How rich art is. If one can only remember what one has seen,
one is never empty of thoughts or truly lonely, never alone.
—LETTER TO THEO, NOVEMBER 1878
VINCENT, HOMESICK BUT TRYING to make the best of it, sketched the view looking out the window of a small school in Ramsgate, England. The scratchy picture—a lamppost, a curving driveway, the corner of a building, and beyond it the ocean—was for Theo. “Enclosed is a little drawing of the view from the school window where the boys wave good-by to their parents when they are going back to the station after a visit. No one of us will ever forget the view from the window,” Vincent wrote.
After many letters and inquiries, he finally had found a position at a small boarding school for poor English boys between the ages of ten and fourteen. He received no salary. Mr. Stokes, who ran the school, said he could attract all the teachers he needed in return for food and lodging.
Although Mr. Stokes played marbles with his students and took them for walks on the beach, Vincent reported that Stokes sometimes lost his temper. “When the boys make more noise than he likes, they occasionally have to go without their supper. I wish you could see them looking from the window then, it is rather melancholy; they have so little else except their meals to look forward to and help them pass their days.”
The school resembled something out of Vincent's favorite English author, Charles Dickens. Roaches crawled all over the old building. The room where the boys washed had rotten floorboards and broken windowpanes through which the wind whistled, but the view of the ocean almost compensated for the discomfort. Ramsgate was a charming seaside village of about six thousand people almost eighty miles from London. Vincent's letters describing the area to Theo display an eloquence that his drawings had yet to achieve. “The ground we walk on was all covered with big gray stones, chalk and shells. To the right lay the sea as calm as a pond, reflecting the light of the transparent gray sky where the sun was setting.”
Scenic vistas, however, were not enough to sustain him. When Mr. Stokes moved his school from Ramsgate to Isle-worth, closer to London, Vincent began to look for other work. He had turned his back on the art business and now announced that “there were no professions in the world other than those of schoolmaster and clergyman, with all that lies between these two—such as missionary, especially a London missionary.”
He accepted a new job at a school in Isle worth with the Reverend Mr. Slade-Jones, who at least paid him a meager salary. More exciting was the opportunity Mr. Slade-Jones offered him to preach. Vincent read Bible stories with the boys and taught Bible history. His letters home, crammed with religious meditations, caused his parents to worry about his lack of balance. If their son wanted to be an evangelist, his father fretted, he should start the necessary studies, not go on and on in this unpractical way.
In October 1876 Vincent preached his first real sermon: “Sorrow is better than joy—and even in mirth the heart is sad—and it is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasts, for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better.” It wasn't a crowd pleaser. The gloomy message aside, he was not a good speaker. Like his father, he lacked the gift of inspiring his listeners, and certainly his heavy accent didn't help.
Even without preaching, the schedule at Mr. Slade-Jones's school was grueling, and Vincent labored nonstop. He taught languages, lectured on the Bible, weeded the garden, tutored, and acted as the school's bill collector. Exhausted, he returned home for the Christmas holidays. His younger sister Elizabeth, who looked forward to having fun with him, instead found her brother “groggy with piety.” Vincent informed his family that his experience in Isleworth had revealed his true mission in life. Following the van Gogh tradition of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, he would become a clergyman.
His family doubted Vincent's chances for success in this vocation. It was clear, however, that for now he was better off in the Netherlands, and Vincent wrote a long letter to Slade-Jones and his wife explaining why he wouldn't be coming back.
Uncle Cent found him a temporary job working in a bookstore, where Vincent spent most of his time in the back room, polishing his language skills by translating the Bible from Dutch into English, French, and German. At the boarding-house where he stayed, his roommate reported that Vincent lived like a saint, refusing meat and existing on a Spartan diet of bread and boiled vegetables. His only luxury was a little to-bacco for the pipe he had started smoking, and on at least one occasion he gave that up to buy food for a hungry stray dog. On Sundays Vincent amused himself by attending services at four or five different churches. He had made up his mind about his calling. Unfortunately, it took more than desire to be a pastor.
For ordination in the Dutch Reformed Church, he would need to pass state entrance examinations, then train for six expensive years at the theological seminary in Amsterdam. Vincent spoke four languages but not the required Greek and Latin. He knew a great deal about art and literature, but didn't have a high-school degree. Preparing for the exams might take as much as two years of tutoring.
His parents suspected that at age twenty-four their son was unlikely to develop academic discipline, but without a degree, they knew, he wouldn't be eligible for a meaningful job in the church. The whole extended family organized themselves to help Vincent out—all except Uncle Cent, who called Vincent's latest ambition ridiculous. Uncle Jan, the commandant of the naval shipyard in Amsterdam, offered Vincent room and board in his large house. Uncle Cor gave him paper and other supplies. And Uncle Strieker, a successful pastor and published author, supervised his studies and found him tutors.
Uncle Jan's house overlooked the huge shipyard, and Vincent delighted in the hustle and bustle of the wharves. He compared the sound of footsteps of three thousand workmen on their way home to.the roaring of the sea. He found his studies less enjoyable. All too soon the reality of what he had undertaken began to worry him. It proved to be “much difficult work which I do not like—which I, or rather my evil self, would like to shirk.”
Vincent began to feel constantly anxious. In his uneasy dreams solid, well-meaning relatives stared at him reproachfully. After all their help, how could he fail them? He tried to keep his letters to Theo cheerful, filled with news of his studies and visits to family members and their friends, but sometimes the effort was beyond him. He wrote that he had breakfasted on a piece of dry bread and a glass of beer—that being the remedy Charles Dickens advised for those who are on the point of committing suicide.
Mendes da Costa, a young rabbi not much older than Vincent, tutored him in Latin and Greek. Da Costa liked his freckle-faced student, who might be homely but whose appearance had a “charming quaintness.” He was particularly impressed by Vincent's gentle manner with the da Costa family's aunt. While many people mocked the old woman for her twisted body and slow wits, Vincent always treated her kindly. She eagerly hurried to answer the door when he came for his lessons, and Vincent told da Costa that she was a good soul—even if she did mispronounce his name.
Perhaps because they were close in age, Vincent confessed to da Costa what the pressures had driven him to do. For failures, real or imagined, he punished himself by beating his back with a rope or else locking himself out of his uncle's house and sleeping in a cold shed without a blanket.
This extreme behavior did nothing to help his concentration—or his growing negative feelings toward the whole academic enterprise. Vincent excelled at languages and didn't mind Latin, but Greek he found a waste of time. “Mendes,” he said, “do you seriously believe that such horrors are indispensable to a man who wants to do what I want to do: give peace to poor creatures and reconcile them to their existence here on earth.” After a year of struggling, Vincent asked Mendes to tell his uncle Strieker that it was useless. He would not be able to pass his entrance examinations.
Instead of looking for a profession better suited to his talents, Vincent went to Brussels, Belgium, with his father and his friend Slade-Jones, who traveled from Isleworth to help him. The English clergyman knew of an evangelical course there that took three years instead of six. Vincent was accepted on a trial basis.
If he knew what trial meant, it didn't make any impression on him. When asked during a grammar lesson whether a word was in the nominative or the dative case, he replied, “Oh, sir, I really don't care.” His father received alarming reports that Vincent starved himself and slept on the floor instead of the bed. He visited his son and tried to put him back on track, but without success. At the end of his trial period Vincent was told he could stay, but not on the same inexpensive terms as the students from Belgium.
Vincent refused to ask his parents to pay for more schooling. He wangled a six-month assignment as an evangelist and once more set out on a journey, this time to the Borinage, a grim mining district in southwestern Belgium, “far from the land of pictures.”