Father and Son | Page 7

We
have our house to ourselves and enjoy each other's society. If we move
we shall do longer be alone. The situation may be more favourable,
however, for Baby, as being more in the country. I desire to have no
choice in the matter, but as I know not what would be for our good, and
God knows, so I desire to leave it with Him, and if it is not His will we
should move, He will raise objections and difficulties, and if it is His
will He will make Henry [my Father] desirous and anxious to take the
step, and then, whatever the result, let us leave all to Him and not regret
it."
No one who is acquainted with the human heart will mistake this
attitude of resignation for weakness of purpose. It was not poverty of
will, it was abnegation, it was a voluntary act. My Mother, underneath
an exquisite amenity of manner, concealed a rigour of spirit which took
the form of a constant self-denial. For it to dawn upon her
consciousness that she wished for something, was definitely to
renounce that wish, or, more exactly, to subject it in every thing to what
she conceived to be the will of God.

This is perhaps the right moment for me to say that at this time, and
indeed until the hour of her death, she exercised, without suspecting it,
a magnetic power over the will and nature of my Father. Both were
strong, but my Mother was unquestionably the stronger of the two; it
was her mind which gradually drew his to take up a certain definite
position, and this remained permanent although she, the cause of it, was
early removed. Hence, while it was with my Father that the long
struggle which I have to narrate took place, behind my Father stood the
ethereal memory of my Mother's will, guiding him, pressing him,
holding him to the unswerving purpose which she had formed and
defined. And when the inevitable disruption came, what was
unspeakably painful was to realize that it was not from one, but from
both parents that the purpose of the child was separated.
My Mother was a Puritan in grain, and never a word escaped her, not a
phrase exists in her diary, to suggest that she had any privations to put
up with. She seemed strong and well, and so did I; the one of us who
broke down was my Father. With his attack of acute nervous dyspepsia
came an unexpected small accession of money, and we were able, in
my third year, to take a holiday of nearly ten months in Devonshire.
The extreme seclusion, the unbroken strain, were never repeated, and
when we returned to London, it was to conditions of greater amenity
and to a less rigid practice of 'the world forgetting by the world forgot'.
That this relaxation was more relative than positive, and that nothing
ever really tempted either of my parents from their cavern in an
intellectual Thebaid, my recollections will amply prove. But each of
them was forced by circumstances into a more or less public position,
and neither could any longer quite ignore the world around.
It is not my business here to re-write the biographies of my parents.
Each of them became, in a certain measure, celebrated, and each was
the subject of a good deal of contemporary discussion. Each was
prominent before the eyes of a public of his or her own, half a century
ago. It is because their minds were vigorous and their accomplishments
distinguished that the contrast between their spiritual point of view and
the aspect of a similar class of persons today is interesting and may, I
hope, be instructive. But this is not another memoir of public

individuals, each of whom has had more than one biographer. My
serious duty, as I venture to hold it, is other;
that's the world's side, Thus men saw them, praised them, thought they
knew them! There, in turn, I stood aside and praised them! Out of my
own self, I dare to phrase it.
But this is a different inspection, this is a study of
the other side, the novel Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of,
the record of a state of soul once not uncommon in Protestant Europe,
of which my parents were perhaps the latest consistent exemplars
among people of light and leading.
The peculiarities of a family life, founded upon such principles, are, in
relation to a little child, obvious; but I may be permitted to recapitulate
them. Here was perfect purity, perfect intrepidity, perfect abnegation;
yet there was also narrowness, isolation, an absence of perspective, let
it be boldly admitted, an absence of humanity. And there was a curious
mixture of humbleness and arrogance;