A Preacher's Apprenticeship

From the schoolroom window in Royal Road, Ramsgate, the boys could watch their parents walk back to the station after a visit. The new assistant master arrived at one o'clock on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of April 1876, a fortnight after he had left Goupil's, and the first thing he told Theo the next morning was not about the boys or the master or the work. It was that the window of the not-very-large school looked out over the sea.

It was a boarding school with twenty-four boys in it, between the ages of ten and fourteen. The master, William Port Stokes, was out of town when Vincent came and did not get back for five days: "a rather large man with a bald head and whiskers," Vincent wrote, whom the boys seemed to respect and to love all the same, and who was playing marbles with them a couple of hours after he had come in at the door. The new man took the boys walking on the sands and out along the stone jetties of the harbour, and one morning helped them build a sand-castle of the kind he and Theo had built in the garden at Zundert. He was paid in board and lodging, and in nothing else.

At the end of May he sent Theo a drawing of the view from that window, a small thing in pencil and ink, folded into a letter that also carried a few words for their uncle Jan. Many a boy, he explained, would never forget the view from it. Then he told his brother what went on behind it. Mr Stokes was sometimes moody, and when the boys were too boisterous for him they did not get their bread and tea in the evening, and stood at the window looking out instead. They washed in a room with a rotten floor, at six basins, by what light came through a window with broken panes. "It's quite a melancholy sight, to be sure," he wrote. "How I'd like to spend or to have spent a winter with them, to know what it's like."

He mentioned to Theo in the summer that there had been lots of bedbugs at Mr Stokes's, but that the view from the school window had made one forget them.

What he wanted was not a school. On a Monday in the middle of June he left Ramsgate for London on foot, to see people who might help him to a post in the church, and he wrote the journey out for Theo when it was over.

It was awfully hot when he set out, and it stayed hot until the evening, when he reached Canterbury. He walked on a little beyond the town and came to some large beeches and elms beside a small pond, and rested there. "In the morning at half past 3 the birds began to sing upon seeing the morning twilight, and I continued on my way. It was good to walk then." In the afternoon he came to Chatham, where the Thames lay beyond low, half-flooded meadows, full of ships. A carter gave him a lift for a couple of miles and then went into an inn; Vincent, suspecting he would be there a long time, walked on, and came towards evening into the suburbs of London and down the long, long roads into the city.

He stayed two days, running from one end of London to the other to see people, among them a minister to whom he had written. Then, when the pouring rain let up at four in the morning, he set out again, crossed the whole city — something like ten miles, he reckoned — and went on north into Hertfordshire, and at five that afternoon he was at Welwyn with his sister Anna, who was living there.

What he was looking for is in the same letter. He copied out for Theo what he had written to the minister: that he was a clergyman's son who had to earn his living, who had no money and no time for King's College, who was already a couple of years older than was usual for starting there, and who had not even begun the preparatory Latin and Greek, but who dearly wanted a situation connected with the church, "even though the position of a clergyman who has had college training is beyond his reach." He was twenty-three.

Stokes had meanwhile moved his school to Isleworth, on the Thames west of London, to a house in the Twickenham Road, and Vincent followed it. At the beginning of July he wrote that Mr Stokes said he definitely could not give him a salary, "for he can get plenty of people who'll work for board and lodging alone, which is certainly true." Within the week he had gone along the same road to another school, kept by the Reverend Thomas Slade-Jones, a minister with a wife and six children, the eldest of them eleven. When the family came home in August the assistant had decorated the boys' dining room in green, with holly and ivy and the words Welcome home on the wall.

Slade-Jones gave him what Stokes could not. By October Vincent was telling Theo that Mr Jones had promised he need not teach so much any more, and might work in his parish instead — visiting people, talking to them. He walked to London and back for Mr Jones to collect some money. He walked to Richmond of an evening, where he had begun to speak on a text, and to Turnham Green, where there was a little wooden church. Theo was ill that autumn, and the letters from Isleworth are full of him.

On Sunday the twenty-ninth of October 1876 Vincent walked from Isleworth to Richmond along the river and preached at the Wesleyan Methodist church there, from its pulpit, for the first time. He described the day to Theo the next Friday: clear autumn weather, the Thames reflecting the big chestnut trees with their load of yellow leaves and the blue sky, the red roofs of Richmond on the hill with the grey tower above them, and the large grey bridge below, with poplars on either side and people crossing it who looked like small black figures. "When I stood in the pulpit," he wrote, "I felt like someone emerging from a dark, underground vault into the friendly daylight."

He wrote the sermon out in full and sent it with the letter, which is the only reason it survives.

It is in English. Nearly everything else of his has come to us through a translator, and this has not; these are the words as he chose them, in his third language, at twenty-three. His text was the nineteenth verse of the hundred and nineteenth Psalm, I am a stranger in the earth, hide not Thy commandments from me, and he began with it:

"It is an old faith and it is a good faith that our life is a pilgrims progress – that we are strangers in the earth, but that though this be so, yet we are not alone for our Father is with us. We are pilgrims, our life is a long walk, a journey from earth to heaven."

From there it goes where a young man's sermon goes: birth and death, the hundred and seventh Psalm, the storm on the Sea of Galilee, the heart and its seasons. "The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too." It is long and it is earnest and it takes a great deal of its language straight from the Bible.

And near the end he reached for a picture. He had once seen a very beautiful one, he told the congregation, and he described it to them: a landscape at evening, a row of hills blue in the mist, the sunset behind them with grey clouds lined in silver and gold and purple, a heath of grass and heather with here and there the white stem of a birch and its yellow leaves, and a road running across it to a high mountain far away with a city on the top, lit by the setting sun. On the road, a pilgrim with a staff in his hand, who has been walking a good long while and is very tired.

After his signature he added a line for Theo: that he had been moved when he stood at the foot of the pulpit and bowed his head to pray.

He went home to his parents at Etten for Christmas, and he did not go back to England. On the third of January 1877 he left for Dordrecht, where a place had been found for him in the bookshop of Blussé & Van Braam, in the Voorstraat, which sold books and magazines, office supplies, maps, and prints both good and cheap. He wrote to Theo at the end of his third week that things were going rather well in the shop, and that it was so busy that he went there at eight in the morning and came back at one o'clock at night, "but I'm happy about that." In February, in the week the town was flooded, he came out of the shop between twelve and one and walked round the Grote Kerk in a high wind, with the moon going in and out of the rain clouds above the elms.

The letters from Dordrecht are about sermons heard, texts copied, prints pinned up on the wall of his room, and a plan. By April the plan was settled and his uncle Jan had a room ready for him. He would go to Amsterdam and prepare for the university, and read theology there, and be a minister, as his father was. On the last day of April he wrote from Dordrecht that there could still be much good in store for both of them.

In May 1877 he moved into the house of his uncle Jan in Amsterdam. Johannes van Gogh was an admiral and the commandant of the naval dockyard, and his house stood inside the yard. Vincent wrote to Theo in his first weeks there that he could hear the men early in the morning, around three thousand of them, he thought, and that the sound of their footsteps was something like the sound of the sea.

The entrance examination meant Latin, Greek, algebra and geometry, with history and geography besides, and when he began, he told Theo, he had been told that the first four alone would take two years. After that came the university itself. He was twenty-four, and he was writing out the exercises of a schoolboy.

His teacher in the classics was a young scholar named Maurits Benjamin Mendes da Costa. The studies were overseen by his uncle Stricker, a respected Amsterdam minister and another of the family's clergymen. Vincent went to Mendes for his lessons, at his rooms on the Jonas Daniël Meijerplein. For the mathematics a second teacher was found, a cousin of Mendes who taught at the Jewish school for poor children. In August Vincent reported that he had been at Latin and Greek for about three months and that Mendes said they had got as far as he had expected. That month he was also making lists of all the parables and all the miracles, in order, and doing the same in English and French, "expecting Latin and Greek to be added later on, may it come to pass!" By day he studied for Mendes, so the lists were done late at night and early in the morning.

Before the end of his first May in the dockyard house he had asked Theo how he should ever get all that difficult and detailed study into his head. At the end of October he wrote: "Old boy, Latin and Greek and studying are difficult, but all the same I feel very happy with it and am doing the things I have longed for." His uncle had strictly forbidden him to sit up late, he added. He kept a small gaslight burning all night instead, and lay looking at it. In December he was drawing maps of ancient Italy for Mendes, with Latium in one corner.

Mendes da Costa set down his memories of that year in an Amsterdam newspaper at the end of 1910, thirty-three years afterwards, when the pupil he was remembering had become famous. He wrote kindly. He said that they had got on from the first and made good progress at the beginning, that he was soon able to set Vincent an easy Latin author to translate, and that then the Greek verbs became too much for him, whatever device the teacher invented. He remembered his pupil asking whether such horrors were really indispensable to a man who wanted to do what he wanted to do: "give peace to poor creatures and reconcile them to their existence here on earth." He remembered him coming across the square in the early morning with his books pressed under one arm and a bunch of snowdrops for his teacher in the other hand.

And he remembered that the lessons lasted less than a year, and that he himself, having concluded that Vincent would never pass the examination, advised the uncle to let him stop — "wholly in conformity with Vincent's own wishes."

By the middle of July 1878 he was at home in Etten. In Holland, he told Theo that month, the study would have taken another six years at the very least.

There was one more door, and that July his father and Mr Jones, who had come over from Isleworth, went with him to Brussels to look at it. The Flemish Protestants kept a training college for evangelists there, with a three-year course, and a man did not even have to finish it before he could be considered for a post. Vincent set out for Theo what the college looked for instead of Greek: "the talent to give easy, warm-hearted and popular lectures or speeches to the people, better short and to the point than long and learned." And of that gift of speaking to people naturally and without stiffness, he wrote in the same letter that nobody suddenly possesses it: "We aren't there yet, though."

The college proposed a trial of three months. In August he went to Brussels and lodged at Laeken, on the northern edge of the city. His father told Theo in September that Vincent was attending classes from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon, sometimes until eight at night, and had held a Bible class at Mechelen and Lier one Sunday and been asked back.

In November, when the three months were nearly up, Vincent wrote to Theo about the coal-mining country in the south of Belgium, the Borinage, and copied out for him from a geography book how the miners went down three hundred metres every day and scarcely saw the sun except on Sundays. He had asked about work among miners once before, in England, and had been told he must be at least twenty-five. He was twenty-five now. He kept the letter back for a couple of days, and then added a postscript.

"15 Nov. has passed, so the three months are up. Spoke with the Rev. De Jonge and with Master Bokma, they say there is no opportunity to be at the school under the same conditions they offer to native Flemings — I can attend the lessons, for free if necessary — but this is the only privilege — in order to stay, therefore, I would need to have more financial means at my disposal than I do now, which is none. So I'll probably soon try the Borinage plan."

That is the reason as he gave it to his brother.

At the beginning of December he went south to the mines. He had no appointment and no salary, and his father, writing a letter of recommendation for him on the fifth of the month, said that Vincent had refused to take money from him.