Father and Son

E >> Edmund Gosse >> Father and Son


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.