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BY
depths; that veritable hell upon earth which he had made human and possible. He had been deprived of his governorship by those at home who thought that to provide for the moral improvement of criminals was to offend against justice, which should be simply punitive.
The whole question of prison discipline and the final cause of
punishment has undergone revision since then; and it was Captain Maconochie
who started the change. He, who after Howard had the most compassion for
convicted criminals, had, even more than Howard, breadth of view and
administrative capacity. But the grand idea of giving prisoners an interest
in their own good conduct, and of making Hope an element in the process of
self-redemption, was unpalatable to the official world. The actual system
was founded on the basis of punishment pure and simple, plus the deterring
of others by example; the method was that of
unin-
dividualized and unelastic coercion; and the new view of self-reformation by rewarding voluntary well-doing was looked on as offering an educational premium to vice, and making crime a profitable moral investment. For do not minds follow the law of all the rest? and is it fair to reform criminals and let honest men go wrong for want of better teaching?
It was the same in other things. When Captain Maconochie advocated
certainty of detection as more deterring to crime than severity of
sentence, he was laughed at as a dreamer; when he said: 'Reform while
you punish, and turn out a possibly useful member of society, rather than a
confirmed gaol-bird, sure to come back to his foul roost,' he was
ridiculed as a crazy philanthropist who had lost the just distinction
between vice and virtue; when he wished to do away with short-time
sentences, he was met with the rights of the ratepayers; and
everywhere he fell upon the dead wall of negation, and found himself opposed and baffled.
He was one of those men who fail in their own persons, but whose
principles take root and fructify--not to their own profit. The Home
Office negatived his scheme; but afterwards they allowed Sir Walter Crofton
to try his Mark System, modified; and the ticket-of-leave now granted is
also only a modification of his more comprehensive idea. It was painful to
watch the uphill fight he carried on against inertia here and active
opposition there, and to know that all this while a grand truth was being
arrested and nullified by prejudice.
His wife, as firmly convinced as he, and as good and sincere and
earnest, went for a little in this opposition, because of that fatal
quality of exaggeration which makes women such unreasoning partisans and
dangerous auxiliaries. Thus, she was an
ardent homoeopathist; and when she visited the sick female prisoners in the borough gaol afterwards given her husband to administer, she slipped surreptitious globules into their pockets, to the discrediting of the orthodox system and the encouragement of rebellion against the appointed healers. Her doings, when the medical authorities discovered them, brought the whole thing down about their ears; but she comforted herself for the loss she had occasioned by the consciousness of the good of her cause; and the sentiment of martyrdom upheld her. She believed too in mesmerism; she was a born proselytizer; and she had that kind of fervour in her conviction which denies honesty to all opponents.
My friends were full of interesting stories about the criminals whom
they had tamed, subdued and reformed by kindness; among whom, I remember,
figured one notorious ruffian, Jacky-Jacky, who had almost
homi-
cidal mania. Him they made their gardener; and Mrs. Maconochie spoke of a certain creeping of the flesh when one day she stood alone with Jacky-Jacky by the fruit-trees in their compound--he armed with a bill-hook, and she defenceless. They had a family of delightful boys, of whom the eldest was singularly handsome and good; and Captain Maconochie used often to speak of this young fellow's purifying influence over the roughest of the men, and how they checked their ribaldry in his presence because of respect for his youth and purity, and listened to his Bible-reading without a word that would have shocked a girl.
It was the Christian law of kindness all through, rather than the old
hard lex talionis; and it answered so far as the men were concerned. But
practical Christianity is the worst investment a modern Christian can make;
and to follow the example or obey the precepts of Christ is even more
disastrous than to doubt His divinity. And so my friends found to their cost.
In those days I held, with these dear people, that capital punishment
was a barbarism, and that the 'worst use to which you can put a man
is to hang him.' Now I am not quite so sure. Life is only valuable
for what it gives to the individual or contributes to society; and
life-long imprisonment cannot do much for the one nor the other. And as
there is always that inevitable 'must' at the end, it makes
little matter whether it comes a year or two sooner than need have been,
when the intrinsic worth of life has gone and there is no more hope for the
man himself. I did not think this then. I was too strong, too fully
vitalized, to regard death with other feelings than those of dread as well
as pity. But when the coloured glass of vigorous youth, through which one
looks at the large landscape of life, has been broken, one sees
things more in reference to the whole, and less with regard to the individual.
But in those olden times we were warm anti-death punishers at my dear
friends' house, and just as warm believers in the restoration to
righteousness of life for those criminals who were properly directed. We
were all humane, religious, believing and unscientific. We had no faith in
heredity, and we gave no weight to environment. We believed in mind and
soul and spirit; in heavenly influence and divine grace; and we thought
that miracles of moral healing could be worked if only a pathway were made
for this divine grace to enter and take possession.
If Captain Maconochie had been a less religious man, and if Mrs.
Maconochie had been a less logically sincere woman, they would have done
better for themselves and their great ideas than they did. The sword of the
Lord and of Gideon is a difficult
weapon to wield at any time; and, on the whole, biological facts and the hard common-sense views of men make more practicable handles than faith in the influx of the Holy Spirit and the answer of God to prayer.
I knew the famous American actress who then divided London into two
camps--the one of admirers, the other of detractors. I will not say on
which side I am. Things cling about her name which it is as well not to
disturb, and the grave, though dumb, is the most potent of all advocates.
And she had some superb qualities, if she also had some that were low and
mean. Of these last she had jealousy--that lowest and meanest of all
in the moral catalogue; and, for another, she had ingratitude, and knew how
to kick down, with consummate address, the ladder by which she had mounted
a stage higher. Her mother was the vulgarest old woman I have ever seen. I
remember a brief conversation with her which ran thus: The
subject was an underhung, wriggling terrier pup:--
'My!' said this old lady, looking curiously at the dog.
'Why, it's wopper-jawed!'
'"Wopper-jawed"? What is that?' I asked.
'Why, don't you know!--like a wiggler!'
'But what is a "wiggler"?' I asked again.
'Oh my! Not know!--du tell! A wopper-jawed wiggler--just
like a pollywog out of a hydrant!'
The first time I heard the expression 'talking the fifth wheel off
a coach' was from her; and the way in which she used to eat lemons
was what she herself would have called 'a caution.'
Associated with her and her two daughters, in my mind, are a certain
medical man and his beautiful young wife. I knew this rather odd, as well
as famous American
triad through them, and so the association comes about. What charming days I used to have with these dear young people! How handsome they both were!--and how young and happy we all were! As for her, she was one of the most beautiful creatures under heaven, and as good as she was lovely. I have seen the whole theatre turn round to look at her, and she could not walk in the street without attracting more attention than she cared for. She had the carriage of a young goddess or an old-time nymph; and her character corresponded, in its fearless truth and unflinching honesty with the wonderful nobility of her bearing. He too was a right good fellow; but though she, alas! is dead, he is alive--and I do not like to mention the names of those still living.
Also I knew the 'Raffaele-faced young bookseller' whose
hopes were so high and whose aims were so lofty; and in his house
I met many of those who, then young and unknown, have since become world-famous. Herbert Spencer; Marian Evans--our future incomparable George Eliot; William Smith, or 'Thorndale' as he used to be called; Dr. Hodgson; Charles Bray; Dr. Brabant; Edward Pigott;--these were among the stars rising or risen to be found at that house. There too I met Froude, one of our best, if most prejudiced, historians, master of style and eloquent Devil's Advocate as he is; and I remember once seeing Mrs. Gaskell with her beautiful white arms bare to the shoulder, and as destitute of bracelets as were her hands of gloves.
Above all, I remember one special evening when Carlyle and Emerson were
there, and each had his own little circle of adorers clustered round him as
he harangued and perorated. The two great men did not speak to each
other--only each to his own
special gathering; which was for all the world like a swarm of bees clustered round their queen. I sat apart with that soft-voiced, fair-skinned daughter of Dr. Devise of whom I have spoken before, and wondered at the mental servility of these two groups--a mental servility which I confess was to me more sickening than worshipful.
Morris Moore's newly discovered 'Raffaele' was then
almost as much a matter of bitter controversy as it has been since; and the
recognition of its genuineness got somehow mixed up with party spirit and
became a sign of identification. It was engraved by Linton in the
Leader newspaper; and perhaps that was the reason why it was
taken as a test of Liberalism.
The establishment of that newspaper, by the way, was to all of us ardent
youths like the beginning of a moral and intellectual millennium. How
ardent and eager we all were! How bravely Thornton Hunt and
George Henry Lewes and other young lions roared in its columns!--and how confident everyone was that it would supersede the Examiner and the Athenæum, become a monumental success, and transform to its own likeness all divergent public opinion! Oh! those fair false hopes of youth!--those baseless visions of enthusiasm! What 'strengthless heads' of dead loves have half the pathos that lies in these dead faiths! What a glorious castle too, we built when the first International Exhibition was reared, and we all believed that the reign of universal peace had begun, and the death-knell of international strife had sounded! And how all these brilliant hopes and iridescent faiths have gone into space, with nothing left as the residuum save disappointment!
About this time came to all of us who were known to be unorthodox a
certain private and confidential circular bearing Thornton Hunt's
name. It had for its
object the foundation of a quasi-masonic community--a kind of cryptic church of free-thought, where the unpublished members should be able to recognise each other, and by their aid and counsel support such as were weak before the social trials inevitable to denial. This scheme also fell to the ground, and never went beyond that printed appeal.
With others, I became an intimate in the house of Mrs. Milner Gibson,
that large-hearted woman who opened her doors to all the exiled patriots
that flocked to England as their only safe asylum, and who was as a crowned
Queen wandering through Bohemia. She was one of the most prominent features
of London society in her day, and went through the appointed phases of the
widest Liberalism, the most marked Bohemianism, the most mystical
spiritualism, and the most fervent Catholicism, proper to her kind. But in
each and
all the generous heart, the loving nature, the wide, full charity of divine sympathy and pity, remained unchanged.
At her house I met, in their due time, Mazzini, Louis Blanc, Kossuth,
Klapka, Pulszky, the Sicilian exiles--notably the Scalias--to
mention only a few of the most famous. But when the well-known floating
medium got hold of her, her salon was given up to table-turning and
séances, wherein she herself was the most deceived and the most
credulous. Great efforts were made to convince me of the truth of the
phenomena exhibited. I was young, ardent, and a press-man; hence I should
have been so far a valuable ally. But though I went diligently to these
séances, and was quite prepared to believe in their genuineness, I
never saw anything that might not have been done by trick--neither
there nor elsewhere.
I was at this house when the notorious
levitating medium was said to have floated to the ceiling. The story is simply this. Mr. Hume was in his usual place at the end of the chain of experimenters, where the circular-table touched the jamb of the window--leaving a free space between him and Mademoiselle, the governess, who always sat opposite to him. Our hostess was always on his left hand. The room was almost pitch-dark--lighted only from the distant lamp in the mews, which this window faced. Suddenly Mr. Hume left his seat and came over to where I was sitting. He leaned over my chair and spoke to my neighbour and me, saying that the spirits were preparing something, he did not know what. The next moment we heard the sound of a piece of furniture moving across the room. It was a light chaise longue, which stood by the wall in a line with our chairs.
'The spirits want me to get on this,' he
said; and forthwith he sat down on the couch.
There was a certain man in the company, called Smith, of Peckham, who
had been an atheist, but whom Mr. Hume had converted to spiritualism and
Christianity. To him this medium was a Christ. He clasped his hands and
knelt on the ground.
'Let me go too!' he said, praying the Lord rather than
making a request to his brother man.
His High Priest gave a rather ungracious assent, and the two moved off;
but Smith of Peckham was found to be inconvenient, so was soon sent back to
his old place at the table.
There was a large mirror over a console-table at the end of the wall,
facing the window; and near to this was a heavy old-fashioned ottoman, with
a strong and serviceable centre-piece.
In a short time Mr. Hume said he was
floating up to the ceiling; and in the dim light of the room we could see that a dark body was between us and the mirror. The voice seemed to ascend, and we heard the sound of a slight scratching. Then the voice came down. Mr. Hume said he had scratched a cross on the ceiling, and called for lights. There was a great hunt for the small grains of plaster on the floor, and the case was recorded in the spiritualist journal as an undoubted instance of floating.
There was nothing to have prevented Mr. Hume from drawing the
chaise longue to him by means of a string
round the front two legs; moving it by his own feet and muscles; standing
on the centre-piece of the ottoman; and, with a knife tied to the end of a
stick, scratching a cross on the ceiling. The rest was easy to
ventriloquism and certain to credulity.
At other times he showed the hands--luminous hands--which
Mademoiselle, the
governess, said she felt forming themselves in her dress. These hands played with the tassel and strings of the blinds, and were phosphorescent. One, coal-black, was the emblem of superstition; another--covered with what they all said was a spiritual veil or refulgent kind of mask, and a cambric pocket-handkerchief--was the sign of faith. But as no one was allowed to investigate, and as to express doubt would have been impolite, things were received with acclaim by most of those present, and only a few of us had the honesty of silence.
Capable of being made into a useful ally, could I but be caught, Mr.
Hume arranged one séance for my benefit. This was the first at which
I was present. I must explain the foundations. One of my friends had had a
little child of which I had been passionately fond. It had been named after
me; I had adopted it for my own; and the whole story was patent to the
world.
At the time of which I write the child was dead, and the mother was a hopeless invalid. By all my own people I had always been called Chris, or Christie. By our hostess and the whole group of her friends, who were mine, and by this group only, I was called Crishna. The child had been christened Christopher, and was called Christie.
In the midst of the usual array of luminous hands, this night, came a
round shining thing which Mademoiselle, the governess, and Mr. Hume, the
medium, both cried out at once was a child's head. For whom? The
guests were numbered, and the spirits rapped when I was indicated. This
spiritual child was for me. This was my first personal experience of a
thing of this kind, and for the moment I was overcome.
'This means a little child of whom I was very fond,' I said
in a half-whisper to my neighbour. 'It was called after me and
dedicated to me.'
'Yes,' said Mr. Hume, as if speaking in a dream. He was in a
trance. 'This little child was Crishna on earth, as it is Crishna in
heaven, and its mother thanks you in heaven for your loving care of it on
earth. She is standing by you now, blessing you and watching over
you.'
She was in her own bed, poor body, incapable of either blessing or
watching over even herself!
This bad shot saved me from all after danger of credulity, and left me
with a clear mind and untroubled senses to watch and weigh all that I
saw.
Robert Bell was one of the most convinced of Mr. Hume's dupes. He
expatiated warmly on the supernatural power which enabled a pencil to
lie--on a clinging velvet cloth--without rolling off when the
table was tilted to a certain angle. I tried the experiment at home, and
found that by careful manipulation I could tilt my own
table at even a more acute angle than the medium had done, and that neither the pencil nor the glasses would fall.
When I said this to Robert Bell he was exceedingly angry, and what had
been a very pleasant friendship came to an abrupt and sudden end.
Poor old Dr. Ashburner too, had it much at heart to convert me to the
faith; and at his house I saw, among others, the medium who writhed like a
demoniac when the spirits were writing in red letters on his large white
fine-skinned arm a name that should carry conviction to the soul of the
unbeliever.
This man had two tricks--that of this skin-writing, which was soon
found out; and that of reading with the tips of his fingers the names
written on small pieces of paper, folded up into pellets and flung into a
heap on the table. This sleight-of-hand was respectable; but I caught the
trick, and told
Dr. Ashburner what I had seen. The dear old man did not believe me and he did believe Mr. Foster, the medium, even after he found out that he had been in prison for felony.
I could fill a volume with my spiritualistic experiences, suspicions,
and silent detections of imposture. I have never seen anything whatever
that might not have been done by trick and collusion, and I have seen
almost all the mediums. Never, anywhere, has there been allowed the
smallest investigation, nor have the most elementary precautions been taken
against imposture; and the amount of patent falsehood swallowed
open-mouthed has been to me a sorry text on which to preach a eulogium on
our enlightenment.
Yet all the time I was yearning to believe--to be forced by
irrefragable proofs to accept one undoubted authority, which would have
ended for ever certain gnawing
pains. Those proofs never came. On the contrary, with every séance at which I assisted came increased certainty of imposture. And yet, now, at the end of it all, though I have never seen a medium who was not a patent trickster, I believe that there is an uncatalogued and perhaps undeveloped human force, which makes what the Americans call a magnetic man, and which is the substratum of truth underlying the falsehoods of spiritualism, the deceptions of hysteria, and the romances of religious fervour. We have not said the final word yet on the development of man; and this uncatalogued force may be one of the chief factors in the sum of future progress.
So far there may be truth in what we hear; but when heavy women are
brought bodily through the air and dropped clean through roofs and walls;
when notes fly from India to London; and when spirits
materialize themselves and put on hair which is made up of cells and fibres and pigments like growing human hair, and dress in clothes well-cut and stitched together with ordinary thread, beside being loaded with Manchester dressing--then, I think, the common-sense of the world should revolt in indignation at these patent falsehoods and frauds, and the weak should be protected from the cruel craft of the unscrupulous.
What will not people believe? I remember poor old Dr. Ashburner telling
me a story of how once, when he was sitting alone at night, in sore
perplexity as to ways and means, a knock came to the street door. He opened
it, and saw on the pavement an unknown man bestriding a black horse.
Without a word this visitor silently thrust into his hand a packet of Bank
of England notes, then dashed off down the street and was no more seen. The
notes were to the value of five
hundred pounds, and were given by the spirits.
If so, were those spirits thieves or forgers? For these Bank of England
notes must have been stolen, either from the Bank itself or from some
private person; or, if made by the spirits themselves, they were forgeries
and the Bank would have to suffer. But, because the transactions of the
Bank of England--like those of nature--are so large as to appear
illimitable to us, we do not realize that not one single five-pound note is
issued without the utmost accuracy of registration and balance; and that
therefore a spiritual theft or forgery of five hundred pounds would as
certainly be detected, and would as certainly result in the loss of some
individual, as if it had been money taken out of one's own private
purse.
It was, however, like arguing against the miracle of the loaves and
fishes because
corn is made only by translation of material through assimilation, and is built up cell by cell--and fishes cannot be fashioned without milt and spawn and development, save at the cost of upsetting the whole balance of everything. The dear old man only lamented my blindness, which far exceeded his own, he said sorrowfully. But my Sadduceeism was immovable, and I could not see my way to the spiritual origin of those bank notes--if indeed they ever existed out of the realms of fancy at all. For after he became blind, and his imagination was neither checked nor controlled by his senses, Dr. Ashburner fell into that state of mental haze where the boundary lines between fact and fancy are clean swept away.
What crowds of people, and what multitudes of drawing-rooms come before
me, like shapes and shadows passing over a mirror! Handsome Harrison
Ainsworth, with his choice little dinners at Kensal
Green; Dr. Quin, that prince of diners-out and king of good fellows; Douglas Jerrold, keen, witty, sarcastic, yet kind-hearted; those Sunday evenings at Thornton Hunt's, where used to be met that Reader, who always reminded me of the Spanish proverb which bids you beware of the man who speaks softly and writes harshly; for Mr. Williams, with the softest, sleekest, silkiest manner in the world, had the most trenchant pen, and could cut your very heart out when he refused your manuscript for his firm:--All are gone now; and of many almost even the very remembrance has died out.
Who now remembers that fine old lady, in her quaint old-world costume,
who had been married to one of the notabilities of his day, and was herself
a notability in her own? whose son-in-law was also a celebrity? and whose
daughter is still one of the standing marvels as well as one of the charms
of London society? How well I remember
her friendly interest in me, and how, when I once kissed her hand, she patted my face and thanked me. At her daughter's house I first met one of our since most famous painters. He was a mere lad then, very handsome, and very unused to society. He wore a frock-coat buttoned to the chin; black gloves; and his boots showed that he had been walking, and that the streets were muddy. The whole mise-en-scène of his life is rather of a different character now!
Then there was that celebrity-loving lady who was always supposed to
have been the original of Mrs. Leo Hunter. Her husband had lost his large
fortune in some South American mines, but they still 'saw
people.' At her house I met poor Miss Pardoe, who took the substance
for the shadow, and spent on society the proceeds which she should have
husbanded for old age, to find, when too late, that fashion is about the
worst bank in which you can invest. She
had very small feet, of which, woman-like, she was proud; and I can yet see the dainty coquettishness of her pale blue satin slippers and the art with which she kept them well in view.
Here I met the two Misses Strickland--Agnes, with her ringlets and
look of faded prettiness, accepting homage as one who had been used to it
all her life; Elizabeth, sturdy, plain, devoted, self-effacing, the one who
did the real work while giving to her sister all the honour. She lived only
for that sister's pleasure and in her success; and she really idolized
her. I shall never forget my own surprise when one day she turned to me,
with a look of supreme devotion on her good, plain, hard-featured face, and
said--every word like a caress--'How pretty Agnes looks
to-day!'
Once I was taken to see Miss Jane Porter, then living in a little street
in Bayswater. She was in her bedroom, dressed in
black, and I think she wore a white cap underneath a long black scarf over her head. I was considerably awed by her presence and manner, and I felt as if I had been in one of Mrs. Radcliffe's rooms. She was an eerie, ghastly old lady, and she had that stagey and stately manner of the old school which impresses young people so painfully--impresses and crushes them.
Then there was that pretty little wife of the Q.C., with her trim
figure, childish shoulders, youthful manners, and plain-featured
daughters--whom she suppressed. She was one of my social godmothers,
and stood sponsor for me in more houses than one. She took me, inter alia,
to Sir Charles Babbage's, telling me on the way that he admitted to
his evening parties only pretty women and distinguished men. The compliment
was two-edged, and pleased both her and me alike.
Her sister was that famous widow who
spent her substance in searching for the remains of her still more famous husband. But, as was often said, she built her own monument when she manned her ships and organized her expeditions; and she wrote her epitaph in her conjugal constancy. Nevertheless, I believe it is an open secret that when they were together she and Sir John did not live quite like turtle-doves.
Then there was the barrister, so well known in society, who has now
become a legal power and has attained high dignity. What charming parties
he gave in his pleasant chambers! He got together notorieties of every
kind, and levelled social distinctions as smooth as a bowling-green. I
remember one evening when he introduced sherry cobbler, then a novelty, and
when we tried our skill in guessing the face, whereof we saw only the eyes
through two holes in the curtain. We all knew Mr. Urquhart's and
Chisholm Anstey's.
A strange little drama was then going on behind the scenes of that
barrister's life. It was not so much behind the scenes, however, as to
be concealed from the whole world; and there were many of the initiated who
assisted at its representation. The curtain was rung down one evening,
when, pale as his own white gloves, he stood by the door of a certain
pretty and popular woman's drawing-room in Belgravia, and saw enter
the lady of his long-time love, leaning on the arm of his triumphant rival
and accepted successor. He took his public displacement like a gentleman,
and effaced himself without a word of complaint or reproach.
I went to the house of Serjeant Talfourd, to whom women owe so much, and
who added heroic poetry to his legal reforms and well-considered Bills; and
I remember how he kept up the traditions of the then past generation, and
came into the drawing-room with a thick speech and unsteady legs.
Then, in strong contrast to all this, I was proselytized by Mrs.
Schimmelpennick, whose mystical piety oppressed and chilled
me--taking, as I thought it did, all the colour and backbone out of
life. I was too full of the fire of youth to accept her quietism and
self-suppression--which had not in it the active force of voluntary
stoicism. Nor had it the etherealized passion, the sublime poetry, which
had characterized the spirituality of Adeline Dalrymple. This had been the
fiery essence of passionate love purified from all earthly grossness; but
here I felt only the congelation, the paralysis, the death of life.
The most intrinsically remarkable of all my friends at this time was a
certain Mrs. Hulme--a woman not in the fore-front anywhere, though she
was incomparably the cleverest, the most brilliant, and the most original
of my whole circle of acquaintances. She wanted only that energy
which springs from respect for humanity and consequent regard for success--that energy we call ambition--to have become as famous in her own way as a second Madame du Deffand or another De Stael. She was a distant cousin of the Kings, and she therefore felt bound, she said, to be dry-nurse and bear-leader to all their cubs.
'And as you, my dear,' she said to me one day, with her
curious little smile, cynical for the one part, humorous for the other,
'are a cub who want a great deal of licking into intellectual shape,
I shall be glad to do what I can for you. So come to all my Tuesday
evenings, and as often as you like in the week besides. I shall be always
glad to see you, for you amuse me--I might almost say you interest
me.'
And of this permission I was not slow to avail myself. If society were
my favourite primer, I had nowhere such queer pages to
decipher as here. All the other people I knew were tame and common-place compared to those I met at Mrs. Hulme's; and I date many of my after-views in life to my acquaintance with her and hers.
achieving only small ones, and living by methods unknown to men of letters in the mass; handsome women, with invisible husbands and curiously constant male friends; unengaged actresses, whose jewels, fine dresses and pretty little broughams did not suffer from their enforced want of work; and every shade and kind of Bohemianism extant. There were no limits to the breadth and depth of Mrs. Hulme's hospitality; and as there were no restraints, from dress to certificates, and the only stipulation demanded was the power to amuse or the capacity for being amused, she got round her what Mr. King called a 'job lot'--and a job lot of even more unscoured character than that which Silk Buckingham drew into the net of his famous Institute.
Her evenings were singularly pleasant. There was always good music by
professionals, for whom this was a kind of unpaid and unfruitful
advertisement. Sometimes
there was an impromptu charade; or a pretty aspirant gave the walking scene of Lady Macbeth, or Juliet on the balcony, as a proof of her powers--if only that stout sleek impresario in the huge white waist-coat and heavy golden chain would make her the leading lady at so much the week. Or a clever imitator reproduced Buckstone, or O. Smith, Paul Bedford or Webster, Wright or Liston, Farren, 'Little Munden,' or Robson, to the life, and the stock catch-words 'brought down the house' as at the real thing. Sometimes there was a spell of table-turning, or of mesmeric experiments, when young sensitives acted according to order, and proved the truth of craniology by showing love or hate, devotion or disdain, as this bump was touched or that indicated. And always there was plenty of wit and laughter, with a subtle suspicion of garlic and tobacco, and an ever-present sense of hunger and impecuniosity.
The steady folk were scandalized by the free-and-easy tone of these
evenings, as well as by the slightly ragamuffin look of some of the guests,
and the more than slightly doubtful antecedents and conditions of most of
them. But as Mrs. Hulme was a woman of good birth, passably rich, heirless,
and of an age when scandal had ceased to make merry with her name--it
had made very merry indeed in times past--she somehow managed to hold
on with respectability, while she towed her queer cargo behind and kept her
own head above water.
She had lived a great deal abroad, where it was supposed she had adopted
her loose ways and put off more than her English stays. And the pernicious
influence of all that bad foreign example to which she had been subjected
was her excuse with those who could not approve yet would not renounce.
Thus, nothing
worse was said of her, by even the strictest of the Pharisees who consorted with her, than:
'What a pity it is that Mrs. Hulme knows such very odd people! She
is really too kind-hearted and indiscriminate!'
If they were odd, however, they were all, according to their hostess,
personages of latent distinction and the unrecognised geniuses of the
future. What a hot-bed of compressed talent it was!--the crozier heads
of forth-coming far-spreading fronds! What nameless Raffaeles in long hair
and thread-bare coats discoursed learnedly on 'method' and
'touch,' 'technique' and 'morbidezza;'
on Turner's skies and Stansfield's seas; on Chalon's grace
and Etty's flesh-tints; on the power of Maclise and the versatility of
Mulready! What cotyledonous Beethovens sprung the notes and broke the
strings of that Broadwood 'grand' which was Mrs. Hulme's
most important bit of furniture!--
and what fascinating Malibrans that were to be sang 'Robert! toi que j'aime!' looking at that stout impresario in the big white waistcoat, who had their fortune in his pocket if only he would put his hand therein to find it!
And those black-bearded counts and fair-haired barons, with coats
buttoned to the chin and not a line of linen to swear by--they were
all great men in their own country, and most of them were inventive
geniuses, with that potential wealth beyond the dreams of avarice we have
heard of so often before, in the shape of unpatented
inventions--wanting but so few pounds to set agoing for the certain
realization of those dreams! Among them were some good ideas which have
since been taken up and worked out into practicality. But it is sad to
think that many a germ of what is now an accomplished fact, bringing an
enormous fortune to the manipulator, had its origin in the brains of
these poor unfriended foreigners,who scarcely knew where to get the bread and meat that should keep body and soul together.
Mrs. Hulme herself, always sitting in her own especial arm-chair by the
fireplace, was not the least remarkable in an assembly where no one was
common-place. She was a woman of about seventy, whose love of personal ease
had conquered all that personal vanity some vestige of which most women
keep to the end of time. She was loose and stout, and with no more shape
than the typical sack tried round the middle. Her grey hair was thin and
wispy, and brushed straight off her bold full brow; and she wore no cap, as
do other women of her age, but only a small black lace kerchief, tied round
her face and knotted under her chin. She was always dressed in black stuff,
with a grey woollen knitted shawl on her shoulders. She wore black mittens
on her soft white flaccid hands; and among her
numerous old-fashioned rings was one large onyx. This she said held her quietus.
'The day when I can no longer laugh,' she said to me quite
cheerfully; 'the day when I have to confess that I am beaten, that
life is at last played out, and that humanity has become to me more
revolting than ridiculous--then I shall open this and bid you all
"Good-night."'
She made no secret of her intention to commit suicide when life should
be no longer enjoyable. She had no fancy for dregs, she used to say, with
her strange laugh, at once so cynical and so pleasure-loving, so mocking,
so sensual and so humorous. And the knowledge that she could die when she
chose, without pain or confusion, helped her to live. It was her staff of
strength, without which the road would be both rough and tiresome--and
perhaps already too long.
I may as well say here as later, that she
carried out her intention, and did one night take that great leap into the dark which she always said she would take when tired of the light. When she found out that she had an internal tumour, which would probably become cancerous, she put her affairs in order; gave her last Bohemian evening, where she surpassed herself in the audacity of her speech and the brilliancy of her wit; and then, with her finger between the pages of her pocket Rabelais, she drew down the thick curtain between herself and the House of Life, and so ended the play for ever. She left all she possessed to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and other kindred institutions; dumb brutes being, according to her, less bestial than men.
She was the first person I had ever heard speak of suicide in this
philosophical manner--as a thing to be discussed like any
other--an act of free will and intelligence, good
or evil according to conditions, but not necessarily a sin, a mystery, a shame, a dread. And her words made on me one of those ineffaceable impressions which are the birth-hours of thought.
Of course the first time she spoke to me I was shocked--and more.
My father had never mentioned the subject without horror, as murder of the
worst kind--impiety of the most damnable character--the one sin
which could never be repented of. Cato might be pardoned, because Cato was
a heathen; but a Christian who had the true knowledge was outside the pale
of forgiveness--and God Himself had limited His own power. But the
thing was altogether forbidden; and even discussion was an irreligious
tampering with evil. It was to be simply abhorred in silence, like any
other infamy. Yet I remember when a poor fellow, a clergyman, cut his
throat not far from Eden, my dear father would not
allow a harsh word to be spoken of him, but said only:
'The mercy of God is infinite. Let him who is without sin cast the
first stone.'
For here, as so often in his life, personal charity was stronger than
dogmatic harshness, and the man pitied what the theologian condemned.
Of this teaching I naturally retained the impress, and looked on
self-murder as one of those crimes which have no two sides and for which
there is no kind of palliation. And now, here was Mrs. Hulme calmly
upholding not only the moral right, but even the social value, of suicide,
and proclaiming her own intention of one day practising what she
professed!
Two years ago a new arithmetic would have seemed to me as possible as a
new moral code. Theology might be, and was, an uncertain quantity, but
morality was as fixed as the everlasting hills. But now, I
confess it, my absolutes were beginning to dissolve. My old principles were laughed out of court by my Paphian friends the Free-lovers, with whom the sanctity of marriage was effaced in favour of the imperialism of love--by the hedonism of Mrs. Hulme, with whom duty was a superstition and pleasure the final cause and great end of existence.
Yet these people were neither criminals nor savages. They were
thoughtful, kindly, cultivated, conscientious; and the ordinary theological
writ about the depravity of the human heart did not run among them. Still,
they made morality discretionary and not compulsory; and changed the
granite stability of right and wrong into a nebulous kind of individualism,
where all was convertible according to convenience, and nothing was radical
and superior to conditions.
Thus it was that I first began to see the
moral law as a question of evolution and social arrangement, void of extrinsic divine ordination--that, while recognising some laws as better and making more for progress than others, I had to confess, also, that nowhere has been said the final word, and that nothing has received its last and unchangeable form--that everything on earth is relative--from colour by juxtaposition, to crime by the circumstances surrounding it.
In manner Mrs. Hulme was kindly, brusque, unconventional, familiar. She
never rose from her chair, let who would enter the room; and she kept a
seat immediately behind her for her favourite of the evening, to whom she
laughed and talked over her shoulder. That beside her was for the last
comer, who was expected to vacate it when another visitor entered. If he
delayed, he was ordered off without ceremony. She called women by their
Christian names, and
men by their surnames, without prefix or distinctive title; and she treated all young people like children, rebuking, encouraging or caressing, according to her mood, as if these young heroes had been so many boy-babies at her knee.
In religion an atheist; in theoretical politics a socialist; despising
human nature, and therefore tolerant of its weaknesses and indifferent to
its vices; mocking, cynical, irreverent; without tenderness of sentiment to
make her sympathetic with earnestness, yet marvellously kind-hearted and
generous to excess, she stripped every question that she touched of all
sacredness, all mystery, all poetry, all divinity, and reduced it to a
standard as prosaic as the market-price of a pound of tallow-candles. She
scoffed at the idea of hidden mysteries, and denied the peculiar sacredness
of things because they are unknown. She saw no difference in kind, only in
degree, and
swept the whole universe into the same abyss of contempt.
'The Divine Life to be found in bugs and blue-bottles?' she
said with her mocking laugh when I, still under the influence of Adeline
Dalrymple, spoke as I had been taught. 'So you make yourself a
deicide every time you catch the one or scrunch the other? The Divine Life
energizing itself in a stinging-nettle or a dandelion? What rubbish! Reduce
your pretty fancy to reason, and you will find that your divinity means, on
the one hand, bigness and complexity of organism--on the other, that
which pleases and profits yourself. You vapour about the beauty--a
condition of the Divine Life--of a lily; but you will dig up and
destroy that stinging-nettle aforesaid. A beautiful woman is of course very
divine--but that flea biting her neck? that midge making a bump on her
forehead? Pshaw! You have a great deal yet to learn, my dear
boy, and a great deal more to unlearn. We shall have to scrape those brains of yours clear of all the superstitious whitewash plastered over them, if you are to do any good in life or see things as they are.'
'Say what you will,' I answered, 'there must be
something at the back of creation; and life did not come of
itself.'
'How do you know that?' she said drily. 'If you do not
know one thing you do not know another; and one unlighted candle is as good
as another when you are in a dark room and have no matches.'
According to Mrs. Hulme, we come from nothing and return to
nothing--or, rather, we are simply old material re-combined and
re-incorporate. We are mere phenomena of the hour--mere phantasmagoria
in time and appearances flitting though space--no more stable than
clouds, no more individually valuable than so many melon seeds. If any
secret meaning lies at the back of
life, we have not found the key yet, and never shall. But she denied any secret meaning at all, and treated the whole thing as a huge cosmic joke and energized satire.
'A fortuitous concourse of atoms--creatures bound by the
material circumstances which have formed them--brought into the world
without their own consent and by no action of theirs--dependent on
time and place, food, parentage, and weather for what they are and
do--and then credited with an immortal soul to be punished or rewarded
for deeds done in the flesh!--those deeds as necessarily the result of
material conditions over which the individual has no more control than has
the acorn when it springs into an oak and not an ash--than has the
piece of wax when it is moulded into the likeness of Jupiter, or battered
out into the mask of Silenus! What logic! What reasoning! And this is the
nineteenth century! And you are one of those who
"lead public opinion." The blind leading the blind, with a vengeance, and the ditch as the consequence!'
'But what do you make of free-will?' I asked. 'We all
have free-will, and can choose the bad or the good at pleasure; we are not
the mere slaves of material conditions.'
She measured my head with her two hands. Among other things, she was a
phrenologist, and believed in George Combe as well as in Lavater.
'A simple question of proportion,' she said.
'Intellectual, moral, animal:--which of the three is largest,
there will be the thing you call "free-will"; that is,
self-governance through the preponderance of the intellect--passions
which are uncontrollable because of the weight of the cerebellum--or
the higher range of social instincts because of the size of the coronal
region. The mind is like a muscle--it cannot go beyond its
own power. A weak arm cannot raise a heavy weight; a small intellectual and moral development cannot overcome a large animal region. The doctrine of free-will, like all the rest of human life, is a delusion. It has its economic uses. So has the belief in heaven and hell--in the eve of God and the claws of the devil. But economic uses, because men are ignorant and therefore superstitious, do not make a lie the truth, nor delusion a reality.'
'Then you would destroy the conscience?' I asked.
'What is conscience?' she returned. 'The public
opinion and fleeting ideas of a certain time and era individualized. Is
that an absolute?'
'If it is not, then all human virtue goes to the wall,' I
answered. 'Your theories leave us neither spiritual influence nor
eternal laws of right--neither truth nor
conscience.'
She laughed in her mocking Voltairean way.
'Eternal laws of right, spiritual influence, truth, the absolute,
conscience!' she said. 'And pray, my dear, what do you make of
any of these, outside external conditions? Point me out one virtue which
has not been merely the expression of the needs of the time, cherished
because of social exigencies;--tell me of one that has been absolute
from the beginning anywhere, and in all stages of civilization--and
then we can talk of the divine illumination of conscience and the eternal
rule of right. Go over the list. Truth, which is the most necessary of all
as the mutual defence-work and protection between man and man--the
concordat of society and the basis of association; Chastity, on which the
family is founded, the family being in its turn the foundation of society;
Justice, which is the taproot of law--these, the very elements of all
the rest, are
es-
sentially geographical, chronological, social. So also is magnanimity; so charity, liberty, patriotism, temperance--and all the rest. The whole fabric from end to end is a matter of growth and modification; and this absolute rightness, this divine illumination of the conscience, about which you ecstatics talk such egregious nonsense, is the mere result of external education, like proficiency in mathematics or clever combinations in chemistry.'
'Then right and wrong do not exist?' I said.
'As unchangeable principles?--no!' was her answer.
'Where do you find them? In the Bible? Surely there least of all! But
in no place--none! Polygamy, honoured as well as lawful in the East,
is prostitution in the West. Mohammed sanctified what David and Solomon and
the patriarchs had all practised and what Christ and later Judaism forbade.
Who is to
choose between the two systems, and pronounce arbitrarily on either? Slavery, supposed by the Jews to have been expressly sanctioned--and limited--by Jehovah; practised by all barbarous peoples and a main feature in the civilization of Greece and Rome; upheld in the United States as morally allowable, divinely ordained, and valuable for the general good--has become to us of late years an accursed thing, and we have put it away from us. But the doctrine of a man and a brother is one of quite modern growth. It is not even essentially Christian. Yet before the rights of man were preached you cannot say that slavery was a crime. There can be no fault where there is no better knowledge. You might as well say that belief in dreams, touching for the king's evil, or any other foolish outcome of superstition, was a crime. It was only ignorance. And he who would condemn
ignorance must begin with the new-born babe.'
'You make life very uncertain, and leave no solid foot-hold
anywhere,' I said.
'Do you think so? I do not. On the contrary, I find in my belief
the greatest certitude,' she answered.
'How? Where?' I asked.
She laughed again.
'In a paradox, my dear--in the universal phantasmagoria and
mirage that it all is--the universal delusion and maze of
everything,' she said. 'There is no reality except illusion.
There is no absolute standard--only the opinion of the day; and
morality, truth and right, change their names and dresses according to time
and place, just as our winter is the Australian summer, and the despised
donkey of the London costermonger is the honoured ass of the Eastern
dignitary. We are no better than blind puppies abandoned by their mother,
and we know very little
more than they. We do not even understand the material of the basket in which we find ourselves, nor our relations with the rest of the stable where we have been littered.'
'I cannot push God out of the world,' I said. 'He is
the Absolute; He is the Truth; the Life of the universe and the Soul of the
soul of man'!
'All in capitals?' she said, lifting her upper lip, but with
no sting in her good-tempered contempt. 'All right; I congratulate
you, my dear boy. You have found the key to the riddle which the world has
so long sought in vain. Give me your talisman. Teach me your method. It is
worth knowing.'
'My talisman?--Love!' I answered fervently, thinking of
Adelina Dalrymple.
'Yes? love? Love of what?--of whom? Love between the
sexes?--sometimes not a very celestial matter,' she said.
'Love in Nature,' I repeated.
'So!' she said drily. 'The Divine may be there for
you, but for myself, I cannot for the life of me find God in a stagnant
horse-pond, nor in a ploughed field spread over with dead fish. And I
confess I see Him no more in hawks and tigers, bogs and weeds, than in this
bundle of passions, weaknesses, appetites, treacheries, and impulses we
call man. But your Pantheism, to be logical, must include man as well as
beasts and roots and stones and trees.'
'And why not?' I answered. 'Man is the base of our
ideal God--he is the best we know.'
'In which case all I can say is--bad is the best, and very
bad too; and your divine tabernacle is wonderfully in need of repair, and a
very ramshackle concern all through.'
'That which He has made must have something of Himself in
it,' I said. 'Nature,
and with nature man, are both the expressions of the thought and power of God.'
'You believe in direct creation?' she returned, as if with
surprise. 'You believe that we are consciously and intentionally made
as we are, by a Supreme Being who could have done so much better for us if
He would? How odd! If I were to think so, I should go as mad as if I were
locked up in a torture-chamber where I had to witness the agonies of
others, and be twinged myself as a gentle reminder of consanguinity. To
believe that this world, with all its pain and misery, its disease and
death and ignorance, is the deliberate work of an Omnipotent and Omniscient
Deity, seems to me the most blasphemous assumption--if there be such a
thing as blasphemy--the most illogical and self-contradictory idea, as
well as the most derogatory to the character of the God proclaimed, that
the mind can conceive. No, my dear, I make no God responsible for
all this misery! It was not by the direct act of a Supreme Power that Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed--that we are born by torture and have to die in agony--that we have to protect ourselves from the elements which else would annihilate us--that we have to labour if we would live, and to suffer if we would enjoy--no Conscious Power is responsible for all this. It is the Law--that thing of which we know neither the origin nor the issue--Law without consciousness, without favour, without discretion, without individualism--Law as cold and stony as one of the old Egyptian gods, sitting through all eternity, their hands resting on their knees, deaf to the cries of men, dead to their prayers, and unmoved by all that passes before them, whether it be the blood of slain men or the laughter of little children.'
All this kind of talk fascinated while it half-terrified me. It had on
me the same
effect as conjuring up the devil and the practice of the Black Art must have had on a mediæval student. It was peeping into forbidden places and listening to forbidden sounds. The boldness of Mrs. Hulme's negations; the cynicism of her morality; her contempt for all those things which have ever been most sacred to man, and which were then my holiest treasures of faith; her keen wit; her kind heart and the barrenness of her spiritual nature--all made her a study of singular interest to me. But my interest was mixed with dread and my affection for her was dashed with reprobation. I was in a new world when with her; and I had not yet polarized myself. My enthusiasm was pitied as the fever of youth; my principles of deepest root were shown to be unworkable in actual life; the 'counsels of perfection' to which I yet clung were set aside as moral fairy tales, without substantiality or reasonableness; my faith in
the essential qualities of vice and virtue was treated as a superstition on all fours with Aubrey's astral spirit, the properties of the herb moly, and the gift of invisibility lying in fern-seed. When I spoke of the absolute, I was met by the relative, the evanescent, the apparent; and I was becoming familiarized with the doctrines which made all life mere vapoury phenomena, where nothing is new, nothing is true, and nothing signifies.
As I have said, Mrs. Hulme's contempt for humanity made her
latitudinarian all through. She was philosophically tolerant of lying and
deceit, of selfishness, treachery, unchastity, and all the rest, because
she expected nothing better.
'They have broken the eleventh commandment and been found
out,' she used to say. 'Everyone does the same, but some manage
better than others, and fasten their doors with a closer lock. It is all
that question of the lock--you may be sure of that, my
dear! Behind the door everyone is pretty much alike. An Archbishop is only a chevalier d'industrie made honest because he has no need to cheat. Take away his lawn sleeves and put him into a jockey's jacket, and in place of a saint you will have a blackleg. It is only a matter of dress and assignment.'
'Do you allow no good in human nature?' I asked, a little
impatiently. 'What do you leave us?'
'Well, I leave you Nero and Domitian and Caligula and all that
lot--Lucrezia Borgia and the Marchioness de Brinvilliers--Gilles
de Retz and the whole crew of inquisitors--and a crowd more; all own
brothers and sisters, founded on the same ground-plan as your saints and
heroes, and all divine tabernacles according to you. What more do you
want?'
'Oh, Mrs. Hulme! how can you live without faith in God or love for
man?' I
said with real pain. 'I should die if I were out in the wilderness as you are--if I were so desolate and deserted.'
A sudden look of tenderness came into her face and moistened her eyes.
She leaned forward in her chair and took my hand between both her own.
'What a child you are still, my six-foot-two dreamer!' she
said. 'When you were a little fellow, did you not suck your thumb
before you went to sleep? I am sure you did! You suck your mental thumb
still. It served you then for comfort--was as good as a lollipop. So
are your beliefs and aspirations, your vague adorations and baseless
certainties, now! It is almost a pity to take them from you prematurely.
The day came when of your own accord and by the law of growth you left off
sucking your thumb and yet went happily to sleep; and the day will come
when you will cease to idealize human nature, and yet you will find
life tolerable when you have left off believing in its pretty fables.'
'And I am to find no one good, no one true or faithful?--not
though I know and love you?' I asked, masking emotion under
playfulness.
She patted my head.
'What a pretty speech!' she said. 'I despise flattery,
my dear, but I love it all the same. When I hear beautiful music, I know it
is only a cunning combination of sounds made by lifeless material. But it
stirs my blood, for all that it comes out of the bowels of a cat and the
wood of a tree--nient' altro! So thank you for your nice little
bit of humbug, which is pleasant to hear and which I do not in the least
believe. So far from thinking me good, you think I am a horrible old woman,
given over to the devil and all his works, and destined to be damned to all
eternity.'
'I do not,' I answered. 'I do not agree
with you, but that does not prevent my respecting you.'
'How should you agree with me?' she said, with her mocking
little laugh. 'I am old, you are young; I know, you believe; I have
proved, you hope. We are not on the same platform. It is impossible. But
you will come to me in time;--that is, if you are made of stuff that
matures and ripens and does not wither green--nor become fossilized
before it has fructified.'
'And then I shall despise humanity?' I said.
'Yes, my dear--despise, pity, aid and not condemn it,'
she answered. 'It is a poor thing; but it cannot help itself, any
more than a snake can help its poison-fang or a jelly-fish its want of
backbone. It is so, and no one is to blame. But, being this poor thing, do
not talk to me of the divinity lying within it, nor of the omnipotence, the
love which energizes this grossly cruel and imperfect world.'
This was the kind of thing which Mrs. Hulme perpetually said to me; and
I wonder now how my belief in goodness and the right survived her efforts
to kill it. It did. I could not be brought to that terrible contempt which
seemed to her the key of all wisdom--the awful mirror bought of truth
by knowledge. I must love. I must be able to feel reverence, and to trust;
and to live among the dry bones as she did would have ruined me for ever.
If I had doubted those whom I loved, I should have doubted of God. And this
was to me that mysterious sin against the Holy Ghost on which my young
imagination had been so often exercised.
No; Mrs. Hulme was wrong. There was more than blind Law under which we
lived--there was Divine Providence ever leading us, like little
children, step by step, higher and higher. There was more than the
irresponsible animal in man--there was
his soul, his conscience, his love, his aspiration, his truth. And there were always some who were absolutely good--had I not loved Adeline Dalrymple?--and right and wrong were facts, not fancies.
So I fortified myself against my old friend's cynicism, and for her
dead negation substituted my own fervent affirmation, and made sure that I
had the Truth in front of me. And I was still actuated by principle, and
did my best to put into practice those counsels of perfection which had
always stirred my soul and, so to speak, fired my spiritual ambition. But I
made a terrible fiasco of my worldly matters in the process, and put back
the dial-hand of fortune for as many degrees as it had gone forward.
For instance: I had written a novel, for which Mr. Colbourn, one of the
great publishers of novels of that time, had agreed beforehand to give me
three hundred pounds. Now, three hundred pounds, in
those days of hard work and narrow gains, was a small fortune; and I had reckoned on it with the satisfaction of certainty. But my book was an unconventional and daring sort of thing; and when it was finished I began to think it was not quite the kind Mr. Colbourn had anticipated when he bargained for it. He came to me on the day when I told him it was completed; and he had the three hundred pounds in his pocket-book. When he took out the notes I laid my hand on his.
'No,' I said; 'let it stand over. Take the manuscript;
and if you do not like it, I let you off the bargain.'
He did not like it, and I lost my money. But I kept my sense of honour,
of truth, and fair-dealing; and was not that better?
When I told Mrs. Hulme what I had done, I really thought the end of our
friendship had come. She raved at me for my folly, my absurd pride, my
presumption
even, in pretending to arrange Mr. Colbourn's business for him. What right had I to teach him the lesson of not buying a thing he had not seen? Who was I, to think myself wiser than a sharp man of business who knew what he was about a great deal better than I could tell him? So she stormed. But at last she ended by taking my face between her large, soft, flaccid hands, and kissing me on the forehead.
'You are a fool,' she said in her queer cynical way;
'about the biggest out of Bedlam. But,' she added more softly;
'you are a good fool--which is something.'
Liberals have a constitutional sympathy, yet we knew then, as we know now, that it was the effort of tyranny, happily restrained, to place its yoke on the necks of men. It was like Sinbad's Old Man of the Sea, apparently helpless and ill-used and asking leave only to live like the rest. Once seat him on your shoulders and you will never know intellectual freedom again!
Men suffer individually from the moral grip of the Low Church ministers;
yet, as this grip is more congregational than organic, it can be shaken off
when desired, and is by no means so dangerous as that other. The 'sin
of Erastianism,' which the Tractarians denounce, is the only
safeguard of national religious freedom; and while the Church remains
national, and holds in its hands any kind of directing power over the lives
of citizens, it ought to be essentially, not nominally, Catholic; that is,
it ought to
include in its bounding line as much diversity as may be without self-stultification.
For all that, and in spite of the part which I, and others like me, took
in this Gorham affair, the Evangelical section was, and always has been,
profoundly abhorrent to me. The constricted human sympathies of these
people--their hostility to science--their superstitious adhesion
to every word of the Bible, whatever geology or philology may
say--their arrogant assumption of absolute rightness--their
greater reverence for certain mystical and unprovable doctrines than for
active and practical virtues--their unnatural asceticism, which has
none of the manliness of stoicism in it, but is founded on the crushing
idea of Sin, that pallid spectre everywhere, even in our
affections--in a word, their sanctimoniousness, gave me in my early
youth a repulsion for the whole school, which I retain to my
cooler and soberer old age. I have had a wide personal experience of this section, and when I speak of them it is according to knowledge;--which is the only excuse I can offer for a prejudice I confess to be both illiberal and unphilosophical.
Amongst the full-flavoured Bohemianism and scoffing Voltaireanism of
Mrs. Hulme--the practical honesty and unreserve of my uncovenanted
friends, the Free-lovers--the sharp and brilliant, but not always
modest, wit of Mr. King's lawyer guests, to whom nothing was sacred
save success--was wedged in the Evangelical straitness of the
Honourable and Reverend Mr. Caird, the Low Church incumbent of the parish
in which my boarding-house was situated. My father had stipulated that I
should attend the church and make the personal acquaintance of the
clergyman, whoever he might be, within whose jurisdiction I might be
placed; and, of course, I kept my word.
This intercourse was my penance for the pleasure of the rest.
The Honourable and Reverend Mr. Caird was one of those ecclesiastics
whose very personality sends one's blood the wrong way. Manner, look,
voice, enunciation, gestures, all are studied and artificial with these
men, who talk of glory and knowledge, saving grace, the blood of Jesus, and
the new birth, as others talk of the crops and the weather. Everything is
subdued, nothing is spontaneous about them; and there is the ever-present
consciousness of superior holiness, like a visible varnish, over them. The
thin lips, tightly closed, seem unable or unwilling to take a deep draught
of vitalizing air. Who knows what sobbing breaths of sinful passion may not
have profaned it?--what rude impulses of vigorous life may not have
stirred it?--unlawful for those whose castigated pulses may never
throb beyond the chill regulation
beat. The smooth clean-shaven face is as impassive as if cut out of wood. No generous flash of quick emotion brightens the cheek nor softens the eye, dilates the pinched nostril nor dimples the sterile mouth. You detect the clerical impress on that impassive face the first instant that you see it; for the episcopal laying-on of hands has left the thumb-mark for ever. The eyelids are generally dropped over eyes which may not see too much of Nature, that robust child of goat-footed Pan, with its bold glances roving free and wild over all the mysteries of life, and its ruddy mouth, red with the juice of fruits, laughing up to the sun, its creator and preserver and destroyer in one. Nature, which is unredeemed--humanity, which is unregenerate--are both among the things inhibited to the 'saved' sons of the Gospel. To them Love itself is a snare and a sin; and the very passion of a mother for her
child is deprecated as an idolatrous preference for the creature over the Creator.
As for Nature, the word itself is redolent to them of impiety and
indelicacy. I remember how once, when my sister Ellen, protesting against
the arid teachings of one who it was then thought would be her
mother-in-law, said warmly: 'It is not natural,' received for
her rebuke: 'Natural, Ellen! how can you, a Christian young woman,
use a word at once so indelicate and profane?'
Still, the men themselves are often so good, so conscientious, that it
is impossible not to respect them as individuals, how much soever one may
shrink from them as officials. And this was the case with me in my
intercourse with Mr. Caird.
He lived only to do his duty, as he conceived it, and to spread what he
thought to be right principles. But what principles they were! He
sanctioned no kind of
social pleasure and found sin in the most innocent amusements. Cards were always the 'devil's books' with him; a theatre was the equivalent of hell, and those who went there were predestined to eternal damnation as surely as those who sunk in mid ocean were doomed to be drowned; and dancing was also synonymous with damnation. He once found himself at a lady's house where a small impromptu dance among the boys and girls was got up. They were only children, none counting over ten years of age.
Mr. Caird routed up his wife, took her on his arm, and went straight to
the hostess.
'Madam,' he said severely; 'I cannot stay here to see
these young souls led down to hell. Either this sinful pastime must be
stopped, or I and my wife must leave.'
As the lady refused to stop that in which she saw no kind of harm, and
thus make
a whole roomful of innocent little people unhappy, as their sacrifice to this Moloch of superstition, Mr. Caird acted on his threat, and buried himself and his wife in the cloak-room until his carriage came to take them away.
Another time his wife went out with a cameo brooch in front of her
dress. Seeing it for the first time as she came from the cloak-room,
unshawled and bare-necked, he peremptorily bade her take it off, saying,
with more prudent prevision than substantial delicacy:
'Take that off. It attracts the eyes of men to a part of your
person it is not desirable they should look at too closely.'
He was a man as incapable of understanding or discussing a religious
doubt as was my father himself. He might, perhaps, have scraped up as much
moss of tolerance from among the boulders of his convictions as would have
enabled him to discuss
variorum readings of certain texts; but any doubt cast on the bases of his faith--that was beyond his limit; and to have entered on it at all would have been to him like holding a candle to the devil, where the torchbearer would have been as damnable as the demon he served.
To him and all his school the devil is a personage as real as that
next-door neighbour the Socinian, and hell is as actual a place as Paris or
Rome. Logical and literal, they admit no refining away of words nor
enlargement of sense by the doctrine of development. The worm that dieth
not and the fire that is not quenched are material and existing things.
They cannot accept the softening exegesis of 'tropes,'
'parables,' 'speaking to the people in the language which
alone they could understand,' 'doctrine according to the
learning of the times, and not permanent and fixed in the face of better
knowledge,'
with which the Broad Church smooth out difficulties. The words are final and of cast-iron; consequently the material personality of Satan and the topical reality of hell are matters of absolute certainty which nothing can undo.
I was once present at a very painful scene in the house of one of these
fervent believers in the personality of the devil and the physical pains of
hell--a scene which made a great impression on me and drove me farther
and farther from the line of orthodoxy. The eldest son of the family had
lately died. He had been a wild outward kind of young fellow, who had
enjoyed his youth too freely and flung his cap too far over the windmill.
He had been thoughtless, extravagant, pleasure-loving; and he had done a
great many things which it would have been better to have left undone. But
he had harmed no one but himself; and his worst offences had been due to
tempera-
ment rather than to any obliquity of moral nature.
One day, about a month after his death, I was dining with the family,
when the father suddenly laid down his knife and fork, covered his face in
his hands and burst into loud weeping. We saw the tears run down below the
palms of his hands and ooze through his fingers. His eldest daughter got
up, went over to him, and put her arms round his neck.
'Dearest papa,' she said; 'what is it? what troubles
you?'
'Ah, my dear!' he sobbed; 'I was thinking of poor Jim
in hell!'
The strange incongruity of the thought, so ghastly and so grim, with the
prosaic circumstances of the meal, made a contrast that I have never
forgotten.
Poor man! How often I have thought of the needless agony of that moment;
and how often I have wished that I could help
in breaking once and for ever all these cruel chains which bind men to misery and falsehood. We deprecate the sacrifices made of life and manhood to Juggernaut; are ours of spiritual peace and courage made to Satan any more respectable? By my own early torments I can gauge the misery felt by others; by my own early terrors I know the strength of that mysterious fear which possesses the souls of those who believe and tremble.
I was brought into even closer personal relations with this section of
the Church. My sister Ellen was engaged to be married to the son of one of
these Low Church clergymen, and I was naturally a reprobate and accursed to
the family she was about to enter. Mr. Smith, her father-in-law elect, made
it a condition of the marriage that she should give me up as completely as
if I were dead--that she should never see me, hold no intercourse with
me, and that she
should abandon me entirely, as the plain and manifest duty of a Christian woman.
We were a strange family and full of apparent contradictions. We might
quarrel among ourselves at home, as we did; I might be reprobated and
considered abominable by the rest, as I was; but we were too strong-willed
a race to submit for submission's sake to king or kaiser. And Ellen,
who had never specially loved me and had always trounced me when she could,
refused to accept any husband in the world on these terms.
'Christopher may be quite wrong in all he thinks--and he is
quite wrong; that I admit,' she said; 'but he is my brother,
and I will not give him up. And if Morley'--her
lover--'has not courage to stand by me, he need not.'
He had not the courage; and the marriage was broken off, to my intense
trouble. But Ellen did better afterwards; so that
burden of unavailing regret was rolled off my shoulders. And indeed I doubt if she would ever have been happy in a family where it was considered indelicate and unchristian to say that a thing was unnatural, and where the theatre was considered as one of the Halls of Eblis.
In later years another sister discarded me of her own free-will for my
unsoundness. This was when she had become a believer in the theory of the
Ten Tribes--in universal Jesuitism, so that a Freethinker, a Socinian,
an Evangelical, a Tractarian, have each and all been supposed by her to be
so many emissaries of the Jesuits--in secret poisonings as matters of
weekly occurrence--in the Apocalypse, and the Seal now being opened
(witness thereof the potato disease and the phylloxera)--and in
ghosts, apparitions, presentiments and warnings as among the ordinary
phenomena of this solid earth.
Not all these Evangelicals are sincere; or, if they are sincere in their
convictions, they have odd irregularities in practice. A certain great
provincial light in these days was the leader of the Evangelical school
where he was stationed. An eloquent preacher, he longed to get to London,
saying: 'I am an oak in a flower-pot here'--though his
place was in the second city of the kingdom, and his fame and following
were as great as if he had had St. Paul's for his pulpit. Among his
hearers and friends was a very charming young married woman, with that kind
of mental activity which made her go into religion as she went into
society; study the esoteric meaning of texts as she studied Balzac and
Georges Sand; and long for peculiar enlightenment as she longed to be
received at court and to work her way into the houses of the great. It was
one part of human life to her; and she had a feverish desire to know all
the parts,
and to possess herself of everything by which her mind would be filled with new ideas, as a balloon is filled with gas.
Mr. -- was a handsome, well-favoured man, also desirous of new
ideas, and not disinclined to lead blind white souls into the light, nor to
set dainty tripping feet on to holy places. He and his fair friend often
read the Bible together. He expounded and she took in. How it really ended
I do not know, for she did not tell me more than this little anecdote. When
they were sitting together in the summer-house, with the Bible open before
them, he suddenly re-enacted the drama of Francesca and Paolo--they
were studying the Song of Solomon--broke out into a declaration of
love, and, when she repulsed him, reminding him that both were married,
flung piety to the winds and said:
'Let us then go down to hell together.'
This is all I know; and I know this only
by the voluntary confession of the lady herself. The Oak in the Flower-pot I never saw; and I never told the story against him. But I used to laugh to myself when I heard his name, and think how odd it was that I knew so much of him, while to him I was not even the shadow of a name.
Hearing so much of sin from Mr. Caird, and seeing how he conjured up
this pale and ghastly spectre everywhere, I set myself to think out the
matter and to clear the question, so far as I could, from all
conventionalized interpretations, going down, more meo, to the foundations
of things. And going down to the foundations here, I made it clear to
myself that elemental sin does not exist, and that the whole thing is a
question of proportion. Cut away the base of anything--even of
murder--and you cut away a necessary and integral part of human
nature. Exaggerate this absolutely necessary base, and you come to
disproportion
and selfishness--that is, to sin; as in the instinct of self-preservation, of which anger or revenge, culminating in murder, is the excess, the exaggeration, the disproportion, the crime. Also I made it clear that certain virtues rest on a physical basis; as, the value of chastity in woman for the sake of the purity of the race--the value of temperance in man for the sake of the health of the offspring.
When I had reasoned this out for myself, I can scarcely describe the
relief I felt; how much more manageable the whole question of human life
became; how much wider the horizon, how much clearer the light. Instead of
that maddening mystery of the origin of evil, and why God, who is
Omnipotent, causes His creatures to be born in sin and conceived in
iniquity, I came to the simple equation of comparative excess and
conditional ignorance, of which the results must be dealt with as severely
as may be, but whereof the cause is remediable, and will one day be removed. It seemed to lift me out of the depths, and to invest humanity with a hope and power forbidden while I believed in the inborn wickedness of the human heart. I saw law, crime, and punishment as the logical conditions of human society--society conscious of its needs, and acting out the law of self-preservation by repressing excess and punishing inordinate selfishness. But this was a very different thing from the doctrine of elemental and intrinsic sin which the Low Church holds so strongly. And, as I say, the freedom, the light, the hope, the cheerfulness which resulted from my conclusions made a new moral world for me. So far I owe gratitude to Mr. Caird and his followers. That powerful stimulant of opposition, which has ever worked so strongly in me, led me to the examination of the whole matter; and I burst into
freedom through the very contemplation of bondage.
It was about this time that I met Robert Owen, then an old man, but
still full of pith and vigour. His belief and enthusiasm were in no wise
damped by disappointment, and he still held on to his idea of philosophical
communism as the ultimate outcome and regeneration of society. I became his
ardent convert, and had there been a 'phalanstery' founded on
philosophical principles I would have gone into it. In some form or other I
felt sure that these principles of co-operation would ultimately prevail;
and we see their partial working at the present day, under a new name and
an altered shape. But I should have liked to have seen the question fairly
tried, and to have proved for myself what was the moral hitch to prevent
smooth running. We can live peaceably together in hotels and
pensions--why not in a community,
where we should simply enlarge the principle, and still further restrict that bane of life and progress--selfishness?
Together with Owen I knew Dr. Travis, the delightful man they used to
call his Paraclete. He was one of the loveliest flowers of humanity; but he
wanted magnetic force and vitalizing energy. Handsome, well-read,
singularly well-bred and as pure as a good woman, he was content with
holding sacred the faith that had been bequeathed to him, but he made no
valid efforts to spread it. He might not have succeeded if he had; but I
have always thought that if a more supple intellect, a more worldly-wise
and experimental man, had taken the management of Robert Owen's ideas,
we might have had co-operation sooner in time and more radical in
organization than we have. It seems to me very certain that the thing has
to come sooner or later, and that mutual support will some day be the rule
of
society, rather than what we have now, universal competition.
The strange variety of thought and view found among the people I most
frequented made a moral and intellectual dissolving view or kaleidoscope
which sometimes a little bewildered me; and I often asked with Pilate:
'What is Truth?'--that question which no man answered
then, and no man has answered since; and yet we all believe that we
ourselves have this Truth. And I in those days thought that I had it in
faithful belief in God's Providence and power; in the ultimate good of
all things; in the perfectibility of man and the rapid advance of society
towards that perfection; in the sure progress of the soul after death; in
the elimination of the devil from the scheme of the spiritual world; in the
sweeping away of hell; in the divine life within us; in the universal
Fatherhood of God--God above and beyond us all--God revealed in
the mind of man--God untrammelled by church or creed or formula, neither Christian nor Jewish, neither Mohammedan nor Brahmin, but everywhere, in all beliefs, in all heroic deeds, in all faithful effort, wherever a prayer went up to heaven or an act of sacrifice was done on earth. For though I had got rid of sin in the abstract, I had not relaxed my hold on good; and of all arguments, that which maintains there can be no good without evil was the one I most passionately repudiated. Light was light to me, and I could not admit that it needed darkness to enable it to exist. And in like manner God was God, and needed no devil as His shadow.
the place was somewhat strangely called, was never without its attractions and its visitors. It was a kind of social honeypot round which the flies continually buzzed, and no man who once went there ever failed to put in a second appearance.
There was a mystery in Mrs. Pratten's life which no one understood.
When a young woman she had married a man apparently her suitable match in
every way; and she had kept with him four days. On the fifth she went back
to her mother's house, and never left it again. What happened to
divide these wedded lovers no one knew. It was one of those well-kept
secrets on which all may make theories at pleasure; for no one can either
disprove or verify, and one hypothesis is as good as another. Neither the
husband, who was still alive and who enjoyed life as a bachelor in Paris,
nor Mrs. Pratten herself, told more than the mere fact betrayed:--They
had married a life
time ago, and they had parted after four days, never to meet again.
Since that time the one ever spoke with the bitterest contempt of
women--the other with the profoundest horror of men. To Mrs. Pratten
all men were marked with the Sign of the Beast; and she was accustomed to
say that nothing tried her faith in God so severely as the creation of such
monsters as men. To Mr. Pratten, whom I afterwards knew in Paris, women
were mere jointed dolls, and there was no hope for the human race, doomed
to the degradation of being mothered by such unredeemed and absolute
fools.
Being so uncompromising a man-hater, Mrs. Pratten was, of course, a
misogamist. She lectured every girl of her acquaintance on the sin of
matrimony, as if this were indeed a crime; and, though she accepted women
who were already wives when she knew them, she repudiated those who took to
themselves husbands after she had known them as girls. She professed for them a horror only equalled by that which she felt for the men themselves.
With Althea she was explicit enough. If ever she were to fall away from
grace and virtue so much as to marry, she would be cut out of her
aunt's will as irrevocably as she would be banished from her
aunt's house. If she remained unmarried, as a good and modest woman
should, she would come in for all. And as Mrs. Pratten was a wealthy woman,
who lived up to about half her income and put out the other half to
interest, the bribe was considerable, and so far had proved successful.
Althea Cartwright was Althea Cartwright still; and everyone knew that she
would not marry, and indeed could not, unless she got hold of a
millionnaire.
When I knew her she was some way past thirty--a tall, fair woman
with an almost perfect figure, at once generous and graceful,
where the outlines were long and flowing and the filling-in rich and firmly modelled. Her face was not strictly beautiful, and yet she was more attractive than many confessedly beautiful women. She had an abundance of shining flaxen hair, with a shade of red to be sometimes seen in the sunlight, and her skin was of that clear but not unhealthy pallor which generally goes with flaxen hair. What would else have been its exquisite transparency, however, was marred by freckles, which were the standing sorrow of her life. Her eyes were light-hazel, large, finely-shaped and wonderfully brilliant; her nose was short, rather blunt, but beautiful in profile; her lips were curved, flexible and delightfully expressive of her emotions; her hands and arms were simply perfection; and she was singularly soft in manner, speech, voice and texture. Indeed, her main characteristic was softness. Yet she was not weak; still less was
she flaccid or without grip. She knew what she wanted, and she took it and held it for so long as it pleased her; and when she no longer cared for it she let it drop, and walked on without it. She had the most consummate ability that way, and was no more to be held against her will than a mermaid in the water--no more to be constrained than the cloud which once looked like Juno. More Ixions than one knew this; and no one had yet found the charm which could compel her to maintain any kind of relation whatsoever when she wished to abandon it. From friends to servants, she held while she would and took the good while she could; and then she slipped aside and discarded without a second thought. No; Althea Cartwright, the softest, sweetest, and apparently the most pliant creature in the world, was certainly not weak nor yet flaccid.
Her central point was her devotion to her
aunt, whose moods she divined with almost intuitive perception, and to whose humours she adapted herself with marvellous plasticity. For among her other qualities she had the temper of an angel, and a power of sympathetic receptivity which made her the favourite confidant of all who had anything to confide. But though she was thus devoted to her aunt, she managed to live her own life with tolerable breadth of margin; and, while Mrs. Pratten never went out in the evening, Althea was never at home, save on the nights when they themselves received. Popular as she was, everyone wanted her. Women seemed to love her as much as men admired her; and when once a house-door was opened to her it was rarely shut again. The oddest part of the whole thing was, she always seemed to have some strange power in those houses where she was intimate. I think she did a good deal for her lady-friends as well as for the men;
and I know that she sometimes screened them and sometimes helped them. At all events, she was useful; and she was far too good-natured to refuse a request, whatever it might be. But these concentric circles revolved round and never broke into the standing duty of her life; and her aunt had no cause to feel herself neglected.
Mrs. Pratten was a kind of palimpsest of all the crazy faiths that float
about the world. She had gone through the whole cycle of religious
experiences, yet had learned no self-distrust from her repeated failures.
Her last state was always her final revelation; and for all that the voice
of God had already spoken to her in so many different dialects, she was
invariably sure that this last was that in which He had spoken to Moses on
Mount Sinai. 'Guided by the Spirit'--that was her phrase.
Were this so, it cannot be denied that she had been guided into many queer
corners
and landed among many odd heaps of rubbish. She had adopted every mystical creed extant, and was now in the full swing of the most mystical of all:--it was before the days of Theosophy and Occult Buddhism. She was a Swedenborgian, and a 'spiritist' of the school known a few years afterwards as that of Alan Kardec. His ideas had been in the air before he consolidated them into a system; and Mrs. Pratten, who caught all floating theories as boys catch moths, had adopted them for herself. She believed in successive incarnations of the spirit, and amused herself by tracing back the pedigree of her friends' souls, and locating each in its special tabernacle.
Of her own incarnations she was never weary of talking. She was a frail,
meagre little woman, with a mousy face, a nervous manner and a temperament
as timid as a hare's; but she gave to herself all sorts of heroic and
spiritually splendid antecedents,
and jumbled up her pre-incarnations into an olla podrida of the oddest kind. She had been Miriam and Judith, Joan of Arc and St. Theresa, Queen Elizabeth of England and Queen Elizabeth of Hungary, Dorcas and Elizabeth Fry, besides others which I have forgotten. She added to her impersonations so often that she herself got somewhat 'mixed,' and lost all hold of a dominant idea; and I, among others, was hopelessly muddled.
Her niece, Althea, had been a whole string of interesting frailties;
among whom I remember figured Bathsheba, Aspasia, Fair Rosamond and
Mademoiselle de la Vallière. Her penultimate incarnation had been
Marie Antoinette, as a sign of progressive improvement. But Mrs. Pratten
spoke with pride of the moral superiority of her present condition, and the
cleansing fires through which her soul had manifestly passed. This avatar
was better than all the
others. Even Marie Antoinette was married:--Althea, thank heaven! was husband-less, and one of those divinely marked on the forehead.
Me she called Nero. Certainly, in the daguerreotype taken of me, I had a
curiously Roman look, not visible, I fancy, in my real face. But I did not
feel conscious of my identity with the imperial madman who, she said, had
been my former self. When I objected on the ground of non-recognition, she
became more than ever positive that she was right, and assured me that this
was the best proof I could give, both of my identity and my spiritual
advance. I was ashamed of my former self and therefore repudiated the
connection. I had forgotten my then cherished sins, just as we forget the
angry passions of our childhood. So far I too was cleansed, and by just so
much was nearer to ultimate regeneration. Perhaps this was my last
incarnation, as it was her
own and Althea's. She was certain of these; and she hoped, but was not quite so sure, of mine. She thought I had in me still too much of the original red earth of which the first man was made. And while we had any of that left in us, we were too heavily weighted to soar upward to the New Jerusalem.
Another of her amusements was to find out the correspondences of her
friends in the animal world, and to determine whether they were the further
evolution of that energy, the enlargement of that idea, which had initially
expressed itself in beasts of prey or beasts of burden; in the animals
which are the sustaining sacrifice or in those which are the companions and
servants of man; in singing birds which delight him; in insects which
torment him; in reptiles which destroy him. She subdivided even these
divisions, as when she gravely pondered on the question whether I was a
setter or a retriever.
She finally settled it by a spiritual ukase:--I was a retriever. For herself, she was the solitary unpaired female eagle--the third of the nest; and Althea was a butterfly--that which had crawled having now learned to fly.
Also, it cost her many hours of anxious thought to determine to which
organ of the Great Man, which she and her co-religionists say makes the
shape and conditions of Heaven, we should all be assigned when we had done
with our re-incarnations, and had finally shaken off the last grains of
that red earth which was the cause of our bondage and the chain of our
darkness. She placed herself in the eye, 'seeing' being her
faculty. Althea was in the great sympathetic nerve; but she moved my
locality from organ to organ as she shifted her ideas of my
character--and when I last heard of myself I was in the nerves of the
tongue, as the discriminator of spiritual food.
Odd as she was in all this, Mrs. Pratten was not substantially insane.
She was on the borders, I admit; as must needs be when a woman with an
active brain of small size, and more imagination than critical faculty, has
allowed her reasoning powers to become practically abortive, while she has
cultivated indiscriminate belief as the alpha and omega of spiritual
insight, and passes her whole time in hunting out analogies. This search
for analogy is neither more nor less than so much spiritual
patch-work--piecing together forms and colours which harmonize and
make a pretty pattern. For even religions follow Mrs. Pratten's own
law of analogy; and some are simply mental amusements, as was hers.
Queer as she was, yet, being withal rich, hospitable, of good
family--and the aunt of Althea--people flocked to her dinners and
suppers; assisted at her séances and expositions; and laughed at her
afterwards
as their compensation for time wasted. It was as much as their good-breeding could compass not to laugh at her to her face when she told them of the spirits who had visited her and the revelations which had been made to her. For really, to hear what Napoleon had to say about the celestial bell-shaped tent in which he lived--in the palm of the right hand--and how Marlborough and Gustavus Adolphus and the Black Prince, and all other illustrious warriors, were also living in bell-tents within a stone's-throw of each other, was rather strong meat to come between the roast and boiled! People who walk habitually in spirit-land do undoubtedly scatter a few of their wits by the way; and poor Mrs. Pratten had scattered some of hers, like the rest.
Her favourite scientific craze at this time--for she prided herself
on her science equally with her religion--was the Odic Force and
mesmeric clairvoyance. She had been one of the first in society to follow after Reichenbach and to believe in the Okeys. Now she had elaborated a medium for herself. This was her maid--a certain sharp-witted little Welshwoman, called Sarah Jones in the parish register. In Mrs. Pratten's blue book she was Ruth. The extraordinary 'sensitiveness' which this young person possessed--the way in which she exemplified and even went beyond all Reichenbach's experiments, and the certitude with which she discovered magnets in the dark, owing to the light which played around them and streamed in purple filaments from the ends--were matters of constant wonder to the world which witnessed. The sceptical did not know how it was done; the credulous were all agape at the marvel.
I noticed that Althea avoided discussion on the topics which made her
aunt's whole
happiness and filled her mental world from centre to circumference. She believed in them, of course. She accepted her former doubtful incarnations and her present progressive improvement with her customary serene grace; was quite sure of her eventual lodgment in the great sympathetic nerve; had not a doubt that Sarah Jones, the black-eyed, sharp-witted girl from Wales, was once the sweet and patient Ruth; was convinced of her ability to see a magnet when hidden in a cupboard, and of the purple filaments which streamed like flames from either end when the armature was removed; convinced also of her obedience to orders transmitted by thought from Dover to London; of her knowledge of the word written on a piece of paper and placed inside a hazel-nut or sealed up in an envelope; of her being able to travel to the exact spot where Sir John Franklin and his men were lying stark beneath the snow;
of her interpretation of the mystery of the Foley Place murder; of all the things which 'sensitives' do and know. All the same, out of Mrs. Pratten's presence Althea never talked on these matters. When pressed, she used to refer her interlocuter to her aunt, who understood these things so much better than she herself did! She was only in the place of an ignorant believer. How indeed, could she be a disbeliever, when such marvels were daily enacted before her eyes? But she was neither an expositor nor a teacher. She left that to her aunt; and she did not care to talk about the thing at all. It was beyond her; and she felt lost and bewildered.
If she did not actively support, she never showed the faintest doubt as
to the genuineness of the phenomena; and to the last no one knew what she
believed and what she discredited. For if Mrs. Pratten had dropped a few of
her wits by the way, Althea had kept all hers intact. And, said the
sceptical
and squareheaded: 'How could she possibly believe such rubbish?'
From the first both aunt and niece showed me much kindness. Mrs. Pratten
looked on me as a future certain convert. She recognised my love of truth;
and, as she knew that she had the 'true truth,' she said she
was as sure, as of to-morrow's sunshine, that I would come to the
light wherein she stood. It was only a question of time and teaching. She
knew that I was still too full of red earth; but sometimes the work of
winnowing went on at rapid speed, and I might be one who, when the sifting
once began, would get rid of all that clogged the spiritual machinery in
less time than one could count. Also, as a literary man, I would be a
valuable convert. I never blinded myself to the extrinsic importance given
me by my profession; and I understood from the first that the hand of the
pressman was of more account than the still
further purification of the spirit of Nero. This, therefore, was why Mrs. Pratten made so much of me and had me so often to her house; and Althea naturally followed her aunt's lead in this as in other things.
With Althea was another reason to lend additional force to these--I
filled a gap. She was one of those women who have always on hand a
'brother' or 'son' or 'uncle,'
according to relative age, with whom they go about--to the opera, the
theatre, sometimes down to Richmond, to Greenwich, on the Thames; whom they
take into society and introduce to their friends; and whom the world agrees
to accept as adopted relations according to nomenclature. I was presented
to her by Mr. King, who in his day had been her uncle; and I was presented
at the time when she was looking out for a new kinsman. She had just lost
her 'favourite boy'--a young barrister who had gone out
to India; and she was therefore, as she lamented, sonless. And as she was now growing an old woman, she said with her seductive smile and a peculiar softness veiling the glitter of her greenish-hazel eyes, she preferred sons to all other relations. She was so fond of boys! They were such dear fellows with their funny fresh ways; and men were such dreadful creatures! Hence she adopted me, in the place of Ronald Ray removed; and I was quite willing that she should.
She was of immense use to me in every way. She took me with her into
society, and introduced me freely to all the best people she knew. And she
knew a socially higher and more fashionable set than even that to which I
had been taken by my pretty patroness with the childish shoulders, or than
I found staring at luminous hands in the house of the friend of Mazzini and
the believer in the Floating Medium. And
of itself this was a valuable experience. She polished my manners as much as the material would allow; taught me the shibboleth; instructed me in those microscopic minutiæ which only the initiated can see, but the absence of which they detect at a glance and resent as a crime; and she wanted to make me a fine gentleman from head to heel, in character as well as in bearing. She found fault with me as I was--chiefly for my want of small change in conversation--for my want of all badinage and lightness--for my vehemence when I talked on those things wherein I was really interested--for the frankness with which I gave my opinion when I was called on to say what I thought and what I believed. And above all, she found fault with my superabundant earnestness.
'Glissez mortels, ne vous appuyez pas,' was her motto; and
she found my step too firm and my grip too close.
So did her lady friends; some of whom seemed to consider me good fun
because of the 'simplicity,' the
'naïveté,' the 'innocence' which they
said more than once was 'delicious.' But I was not of the stuff
which makes fine gentlemen nor courtiers; and through all my gratitude for
their kindness, and a certain inevitable dazzle of the senses by reason of
the rank, beauty and wealth of those by whom I was caressed, I kept my head
steady, and the core of me was never reached. There was something about
these grand ladies which intellectually repelled me, for all that
personally I was attracted. There was a certain insolence of egotism to
which I could never reconcile myself, and which came out in all they did
and said and were. The wretched stuff which passed for Art with them; the
miserable daubs; the flimsy writing; the idea-less music; the hideous
jingle called poetry which they displayed to each other with
pride, and for which they received such lavish commendation! What good did their education got by foreign travel do them, if, after having seen the galleries in Florence and Rome, Dresden and Madrid, they could think simpering masks were human likenesses and tea-board abominations landscapes according to nature!
I got an ugly glimpse into something worse than self-contented
incapacity, through the offers made me by more than one great lady who
wanted to appear as an authoress without the trouble of writing, and who
thought to buy my brains as she would have bought so many yards of silk.
Did not the then famous Baroness -- come to me with a bundle of
woodcuts for which she wanted me to write a story under her name?--and
did not Lady -- and Mrs.-- both ask me to take their manuscripts
and put them into readable shape for so much down? And were they not all
offended because I
refused? And did not Althea herself say that I was twin-brother to that Huron of old time who stands as the ideal of unpractical folly, and that I would never make a man of the world?--never!
Again, the lives of these grand ladies struck me as so fragmentary, and
the scope of their energies as so small and thin! An hour in the morning
given to the acquirement of an art which takes for years and years the
whole day's working-time of him who would be a proficient; the
importance of fashion, of etiquette, of the artificial rules of conduct by
which living human nature is checked and stifled; the sense of individual
and social superiority to the commonalty, and one's own consequent
inferiority evidenced by their very condescension; the consciousness that
any man out of their own social sphere is to them a mere toy or tool, to be
used for their pleasure and cast aside when they are tired of him; their
want of
thoroughness and humility, and their unbridled egotism--all this created in me a certain moral and mental revulsion which kept me from the self-abasement of social ambition.
Young as I was, I was determined that it should not be said of me, as
was said of some one else: 'He is smothered in Countesses.'
I went among these grand ladies because Althea Cartwright wished it; but
I went as an outsider; and I was never anything else. I was too proud of my
own order and too essentially democratic to wish to shift my place or to
shine by reflected splendour. And all Althea's endeavours to make me
understand the value of being seen in certain drawing-rooms failed. From
the first days up to now, grand folk were and are nothing to me but curious
studies. While they cannot confess to equality, I refuse to kowtow to
superiority, such as is
given by mere name and fortune. Not inheritance, but acquirement, is, I think, the only true gauge of merit; and the name that is won far surpasses the lustre of that which is bequeathed. And these principles are not those which harmonize best with fine ladies and fine drawing-rooms.
Notwithstanding this stiffneckedness, Althea's kindness to me did
not diminish. On the contrary, it increased, and often became so great as
to be a little startling and bewildering. She called me her boy and
presented me as her new son. She found out my tastes and ministered to
them, even to providing for me a special kind of cake that I liked, and to
giving me a certain champagne glass, which I fancy had gone the rounds. She
worried newspaper editors, and all those who had the power, for boxes at
the theatre and stalls at the opera; and as she had her own little
brougham, these evenings cost neither her
nor myself anything beyond the flowers and the ices which were then de rigueur. She loaded me with small presents, which embarrassed me to receive and were utterly useless to keep; but she would take no denial; and when I remonstrated, she would tap my face with the tips of her fair, soft fingers, and say, with mock anger:
'Naughty child! may not a mother do as she likes with her
son?'
But in the midst of all this undeserved kindness, as the days came and
went a certain strange unrest and impatience seemed, as it were, to line
her satin-like softness--a certain core of almost fierceness, almost
harshness, to lie within the outer envelope of her habitual tenderness. She
was always kind to me in word and deed--caressing, indulgent,
'spoiling'--and yet she seemed dissatisfied with me, as if
she had secret cause of grief against me. And she was so strangely
distrustful of me--so
exacting of assurances, protestations, promises! She used to make me swear every time I saw her, she holding both my hands in hers, saltier-wise, that I would be faithful to her--quite, quite faithful; that I would never have another friend like her--never take one so near to my heart, nor give to any living woman the affection I had given to her. She used to torment me--not all unpleasantly--with her jealousy, which overflowed at all four corners. In that pale pink room off the first landing, where she made her private nest and received her own especial guests, she made me go through many an agitated half-hour by jealous accusations flung broadcast, and as aimless as so many arrows shot in the air for any chance quarry that might be about, although unseen.
After I had sworn and vowed and protested with sufficiently strong
emphasis to satisfy her, we used to have a grand
recon-
ciliation--if that could be called reconciliation where the fracture was all on one side; after which things would go smoothly for a day or two, and the sky would be cleared of its phantoms.
It was after one of these scenes, when she had been angry and I had been
contrite for absolutely nothing, that we came to an understanding.
She took my hand and pressed it against her heart.
'Feel that, you naughty boy!' she said caressingly;
'think how dear you must be to me, when you can make my heart beat
like that for fear you do not love me as much as you ought!'
'But I do love you!' I replied. 'You know that I do!
How could I help loving you? No one has ever been so kind to me as you, and
no one is so delightful.'
'Is that true?' she asked.
'Yes, absolutely true,' I said.
Her breath came with a quick little sob.
'If I could believe you!' she said softly; and as she spoke
the scales fell from my eyes.
True, she was many years older than I; but what of that? She was
beautiful still, and delightful in every way. I was young and could work;
and her certain disinheritance when she married me would free me from all
suspicion of fortune-hunting. I had my own future in my own hands, and
fortune would be the friend to me she always is to the self-reliant. She
loved me. There was no vanity in thinking this; it would have been
stupidity not to have seen it. And I--I loved her, and had forgotten
Adeline Dalrymple:--of whom, by the way, I had never spoken to
her.
I took her in my arms and kissed her upturned face. She closed her eyes,
and, dead white as she was, I thought she had fainted, till half a smile
and half a tremulous
little movement of beseeching came over her colourless lips, as she whispered tenderly:
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