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.