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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments," Edmund Gosse masterfully explores the intricate dynamics of familial relationships through a poignant autobiographical lens. This memoir intricately weaves the contrasting temperaments of Gosse and his father, the devoutly religious and intellectually fervent Philip Gosse, an eminent naturalist. With a sensitive and reflective prose style, Gosse employs vivid characterizations and rich narrative techniques, offering readers a nuanced examination of the tensions between faith and reason, tradition and modernity, that defined the Victorian era's intellectual landscape. Edmund Gosse, born in 1849, was deeply influenced by his upbringing in a household steeped in religious fervor and scientific inquiry. His experiences of navigating the stark divergence between his father's rigid beliefs and his own emerging individuality as a writer and thinker inform much of the emotional depth in this work. As a prominent literary figure and critic of his time, Gosse's insights are not only autobiographical but also reflective of broader social and cultural transformations in Victorian England. "Father and Son" is a compelling read for those interested in the complexities of parental relationships and the struggle between personal identity and familial expectations. Through this intimate study, Gosse invites the reader to ponder the universal questions of love, belief, and self-discovery, making it an essential addition to the canon of reflective autobiographical literature. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments
Table of Contents
Introduction
At the heart of Edmund Gosse's memoir lies a quiet but inexorable clash between filial love and the claims of absolute belief. Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments presents an intimate portrait of a household where devotion, duty, and discovery pull in different directions. Composed with poised restraint, the book follows a child's dawning awareness as it encounters a parent's unwavering convictions. Rather than dramatizing with broad strokes, Gosse registers small frictions—tones of voice, rules, readings—that accumulate into a study of character. What emerges is less an indictment than a meditation on how two sincere natures can diverge.
First published in 1907, this work stands as a classic of English autobiography, grounded in the religious and intellectual life of nineteenth-century Britain. Its setting includes domestic interiors, schoolrooms, and the social world of a strict Protestant community associated with the Plymouth Brethren. The author's father, the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, appears not as an emblem but as a fully realized presence shaped by his faith and scientific vocation. Edmund Gosse writes from the vantage of a new century, when Victorian certainties were already under scrutiny, lending the narrative a reflective, transitional mood between past convictions and emerging modern sensibilities.
As memoir rather than novel, Father and Son offers the candor of remembered experience and the artistry of arranged recollection. The narrative voice is lucid and unsentimental, attentive to textures of thought and atmosphere more than to melodrama. Readers follow a boy's education—religious, literary, and observational—within a carefully ordered home and among coastal and provincial scenes. The mood is contemplative, often tinged with irony, yet anchored in affection. Without rushing toward revelation, the book invites patient reading, rewarding attention to its modulations of feeling and to the subtle shifts by which independence of mind takes shape.
The subtitle signals the book's organizing principle: a comparison of dispositions as much as of doctrines. One temperament is steadfast, disciplined, and certain; the other inquisitive, aesthetically receptive, and gradually independent. Gosse is interested in how temperament filters experience—how the same event can affirm authority for one person and provoke questioning for another. The father's piety gives coherence and purpose; the son's sensibility moves toward literature and the wider world of ideas. Their differences are drawn through scenes of study, worship, and conversation, showing how belief, habit, and hope shape two honorable but diverging paths.
The book unfolds against a backdrop of Victorian disputes about science and Scripture, nonconformist piety, and the role of observation in understanding nature. Rather than summarizing public controversies, Gosse lets their pressure be felt in private routines—what is read, how it is read, and what conclusions may be permitted. Questions of conscience and authority are joined by questions of method: whether to accept received explanations or test them against experience. The result is a portrait of a family carrying the era's intellectual strain within its daily rhythms, where tenderness and rigor cohabit and sometimes collide.
Contemporary readers may find in this memoir a mirror for ongoing conversations about belief, upbringing, and the making of a self. Its pages consider how love can coexist with disagreement, how education forms and confines, and how loyalty navigates the competing claims of tradition and curiosity. The prose, balanced and exact, models a humane scrutiny that avoids caricature. For those interested in the history of science, religion, or family psychology—or simply in finely crafted English prose—Father and Son offers a sustained inquiry into responsibility, freedom, and the ethics of memory.
Approached on its own terms, the book promises an experience at once intimate and rigorous: a slow illumination of character rather than a cascade of incident. It is not a tract for or against faith, nor a sensational confession, but a patient record of growth under pressure. Readers can expect clear scenes, measured judgments, and moments of quiet humor amid seriousness. Without resolving every tension, Gosse leaves room for reflection, encouraging the reader to weigh temperaments as well as ideas. The journey is subtle, the conflicts human-sized, and the aftertaste one of sympathetic understanding.
Synopsis
Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments is Edmund Gosse’s memoir of his Victorian childhood and youth, centered on his relationship with his father, Philip Henry Gosse, a renowned naturalist and devout member of the Plymouth Brethren. The book traces how two contrasting dispositions—one pious, methodical, and doctrinal; the other imaginative, inquisitive, and literary—develop within a single household. It presents a chronological account of family life, religious practice, education, and emerging independence. Without arguing a thesis, Gosse records the circumstances that shaped him and the convictions that guided his father, offering a clear narrative of affection, discipline, and diverging beliefs.
The story begins with a portrait of Edmund’s parents and the strict evangelical milieu into which he was born. Daily life is regulated by prayer, Bible reading, and what the family understands as scriptural obedience. The household excludes fiction and most amusements, aiming to protect the child from worldly influences. Philip Henry Gosse’s scientific work coexists with intense religiosity; he studies marine life but treats nature chiefly as a testament to divine design. Early chapters describe the rhythms of meeting with the Plymouth Brethren, domestic order, and the child’s first lessons, establishing the spiritual framework in which his character initially forms.
A major early event is the illness and death of Edmund’s mother, a gifted religious writer whose influence reinforces the home’s devotional atmosphere. Her passing deepens the father’s solitude and piety. The family’s move to the Devon coast focuses their days on seashore collecting and scriptural study. The landscape becomes both field laboratory and moral classroom, with specimens categorized alongside biblical admonition. Gosse notes the intensification of his father’s resolve to guard his son’s soul, while also recording their companionship in work and observation. This period sets the pattern of combined scientific discipline and evangelical oversight that governs Edmund’s childhood.
Education proceeds largely at home. Philip instructs his son in careful observation, classification, and a sense of order drawn from both science and scripture. Formal schooling is limited; the Bible serves as primary text, and secular subjects are filtered through religious expectations. Edmund’s imagination grows within these constraints. He experiences curiosity about poetry and narrative, discovering books that fall outside the approved canon. Early conflicts arise over reading and the boundaries of permissible knowledge. The narrative presents these incidents as formative tests: the father’s conscientious guardianship meeting the son’s expanding interests, each sincere in purpose yet already moving on different tracks.
As the wider intellectual climate shifts, new theories of natural history challenge traditional interpretations. Philip, committed to biblical literalism, proposes a reconciliation that maintains scriptural authority while acknowledging the world’s apparent antiquity. The reception of his views leaves him isolated, and he redoubles his dedication to a purer religious life. For Edmund, this results in closer supervision and renewed emphasis on separation from worldly culture. The book recounts how the father’s scientific method remains meticulous, yet his conclusions are shaped by faith. The son absorbs both the discipline of inquiry and the constraint of doctrine, feeling the tension without openly breaking it.
Adolescence brings broader experiences. Edmund attends Brethren meetings more actively and engages in the community’s practices, but inward questions persist. Encounters beyond the home—visits, acquaintances, glimpses of public life—suggest alternative paths. The narrative details modest acts of independence, often centered on reading and conversation, and the father’s steady attempts to guide, admonish, and persuade. Moments of misunderstanding alternate with tenderness and shared effort. Throughout, Gosse maintains a factual tone: he marks incidents that signal divergence while preserving the context of mutual respect. The phase closes with the son conscious of difference yet still tied to the family’s religious orbit.
A transition occurs as Edmund takes on work in the secular world and gains access to libraries, lectures, and new companions. Urban surroundings expose him to contemporary literature and art. He begins to form connections with writers and intellectuals, discovering a vocation in letters. The memoir records the practical adjustments this shift requires—managing employment, study, and filial duty—while tracing conversations that reveal widening gaps in belief. The father continues to hope for the son’s firm evangelical commitment. Edmund, increasingly certain of his literary path, navigates between deference and self-direction, seeking to keep affection intact as principles diverge.
The culminating chapters describe decisive conversations and choices. Edmund asserts his intellectual independence and withdraws from the sectarian discipline that shaped his youth. The narrative presents this as a clear turning point: the two temperaments, long intertwined, now follow distinct courses. Philip remains steadfast in faith; Edmund commits to the life of letters. Their relationship endures but is altered, with loving regard complicated by doctrinal distance. Gosse ends the personal story without dramatization, offering a record of separation that neither vilifies nor romanticizes. The emphasis is on acknowledgment—each holding to conviction while recognizing the other’s integrity.
In closing, Father and Son presents a precise portrait of a Victorian household at the crossroads of faith and modern culture. Its central message is not argumentative but illustrative: how sincere devotion and disciplined inquiry can coexist, cooperate, and finally part within one family. The book underscores key moments—bereavement, instruction, guarded reading, public controversy, urban exposure, and eventual independence—to show the development of character and belief. It remains a study of influence and formation, attentive to detail and sequence. By following the narrative flow, Gosse conveys both the power of upbringing and the inevitability of individual temperaments asserting themselves.
Historical Context
Edmund Gosse’s memoir is set chiefly in mid-Victorian England, from his birth in 1849 through the later 1860s, in two contrasting locales: the swelling, Nonconformist districts of north London (notably Islington) and the marine cliffs and coves of St Marychurch near Torquay, Devon. The period coincided with rapid urbanization, railway expansion to resort towns, and an emboldened Evangelical culture that penetrated domestic life. Scientific institutions grew (museums, learned societies, public lectures), while dissenting chapels multiplied and tightened community discipline. Within this environment, a lower-middle-class household navigated the competing claims of revealed religion and empirical inquiry, a conflict intensified by new scientific ideas and by the family’s separatist faith.
A decisive context is the rise of the Plymouth Brethren, a separatist Evangelical movement that emerged in Dublin around 1827–1830 under figures such as John Nelson Darby and Edward Cronin, and took its English name from gatherings in Plymouth by 1831. The schism between “Exclusive” and “Open” Brethren in 1848 hardened a culture of strict discipline, weekly “breaking of bread,” lay ministry, and dispensationalist readings of prophecy. Philip Henry Gosse (1810–1888) adhered to the Brethren by the late 1840s; his wife, Emily Bowes (1806–1857), was also devout. The memoir portrays the movement’s separatism—rejection of Anglican forms, suspicion of “worldliness,” and tight pastoral oversight—shaping the child’s education, reading, and social contact.
Victorian Evangelical moral reform intensified through organizations like the Lord’s Day Observance Society (founded 1831), the Band of Hope (1847), and the United Kingdom Alliance (1853), which pursued Sabbatarian restrictions, temperance, and anti-theatre campaigns. Parliament’s Sunday Trading Act (1855) signaled state sympathy for Sabbatarian aims in London. These initiatives sought to regulate leisure, close museums and zoological gardens on Sundays, and restrain popular amusements. Father and Son records such pressures in the home: prohibitions on novels, theatres, and secular music, strict observance of the Lord’s Day, and a vigilant moral environment. The memoir thus mirrors citywide reform currents as they narrowed a child’s cultural access and defined “holiness” in opposition to urban popular culture.
Public science flourished in the 1850s alongside consumer spectacle. The Great Exhibition in Hyde Park (1851) glorified industrial and scientific achievement; the Zoological Society opened its Fish House in 1853; and an “aquarium craze” swept Britain. Philip Henry Gosse’s The Aquarium (1854) popularized marine biology, while Actinologia Britannica (1858–1860) catalogued British sea anemones. Torquay and St Marychurch, reachable by the South Devon Railway, became collecting grounds where naturalists and tourists mingled. The book situates the child among rock pools and specimen jars, revealing how public enthusiasm for natural history entered the household. Yet it also shows how acclaim and commerce in science uneasily coexisted with his father’s demand for doctrinal purity.
The most formative historical conflict was the public challenge that evolutionary geology and biology posed to biblical chronology. In 1857 Philip Henry Gosse published Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot, proposing “prochronism”—that God created the earth with signs of pre-existing age (for example, tree rings, fossil strata). Intended to reconcile Genesis with the geological record, Omphalos was critically received by both scientists and many believers; Charles Kingsley famously rejected its implication of divine deception. Two years later, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) advanced natural selection, undermining fixed-species creation. The 1860 British Association meeting at Oxford (30 June) dramatized the controversy when Thomas H. Huxley challenged Bishop Samuel Wilberforce’s criticisms; by the mid-1860s, scientific naturalism gained cultural authority through Huxley, John Tyndall, and others. Geological deep time, articulated earlier by Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–1833), and new anthropological claims in Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863), widened the breach with literalist exegesis. The memoir’s narrative of father and son unfolds precisely within these dates: Emily Gosse died in 1857, intensifying Philip’s piety just before Darwin’s book appeared. As debates reverberated from lecture halls and journals into parlors and chapels, the household became a microcosm of national dispute. Father and Son presents the father’s refusal of evolution, his insistence on scriptural inerrancy, and his attempt to corral the child’s reading, against the son’s growing empirical curiosity. The book thereby records, in lived detail, how England’s most momentous nineteenth-century intellectual shift pressed upon a Nonconformist home between 1857 and 1863.
Educational and bureaucratic reform altered middle-class routes to work. The Revised Code of 1862 introduced “payment by results” in elementary schools, stressing testing and basic skills, while the Elementary Education Act of 1870 launched elected school boards and expanded non-denominational provision. Civil service reform followed the Northcote–Trevelyan Report (1854), with open competition expanding after Orders in Council in the 1870s. Edmund Gosse entered the British Museum in 1867, signaling the pull of secular, merit-based institutions. The memoir traces the tensions this produced: a Brethren father wary of state schooling and worldly careers, and a son drawn toward public culture, libraries, and scientific-humanistic vocations.
The urban religious landscape framed daily life. London’s population rose from about 1.9 million (1841) to over 3.2 million (1861); Islington grew swiftly with terraces for clerks and tradesmen. The 1851 Census of Religious Worship recorded heavy Nonconformist participation, with Dissenters delivering roughly half of Sunday attendances nationwide, and dense chapel networks in the metropolis. Such environments bred active lay ministry, tract distribution, and vigilant communal norms. Father and Son depicts the family in pre-1857 Islington and, after bereavement, in St Marychurch, revealing a shift from crowded chapel circuits to a coastal enclave. In both settings, the son experienced a close surveillance of conscience typical of mid-century urban and sectarian life.
As a social and political critique, the book exposes the coercive potential of sectarian authority in a period when state, science, and dissent contested cultural power. It indicts patriarchal control over education and reading, Sabbatarianism’s reach into leisure and knowledge, and the moral absolutism that could isolate families from civic institutions. By showing how an earnest father opposed museums, theatre, and evolutionary science, the memoir illuminates the social costs of privileging doctrinal purity over inquiry. It also registers class anxieties—fear of contamination by urban culture versus aspirations to respectable employment—thereby critiquing Victorian structures that conflated piety with surveillance and left children negotiating between conscience and public life.
Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments
PREFACE
AT the present hour, when fiction takes forms so ingenious and so specious, it is perhaps necessary to say that the following narrative, in all its parts, and so far as the punctilious attention of the writer has been able to keep it so, is scrupulously true. If it were not true, in this strict sense, to publish it would be to trifle with all those who may be induced to read it. It is offered to them as a document, as a record of educational and religious conditions which, having passed away, will never return. In this respect, as the diagnosis of a dying Puritanism[1], it is hoped that the narrative will not be altogether without significance.
It offers, too, in a subsidiary sense, a study of the development of moral and intellectual ideas during the progress of infancy. These have been closely and conscientiously noted, and may have some value in consequence of the unusual conditions in which they were produced. The author has observed that those who have written about the facts of their own childhood have usually delayed to note them down until age has dimmed their recollections. Perhaps an even more common fault in such autobiographies is that they are sentimental, and are falsified by self-admiration and self-pity. The writer of these recollections has thought that if the examination of his earliest years was to be undertaken at all, it should be attempted while his memory is still perfectly vivid and while he is still unbiased by the forgetfulness or the sensibility of advancing years.
At one point only has there been any tampering with precise fact. It is believed that, with the exception of the Son, there is but one person mentioned in this book who is still alive. Nevertheless, it has been thought well, in order to avoid any appearance of offence, to alter the majority of the proper names of the private persons spoken of.
It is not usual, perhaps, that the narrative of a spiritual struggle should mingle merriment and humour with a discussion of the most solemn subjects. It has, however, been inevitable that they should be so mingled in this narrative. It is true that most funny books try to be funny throughout, while theology is scandalized if it awakens a single smile. But life is not constituted thus, and this book is nothing if it is not a genuine slice of life. There was an extraordinary mixture of comedy and tragedy in the situation which is here described, and those who are affected by the pathos of it will not need to have it explained to them that the comedy was superficial and the tragedy essential.
September 1907
CHAPTER I
THIS book is the record of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs. It ended, as was inevitable, in disruption. Of the two human beings here described, one was born to fly backward, the other could not help being carried forward. There came a time when neither spoke the same language as the other, or encompassed the same hopes, or was fortified by the same desires. But, at least, it is some consolation to the survivor, that neither, to the very last hour, ceased to respect the other, or to regard him with a sad indulgence.
The affection of these two persons was assailed by forces in comparison with which the changes that health or fortune or place introduce are as nothing. It is a mournful satisfaction, but yet a satisfaction, that they were both of them able to obey the law which says that ties of close family relationship must be honoured and sustained. Had it not been so, this story would never have been told.
The struggle began soon, yet of course it did not begin in early infancy. But to familiarize my readers with the conditions of the two persons (which were unusual) and with the outlines of their temperaments (which were, perhaps innately, antagonistic), it is needful to open with some account of all that I can truly and independently recollect, as well as with some statements which are, as will be obvious, due to household tradition.
My parents were poor gentlefolks; not young; solitary, sensitive, and although they did not know it, proud. They both belonged to what is called the Middle Class[2], and there was this further resemblance between them that they each descended from families which had been more than well-to-do in the eighteenth century, and had gradually sunken in fortune. In both houses there had been a decay of energy which had led to decay in wealth. In the case of my Father's family it had been a slow decline; in that of my Mother's, it had been rapid. My maternal grandfather was born wealthy, and in the opening years of the nineteenth century, immediately after his marriage, he bought a little estate in North Wales, on the slopes of Snowdon. Here he seems to have lived in a pretentious way, keeping a pack of hounds and entertaining on an extravagant scale. He had a wife who encouraged him in this vivid life, and three children, my Mother and her two brothers. His best trait was his devotion to the education of his children, in which he proclaimed himself a disciple of Rousseau[3]. But he can hardly have followed the teaching of 'Emile' very closely, since he employed tutors to teach his daughter, at an extremely early age, the very subjects which Rousseau forbade, such as history, literature and foreign languages.
My Mother was his special favourite, and his vanity did its best to make a bluestocking of her. She read Greek, Latin and even a little Hebrew, and, what was more important, her mind was trained to be self-supporting. But she was diametrically opposed in essential matters to her easy-going, luxurious and self-indulgent parents. Reviewing her life in her thirtieth year, she remarked in some secret notes: 'I cannot recollect the time when I did not love religion.' She used a still more remarkable expression: 'If I must date my conversion from my first wish and trial to be holy, I may go back to infancy; if I am to postpone it till after my last wilful sin, it is scarcely yet begun.' The irregular pleasures of her parents' life were deeply distasteful to her, as such were to many young persons in those days of the wide revival of Conscience, and when my grandfather, by his reckless expenditure, which he never checked till ruin was upon him, was obliged to sell his estate, and live in penury, my Mother was the only member of the family who did not regret the change. For my own part, I believe I should have liked my reprobate maternal grandfather, but his conduct was certainly very vexatious. He died, in his eightieth year, when I was nine months old.
It was a curious coincidence that life had brought both my parents along similar paths to an almost identical position in respect to religious belief. She had started from the Anglican standpoint, he from the Wesleyan, and each, almost without counsel from others, and after varied theological experiments, had come to take up precisely the same attitude towards all divisions of the Protestant Church—that, namely, of detached and unbiased contemplation. So far as the sects agreed with my Father and my Mother, the sects were walking in the light; wherever they differed from them, they had slipped more or less definitely into a penumbra of their own making, a darkness into which neither of my parents would follow them. Hence, by a process of selection, my Father and my Mother alike had gradually, without violence, found themselves shut outside all Protestant communions, and at last they met only with a few extreme Calvinists like themselves, on terms of what may almost be called negation—with no priest, no ritual, no festivals, no ornament of any kind, nothing but the Lord's Supper[5] and the exposition of Holy Scripture drawing these austere spirits into any sort of cohesion. They called themselves 'the Brethren', simply; a title enlarged by the world outside into 'Plymouth Brethren[4]'.
It was accident and similarity which brought my parents together at these meetings of the Brethren. Each was lonely, each was poor, each was accustomed to a strenuous intellectual self- support. He was nearly thirty-eight, she was past forty-two, when they married. From a suburban lodging, he brought her home to his mother's little house in the northeast of London without a single day's honeymoon. My Father was a zoologist, and a writer of books on natural history; my Mother also was a writer, author already of two slender volumes of religious verse—the earlier of which, I know not how, must have enjoyed some slight success, since a second edition was printed—afterwards she devoted her pen to popular works of edification. But how infinitely removed in their aims, their habits, their ambitions from 'literary' people of the present day, words are scarcely adequate to describe. Neither knew nor cared about any manifestation of current literature. For each there had been no poet later than Byron, and neither had read a romance since, in childhood, they had dipped into the Waverley Novels as they appeared in succession. For each the various forms of imaginative and scientific literature were merely means of improvement and profit, which kept the student 'out of the world', gave him full employment, and enabled him to maintain himself. But pleasure was found nowhere but in the Word of God, and to the endless discussion of the Scriptures each hurried when the day's work was over.
In this strange household the advent of a child was not welcomed, but was borne with resignation. The event was thus recorded in my Father's diary:
'E. delivered of a son. Received green swallow from Jamaica.'
This entry has caused amusement, as showing that he was as much interested in the bird as in the boy. But this does not follow; what the wording exemplifies is my Father's extreme punctilio. The green swallow arrived later in the day than the son, and the earlier visitor was therefore recorded first; my Father was scrupulous in every species of arrangement.
Long afterwards, my Father told me that my Mother suffered much in giving birth to me, and that, uttering no cry, I appeared to be dead. I was laid, with scant care, on another bed in the room, while all anxiety and attention were concentrated on my Mother. An old woman who happened to be there, and who was unemployed, turned her thoughts to me, and tried to awake in me a spark of vitality. She succeeded, and she was afterwards complimented by the doctor on her cleverness. My Father could not—when he told me the story—recollect the name of my preserver. I have often longed to know who she was. For all the rapture of life, for all its turmoils, its anxious desires, its manifold pleasures, and even for its sorrow and suffering, I bless and praise that anonymous old lady from the bottom of my heart.
It was six weeks before my Mother was able to leave her room. The occasion was made a solemn one, and was attended by a species of Churching. Mr. Balfour, a valued minister of the denomination, held a private service in the parlour, and 'prayed for our child, that he may be the Lord's'. This was the opening act of that 'dedication' which was never henceforward forgotten, and of which the following pages will endeavour to describe the results. Around my tender and unconscious spirit was flung the luminous web, the light and elastic but impermeable veil, which it was hoped would keep me 'unspotted from the world'.
Until this time my Father's mother had lived in the house and taken the domestic charges of it on her own shoulders. She now consented to leave us to ourselves. There is no question that her exodus was a relief to my Mother, since my paternal grandmother was a strong and masterful woman, buxom, choleric and practical, for whom the interests of the mind did not exist. Her daughter- in-law, gentle as she was, and ethereal in manner and appearance— strangely contrasted (no doubt), in her tinctures of gold hair and white skin, with my grandmother's bold carnations and black tresses—was yet possessed of a will like tempered steel. They were better friends apart, with my grandmother lodged hard by, in a bright room, her household gods and bits of excellent eighteenth-century furniture around her, her miniatures and sparkling china arranged on shelves.
Left to my Mother's sole care, I became the centre of her solicitude. But there mingled with those happy animal instincts which sustain the strength and patience of every human mother and were fully present with her—there mingled with these certain spiritual determinations which can be but rare. They are, in their outline, I suppose, vaguely common to many religious mothers, but there are few indeed who fill up the sketch with so firm a detail as she did. Once again I am indebted to her secret notes, in a little locked volume, seen until now, nearly sixty years later, by no eye save her own. Thus she wrote when I was two months old:
'We have given him to the Lord; and we trust that He will really manifest him to be His own, if he grow up; and if the Lord take him early, we will not doubt that he is taken to Himself. Only, if it please the Lord to take him, I do trust we may be spared seeing him suffering in lingering illness and much pain. But in this as in all things His will is better than what we can choose. Whether his life be prolonged or not, it has already been a blessing to us, and to the saints, in leading us to much prayer, and bringing us into varied need and some trial.'
The last sentence is somewhat obscure to me. How, at that tender age, I contrived to be a blessing 'to the saints' may surprise others and puzzles myself. But 'the saints' was the habitual term by which were indicated the friends who met on Sunday mornings for Holy Communion, and at many other times in the week for prayer and discussion of the Scriptures, in the small hired hall at Hackney, which my parents attended. I suppose that the solemn dedication of me to the Lord, which was repeated in public in my Mother's arms, being by no means a usual or familiar ceremony even among the Brethren, created a certain curiosity and fervour in the immediate services, or was imagined so to do by the fond, partial heart of my Mother. She, however, who had been so much isolated, now made the care of her child an excuse for retiring still further into silence. With those religious persons who met at the Room, as the modest chapel was called, she had little spiritual, and no intellectual, sympathy. She noted:
'I do not think it would increase my happiness to be in the midst of the saints at Hackney. I have made up my mind to give myself up to Baby for the winter, and to accept no invitations. To go when I can to the Sunday morning meetings and to see my own Mother.'
The monotony of her existence now became extreme, but she seems to have been happy. Her days were spent in taking care of me, and in directing one young servant. My Father was forever in his study, writing, drawing, dissecting; sitting, no doubt, as I grew afterwards accustomed to see him, absolutely motionless, with his eye glued to the microscope, for twenty minutes at a time. So the greater part of every weekday was spent, and on Sunday he usually preached one, and sometimes two extempore sermons. His workday labours were rewarded by the praise of the learned world, to which he was indifferent, but by very little money, which he needed more. For over three years after their marriage, neither of my parents left London for a single day, not being able to afford to travel. They received scarcely any visitors, never ate a meal away from home, never spent an evening in social intercourse abroad. At night they discussed theology, read aloud to one another, or translated scientific brochures from French or German. It sounds a terrible life of pressure and deprivation, and that it was physically unwholesome there can be no shadow of a doubt. But their contentment was complete and unfeigned. In the midst of this, materially, the hardest moment of their lives, when I was one year old, and there was a question of our leaving London, my Mother recorded in her secret notes:
'We are happy and contented, having all things needful and pleasant, and our present habitation is hallowed by many sweet associations. We have our house to ourselves and enjoy each other's society. If we move we shall no longer be alone. The situation may be more favourable, however, for Baby, as being more in the country. I desire to have no choice in the matter, but as I know not what would be for our good, and God knows, so I desire to leave it with Him, and if it is not His will we should move, He will raise objections and difficulties, and if it is His will He will make Henry [my Father] desirous and anxious to take the step, and then, whatever the result, let us leave all to Him and not regret it.'
No one who is acquainted with the human heart will mistake this attitude of resignation for weakness of purpose. It was not poverty of will, it was abnegation, it was a voluntary act. My Mother, underneath an exquisite amenity of manner, concealed a rigour of spirit which took the form of a constant self-denial. For it to dawn upon her consciousness that she wished for something, was definitely to renounce that wish, or, more exactly, to subject it in every thing to what she conceived to be the will of God.
This is perhaps the right moment for me to say that at this time, and indeed until the hour of her death, she exercised, without suspecting it, a magnetic power over the will and nature of my Father. Both were strong, but my Mother was unquestionably the stronger of the two; it was her mind which gradually drew his to take up a certain definite position, and this remained permanent although she, the cause of it, was early removed. Hence, while it was with my Father that the long struggle which I have to narrate took place, behind my Father stood the ethereal memory of my Mother's will, guiding him, pressing him, holding him to the unswerving purpose which she had formed and defined. And when the inevitable disruption came, what was unspeakably painful was to realize that it was not from one, but from both parents that the purpose of the child was separated.
My Mother was a Puritan in grain, and never a word escaped her, not a phrase exists in her diary, to suggest that she had any privations to put up with. She seemed strong and well, and so did I; the one of us who broke down was my Father. With his attack of acute nervous dyspepsia came an unexpected small accession of money, and we were able, in my third year, to take a holiday of nearly ten months in Devonshire. The extreme seclusion, the unbroken strain, were never repeated, and when we returned to London, it was to conditions of greater amenity and to a less rigid practice of 'the world forgetting by the world forgot'. That this relaxation was more relative than positive, and that nothing ever really tempted either of my parents from their cavern in an intellectual Thebaid, my recollections will amply prove. But each of them was forced by circumstances into a more or less public position, and neither could any longer quite ignore the world around.
It is not my business here to re-write the biographies of my parents. Each of them became, in a certain measure, celebrated, and each was the subject of a good deal of contemporary discussion. Each was prominent before the eyes of a public of his or her own, half a century ago. It is because their minds were vigorous and their accomplishments distinguished that the contrast between their spiritual point of view and the aspect of a similar class of persons today is interesting and may, I hope, be instructive. But this is not another memoir of public individuals, each of whom has had more than one biographer. My serious duty, as I venture to hold it, is other;
that's the world's side, Thus men saw them, praised them, thought they knew them! There, in turn, I stood aside and praised them! Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it.
But this is a different inspection, this is a study of
the other side, the novel Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of,
the record of a state of soul once not uncommon in Protestant Europe, of which my parents were perhaps the latest consistent exemplars among people of light and leading.
The peculiarities of a family life, founded upon such principles, are, in relation to a little child, obvious; but I may be permitted to recapitulate them. Here was perfect purity, perfect intrepidity, perfect abnegation; yet there was also narrowness, isolation, an absence of perspective, let it be boldly admitted, an absence of humanity. And there was a curious mixture of humbleness and arrogance; entire resignation to the will of God and not less entire disdain of the judgement and opinion of man. My parents founded every action, every attitude, upon their interpretation of the Scriptures, and upon the guidance of the Divine Will as revealed to them by direct answer to prayer. Their ejaculation[8] in the face of any dilemma was, 'Let us cast it before the Lord!'
So confident were they of the reality of their intercourse with God, that they asked for no other guide. They recognized no spiritual authority among men, they subjected themselves to no priest or minister, they troubled their consciences about no current manifestation of 'religious opinion'. They lived in an intellectual cell, bounded at its sides by the walls of their own house, but open above to the very heart of the uttermost heavens.
This, then, was the scene in which the soul of a little child was planted, not as in an ordinary open flower-border or carefully tended social parterre, but as on a ledge, split in the granite of some mountain. The ledge was hung between night and the snows on one hand, and the dizzy depths of the world upon the other; was furnished with just soil enough for a gentian to struggle skywards and open its stiff azure stars; and offered no lodgement, no hope of salvation, to any rootlet which should stray beyond its inexorable limits.
