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.