was allowed to use all of his colours, except one; I was strictly forbidden to let a hair of my paint- brush touch the little broken mass of carmine which was all that he possessed. We believed, but I do not know whether this could be the fact, that carmine of this superlative quality was sold at a guinea a cake. 'Carmine', therefore, became my shibboleth of self-indulgence; it was a symbol of all that taste and art and wealth could combine to produce. I imagined, for instance, that at Belshazzar's feast, the loftiest epergne of gold, surrounded by flowers and jewels, carried the monarch's proudest possession, a cake of carmine. I knew of no object in the world of luxury more desirable than this, and its obsession in my waking hours is quite enough, I think, to account for 'carmine' having been the torment of my dreams.
The little incident of the beetle displays my Father's mood at this period in its worst light. His severity was not very creditable, perhaps, to his good sense, but without a word of explanation it may seem even more unreasonable than it was. My Father might have been less stern to my lapses from high conduct, and my own mind at the same time less armoured against his arrows, if our relations had been those which exist in an ordinary religious family. He would have been more indulgent, and my own affections might nevertheless have been more easily alienated, if I had been treated by him as a commonplace child, standing as yet outside the pale of conscious Christianity. But he had formed the idea, and cultivated it assiduously, that I was an ame d'elite, a being to whom the mysteries of salvation had been divinely revealed and by whom they had been accepted. I was, to his partial fancy, one in whom the Holy Ghost had already performed a real and permanent work. Hence, I was inside the pale; I had attained that inner position which divided, as we used to say, the Sheep from the Goats. Another little boy might be very well-behaved, but if he had not consciously 'laid hold on Christ', his good deeds, so far, were absolutely useless. Whereas I might be a very naughty boy, and require much chastisement from God and man, but nothing—so my Father thought—could invalidate my election, and sooner or later, perhaps even after many stripes, I must inevitably be brought back to a state of grace.
The paradox between this unquestionable sanctification by faith and my equally unquestionable naughtiness, occupied my Father greatly at this time. He made it a frequent subject of intercession at family prayers, not caring to hide from the servants misdemeanours of mine, which he spread out with a melancholy unction before the Lord. He cultivated the belief that all my little ailments, all my aches and pains, were sent to correct my faults. He carried this persuasion very far, even putting this exhortation before, instead of after, an instant relief of my sufferings. If I burned my finger with a sulphur match, or pinched the end of my nose in the door (to mention but two sorrows that recur to my memory), my Father would solemnly ejaculate: 'Oh may these afflictions be much sanctified to him!' before offering any remedy for my pain. So that I almost longed, under the pressure of these pangs, to be a godless child, who had never known the privileges of saving grace, since I argued that such a child would be subjected to none of the sufferings which seemed to assail my path.
What the ideas or conduct of 'another child' might be I had, however, at this time no idea, for, strange as it may sound, I had not, until my tenth year was far advanced, made acquaintance with any such creature. The 'saints' had children, but I was not called upon to cultivate their company, and I had not the slightest wish to do so. But early in 1859 I was allowed, at last, to associate with a child of my own age. I do not recall that this permission gave me any rapture; I accepted it philosophically but without that delighted eagerness which I might have been expected to show. My earliest companion, then, was a little boy of almost exactly my own age. His name was Benny, which no doubt was short for Benjamin. His surname was Jeffries; his mother—I think he had no father—was a solemn and shadowy lady of means who lived in a villa, which was older and much larger than ours, on the opposite side of the road. Going to 'play with Benny' involved a small public excursion, and this I was now allowed to make by myself—an immense source of self- respect.
Everything in my little memories seems to run askew; obviously I ought to have been extremely stirred and broadened by this earliest association with a boy of my own age! Yet I cannot truly say that it was so. Benny's mother possessed what seemed to me a vast domain, with lawns winding among broad shrubberies, and a kitchen-garden, with aged fruit-trees in it. The ripeness of this place, mossed and leafy, was gratifying to my senses, on which the rawness of our own bald garden jarred. There was an old brick wall between the two divisions, upon which it was possible for us to climb up, and from this we gained Pisgah-views which were a prodigious pleasure. But I had not the faintest idea how to 'play'; I had never learned, had never heard of any 'games'. I think Benny must have lacked initiative almost as much as I did. We walked about, and shook the bushes, and climbed along the wall; I think that was almost all we ever did do. And, sadly enough, I cannot recover a phrase from Benny's lips, nor an action, nor a gesture, although I remember quite clearly how some grown-up people of that time looked, and the very words they said.
For example, I recollect Miss Wilkes very distinctly, since I studied her with great deliberation, and with a suspicious watchfulness that was above my years. In Miss Wilkes a type that had hitherto been absolutely unfamiliar to us obtruded upon our experience. In our Eveless Eden, Woman, if not exactly hirsuta et horrida, had always been 'of a certain age'. But Miss Wilkes was a comparatively young thing, and she advanced not by any means unconscious of her charms. All was feminine, all was impulsive, about Miss Wilkes; every gesture seemed eloquent with girlish innocence and the playful dawn of life. In actual years I fancy she was not so extremely youthful, since she was the responsible and trusted headmistress of a large boarding-school for girls, but in her heart the joy of life ran high. Miss Wilkes had a small, round face, with melting eyes, and when she lifted her head, her ringlets seemed to vibrate and shiver like the bells of a pagoda. She had a charming way of clasping her hands, and holding them against her bodice, while she said, 'Oh, but—really now?' in a manner inexpressibly engaging. She was very earnest, and she had a pleading way of calling out: 'O, but aren't you teasing me?' which would have brought a tiger fawning to her crinoline.
After we had spent a full year without any social distractions, it seems that our circle of acquaintances had now begun to extend, in spite of my Father's unwillingness to visit his neighbours. He was a fortress that required to be stormed, but there was considerable local curiosity about him, so that by-and- by escalading parties were formed, some of which were partly successful. In the first place, Charles Kingsley had never hesitated to come, from the beginning, ever since our arrival. He had reason to visit our neighbouring town rather frequently, and on such occasions he always marched up and attacked us. It was extraordinary how persistent he was, for my Father must have been a very trying friend. I vividly recollect that a sort of cross- examination of would-be communicants was going on in our half- furnished drawing-room one weekday morning, when Mr. Kingsley was announced; my Father, in stentorian tones, replied: 'Tell Mr. Kingsley that I am engaged in examining Scripture with certain of the Lord's children.' And I, a little later, kneeling at the window, while the candidates were being dismissed with prayer, watched the author of Hypatia nervously careening about the garden, very restless and impatient, yet preferring this ignominy to the chance of losing my Father's company altogether. Kingsley, a daring spirit, used sometimes to drag us out trawling with him in Torbay, and although his hawk's beak and rattling voice frightened me a little, his was always a jolly presence that brought some refreshment to our seriousness.
But the other visitors who came in Kingsley's wake and without his excuse—how they disturbed us! We used to be seated, my Father at his microscope, I with my map or book, in the down- stairs room we called the study. There would be a hush around us in which you could hear a sea-anemone sigh. Then, abruptly, would come a ring at the front door; my Father would bend at me a corrugated brow, and murmur, under his breath, 'What's that?' and then, at the sound of footsteps, would bolt into the verandah, and around the garden into the potting-shed. If it was no visitor more serious than the postman or the tax-gatherer, I used to go forth and coax the timid wanderer home. If it was a caller, above all a female caller, it was my privilege to prevaricate, remarking innocently that 'Papa is out!'
Into a paradise so carefully guarded, I know not how that serpent Miss Wilkes could penetrate, but there she was. She 'broke bread' with the Brethren at the adjacent town, from which she carried on strategical movements, which were, up to a certain point, highly successful. She professed herself deeply interested in microscopy, and desired that some of her young ladies should study it also. She came attended by an unimportant man, and by pupils to whom I had sometimes, very unwillingly, to show our 'natural objects'. They would invade us, and all our quietness with chattering noise; I could bear none of them, and I was singularly drawn to Miss Marks by finding that she disliked them too.
By whatever arts she worked, Miss Wilkes certainly achieved a certain ascendancy. When the knocks came at the front door, I was now instructed to see whether the visitor were not she, before my Father bolted to the potting-shed. She was an untiring listener, and my Father had a genius for instruction. Miss Wilkes was never weary of expressing what a revelation of the wonderful works of God in creation her acquaintance with us had been. She would gaze through the microscope at awful forms, and would persevere until the silver rim which marked the confines of the drop of water under inspection would ripple inwards with a flash of light and vanish, because the drop itself had evaporated. 'Well, I can only say, how marvellous are Thy doings!' was a frequent ejaculation of Miss Wilkes, and one that was very well received. She learned the Latin names of many of the species, and it seems quite pathetic to me, looking back, to realize how much trouble the poor woman took. She 'hung', as the expression is, upon my Father's every word, and one instance of this led to a certain revelation.
My Father, who had an extraordinary way of saying anything what Came into his mind, stated one day,—the fashions, I must suppose, being under discussion,—that he thought white the only becoming colour for a lady's stockings. The stockings of Miss Wilkes had up to that hour been of a deep violet, but she wore white ones in future whenever she came to our house. This delicacy would have been beyond my unaided infant observation, but I heard Miss Marks mention the matter, in terms which they supposed to be secret, to her confidante, and I verified it at the ankles of the lady. Miss Marks continued by saying, in confidence, and 'quite as between you and me, dear Mary Grace', that Miss Wilkes was a 'minx'. I had the greatest curiosity about words, and as this was a new one, I looked it up in our large 'English Dictionary'. But there the definition of the term was this:—'Minx: the female of minnock; a pert wanton.' I was as much in the dark as ever.
Whether she was the female of a minnock (whatever that may be) or whether she was only a very well-meaning schoolmistress desirous of enlivening a monotonous existence, Miss Wilkes certainly took us out of ourselves a good deal. Did my Father know what danger he ran? It was the opinion of Miss Marks and of Mary Grace that he did not, and in the back-kitchen, a room which served those ladies as a private oratory in the summer-time, much prayer was offered up that his eyes might be opened ere it was too late. But I am inclined to think that they were open all the time, that, at all events, they were what the French call 'entr'ouvert', that enough light for practical purposes came sifted in through his eyelashes. At a later time, being reminded of Miss Wilkes, he said with a certain complaisance, 'Ah, yes! she proffered much entertainment during my widowed years!' He used to go down to her boarding-school, the garden of which had been the scene of a murder, and was romantically situated on the edge of a quarried cliff; he always took me with him, and kept me at his side all through these visits, notwithstanding Miss Wilkes' solicitude that the fatigue and excitement would be too much for the dear child's strength, unless I rested a little on the parlour sofa.
About this time, the question of my education came up for discussion in the household, as indeed it well might. Miss Marks had long proved practically inadequate in this respect, her slender acquirements evaporating, I suppose, like the drops of water under the microscope, while the field of her general duties became wider. The subjects in which I took pleasure, and upon which I possessed books, I sedulously taught myself; the other subjects, which formed the vast majority, I did not learn at all. Like Aurora Leigh,
I brushed with extreme flounce
The circle of the universe,
especially zoology, botany and astronomy, but with the explicit exception of geology, which my Father regarded as tending directly to the encouragement of infidelity. I copied a great quantity of maps, and read all the books of travels that I could find. But I acquired no mathematics, no languages, no history, so that I was in danger of gross illiteracy in these important departments.
My Father grudged the time, but he felt it a duty to do something to fill up these deficiencies, and we now started Latin, in a little eighteenth-century reading-book, out of which my Grandfather had been taught. It consisted of strings of words, and of grim arrangements of conjunction and declension, presented in a manner appallingly unattractive. I used to be set down in the study, under my Father's eye, to learn a solid page of this compilation, while he wrote or painted. The window would be open in summer, and my seat was close to it. Outside, a bee was shaking the clematis-blossom, or a red-admiral butterfly was opening and shutting his wings on the hot concrete of the verandah, or a blackbird was racing across the lawn. It was almost more than human nature could bear to have to sit holding up to my face the dreary little Latin book, with its sheepskin cover that smelt of mildewed paste.
But out of this strength there came an unexpected sudden sweetness. The exercise of hearing me repeat my strings of nouns and verbs had revived in my Father his memories of the classics. In the old solitary years, a long time ago, by the shores of Canadian rapids, on the edge of West Indian swamps, his Virgil had been an inestimable solace to him. To extremely devout persons, there is something objectionable in most of the great writers of antiquity. Horace, Lucretius, Terence, Catullus, Juvenal,—in each there is one quality or another definitely repulsive to a reader who is determined to know nothing but Christ and him crucified. From time immemorial, however, it has been recognized in the Christian church that this objection does not apply to Virgil. He is the most evangelical of the classics; he is the one who can be enjoyed with least to explain away and least to excuse. One evening my Father took down his Virgil from an upper shelf, and his thoughts wandered away from surrounding things; he travelled in the past again. The book was a Delphin edition of 1798, which had followed him in all his wanderings; there was a great scratch on the sheep-skin cover that a thorn had made in a forest of Alabama. And then, in the twilight, as he shut the volume at last, oblivious of my presence, he began to murmur and to chant the adorable verses by memory.
Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi,
he warbled; and I stopped my play, and listened as if to a nightingale, until he reached
tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra
Formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvan.
'Oh Papa, what is that?' I could not prevent myself from asking. He translated the verses, he explained their meaning, but his exposition gave me little interest. What to me was beautiful Amaryllis? She and her love-sick Tityrus awakened no image whatever in my mind.
But a miracle had been revealed to me, the incalculable, the amazing beauty which could exist in the sound of verses. My prosodical instinct was awakened quite suddenly that dim evening, as my Father and I sat alone in the breakfast-room after tea, serenely accepting the hour, for once, with no idea of exhortation or profit. Verse, 'a breeze mid blossoms playing', as Coleridge says, descended from the roses as a moth might have done, and the magic of it took hold of my heart forever. I persuaded my Father, who was a little astonished at my insistence, to repeat the lines over and over again. At last my brain caught them, and as I walked in Benny's garden, or as I hung over the tidal pools at the edge of the sea, all my inner being used to ring out with the sound of
Formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvan.
CHAPTER VIII
IN the previous chapter I have dwelt on some of the lighter conditions of our life at this time; I must now turn to it in a less frivolous aspect. As my tenth year advanced, the development of my character gave my Father, I will not say anxiety, but matter for serious reflection. My intelligence was now perceived to be taking a sudden start; visitors drew my Father's attention to the fact that I was 'coming out so much'. I grew rapidly in stature, having been a little shrimp of a thing up to that time, and I no longer appeared much younger than my years. Looking back, I do not think that there was any sudden mental development, but that the change was mainly a social one. I had been reserved, timid and taciturn; I had disliked the company of strangers. But with my tenth year, I certainly unfolded, so far as to become sociable and talkative, and perhaps I struck those around me as grown 'clever', because I said the things which I had previously only thought. There was a change, no doubt, yet I believe that it was mainly physical, rather than mental. My excessive fragility—or apparent fragility, for I must have been always wiry—decreased; I slept better, and therefore, grew less nervous; I ate better, and therefore put on flesh. If I preserved a delicate look—people still used to say in my presence, 'That dear child is not long for this world!'—it was in consequence of a sort of habit into which my body had grown; it was a transparency which did not speak of what was in store for me, but of what I had already passed through.
The increased activity of my intellectual system now showed itself in what I behove to be a very healthy form, direct imitation. The rage for what is called 'originality' is pushed to such a length in these days that even children are not considered promising, unless they attempt things preposterous and unparalleled. From his earliest hour, the ambitious person is told that to make a road where none has walked before, to do easily what it is impossible for others to do at all, to create new forms of thought and expression, are the only recipes for genius; and in trying to escape on all sides from every resemblance to his predecessors, he adopts at once an air of eccentricity and pretentiousness. This continues to be the accepted view of originality; but, in spite of this conventional opinion, I hold that the healthy sign of an activity of mind in early youth is not to be striving after unheard-of miracles, but to imitate closely and carefully what is being said and done in the vicinity. The child of a great sculptor will hang about the studio, and will try to hammer a head out of a waste piece of marble with a nail; it does not follow that he too will be a sculptor. The child of a politician will sit in committee with a row of empty chairs, and will harangue an imaginary senate from behind the curtains. I, the son of a man who looked through a microscope and painted what he saw there, would fair observe for myself, and paint my observations. It did not follow, alas! that I was built to be a miniature-painter or a savant, but the activity of a childish intelligence was shown by my desire to copy the results of such energy as I saw nearest at hand.
In the secular direction, this now took the form of my preparing little monographs on seaside creatures, which were arranged, tabulated and divided as exactly as possible on the pattern of those which my Father was composing for his Actinologia Britannica. I wrote these out upon sheets of paper of the same size as his printed page, and I adorned them with water-colour plates, meant to emulate his precise and exquisite illustrations. One or two of these ludicrous pastiches are still preserved, and in glancing at them now I wonder, not at any skill that they possess, but at the perseverance and the patience, the evidence of close and persistent labour. I was not set to these tasks by my Father, who, in fact, did not much approve of them. He was touched, too, with the 'originality' heresy, and exhorted me not to copy him, but to go out into the garden or the shore and describe something new, in a new way. That was quite impossible; I possessed no initiative. But I can now well understand why my Father, very indulgently and good-temperedly, deprecated these exercises of mine. They took up, and, as he might well think, wasted, an enormous quantity of time; and they were, moreover, parodies, rather than imitations, of his writings, for I invented new species, with sapphire spots and crimson tentacles and amber bands, which were close enough to his real species to be disconcerting. He came from conscientiously shepherding the flocks of ocean, and I do not wonder that my ring-straked, speckled and spotted varieties put him out of countenance. If I had not been so innocent and solemn, he might have fancied I was mocking him.
These extraordinary excursions into science, falsely so called, occupied a large part of my time. There was a little spare room at the back of our house, dedicated to lumber and to empty portmanteaux. There was a table in it already, and I added a stool; this cheerless apartment now became my study. I spent so many hours here, in solitude and without making a sound, that my Father's curiosity, if not his suspicion, was occasionally aroused, and he would make a sudden raid on me. I was always discovered, doubled up over the table, with my pen and ink, or else my box of colours and tumbler of turbid water by my hand, working away like a Chinese student shut up in his matriculating box.
It might have been done for a wager, if anything so simple had ever been dreamed of in our pious household. The apparatus was slow and laboured. In order to keep my uncouth handwriting in bounds, I was obliged to rule not lines only, but borders to my pages. The subject did not lend itself to any flow of language, and I was obliged incessantly to borrow sentences, word for word, from my Father's published books. Discouraged by everyone around me, daunted by the laborious effort needful to carry out the scheme, it seems odd to me now that I persisted in so strange and wearisome an employment, but it became an absorbing passion, and was indulged in to the neglect of other lessons and other pleasures.
My Father, as the spring advanced, used to come up to the Boxroom, as my retreat was called, and hunt me out into the sunshine. But I soon crept back to my mania. It gave him much trouble, and Miss Marks, who thought it sheer idleness, was vociferous in objection. She would gladly have torn up all my writings and paintings, and have set me to a useful task. My Father, with his strong natural individualism, could not take this view. He was interested in this strange freak of mine, and he could not wholly condemn it. But he must have thought is a little crazy, and it is evident to me now that it led to the revolution in domestic policy by which he began to encourage any acquaintance with other young people as much as he had previously discouraged it. He saw that I could not be allowed to spend my whole time in a little stuffy room making solemn and ridiculous imitations of Papers read before the Linnaean Society. He was grieved, moreover, at the badness of my pictures, for I had no native skill; and he tried to teach me his own system of miniature-painting as applied to natural history. I was forced, in deep depression of spirits, to turn from my grotesque monographs, and paint under my Father's eye, and, from a finished drawing of his, a gorgeous tropic bird in flight. Aided by my habit of imitation, I did at length produce some thing which might have shown promise, if it had not been wrung from me, touch by touch, pigment by pigment, under the orders of a task-master.
All this had its absurd side, but I seem to perceive that it had also its value. It is, surely, a mistake to look too near at hand for the benefits of education. What is actually taught in early childhood is often that part of training which makes least impression on the character, and is of the least permanent importance. My labours failed to make me a zoologist, and the multitude of my designs and my descriptions have left me helplessly ignorant of the anatomy of a sea-anemone. Yet I cannot look upon the mental discipline as useless. It taught me to concentrate my attention, to define the nature of distinctions, to see accurately, and to name what I saw. Moreover, it gave me the habit of going on with any piece of work I had in hand, not flagging because the interest or picturesqueness of the theme had declined, but pushing forth towards a definite goal, well foreseen and limited beforehand. For almost any intellectual employment in later life, it seems to me that this discipline was valuable. I am, however, not the less conscious how ludicrous was the mode in which, in my tenth year, I obtained it.
My spiritual condition occupied my Father's thoughts very insistently at this time. Closing, as he did, most of the doors of worldly pleasure and energy upon his conscience, he had continued to pursue his scientific investigations without any sense of sin. Most fortunate it was, that the collecting of marine animals in the tidal pools, and the description of them in pages which were addressed to the wide scientific public, at no time occurred to him as in any way inconsistent with his holy calling. His conscience was so delicate, and often so morbid in its delicacy, that if that had occurred to him, he would certainly have abandoned his investigations, and have been left without an employment. But happily he justified his investigation by regarding it as a glorification of God's created works. In the introduction of his Actinologia Britannica, written at the time which I have now reached in this narrative, he sent forth his labours with a phrase which I should think unparalleled in connection with a learned and technical biological treatise. He stated, concerning that book, that he published it 'as one more tribute humbly offered to the glory of the Triune God, who is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in working'. Scientific investigation sincerely carried out in that spirit became a kind of weekday interpretation of the current creed of Sundays.
The development of my faculties, of which I have spoken, extended to the religious sphere no less than to the secular, Here, also, as I look back, I see that I was extremely imitative. I expanded in the warmth of my Father's fervour, and, on the whole, in a manner that was satisfactory to him. He observed the richer hold that I was now taking on life; he saw my faculties branching in many directions, and he became very anxious to secure my maintenance in grace. In earlier years, certain sides of my character had offered a sort of passive resistance to his ideas. I had let what I did not care to welcome pass over my mind in the curious density that children adopt in order to avoid receiving impressions—blankly, dumbly, achieving by stupidity what they cannot achieve by argument. I think that I had frequently done this; that he had been brought up against a dead wall; although on other sides of my nature I had been responsive and docile. But now, in my tenth year, the imitative faculty got the upper hand, and nothing seemed so attractive as to be what I was expected to be. If there was a doubt now, it lay in the other direction; it seemed hardly normal that so young a child should appear so receptive and so apt.
My Father believed himself justified, at this juncture, in making a tremendous effort. He wished to secure me finally, exhaustively, before the age of puberty could dawn, before my soul was fettered with the love of carnal things. He thought that if I could now be identified with the 'saints', and could stand on exactly their footing, a habit of conformity would be secured. I should meet the paganizing tendencies of advancing years with security if I could be forearmed with all the weapons of a sanctified life. He wished me, in short, to be received into the community of the Brethren on the terms of an adult. There were difficulties in the way of carrying out this scheme, and they were urged upon him, more or less courageously, by the elders of the church. But he overbore them. What the difficulties were, and what were the arguments which he used to sweep those difficulties away, I must now explain, for in this lay the centre of our future relations as father and son.
In dealing with the peasants around him, among whom he was engaged in an active propaganda, my Father always insisted on the necessity of conversion. There must be a new birth and being, a fresh creation in God. This crisis he was accustomed to regard as manifesting itself in a sudden and definite upheaval. There might have been prolonged practical piety, deep and true contrition for sin, but these, although the natural and suitable prologue to conversion, were not conversion itself. People hung on at the confines of regeneration, often for a very long time; my Father dealt earnestly with them, the elders ministered to them, with explanation, exhortation and prayer. Such persons were in a gracious state, but they were not in a state of grace. If they should suddenly die, they would pass away in an unconverted condition, and all that could be said in their favour was a vague expression of hope that they would benefit from God's uncovenanted mercies.
But on some day, at some hour and minute, if life was spared to them, the way of salvation would be revealed to these persons in such an aspect that they would be enabled instantaneously to accept it. They would take it consciously, as one takes a gift from the hand that offers it. This act of taking was the process of conversion, and the person who so accepted was a child of God now, although a single minute ago he had been a child of wrath. The very root of human nature had to be changed, and, in the majority of cases, this change was sudden, patent, and palpable.
I have just said, 'in the majority of cases', because my Father admitted the possibility of exceptions. The formula was, 'If any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.' As a rule, no one could possess the Spirit of Christ, without a conscious and full abandonment of the soul, and this, however carefully led up to, and prepared for with tears and renunciations, was not, could not, be made, except at a set moment of time. Faith, in an esoteric and almost symbolic sense, was necessary, and could not be a result of argument, but was a state of heart. In these opinions my Father departed in no ways from the strict evangelical doctrine of the Protestant churches, but he held it in a mode and with a severity peculiar to himself. Now, it is plain that this state of heart, this voluntary deed of acceptance, presupposed a full and rational consciousness of the relations of things. It might be clearly achieved by a person of humble cultivation, but only by one who was fully capable of independent thought, in other words by a more or less adult person, The man or woman claiming the privileges of conversion must be able to understand and to grasp what his religious education was aiming at.
It is extraordinary what trouble it often gave my Father to know whether he was justified in admitting to the communion people of very limited powers of expression. A harmless, humble labouring man would come with a request—to be allowed to 'break bread'. It was only by the use of strong leading questions that he could be induced to mention Christ as the ground of his trust at all. I recollect an elderly agricultural labourer being closeted for a long time with my Father, who came out at last, in a sort of dazed condition, and replied to our inquiries,—with a shrug of his shoulders as he said it,—'I was obliged to put the Name and Blood and Work of Jesus into his very mouth. It is true that he assented cordially at last, but I confess I was grievously daunted by the poor intelligence!'
But there was, or there might be, another class of persona, whom early training, separation from the world, and the care of godly parents had so early familiarized with the acceptable calling of Christ that their conversion had occurred, unperceived and therefore unrecorded, at an extraordinarily earl age. It would be in vain to look for a repetition of the phenomenon in those cases. The heavenly fire must not be expected to descend a second time; the lips are touched with the burning coal once, and once only. If, accordingly, these precociously selected spirits are to be excluded because no new birth is observed in them at a mature age, they must continue outside in the cold, since the phenomenon cannot be repeated. When, therefore, there is not possible any further doubt of their being in possession of salvation, longer delay is useless, and worse than useless. The fact of conversion, though not recorded nor even recollected, must be accepted on the evidence of confession of faith, and as soon as the intelligence is evidently developed, the person not merely may, but should be accepted into communion, although still immature in body, although in years still even a child. This my Father believed to be my case, and in this rare class did he fondly persuade himself to station me.
As I have said, the congregation,—although docile and timid, and little able, as units, to hold their own against their minister— behind his back were faintly hostile to this plan. None of their own children had ever been so much as suggested for membership, and each of themselves, in ripe years, had been subjected to severe cross-examination. I think it was rather a bitter pill for some of them to swallow that a pert little boy of ten should be admitted, as a grown-up person, to all the hard-won privileges of their order. Mary Grace Burmington came back from her visits to the cottagers, reporting disaffection here and there, grumblings in the rank and file. But quite as many, especially of the women, enthusiastically supported my Father's wish, gloried aloud in the manifestations of my early piety, and professed to see in it something of miraculous promise. The expression 'another Infant Samuel' was widely used. I became quite a subject of contention. A war of the sexes threatened to break out over me; I was a disturbing element at cottage breakfasts. I was mentioned at public prayer-meetings, not indeed by name but, in the extraordinary allusive way customary in our devotions, as 'one amongst us of tender years' or as 'a sapling in the Lord's vineyard'.
To all this my Father put a stop in his own high-handed fashion. After the morning meeting, one Sunday in the autumn of 1859, he desired the attention of the Saints to a personal matter which was, perhaps, not unfamiliar to them by rumour. That was, he explained, the question of the admission of his, beloved little son to the communion of saints in the breaking of bread. He allowed—and I sat there in evidence, palely smiling at the audience, my feet scarcely touching the ground—that I was not what is styled adult; I was not, he frankly admitted, a grown-up person. But I was adult in a knowledge of the Lord; I possessed an insight into the plan of salvation which many a hoary head might envy for its fullness, its clearness, its conformity with Scripture doctrine. This was a palpable hit at more than one stumbler and fumbler after the truth, and several hoary heads were bowed.
My Father then went on to explain very fully the position which I have already attempted to define. He admitted the absence in my case of a sudden, apparent act of conversion resulting upon conviction of sin. But he stated the grounds of his belief that I had, in still earlier infancy, been converted, and he declared that if so, I ought no longer to be excluded from the privileges of communion. He said, moreover, that he was willing on this occasion to waive his own privilege as a minister, and that he would rather call on Brother Fawkes and Brother Bere, the leading elders, to examine the candidate in his stead. This was a master- stroke, for Brothers Fawkes and Bere had been suspected of leading the disaffection, and this threw all the burden of responsibility on them. The meeting broke up in great amiability, and my Father and I went home together in the very highest of spirits. I, indeed, in my pride, crossed the verge of indiscretion by saying: 'When I have been admitted to fellowship, Papa, shall I be allowed to call you "beloved Brother"?' My Father was too well pleased with the morning's work to be critical. He laughed, and answered: 'That, my Love, though strictly correct, would hardly, I fear, be thought judicious!'
It was suggested that my tenth birthday, which followed this public announcement by a few days, would be a capital occasion for me to go through the ordeal. Accordingly, after dark (for our new lamp was lighted for the first time in honour of the event), I withdrew alone into our drawing-room, which had just, at length, been furnished, and which looked, I thought, very smart. Hither came to me, first Brother Fawkes, by himself; then Brother Bere, by himself; and then both together, so that you may say, if you are pedanticaly inclined, that I underwent three successive interviews. My Father, out of sight somewhere, was, of course, playing the part of stage manager.
I felt not at all shy, but so highly strung that my whole nature seemed to throb with excitement. My first examiner, on the other hand, was extremely confused. Fawkes, who was a builder in a small business of his own, was short and fat; his complexion, which wore a deeper and more uniform rose-colour than usual, I observed to be starred with dew-drops of nervous emotion, which he wiped away at intervals with a large bandana handkerchief. He was so long in coming to the point, that I was obliged to lead him to it myself, and I sat up on the sofa in the full lamplight, and testified my faith in the atonement with a fluency that surprised myself. Before I had done, Fawkes, a middle-aged man with the reputation of being a very stiff employer of labour, was weeping like a child.
Bere, the carpenter, a long, thin and dry man, with a curiously immobile eye, did not fall so easily a prey to my fascinations. He put me through my paces very sharply, for he had something of the temper of an attorney mingled with his religiousness. However, I was equal to him, and he, too, though he held his own head higher, was not less impressed than Fawkes had been, by the surroundings of the occasion. Neither of them had ever been in our drawing-room since it was furnished, and I thought that each of them noticed how smart the wallpaper was. Indeed, I believe I drew their attention to it. After the two solitary examinations were over, the elders came in again, as I have said, and they prayed for a long time. We all three knelt at the sofa, I between them. But by this time, to my great exaltation of spirits there had succeeded an equally dismal depression. It was my turn now to weep, and I dimly remember any Father coming into the room, and my being carried up to bed, in a state of collapse and fatigue, by the silent and kindly Miss Marks.
On the following Sunday morning, I was the principal subject which occupied an unusually crowded meeting. My Father, looking whiter and yet darker than usual, called upon Brother Fawkes and Brother Bere to state to the assembled saints what their experiences had been in connexion with their visits to 'one' who desired to be admitted to the breaking of bread. It was tremendously exciting to me to hear myself spoken of with this impersonal publicity, and I had no fear of the result.
Events showed that I had no need of fear. Fawkes and Bere were sometimes accused of a rivalry, which indeed broke out a few years later, and gave my Father much anxiety and pain. But on this occasion their unanimity was wonderful. Each strove to exceed the other in the tributes which they paid to any piety. My answers had been so full and clear, my humility (save the mark!) had been so sweet, my acquaintance with Scripture so amazing, my testimony to all the leading principles of salvation so distinct and exhaustive, that they could only say that they had felt confounded, and yet deeply cheered and led far along their own heavenly path, by hearing such accents fall from the lips of a babe and a suckling. I did not like being described as a suckling, but every lot has its crumpled rose-leaf, and in all other respects the report of the elders was a triumph. My Father then clenched the whole matter by rising and announcing that I had expressed an independent desire to confess the Lord by the act of public baptism, immediately after which I should be admitted to communion 'as an adult'. Emotion ran so high at this, that a large portion of the congregation insisted on walking with us back to our garden-gate, to the stupefaction of the rest of the villagers.
My public baptism was the central event of my whole childhood. Everything, since the earliest dawn of consciousness, seemed to have been leading up to it. Everything, afterwards, seemed to be leading down and away from it. The practice of immersing communicants on the sea-beach at Oddicombe had now been completely abandoned, but we possessed as yet no tank for a baptismal purpose in our own Room. The Room in the adjoining town, however, was really quite a large chapel, and it was amply provided with the needful conveniences. It was our practice, therefore, at this time, to claim the hospitality of our neighbours. Baptisms were made an occasion for friendly relations between the two congregations, and led to pleasant social intercourse. I believe that the ministers and elders of the two meetings arranged to combine their forces at these times, and to baptize communicants from both congregations.
The minister of the town meeting was Mr. S., a very handsome old gentleman, of venerable and powerful appearance. He had snowy hair and a long white beard, but from under shaggy eyebrows there blazed out great black eyes which warned the beholder that the snow was an ornament and not a sign of decrepitude. The eve of my baptism at length drew near; it was fixed for October 12, almost exactly three weeks after my tenth birthday. I was dressed in old clothes, and a suit of smarter things was packed up in a carpet- bag. After nightfall, this carpet-bag, accompanied by my Father, myself, Miss Marks and Mary Grace, was put in a four-wheeled cab, and driven, a long way in the dark, to the chapel of our friends. There we were received, in a blaze of lights, with a pressure of hands, with a murmur of voices, with ejaculations and even with tears, and were conducted, amid unspeakable emotion, to places of honour in the front row of the congregation.
The scene was one which would have been impressive, not merely to such hermits as we were, but even to worldly persons accustomed to life and to its curious and variegated experiences. To me it was dazzling beyond words, inexpressibly exciting, an initiation to every kind of publicity and glory. There were many candidates, but the rest of them,—mere grownup men and women,—gave thanks aloud that it was their privilege to follow where I led. I was the acknowledged hero of the hour. Those were days when newspaper enterprise was scarcely in its infancy, and the event owed nothing to journalistic effort; in spite of that, the news of this remarkable ceremony, the immersion of a little boy of ten years old 'as an adult', had spread far and wide through the county in the course of three weeks. The chapel of our hosts was, as I have said, very large; it was commonly too large for their needs, but on this night it was crowded to the ceiling, and the crowd had come—as every soft murmur assured me—to see me.
There were people there who had travelled from Exeter, from Dartmouth, from Totnes, to witness so extraordinary a ceremony. There was one old woman of eighty-five who had come, my neighbours whispered to me, all the way from Moreton-Hampstead, on purpose to see me baptized. I looked at her crumpled countenance with amazement, for there was no curiosity, no interest visible in it. She sat there perfectly listless, looking at nothing, but chewing between her toothless gums what appeared to be a jujube.
In the centre of the chapel-floor a number of planks had been taken up and revealed a pool which might have been supposed to be a small swimming-bath. We gazed down into this dark square of mysterious waters, from the tepid surface of which faint swirls of vapour rose. The whole congregation was arranged, tier above tier, about the four straight sides of this pool; every person was able to see what happened in it without any unseemly struggling or standing on forms. Mr. S. now rose, an impressive hieratic figure, commanding attention and imploring perfect silence. He held a small book in his hand, and he was preparing to give out the number of a hymn, when an astounding incident took place.
There was a great splash, and a tall young woman was perceived to be in the baptismal pool, her arms waving above her head, and her figure held upright in the water by the inflation of the air underneath her crinoline which was blown out like a bladder, as in some extravagant old fashion-plate. Whether her feet touched the bottom of the font I cannot say, but I suppose they did so. An indescribable turmoil of shrieks and cries followed on this extraordinary apparition. A great many people excitedly called upon other people to be calm, and an instance was given of the remark of James Smith that
He who, in quest of quiet, 'Silence!' hoots
Is apt to make the hubbub he imputes.
The young woman, in a more or less fainting condition, was presently removed from the water, and taken into the sort of tent which was prepared for candidates. It was found that she herself had wished to be a candidate and had earnestly desired to be baptized, but that this had been forbidden by her parents. On the supposition that she fell in by accident, a pious coincidence was detected in this affair; the Lord had pre-ordained that she should be baptized in spite of all opposition. But my Father, in his shrewd way, doubted. He pointed out to us, next morning, that, in the first place, she had not, in any sense, been baptized, as her head had not been immersed; and that, in the second place, she must have deliberately jumped in, since, had she stumbled and fallen forward, her hands and face would have struck the water, whereas they remained quite dry. She belonged, however, to the neighbour congregation, and we had no responsibility to pursue the inquiry any further.
Decorum being again secured, Mr. S., with unimpaired dignity, proposed to the congregation a hymn, which was long enough to occupy them during the preparations for the actual baptism. He then retired to the vestry, and I (for I was to be the first to testify) was led by Miss Marks and Mary Grace into the species of tent of which I have just spoken. Its pale sides seemed to shake with the jubilant singing of the saints outside, while part of my clothing was removed and I was prepared for immersion. A sudden cessation of the hymn warned us that to Minister was now ready, and we emerged into the glare of lights and faces to find Mr. S. already standing in the water up to his knees. Feeling as small as one of our microscopical specimens, almost infinitesimally tiny as I descended into his Titanic arms, I was handed down the steps to him. He was dressed in a kind of long surplice, underneath which—as I could not, even in that moment, help observing—the air gathered in long bubbles which he strove to flatten out. The end of his noble beard he had tucked away; his shirt-sleeves were turned up at the wrist.
The entire congregation was now silent, so silent that the uncertain splashing of my feet as I descended seemed to deafen one. Mr. S., a little embarrassed by my short stature, succeeded at length in securing me with one palm on my chest and the other between my shoulders. He said, slowly, in a loud, sonorous voice that seemed to enter my brain and empty it, 'I baptize thee, my Brother, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost!' Having intoned this formula, he then gently flung me backwards until I was wholly under the water, and then—as he brought me up again, and tenderly steadied my feet on the steps of the font, and delivered me, dripping and spluttering, into the anxious hands of the women, who hurried me to the tent—the whole assembly broke forth in a thunder of song, a paean of praise to God for this manifestation of his marvellous goodness and mercy. So great was the enthusiasm, that it could hardly be restrained so as to allow the other candidates, the humdrum adults who followed in my wet and glorious footsteps, to undergo a ritual about which, in their case, no one in the congregation pretended to be able to take even the most languid interest.
My Father's happiness during the next few weeks it is not pathetic to me to look back upon. His sternness melted into a universal complaisance. He laughed and smiled, he paid to my opinions the tribute of the gravest considerations, he indulged— utterly unlike his wont—in shy and furtive caresses. I could express no wish that he did not attempt to fulfill, and the only warning which he cared to give me was one, very gently expressed, against spiritual pride.