The Passionate Friends
humanity under tuition for the social life.
I write "old Siddons," for so he seemed to me then. In truth he was
scarcely a dozen years older than I, and the other day when I exchanged
salutations with his gaitered presence in the Haymarket, on his way I
suppose to the Athenæum, it struck me that he it is who is now the
younger man. But at Burnmore he was eighteen inches or more above my
head and all the way of school and university beyond me; full of the
world they had fitted him for and eager to impart its doctrines. He went
along in his tweeds that were studiously untidy, a Norfolk jacket of one
clerically-greyish stuff and trousers of another somewhat lighter
pattern, in thick boots, the collar of his calling, and a broad-minded
hat, bearing his face heavenward as he talked, and not so much aware of
me as appreciating the things he was saying. And sometimes he was
manifestly talking to himself and airing his outlook. He carried a
walking-stick, a manly, homely, knobby, donnish walking-stick.
He forced the pace a little, for his legs were long and he had acquired
the habit of strenuous pedestrianism at Oxford with all the other
things; he obliged me to go at a kind of skipping trot, and he preferred
the high roads towards Wickenham for our walks, because they were
flatter and there was little traffic upon them in those days before the
motor car, and we could keep abreast and go on talking uninterruptedly.
That is to say, he could.
What talk it was!
Of all the virtues that the young should have. He spoke of courage and
how splendid it was to accustom oneself not even to feel fear; of truth,
and difficult cases when one might conceivably injure others by telling
the truth and so perhaps, perhaps qualify the rigor of one's integrity,
but how one should never hesitate to injure one's own self in that
matter. Then in another phase he talked of belief--and the
disagreeableness of dissenters. But here, I remember, there was a
discussion. I have forgotten how I put the thing, but in some boyish
phrasing or other I must have thrown out the idea that thought is free
and beliefs uncontrollable. What of conformity, if the truth was that
you doubted? "Not if you make an effort," I remember him saying, "not if
you make an effort. I have had my struggles. But if you say firmly to
yourself, the Church teaches this. If you dismiss mere carping and say
that."
"But suppose you can't," I must have urged.
"You can if you will," he said with a note near enthusiasm. "I have been
through all that. I did it. I dismissed doubts. I wouldn't listen. I
felt, _This won't do. All this leads nowhere._"
And he it was told me the classic story of that presumptuous schoolboy
who went to his Head Master and declared himself an atheist. There were
no dialectics but a prompt horse-whipping. "In after life," said Mr.
Siddons, with unctuous gratification, "he came to recognize that
thrashing as the very best thing that had ever happened to him. The
kindest thing."
"Yes," urged the obstinate rebel within me, "but--the Truth, that
fearless insistence on the Truth!"
I could, however, find nothing effective to say aloud, and Siddons
prevailed over me. That story made my blood boil, it filled me with an
anticipatory hatred of and hostility to Head Masters, and at the same
time there was something in it, brutally truer to the conditions of
human association than any argument.
I do not remember the various steps by which I came to be discussing
doubts so early in my life. I could not have been much more than
thirteen when that conversation occurred. I am I think perhaps
exceptionally unconscious about myself. I find I can recall the sayings
and even the gestures of other people far more distinctly than the
things I said and did myself. Even my dreams and imaginings are more
active than my positive thoughts and proceedings. But I was no doubt
very much stimulated by the literature lying about my home and the
gleans and echoes of controversies that played like summer lightning
round and about the horizons of my world. Over my head and after I had
gone to bed, my father and Siddons were talking, my cousin was listening
with strained apprehensions, there was a new spirit in my father's
sermons; it was the storm of Huxley-Darwin controversies that had at
last reached Burnmore. I was an intelligent little listener, an eager
reader of anything that came to hand, Mr. Siddons had a disposition to
fight his battles over again in his monologues to me; and after all at
thirteen one isn't a baby. The small boy of the lower classes used in
those days to start life for himself long before then.
How dramatic a phase it was in the history of the human mind when
science suddenly came into the vicarages, into all the studies and quiet
places that had been the fastnesses of conviction and our ideals, and
denied, with all the power of evidence it had been accumulating for so
long, and so obscurely and inaggressively, with fossils and strata, with
embryology and comparative anatomy, the doctrine of the historical Fall
and all the current scheme of orthodoxy that was based on that! What a
quickening shock it must have been in countless thousands of educated
lives! And my father after a toughly honest resistance was won over to
Darwinism, the idea of Evolution got hold of him, the idea that life
itself was intolerant of vain repetitions; and he had had to "consider
his position" in the church. To him as to innumerable other honest,
middle-aged and comfortable men, Darwinism came as a dreadful invitation
to go out into the wilderness. Over my head and just out of range of my
ears he was debating that issue with Siddons as a foil and my cousin as
a horrified antagonist. Slowly he was developing his conception of
compromise. And meanwhile he wasn't going out into the wilderness at
all, but punctually to and fro, along the edge of the lawn by the bed of
hollyhocks and through the little green door in the garden wall, and
across the corner of the churchyard to the vestry and the perennial
services and sacraments of the church.
But he never talked to me privately of religion. He left that for my
cousin and Mr. Siddons to do or not to do as they felt disposed, and in
those silences of his I may have found another confirmation of my
growing feeling that religion was from one point of view a thing
somehow remote and unreal, claiming unjustifiable interventions in the
detailed conduct of my life, and from another a peculiar concern of my
father's and Mr. Siddons', to which they went--through the vestry,
changing into strange garments on the way.
§ 4
I do not want to leave the impression which my last section may have
conveyed that at the age of thirteen or thereabouts I walked about with
Mr. Siddons discussing doubt in a candid and intelligent manner and
maintaining theological positions. That particular conversation, you
must imagine with Mr. Siddons somewhat monologuing, addressing himself
not only to my present self, but with an unaccustomed valiance to my
absent father. What I may have said or not said, whether I did indeed
dispute or merely and by a kind of accident implied objections, I have
altogether forgotten long ago.
A boy far more than a man is mentally a discontinuous being. The
drifting chaos of his mind makes its experimental beginnings at a
hundred different points and in a hundred different spirits and
directions; here he flashes into a concrete realization, here into a
conviction unconsciously incompatible; here is something originally
conceived, here something uncritically accepted. I know that I
criticized Mr. Siddons quite acutely, and disbelieved in him. I know
also that I accepted all sorts of suggestions from him quite
unhesitatingly and that I did my utmost to satisfy his standards and
realize his ideals of me.
Like an outer casing to that primordial creature of senses and dreams
which came to the surface in the solitudes of the Park was my
Siddonsesque self, a high-minded and clean and brave English boy,
conscientiously loyal to queen and country, athletic and a good
sportsman and acutely alive to good and bad "form." Mr. Siddons made me
aware of my clothed self as a visible object, I surveyed my garmented
being in mirrors and was trained to feel the "awfulness" of various
other small boys who appeared transitorily in the smaller Park when Lady
Ladislaw extended her wide hospitality to certain benevolent London
associations. Their ill-fitting clothing, their undisciplined outcries,
their slouching, their bad throwing and defective aspirates were made
matters for detestation in my plastic mind. Those things, I was assured,
placed them outside the pale of any common humanity.
"Very unfortunate and all that," said Mr. Siddons, "and uncommonly good
of Lady Ladislaw to have them down. But dirty little cads, Stephen,
dirty little cads; so don't go near 'em if you can help it."
They played an indecent sort of cricket with coats instead of a wicket!
Mr. Siddons was very grave about games and the strict ritual and proper
apparatus for games. He believed that Waterloo was won by the indirect
influence of public school cricket--disregarding many other contributory
factors. We did not play very much, but we "practised" sedulously at a
net in the paddock with the gardener and the doctor's almost grown-up
sons. I thought missing a possible catch was an impropriety. I
studiously maintained the correct attitude, alert and elastic, while I
was fielding. Moreover I had a shameful secret, that I did not really
know where a ball ought to pitch. I wasn't clear about it and I did not
dare to ask. Also until I was nearly thirteen I couldn't bowl overarm.
Such is the enduring force of early suggestion, my dear son, that I feel
a faint twinge of shame as I set this down for your humiliated eyes. But
so it was. May you be more precocious!
Then I was induced to believe that I really liked hunting and killing
things. In the depths of my being I was a gentle and primitive savage
towards animals; I believed they were as subtle and wise as myself and
full of a magic of their own, but Mr. Siddons nevertheless got me out
into the south Warren, where I had often watched the rabbits setting
their silly cock-eared sentinels and lolloping out to feed about
sundown, and beguiled me into shooting a furry little fellow-creature--I
can still see its eyelid quiver as it died--and carrying it home in
triumph. On another occasion I remember I was worked up into a ferocious
excitement about the rats in the old barn. We went ratting, just as
though I was Tom Brown or Harry East or any other of the beastly little
models of cant and cruelty we English boys were trained to imitate. It
was great sport. It was a tremendous spree. The distracted movements,
the scampering and pawing of the little pink forefeet of one squawking
little fugitive, that I hit with a stick and then beat to a shapeless
bag of fur, haunted my dreams for years, and then I saw the bowels of
another still living victim that had been torn open by one of the
terriers, and abruptly I fled out into the yard and was violently sick;
the best of the fun was over so far as I was concerned.
My cousin saved me from the uttermost shame of my failure by saying
that I had been excited too soon after my dinner....
And also I collected stamps and birds' eggs.
Mr. Siddons hypnotized me into believing that I really wanted these
things; he gave me an egg-cabinet for a birthday present and told me
exemplary stories of the wonderful collections other boys had made. My
own natural disposition to watch nests and establish heaven knows what
friendly intimacy with the birds--perhaps I dreamt their mother might
let me help to feed the young ones--gave place to a feverish artful