Van Gogh (26 page)

One thing
was
clear, however: Vincent was not happy. He wrote his parents melancholy letters complaining about the job, the school, and his loneliness (the students were on their summer break). “He is going through a difficult time,” they reported to Theo; “his life is not easy.” “I think it’s a matter of dreading his work among the boys,” Anna concluded. “I think he is afraid that he will fail.”
She flatly predicted that Vincent “will not be able to stay in that profession.” He needed a new direction that would “mold him for everyday life” and “make his life happier and calmer.” She even offered a suggestion: “I wish he could work in nature or art—that would be grounds for hope.”

It wasn’t until August that Vincent found his direction again, and it wasn’t the one his mother suggested. Only two days before a planned visit to see Harry Gladwell, who was spending the summer holidays with his family outside London, Vincent received word that Harry’s seventeen-year-old sister had died in a riding accident. He immediately set out on the six-hour walk, crossing London “from one end to the other.” He arrived just as
the mourning family returned from the funeral. The “spectacle of pain” overwhelmed him. He felt “something truly holy” in the house and longed to connect with it, but couldn’t. “I felt a kind
of shyness and shame,” he confessed to Theo the next day. “I wanted to console [them], but I felt embarrassed.”

Only with his old friend Harry could Vincent play the role that burned inside him. On a long walk, they talked “about everything,” Vincent wrote, “the kingdom of God, the Bible,” just as they had in Paris. As they paced up and down the train platform, Vincent poured forth a manic, sermonlike stream of consolation. In that moment, he said, he felt “the ordinary world” suddenly “animated by thoughts that were not
ordinary.”

Soon after that, he decided to become a preacher.

FOR VINCENT, PREACHING
meant only one thing: consolation. At the core of its theology, where Catholicism put sin and punishment, the Dutch Reformed Church put solace. The “unspeakable consolation” of a watchful, caring God filled the church’s founding documents, the Formularies of Unity. In the embattled religious outpost of Zundert, a preacher’s first duty was to comfort, not to convert. Dorus van Gogh provided
spiritual consolation and financial support to his precarious flock. At times of sickness and death, he brought them proof against loneliness in this life and affirmation of a higher love in the next. In ordinary times, he calmed their worries and quieted their fears. His sermons did not educate or illuminate so much as weave warm blankets of “healing words” from familiar strands of scripture and anecdote.

No one, of course, needed the balm of religion more than Vincent. From childhood, he fixed on the image of Christ as both sorrowing and comforter of sorrows. This was the image enshrined forever in his imagination by an engraving of Ary Scheffer’s
Christus Consolator
that hung in the Zundert parsonage. Illustrating a passage from the Bible (“I have come to heal those who are of a broken heart”), it became one of the favorite religious
images of a century fixated on images of innocent suffering: a radiant but sad Christ sits surrounded by supplicants prostrated by pain, sadness, oppression, and despair. He opens his hand to reveal the stigmata, a reminder of his own suffering. The message was clear: suffering brings one closer to God. “Sadness does no harm,” Dorus wrote, “but makes us see things with a holier eye.” Melancholy, said Vincent, is “fine gold.”

His reading of the Romantics added new layers of imagery and meaning to Scheffer’s icon, introducing Vincent to new forms of suffering, new myths of salvation, new paradoxes of hope, and new windows on the sublime—all of which filled his albums and papered his walls. Long before he preached the Gospel, Vincent preached the “quiet melancholy” of nature and consoled himself with its images in poetry and pictures. He followed Christ’s
shadow through the writings of Carlyle and Eliot, who transposed the theme of redemption through
suffering into a modern, internalized world. “Deep, unspeakable suffering,” wrote Eliot in
Adam Bede
, “may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.”

A
RY
S
CHEFFER
,
Christus Consolator
, 1836–37,
OIL ON CANVAS
, 72¼
X
97⅝
IN
. (
Illustration credit 8.1
)

When an exiled Vincent rediscovered Jesus in 1875 in his little room on Kennington Road, he turned first to the comforting Christ of his childhood. Renan described Him as “the great consoler of life,” who “filled souls with joy in the midst of this vale of tears.” Kempis’s Christ promised, “Your acts of penance will be transformed into joy.” A fragment of scripture from Corinthians quickly became Vincent’s mantra
of consolation: “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.” In these four words, Vincent discovered a perfect expression of the alchemy of happiness that he always expected from religion (and would later expect from art). “I’ve found a joy in sorrow,” he wrote. “Sorrow is better than laughter.”

This new vision of a life spinning heartbreak into happiness so excited him that he bought a new pair of boots—“to get myself ready for new wanderings”—and persuaded his employer, Reverend Slade-Jones, to let him assist at the Methodist church in Richmond, just across the Thames from Isleworth. At the weekly prayer meeting that Slade-Jones conducted there, Vincent began “visiting the people [and] talking with them.” Before long,
he was invited to “speak a few words” to the group. At school, Slade-Jones agreed to let Vincent spend more of his time on religious devotions and less on academic instruction. Vincent led
the twenty-one boys in their Bible study and prayed with them every morning and evening. At night, he sat between their beds in the dark dormitories and told inspirational stories from the Bible and literature.

Impressed by Vincent’s ardor, Slade-Jones invited him to assist at the Congregational church in Turnham Green, a small community three miles downriver from Isleworth, where he preached. Vincent prepared the little iron church for meetings and services, and taught Sunday school. The other teachers welcomed the strange young Dutchman as a coworker, although they continued to mangle his name (“Mr. van Gof”) until Vincent persuaded them to call him by
his first name: “Mr. Vincent.” In addition to Sunday classes, he organized a Thursday evening service for youths and was given responsibility for visiting sick and absent students. Soon afterward, Slade-Jones sent his eager young assistant to yet another church, a tiny Methodist chapel in Petersham, two miles upriver from Isleworth, to lead a Sunday evening service.

Churches at Petersham and Turnham Green
,
LETTER SKETCH
, N
OVEMBER
1876,
INK ON PAPER, 1⅝ ×
3⅞
IN
. (
Illustration credit 8.2
)

At some point in this shuttle of pious activity, Vincent won Slade-Jones’s consent to preach a sermon of his own. Elated at the prospect, he began feverish preparations. He practiced his delivery at the weekly prayer meetings in Richmond and with the boys in his Bible study class. (They sometimes fell asleep in the middle of a story, he admitted.) He made lists of his favorite verses, stories, hymns, and poetry and transcribed them into a “sermon
book.” Judging by the long letters he wrote to Theo that fall, which undoubtedly drew from it, the book must have been a frenetic fantasia of consolation, far exceeding any of his previous albums—a perfect reflection of his frenzied imagination as he prepared for his new life as a preacher. “Whoever wants to preach the Gospel must carry it in his own heart first,” he said. “Oh! May I find it.” At the end of each day, he would climb to his
room on the third floor of Holme Court and fall asleep with
a Bible still gripped in his hands and a print of
Christus Consolator
looking down from the wall.

Finally, on Sunday, October 29, Vincent stepped into the pulpit of the Richmond Methodist church to give his first sermon. He described the event in rapturous detail in a letter to Theo two days later, painting the scene like the opening of an Eliot novel:

At the foot of the pulpit, he paused, bowed his head, and prayed: “Abba, Father, in Thy name be our beginning.” As he ascended, he felt as if he were “emerging from a dark cave underground,” he said, and was overcome by a vision of his future “preaching the Gospel wherever I go.”

He chose his text from Psalms: “I am a stranger on the earth …”

“It is an old belief,” he began, “and it is a good belief, that our life is a pilgrim’s progress.”

It is impossible to know what churchgoers thought of the sermon that day, or even how much of it they understood. Vincent spoke English accurately, but with great speed and a heavy accent. Some in the congregation had heard him talk before at prayer meetings, and no doubt had learned to cope with his grapplings in an unfamiliar language. But none could have been prepared for the eruption of fervor they heard that morning.

In his fever to console, Vincent piled scripture on scripture, verse on verse, aphorism on aphorism in a deluge of earnest, obscure pieties. He lurched from bold exhortations to muddled exegeses, from bland bromides to odd analogies (“Have we not often felt as a widow and an orphan—in joy and prosperity as well and even more than under grief—because of the thought of Thee”). Metaphors
mixed and morphed under the strain of
his ardor. Strange confessional pleas burst from the dull rhetoric with an urgency that surely alarmed his listeners: “We want to know that we are Thine and that Thou art ours, we want to be Thine—to be Christians—we want a Father, a Father’s love and a Father’s approval.”

Vincent had said that his goal was to preach in “simplicity” and “fullness of heart.” No one who heard him could have doubted his heart. But even his father, whose sermons were hardly a model of concision or clarity, criticized Vincent’s convoluted and obscure way with scripture. After receiving one of the long letters that Vincent wrote rehearsing his sermon, Dorus complained to Theo: “If only he learned to remain simple as a
child, and not always go on filling his letter with Bible texts in such an exaggerated and overwrought manner.” Whether or not Vincent accepted the criticism, he recognized the problem. “I do not speak without difficulty,” he admitted. “How it sounds to English ears, I do not know.” A few weeks later, he felt compelled to warn his congregation: “You are going to hear bad English.”

But he pressed ahead anyway, haunted by the prospect of yet another setback on his journey. “I shall be unlucky if I cannot preach the Gospel,” he wrote ominously in early November. “If my lot is not to preach … well,
misery
is truly my lot.”

THERE WAS ONE PLACE
, however, where Vincent found the simple comfort that he sought, but could not give.

He had felt the tug of hymns since childhood. Every Sunday, their solemn drone filled the little Zundert church, often accompanied by his mother playing the reedy harmonium. From the moment he arrived in London in 1873, he seemed, according to his sister-in-law, “intoxicated with the sweet, melodious words” of English church music, so different from the penitent hymns of his Calvinist youth. “[He] likes the organ and the singing most of all,”
Dorus reported after Vincent had been in England only a month. At Spurgeon’s Metropolitan Tabernacle, Vincent surely added his voice to the chorus of thousands—an experience that one participant likened to floating on “a huge sea of melody which rises and falls and surges and floods the place.” He asked Theo to send him a Dutch hymn book and sent him in return two English hymnals. He carried a popular hymnal with him everywhere he went, and knew it so well
that he referred to his favorites by number.