Certainly few young people now seem sensitive, as I was, and as thousands before me had been, to the quality of his fascination.
It was curious that living in a household where a certain delicate art of painting was diligently cultivated, I had yet never seen a real picture, and was scarcely familiar with the design of one in engraving. My stepmother, however, brought a flavour of the fine arts with her; a kind of aesthetic odour, like that of lavender, clung to her as she moved. She had known authentic artists in her youth; she had watched Old Crome painting, and had taken a course of drawing-lessons from no less a person than Cotman. She painted small watercolour landscapes herself, with a delicate economy of means and a graceful Norwich convention; her sketch-books were filled with abbeys gently washed in, river-banks in sepia by which the elect might be dimly reminded of _Liber Studiorum_, and woodland scenes over which the ghost of Creswick had faintly breathed. It was not exciting art, but it was, so far as it went, in its lady-like reserve, the real thing. Our sea-anemones, our tropic birds, our bits of spongy rock filled and sprayed with corallines, had been very conscientious and skilful, but, essentially, so far as art was concerned, the wrong thing.
Thus I began to acquire, without understanding the value of it, some conception of the elegant phases of early English watercolour painting, and there was one singular piece of a marble well br.i.m.m.i.n.g with water, and a greyish-blue sky over it, and dark-green poplars, shaped like wet brooms, menacing the middle distance, which Cotman himself had painted; and this seemed beautiful and curious to me in its dim, flat frame, when it was hoisted to a place on our drawing-room wall.
But still I had never seen a subject-picture, although my stepmother used to talk of the joys of the Royal Academy, and it was therefore with a considerable sense of excitement that I went, with my Father, to examine Mr. Holman Hunt"s "Finding of Christ in the Temple" which at this time was announced to be on public show at our neighbouring town. We paid our shillings and ascended with others to an upper room, bare of every disturbing object, in which a strong top-light raked the large and uncompromising picture. We looked at it for some time in silence, and then my Father pointed out to me various details, such as the phylacteries and the mitres, and the robes which distinguished the high priest.
Some of the other visitors, as I recollect, expressed astonishment and dislike of what they called the "Preraphaelite"
treatment, but we were not affected by that. Indeed, if anything, the exact, minute and hard execution of Mr. Hunt was in sympathy with the methods we ourselves were in the habit of using when we painted b.u.t.terflies and seaweeds, placing perfectly pure pigments side by side, without any nonsense about chiaroscuro. This large, bright, comprehensive picture made a very deep impression upon me, not exactly as a work of art, but as a brilliant natural specimen. I was pleased to have seen it, as I was pleased to have seen the comet, and the whale which was brought to our front door on a truck. It was a prominent addition to my experience.
The slender expansions of my interest which were now budding hither and thither do not seem to have alarmed my Father at all.
His views were short; if I appeared to be contented and obedient, if I responded pleasantly when he appealed to me, he was not concerned to discover the source of my cheerfulness. He put it down to my happy sense of joy in Christ, a reflection of the sunshine of grace beaming upon me through no intervening clouds of sin or doubt. The "saints" were, as a rule, very easy to comprehend; their emotions lay upon the surface. If they were gay, it was because they had no burden on their consciences, while, if they were depressed, the symptom might be depended upon as showing that their consciences were troubling them, and if they were indifferent and cold, it was certain that they were losing their faith and becoming hostile to G.o.dliness. It was almost a mechanical matter with these simple souls. But, although I was so much younger, I was more complex and more crafty than the peasant "saints". My Father, not a very subtle psychologist, applied to me the same formulas which served him well at the chapel, but in my case the results were less uniformly successful.
The excitement of school-life and the enlargement of my circle of interests, combined to make Sunday, by contrast, a very tedious occasion. The absence of every species of recreation on the Lord"s Day grew to be a burden which might scarcely be borne. I have said that my freedom during the week had now become considerable; if I was at home punctually at meal times, the rest of my leisure was not challenged. But this liberty, which in the summer holidays came to surpa.s.s that of "fishes that tipple in the deep", was put into more and more painful contrast with the unbroken servitude of Sunday.
My Father objected very strongly to the expression Sabbath-day, as it is commonly used by Presbyterians and others. He said, quite justly, that it was an inaccurate modern innovation, that Sabbath was Sat.u.r.day, the Seventh day of the week, not the first, a Jewish festival and not a Christian commemoration. Yet his exaggerated view with regard to the observance of the First Day, namely, that it must be exclusively occupied with public and private exercises of divine worship, was based much more upon a Jewish than upon a Christian law. In fact, I do not remember that my Father ever produced a definite argument from the New Testament in support of his excessive pa.s.sivity on the Lord"s Day. He followed the early Puritan practice, except that he did not extend his observance, as I believe the old Puritans did, from sunset on Sat.u.r.day to sunset on Sunday.
The observance of the Lord"s Day has already become universally so lax that I think there may be some value in preserving an accurate record of how our Sundays were spent five and forty years ago. We came down to breakfast at the usual time. My Father prayed briefly before we began the meal; after it, the bell was rung, and, before the breakfast was cleared away, we had a lengthy service of exposition and prayer with the servants. If the weather was fine, we then walked about the garden, doing nothing, for about half an hour. We then sat, each in a separate room, with our Bibles open and some commentary on the text beside us, and prepared our minds for the morning service. A little before 11 a.m. we sallied forth, carrying our Bibles and hymn- books, and went through the morning-service of two hours at the Room; this was the central event of Sunday.
We then came back to dinner,--curiously enough to a hot dinner, always, with a joint, vegetables and puddings, so that the cook at least must have been busily at work,--and after it my Father and my stepmother took a nap, each in a different room, while I slipped out into the garden for a little while, but never venturing farther afield. In the middle of the afternoon, my stepmother and I proceeded up the village to Sunday School, where I was early promoted to the tuition of a few very little boys. We returned in time for tea, immediately after which we all marched forth, again armed as in the morning, with Bibles and hymn-books, and we went though the evening-service, at which my Father preached. The hour was now already past my weekday bedtime, but we had another service to attend, the Believers" Prayer Meeting, which commonly occupied forty minutes more. Then we used to creep home, I often so tired that the weariness was like physical pain, and I was permitted, without further "worship", to slip upstairs to bed.
What made these Sundays, the observance of which was absolutely uniform, so peculiarly trying was that I was not permitted the indulgence of any secular respite. I might not open a scientific book, nor make a drawing, nor examine a specimen. I was not allowed to go into the road, except to proceed with my parents to the Room, nor to discuss worldly subjects at meals, nor to enter the little chamber where I kept my treasures. I was hotly and tightly dressed in black, all day long, as though ready at any moment to attend a funeral with decorum. Sometimes, towards evening, I used to feel the monotony and weariness of my position to be almost unendurable, but at this time I was meek, and I bowed to what I supposed to be the order of the universe.
CHAPTER XI
As my mental horizon widened, my Father followed the direction of my spiritual eyes with some bewilderment, and knew not at what I gazed. Nor could I have put into words, nor can I even now define, the visions which held my vague and timid attention. As a child develops, those who regard it with tenderness or impatience are seldom even approximately correct in their a.n.a.lysis of its intellectual movements, largely because, if there is anything to record, it defies adult definition. One curious freak of mentality I must now mention, because it took a considerable part in the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of my mind, or rather in the formation of my thinking habits. But neither my Father nor my stepmother knew what to make of it, and to tell the truth I hardly know what to make of it myself.
Among the books which my new mother had brought with her were certain editions of the poets, an odd a.s.sortment. Campbell was there, and Burns, and Keats, and the "Tales" of Byron. Each of these might have been expected to appeal to me; but my emotion was too young, and I did not listen to them yet. Their imperative voices called me later. By the side of these romantic cla.s.sics stood a small, thick volume, bound in black morocco, and comprising four reprinted works of the eighteenth century, gloomy, funereal poems of an order as wholly out of date as are the crossbones and ruffled cherubim on the gravestones in a country churchyard. The four--and in this order, as I never shall forget--were "The Last Day" of Dr Young, Blair"s "Grave", "Death"
by Bishop Beilby Porteus, and "The Deity" of Samuel Boyse. These lugubrious effusions, all in blank verse or in the heroic couplet, represented, in its most redundant form, the artistic theology of the middle of the eighteenth century. They were steeped in such vengeful and hortatory sentiments as pa.s.sed for elegant piety in the reign of George II.
How I came to open this solemn volume is explained by the oppressive exclusiveness of our Sundays. On the afternoon of the Lord"s Day, as I have already explained, I might neither walk, nor talk, nor explore our scientific library, nor indulge in furious feats of water-colour painting. The Plymouth-Brother theology which alone was open to me produced, at length, and particularly on hot afternoons, a faint physical nausea, a kind of secret headache. But, hitting one day upon the doleful book of verses, and observing its religious character, I asked "May I read that?" and after a brief, astonished glance at the contents, received "Oh certainly--if you can!"
The lawn sloped directly from a verandah at our drawing-room window, and it contained two immense elm trees, which had originally formed part of the hedge of a meadow. In our trim and polished garden they then remained--they were soon afterwards cut down--rude and obtuse, with something primeval about them, something autochthonous; they were like two peasant ancestors surviving in a family that had advanced to gentility. They rose each out of a steep turfed hillock, and the root of one of them was long my favourite summer reading-desk; for I could lie stretched on the lawn, with my head and shoulders supported by the elm-tree hillock, and the book in a fissure of the rough turf. Thither then I escaped with my graveyard poets, and who shall explain the rapture with which I followed their austere morality?
Whether I really read consecutively in my black-bound volume I can no longer be sure, but it became a companion whose society I valued, and at worst it was a thousand times more congenial to me than Jukes" "On the Pentateuch" or than a perfectly excruciating work ambiguously styled "The Javelin of Phineas", which lay smouldering in a dull red cover on the drawing-room table. I dipped my bucket here and there into my poets, and I brought up strange things. I brought up out of the depths of "The Last Day"
the following e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of a soul roused by the trump of resurrection:
Father of mercies! Why from silent earth Didst thou awake, and curse me into birth?
Tear me from quiet, ravish me from night, And make a thankless present of thy light?
Push into being a reverse of thee, And animate a clod with misery?
I read these lines with a shiver of excitement, and in a sense I suppose little intended by the sanctimonious rector of Welwyn. I also read in the same piece the surprising description of how
Now charnels rattle, scattered limbs, and all The various bones, obsequious to the call, Self-mov"d, advance--the neck perhaps to meet The distant head, the distant legs the feet,
but rejected it as not wholly supported by the testimony of Scripture. I think that the rhetoric and vigorous advance of Young"s verse were pleasant to me. Beilby Porteus I discarded from the first as impenetrable. In "The Deity",--I knew nothing then of the life of its extravagant and preposterous author,--I took a kind of persistent, penitential pleasure, but it was Blair"s "Grave" that really delighted me, and I frightened myself with its melodious doleful images in earnest.
About this time there was a great flow of tea-table hospitality in the village, and my friends and their friends used to be asked out, by respective parents and by more than one amiable spinster, to faint little entertainments where those sang who were ambitious to sing, and where all played post and forfeits after a rich tea. My Father was constantly exercised in mind as to whether I should or should not accept these glittering invitations. There hovered before him a painful sense of danger in resigning the soul to pleasures which savoured of "the world".
These, though apparently innocent in themselves, might give an appet.i.te for yet more subversive dissipations. I remember, on one occasion,--when the Browns, a family of Baptists who kept a large haberdashery shop in the neighbouring town, asked for the pleasure of my company "to tea and games", and carried complacency so far as to offer to send that local vehicle, "the midge", to fetch me and bring me back,--my Father"s conscience was so painfully perplexed, that he desired me to come up with him to the now-deserted "boudoir" of the departed Marks, that we might "lay the matter before the Lord". We did so, kneeling side by side, with our backs to the window and our foreheads pressed upon the horsehair cover of the small, coffin-like sofa. My Father prayed aloud, with great fervour, that it might be revealed to me, by the voice of G.o.d, whether it was or was not the Lord"s will that I should attend the Browns" party. My Father"s att.i.tude seemed to me to be hardly fair, since he did not scruple to remind the Deity of various objections to a life of pleasure and of the snakes that lie hidden in the gra.s.s of evening parties. It would have been more scrupulous, I thought, to give no sort of hint of the kind of answer he desired and expected.
It will be justly said that my life was made up of very trifling things, since I have to confess that this incident of the Browns"
invitation was one of its landmarks. As I knelt, feeling very small, by the immense bulk of my Father, there gushed though my veins like a wine the determination to rebel. Never before, in all these years of my vocation, had I felt my resistance take precisely this definite form. We rose presently from the sofa, my forehead and the backs of my hands still chafed by the texture of the horsehair, and we faced one another in the dreary light. My Father, perfectly confident in the success of what had really been a sort of incantation, asked me in a loud wheedling voice, "Well, and what is the answer which our Lord vouchsafes?" I said nothing, and so my Father, more sharply, continued, "We have asked Him to direct you to a true knowledge of His will. We have desired Him to let you know whether it is, or is not, in accordance with His wishes that you should accept this invitation from the Browns." He positively beamed down at me; he had no doubt of the reply. He was already, I believe, planning some little treat to make up to me for the material deprivation. But my answer came, in the high-piping accents of despair: "The Lord says I may go to the Browns." My Father gazed at me in speechless horror. He was caught in his own trap, and though he was certain that the Lord had said nothing of the kind, there was no road open for him but just sheer retreat. Yet surely it was an error in tactics to slam the door.
It was at this party at the Browns--to which I duly went, although in sore disgrace--that my charnel poets played me a mean trick. It was proposed that "our young friends" should give their elders the treat of repeating any pretty pieces that they knew by heart. Accordingly a little girl recited "Casabianca", and another little girl "We are Seven", and various children were induced to repeat hymns, "some rather long", as Calverley says, but all very mild and innocuously evangelical. I was then asked by Mrs. Brown"s maiden sister, a gushing lady in corkscrew curls, who led the revels, whether I also would not indulge them "by repeating some sweet stanzas". No one more ready than I. Without a moment"s hesitation, I stood forth, and in a loud voice I began one of my favourite pa.s.sages from Blair"s "Grave":
If death were nothing, and nought after death-- If when men died at once they ceased to be,-- Returning to the barren Womb of Nothing Whence first they sprung, then might the debauchee...
"Thank you, dear, that will do nicely!" interrupted the lady with the curls. "But that"s only the beginning of it," I cried. "Yes.
dear, but that will quite do! We won"t ask you to repeat any more of it," and I withdrew to the borders of the company in bewilderment. Nor did the Browns or their visitors ever learn what it was the debauchee might have said or done in more favourable circ.u.mstances.
The growing eagerness which I displayed for the society of selected schoolfellows and for such gentle dissipations as were within my reach exercised my Father greatly. His fancy rushed forward with the pace of a steam-engine, and saw me the life and soul of a gambling club, or flaunting it at the Mabille. He had no confidence in the action of moderating powers, and he was fond of repeating that the downward path is easy. If one fretted to be bathing with one"s companions on the shingle, and preferred this exercise to the study of G.o.d"s Word, it was a symbol of a terrible decline, the angle of which would grow steeper and steeper, until one plunged into perdition. He was, himself, timid and reclusive, and he shrank from all avoidable companionship with others, except on the footing of a master and teacher. My stepmother and I, who neither taught nor ruled, yearned for a looser chain and lighter relationships. With regard to myself, my Father about this time hit on a plan from which he hoped much, but from which little resulted. He looked to George to supply what my temperament seemed to require of congenial juvenile companionship.
If I have not mentioned "George" until now, it is not that he was a new acquaintance. When we first came down into the country, our sympathy had been called forth by an accident to a little boy, who was knocked over by a horse, and whose thigh was broken.
Somebody (I suppose Mary Grace, since my Father could rarely bring himself to pay these public visits) went to see the child in the infirmary, and accidentally discovered that he was exactly the same age that I was. This, and the fact that he was a meditative and sober little boy, attracted us all still further to George, who became converted under one of my Father"s sermons.
He attended my public baptism, and was so much moved by this ceremony that he pa.s.sionately desired to be baptized also, and was in fact so immersed, a few months later, slightly to my chagrin, since I thereupon ceased to be the only infant prodigy in communion. When we were both in our thirteenth year, George became an outdoor servant to us, and did odd jobs under the gardener. My Father, finding him, as he said, "docile, obedient and engaging", petted George a good deal, and taught him a little botany. He called George, by a curious contortion of thought, my "spiritual foster-brother", and antic.i.p.ated for him, I think, a career, like mine, in the Ministry.
Our garden suffered from an incursion of slugs, which laid the verbenas in the dust, and sh.o.r.e off the carnations as if with pairs of scissors. To cope with this plague we invested in a drake and a duck, who were christened Philemon and Baucis. Every night large cabbage-leaves, containing the lees of beer, were spread about the flower-beds as traps, and at dawn these had become green parlours crammed with intoxicated slugs. One of George"s earliest morning duties was to free Philemon and Baucis from their coop, and, armed with a small wand, to guide their footsteps to the feast in one cabbage-leaf after another. My Father used to watch this performance from an upper window, and, in moments of high facetiousness, he was wont to parody the poet Gray:
How jocund doth George drive his team afield!
This is all, or almost all, that I remember about George"s occupations, but he was singularly blameless.
My Father"s plan now was that I should form a close intimacy with George, as a boy of my own age, of my own faith, of my own future. My stepmother, still in bondage to the social conventions, was pa.s.sionately troubled at this, and urged the barrier of cla.s.s-differences. My Father replied that such an intimacy would keep me "lowly", and that from so good a boy as George I could learn nothing undesirable. "He will encourage him not to wipe his boots when he comes into the house," said my stepmother, and my Father sighed to think how narrow is the horizon of Woman"s view of heavenly things.
In this caprice, if I may call it so, I think that my Father had before him the fine republican example of "Sandford and Merton", some parts of which book he admired extremely. Accordingly George and I were sent out to take walks together, and as we started, my Father, with an air of great benevolence, would suggest some pa.s.sage of Scripture, or "some aspect of G.o.d"s bountiful scheme in creation, on which you may profitably meditate together."
George and I never pursued the discussion of the text with which my Father started us for more than a minute or two; then we fell into silence, or investigated current scenes and rustic topics.
As is natural among the children of the poor, George was precocious where I was infantile, and undeveloped where I was elaborate. Our minds could hardly find a point at which to touch.
He gave me, however, under cross-examination, interesting hints about rural matters, and I liked him, although I felt his company to be insipid. Sometimes he carried my books by my side to the larger and more distant school which I now attended, but I was always in a fever of dread lest my schoolfellows should see him, and should accuse me of having to be "brought" to school. To explain to them that the companionship of this wholesome and rather blunt young peasant was part of my spiritual discipline would have been all beyond my powers.
It was soon after this that my stepmother made her one vain effort to break though the stillness of our lives. My Father"s energy seemed to decline, to become more fitful, to take unseasonable directions. My mother instinctively felt that his peculiarities were growing upon him; he would scarcely stir from his microscope, except to go to the chapel, and he was visible to fewer and fewer visitors. She had taken a pleasure in his literary eminence, and she was aware that this, too, would slip from him; that, so persistently kept out of sight, he must soon be out of mind. I know not how she gathered courage for her tremendous effort, but she took me, I recollect, into her counsels. We were to unite to oblige my Father to start to his feet and face the world. Alas! we might as well have attempted to rouse the summit of Yes Tor into volcanic action. To my mother"s arguments, my Father--with that baffling smile of his--replied: "I esteem the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt!" and that this answer was indirect made it none the less conclusive. My mother wished him to give lectures, to go to London, to read papers before the Royal Society, to enter into controversy with foreign savants, to conduct cla.s.ses of outdoor zoology at fashionable watering-places. I held my breath with admiration as she poured forth her scheme, so daring, so brilliant, so sure to cover our great man with glory. He listened to her with an ambiguous smile, and shook his head at us, and resumed the reading of his Bible.
At the date of which I write these pages, the arts of ill.u.s.tration are so universally diffused that it is difficult to realize the darkness in which a remote English village was plunged half a century ago. No opportunity was offered to us dwellers in remote places of realizing the outward appearances of unfamiliar persons, scenes or things. Although ours was perhaps the most cultivated household in the parish, I had never seen so much as a representation of a work of sculpture until I was thirteen. My mother then received from her earlier home certain volumes, among which was a gaudy gift-book of some kind, containing a few steel engravings of statues.
These attracted me violently, and here for the first time I gazed on Apollo with his proud gesture, Venus in her undulations, the kirtled shape of Diana, and Jupiter voluminously bearded. Very little information, and that tome not intelligible, was given in the text, but these were said to be figures of the old Greek G.o.ds. I asked my Father to tell me about these "old Greek G.o.ds".
His answer was direct and disconcerting. He said--how I recollect the place and time, early in the morning, as I stood beside the window in our garish breakfast-room--he said that the so-called G.o.ds of the Greeks were the shadows cast by the vices of the heathen, and reflected their infamous lives; "it was for such things as these that G.o.d poured down brimstone and fire on the Cities of the Plain, and there is nothing in the legends of these G.o.ds, or rather devils, that it is not better for a Christian not to know." His face blazed white with Puritan fury as he said this--I see him now in my mind"s eye, in his violent emotion. You might have thought that he had himself escaped with horror from some h.e.l.lenic hippodrome.
My Father"s prestige was by this time considerably lessened in my mind, and though I loved and admired him, I had now long ceased to hold him infallible. I did not accept his condemnation of the Greeks, although I bowed to it. In private I returned to examine my steel engravings of the statues, and I reflected that they were too beautiful to be so wicked as my Father thought they were. The dangerous and pagan notion that beauty palliates evil budded in my mind, without any external suggestion, and by this reflection alone I was still further sundered from the faith in which I had been trained. I gathered very diligently all I could pick up about the Greek G.o.ds and their statues; it was not much, it was indeed ludicrously little and false, but it was a germ.
And at this aesthetic juncture I was drawn into what was really rather an extraordinary circle of incidents.
Among the "Saints" in our village there lived a shoemaker and his wife, who had one daughter, Susan Flood. She was a flighty, excited young creature, and lately, during the pa.s.sage of some itinerary revivalists, she had been "converted" in the noisiest way, with sobs, gasps and gurglings. When this crisis pa.s.sed, she came with her parents to our meetings, and was received quietly enough to the breaking of bread. But about the time I speak of, Susan Flood went up to London to pay a visit to an unconverted uncle and aunt. It was first whispered amongst us, and then openly stated, that these relatives had taken her to the Crystal Palace, where, in pa.s.sing through the Sculpture Gallery, Susan"s sense of decency had been so grievously affronted, that she had smashed the naked figures with the handle of her parasol, before her horrified companions could stop her. She had, in fact, run amok among the statuary, and had, to the intense chagrin of her uncle and aunt, very worthy persons, been arrested and brought before a magistrate, who dismissed her with a warning to her relations that she had better be sent home to Devonshire and "looked after". Susan Flood"s return to us, however, was a triumph; she had no sense of having acted injudiciously or unbecomingly; she was ready to recount to every one, in vague and veiled language, how she had been able to testify for the Lord "in the very temple of Belial", for so she poetically described the Crystal Palace. She was, of course, in a state of unbridled hysteria, but such physical explanations were not encouraged amongst us, and the case of Susan Flood awakened a great deal of sympathy.
There was held a meeting of the elders in our drawing-room to discuss it, and I contrived to be present, though out of observation. My Father, while he recognized the purity of Susan Flood"s zeal, questioned its wisdom. He noted that the statuary was not her property, but that of the Crystal Palace. Of the other communicants, none, I think, had the very slightest notion what the objects were that Susan had smashed, or tried to smash, and frankly maintained that they thought her conduct magnificent.
As for me, I had gathered by persistent inquiry enough information to know that what her sacrilegious parasol had attacked were bodies of my mysterious friends, the Greek G.o.ds, and if all the rest of the village applauded iconoclastic Susan, I at least would be ardent on the other side.
But I was conscious that there was n.o.body in the world to whom I could go for sympathy. If I had ever read "h.e.l.las" I should have murmured
Apollo, Pan and Love, And even Olympian Jove, Grew weak, when killing Susan glared on them.