by Edmund Gosse
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 appetite 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 God, whether it was or was not the Lord’s will that I should attend the Browns’ party. My Father’s attitude 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 grass 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 through 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 passages 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 circumstances.
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 God’s Word, it was a symbol of a terrible decline, the angle of which would grow steeper and steeper, till 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 passionately 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 anticipated 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 shore 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 performa
nce 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 passionately troubled at this, and urged the barrier of class-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 passage of Scripture, ‘some aspect of God’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 school-fellows 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 through 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 classes of out-door 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 at which I write these pages, the arts of illustration are so universally diffused that it is difficult to realise 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 realising 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 till 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 to me not intelligible, was given in the text, but these were said to be figures of the old Greek gods. I asked my Father to tell me about these ‘old Greek gods.’ 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 gods 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 God poured down brimstone and fire on the Cities of the Plain, and there is nothing in the legends of these gods, 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 Hellenic 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 gods 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 passage of some itinerary revivalists, she had been ‘converted’ in the noisiest way, with sobs, gasps and gurglings. When this crisis passed, 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 passing 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 recognised 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 gods, 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 nobody in the world to whom I could go for sympathy. If I had ever read ‘Hellas’ I should have murmured:
Apollo, Pan and Love,
And even Olympian Jove,
Grew weak, when killing Susan glared on them.
On the day in question, I was unable to endure the drawing-room meeting to its close, but, clutching my volume of the Funereal Poets, I made a dash for the garden. In the midst of a mass of laurels, a clearing had been made, where ferns were grown and a garden seat was placed. There was no regular path to this asylum; one dived under the snake-like boughs of the laurel and came up again in absolute seclusion.
Into this haunt I now fled to meditate about the savage godliness of that vandal, Susan Flood. So extremely ignorant was I that I supposed her to have destroyed the originals of the statues, marble and unique. I knew nothing about plaster casts, and I thought the damage (it is possible that there had really been no damage whatever) was of an irreparable character. I sank into the seat, with the great wall of laurels whispering around me, and I burst into tears. There was something, surely, quaint and pathetic in the figure of a little Plymouth Brother sitting in that advanced year of grace, weeping bitterly for indignities done to Hermes and to Aphrodite. Then I opened my book for consolation, and read a great block of pompous verse out of ‘The Deity,’ in the midst of which exercise, yielding to the softness of the hot and aromatic air, I fell fast asleep.
Among those who applauded the zeal of Susan Flood’s parasol, the Pagets were prominent. These were a retired Baptist minister and his wife, from Exmouth, who had lately settled amongst us, and joined in the breaking of bread. Mr Paget was a fat old man, whose round pale face was clean-shaven, and who carried a full crop of loose white hair above it; his large lips were always moving, whether he spoke or not. He resembled, as I now perceive, the portraits of S. T. Coleridge in age, but with all the intellect left out of them. He lived in a sort of trance of solemn religious despondency. He had thrown up his cure of souls, because he became convinced that he had committed the Sin against the Holy Ghost. His wife was younger than he, very small, very tight, very active, with black eyes like pin-pricks at the base of an extremely high and narrow forehead, bordered with glossy ringlets. He was very cross to her, and it was murmured that ‘dear Mrs Paget had often had to pass through the waters of affliction.’ They were very poor, but rigidly genteel, and she was careful, so far as she could, to conceal from the world the caprices of her poor lunatic husband.