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Now that I was twelve years old my mother decided that I ought to be sent to a boarding school. It was to be a small private school, for she had heard too much evil of large public schools to care to send her only son to them. Moreover, our means were not sufficient for an expensive education. We lived, indeed, in ease and comfort, from a lower middle-class point of view, on my father's earnings as sea-captain under more prosperous conditions than have always prevailed in the merchant service since, and on a small income of my mother's, and until I left home I never knew what money worries meant—though I have often had occasion to know in the years that have followed—but as my parents always lived well within their means a lavish expenditure even on so important a matter as education was out of the question. My mother accordingly visited a school at Mitcham which, from what she had heard, seemed likely to furnish a desirable education at a moderate cost. The house was large and old—one of the numerous houses wherein Queen Elizabeth is said once to have slept—and my mother was of course shown over it with all due consideration. But the ill-ventilated schoolroom full of boys smelt so fusty and dirty that she conceived a dislike of the place and came away without making any arrangements. On her way back to Tooting Station she had to pass another school, The Poplars—a curious old wooden house, long since pulled down, though the brick schoolroom yet stands—facing an open triangular space with a pond which we called Frogs' Marsh. She entered, and was so pleased with everything here that she arranged at once with the headmaster to send me to him, although the terms were higher than she had proposed to pay. I was to be a weekly boarder, for my mother, though she never made any similar arrangements for her daughters, wished to preserve a home influence over her son and to direct his religious education.

My mother was pleased with the ways of The Poplars, but it is not possible to make any high claims for its educational methods. My headmaster, Mr. Albert Grover, was an oddity, a tall middle-aged man, looking much older than his years, with a long grey beard, a bald head, and a blind eye. He had some resemblance to Darwin, but he cherished much contempt for that great man's doctrines, and even published a little anti-Darwinian pamphlet in doggerel verse which so nearly verged on the obscene that it could not be sold on railway bookstalls. Grover had a weakness for verse; he liked to teach facts and dates in doggerel, such as:

"Preston Pans and Fontenoy

Were fought in 1745, my boy."

He even introduced that method into his punishments, and I recall how a little boy had to stand on the form during breakfast-time in the presence of the master's wife and daughter and the whole of the school, repeating:

"Oh! Oh! Oh!

I'm the little boy who broke the pot."

But Mrs. Grover, too, was an oddity—a queer small boyish woman, with short curly hair, rarely seen then in women, and also frank of speech. It was told how she had once entered a bedroom, at a moment when a boy chanced to be naked, and how, as he modestly placed his hands before him, she reassuringly remarked: "It's not the first time I've seen a little cuckoo."

It would be easy to write amusingly of the life at The Poplars, but beneath its eccentricities it was essentially commonplace and old-fashioned, quite comfortable, certainly, and without hardship. So far as my headmaster was concerned, the influence of school upon me was neither good nor evil. He was a kindly man who always treated me well. I do not remember that he ever punished me or ever had cause to, but he inspired no love for any kind of learning, and I continued, as I had begun, without aptitude for formal studies. (It has always amused me in later life when I have come across references to my "learning" or my "scholarship.") I learnt no Greek at all, though I taught myself a little some years later; I plodded blunderingly through Latin, and cannot read any Latin author easily even now; I was, as I always remained, a blockhead at even the simplest mathematical problem; in Euclid, however, I showed a certain facility and rather enjoyed its logic, for reason and clarity have always appealed to me, and I am not surprised when I am told that my writings translate peculiarly well into the Latin tongues, in which those qualities most prevail. In any art I may sometimes be fascinated by the romantically obscure, but it is to the classic (though not the pseudo-classic) that my admiration instinctively goes out: I am repelled by the shapeless and the unintelligible. At Merton, with a head master who was himself of French origin, I was well-grounded in that language, and now at Mitcham I had the good fortune to find eventually—for he was preceded by three others, one a typical Pole, whose engagement proved brief—a resident French master who really loved his work and taught with thoroughness and enthusiasm. His name was Joseph Stevens; he came from Douai and was, as his name might lead one to expect, of distinctly Flemish type, slender and fair, a simple single-minded man with no interests beyond his work. I frequently associated with him outside school hours and my knowledge of French literature now began and rapidly progressed. Stevens had some knowledge of other languages besides French, and with a little help from him I began on my own account and in my own time (in which also I was keeping up my practice on the piano) to master the elements of German and Italian. My interest in French, and in modern languages generally, simply as instruments to bring me nearer to contemporary life and contemporary literature and contemporary peoples, has been of inestimable value to my work, as well as a perpetual source of delight and of refreshment, and I am grateful to Joseph Stevens, I do not say for implanting but for stimulating and fostering it.

The English assistant master, however, Angus Mackay, had a far more vital and profound influence upon me than Stevens. He came to the school soon after I entered, and he remained when, four years afterwards, I left. I still recall him as he paced the garden on the first evening of his arrival, a short, sturdy figure with bent head. Though scarcely twenty years of age, he had already struggled against many difficulties and seen much of life. A Highlander on one side (his father had been an accomplished "Royal Piper" but died early after, I believe, a rather dissolute life), English on the other, he fortunately reaped all the congenital advantages that may sometimes come of such mixture of blood. A dreamer and a poet, eager in intelligence and strong in enthusiasm, he was at the same time keen-sighted, energetic, practical, robust, a man of wholesome and pure instincts, a sanguine optimist, hearty in his friendships, equally downright in his contempt for all shams and pretences wherever they might be found. Struggling in poverty for his education (as also was his sister at the same time and with eventual success, for she founded a prosperous school), he had supported himself first as an office boy, then as a city clerk; now he felt able to take the post of assistant master in a school while further studying for a degree at London University. After that, he proposed to enter the Church. His religious views were those of the so-called Broad Church—that is to say, he followed Carlyle, Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, F. D. Maurice and F. W. Robertson—while he was also in personal touch with Baldwin Brown, a distinguished divine of the Congregational Church. In politics he was, of course, Liberal, not to say Radical. It was, however, to literature, and especially to poetry, that he had been devoted. He had himself already published two little volumes of verse, strongly marked by the influence of Wordsworth and Tennyson, and one of these, An Artist's Idylls, had even gone into a second edition; he knew thoroughly the English poetic literature of the first half of the nineteenth century, and he had some acquaintance with contemporary poetic movements, while he was also familiar with many of the great English novelists and an ardent admirer of several contemporary novelists, especially Thomas Hardy, whose Far From the Madding Crowd was then about to appear in the Cornhill, which Mackay placed in my hands.

It is evident that to the shy sensitive solitary boy of twelve who had just arrived at Mitcham, however precocious in some mental respects he was, this man, full of the life and energy of the outer world, and inspired by its culture, was as it were a God-given revelation. He led me into that world. I had travelled round the earth, but I had never in my life conversed with a cultured, intellectual man. My mother was a liberallyminded Evangelical and I knew of no other religious views, except as a vague rumour of objectionable things; she was a Conservative in politics, or, as she later used to say, a Liberal-Conservative, and I had no idea that any reasonable creature held any other views. I had read Milton and Keats, Scott's Marmion, some of Shakespeare's plays, and various other standard poets with more or less tepid interest, and Longfellow had spoken to my youthful heart; in Scott's novels I had revelled. But I had scarcely so much as heard the names of Shelley, of Mrs. Browning, of George Eliot, whose works were now placed before me, and for all of whom I was soon to acquire a love that for a period was almost passion. I still remember the day when, during a school walk, Mackay first mentioned to me the names of Rossetti, Swinburne and Morris, none of which I had heard before, but all poets destined to mean much to me and one to be known personally. If, indeed, I were to repeat all the names that Mackay first mentioned to me I should have to cover the whole nineteenth century in England and more. It was not, however, merely that many great manifestations of the human spirit were now first brought before me. That was bound to happen soon. It lay, even more, in the stimulus of contact with my friend's vigorous mind, for our relationship was soon that of friends rather than of master and pupil. It was scarcely possible for him to speak a sentence that did not strike sharply across the beliefs and conventions that I had grown up in, that I had accepted, without ever thinking about them. For the first time I realised that there were great questions and problems in life, great aspirations beyond one's own personal longings, great ideals to be passionately fought for. A touch had awakened my soul and my intellect; they were now to work at no man's bidding, not even Mackay's—who, indeed, never consciously sought to influence me—but in accordance with the laws of their own inborn nature. For years, however, Mackay was a banner that waved before me on the road to fresh spiritual conquests.*

[* I wrote this in the summer of 1905, at Carbis. Shortly afterwards, Mackay, who knew nothing of what I had written, came to spend a few days with me in Brixton. It was the last time I saw him. Six months later he died of a rapidly developed cancerous tumour in the brain. At that time he had an Anglican church (Holy Trinity) in Edinburgh, had published several notable books, especially one on the Brontës, and was beginning to make a name for himself.]

I was fortunate in my French master; I was fortunate, indeed, in my English master; in more recent years it has been a regret to me that I never had an equally congenial science master, or at all events some friend to whom the scientific spirit and scientific methods were a reality. Mackay had no native scientific tastes. I was myself, I believe, instinctively possessed of the scientific spirit and independently anxious to gain scientific knowledge. I obtained and studied elementary manuals of natural philosophy, chemistry, and geology; botany chiefly interested me (there, as in some other respects, I seem to see the East Anglican temperament emerging). I studied flowers with the aid of books. But I never had a single scientific lesson of the most elementary kind at school, and I never met anyone who had learnt to observe, or really loved, Nature in her processes. I was never even taught drawing, to my life-long regret, for that at all events is a discipline in exact observation, and as a child I had a certain amount of natural taste for it. My mother preferred instead to teach me music at home at the domestic piano, and for that I had no real aptitude, though a considerable amount of love. (I even, though entirely ignorant of the science of music, "composed" and wrote down a few short pieces.) I had as a child read and enjoyed Maria Edgeworth's Harry and Lucy, which was written to guide boys and girls into the paths of elementary science by story and play. But if I had personally known someone who could have shown me how our daily life is full of chemical problems, someone to whom the names, structures and uses of plants were familiar, someone who would have made me feel the vital mechanism of animals and men, I should probably have been greatly helped and saved from wasting much time. I had an instinct for exact measurement; at the age of twelve, or earlier, I was measuring the varying lengths of the urinary stream, and at seventeen I discovered for myself the fact that stature varies during the day. But it was not until I became a student at St. Thomas's Hospital, at the age of twenty-one, that I really began to learn to observe accurately and to comprehend the scientific temper. I discovered then how rare that temper is among professional men of science.

So far as my masters were concerned, my life at Mitcham would have been from first to last a peaceful and happy period of more or less spontaneous mental development. But for a considerable time it was made a hell by the influence of one boy. I shared a large bedroom with two boys, both several years older than I was. One of them was of quiet and inoffensive temperament when left to himself, but he was always willing to become the tool and partner of the third boy. This third boy, Willie Orr, may, for all that I know, have possessed many fine latent qualities. But he was one of those youths whose irresistible impulse it is to bully and dominate those who are too young or too timid to resist them. His father was a colonel in the Indian army; young Orr was probably fond of riding (later he appropriately joined the Indian Frontier Mounted Police, dying young) and in the absence of a horse he conceived the idea of using me in that capacity. In order to carry out the idea in a manner quite satisfactory to himself he made spurs in which pins formed the working portion; every night he mounted my back with his spurs on and rode me round and round the room in my night shirt, handing me over to the other boy when he was himself tired of the exercise. (I should add that nothing else, nothing of the slightest sexual character, ever took place.) To a shy, sensitive and reserved boy, one, moreover, who had never been harshly treated, these performances were an acute nervous torture, out of all proportion to any pain actually inflicted. I had no instincts of pugnacity, and the idea of attacking or resisting a robust and brutal boy older and bigger than myself never occurred to me. I performed the required duties much as a real animal would have done, without articulate protest or complaint, until my mother, discovering something amiss with me, made me confess what was going on, and came to interview Mr. Grover. I was then placed in another room, which I shared pleasantly with a boy of character congenial to my own. But I am inclined to think that the suffering I had silently endured was not without evil influence on my nervous system. I was just then at the critical period of puberty. While subjected to this treatment, at about the age of thirteen, copious seminal emissions began to take place during sleep, once or twice a week, always without dreams or any sensations, and continued, whenever I was alone, for some thirty years. Doubtless my temperament predisposed me to such manifestations, though my thoughts and my habits were, at this period, alike free from any physically sensual tincture, but I incline to think that the state of nervous excitement in which every night I fell asleep was a factor in causing this lack of nervous stability in the new function then developing. The emissions were themselves a source of nervous apprehension, for I vaguely felt they were something to be ashamed of; I constantly dreaded their occurrence and feared their detection.

I was now entering on the period of adolescence, and it is time to describe what sort of boy I was in the eyes of those with whom I associated. When a baby, I had been, as the son of well-developed, healthy and mature parents might be expected to be, a large and robust infant, and I have already said how I appeared, on my mother's lap, in all the happy insolence of vigorous babyhood, in my earliest portraits which Olive Schreiner borrowed and lost, and how in the next portrait, that happy, careless air gone, I appear as a small child, in a frock, gazing out at the world of human beings with a look of nervous anxiety and doubt, a look which, whether or not it has gone out of my face, has scarcely yet altogether gone out of my heart. It was a portrait that much appealed to my wife, but foolishly remembering the fate of the earlier portrait, I went on postponing a promise I had made to give it to her, though she often reminded me of it, until it was too late. At the age of seven, in a photograph taken in Sydney, I appear with a sensitive but composed face (at this time it was said of me that I always looked as if I had just been taken out of a band-box), and again at the beginning of the Mitcham period I am seen, now tall but still with the same expression, and an added air of self-consciousness. My height, I may say, when full grown was 5 ft. 10½ ins. My weight has never been considerable (usually around 150 pounds), for I am not thickly developed and have never been stout, though, on the other hand, I am not excessively slight or at all emaciated. Olive Schreiner said once of my nude form that it was like that of Christ in the carpenter's shop in Holman Hunt's "Shadow of the Cross." I am fairly well formed and proportioned, without congenital blemish or defect at any point, and the skin is of fine texture, though not, I think, of feminine quality. The legs are well developed, the arch of the instep unusually high, the great toe the longest. The chest is not narrow but the arms are relatively less developed than the legs, and the knuckles of the fingers are slightly prominent; in this I am unlike my eldest sister, whose hands are of aristocratic and fine shape. My eyes are commonly called grey, occasionally blue; I call them green—that is to say, blue with brown circles round the irises—and my hair, which was light brown, became a dark brown, and began to turn grey towards the age of forty. It seems intermediate between that of my mother, which was rather auburn, approaching sandy in the eyebrows, and that of my father, which in mature life had been a brown approaching black. His eyes in early life were said to be hazel, but in later life they were certainly more nearly blue. My hair was and remains remarkably thick on the head; the beard, lighter in tone, sparse and rather straggling. I may add here that my mother when she kissed me used often to say that my cheeks were scented, and my wife, who has frequently made the same remark, has also said that my cast-off shirts have a distinct odour of cedar. My face was not remarkable in adolescence, and the occasional presence of acne pimples was a source of distress which increased the humble self-consciousness I felt concerning my personal appearance. It is rather a short face; the chin, with the large dimple in it (seemingly inherited from the Havelocks) is, I have been told, lacking in strength; the nostrils are broad, and at the base of the nose is a marked indentation which my mother used to think was caused by the forceps at my birth, but that is unlikely, and a similar indentation may be noted in various men of marked intellectual force and large heads. My mouth is broad and opens widely, showing large white teeth, finely formed and regular but not of strong texture, for they began to decay early, and with the carelessness of youth I neglected them. Dentally I resemble my mother, for my father's teeth were almost perfect at the age of seventy. The facility with which my teeth appear caused my schoolfellows to compare me, quite unjustly, with that Roman Ignatius who smiled much to show his good teeth. Internally my palate has a well-marked antero-posterior central ridge, the torus palatinus. My head is large, 23 inches at the greatest circumference, and I have sometimes had difficulty in finding a hat to fit. In the absence of exact measurements, I should say it is mesocephalic; it is certainly well removed from dolichocephaly. In later days, on the whole, I hear that my head is called "noble," and that my eyes are bright and, when I look anyone in the face, beautiful, but that the lower part of my face is rather "weak." There is, I may add, a peculiarity in the profile of the lower jaw which is probably characteristic. I have never been able to analyse it precisely, nor to say definitely that it is due to prognathism, but when the head is raised there is, in some aspects, a slightly ape-like suggestion. Boys are quick to catch the faintest abnormalities, and my schoolfellows at Mitcham sometimes, quite good-naturedly, would call me "Baboon." I must admit the justice of the epithet, for something analogous, both in my face and in my nature, has been visible to those who have known me most intimately and most sympathetically. When in the National Gallery once with Olive Schreiner before Rubens' "Silenus," she laughingly noted my resemblance to the eager, bright-eyed satyr to the right in the picture; and I must now add that more than thirty years later a dear friend loves to call me "Faun." Edward Carpenter, with the quiet twinkle of his luminous eyes, once said of me: "He is the god Pan."*

[* Many years later he brought the same point into a personal description in his autobiography, My Days and Dreams.]

At the same time quite as many who have known me well—even among those who called me a satyr—have half seriously and half in play remarked a resemblance to Jesus Christ. My wife has often told me that I am a mixture of a satyr and Christ. Both points had before been noted by Olive Schreiner. I first heard of the resemblance to Jesus from a fellow student at St. Thomas's who, when I was one day sitting on a bench awaiting a surgical demonstration, leant over to me from another bench at right angles where he was sitting and said with a dry smile: "You remind me of Jesus Christ." I frequently heard of similar remarks in the years that followed. The fact that, owing to the thickness of my hair, I had adopted the fashion of parting it in the middle, may have had something to do with this. I do not think it was generally taken to be a resemblance flagrantly in contrast with my satyr air. Nor would I myself see any contrast. Pan and the satyrs were divinities of Nature, as was Jesus on another plane. The wild being of the woods who knelt in adoration before the secret beauty of sleeping nymphs was one at heart with the Prophet who could see no more than a passing stain of sin in the wanton woman kissing his feet.

These similitudes may suggest that there was about me something slightly anomalous. It probably was so. Although my ancestry has been English in the narrowest sense for some centuries at least, and probably much longer, my physiognomy is not English. Foreign physicians curious in such matters (like my friend by correspondence, Paul Näcke, when he received my photograph) have made this remark, and its truth has often been brought home to me. I have been taken for a Spaniard in England, and in Spain Spaniards have often taken me for a fellow-countryman. "Monsieur est russe?" asked the new landlord when I alighted at the Hôtel Corneille in Paris. "Flamand?" It never occurred to him, until his wife suggested it, that I belonged to the nationality most often found abroad. The Russian character of my physiognomy must be marked; a Russian lady in the British Museum once addressed me as evidently a fellow-countryman, and more than one friend has told me that I resembled the early portraits of Tolstoy. It is perhaps significant that the peoples I was thus thought to resemble are peoples with whom I feel a special degree of affinity or sympathy.

It is evident that from boyhood I possessed a rather strongly marked and peculiar face, however emphasised this may have become with years; for it seems due more to its natural structure than to any acquired impress on the muscles. It is curious to me that as a boy I had a great horror of acquiring an artificially moulded and wrinkled face. I used to observe myself carefully in the glass, so as to be able to nip in the bud any wrinkling of forehead or contraction of lips. This was by no means from fear of impairing good looks, for I never imagined I had any, but solely because my natural and instinctive ideal involved a fluid receptivity of mind, an openness to impressions which was hostile to all rigidity and fossilised restraint, and I felt, doubtless rightly, that the hardening of mind and heart had its outward expression in a tightly contracted face. The idea, which thus seems to have arisen in me naturally, persisted for many years, whether or not it had any influence on the character of my face.

Facial variation from the average of one's race and family, however slight, doubtless indicates some degree of nervous and psychic variation. That also was certainly present, and I believe the germ of it was inherited from my mother. My father, with his cheerful and superficial temperament, has always been wholesomely normal, in nervous function as in all else. He never knew what it meant to have a headache, and he seems to have known equally little of nervousness or of shyness. In contrast to me, he was sociable and always able to meet the demands of social life, not indeed brilliantly but adequately and pleasantly; he has always easily won the liking and regard of men and women of all ages and classes. My mother, with all her fine and deep convictions, and a personality outwardly dignified and impressive, was beneath the surface congenitally emotional, shy, nervous, diffident, anxious, frequently uncomfortable in the presence of strangers, and only able to meet many ordinary eventualities of life with an effort of will and, I believe, secret prayer. This is my temperament also, and in a more marked degree. I am bold and fearless in abstract matters, or when questions of principle are involved, but in small practical matters I usually prefer to follow a leader. When left to myself in the details of life, I am apt to be cautious, nervous, self-suspicious, haunted by doubts when I have to choose between two courses of action, and tortured by the thought that the course I have rejected may have been the better. I cannot quite escape this tendency even when it is only a matter of choosing a dish at a restaurant, and my wife is always amused that I wait till she has chosen and then usually make the same choice. This temperament alone would probably have stood in the way of success as a practitioner of medicine, though, in art as in science, it is helpful since it aids self-criticism. I have never been the victim of any definite morbid impulse, phobia, or obsession, but the mother liquid out of which such things crystallise is for ever flowing in my veins. In early life I was shy to an almost painful extent. During the whole of adolescence and later I suffered from a tendency to blush from slight causes or no cause at all. Until late in life I found it difficult to look people in the eye, not, it seems, because I minded them looking into my eyes, but because there seemed to me something intimate and sacred in looking into the eyes of others; to meet a stranger's eye casually gives me a slight nervous shock and has often caused my lips to twitch involuntarily into a sort of momentary pout. Any kind of position or action which would attract public attention I find highly embarrassing, and for the most part impossible, though as a child I seem to have had nothing of this feeling and on the Empress, at the age of seven, I would sing to the piano and enjoy the applause. I have never made even the shortest speech in public. This, with the diffidence it involves, renders me inapt for social intercourse; there is nothing I find so depressing and so oppressive, even so absurd, as ordinary social intercourse in a roomful of strangers, as generally practised by the men and women of the age into which I have been born. Whether the twenty-first century will differ in this respect from the twentieth I cannot guess. I am, moreover, awkward in movement, though not to any notable extent. I always find it difficult, as my wife has frequently told me, to conduct myself skilfully at a dinner table—though I believe I have improved under her training—or even to eat with becoming propriety, and although as a boy I played cricket and the ordinary school games, I never achieved any real skill in them, and football suited me best. This awkwardness can scarcely be the result of defective training; it seems rooted in an organic inborn lack of nervous stability. Many of my larger muscles, especially of the leg, are in frequent fibrillar activity. (I have just now, at the age of sixty-eight, found it possible to verify this observation, though the movement has become less frequent.) I first observed this at about the age of twenty-three, when I was perhaps working too hard at my medical studies. There is also a slight unsteadiness of the smaller muscles, which is not visible but makes finer movements of any kind difficult. My handwriting has always been lacking in backbone and is frequently illegible, though as a small boy, and even now, I could always write a clear and orderly hand by taking the requisite trouble. My first schoolmaster used to say, aptly enough, that I kept a tame spider to write for me, and Grover would remark with an air of resignation: "You will have a hand of your own, my boy." In this matter I inherit to some extent from my father, but his handwriting, though invertebrate, was uniform and legible. Although I am right-handed except in the single action of throwing a stone or ball, I am inclined to think that congenitally I may be left-handed, and that my right-handedness is the artificial result of training, the spontaneous tendency only showing itself in the untrained act of throwing. So much for the anatomical and physiological characters, in such degree as I consider them significant, on which my psychic characteristics have arisen.

To complete the picture I should add something as regards my health during this early period of life. Though a healthy breast-fed baby, at some period in childhood it seems that I ailed somewhat and was taken by my mother from time to time to see London physicians, occasionally to a noted homaeopathist who had been recommended to her. I cannot recall in the slightest degree what my symptoms were; they were certainly not severe, and I gather that the physician sometimes thought that, as is probable, my mother was unduly nervous about me. It is possible, though this I doubt, that the beginning had taken place of a recurrent malady which tortured me at intervals in later boyhood and during the whole of adolescence.

I cannot remember when this disorder appeared; it certainly occurred at fairly frequent intervals soon after the age of twelve; it would come on rather suddenly with intense pain and tenderness in (if I remember rightly) the right side of the abdomen, the region of the caecum, a dull sickening unintermittent pain; at its worst I could only lie on my back with thighs flexed, so as to relieve the pressure of the abdominal walls. Vomiting always occurred. Eating and sleeping, any mental or physical activity, were alike impossible. Sometimes the attack lasted for hours, sometimes for days, and recovery was always slow, tenderness remaining for some time. The doctors I was taken to could evidently make nothing of the case (Dr. Carpenter, I remember, on a second visit to him, mistakenly recalled the seat of pain as being oil the opposite side), and they did nothing to relieve it. Nowadays, I feel certain, it would be regarded as a recurrent form of appendicitis. (Half a century later, and long after this narrative was first written, one day when staying at my third sister's house at Tunbridge Wells, in robust health, after a rapid two-mile walk to catch a train I had a sudden attack of duodenal ulcer, the presence of which I had not detected, and a night of excruciating agony, followed by several weeks in bed, the first severe illness of my life. Appendicitis is regarded as a frequent precursor of duodenal ulcer, and this tends to confirm my diagnosis.) As to the cause, J can only suggest that it was connected with indigestion. My digestion was never vigorous; in that I resembled my mother; my father's had always been perfect, like all his functions. The attacks occurred most usually when I was at home, and our midday dinner was a simple and copious meal, of, most usually, a solid joint of meat, potatoes and cabbage, suet pudding or fruit pie, with a little English ale until my mother became a total abstainer. It was an excellent meal for a plough-boy, but for me such a combination, as I now recognise, is very like a poison, especially if eaten without care and deliberation. And unfortunately I was, if I do not indeed still remain, an incurably rapid eater.

These attacks gradually died down and had almost or quite disappeared by the time I was twenty; but they merged into a chronic tendency to dyspepsia which has more or less seriously incapacitated me and greatly contributed to render me inapt for social functions. If I am leading a healthy and leisurely existence, much out in the open air, free from mental strain, able to control the conditions of my daily life and my meals—which should consist, if possible, of several small dainty dishes, served at fairly long intervals, and with rest after the meal—then I am usually able to escape my demon of dyspepsia. But any slight aberration may nullify other favourable conditions, and then a feeling of gastric swelling and discomfort slowly increases and tends to become paroxysmal in character; I grow more and more wretched, stupid, silent, absorbed in the consciousness of visceral conditions, and unless I am free by a voluntary effort of pseudo-vomiting to relieve the stomach of gas, pressure on the heart causes faintness, and once or twice, in a theatre and in a restaurant, I have actually fainted for a few moments from this cause, the only occasions in my life that I ever have fainted. When the condition becomes intolerable I usually invent an excuse to escape, but I expect that my unexplained stupidity has sometimes left an ineffaceably bad impression on kind hosts. I am inclined to suspect that, like Nietzsche, I have some dilatation of stomach, but the suspicion remains unverified. It was this constantly recurring dyspepsia which caused me to overlook the symptoms of duodenal ulcer until actual haemorrhage occurred. (With the approach of old age, after the attack of duodenal ulcer, when dieting became imperative and self-control easier, and especially when I had learnt the benefit of avoiding much fluid at meals, the condition improved and seldom caused more than minor inconvenience.)

On the whole, though not robust, I was a fairly healthy boy. As a child I had none of the usual childish fevers, except a slight attack of chicken-pox. I have never throughout life had any long or dangerous illness. (Needless to say, the duodenal attack occurred many years after this was written.) When I was about thirteen I had a slight feverish illness which the family doctor seems to have thought was possibly a touch of typhoid, and he declared that I had "no stamina" and that I was "threatened with consumption." The threat was never realised—though my eldest sister afterwards developed this disease—but the observation about the absence of stamina probably contained an element of truth. I mean to say that there are some persons whose nervous systems seem to be of such tough fibre that they can stand prolonged strain without apparently feeling it, and can work at high tension during long periods, the resulting collapse, when at last it appears, being, however, serious and leaving often a life-long nervous weakness. I am not of that type; I am sensitive to the earliest signs of nervous stress; rest or, rather, change, speedily becomes a necessity; I bend and so I never break. This kind of temperament is associated with the fact that, for me, all work must be of the nature of play. If it is work, as work is usually understood, I find it arduous. So that when people tell me they wonder at the amount of work I get through, I honestly, if not truthfully, answer: "Work? Why, I never work at all; I only play." If I had not always been sensitive to the signs of nervous strain, and almost instinctively careful to guard against them, I might have become a nervous wreck. When I was about twenty-one, living at home at the beginning of my medical studies, while at the same time my literary activity began to develop, my brain became very active, full of ideas I wanted to work out; I began to suffer from sleeplessness which I treated myself by occasional doses of bromide or chloral. I quickly realised the necessity of good hygiene; I made it a rule not to work late at night, and never to occupy myself with any literary work in the evening or to read any exciting book. This rule I have seldom broken; I like to read before going to sleep, but always an unexciting book; an architectural book or magazine just now I find best, for it is always interesting and yet soothing to me. The result is that I have never again suffered seriously from sleeplessness and never again been tempted to take any soporific drug.

This kind of nervous temperament has been allied, happily, no doubt, with that instinctive temperance which, as I have already said, I inherit from my father's family. It is the English form of that quality which the Greeks praised, whether or not they possessed it. Not only is every kind of excess repugnant to me, both mentally and emotionally, but I have not the organisation which would lend itself to excess. This seems to me a fundamental characteristic. I think it has coloured the whole of my moral ideal. I am on the side of freedom and nature. I look for the coming of Thelema and I accept its ethical rule: "Fais ce que vouldras." I know that, so far as I am concerned, while I am living a free and healthy life I am not likely to hurt either myself or others by doing what I like, and it seems to me that this is more or less true of most people. But there are some persons—a minority, I feel sure, and perhaps a congenitally abnormal minority—of whom this is not true. These people have the temperament of excess; they seem to crave for the hard bit and the tight rein; there may well be some doubt as to whether my code of morals would suit them. I can only say that if these people are, as I believe, a minority—though, as I well know, often very fascinating, very lovable—we must make our moral rules to suit our majority. The main point, certainly, is to find the law of one's own nature.

I left school at the age of sixteen, and for a time lived at home (now at Wandsworth Common), making myself useful by acting as tutor to my two elder sisters, both younger than I was. What my occupation was to be, how I was to earn my living, I had not the slightest idea. My formal education was over, and though it had been a little above my parents' means, I had not been educated for any profession or employment. Nor, though full of eager interests, was there any career that I wanted to enter. Like the youthful Diderot, I wanted to be nothing, absolutely nothing, though, as for him, "nothing" for me meant something not very far removed from "everything." By inborn temperament I was, and have remained, an English amateur; I have never been able to pursue any aim that no passionate instinct has drawn me towards. At this period I was at the beginning of adolescence. My thoughts were much occupied with ideal dreams of women and love; my attitude towards life was embodied in an "Ode to Death," in which I implored Death to bear me away from the world on gentle wings, although at the same time I had no thought of taking any steps to aid Death in this task. Yet the lack of vocation on earth troubled me much, and also caused some mild concern to my parents, though they never put any pressure on me to bring this uncertainty to an end. My father was too easy-natured for that, and my mother had too much faith in God, and too much faith in her son's abilities. "Do not worry about Harry," she said to my father, probably about this time, and with a confidence which impressed him, for he told me of it many years later. She was right in her insight, but I have taken a great many years to realise that she was right. It seems likely that if literature could have presented itself to me as a possible career, that would have been the career to appeal to me. I loved reading; I had been writing verse and prose, out of the love of doing so, for some years. I had even sent letters to religious and other newspapers and seen my letters printed. But literature never presented itself to me as a means of livelihood, and, if it had, I lacked the ambition and self-confidence to believe that I could succeed in it; when, more than ten years later, I actually turned to literature as a vocation, it was as an editor rather than as a writer that I sought my living; I have never written for a living, only out of inner compulsion. Ambition I have never had—it is not a matter either for pride or for shame but merely of temperament—and the belief that I could win a position in the world never came until, late in life, the position was won. I have a certain dogged persistence in quietly keeping on my own path and working out my own nature; this obstinacy alone has brought me what success I have achieved, and the success thus gained was preceded by no enjoyment in imagination. The only possible career that wavered before my mind was that of religion. My mother, religious as she was, had never suggested it to me, and I was quite ignorant of the perhaps significant fact that many of my ancestors had been parsons. At least four years earlier I had fallen into the habit of carrying a little Testament in my pocket. Moreover, I had been stirred by the preaching of the Rev. Erck, the vicar of Merton, whose church my mother attended. I was at Merton Church every Sunday from the age of twelve to fifteen, when we left Wimbledon. I have already mentioned Erck, who only died last year (1910), as an extraordinarily eloquent and typically "Celtic" Irishman, shy and silent in private life, but a lion in the pulpit. I vaguely proposed to myself to become a minister but was not quite sure what Church I would enter (my friend Mackay at that time was more closely associated with the Congregationalists than with the Anglican Church, in which later he became a priest), and I still have a letter from Erck urging me to choose the Church of England on account of the greater "liberty of prophesying" that Church offered. I was destined to need an indeed large liberty of prophesying. Even when I received that letter (at the age of fifteen) it is probable that my own faith was already being subtly undermined, and my vague notion of entering the ministry was rapidly dissipated.

It was in the course of my reading that I slid almost imperceptibly off the foundation of Christian belief. No personal influence entered. I had never talked with an unbeliever on religious matters, indeed, I scarcely knew one, though I was aware that my uncle Joe, my father's youngest brother, was—although he had a special regard for my mother and she for him—a "free-thinker."*

[* When this was written, in 1911, he was still alive, the affectionate father of a large family, brought up away from the churches, to which they returned with avidity. He died of influenza and bronchitis in 1915, a few months after my father, whose death was a great shock to him, but he remained sprightly and alert to the last, a remarkable figure in old age; I sometimes met him at concerts, for he was musical, playing the 'cello and singing in the chorus at Handel Festivals.]

While still at school I had bought a cheap reprint of the English translation of Renan's Life of Jesus. It was probably the first "infidel" book I ever read. I read it carefully, with considerable admiration, though still from the Christian point of view, and the notes that I made on the margins of its pages were critical. But it served to familiarise me with the non-Christian standpoint. At the age of sixteen, when I left school, and was about to accompany my father on his ship, I purchased among other books for the voyage a second-hand copy of Swinburne's Songs Before Sunrise, and at the same time, or soon after reaching Sydney, the notorious Elements of Social Science (by George Drysdale), which I had somehow heard of. They both had an influence in stimulating the course of my thought away from Christianity, though the tone of the Elements was thoroughly uncongenial to me. To these I should probably add, as a subtler but deeper influence, the volume of Shelley's poems which at this age, and for two years later, was a greatly loved companion, read and often re-read. I now reach the great formative period of my life, when my destiny was finally sealed.

My father was soon to sail for Sydney, in the ship Surrey which he then commanded, with a large batch of government emigrants. I had just left school, and though in fairly good health and free from definite disease, I was not, as I perhaps never have been, robust. My parents doubtless bore in mind the report of the family doctor, as well as my recurring attacks of disabling abdominal pain. It occurred to them that the vigour of my health would probably be established, and the way prepared for my settlement in life, by a voyage round the world—before I began to earn my living. It was an idea that does credit to the fundamental wisdom of my parents, though they could not know how my whole life may be said to have hinged on this decision of theirs. I cannot recall that I greeted the plan with enthusiasm, for such a voyage was no novelty to me. But I certainly accepted it without demur, for at least it enabled me to postpone that melancholy problem of a money-earning occupation which lay so heavily on my thoughts. The Surrey was carrying emigrants, and no ordinary passengers are allowed on an emigrant ship, but the diffculty was overcome by putting me on the ship's articles as "captain's clerk," with the consent of the emigration officials, though one of them remarked at Plymouth, more or less jokingly, that I was a good size for my age and might cause havoc among the single girls. My father afterwards bantered me on the exemplary way in which I proved the groundlessness of that official's fear. Woman occupied an enormous place in my ideal life, but it never occurred to me to identify her with any one of the crowd of emigrant girls on board the Surrey.

My preparation for the voyage consisted mainly in a supply of books chosen by myself and bought with the aid of money supplied by my parents. They were mostly literary works of good quality in English and French, with a few in German. Some of the books I took with me I still possess, notably Spenser, Rabelais, and Faust. There were no real scientific books, except a few text-books procured with the object of working for matriculation at London University.

My father added a harmonium to my equipment, at least as much for his own sake as mine, for he sang and, like all his family, had a simple taste for music. I had been taught the piano some years earlier, chiefly by Miss Johnston, my mother's old friend (once a teacher in my grandmother's school), and I specially delighted in strumming some of Beethoven's sonatas, fragments of Schubert and Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words, though the last I outgrew; I never played well, but it was a useful method of emotional relief until the age of eighteen; since that age (when I left Carcoar) I believe I never touched the piano again. I said to myself that what I could not do well was not worth doing. Perhaps, also, I ceased to find emotional relief in the piano since my emotions were ceasing to be diffuse and taking on more definite forms. The harmonium, however, was not a sympathetic instrument to me, and the career of this particular instrument was brief. When we had only been a few weeks at sea a tremendous and abnormal wave struck the stern cabin, my father's and mine—fortunately when we were at breakfast—burst through the ports, swamped the saloon, injured the chronometers, and with much other destruction ruined the harmonium. I seem to have accepted this catastrophe with characteristic coolness, for years afterwards my father used to tell smilingly that my only remark was: "Does this often happen?" He himself had been perfectly cool, as indeed sailors have to be, for they live habitually in an atmosphere of impending catastrophe.

The Surrey left London on April 19th, 1875. From this date, and during the four years I spent in Australia, I kept a diary in a solid manuscript book purchased to this end, so that for the approaching formation period, when nearly all the seeds of my life's activities were sown, I could if I please—though I have not done so—check my recollection by the entries in this intimate contemporary record.

Except Olive Schreiner, none has ever read this diary, not even my wife, though it contains nothing I had any wish to hide from her; but to Olive, with her large tolerance and her active intellectual receptivity, it seemed in 1884 easy and natural to me to bare my inner self. I sometimes think that with increasing years and ill health she has become less tolerant, less receptive, but we have long been separated by all the waves of the Atlantic.*

[* A few years later when she came again to live in England I clearly realised how changed she had become in this respect. I remember how a young woman friend of hers once came to me and in a first interview told me of herself what, she said, one could not tell to Olive because one knew she would not be sympathetic.]

We proceeded from London to Plymouth to take on board the emigrants. During the few days here I recall that we stayed at Lucey's Hotel (a house which, many years later, I have looked around for in vain), and that one night my father took me to the theatre. I do not remember what we saw, but it was my first visit to the theatre. My mother possessed the moral objections of the Evangelical training to the theatre (though she had once taken me to a play at the Crystal Palace), and my father when at home adapted himself to her scruples, but at other times he shared the love of amusement natural to the sailor on shore. More vividly than the theatre I recall a visit to a lady at Devonport who had a charming daughter and a buxom girl friend, both a little over my own age. On the following day they visited the ship. The mother, who had evidently noticed my shy awkwardness, remarked that I needed "some jolly girl friends." That remark stayed in my memory. It was certainly true. I had never had girl friends of my own age; my sisters were much younger and still children; girl comrades might have despiritualised my ideas of women but would have wholesomely harmonised them.

My definite memories of the voyage are few. For the most part they are fused with all my memories cf voyages on the sea, with the magic of a sailing-ship—so exquisitely responsive to Nature, sometimes idly calm on a glassy ocean, sometimes swiftly driven onwards, furling and unfurling her canvas wings to the breeze—of the vast blue foam-crested rhythmic waves of the South Atlantic, of the wild free birds of the sea, above all the albatross and the gull. I most clearly picture myself laboriously struggling with the first pages of Faust, for it was not until a year or two later that I really gained some mastery of German through becoming absorbed in Heine. My chief interest during the voyage was certainly in the adolescent impulse to write verse. I had written verses from time to time since I first fell in love at the age of twelve. But now I vaguely had in mind the scheme of a whole drama. So far, although I had read much poetry, only three poets had deeply stirred me: first, of course, Longfellow, the supreme poetic evangelist to boyhood, at all events for my time, and, after that, Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh and Alexander Smith's Life Drama, two volumes that Mackay had lent me a year or so before I left England. Passages in Aurora Leigh had aroused my idealistic emotions to the highest point. But the Life Drama, with its extravagant Elizabethan imagery and its unrestrained emotionalism, probably made the most intimate appeal to my adolescent soul. The outline and the tone of the drama I proposed to write—so far as it had any definite outline and tone—were due to Alexander Smith's romantic poems, though I may also have been influenced by Bailey's Festus, which I had bought a little before and carefully read, with interest though no excitement. A number of fragments in blank verse were written during the voyage, and after that—nothing. I quickly realised that I had no strong native impulse in this direction. I confined myself henceforth in verse to translation and the sonnet, with an occasional lyric. In prose I wrote almost nothing until my last year in Australia; my early crude efforts had ceased before I left England. I learnt how to write verse before I seriously drew near prose. I think now it is the right course and that my instinct was sound.

When the ship entered Sydney Harbour and the Port Medical Officer came on board, he was informed by our ship's surgeon, Dr. Sheridan Hughes, that there were cases of chicken-pox among the emigrants. Hughes had discreetly kept this to himself, so it was a surprise as much to the captain as to everyone to find the Surrey ordered to the quarantine station, at a beautiful and solitary cove, in charge of an Irishman called Carroll. Hughes was Irish, too, a genial man and capable, but one to whom the writing of the simplest letter presented almost insuperable difficulties. So in the official correspondence which quarantine involved the "captain's clerk" was at last found useful. We were delayed at Spring Cove three weeks.

I have little recollection of the first weeks in Sydney, scarcely more than of my earlier visit to the same city ten years before. I remember that we continued, as was usual, to live on board while the ship was unloading at the Circular Quay which remains familiar to my memory. I remember that very soon after our arrival my father took me to a concert which was largely a recital by some famous violinist whose name I forget; it was the first time I had heard the solo violin and what a few years later was to become for me the most exquisite music in the world seemed at this first hearing to be really just the scraping of horsehair against catgut and so ludicrous that I could scarcely refrain from laughing. And I remember a visit to the theatre which produced an altogether different effect; Ristori was in Sydney and my father took me to see her in Pia de Tolumei and (in English) the sleep-walking scene in Macbeth; more than fifty years later (as I re-write these lines) I can see her still in both parts; for classic simplicity, for concentrated intensity with extreme economy of movement, I have never seen her acting excelled. I remember, again, that we used to go to dinner on Sundays to the house of the ship's agent, the Hon. G. A. Lloyd, a member of the Legislative Assembly and formerly Treasurer of the Colony; he had a tall and numerous family and after dinner we would all solemnly sing hymns round the piano. Of more significance for my fate was another acquaintance of my father's, Alfred Morris. He had been first mate when my father once took emigrants to Australia many years earlier, had married one of the girls on board, thrown up his post, and settled in Australia, where he had practised a number of employments, being a clever and versatile Welshman, well spoken and of good presence, but superficial and unstable, never able to persevere in the tasks he was fitted for, and, naturally, always failing in the others. At this moment he had just joined forces with another man also Hying on his wits, one Frederick Bevill, a baronet's son, born in France and lately from Japan, still youthful but enormously fat and correspondingly good-natured. They had taken a little office between Pitt Street and George Street and under a pompous name set up an educational agency. Now it happened that the Surrey was to proceed from Sydney to Calcutta, and Dr. Hughes had told my father that the Indian climate would be unsuitable for me. At this point Morris put in a suggestion and proposed that the General Educational Registration Association (that, I think, is what he called his little agency) should find me a post as assistant master at some Sydney school. This proposal was accepted, on my part, it seems, as easily as on my father's. Morris made no attempt to investigate my aptitude for such a position, but in one of his former functions as headmaster of a little school in Melbourne he wrote a glowing testimonial to my abilities, and therewith (since his name happened to be also that of a distinguished and better known headmaster in Melbourne) he was able in his function as agent to secure for me at once the post of assistant master at a good salary to Mr. Hole who had a private school, Fontlands, at Burwood near Sydney. Here I was settled without delay to the apparent satisfaction of everyone.

Therewith the first stage of my life ends. I now entered the world. I entered it indeed very thoroughly, without a single friend (except in so far as I can so count Morris), without anyone who cared for me in the whole southern hemisphere I had been dropped into. I am sure that I never myself realised how important a moment it was; I could not know how my whole fate in life hung on it. A little sign indeed I recall which at the outset indicated a new stage of mental development. For it was then, as I have already told, that I read The Pirate, brought with me from England, one of the few of Scott's novels I had never read, and that, for the first time, I found Scott wearisome. The inner world of my boyhood had imperceptibly slipped away. I realised with a pang that I should never open a volume of Scott's again. I never have. But I was about to open a book which held greater revelations than Scott could bring, and in Australia to find my own soul.