Father and Son

by Edmund Gosse

  The details of Gosse’s youth seemed so close to my own that the years between them may as well have been a matter of weeks. Nonconformists take great pains to separate themselves from the ritualism of the Established Church, but there is a shared language, used by Brethren and Baptists and Methodists and all the little fractured denominations alike, which unites even the most doctrinally isolated chapels in a common prayer. Saints, sinners, the five points of Calvinism, the Last Times, the Lord’s Day, the Catholic Church as the Whore of Babylon – these words were Gosse’s liturgy, and they were mine. The hymns Gosse sang, I knew by heart; the Sunday-school trips to the seaside had been my summer treats, too. I also had failed at my bedside prayers, unable to subjugate all the desires and needs of my child’s heart to a virtuous and disinterested communion with a God whose will could not possibly be swayed by mine. When Gosse writes of how he prayed for a humming-top, which he needed ‘a great deal more than the conversion of the heathen and the restitution of Jerusalem to the Jews’, a nightly petition which left him ‘very cold’, I was choked halfway between laughter and tears.

  Gosse uses phrases that I had never heard outside the walls of the chapels where I worshipped, or the homes of other worshippers. When he writes of his parents’ desire to keep him ‘unspotted from the world’ the line does not seem strange or antiquated to me: I respond with reflexive fondness for the life of chapel teas and scripture recitals where I, too, had been kept separate from the world by means of a ‘light and elastic but impermeable veil’. For the young Gosse, as for me, ‘the world’ did not merely mean the whole body of humanity or the planet on which it lived, but rather a kind of vast Vanity Fair, peopled with godless sinners on the broad path to destruction, whose habits and desires (the cinema! alcohol! shopping on the Lord’s Day!) were likely to prove contagious.

  Naturally this had the effect of rendering ‘the world’ of the imagination more exotic and compelling by far than it would subsequently prove to be. Gosse recalls visiting bachelor uncles in their ‘old, rambling house in Clapton’, and its ‘strange delicious smell, so unlike anything I smelt anywhere else’ that it drove him to ‘tears of mysterious pleasure’. Not for decades was he to realise that this was merely the scent of cigars.

  For my part, I knew that pubs were places of godless revelry, and I was afraid of them. As a child I nurtured a furtive fascination for a pub a few yards distant from traffic lights on the road as we drove to chapel. When the lights were red I would gaze with fearful intensity through the windows, where I could make out what looked like the pews from which I heard sermons, but which were upholstered in brocade; and dark wooden tables scattered with ashtrays and beer mats. What most drew my eye, and most appalled me, was a large painting that hung diagonally on the wall, as if it had been knocked violently by a man in a drunken stupor, and the landlord and all his drinkers were too wretched, and too heedless of the need for decency and order, to return it to the perpendicular. I could hardly imagine what vices and vanities were played out each night beyond that window, or, for that matter, how anybody could drink anything at all by the pint – the sheer quantity alone struck me as sinful. Many years later it occurred to me that probably the painting had been hung askew deliberately.

  Like Philip Henry Gosse, my father was a scientist. He was – and remains – endlessly in thrall to the mysteries of the material world, and to the laws of physics and chemistry that underpin them. I recall as a young child at school watching older pupils playing football in a distant playground, and, having observed how I saw the ball strike the ground before I heard it, going home to ask my father why. With pen and paper he explained how the speed of light exceeds that of sound, and immediately it seemed to me that a key had been turned in a lock: there was nothing in heaven or on earth that was beyond our understanding. For many years I had no idea that where matters of faith and reason were concerned it was generally thought to be a zero-sum game – that one could possess a microscope or a Bible, but not both. My father’s faith and the delight with which he showed me the passage of Halley’s Comet across our back garden when I was eight years old were all, I felt, of a piece: who would be likelier to turn a telescope on the heavens than someone who believed they showed the handiwork of God? In the mid-nineteenth century the Devon coast was still bright with sea anemones and corallines, which Philip Henry studied, taxonomised and painted. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and his 1854 pamphlet The Aquarium helped spark a fad for household aquariums in fashionable homes. But the theories of Darwin and Lyell, which were at that time disrupting the Genesis account like the shifting of tectonic plates, entered the life of the Gosse family, and caused Philip Henry to, as his son would have it, ‘burn his ships down to the last beam and log out of which a raft could have been made’. On his first encounter with the new theory, Edmund reports that ‘mournful as the admission is, every instinct in [his father’s] intelligence went out at first to greet the new light. It had hardly done so when a recollection of the opening chapter of Genesis checked it at the outset.’ In his attempt to reconcile the fossil record with a literal interpretation of scripture, Philip Henry conceived his ‘omphalos’ theory, suggesting that at the act of creation the world came into being in its final form, complete with the apparent evidence of millennia or more of ancient life, and long-extinct species. He had hoped it would be a means of uniting Christians and atheists – and it did, but the unity was one of equal ridicule. The effect, Gosse remembers, was that ‘a gloom, cold and dismal, descended upon our morning teacups’, as his father ‘could not recover from amazement at having offended everybody by an enterprise which had been undertaken in the cause of universal reconciliation’.

  I could not then, and do not now, look on the faith and rituals of my parents – or of any of those with whom I worshipped – with anything like contempt, or even pity. I know, as Gosse knew, that for an intelligent person to retain an ardent inflexible faith requires daily conscious acts of intellectual enquiry and self-denial. No passage in Father and Son moves and distresses me so much as that in which Gosse recounts the publication of Omphalos, and its reception. The flare of a native intelligence suffocated by doctrine has always struck me as a greater tragedy even than the breach that eventually opened between father and son. It is certainly the case that my own failure to maintain a fundamentalist faith has been caused by an inability to extinguish my intellect in favour of a divine consciousness of which I can barely conceive, and to abnegate my whole self to it.

  I was discomfited to discover that Father and Son is, in places, demonstrably untrue. Gosse’s friend Henry James remarked that he had ‘a genius for inaccuracy’, and scholars examining the papers of Philip Henry have been able to identify numerous places where either Edmund’s memory failed him, or he departed from fact the better to depict an emotional and psychological truth. Certainly it seems that Philip Henry, though as devout as painted by his son, was not quite the isolated and austere figure the reader might take him for. Like Gosse, I had been raised to be truthful, and to feel any failure in this respect to be a sin; that he could have prefaced his work with the declaration that it was ‘scrupulously true’, when in fact it was not, I found shocking. On subsequent readings I realised that what most concerns Gosse is not the precise detail of this incident or that encounter, but rather the acute portrayal of two minds that came to be intractably opposed.

  It is not possible to understand the depth and melancholy of that opposition without understanding the doctrine of election, which governed more or less all the interactions between them. As strict Calvinists, the Gosse family believed that God elected His people long before they were born – in fact, before the world came into being. All those who were elect would be irresistibly drawn to faith; all those who were not elect might well sit for a lifetime beneath fire-and-brimstone sermons and their heart would never be moved. Naturally, for Philip Henry, the elect were highly unlikely to be found in Catholic churches or Protestant cathedrals, or indeed much beyond
the small number of Plymouth Brethren – ‘he would speak with solemn complacency of the aged nun who, after a long life of renunciation and devotion, died at last, “only to discover her mistake”’. All of this I recognised, from Sunday-school lessons and from the pulpit and from the little devotional magazines which I read on Sundays (novels being out of the question on the Sabbath). I would often fret at the unfairness of isolated communities with not the least hope of hearing the gospel being consigned to what we called ‘a lost eternity’, and puzzle equally at how improbably convenient it seemed that God would elect generations of the same family who happened to worship at the same church.

  Any Calvinist parent would hope that their child was one of the elect, but both Gosse’s mother and father believed sincerely that Edmund was one of God’s chosen people. According to Gosse, his father believed his young son ‘a being to whom the mysteries of salvation had been divinely revealed and by whom they had been accepted’. Any naughtiness on Edmund’s part (such as the wicked consumption of a slice of Christmas pudding) could do nothing to invalidate his election. The doctrine was a source of comfort to Emily Gosse in her final excruciating illness: Gosse recalls how ‘in her last hours, [she] dwelt on our unity in God’, believing that father, mother and child were ‘drawn together … elect from the world’. But the great tragedy, of course, is that if one can do nothing to earn one’s election, one can equally do nothing to gain it. The same doctrine that caused Philip Henry to ‘hold this confidence and vision steadily before him’ could by the same token consign a child to hell, and elect his parents to paradise. The crumbling of Gosse’s ‘artificial edifice of extravagant faith’, which he had tried all his life to cultivate out of love for his father, caused a rift which would outlast them both into eternity, with the two men, still joined by the ordinary ties of family love, walking ‘in opposite hemispheres of the soul’, with the world between them.

  Some months ago a fellow admirer of Father and Son unearthed for me a recording of Gosse speaking, with a kind of waspish fondness, about Thomas Hardy. The high, finicky voice, the precision of its sentences, and the wit buried fathoms deep beneath its melancholy, seemed immediately familiar, and with predictable sentimentality I began to cry. Perhaps I can be forgiven for sometimes thinking that if, after all, Gosse and I were both elect, as our fathers hoped, I’ll one day meet my old friend in person, and talk over the tragicomedy of our lives – and possibly sing, only half ironically, the hymns we know by heart.

  Sarah Perry, 2018

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  Introduction © Anthony Quinn, 2018

  Afterword © Sarah Perry, 2018

  Cover Image: studies by Philip Henry Gosse © Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, Devon/Bridgeman Art Library

  Edmund Gosse has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published by Vintage in 2018

  First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd in 1907

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library