Father and Son

by Edmund Gosse

  This was maintained whether the subject under discussion was poetry, or society, or the Prussian war with Austria, or the stamen of a wild flower. Once, at least, he was himself conscious of the fatiguing effect on my temper of this insistency, for, raising his great brown eyes with a flash of laughter in them, he closed the Bible suddenly after a very lengthy disquisition, and quoted his Virgil to startling effect:—

  Claudite jam rivos, pueri: sat prata biberunt.

  The insistency of his religious conversation was, probably, the less incomprehensible to me on account of the evangelical training to which I had been so systematically subjected. It was, however, none the less intolerably irksome, and would have been exasperating, I believe, even to a nature in which a powerful and genuine piety was inherent. To my own, in which a feeble and imitative faith was expiring, it was deeply vexatious. It led, alas! to a great deal of bowing in the house of Rimmon, to much hypocritical ingenuity in drawing my Father’s attention away, if possible, as the terrible subject was seen to be looming and approaching. In this my stepmother would aid and abet, sometimes producing incongruous themes, likely to attract my Father aside, with a skill worthy of a parlour conjurer, and much to my admiration. If, however, she was not unwilling to come, in this way, to the support of my feebleness, there was no open collusion between us. She always described my Father, when she was alone with me, admiringly, as one ‘whose trumpet gave no uncertain sound.’ There was not a tinge of infidelity upon her candid mind, but she was human, and I think that now and then she was extremely bored.

  My Father was entirely devoid of the prudence which turns away its eyes and passes as rapidly as possible in the opposite direction. The peculiar kind of drama in which every sort of social discomfort is welcomed rather than that the characters should be happy when guilty of ‘acting a lie,’ was not invented in those days, and there can hardly be imagined a figure more remote from my Father than Ibsen. Yet when I came, at a far later date, to read ‘The Wild Duck,’ memories of the embarrassing household of my infancy helped me to realise Gregers Werle, with his determination to pull the veil of illusion away from every compromise that makes life bearable.

  I was docile, I was plausible, I was anything but combative; if my Father could have persuaded himself to let me alone, if he could merely have been willing to leave my subterfuges and any explanations unanalysed, all would have been well. But he refused to see any difference in temperament between a lad of twenty and a sage of sixty. He had no vital sympathy for youth, which in itself had no charm for him. He had no compassion for the weaknesses of immaturity, and his one and only anxiety was to be at the end of his spiritual journey, safe with me in the house where there are many mansions. The incidents of human life upon the road to glory were less than nothing to him.

  My Father was very fond of defining what was his own attitude at this time, and he was never tired of urging the same ambition upon me. He regarded himself as the faithful steward of a Master who might return at any moment, and who would require to find everything ready for his convenience. That master was God, with whom my Father seriously believed himself to be in relations much more confidential than those vouchsafed to ordinary pious persons. He waited, with anxious hope, ‘the coming of the Lord,’ an event which he still frequently believed to be imminent. He would calculate, by reference to prophecies in the Old and New Testament, the exact date of this event; the date would pass, without the expected Advent, and he would be more than disappointed,—he would be incensed. Then he would understand that he must have made some slight error in calculation, and the pleasures of anticipation would recommence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Afterword

  Each December my father greeted the onset of Christmas with wry disfavour. The mince pies my mother baked would, he said, have been outlawed under the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, and quite rightly too; the plastic Christmas tree drawn annually down through the loft hatch was nothing but a pagan log; and the name itself – Christ’s Mass, if you please! – evoked the yoke of popish superstition so courageously cast off by Protestant England.

  These reservations appeared to vanish the moment our grandfather clock ticked Christmas Eve into Christmas Day. There could be fewer more festive sights than my father with his white beard handing out gifts to his five daughters, and nobody could eat mince pies more quickly, or with greater relish. In most respects the Christmases of my childhood were not so dissimilar to those of my school friends, but there were certain inscrutable differences. No, I explained, we did not attend church on Christmas morning, and anyway it was not a church, but a chapel. Yes, we sometimes sang carols, but rarely during the month of December – we had been known to sing ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ in full harmony at midsummer, by way of affirming our chapel’s liberation from the ritualist calendar of the Established Church. If Christmas fell on a Sunday, it was postponed for twenty-four hours, so that all the usual rigours of the Lord’s Day – which were inimical to the opening of gifts, or to games of Trivial Pursuit – could be preserved. It was so impossible to account for these distinctions – to agree that, yes, we were a very religious family, but that our Senior Deacon would not say the word ‘Christmas’ within the chapel walls, preferring instead to refer obliquely to ‘the holiday season’ – that in time I learned only to mention the books I was given, and the excellence of my mother’s cakes.

  I did not read Father and Son until I was twenty-eight. I was not, like Gosse, raised among the Plymouth Brethren, but as a Strict Baptist, in a chapel whose shibboleths and social attitudes resembled those of a devout rural community at the turn of the century. By the time Gosse and I became acquainted I had negotiated more than two decades of explaining myself away, and had taken to declaring that I had been born in 1895. This small and tiresomely repeated joke seemed both to illuminate and obscure all the ways in which I felt my failure to be an ordinary carefree young woman: my lack of facility with popular culture, because I had been raised with no television, or pop music, or visits to the cinema; my long skirts and embroidered dresses, which perhaps I wore because I subconsciously retained the belief that trousers on women were ungodly; my preoccupation with what it meant to be good, and my sombre knowledge that I was a sinner; my speech, which lapsed into the phrases and patterns of the King James Bible, from which I had recited since the age of three. To read Gosse was to meet the gaze of a friend across a room of hostile or indifferent strangers. No other book has so precisely evoked the feeling that it had been written not for a general readership, but particularly and specifically for me.

  I read in a fever of self-absorption. Nobody, I thought, had ever written about a life like mine, and I had vowed never to write about it myself; until Gosse, my childhood and youth, and the painful development of an adult consciousness unlatched from the dogma which had formed my mind, had left me lone
ly. If I attended chapel I felt my lack of faith like a limp, but in the offices where I worked and the pubs where I tentatively learned how to drink I felt quaint, and easily shocked. I had not lost my mother when I was a child, I had never been anyone’s son, and I had been born 130 years after Gosse, but the parallels I found in Father and Son so astonished me that often I found myself weeping in a kind of self-consoling way, unable to go on until the storm blew out. Gosse wrote that he considered his memoir ‘a record of educational and religious conditions which, having passed away, will never return’, and could not have imagined how those conditions would persist, here and there, towards the conclusion of the twentieth century. On first reading, what struck me most was the way in which the fabric of Gosse’s life seemed composed of the same threads which had made mine. Christmas, for Gosse, was a period of confusion and isolation that struck a note I recognised, but which was greatly amplified. His father, the celebrated naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, far outranked mine in the severity and ferocity of his loathing of the festival, and perhaps the most famous pages of the book are those in which, having discovered his son had succumbed to a piece of plum pudding, Philip Henry consigns the remains of the pudding to an ash heap, raking it in as if disposing of a corpse. It is a scene which is funny and sad in equal measure, and exemplifies Gosse’s note that his book comprises ‘an extraordinary mixture of comedy and tragedy’, and that the reader ‘will not need to have it explained to them that the comedy was superficial and the tragedy essential’.