Yeast: a Problem Part 10

'To fall back on, indeed! and down on, too. At all events, you rich might help to make Christians of them, and men of them. For I'm beginning to fancy strangely, in spite of all the preachers say, that, before ever you can make them Christians, you must make them men and women.'

'Are they not so already?'

'Oh, sir, go and see! How can a man be a man in those crowded styes, sleeping packed together like Irish pigs in a steamer, never out of the fear of want, never knowing any higher amus.e.m.e.nt than the beer-shop? Those old Greeks and Romans, as I read, were more like men than half our English labourers. Go and see! Ask that sweet heavenly angel, Miss Honoria,'--and the keeper again blushed,--'And she, too, will tell you. I think sometimes if she had been born and bred like her father's tenants' daughters, to sleep where they sleep, and hear the talk they hear, and see the things they see, what would she have been now? We mustn't think of it.' And the keeper turned his head away, and fairly burst into tears.

Lancelot was moved.

'Are the poor very immoral, then?'

'You ask the rector, sir, how many children hereabouts are born within six months of the wedding-day. None of them marry, sir, till the devil forces them. There's no sadder sight than a labourer's wedding now-a-days. You never see the parents come with them. They just get another couple, that are keeping company, like themselves, and come sneaking into church, looking all over as if they were ashamed of it--and well they may be!'

'Is it possible?'

'I say, sir, that G.o.d makes you gentlemen, gentlemen, that you may see into these things. You give away your charities kindly enough, but you don't know the folks you give to. If a few of you would but be like the blessed Lord, and stoop to go out of the road, just behind the hedge, for once, among the publicans and harlots! Were you ever at a country fair, sir? Though I suppose I am rude for fancying that you could demean yourself to such company.'

'I should not think it demeaning myself,' said Lancelot, smiling; 'but I never was at one, and I should like for once to see the real manners of the poor.'

'I'm no haunter of such places myself, G.o.d knows; but--I see you're in earnest now--will you come with me, sir,--for once? for G.o.d's sake and the poor's sake?'

'I shall be delighted.'

'Not after you've been there, I am afraid.'

'Well, it's a bargain when you are recovered. And, in the meantime, the squire's orders are, that you lie by for a few days to rest; and Miss Honoria's, too; and she has sent you down some wine.'

'She thought of me, did she?' And the still sad face blazed out radiant with pleasure, and then collapsed as suddenly into deep melancholy.

Lancelot saw it, but said nothing; and shaking him heartily by the hand, had his shake returned by an iron grasp, and slipped silently out of the cottage.

The keeper lay still, gazing on vacancy. Once he murmured to himself,--

'Through strange ways--strange ways--and though he let them wander out of the road in the wilderness;--we know how that goes on--'

And then he fell into a mixed meditation--perhaps into a prayer.

CHAPTER V: A SHAM IS WORSE THAN NOTHING

At last, after Lancelot had waited long in vain, came his cousin's answer to the letter which I gave in my second chapter.

'You are not fair to me, good cousin . . . but I have given up expecting fairness from Protestants. I do not say that the front and the back of my head have different makers, any more than that doves and vipers have . . . and yet I kill the viper when I meet him . . . and so do you. . . . And yet, are we not taught that our animal nature is throughout equally viperous? . . . The Catholic Church, at least, so teaches. . . . She believes in the corruption of human nature. She believes in the literal meaning of Scripture.

She has no wish to paraphrase away St. Paul's awful words, that "in his flesh dwelleth no good thing," by the unscientific euphemisms of "fallen nature" or "corrupt humanity." The boasted discovery of phrenologists, that thought, feeling, and pa.s.sion reside in this material brain and nerves of ours, has ages ago been antic.i.p.ated by her simple faith in the letter of Scripture; a faith which puts to shame the irreverent vagueness and fantastic private interpretations of those who make an idol of that very letter which they dare not take literally, because it makes against their self-willed theories.

'And so you call me douce and meek? . . . You should remember what I once was, Lancelot . . . I, at least, have not forgotten . . . I have not forgotten how that very animal nature, on the possession of which you seem to pride yourself, was in me only the parent of remorse., . . I know it too well not to hate and fear it. Why do you reproach me, if I try to abjure it, and cast away the burden which I am too weak to bear? I am weak--Would you have me say that I am strong? Would you have me try to be a Prometheus, while I am longing to be once more an infant on a mother's breast? Let me alone . . . I am a weary child, who knows nothing, can do nothing, except lose its way in arguings and reasonings, and "find no end, in wandering mazes lost." Will you reproach me, because when I see a soft cradle lying open for me . . . with a Virgin Mother's face smiling down all woman's love about it . . . I long to crawl into it, and sleep awhile? I want loving, indulgent sympathy . . . I want detailed, explicit guidance . . . Have you, then, found so much of them in our former creed, that you forbid me to go to seek them elsewhere, in the Church which not only professes them as an organised system, but practises them . . . as you would find in your first half-hour's talk with one of Her priests . . . true priests .

. . who know the heart of man, and pity, and console, and bear for their flock the burdens which they cannot bear themselves? You ask me who will teach a fast young man? . . . I answer, the Jesuit. Ay, start and sneer, at that delicate woman-like tenderness, that subtle instinctive sympathy, which you have never felt . . . which is as new to me, alas, as it would be to you! For if there be none now-a- days to teach such as you, who is there who will teach such as me?

Do not fancy that I have not craved and searched for teachers . . .

I went to one party long ago, and they commanded me, as the price of their sympathy, even of anything but their denunciations, to ignore, if not to abjure, all the very points on which I came for light--my love for the Beautiful and the Symbolic--my desire to consecrate and christianise it--my longing for a human voice to tell me with authority that I was forgiven--my desire to find some practical and palpable communion between myself and the saints of old. They told me to cast away, as an accursed chaos, a thousand years of Christian history, and believe that the devil had been for ages . . . just the ages I thought n.o.blest, most faithful, most interpenetrated with the thought of G.o.d . . . triumphant over that church with which He had promised to be till the end of the world. No . . . by the bye, they made two exceptions--of their own choosing. One in favour of the Albigenses . . . who seemed to me, from the original doc.u.ments, to have been very profligate Infidels, of whom the world was well rid .

. . and the Piedmontese . . . poor, simple, ill-used folk enough, but who certainly cannot be said to have exercised much influence on the destinies of mankind . . . and all the rest was chaos and the pit. There never had been, never would be, a kingdom of G.o.d on earth, but only a few scattered individuals, each selfishly intent on the salvation of his own soul--without organisation, without unity, without common purpose, without even a masonic sign whereby to know one another when they chanced to meet . . . except s.h.i.+bboleths which the hypocrite could ape, and virtues which the heathen have performed . . . Would YOU have had me accept such a "Philosophy of History"?

'And then I went to another school . . . or rather wandered up and down between those whom I have just described, and those who boast on their side prescriptive right, and apostolic succession . . . and I found that their ancient charter went back--just three hundred years . . . and there derived its transmitted virtue, it seemed to me, by something very like obtaining goods on false pretences, from the very church which it now anathematises. Disheartened, but not hopeless, I asked how it was that the priesthood, whose hands bestowed the grace of ordination, could not withdraw it . . .

whether, at least, the schismatic did not forfeit it by the very act of schism . . . and instead of any real answer to that fearful spiritual dilemma, they set me down to folios of Nag's head controversies . . . and myths of an independent British Church, now represented, strangely enough, by those Saxons who, after its wicked refusal to communicate with them, exterminated it with fire and sword, and derived its own order from St. Gregory . . . and decisions of mythical old councils (held by bishops of a different faith and practice from their own), from which I was to pick the one point which made for them, and omit the nine which made against them, while I was to believe, by a stretch of imagination . . . or common honesty . . ., which I leave you to conceive, that the Church of Syria in the fourth century was, in doctrine, practice, and const.i.tution, like that of England in the nineteenth? . . . And what was I to gain by all this? . . . For the sake of what was I to strain logic and conscience? To believe myself a member of the same body with all the Christian nations of the earth?--to be able to hail the Frenchman, the Italian, the Spaniard, as a brother--to have hopes even of the German and the Swede . . . if not in this life, still in the life to come? No . . . to be able still to sit apart from all Christendom in the exclusive pride of insular Pharisaism; to claim for the modern littleness of England the infallibility which I denied to the primaeval mother of Christendom, not to enlarge my communion to the Catholic, but excommunicate, to all practical purposes, over and above the Catholics, all other Protestants except my own sect . . . or rather, in practice, except my own party in my own sect. . . . And this was believing in one Catholic and Apostolic church! . . . this was to be my share of the communion of saints! And these were the theories which were to satisfy a soul which longed for a kingdom of G.o.d on earth, which felt that unless the highest of His promises are a mythic dream, there must be some system on the earth commissioned to fulfil those promises; some authority divinely appointed to regenerate, and rule, and guide the lives of men, and the destinies of nations; who must go mad, unless he finds that history is not a dreary aimless procession of lost spirits descending into the pit, or that the salvation of millions does not depend on an obscure and controverted hair's breadth of ecclesiastic law.

'I have tried them both, Lancelot, and found them wanting; and now but one road remains. . . . Home, to the fountain-head; to the mother of all the churches whose fancied cruelty to her children can no more destroy her motherhood, than their confest rebellion can. .

. . Shall I not hear her voice, when she, and she alone cries to me, "I have authority and commission from the King of kings to regenerate the world. History is a chaos, only because mankind has been ever rebelling against me, its lawful ruler . . . and yet not a chaos . . . for I still stand, and grow rooted on the rock of ages, and under my boughs are fowl of every wing. I alone have been and am consistent, progressive, expansive, welcoming every race, and intellect and character into its proper place in my great organism .

. . meeting alike the wants of the king and the beggar, the artist and the devotee . . . there is free room for all within my heaven- wide bosom. Infallibility is not the exclusive heritage of one proud and ignorant Island, but of a system which knows no distinction of language, race, or clime. The communion of saints is not a bygone tale, for my saints, redeemed from every age and every nation under heaven, still live, and love, and help and intercede.

The union of heaven and earth is not a barbaric myth; for I have still my miracles, my Host, my exorcism, my absolution. The present rule of G.o.d is still, as ever, a living reality; for I rule in His name, and fulfil all His will."

'How can I turn away from such a voice? What if some of her doctrines may startle my untutored and ignorant understanding? . . .

If she is the appointed teacher, she will know best what truths to teach. . . . The disciple is not above his master . . . or wise in requiring him to demonstrate the abstrusest problems . . . spiritual problems, too . . . before he allows his right to teach the elements. Humbly I must enter the temple porch; gradually and trustfully proceed with my initiation. . . . When that is past, and not before . . . shall I be a fit judge of the mysteries of the inner shrine.

'There . . . I have written a long letter . . . with my own heart's blood. . . . Think over it well, before you despise it. . . . And if you can refute it for me, and sweep the whole away like a wild dream when one awakes, none will be more thankful--paradoxical as it may seem--than your unhappy Cousin.'

And Lancelot did consider that letter, and answered it as follows:--

'It is a relief to me at least, dear Luke, that you are going to Rome in search of a great idea, and not merely from selfish superst.i.tious terror (as I should call it) about the "salvation of your soul." And it is a new and very important thought to me, that Rome's scheme of this world, rather than of the next, forms her chief allurement. But as for that flesh and spirit question, or the apostolic succession one either; all you seem to me, as a looker on, to have logically proved, is that Protestants, orthodox and unorthodox, must be a little more scientific and careful in their use of the terms. But as for adopting your use of them, and the consequences thereof--you must pardon me, and I suspect, them too.

Not that. Anything but that. Whatever is right, that is wrong.

Better to be inconsistent in truth, than consistent in a mistake.

And your Romish idea of man is a mistake--utterly wrong and absurd-- except in the one requirement of righteousness and G.o.dliness, which Protestants and heathen philosophers have required and do require just as much as you. My dear Luke, your ideal men and women won't do--for they are not men and women at all, but what you call "saints" . . . Your Calendar, your historic list of the Earth's worthies, won't do--not they, but others, are the people who have brought Humanity thus far. I don't deny that there are great souls among them; Beckets, and Hugh Grostetes, and Elizabeths of Hungary.

But you are the last people to praise them, for you don't understand them. Thierry honours Thomas a Becket more than all Canonisations and wors.h.i.+ppers do, because he does see where the man's true greatness lay, and you don't. Why, you may hunt all Surius for such a biography of a mediaeval worthy as Carlyle has given of your Abbot Samson. I have read, or tried to read your Surius, and Alban Butler, and so forth--and they seemed to me bats and a.s.ses--One really pitied the poor saints and martyrs for having such blind biographers--such dunghill c.o.c.ks, who overlooked the pearl of real human love and n.o.bleness in them, in their greediness to s.n.a.t.c.h up and parade the rotten chaff of superst.i.tion, and self-torture, and spiritual dyspepsia, which had overlaid it. My dear fellow, that Calendar ruins your cause--you are "sacres aristocrates"--kings and queens, bishops and virgins by the hundred at one end; a beggar or two at the other; and but one real human lay St. h.o.m.obonus to fill up the great gulf between--A pretty list to allure the English middle cla.s.ses, or the Lancas.h.i.+re working-men!--Almost as charmingly suited to England as the present free, industrious, enlightened, and moral state of that Eternal City, which has been blest with the visible presence and peculiar rule, temporal as well as spiritual, too, of your Dalai Lama. His pills do not seem to have had much practical effect there. . . . My good Luke, till he can show us a little better specimen of the kingdom of Heaven organised and realised on earth, in the country which does belong to him, soil and people, body and soul, we must decline his a.s.sistance in realising that kingdom in countries which don't belong to him. If the state of Rome don't show his idea of man and society to be a rotten lie, what proof would you have? . . . perhaps the charming results of a century of Jesuitocracy, as they were represented on a French stage in the year 1793? I can't answer his arguments, you see, or yours either; I am an Englishman, and not a controversialist. The only answer I give is John Bull's old dumb instinctive "Everlasting No!"

which he will stand by, if need be, with sharp shot and cold steel-- "Not that; anything but that. No kingdom of Heaven at all for us, if the kingdom of Heaven is like that. No heroes at all for us, if their heroism is to consist in their being not-men. Better no society at all, but only a compet.i.tive wild-beast's den, than a sham society. Better no faith, no hope, no love, no G.o.d, than shams thereof." I take my stand on fact and nature; you may call them idols and phantoms; I say they need be so no longer to any man, since Bacon has taught us to discover the Eternal Laws under the outward phenomena. Here on blank materialism will I stand, and testify against all Religions and G.o.ds whatsoever, if they must needs be like that Roman religion, that Roman G.o.d. I don't believe they need--not I. But if they need, they must go. We cannot have a "Deus quidam deceptor." If there be a G.o.d, these trees and stones, these beasts and birds must be His will, whatever else is not. My body, and brain, and faculties, and appet.i.tes must be His will, whatever else is not. Whatsoever I can do with them in accordance with the const.i.tution of them and nature must be His will, whatever else is not. Those laws of Nature must reveal Him, and be revealed by Him, whatever else is not. Man's scientific conquest of nature must be one phase of His Kingdom on Earth, whatever else is not. I don't deny that there are spiritual laws which man is meant to obey- -How can I, who feel in my own daily and inexplicable unhappiness the fruits of having broken them?--But I do say, that those spiritual laws must be in perfect harmony with every fresh physical law which we discover: that they cannot be intended to compete self-destructively with each other; that the spiritual cannot be intended to be perfected by ignoring or crus.h.i.+ng the physical, unless G.o.d is a deceiver, and His universe a self-contradiction.

And by this test alone will I try all theories, and dogmas, and spiritualities whatsoever--Are they in accordance with the laws of nature? And therefore when your party compare sneeringly Romish Sanct.i.ty, and English Civilisation, I say, "Take you the Sanct.i.ty, and give me the Civilisation!" The one may be a dream, for it is unnatural; the other cannot be, for it is natural; and not an evil in it at which you sneer but is discovered, day by day, to be owing to some infringement of the laws of nature. When we "draw bills on nature," as Carlyle says, "she honours them,"--our s.h.i.+ps do sail; our mills do work; our doctors do cure; our soldiers do fight. And she does not honour yours; for your Jesuits have, by their own confession, to lie, to swindle, to get even man to accept theirs for them. So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles.

The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating G.o.d.'

Which of them do you think, reader, had most right on his side?

CHAPTER VI: VOGUE LA GALERE

Lancelot was now so far improved in health as to return to his little cottage ornee. He gave himself up freely to his new pa.s.sion.

With his comfortable fortune and good connections, the future seemed bright and possible enough as to circ.u.mstances. He knew that Argemone felt for him; how much it seemed presumptuous even to speculate, and as yet no golden-visaged meteor had arisen portentous in his amatory zodiac. No rich man had stepped in to s.n.a.t.c.h, in spite of all his own flocks and herds, at the poor man's own ewe- lamb, and set him barking at all the world, as many a poor lover has to do in defence of his morsel of enjoyment, now turned into a mere bone of contention and loadstone for all hungry kites and crows.

All that had to be done was to render himself worthy of her, and in doing so, to win her. And now he began to feel more painfully his ignorance of society, of practical life, and the outward present.

He blamed himself angrily for having, as he now thought, wasted his time on ancient histories and foreign travels, while he neglected the living wonderful present, which weltered daily round him, every face embodying a living soul. For now he began to feel that those faces did hide living souls; formerly he had half believed--he had tried, but from laziness, to make himself wholly believe--that they were all empty masks, phantasies, without interest or significance for him. But, somehow, in the light of his new love for Argemone, the whole human race seemed glorified, brought nearer, endeared to him. So it must be. He had spoken of a law wider than he thought in his fancy, that the angels might learn love for all by love for an individual. Do we not all learn love so? Is it not the first touch of the mother's bosom which awakens in the infant's heart that spark of affection which is hereafter to spread itself out towards every human being, and to lose none of its devotion for its first object, as it expands itself to innumerable new ones? Is it not by love, too--by looking into loving human eyes, by feeling the care of loving hands,--that the infant first learns that there exist other beings beside itself?--that every body which it sees expresses a heart and will like its own? Be sure of it. Be sure that to have found the key to one heart is to have found the key to all; that truly to love is truly to know; and truly to love one, is the first step towards truly loving all who bear the same flesh and blood with the beloved. Like children, we must dress up even our unseen future in stage properties borrowed from the tried and palpable present, ere we can look at it without horror. We fear and hate the utterly unknown, and it only. Even pain we hate only when we cannot KNOW it; when we can only feel it, without explaining it, and making it harmonise with our notions of our own deserts and destiny. And as for human beings, there surely it stands true, wherever else it may not, that all knowledge is love, and all love knowledge; that even with the meanest, we cannot gain a glimpse into their inward trials and struggles, without an increase of sympathy and affection.

Whether he reasoned thus or not, Lancelot found that his new interest in the working cla.s.ses was strangely quickened by his pa.s.sion. It seemed the shortest and clearest way toward a practical knowledge of the present. 'Here,' he said to himself, 'in the investigation of existing relations between poor and rich, I shall gain more real acquaintance with English society, than by dawdling centuries in exclusive drawing-rooms.'

The inquiry had not yet presented itself to him as a duty; perhaps so much the better, that it might be the more thoroughly a free-will offering of love. At least it opened a new field of amus.e.m.e.nt and knowledge; it promised him new studies of human life; and as he lay on his sofa and let his thoughts flow, Tregarva's dark revelations began to mix themselves with dreams about the regeneration of the Whitford poor, and those again with dreams about the heiress of Whitford; and many a luscious scene and n.o.ble plan rose brightly detailed in his exuberant imagination. For Lancelot, like all born artists, could only think in a concrete form. He never worked out a subject without embodying it in some set oration, dialogue, or dramatic castle in the air.

But the more he dreamt, the more he felt that a material beauty of flesh and blood required a material house, baths, and boudoirs, conservatories, and carriages; a safe material purse, and fixed material society; law and order, and the established frame-work of society, gained an importance in his eyes which they had never had before.