But no one suffered more on account of Vincent’s “excesses” than Vincent himself. “In those years,” he wrote later, “I was abroad without friends or help, suffering great misery.” Indeed, self-punishment may have been the true purpose of his ordeal. Clearly, a huge burden of guilt weighed on every step. “Keep me from being a son that maketh ashamed,” he wrote soon after his arrival in England. In letter after letter, he confessed to feelings of “great inadequacy,” “imperfection,” and “unworthiness.” He admitted to “hating his own life,” and longed for the day when he could “forget the sins of my youth.” “Who shall deliver me completely and forever from the body of this deed,” he asked plaintively, “and how long shall I have to fight against myself?”
The months of self-punishing flight were accompanied by a flood of reparative imagery. Images of travelers and traveling, leave-takings and homecomings, lovesick wanderings and moral questings, had always excited Vincent’s imagination. Now they became his lifeline. He returned to old favorites like Longfellow’s Evangeline and The Courtship of Miles Standish, both tales of transformative exile, and took up the same author’s Hyperion, the story of a melancholy young poet wandering the apocalyptic landscape of post-Napoleonic Europe in search of himself. Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn, a wanderer’s storybook, became his new gospel. The homeless heroine of Elizabeth Wetherell’s sentimental blockbuster The Wide, Wide World touched him so deeply that he read the book to his students and sent a copy to Theo.
He collected scenes of tearful farewells and ecstatic reunions: scenes like the opening of Henri Conscience’s Le conscrit (The Conscript), which he copied out in pages of careful script. (“The hour of leavetaking has struck!…Squeezing his mother’s hand … he covers his face in his hand to hide the tears streaming down his cheeks and says in an almost unintelligible voice: ‘Adieu.’ ”) He found the same heartbreaking image in Gustave Brion’s picture Les adieux, showing a young man bidding his parents good-bye amid copious tears. For a while, the image attained devotional status in his collection of prints, which he somehow managed to keep with him through all the peregrinations of the summer and fall. In May, he sent a version of it to his parents for their anniversary.
Roads figured as prominently in Vincent’s imagination as they did in his daily life. He was raised in a country filled with rail-straight lanes lined to the vanishing point with trees. His mother had taught him early about “the road of life,” and his father treasured a print showing a funeral procession making its way along a path through a cornfield. Not surprisingly, Vincent grew up seeing a journey in every road and a life in every journey. In looking at landscapes, his eye always searched for the path. He hung in his room a print like his father’s showing a rough country road leading into the distance. One of his favorite stanzas of poetry pleaded in the voice of a weary traveler: “Does the road go uphill all the way? / Yes, to the very end. / Will the journey take the whole long day? / From morn till night, my friend.”
Just as he saw a journey in every road, he saw a pilgrim in every traveler. “If you want to persevere and make spiritual progress,” Kempis advised, “look upon yourself as an exile and a pilgrim on this earth.” Now embarked on his own lonely journey, Vincent found new solace in stories of pious travelers trekking earthly routes toward otherworldly destinations. In the album he prepared for Matthijs Maris in Paris, he copied out the opening stanzas of Uhland’s “Der Pilger,” about a pilgrim setting off for the Holy City. In a book of Dutch poetry that his father sent him, Vincent singled out (and copied into a letter for Theo) only one poem: “De pelgrimstogt” (“The Pilgrimage”), another story about the “uphill road to a better life.”
But no pilgrim made a deeper impression on his imagination than the one he discovered in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. “If you ever have an opportunity to read [it],” he told his brother, “you will find it greatly worthwhile.” Like Vincent, Bunyan’s pilgrim, Christian, abandons home and family to undertake a dangerous journey, encountering on his way every form of human frailty, folly, and temptation. Much like Vincent’s later art, Bunyan’s story infuses the cartoon world of allegory with an emotional urgency that startled and endeared readers when it was first published in 1678, and had earned it an honored place beside the Bible in every literate English household in the two centuries since. “For my part,” Vincent wrote, “I am exceedingly fond of it.”
But Bunyan’s Christian had to compete with a different traveler in Vincent’s imagination. In another book, he found the story of the pillawer—the “rag and bone man”—who scratched out a life wandering the byways, collecting rags to be used in making paper. The story so touched him that he copied it out, at length, in an album: “People close their doors when they see him.… He is a stranger in the village where he was baptised.… He does not know what is happening in his own family.”
As the miles accumulated and his shoes wore out, this was the image that increasingly haunted Vincent’s journey. “He walks, he walks, the rag and bone man, like a wandering Jew. Nobody likes him.”
VINCENT’S JOURNEY BEGAN in an unkempt, bug-infested house in Ramsgate. He must have thought he had wandered into one of his beloved Dickens stories—one of the dark ones. The school run by William Post Stokes was nothing like the formal, well-funded institutions of Vincent’s own experience. Twenty-four boys between the ages of ten and fourteen crowded into the narrow townhouse at 6 Royal Road, only a hundred yards from the edge of a cliff that dropped vertiginously to the sea. Vincent complained about the building’s rotten floors, broken windows, dim light, and dark passages. “A rather melancholy sight,” he called it. Dinner consisted of bread and tea, but so dreary was the rest of their day that the boys looked forward to it eagerly, he wrote.
In these miserable conditions, Vincent staggered like a Dickens hero under onerous and unrelenting duties. From six in the morning until eight at night, he and a fellow “assistant teacher” bore full responsibility for all the school’s students. He taught them “a little of everything,” he said: French, German, math, recitation, and “dictation.” He led them on walks and took them to church; he oversaw their flea-ridden dormitory and put them to bed at night. Once, at least, he bathed them. In his spare hours, he did maintenance work and odd jobs. “It’s a heavy task,” he said stoically.
Stokes himself completed the Dickensian picture. A big man with a bald pate and bushy side-whiskers, Stokes ran his school like the business it was. With the government school system overwhelmed by the demand for education from the new middle class, anybody with a house and pretense of erudition could start a school. Stokes had “but one goal,” Vincent later wrote, “money.” He conducted his business “mysteriously,” according to Vincent; never talked about the past; and kept everyone off guard with his odd comings and goings. Too many secrets made Stokes a moody master: one minute playing marbles with his students, the next minute flying into fits of rage at their rowdiness and ordering them to bed without dinner. A fortnight after Vincent’s arrival, Stokes abruptly announced that the school would be moving to Isleworth, where his mother ran a similar enterprise.
Vincent’s letters soon fell silent on the subject of his job and focused instead on the view of the town in a battering rainstorm or the “spectacle of the sea” as seen from the school’s front window (“unforgettable,” he called it). No doubt his limited, heavily accented English made a hard job even harder. “It is not easy to see that what they are learning is what we are teaching them,” he wrote candidly. Vincent also found Stokes’s miserliness “disgusting.” When Vincent asked for the small salary that Stokes had promised him after a one-month trial, Stokes refused to pay it. “[I] can get teachers enough for just board and lodging,” he said brusquely.
By the time the school moved in mid-June, Vincent was already looking for something else, someplace else. That, after all, was the pilgrim’s lot. “We must continue quietly on our way,” he wrote.
After a mere two months as a
teacher, he had decided to become a missionary.
THE AMBITION TO BRING others to the Truth was deeply rooted in Vincent’s nature. Years of alienation and lonely, self-righteous brooding had left him with an irrepressible urge to persuade. For him, enthusiasms had to be shared to be fully enjoyed. Successful persuasion, even over trivial matters, brought vindication at the most visceral level. Failure to persuade amounted to absolute rejection. In this regard, the outbreak of missionary zeal in the summer of 1876 followed inevitably on the poetry albums for Theo and the joint discipleship with Gladwell—another in an endless series of life-and-death campaigns to right unnamable wrongs.
In his new calling, Vincent found encouragement, even inspiration, in the novels of George Eliot. Books such as Felix Holt, Adam Bede, Silas Marner, and Scenes of a Clerical Life, all of which he sent to his parents that winter, offered the perfect bridge from Kempis’s insular piety back to the world of fiction that Vincent always loved. Felix Holt tells the story of a “rough” young man who repudiates his family’s legacy to pursue a life of political and religious fervor among the working class and, in doing so, redefines “failure.” In both Adam Bede and Scenes of a Clerical Life, flawed, guilt-racked men achieve heroic martyrdom by ministering to the poor and living a life of utter self-abnegation. Freely ignoring Eliot’s cynical view of religion in general and evangelism in particular, Vincent found inspiration even in her devastating portrait of the fundamentalist sect Lantern Yard in Silas Marner. “There is such a longing for religion among the people in the big cities,” he wrote, that groups like Lantern Yard offered “the kingdom of God on earth, no more, no less.”
In response to this perceived “longing,” Vincent began looking for a new position. He described his ideal job to Theo in terms that closely tracked his reading: “[It] should tend toward something between a clergyman and a missionary,” he wrote; should involve preaching “mainly to the working class population”; and should be located “in the suburbs of London.” In what was surely a painful exercise, he prepared a brief autobiography (a levensschets, or “life sketch”) that combined guilty half-truths, hopeful inflations, and abject pleas: “Father … make me as one of thy hired servants. Be merciful to me a sinner.” In June, while still in Ramsgate, he sent the statement to a preacher in London. “When I lived in London I often attended your church,” he wrote. “Now I would ask for your recommendation as I look for a position.”
In fact, London was swarming with missions. In a backwash from the tide of secularization that had swept over Victorian England earlier in the century, religion was once again seen as the solution to society’s every ill. By the 1870s, a consensus had emerged among the bourgeoisie that rising crime rates and intractable poverty did not reflect underlying flaws in their bright new world, but rather ominous signs of a spiritual deficit. Restive workers lacked faith, not rights; and no social problem could long resist the beneficial effects of charity and religious instruction. As a result, money poured into new sects, revivalist preachers (like Charles Spurgeon), and evangelical missions—especially those aimed at the poor and working classes. More than five hundred charitable societies doled out more than seven million pounds annually, a fabulous sum. Bible societies distributed more than half a million free copies of the Gospels every year.
So fanatic was the belief in the benefits of Bible distribution that it was recognized as a new religious “calling”: colportage. Spurgeon established an entire school just to train colporteurs—men and women who took Bibles from door to door “among classes almost inaccessible to such influences.” So-called “Bible carriages” roamed the busy streets carrying big-voiced men reading scripture and loaded with stacks of the Good Book. On crowded street corners, members of the Society for Open-Air Preaching enlightened passersby. In railway stations, foreign travelers were astonished to find large Bibles chained in waiting rooms; while in the parks, dozens of lay preachers stood reading with a Bible in one hand and an umbrella in the other.
At the same time, more than a thousand paid missionaries fanned out across London—from the hellishly overcrowded City to the farthest and newest working-class suburbs. Evangelical churches, like Spurgeon’s, spearheaded the offensive, but vast nondenominational organizations such as the London City Mission provided many of the troops needed to fight the new war on destitution and damnation. Dozens of specialized aid societies competed with each other to mitigate the suffering and save the souls of drinkers, penitent prostitutes, wayward servants, and abused children. In 1875, the year before Vincent returned to London, a former lay preacher named William Booth led a new ministry to “win back” the hearts of the working class with a combination of street-corner evangelism, missionary assistance, and soul-rousing music. He called his group the Salvation Army.
Despite the storm of missionary activity going on all around him, Vincent could not find a job. Or would not. After his initial visit in mid-June, he returned to London several more times “to find out if there was a chance of becoming” a missionary, he reported to Theo. In support of his application, he claimed that he had “mixed with people of the lower classes” in Paris and London, and that as a foreigner, he could better assist other foreigners “looking for work [or] in difficulties.” But to no avail. That his search proved unsuccessful may suggest how limited his language skills were or how unpersuasive and off-putting his approach. Even Vincent’s pessimistic parents were taken aback by his lack of success. “One would think that it would be easy to find a position in such a big world,” Anna wrote.
On the other hand, his failure may have betrayed his doubts about the way forward. “I see a light in the distance so clearly,” he admitted to Theo, “[but] that light disappears now and then.” Vincent offered only a single improbable explanation for his failure to find any kind of suitable position: “one must be at least twenty-four years old,” he wrote both Theo and his parents. It was the unassailable excuse of a man afraid to risk further rejection. “It is very doubtful whether I shall make great progress in this profession,” he concluded only weeks after his initial foray.
Instead of persisting or exploring serious alternatives, his mind quickly drifted to exotic and unlikely scenarios. Inspired perhaps by melodramatic newspaper accounts of poverty and suffering in the coal fields (often accompanied by graphic black-and-white illustrations), he considered going off to the mining districts in western England to minister to the miners. He even briefly contemplated joining a mission to South America. But all of those ideas, too, came to nothing. His ambition to be a missionary lasted barely more than a month.
By the beginning of July, he had retreated to his room in Isleworth, claiming a martyrdom of rejection and still looking for the “light in the distance.” He dismissed his teaching job as frustrating and “humiliating.” After a final round of broken promises and futile bargaining, he left Stokes’s school. (He told his parents that he resigned, but later hinted that Stokes had fired him—or was about to.) Meanwhile, he drifted into an almost identical position at another boys’ school only a few hundred yards away. By July 8, he had moved into Holme Court, the school run by the Reverend Thomas Slade-Jones, while continuing to work part-time for Stokes. The halting transition confused his parents, who had initially welcomed the move because Vincent advertised Slade-Jones’s school as “more fashionable.” “Oh! nothing is clear yet,” Dorus protested.
One thing was clear, however: Vincent was not happy. He wrote his parents melancholy letters complaining about the job, the school, and his loneliness (the students were on their summer break). “He is going through a difficult time,” they reported to Theo; “his life is not easy.” “I think it’s a matter of dreading his work among the boys,” Anna concluded. “I think he is afraid that he will fail.” She flatly predicted that Vincent “will not be able to stay in that profession.” He needed a new direction that would “mold him for everyday life” and “make his life happier and calmer.” She even offered a suggestion: “I wish he could work in na
ture or art—that would be grounds for hope.”
It wasn’t until August that Vincent found his direction again, and it wasn’t the one his mother suggested. Only two days before a planned visit to see Harry Gladwell, who was spending the summer holidays with his family outside London, Vincent received word that Harry’s seventeen-year-old sister had died in a riding accident. He immediately set out on the six-hour walk, crossing London “from one end to the other.” He arrived just as the mourning family returned from the funeral. The “spectacle of pain” overwhelmed him. He felt “something truly holy” in the house and longed to connect with it, but couldn’t. “I felt a kind of shyness and shame,” he confessed to Theo the next day. “I wanted to console [them], but I felt embarrassed.”
Only with his old friend Harry could Vincent play the role that burned inside him. On a long walk, they talked “about everything,” Vincent wrote, “the kingdom of God, the Bible,” just as they had in Paris. As they paced up and down the train platform, Vincent poured forth a manic, sermonlike stream of consolation. In that moment, he said, he felt “the ordinary world” suddenly “animated by thoughts that were not ordinary.”
Soon after that, he decided to become a preacher.
FOR VINCENT, PREACHING meant only one thing: consolation. At the core of its theology, where Catholicism put sin and punishment, the Dutch Reformed Church put solace. The “unspeakable consolation” of a watchful, caring God filled the church’s founding documents, the Formularies of Unity. In the embattled religious outpost of Zundert, a preacher’s first duty was to comfort, not to convert. Dorus van Gogh provided spiritual consolation and financial support to his precarious flock. At times of sickness and death, he brought them proof against loneliness in this life and affirmation of a higher love in the next. In ordinary times, he calmed their worries and quieted their fears. His sermons did not educate or illuminate so much as weave warm blankets of “healing words” from familiar strands of scripture and anecdote.
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