The Project Gutenberg eBook, Father and Son, by Edmund Gosse

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Title: Father and Son

Author: Edmund Gosse

Release Date: November 28, 2004 [eBook #2540]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FATHER AND SON***

E-Text created by Martin Adamson
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Father and Son

A study of two temperaments

by Edmund Gosse

Der Glaube ist wie der Liebe:
Er Lasst sich nicht erzwingen.

Schopenhauer

PREFACE

AT the present hour, when fiction takes forms so ingenious and so
specious, it is perhaps necessary to say that the following
narrative, in all its parts, and so far as the punctilious
attention of the writer has been able to keep it so, is
scrupulously true. If it were not true, in this strict sense, to
publish it would be to trifle with all those who may be induced
to read it. It is offered to them as a _document_, as a record of
educational and religious conditions which, having passed away,
will never return. In this respect, as the diagnosis of a dying
Puritanism, it is hoped that the narrative will not be altogether
without significance.

It offers, too, in a subsidiary sense, a study of the development
of moral and intellectual ideas during the progress of infancy.
These have been closely and conscientiously noted, and may have
some value in consequence of the unusual conditions in which they
were produced. The author has observed that those who have
written about the facts of their own childhood have usually
delayed to note them down until age has dimmed their
recollections. Perhaps an even more common fault in such
autobiographies is that they are sentimental, and are falsified
by self-admiration and self-pity. The writer of these
recollections has thought that if the examination of his earliest
years was to be undertaken at all, it should be attempted while
his memory is still perfectly vivid and while he is still
unbiased by the forgetfulness or the sensibility of advancing
years.

At one point only has there been any tampering with precise fact.
It is believed that, with the exception of the Son, there is but
one person mentioned in