Father and Son

E >> Edmund Gosse >> Father and Son


Me in all this he used as a kind of inferior coadjutor, much as a
responsible and upper servant might use a footboy. I, also, must
be watching; it was not important that I should be seriously
engaged in any affairs of my own. I must be ready for the
Master's coming; and my Father's incessant cross-examination was
made in the spirit of a responsible servant who fidgets lest some
humble but essential piece of household work has been neglected.

My holidays, however, and all my personal relations with my
Father were poisoned by this insistency. I was never at my ease
in his company; I never knew when I might not be subjected to a
series of searching questions which I should not be allowed to
evade. Meanwhile, on every other stage of experience I was
gaining the reliance upon self and the respect for the opinion of
others which come naturally to a young man of sober habits who
earns his own living and lives his own life. For this kind of
independence my Father had no respect or consideration, when
questions of religion were introduced, although he handsomely
conceded it on other points. And now first there occurred to me
the reflection, which in years to come I was to repeat over and
over, with an ever sadder emphasis,--what a charming companion,
what a delightful parent, what a courteous and engaging friend my
Father would have been, and would pre-eminently have been to me,
if it had not been for this stringent piety which ruined it all.

Let me speak plainly. After my long experience, after my patience
and forbearance, I have surely the right to protest against the
untruth (would that I could apply to it any other word!) that
evangelical religion, or any religion in a violent form, is a
wholesome or valuable or desirable adjunct to human life. It
divides heart from heart. It sets up a vain, chimerical ideal, in
the barren pursuit of which all the tender, indulgent affections,
all the genial play of life, all the exquisite pleasures and soft
resignations of the body, all that enlarges and calms the soul
are exchanged for what is harsh and void and negative. It
encourages a stern and ignorant spirit of condemnation; it throws
altogether out of gear the healthy movement of the conscience; it
invents virtues which are sterile and cruel; it invents sins
which are no sins at all, but which darken the heaven of innocent
joy with futile clouds of remorse. There is something horrible,
if we will bring ourselves to face it, in the fanaticism that can
do nothing with this pathetic and fugitive existence of ours but
treat it as if it were the uncomfortable ante-chamber to a palace
which no one has explored and of the plan of which we know
absolutely nothing. My Father, it is true, believed that he was
intimately acquainted with the form and furniture of this
habitation, and he wished me to think of nothing else but of the
advantages of an eternal residence in it.

Then came a moment when my self-sufficiency revolted against the
police-inspection to which my 'views' were incessantly subjected.
There was a morning, in the hot-house at home, among the gorgeous
waxen orchids which reminded my Father of the tropics in his
youth, when my forbearance or my timidity gave way. The enervated
air, soaked with the intoxicating perfumes of all those
voluptuous flowers, may have been partly responsible for my
outburst. My Father had once more put to me the customary
interrogatory. Was I 'walking closely with God'? Was my sense of
the efficacy of the Atonement clear and sound? Had the Holy
Scriptures still their full authority with me? My replies on this
occasion were violent and hysterical. I have no clear
recollection what it was that I said,--I desire not to recall the
whimpering sentences in which I begged to be let alone, in which
I demanded the right to think for myself, in which I repudiated
the idea that my Father was responsible to God for my secret
thoughts and my most intimate convictions.

He made no answer; I broke from the odorous furnace of the
conservatory, and buried my face in the cold grass upon the lawn.
My visit to Devonshire, already near its close, was hurried to an
end. I had scarcely arrived in London before the following
letter, furiously despatched in the track of the fugitive, buried
itself like an arrow in my heart:

'When your sainted Mother died, she not only tenderly committed
you to God, but left you also as a solemn charge to me, to bring
you up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. That
responsibility I have sought constantly to keep before me: I can
truly aver that it has been ever before me--in my choice of a
housekeeper, in my choice of a school, in my ordering of your
holidays, in my choice of a second wife, in my choice of an
occupation for you, in my choice of a residence for you; and in
multitudes of lesser things--I have sought to act for you, not in
the light of this present world, but with a view to Eternity.

'Before your childhood was past, there seemed God's manifest
blessing on our care; for you seemed truly converted to Him; you
confessed, in solemn baptism, that you had died and had been
raised with Christ; and you were received with joy into the bosom
of the Church of God, as one alive from the dead.

'All this filled my heart with thankfulness and joy, whenever I
thought of you:--how could it do otherwise? And when I left you
in London, on that dreary winter evening, my heart, full of
sorrowing love, found its refuge and its resource in this
thought,--that you were one of the lambs of Christ's flock;
sealed with the Holy Spirit as His; renewed in heart to holiness,
in the image of God.

'For a while, all appeared to go on fairly well: we yearned,
indeed, to discover more of heart in your allusions to religious
matters, but your expressions towards us were filial and
affectionate; your conduct, so far as we could see, was moral and
becoming; you mingled with the people of God, spoke of occasional
delight and profit in His ordinances; and employed your talents
in service to Him.

'But of late, and specially during the past year, there has become
manifest a rapid progress towards evil. (I must beg you here to
pause, and again to look to God for grace to weigh what I am
about to say; or else wrath will rise.)

'When you came to us in the summer, the heavy blow fell full upon
me; and I discovered how very far you had departed from God. It
was not that you had yielded to the strong tide of youthful
blood, and had fallen a victim to fleshly lusts; in that case,
however sad, your enlightened conscience would have spoken
loudly, and you would have found your way back to the blood which
cleanseth us from all sin, to humble confession and self-
abasement, to forgiveness and to recommunion with God. It was not
this; it was worse. It was that horrid, insidious infidelity,
which had already worked in your mind and heart with terrible
energy. Far worse, I say, because this was sapping the very
foundations of faith, on which all true godliness, all real
religion, must rest.

'Nothing seemed left to which I could appeal. We had, I found, no
common ground. The Holy Scriptures had no longer any authority:
you had taught yourself to evade their inspiration. Any
particular Oracle of God which pressed you, you could easily
explain away; even the very character of God you weighed in your
balance of fallen reason, and fashioned it accordingly. You were
thus sailing down the rapid tide of time towards Eternity,
without a single authoritative guide (having cast your chart
overboard), except what you might fashion and forge on your own
anvil,--except what you might _guess_, in fact.

'Do not think I am speaking in passion, and using unwarrantable
strength of words. If the written Word is not absolutely
authoritative, what do we know of God? What more than we can
infer, that is, guess,--as the thoughtful heathens guessed,--
Plato, Socrates, Cicero,--from dim and mute surrounding
phenomena? What do we know of Eternity? Of our relations to God?
Especially of the relations of a sinner to God? What of
reconciliation? What of the capital question--How can a God of
perfect spotless rectitude deal with me, a corrupt sinner, who
have trampled on those of His laws which were even written on my
conscience?...

'This dreadful conduct of yours I had intended, after much prayer,
to pass by in entire silence; but your apparently sincere
inquiries after the cause of my sorrow have led me to go to the
root of the matter, and I could not stop short of the development
contained in this letter. It is with pain, not in anger, that I
send it; hoping that you may be induced to review the whole
course, of which this is only a stage, before God. If this grace
were granted to you, oh! how joyfully should I bury all the past,
and again have sweet and tender fellowship with my beloved Son,
as of old.'

The reader who has done me the favour to follow this record of
the clash of two temperaments will not fail to perceive the
crowning importance of the letter from which I have just made a
long quotation. It sums up, with the closest logic, the whole
history of the situation, and I may leave it to form the epigraph
of this little book.

All that I need further say is to point out that when such
defiance is offered to the intelligence of a thoughtful and
honest young man with the normal impulses of his twenty-one
years, there are but two alternatives. Either he must cease to
think for himself; or his individualism must be instantly
confirmed, and the necessity of religious independence must be
emphasized.

No compromise, it is seen, was offered; no proposal of a truce
would have been acceptable. It was a case of 'Everything or
Nothing'; and thus desperately challenged, the young man's
conscience threw off once for all the yoke of his 'dedication',
and, as respectfully as he could, without parade or remonstrance,
he took a human being's privilege to fashion his inner life for
himself.