as i think of myself and all these glowing secrecies and hidden fancies within, walking along beside old siddons, and half listening to his instructive discourse, i see myself as though i was an image of all 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.
