His alacrity was dreadful to me, his well-aimed blows fell on what was rather a bladder or a pillow than a vivid antagonist.
He was, indeed, most unfairly handicapped,--I was naked, he in a suit of chain armour,--for he had adopted a method which Ithought, and must still think, exceedingly unfair. He assumed that he had private knowledge of the Divine Will, and he would meet my temporizing arguments by asseverations,--'So sure as my God liveth!' or by appeals to a higher authority,--'But what does my Lord tell me in Paul's Letter to the Philippians?' It was the prerogative of his faith to know, and of his character to overpower objection; between these two millstones I was rapidly ground to powder.
These 'discussions', as they were rather ironically called, invariably ended for me in disaster. I was driven out of my papier-mache fastnesses, my canvas walls rocked at the first peal from my Father's clarion, and the foe pursued me across the plains of Jericho until I lay down ignominiously and covered my face. I seemed to be pushed with horns of iron, such as those which Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah prepared for the encouragement of Ahab.
When I acknowledged defeat and cried for quarter, my Father would become radiant, and I still seem to hear the sound of his full voice, so thrilling, so warm, so painful to my over-strained nerves, bursting forth in a sort of benediction at the end of each of these one-sided contentions, with 'I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your heart by faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that you might be filled with the fullness of God.'
Thus solemn and thus ceremonious was my Father apt to become, without a moment's warning, on plain and domestic occasions;abruptly brimming over with emotion like a basin which an unseen flow of water has filled and over-filled.
I earnestly desire that no trace of that absurd self-pity which is apt to taint recollections of this nature should give falsity to mine. My Father, let me say once more, had other interests than those of his religion. In particular, at this time, he took to painting in water-colours in the open air, and he resumed the assiduous study of botany. He was no fanatical monomaniac.
Nevertheless, there was, in everything he did and said, the central purpose present. He acknowledged it plainly; 'with me,' he confessed, 'every question assumes a Divine standpoint and is not adequately answered if the judgement-seat of Christ is not kept in sight.'
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 realize 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 my 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.
