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BY
to God through him,' though pretty enough in poetry, makes but a mighty poor kind of life for her in practice, and reduces co-partnership to serfdom. My own creed in these things may be summed up in these three clauses:--That women should have an education as good in its own way as, but not identical with, that of men; that they ought to hold their own property free from their husbands' control without the need of trustees, but subject to the joint expenditure for the family; that motherhood should be made legally equal with paternity, so that no such miserable scandal of broken promises and religious rancour as this later Agar-Ellis case should be possible. But these are only the alphabet of the movement; the main theme goes far beyond.
Things had already begun to move. Talfourd's Bill, giving the
custody of young children to the mother, had been passed after a stout
resistance from the Law Lords on the Obstructive side. One of these said
that, should this Bill become law, the avenues to the Court of Chancery would be choked with applicants for legal separation, as nothing but the fear of being parted from her children kept many a wife with her husband. The prophecy was disregarded; the Bill passed; and married life in England has gone on much the same as before.
The sensational part of the matter was, the story of that man in the
Marshalsea prison who took his suckling babe from his wife and handed it
over to his mistress--a possibility of action on all fours with the
vilest features of slavery.
It is wonderful to think how we supported such hideous injustice; just
as it is wonderful now to think how the absolute power of making a will,
and thereby leaving all his property away from his wife and children, is
still maintained as part of the rights of a man. The argument of trust in
the natural softness of the parental instinct is about as solid as a drum.
It makes a
fine sound when nicely struck; but it is a rickety kind of foundation to build on.
Though the core of this question of woman's rights is just and
reasonable, some of its supporters were even then too extreme for my ideas
of what was fitting. I could not accept the doctrine that no such thing as
natural limitation of sphere is included in the fact of sex, and that
individual women may, if they have the will and the power, do all those
things which have hitherto been exclusively assigned to men. Nor can I deny
the value of inherent modesty; nor despise domestic duties; nor look on
maternity as a curse and degradation--'making a woman no better
than a cow,' as one of these ladies, herself a mother, once said to
me indignantly; nor do I join in the hostility to men which comes in as the
correlative of all that has gone before. On these points I have parted
company with the cause. But in the beginning these points had not come to
the front.
Also, I have confessed already to the frivolity of finding many of these
extremely advanced women antagonistic to my ideas of feminine charm. Most
of them then, in the early days, were not only plain in person but ill-bred
in manner. The epigram of the time, 'Women's Rights are
Men's Lefts,' was truer then than it is now, when the circle has
widened. In the first cast the net took in, as by far the largest
proportion, the most unpersonable and the least love-worthy of the sex. But
this æsthetic distaste on my part was what the Americans call
'mean' in view of the gravity of the principles involved, and I
was always ashamed of my own childishness of judgment.
I tried to make myself tolerant of all this unloveliness, by remembering
that the cause, being in the initial stage of protest and insurrection,
must necessarily be supported by those who had nothing to lose and all to
gain, as well as necessarily sur-
rounded by that kind of exaggeration which is inseparable from the beginning of radical innovations. But tolerance is an exotic with me, got by painful processes of self-discipline and preserved only with care and watching. When I was in my fighting age, it was either the crime of indifferentism or of time-serving, and I put it behind me as high-treason to truth.
This is the penalty attached to earnestness--the harsh lining of
enthusiasm.
My present intolerance, I am sorry to say, was even less respectable
than this. It was simply a matter of taste; and the cause undeniably
suffered with me because so many of its advocates were ungainly and
unlovely.
In those days the movement did not include the political rights
which--the rest having been won--make now the point to be gained.
It was more for the right of a liberal education, such as is given by
Girton and Newnham; for office-work; and specially
for leave to enter the medical profession on an equality with men.
In this last I was again at issue with the sect. Unless the demand for
female doctors was strong enough to support female schools and hospitals, I
maintained, and maintain, the inexpediency of providing a few lady-doctors
by means of mixed medical education--just as I dislike mixed
drawing-classes from the nude. These two things seemed to me repugnant to
every sentiment of morality or decency in either sex; and I have never been
able to change my view. For, granting that in the end science and art
conquer all sense of shame and bear down all consciousness of sex, then
surely the last state is worse than the first--and these young
unmarried women have killed within them something more valuable than they
will replace by the knowledge of anatomy and the human figure.
As yet, however, mixed life schools were not in force--I only knew
of one in those
days, private, little known and conducted secretly; and but few young women had clanked into the dissecting-room. Miss Garrett, the two Misses Blackwell and Dr. Mary Walker are all that I remember. There may have been others, but if so I did not know of them. The aftermath of flirting, touzled, pretty young creatures--foolish virgins of eighteen or nineteen--by whom the ground has been covered, had not then sprouted into being; and as yet the world was spared the oracular utterances by which these Hypatias seek to regulate all the difficulties and pronounce on all the questions of life and science.
Speaking of Dr. Mary Walker, I may as well say here that the Bloomer
costume which she wore, with that huge rose in her hair as her sign of sex,
did much to retard the woman question all round. The world is frivolous, no
doubt, but here, as in France, ridicule kills, and you can force
convictions sooner than tastes. When that handsome
barmaid in Tottenham Court Road put on trousers as a greater attraction to gin-drinkers, not only Bloomerism received its death-blow, but the cause got a 'shog' maist ruined a'.' It survived, however; and now flourishes like a green bay-tree.
Equal political rights; identical professional careers; the men's
virile force toned down to harmony with the woman's feminine weakness;
the abolition of all moral and social distinctions between the
sexes;--These are the confessed objects of the movement whereby men
are to be made lady-like and women masculine, till the two melt into one,
and you scarcely know which is which.
Since those early days of which I am now writing, much of what was then
agitated for has been granted, and many abuses have been removed. One of
the most important was the Bill which raises the age of the child
necessarily left to the mother in cases of separation, from
Tal-
fourd's three and a half to seven years--giving afterwards to the child the right at sixteen to choose between its parents. This short Bill, of two clauses only, slipped through the house unnoticed; and I have always held it for good that the Emancipated Women did not get wind of it, and by their clamour draw on it the attention, and consequent hostility, of the Conservatives. The Married Women's Property Act has given the widest range of freedom possible in any kind of partnership. Girton and Newnham minister to the intellectual cravings of girls and supply stimulus for their ambition. Female colleges and hospitals make the study of medicine decent, and India offers a lucrative and useful field of practice. Slade-schools give Adam and Eve in all their desired nudity, and young unmarried women exhibit themselves on the walls of the Academy naked and not ashamed. The Post Office and the Telegraph Office put money into the pockets of
some hundreds of industrious girls; and there is at least one female firm--there may be more, but I know only of one--which 'devils' for lawyers, and makes a good thing by its labours. Other women do other things of a like nature. Some keep co-operative stores and some breed horses and some again make books and understand the mysteries of fields and favourites, 'two to one bar one' and hedging, better than they understand the science of housekeeping or the art of needlework. The School-Boards test the value of their administrative faculty; and Lady Harberton's divided skirt satisfies the sentiment and does not shock the taste.
Thus, in all directions, the running has been more equalized, and women
are now handicapped mainly by their sex. On that point they have to try
conclusions with nature. To break up the cradles for firewood must be the
first step in the series of transformations; for as long as that
obstructive cradle exists, and is filled, there
must be the division of labour and function against which women revolt, and men must fare forth while they bide within.
When the cause was yet young it found its nidus chiefly in the house of
one who brought as her contribution a fair person, a good position, money,
fervour, sincerity, intelligence, the oddest and most catholic sweepings of
adherents, and only just not enough liberality to tolerate opposition. She
herself was singularly sweet and charming; thoroughly feminine, her
doctrines notwithstanding; and without the affectation and exaggeration
which characterize the mass of the pretty persons who have gone over to
this side in these later days. In those, she was almost the only pretty
woman the cause could boast. Her house was the rendezvous for all Liberals
of all kinds; and one of the causes she and her husband had at heart was
that of emancipation and the equalization of the negro race. I remember one
of her protégés was a certain Miss
Red-
mayne a woman as black as her own American grapes; who had studied medicine under the Stars and Stripes and who now wanted to practise it under the Union Jack. She was a dreadful looking woman, with a kind of devouring, wild-beast air, oppressive and almost terrifying. Her glittering eyes and tufted hair, wide mouth, white, pointed teeth and jet-black skin, made her remarkable enough in a room full of fair-faced Saxons; but add to these a curious rapacious manner--an eager, restless, following way in eye and foot, unlike anything seen in ordinary society--and it is easy to understand how antipathetic she must have been to the majority, even of Liberals. I shall never forget the way in which she followed up a fair-haired, slightly-built artist to whom she was talking. He edged away, step by step--she always following close on his track--till he finally edged himself into the corner, where she had him at her will. So there they were, a black
cat and a white mouse; and the poor white mouse shivered, while the black cat pranced triumphant.
My friend, our hostess, thought it mean and cowardly that no English
gentleman came forward to marry this unlovely daughter of Ham. I should
have held it as an act of madness if anyone had.
It was in this house that I first met Mr. and Mrs. Lambert, with whom I
made one of those intimate friendships which invariably lead to sequels and
complications.
Joshua Lambert was an artist, shiftless, dreamy, unpractical, morally
self-indulgent, personally pure and ascetic; a man who could live on bread
and spring-water, but who would not work in his studio when he wanted to be
out in the sunshine, and who exhaled in thought all the strength that
should have gone into action. He was a man whom everyone loved and was
sorry for--regretting his want of practical grip, while reverencing
the beauty of holiness
which pervaded his whole nature. And yet, between the two, love predominated, and reverence was stronger than regret.
His wife was a woman of like nature, but with more 'go' in
her than he had--with an active force behind her wanting to him. He
was a dreamer of ideal beauty, she was a worker for ideal perfection. Thus
their views were harmonious while their methods were diverse.
She was a Woman's Rights woman from head to heel. A kind of
antitypical Louise Michel, doubled with a Madonna, she gathered under the
wide cloak of her womanly pity all the suffering and downtrodden, all the
oppressed and all the unfortunate. She knew no blame save for the
fashionable and the frivolous. The core of her morality was charity; the
mainspring of her character, purity; the force by which she worked, belief
in the all-pervading Providence of God. Married and a mother, but still
almost virginal in her modesties,
she abhorred licentiousness as something even worse than murder. At the same time she reverenced love as the true marriage, and when this was real she held other ties superfluous.
Thus, she was one of the guests at that famous supper given to his
personal friends and sympathisers by Mr. --, when, with his
wife's hardly-won consent, he brought up his children's governess
as his acknowledged supplementary wife, and with but thin ideas of decency
called together this cloud of witnesses to celebrate the nuptials. For
herself, Esther Lambert was as chaste and pure as ice and snow; but her
Liberalism and sympathy supplied what was wanting to her temperament, and
she could accept in another an action which she would rather have died than
have committed in her own person.
She was a lecturer of some repute; and her platform life was the result,
not only of her belief in the righteousness of the things
she advocated, but also of the need there was for adding to the tale of loaves, which, at the best, came in but scant numbers for the many hungry little mouths to be fed. As it was, the ordering of the household was narrow to penury and its simplicity touched on destitution.
The first time I went down to their house on the borders of Epping
Forest, I felt as if I had got into a new world--one with which my
experiences on this old earth of ours had no point in common, and were of
no use as guide nor glossary. Playing in the neglected, untrimmed garden,
where never tree nor bush was lopped nor pruned, and where the long grass
of the lawn was starred with dandelions and daisies as better flowers than
those which man could cultivate, was a troop of little children, one of
whom was more beautiful than another. They were all dressed exactly
alike--in long blouses of that coarse blue flannel with which
house-maids scrub the floors; and all had pre-
cisely the same kind of hats--the girls distinguished from the boys only by a somewhat broader band of faded ribbon. Nazarenes, even to the eldest boy of fourteen, they wore their hair as Nature ordained in long loose locks to their shoulders. It was difficult to distinguish the sex in this queer epicene costume, which left it doubtful whether they were girls Bloomerized or boys in feminine tunics; for the only differences were--cloth trousers for the boys, cotton for the girls, and the respective width of the hat-ribbon aforesaid. But they were lovely as angels, and picturesque as so many Italian studies; so that amazement lost itself in admiration, and one forgave the unfitness of things for the sake of their beauty.
The house itself was found and furnished on the same lines. There were
no carpets, but there were rare pictures and first proofs unframed; casts
of noble cinque-cento work, darkened with dust; superb shells; and all
the precious lumber of an artist's home, crowded on shelves of rough-hewn, unvarnished deal set against the unpapered white-washed wall. There were not enough chairs for the family, and empty packing-cases eked out the deficiency. For their food, meat was a luxury; wine as rare as Olympian nectar; and sweetmeats were forbidden as the analogues of vicious luxury. Milk, bread, vegetables and oatmeal, with treacle as the universal sweetener, were the food-stuffs by which the Lamberts believed they should rear a family consecrated to the work of God in the world and the carrying out of the regeneration of society. The boys were to be great artists or divine poets. The girls were to be preachers or prophetesses. One or two might be told off as mothers, to keep up the supply of the Chosen. But, for the most part, their sphere of activity would be the world, not the home--their care, humanity, not the family.
No man nor woman who knew her could have failed to love and reverence
Esther Lambert. No matter how little you sympathized with her methods, you
could not do other than respect and admire her personality. Her face was
the face of a Madonna, behind whose sweetness flashed the inspired
enthusiasm of a sibyl. It was the most perfect combination of moral purity
and intellectual ardour to be found, and drew all hearts to love, like that
Blue Glory of Torcelli. Earnest and religious, something beyond the
ordinary thought of humanity seemed to shine in her soft grey eyes; and had
she announced herself another Mother of God, she would have found some to
believe her by the very force of her own inner truth and purity. As it was,
she stopped short of miracles, and contented herself with inspiration.
Her political creed was her religion; the emancipation of woman was her
mission; the equalization of the sexes was her shibboleth;
but the supremacy of woman was her secret sacrament. She believed in the regeneration of man by this supremacy, and by this only. All masculine modes of dealing with nature and society were false and futile. No good could come of political economy, of sociology, of science, of statesmanship. All these were of the nature of Dead Sea apes and the Unveracities. But, once admit women into the domain of active politics, and then would come the moral millennium. Deception would be burned out of diplomacy, to leave the pure gold fillet of mutual candour unclogged by dross of any kind; abstract right would take the place of godless expediency; wars would cease; territorial aggressions and annexations would be no more; and the reign of peace and truth, of justice without flaw, and perfect purity of life alike for men and women, would begin. She believed all things of the future and she hoped all things from the present. She had neither fear nor misgiving; and her
faith saw in every day so much advance, and in every circumstance a coign of vantage gained and held for future progress. A new society for the advocacy of any form of Liberal opinion was to her equivalent to a victory. A pamphlet was another gospel which must compel assent. A speech was like a judgment of Solomon which no one could repudiate. Her life was the perpetual ascending of a rainbow--an endless mounting of the ladder let down from heaven, with angels before and on each side, showing her the way and directing her steps. Her faith bore her up over all dismaying obstacles; and when bad times were on hand within, as was so often the case--when the family wanted food and the house wanted funds--she would raise her beautiful eyes to heaven, and say, serenely smiling: 'God will provide.'
And so far as they had yet gone, ravens had supplied them somehow; and
the children had not starved.
Esther's theological creed was a large loose jumble of Christianity
and Pantheism, the chief working tenets of which were:--belief in the
direct personal superintendence of God over the affairs of men, faith in
the power of truth and the invincibility of the right, with the correlative
belief that falsehood would not prevail nor wrong ultimately conquer
because of this personal rule of God and the 'stream of
tendency' in humanity.
'Men and women want only to be told the better thing--to be
shown the higher way,' she used to say earnestly. 'No one
wishes to do wrong. It is simply ignorance, not wilful intention, which
leads us astray. When all men are taught of God, then they will of
necessity act justly. The Truth is God; and God's laws are the
ultimate laws of life. It is only a question of time; and in the end they
must prevail.'
For all its vagueness, her enthusiasm gained on me. Her arc was very
wide, and
though not drawn with mathematical precision and rather sketchy in its lines, it was nevertheless grandly suggestive. Her words were full of that heroic promise, that mysterious magnificence, which surrounds the shining domes of a city seen from afar in the morning light. By noon we shall be there to see with our own eyes the treasure lying therein--to find the lady of our dreams; the brother consecrated to our friendship from our birth; the teacher who will show us the meaning of the Great Cabbala; the hierophant who will take the veil from off the face of Isis. Her words stirred my imagination as much as noble scenery stirs it; and I felt her to be a kind of dynamic power to which others must apply the direction--but she was always that power.
I used to attend her lectures--I, the declared enemy of the whole
tribe of lady lecturers!--and I always vigorously applauded her. I
made it up somehow be-
tween my consistency and my partisanship by convincing myself that Esther Lambert was essentially different from all the others. She was so real in her self-devotion, her sincerity, her faith in herself and her cause! There was no playing a part, anyhow; just as there was no consciousness, no simper, no affectation and no vulgarity. She spoke well too, and did not offend one's taste by matter nor manner. She did not touch on doubtful subjects; and she had always more the air of an old-time prophetess, re-embodied, than that of a modern lady-lecturer spouting on a platform to a half-curious and half-disdainful audience. She was so completely absorbed in her subject, and so earnest to do good, that she won my admiration all round; and I approved in her what I condemned in others.
For all that, I wished her little tribe had been better cared for,
better taught and nourished and more practically handled than they were;
that the house had been
less of a squalid and disorganized barrack than it was; and that her husband had been a little more the master and head than she allowed him to be. Maybe he would not have guided things a whit better; but it would have been more seemly, and his influence over the boys would probably not have been quite so emasculating as hers. I was Philistine enough to feel that the saint is less useful than the housekeeper, and that Mary's part is not always the most profitable.
Still, this fractional want of sympathy with the fringes of things did
not touch the substance of my respect and liking for the Lamberts. And as I
was not responsible for the life they made together, and as really it was
not in my right to either criticize or condemn, I was glad to be their
friend, and to love where I could not follow.
After I had known them about three years, Joshua Lambert died. He had
often been ailing, and the fatal disease which had
threatened him for so long, and which I always must think might have been averted by a little common-sense and care, at last declared itself in unmistakable fashion enough. He died of rapid consumption in less than two months from the first visit of the mesmeric herbalist who attended him. For of course the Lamberts were believers in both mesmerists and herbalists. They were mystic all through; and clairvoyant prescriptions, dealing with natural simples, field-grown, were to them saturated with a spiritual power wanting altogether to the coarser therapeutics of allopathists and their mineral medicines.
Naturally, I was much with my poor friends at this time. They clung to
me like children, and I was glad to put all my resources at their disposal.
Strength and energy--time and money--I poured all into their
hands, and thought nothing lost which gained them ease. I was deeply
interested in them. They had fascinated me by their
very strangeness, linked as this was to so much goodness and so much beauty; and feeling myself to be of use to them seemed to compensate me for the loss of her whom her creed--and Christ--had taken from me. The simplicity with which they accepted all I did for them, as of the natural order of things, had also its charm.
Looked at from their point of view, it was better than gratitude;
because it was the right thing to do, and if I were a true man I could do
nothing else. They would as soon have thought of praising me for not
telling lies nor picking pockets, as for bearing the burden of friends too
heavily laden to bear it for themselves. Of course, this kind of communism
brought about a closer intimacy, and on my side a still deeper
affection--the helper always loving the dependent.
At last the end came. Poor beauty-loving and unpractical Joshua Lambert
took his last look of the blessed sun, and
smiled his last wan smile up to the face of day and all he loved. He died as he had lived, without struggle as without regret; without bitterness, and in love with all mankind; full of faith in his own enduring blessedness beyond the grave and in the Divine goodness for those he left behind; sure that his dear ones would be cared for by the Father--working principally through me.
Not an hour before he breathed his last hard breath he said, with a
faint flicker of his old boyish smile and that tranquil assurance which had
so often amused me in the difficult moments of past times:
'I leave them to you, dear friend. I have always held that God
sent you to us for our good, and I die quite happy, sure that you will
accept your charge and fulfil its obligations.'
'Do not be afraid, Joshua,' said Esther tenderly.
'Chris knows his duty, and he has never failed in it yet.'
I need not spread out this part of my life in detail. In view of what
followed, it is too full of pain to be willingly dwelt on. So much only I
need say:--I was in that frame of mind which made benevolence my
greatest solace and my only happiness. I had the desire to sacrifice myself
for the well-being of others, feeling in this self-sacrifice my purest
balm. I had given up my love for truth:--now I wanted to give myself
as an offering to God, through man. Believing still in spiritual direction,
and in the moral governance of the world through duties and chastisements,
I believed that I was indeed specially ordained by God to serve and save
this family. I had come among them at the moment when they had had most
need of me. Joshua had lived just long enough to consolidate our
friendship; and among all they knew I was the only one who could really
help and practically benefit them. It would be a good thing to do. If I
could rescue a noble
creature like Esther Lambert from the degrading influences of debt and poverty, bring a more rational rule into the household, and set her children well before the world by a more wholesome education, I should redeem the past. If I could not be happy in my own highest and deepest affection, I could at least make others blessed; and in their well-being find my own.
I thought over all this, and prayed for guidance with all the fervour of
my boyish days. My prayers, of course, answered themselves, and asking for
Divine Direction only strengthened my own inclination. Full of desire to
serve one whom I loved and respected--eager to make loyal response to
the poor dead friend who had trusted me--seeing only all that was
beautiful in Esther's nature and pitiful in her condition--loving
the children like my own, and earnest to see them better cared for, better
taught, more wisely guided than they were--my common-sense
overweighted by religious
zeal and altruistic pity, by affection, by principle and by hope--I took the irretrievable step; and in less than two years from Joshua's death I married his widow and took her family for my own.
Behind this strange fact lay contradictions yet more strange.
Personally, Esther failed to satisfy my taste. She was short, ungraceful,
and careless in her dress, which was also of notable neglect. She was
unthrifty; without method; and of the two she preferred disorder to
regularity. Nothing could make her punctual nor orderly; and the love of
free nature which left the daisies and dandelions on the lawn and forbore
to lop the low-growing branches of the trees, manifested itself in the
house by a liberal dislocation of hours and the want of
circumscription--of apportionment--all through. But she was
earnest, sincere, devoted, gentle-mannered; and she had that perilous gift
of loving idealization by which she made one see one's best and
highest self--one's ideal
angel--mirrored in her mind as the work-a-day commonplace human being. And I was blinded by the splendour of the Divine handwriting on the wall, which I thought bade me do this thing; and by my somewhat arrogant belief that I was strong enough to remould and to save.
I do not mean to say that I married with any personal reluctance, but I
do say that I married with more sense of duty than of attraction, and that
I knew I was making a sacrifice. But it was a sacrifice willingly
made--for God's sake and for humanity's, represented by that
desolate widow and her children. No action of my life was ever based on
more simple religiousness of feeling, on a more entire sense of duty than
was this. In none did I ever wish to do so well for others, with so little
regard for my own condition.
One thing, by the way, I stipulated for as a sacrifice on Esther's
side; she was to give up her public life and keep to her home like
any other wife and mother. What in the beginning had helped to fascinate the friend on the outside of things, revolted the husband who had made himself responsible for the conduct of the family. I confess this frankly. Whatever of egotism, of inconsistency may lie in the admission, I make it, and accept the blame accruing. The home which Joshua Lambert had found sufficient for his happiness would be the grave of mine; and I could no more have lived in the neglect, disorder, unthrift and squalor which had been the normal condition of things in his time, than I could have lived in a wigwam with a Cherokee Indian for my squaw. Hence I stipulated for the abandonment of the platform for the fireside, and for the maintenance of a more conventionally ordered household.
I also urged Esther to give me a list of her debts; but this I could
never get from her. Not because she was ashamed; nor because she wished to
conceal them; simply
because she could not understand the value of financial order, and had always that trust in ravens and things coming right of themselves which despises effort. I could not convince her of the need of method, regularity, foresight, or any other economic virtue. She was sweet in word and acquiescent in manner; smiled; promised compliance--and indeed did much that I wished because I wished it. But I never touched the core. I had modified the envelope for a time; but before I had been married two months, I asked myself the question: 'How long will this last? Will temperament and long usage prove too strong for the new practice? and, Will the bent bow spring back and the strained cord break?'
should be given to humanity; and she could not be made to approve of that which she regarded as the maladministration of a trust. But as it was my own money that I was spending, she let it pass without active opposition, and contented herself with being a kind of passive drag on the wheel, neither aiding nor preventing.
Also she allowed me to change the ordering of things for the children.
Their epicene costume was put off for the ordinary jackets and frocks of
ordinary English children; the boys were sent to school, a governess taught
the girls at home. She used to laugh at their studies, but quite
good-naturedly, without malice or bitterness--only with a little
gentle ridicule; the ridicule of superior insight and higher
aims--finding art and literature mere waste of precious time, and
woman's work, such as sewing and the like, degrading to the finer
functions. Still, she left Miss Palmer, the governess, very much
to herself, and did not interfere in her curriculum. She was indeed very sweet and complaisant in those early days; and of two threads, the white is as true as the black.
All things in the house, and the house itself, being new and fresh, the
radical defects of my wife's character as a mistress were not at the
first visible. Though I objected to the children amusing themselves by
carving fancy arabesques on the side-board, playing at ball in the
drawing-room, slitting up the oil-cloth, and the like, things went on with
peaceful serenity; and for the first two months we 'stood on
velvet.' Also, the sense of security from poverty, of rest from
strain, of a stable background and a strong arm on which to lean, won
Esther to a certain amount of domesticity and made many things in her new
life comforting and joyful. Then she liked me in a way that had the charm
of novelty. She looked up to me as more
practical than herself, and as having a surer judgment in worldly matters; and for the time she laid aside her own and accepted my responsibility, which was like taking breath on an uphill climb. To Joshua she had been a goddess, immaculate and absolute. Her will had been his law, and he had placed his honour in his worship and his manhood in his obedience.
'She is my Madonna,' he once said to me. 'I know no
higher revelation than her will.'
Consequently she had loved him with that kind of spiritual supremacy,
that kind of intellectual condescension, which had sometimes wearied her
and made her long for at least equality in her companion.
'If only I could find some one who would say "No" to
my "Yes"!' she said to me one day, when she had sought
counsel of her husband and had received only acquiescence.
She had found in me what she had often
longed for in Joshua--that is, a strong individuality and a clear will; definite aims and sharply defined thoughts; and at the first, as I say, the novelty pleased her and she enjoyed this new phase of love and life. But--
Though by nature and temperament Esther was purely feminine, by habits
of life she had become unsexed in the way of personal independence and
political activities; and very soon the restrictions of home began to irk
and gall. She submitted at the outset because of novelty and because of
gratitude; but she submitted of her own free will, as her gift of grace,
not her duty. And what she gave she felt that she could at any moment
reclaim. While it was pleasant to her to be loved for her compliance rather
than respected for her power and obeyed as an almost inspired autocrat, she
was the very soul of sweet surrender. When it should become no longer
pleasant--what then?
In the details of the house-management my wife was, of course, absolute
mistress; in the general ordering I was master. That is, I demanded a
well-regulated interior, good manners in the children, no debts, and
neither insufficiency in the commissariat nor extravagance in the supplies.
I interfered not at all in the working of these general laws; but I was
firm on the main points; and I thought I was in my right to require the
niceness and refinements of a gentleman's home.
For the rest, Esther was naturally unhindered. She kept her own friends
and asked them to the house when she would; and I always bade them welcome
and gave them good cheer. She went and came as she would, subject only to
the necessary restraints of a family life, and I never questioned nor
interfered. I, on my side, was as free. But soon she began to object to my
friends. She wanted me to forswear them as worldly, fashionable, frivolous,
un-
godly; and when I would not, she made the house so painful to them that for self-respect they could not return.
Also she began to disregard those times and rules without which no
home-life can go on with comfort or decency. For an eight o'clock
breakfast she would come down at ten; for a six o'clock dinner she
would appear at eight: and she took it as unloving--not disrespectful,
but unkind--if we sat down without her. This was disastrous for us
all. For my own work it was ruinous; for the children, destructive both to
their health and education. But remonstrance made matters worse, and the
only way in which I could touch my wife was by a tender kind of coaxing
flattery--beseeching her to do of her own free, grand, loving heart
that which was the absolute obligation of her plain duty. And I ask, how is
married life possible under such conditions?
Again, I had occasion to be disturbed
on account of the expense at which we lived. And yet we did not seem to live extravagantly. The lines on which our home was based were modest, and well within my income; but I had to draw largely from such savings as the furnishing of the house had left; and my hope of making provision for the future was merged in the fear that my earnings would not cover our expenditure. Money ran away like water in sand. Where did it go? This was a subject on which Esther was strangely sensitive; and I could not get her to explain how it was that we lived so simply and yet spent so lavishly. Even her hospitalities to poor patriots and penniless propagandists, large as they were, did not appear to cover that ever-increasing margin; and to this hour I do not know into what underground channel the surplus flowed.
Naturally I held that I was in my right as a partner, to put it no more
strongly, to
lay it on my wife's conscience, both for my sake and her children's, to be more careful, more exact. She could not bear the mildest remonstrance on the money question, but turned back on me all that I complained of in her, and said that I was the one to blame, because of the criminally extensive base-lines on which the whole home had been constructed. Poor soul! By this time novelty had worn itself threadbare and the original stuff showed through.
She had grown weary of it all; weary of her part of wife whose husband
was at the head of affairs; of her duties as house-mistress, restrictive
and necessitating some amount of self-sacrifice as they did; of the order
and regularity of a well-conditioned home; of the need of conventional, I
should say civilized, propriety, which she confounded with fashionable
frivolity--of all that makes the sign-manual of gentlehood in domestic
life and personal habits. So long accus-
tomed as she had been to a hand-to-mouth kind of existence, where Providence had been her bank and Chance had paid her dividends, she resented my prosaic precision as faithlessness, and accounted it to me as moral cowardice that I should take thought for the selfish things of to-morrow, when the altruistic things of to-day needed doing.
These discussions on money were the first real rifts in the lute; and
they widened day by day. They precipitated the end which must have come
under any conditions. For I see now that my marriage had no real element of
stability in it. Unless Esther or I could have radically changed, we must
have made shipwreck on one of the many rocks ahead. And though we struck
first on that of my worldliness, others had to come.
There crept into our lives a certain mystery which I have never been
able to
fathom. A young Pole, who was said to have escaped from prison, was brought to our house in my absence by one of my wife's political friends, and an asylum was begged for him. Who he was, what he was, what he had done there or was doing here, I did not know then and I do not know now. That he was the centre of some movement and held the strings of some plot was evident; but in what direction, and to what end, were kept from me. I only knew that he was a refugee called M. Boris, and that my wife and he had a secret together which included certain experiments in chemistry, photography, and printing--all of which were conducted in an upper room, whence I was rigidly excluded.
Some of my own possessions disappeared at this time. Letters from
eminent political men which had come to me in the way of business, and two
Foreign-Office passports, which had
served me in my former wanderings, were taken from my writing-table drawers, notwithstanding those patent locks which were pronounced unassailable. I never found a trace of my lost property; and when I accused M. Boris, Esther's passionate indignation was so intense as very nearly to make an end of everything. Finally she sealed my mouth by declaring that she herself had taken those papers, for what purpose she would not say. I might kill her, she said, but she would never confess.
I had nothing for it but to accept her declaration as she made it;
though, as I still connected M. Boris with the affair, I insisted on it
that he should leave the house. The sequel proved that I took nothing by my
action. I only diverted the channel, I did not stop the outfall.
My wife's domesticity gave way as suddenly as a house of cards
falls to the ground. The old fever of propagandism,
the craving for political activity, blazed out afresh. She flung up the reins, saying that all life was not centred in clean table-cloths and the accurate adding-up of butchers' bills; and that the highest duties of a faithful servant of God and lover of humanity were not to be found within the four walls of home. Any honest maid-of-all-work could do the work that she was doing now, but that for which she was specially consecrated was lying undone, with no one to take it up. Her sphere was in political morality; her duty was to preach the rights of the weaker and liberty for all the oppressed. To give to one household only, albeit her own, the energies meant for humanity at large, was desertion of her flag and infidelity to God.
In vain I argued, pleaded, rebuked, reasoned--was now, I am ashamed
to say, violently angry, with all the passion and excess of my old
undisciplined days, and
now as violently sorry. Esther was not to be moved; and, by this time, a distinct flavour of personal dislike to me added strength to her resolve as well as bitterness to her feelings. It was not wonderful then that she went back on the old track, the new having failed to satisfy her. In a week's time from our first stormy discussion my wife's name was placarded on all the hoardings in London, and she was announced as giving a lecture on the 16th--the subject being, 'The Down-trodden Nationalities of Europe.'
I was grieved, disappointed, humiliated and angry. I thought that my
wife's affection for me should have been deeper than it proved to be;
that, looking at things in the most prosaic light of reciprocity, the
friendship I had had for her and hers, the help I had given them in times
past, the heartiness with which I had adopted her children and done my best
to benefit them, and the sincerity with which
I had sought to build up her ruined home and take her out of poverty into sufficiency, should have secured from her some consideration for me in return. I was wrong. I had not calculated on the force of that nature which, expelled with a pitchfork though it may be, is sure to come back in spite of the prongs. I had no help for it. The strong hand of a husband is all very well to talk about. What if the wife resists? You cannot lock her up, nor create a public scandal. You have to bear what you do not like, or break with her altogether. And as I was not then prepared to do this, I had to take my philosophy in both hands and make the best of things as they were--bad enough as they were in all conscience!
The dyke had broken down just as the pitchfork had failed. My wife went
back to her old ways with all the keener zest, because of the cessation
which had strengthened and rested her. She was every
where but at home--now in Carlisle and now in Falmouth--at Norwich one week, at Swansea another, lecturing and agitating on every conceivable subject connected with Liberal politics, but always sincere--always the Madonna doubled with the sibyl--always enthusiastic, pure, beautiful, religious and unpractical.
The home and the children were thrown entirely on my hands, and I had to
do the best I could for them. The young governess, Miss Palmer, was too
timid to be an efficient lieutenant and the eldest girl was too young. The
house was neglected and ill-conducted; and the servants were but inadequate
mistresses of affairs and unsatisfactory mistresses of themselves. When
Esther was by chance at home, the place was like an office with the coming
and going of many women and men, her coadjutors. When she was away she
billeted on me, in her place, consecrated friends who continued the work
and kept up the ball.
Finally, things came to a complete disruption, as was inevitable. My
wife suddenly announced her intention of going back to the old house in
Epping Forest. She must do her life's work, she said, for she knew
that she was called, and that it was God's will she should abandon the
flesh-pots of Egypt for the purer manna of righteousness. Our marriage,
though not broken by the law--there was no cause for divorce on either
side--had been a failure, a mistake, and must be in perpetual abeyance
henceforward. She was sorry she had yielded to temptation and gone into the
snare of worldliness with me; but she had done so unwittingly, believing
that I was as whole-hearted as herself. She had found instead that I was
worldly, unregenerate, Laodicean; caring more for persons than for
principles; not knowing what truth meant; devoted to pleasure; greedy of
praise; a traitor to the cause; shallow rather than broad; a miserable
pretence
and a sham, not a reality. God had called to me as to her from the heights of Sinai, and I had knelt with the idolators and worshipped the Golden Calf rather than the Living and Eternal Jehovah. As she had expected when she had married to have found in me a faithful disciple and not a renegade to the cause of righteousness--a helper and not a hinderer--she was justified in breaking a social bond which was antagonistic to higher duties, and was both a lie and a snare. God was greater than man, and His laws were beyond ours. God called her to His work as He had called the prophets before her. And, even as Christ had forsaken father and mother, and life itself, to fulfil His Father's mission, so must she forsake me and all the material advantages of our union for her Father's work. She was testifying for the truth; and in abandoning me she was abandoning the world, the flesh and the devil, which I repre-
sented for the one part and served for the other.
All this she said with the passionate fervour of conviction; and, like
Warren Hastings when he heard Burke's indictment against him, I held
my breath, and wondered if what she said were indeed true.
Was I really the base and ignoble creature she painted? God knows! I was
only conscious of having tried to do my day's work faithfully to be
loyal to my principles and true to the light by which I walked; obedient to
my conscience, and honest before God and man. When she accused me of this
unfaithfulness--this moral dishonour--I remembered my Love, and
what my devotion to the truth, as I had made it for myself, had cost me.
And I took heart of grace to hope that I was less vile than my wife
believed me to be, and that for all my many glaring faults and radical
defects she had judged me below
my deserving. Rather indeed, than that she left me because she had found me too worldly and insincere to live with--I, whose marriage with her had been a sacrifice in every part, and who had not deceived her in one fact, one feeling of my whole life--I preferred to believe that she had outlived the love which had never been more than fancy. She had gone through the pleasure found in the first novelty of an assured life, and had tired of her very comforts.
She was one of those ascetic Bohemians who frankly prefer poverty and
disorder to sufficiency and regularity. Give her the choice, and she would
rather have a dish of herbs on a bare table than a stalled ox with glass
and silver and damask as the adjuncts. All conventional proprieties irked
her; and it was positive pain to her to be brought into line with the
ordinary habits of the ordinary world. For though one might well deny her
wisdom, no one could doubt her sincerity; and for all the
humiliation she heaped on me, I desire only to speak with respect of her.
To illustrate her wholeness of character: I remember the first evening
party to which we went after we were married, when she wore an evening
gown, how she blushed for shame and wept for sorrow, and could scarcely be
persuaded to dress herself in what was to her the livery of sin. It was
unfitting, she said; and more--it was wrong. While there was a poor
woman in England who wanted a pair of shoes, she had no right to more than
was absolutely necessary for decency. All superfluity was robbery; and this
silk gown was a crime.
In the children's dress she allowed no ornament of any kind, and
she never went beyond grey for the colour. One of our first discussions of
an animated kind--not broadening into a quarrel--was, when I
bought for the eldest girl a pretty kind of pink stuff I had seen in the
shop-window that I thought would suit her
age and complexion. Esther refused to allow the child to wear it. The beginning of womanly evil was in personal vanity, she said; and no daughter of hers should learn to take pleasure in dress, nor think twice how she should best win admiration.
These matters, trivial as they are, show the thoroughness of her
asceticism, and explain other things which perhaps lie deeper than the mere
gratification of the senses. Certainly, they explain the impatience which,
after a time, she felt with the order, the very beauty, of the home I had
made for her; and how she went back to that barrack on the borders of
Epping Forest as one suffering from nostalgia goes back to the old
home.
So ended the family life to which I had grown pleasantly accustomed. The
children had become as dear to me as my own; I had none of my own, and they
took the place of these. I had done my best for
them in such things as I held to be vital to their interest. But since my wife had learned to despise me, she had opposed all my action with regard to them. My advice was tainted with the sin of worldly-mindedness. I was the enemy of truth and the advocate of insincerity; I was, therefore, not fit to counsel those whom she hoped to make thorough like herself. Hence, by the logic of conscientiousness, she held that she not only consulted the highest good of her children, but also that she obeyed the express will of God, when she repudiated my counsel and opposed my wishes. Wherefore I had ceased to be of good to them, and had become only a hindrance instead. I felt that it was better for her children to be brought up in the one simple atmosphere of their mother's influence, than in the storms and dissensions of two such opposing currents of thought as hers and mine had become. They were hers too; they were not mine;
and she had the most right to them. So I let her go first to the old barrack without me, where she lived after her own rules, and thence to America, where she said her life's work was to be found.
Had things been different between us, I would have thrown up everything
in England, and I would have gone with her. I could have written in America
as well as here, and perhaps with even better results. Had my wife still
loved and respected me, even while she differed from me--had she not
begun to treat me with systematic neglect and intolerable
contempt--had she not thought it her duty to oppose me in everything,
merely because it was I who proposed; as a saint should deny the devil, not
because he offered evil, but because it was the devil who offered anything
at all--had she not made her own life apart, and kept every fact in
that life a profound secret from me--nor stood between me and the
children, teaching them to doubt my
moral worth, my truth and sincerity, and to refuse my right of rule--I would have kept with her to the end. But a continuance of my present life was impossible, would I retain one shred of self-respect. So I bade them farewell; and they started on their voyage alone.
When my home was finally broken up and all things were swept away, I
found myself possessed of only a few shillings as my sole capital. My last
investment was sold to pay the last of the household bills; and the
clearance was complete. I was just where I had stood twenty years ago, and
had lost in my marriage the whole of my private means. This was the least
of my troubles. I was strong and in the meridian of my working powers; and
I could always make my way. But when I had to ask the most genial and
friendly of my two chiefs for an advance of fifty pounds to float my
stranded bark into serviceable waters again, I felt as if the
whole thing had been a dream, and that I was once more a boy, with all my life to make anew.
Now that time has dulled the edge of sorrow and dissolved all the
bitterness in the cup, I can look back on things as they were and
appreciate them at their true value. I blame my wife in nothing. We are
what we are, and we cannot act differently from ourselves--at least,
not for long. My wife had mistaken a passing fancy for love, and had found
out her mistake by use and wear. While she liked me, she believed me good;
when she ceased to care for me, she found me evil. Judged from her own
point of view, she was right to repudiate me and all my works in the matter
of her own life and with respect to the children. Less extreme than she, I
was just by so much the farther from the grace of truth; and to keep my
pace would have been consenting with sinners. She despised as sensuality
and worldliness
all that I held essential to gentlehood; and she carried on to me personally the same repudiation, because I was moderately well-born and had both the habits and traditions, the likings and the fastidiousness, of a gentleman. I lost all hold on her imagination, her taste, her esteem, her love.
'You have lost your charm for me,' she said one day, quite
quietly, without anger or passion. 'Joshua kept his beauty for me to
the end. You have lost yours.'
Yes; I had lost all personal charm for her because I had lost all moral
value; and her very repugnance to me was a proof of her own sincerity.
It was strange how deeply the loss of my home-life affected me. I had
never pretended to love Esther as I had loved--as I still
loved--Cordelia; nor to find in her that idealizing and poetic
fascination I had found in Adeline Dalrymple. My first love had been my
boyish romance; my
second the rooted reality of my manhood; but she, my wife, had been my friend, my companion, my housemate--my regard for her had been very true--and the sentiment that I had helped her in her hour of need, and done well for her fatherless children, had been one of the holiest joys of my life.
Now, when I stood alone in the desert, I knew that all this past
happiness had been illusion; as I knew that all the future way must be in
isolation--that I and the consciousness of disappointment must be for
ever one, and that I must live in a solitude of heart more complete than
any I had ever yet known. For the first time I asked myself that bitter
question: Was life indeed worth the pain it brought?--Was its joy
equal to its despair?
Days came and went, and weeks passed into months, like clouds over a
river rather than as landmarks planted four-square on the solid ground of
fact. I looked back on a mirage and forward into vacancy. The
present had no comfort, and there was no future to make amends. I was debarred from all hope of love, and I could never rebuild my wrecked and ruined home. Time was too short now to enable me to make a fortune worth having--for I was only a worker, not a speculator; and I had suddenly lost that personal ambition which had glorified my boyish dreams of success. Large as was my volume of vitality--strong as were my energies--with all my passionate determination to conquer fate and make a good thing of life and fortune--to never own that I was beaten, nor to give up the struggle while one hour's sunlight remained--the strain under which I had lived for so many years had told on me; and the disappointment of my last hopes, the frustration of my latest endeavour, completed my temporary demoralization.
I existed only. I did not live, in the true sense of the word. That is,
I neither loved nor hoped. I shrank from the world
as a wounded animal creeps into the jungle. Indeed, by now I had scarcely any world from which to shrink. The advanced class and all Esther's friends condemned me for my separation; and by the fact of my marriage, and from its outset, I had given up most of my own acquaintances--or the few whom I had still retained had given me up, affronted by my wife's hostile manner when they had called to see us. So that now, save one or two intimate personal friends, I was alone. And society, like fortune, was all to be won afresh.
This stretch of backwater into which I had drifted, by turning my mind
inward, brought back over me the flood of speculation which for some time
now had been dammed up by action and a certain stability of negation, as
well as by a great deal of positive affirmation. Ever and ever in the
solitude of the evening and the stillness of the night came thronging about
me those
unanswerable questions touching the meaning of the universe; the end of life; the action of the Great First Cause on this entangled web we call human history; our relations with the unseen; the ultimate evolution of the 'mind-stuff' which lies behind matter; the self-consciousness of matter; the destinies of the human race; the destiny of the individual soul; and how far the Unknown will be for ever the Unknowable--those questions which we cannot answer yet cannot stay, and which sometimes seem as if they must land the seeker in the pathless maze of madness. What did it all mean? In the wilderness we call life, who can strike the right road? In the darkness we call faith, who can come to the light?
One dominant ray had long seemed to me to be the true
illumination--one unassailable fact had been my solid
foothold--GOD! I believed in a Great First Cause, providential,
intelligent, loving; to be
spiritually communicated with by prayer; informing humanity; directing history; but unrevealed, save in the mind of man and physical creation--His act and incorporate idea. I believed in the truth of the religious instinct, though all religions were equally symbolic in their structure, and their iconology was equally untrue as human fact. Buddhism was as true as Mohammedanism; Brahminism was as real as Judaism; and the Christian Trinity was no more actual than the Twelve Great Gods whom it banished from Olympus. The self-evolved purity of Buddha was like the Hidden Wisdom of Christ; and both were the outcome of that human faculty--that stream of tendency--which attains to righteousness by endeavour. The aspiration towards a higher life, the belief in a divine power, which underlies all religions alike--this was the immutable and imperishable core. The form, the name, was the mere provisional envelope.
The only advantage which one faith had over another, seemed to me to be in the relative power of expansion left to the human intellect, the liberality of its formulas, and the smallest amount of historic untruths and scientific absurdities mixed up with its theology. Hence Unitarianism had long been the nearest approach to Truth that I could find--Unitarianism founded on the Christian basis, where denial of the divinity did not include disregard for the doctrines of Christ.
But now, both solid comfort and spiritual enlightenment seemed to fail
me here. One of the congregation, I was on the outside of the body and not
harmonious with the teaching. That most eloquent preacher of them all, at
last ceased to hold me. His sermons were poetic, beautiful, full of
spiritual imagination, but there was always in them a limitation of
inquiry, and that dogmatism of unproved assertion which prevented my
full assent. They assumed their premises too absolutely, and built up the conclusions too arbitrarily, where there was really no Q.E.D. Unlike science, which begins from the unit and from the two and two which makes four proves all the rest, his arguments, however clearly defined, were nebulous and unproved, though arbitrary, and you had to grant too much if you would accept the residue. And they were wanting in that human element in which Stopford Brooke, of all men, is most conspicuous. They touched the stronger passions, the more tragic pain of life, with too delicate a hand, too flimsy a sweep; and gave nor heed nor thought to the more turbulent forces of emotion. They were too etherealized for work-a-day uses; and, though on a broader basis than the Established Church, still the doctrines they taught were always theological--always treating the hypothetical as the absolute--and as if he, the preacher, were afraid of
opening issues which might admit of divergence, and the consequent wandering of the startled flock--whither?
One thing, for a time, gave me cause to doubt the justice of my own
dissatisfaction and kept me longer in the congregation than else would have
been. The spiritual food which did not nourish me was sufficient for Sir
Charles Lyell, whose fine and thoughtful face was always to be seen in his
place. Yet he was an intellectual giant where I was but a pigmy.
Since the failure of my marriage, this dissatisfaction with my spiritual
state and position had been growing. That thing which I had done with so
much pure religiousness of feeling--wherein I had taken counsel of the
Lord and believed that I was doing His will and putting my hand to the work
He had appointed me to do--that thing had fallen into ruins; and God,
who had then seemed to be my
leader, had since abandoned me when most needed. No prayers had helped me, no cries for guidance, for patience, for support had been heard. During the dark days of stormy dissension which had prefaced our separation, I had turned to my God, my Father, with all the fervour and passion of my soul. I had carried to Him so much despair, so much bleeding agony of heart, that at last I dared not trust myself in church nor chapel. The passion of it all overwhelmed me with too much violence. And when such hymns as 'Nearer, my God, to Thee,' or, 'My God, my Father, while I stray,' were sung, I more than once broke down, and was too unmanned to dare a repetition of the trial. But to all my seeking I had no answer. None! none! no more than in those early days of youthful violence and unrest; and the dark solitude in which my soul had lived had been terrible and appalling.
This want of spiritual consolation as my
own experience--this seeking and not finding--gave increased stimulus to those incessant questionings on the meaning of life and the nature of God by which I was now torn as on the rack. I saw dimly the terrible end which I was nearing. I would not confess it, but I was dumbly conscious in my own soul of the result of all this frustration of endeavour. To do in faith and to fail, to cry and not be heard, to ask and not be answered, to struggle and not get free:--there was only one end possible to such a life, and that was--the abyss.
I learned much from what I heard, and sometimes more than the speaker
always intended. For the men of that time, so short a while ago, were
different from
the men of the actual day; and things which are now accepted as incontestable truths were then only in the nebulous or the tentative stage, and you might or might not receive them, at your pleasure. During the last twenty or twenty-five years, science has bloomed and fructified with marvellous vigour and rapidity; but those who did not reap all they sowed, yet sowed well for others to garner. They made the running, if they did not reach the goal.
John Crawfurd was neither a synthesist nor a scientific revolutionizer.
He disbelieved in the 'Aryan heresy;' would have no part in the
Evolution theory; derided the idea of the Solar myth as in any way
incorporated into Christianity; but his labours in ethnology, physical
geography and other kindred subjects have helped on the synthesists; and
the revolutionizers owe him thanks for at least the use of his shoulders.
They sit so much the higher, and know so much the more, for what he has
done.
Nor was Sir Roderick Murchison a name wherewith to conjure; yet the
palæontologists are indebted to him as much as if the calibre of his
mind had been equal to the quality of his discovery, and as if he had been
as intellectually great as he was scientifically fortunate. But with him,
more than any other scientist of his time, the worth of the work he did was
incommensurably beyond himself. It was like the finding of a buried jewel
by a child scratching in the garden. The jewel was priceless, but the child
had not searched with the intelligence of a mining engineer, and when he
had unearthed the treasure his brain was no nearer in weight nor value to
that of the engineer than it had been before.
Again, Robert Chambers, though a brave pioneer in the making of the new
road, and one of the first to speak the new language, was in a certain
sense pre-scientific. He was the dawn but not the full day. He still
accepted for granted things which were
not proved nor capable of proof--e.g. spiritualism; and the poetry of his nature, while it added beauty to his intellect, took from the rigid value of his evidence. Still, he saw the true shapes of things, if he did not fill in all the details with perfect accuracy; and his 'Vestiges of Creation'--which we may now take for granted was his--will take rank for ever as one of the advanced guard in the forces of knowledge as they stand arrayed against those of ignorance.
In cataloguing my memories of twenty or twenty-five years ago, I see the
enormous span which science and free-thought have thrown across the abyss
of ignorance and superstition. Twenty-five years ago, Mill's
definition of liberty was not the household word it is now. The doctrine
that exact laws could be applied to that inconstant quantity, man; laws of
averages as precise as mathematics; laws of economic results as certain as
chemical combinations; laws
governing human conduct and forming the science of sociology as unalterable as those which govern the course of the planets and form the science of astronomy;--this was a new page in the great Book of Life, which many found too hard to read;--and Herbert Spencer's laurel-crown was still growing on the bushes.
Twenty-five years ago too, our greatest man of all, the true epoch-maker
and torch-bearer of this century, he to whom our age owes its
characteristic value--Charles Darwin--was in the first of the two
stages which every original thinker and revolutionizing discoverer has to
pass through. He had a few choice adherents who believed in him; but the
learned public disputed his conclusions, the unlearned derided his facts,
and the theological remnant denounced him as a lying teacher of
iniquity.
Now he is in the second phase--accepted as an expositor of
common-places:--'What every ploughboy knew generations
ago,' as
said to me, contemptuously, a certain Roman Catholic Professor, on the action of worms as set forth in one of the last books.
Between Darwin and Sir Charles Lyell--the 'Antiquity'
and the 'Descent' of man--however, the cosmogony dear to
this Professor and others of his creed becomes a handful of dry dust. When
the tip of one of Prince Rupert's drops is broken off, what becomes of
the body? So in regard to the old cosmogony; on which other things, held to
be more vital, hang like grapes on a severed vine-branch.
In those days Haeckel and Huxley were not the powers they are now, and
Owen was in his zenith. In that famous dispute between these last two,
about the hippocampus minor, how well I remember my eager advocacy of our
poor relation, and how I rejoiced in the firm, bold arguments of the
younger man! My state of mind was conviction, not knowledge; but the want
of knowledge did not lessen my ardour of conviction.
Darwin first, and then the spectroscope, opened a new world to me, and
one which redressed the balance and recompensed me for all the sufferings
and shortcomings of the old. The Unity of Nature was the core of the creed
to which I owe my subsequent mental progress--the Doctrine of
Evolution that by which I have come to peace. The fact that we have
advanced so far already makes all the future possible and reduces pessimism
to an absurdity; and the consciousness of fixed laws robs history of all
its elements of doubt, incompleteness and partiality. It makes infinite
amelioration dependent on man's clear and understanding will; and
shows how, by the scientific evolution of morals, systems of government,
laws of health, physical well-being and education, we can accomplish things
which hitherto have been only the dreams of poets and the fantasies of
artists.
Sir Charles Lyell's book had also an immense influence on me; so
had Hugh
Miller's 'Testimony of the Rocks'; for all that this last touched the old faith with as tender and reverent as he grasped the new truths with a strong and manly hand. Sir Charles was in a different category. He was not one of those who 'builded better than he knew,' for he looked his own conclusions fairly in the face, and accepted in its integrity every word of the writing on the living scroll which unrolled itself before his eyes. Max Müller's work again was among the charms of my existence in those days. I remember what Grote's 'History of Greece' was to me; also the joy that I took in Kinglake's 'Eothen,' and, when it appeared, many years later, in his 'History of the Crimea.' George Henry Lewes's books added to the general sum of mental content; and George Eliot, just stepping to the front, was a goddess behind a cloud. But a new novel by Georges Sand out-ran hers; and a poem by Mrs. Browning was looked on as an event greater than either.
Still, I had not so much interest in pure literature as I had in
science. In the former almost everything had been already said. From
Æschylus to Shakespeare and onwards, not many thoughts had been left
untouched; but in science were FACTS, and
these were of the kind to make a new mental era--a new departure of
thought for the whole world, as well as for myself individually.
It was all in the air. The emancipation of the human intellect from
superstition in the substitution of the scientific method for the
theological, was the great event of the time and made itself felt
everywhere. Brute absolutism and unreasoning authority were set aside in
matters intellectual as they had already been in things social, legal,
governmental. That which bestrode the reason was flung off into the dust;
and even the Church followed with the rest. 'Essays and
Reviews' had brought on its authors the honour of ecclesiastical
condem-
nation; and Colenso's book, which is now a mere letter in the alphabet of destructive criticism, had been stamped in gold by Convocation as 'full of errors of the gravest and most dangerous kind.' And yet how far short it falls of both De Wette and Norton!
Colenso himself was as clear and precise as his arithmetic; and his
thoughtful, handsome, refined face was always a beautiful point in the
bald-headed crowd at the Ethnological and Royal Societies, where Sir Edward
Belcher and Sherrard Osborne sat side by side like two mastiffs unmuzzled.
I used to wonder if what I had been told was true, that Captain Belcher had
once been forcibly prevented from hanging Sherrard Osborne up to the
yard-arm; and, to indemnify himself for his disappointment, had brought him
home in irons.
Strauss's 'Leben Jesu' had long been known to the
English reading public, thanks to the fine translation by Marian Evans,
whose first knot in the quipos of her fame was made by this work. The ripple raised by the 'Creed of Christendom' yet ran to the shore; and Newman's 'Soul,' as well as his 'Sins of the House of Hapsburg,' were moving forces in the world which his brother's 'Apologia' and reliance on authority have not arrested in later years.
'Ecce Homo' and Renan--still later--have given
pregnant cause for thought and divergence; but these have not roused the
anger which has been caused by coarser and more personal attacks, such as
Winwood Reade's 'Martyrdom of Man' and Colonel
Ingersoll's leaflets; and Lockyer's popularization of astronomy,
with the results of the spectroscope, have lifted freethought into a purer
because wholly impersonal atmosphere, and brought the witness of
unification against the doctrine of direct and separate creation. Those
Friday Evening Lectures at the Royal Institution, when Tyndall experimented
or Huxley
demon-
strated--or haply William Spottiswoode or Lockyer tried to bring things ethereal and celestial visibly before our eyes--what evenings in the Court of Paradise those were! How I pitied the poor wretches who did not come to them! Contrast a Queen's Ball and a Friday Evening Lecture--the nothingness of the one and the glorious communion of the other! I do not think there was one in the whole audience who drank in the wine of scientific thought with more avidity than I. Did my own ignorance make that wine but froth? Perhaps. All the same, it strengthened, warmed, exhilarated and almost intoxicated me.
What a glorious time it was! Everywhere the ground was being broken up
in preparation for the great superstructure which has been raised as by an
enchanter's wand. Everywhere was a shaking of the dry bones, and the
clothing of flesh and sinew on what had been dead and useless fragments
buried in the earth. In art and
science, in literature and theology alike was a confused noise of Life and of the forces which ran together. It was the birth-hour of a new Truth; and more than a few shepherds heard the heralding Voices which announced it. At no time in our history have the mental activities of England been so vigorous as they were now. And to me also, as I have said, came the Promise--which at first I did not rightly understand--and from the desert where I stood I looked over to the fertile land which as yet lay only faintly outlined in the dawning light.
My meeting with John Crawfurd brought me into contact with the long,
long ago, and made one of those loops in life which are so full of beauty
and interest. When we were young, and while we lived at our father's
place in Kent, we were much mixed up with three beautiful girls who lived
not more than a mile or so from us. All lovely, yet very different, each
was strongly individualized. The eldest
might have been her namesake of Troy. The second was bright, vivacious, playful, a kind of English-speaking Euphrosyne; and the youngest was the sweetest, gentlest, dearest of them all. We called her Dudù, for indeed she was a very sleepy Venus, and thinner she might have been and yet not lose. She and my beloved brother Godfrey made a summer day's excursion into that enchanted wood of fruitless love, whence is no issue save by tears and the heart-rending of separation. I was a child at the time; but the early friendship of the families, and the romance of this love-affair which we all knew, made it very delightful to me to foregather again with those who were left of these dear people. My new old friend, John Crawfurd, had married the eldest sister of all--one of the most regal and empress-like women I have ever seen--whom I can distinctly remember as one would remember a queen.
There were other members of the family
with whom I was also brought in contact. Let me recall the image of that gracious Lady, just returned from the Drawing-room, as she stood there by the sofa, in her court dress of blue and white and pearls, receiving her guests with the grace and ease, the dignity and the courtesy, of a young queen on her own account. Of all women known to me, Lady -- has the most perfect manner. And it is not only manner. Her heart is as kind as her ways are gracious, and she has proved the worth of her moral courage in more ways than one.
The Dudù of past times has mellowed into a bit of perfection of
her kind. The indolent grace of girlhood has become the soft serenity of
age, and the sweet temper of the sunny morning has raised itself into the
pious pity, the womanly compassion, which makes the evening of life so
beautiful, so blessed! Never an old friend lost, and new ones gathering
round
her, attest her sweetness and give warranty for love.
When John Crawfurd ended his long and honoured life, more than I lost a
friend whom to know was to love, to respect, to look up to--a man who,
if not one of the world's leaders, yet was one of the world's
helpers--a man who had done his day's work gallantly and well,
and whose character was as sterling as his intellect. No truer soul ever
lived than he; no kinder, juster, nor more faithful friend and father. His
tall and powerfully built figure, just touched by the hand of time, and
slightly, very slightly, bent--his handsome face with the eyes still
bright, vivacious, penetrating, where the lightning-lines of latent passion
flashed across the sweeter and more placid tracts--his noble,
white-haired head, and that look of a man who has won all along the line,
and who enjoys and does not regret--all made him one of the most
striking features of the learned societies
where no one was commonplace. And when he went, a power passed out of those where he had been most often seen, and had had most influence, which left them flavourless--at least to those who had loved him.
So in these late years, when William Spottiswoode died so long before
his time, the world lost more than it will easily regain. Mr. Spottiswoode
was perhaps the most ideal of all the scientists. Fortune and place, beauty
of person and refinement of mind, an intelligence that somehow reminded one
of polished steel, and a character as free from base alloy as gold that has
been tried in the fire--we do not often find such a combination as
this devoted to the furtherance of pure science and to the good of his
fellow-men. And now all these forces are dissolved, lost for ever to man
and gone into limitless space. And yet they are not lost. The work he did
lives after him and is his truest immortality.
I was in no way up to his subjects--none but the higher
mathematicians were; but I could understand something of what he said. I
remember specially a lecture of his on crystals, and how he seemed to
indicate that crystals were on the border-land of consciousness--just
below the plastic assimilation and active conversion of protoplasm, but
beyond the unchangeable rigidity of metals. That lecture was also one of
the starting-points of new thought to me--a nucleus whence my mind
branched out like one of the crystals spoken of.
How many of our good men have been taken! James Spedding was one who
touched the crown of the ideal student, whose justness of judgment was on a
par with his sweetness of nature, whose intellectual force was matched by
his serenity, his patience, his self-mastery, his purity. In the midst of
the violent clashings caused by the arbitrary and contradictory dogmatisms
which afflict and bewilder us, his quiet breadth,
his god-like serenity and all-embracing liberalism, were as refreshing as silence after uproar, as shade in the noonday heat. The way in which he died was the crowning act of a life that had never known bitterness, revenge, nor any strain whatever of the darker passions; and were the world of thought to have its saints, James Spedding would be one of the first canonized.
Very different were the Amberleys, who also were as grievous a loss to
the world, though standing on such a different platform. They carried a
more complete integrity of purpose and wholeness of action into their ideas
than any of their class known to me; and the brief meteor-like brilliancy
of their lives is a subject to me of enduring regret. It would have been
well for men and women had they lived and matured; even though they had
changed front and taken a new shape. They were too young and eager as
things were to have much influence, and their very
wholeness, by the slight exaggeration and want of tact which it included, made fewer proselytes than opponents.
Edward Flower, the handsome Jupiter whose humanity went over to horses
after the issue of slavery was closed by emancipation--he also was a
man of public note of the time; and he too was thorough. In the early days
of the American Civil War, before the introduction of emancipation by the
North--the playing of the black knave as the trump card--I was on
the side of the South. I took their part because of the Right of
Insurrection which I had always upheld. As all of us who were Liberals had
sympathized with the revolution in Italy, and the desire of the independent
States to consolidate themselves into one kingdom, so we now sympathized
with the States in America which desired to get rid of their Union, and to
form themselves into a separate nation. I could not see any difference
between the two. In both it was the will
of the people that I respected--uninfluenced by the differences of aim.
One day I said this to Edward Flower, as we stood on the hearthrug
before dinner was announced; and he very nearly ordered me out of the
house, instead of giving me the place at his table destined for me. I think
he would have done so, had not Moncure Conway come to the rescue. He
defended me, from my own point of view. He condemned that point of view in
itself, and showed where it was part crooked and part short-sighted, but,
granting my premises as honestly held, he could not see that I was to be
condemned. Thus he calmed down the towering wrath of our Jupiter
Mecænas, and things went on velvet from the soup to the grapes. But I
had skirted by a very unpleasant bit of coast, where I nearly made
shipwreck of an old and valued friendship.
Perhaps the two greatest losses to the world--making a wide leap
onward; but
this chapter deals so much with the honoured dead!--have been the deaths of Clifford and Balfour. Each had showed only a sample of his quality. Neither had done his day's work nor come to the meridian of his power. When Darwin died, he had lived. He had fulfilled his appointed mission, and planted his Tree of Life fathoms deep in the soil of human thought and knowledge. But these two young men went down to the grave before they had more than begun their assigned tasks; and their slips of the great Yggdrasil, by which heaven and earth are bound together, withered in the darkness of their untimely death. It fills one with sorrow to think what great things each might have done, and the loss to the world through their incompleted lives!
All this is a very fragmentary notice of the intellects which then were
in their vigour or their promise and now have sunk below the horizon. But I
am not writing a history of my own times, nor
speaking of things and people with whom I had no relation. I am only writing of those with whom I came in contact personally or intellectually, and who were either friends through love or masters through influence.
As my mind recovered its lost tone by the admission of a new interest,
and science worked out the scars left by disappointment, I found a new zest
in the work I had never ceased to love. I went as a free-lance under the
banner of my old chief, though I never saw him again; and I wrote what
struck and made its mark on the things of the time. But my connection with
this paper brought me more obloquy than praise. I had something to say, and
I said it with what literary force and moral vigour I possessed,
indifferent to personal consequences, as I have always been, and as I must
ever be now to the end. And those at whom I struck were naturally
indignant, and gave me back blow for blow, sometimes hitting below the
belt,
with even a few odd scratchings thrown in.
At this time my portion was a strange mixture of literary kudos and
personal enmity. I was publicly cut by irate partisans, and no one seemed
to think it possible that I had a conscience and was not merely an
'advocatus diaboli,' opposing that which I knew to be good and
bolstering up that which I knew to be evil. But I lived through it, and got
good out of it. For I do not think anything enlarges the sympathies or
humanizes the mind more than undue condemnation. By what we suffer
experimentally we can measure the pain of others; and the injustice which
we have to accept we are careful not to pass on.
Besides independent essays, all more or less dealing with one social
subject only, I did a great deal of reviewing for the paper. And as I was
notoriously beyond fear or favour, I was trusted with the books of my known
friends as well as with those of
strangers and new writers. My work was always to me impersonal. I said what I honestly thought of the book as an achievement, and no personal sympathy with, nor hostility to, the writer turned me one hair's-breadth to either side. I put my honour in keeping up the high standard of excellence for which the paper in question was then famous. If a book reached that standard, I praised it; if it did not, I condemned it--and who wrote it did not count. This might have been the work of a stranger, that of a friend--to either circumstance I was indifferent; and the personal favour I have not looked for, nor had shown to myself, I never gave to others. I know no other way of dealing with things than on their own merits; and I should care neither to receive for myself, nor to help others to obtain, that ephemeral reputation which is due to private patronage and not to the worth of the work done.
I remember one Sunday dining at the
house of a clever woman who disbelieved in the general honesty of the press. I had just reviewed a book which she had not read; but she knew the young authoress personally, and believed that she could not have written anything worthy of these encomiums--that no good could come out of this little corner of Nazareth. During dinner the conversation turned on the corruption and venality of the press, and she instanced this notice, which had appeared the day before in the --, as an example.
'That review must either have been paid for, or it was done by a
personal friend,' she said. 'In neither case was it an honest
criticism.'
'Neither one nor the other,' I answered. 'I know who
wrote it, and I give you my word of honour that the reviewer had never
heard the name of the authoress before he received her book, nor was the
faintest indication given him of the tone to be taken. It was reviewed on
its own merits only.'
For my own part, I can only say that I know nothing of the venality of
the press so often spoken of. One hears of ten pounds paid for this
favourable notice and ten pounds paid for that; but I take it these sums
are like poor Dr. Ashburner's banknotes brought by the strange man on
a black horse, and never existed outside the region of imagination. So far
as I know, those come worst off who attempt to influence to their own
favour the authorities in chief or the workers in detail of any paper that
respects itself.
I know an editor on whom one day called, unintroduced, a lively
scribbler. She had just finished a flashy book, which she was not content
to leave to be judged of according to its merits, but thought her social
standing should be brought into play as a kind of extra lever whereby her
work should be hoisted into notice. When she sent up her card--Lady
Fourstars--to one who was only a plain Mister and
who lived by his pen, while she got just so much more social consideration by hers, and when, after a few moments' conversation, she asked him to dine with her next day, she expected to have made a supple courtier in the place of an incorruptible judge, and to have bought his favourable suffrages.
The refined scholar who then held the reins of that special journal was
revolted by the cynicism of this effrontery; and the lively scribbler
gained nothing by her audacity. Her book was dealt with in the ordinary way
of business, and neither condemned for spite nor praised for
complaisance.
Officially inflexible, personally courteous, this editor, and one other,
were models of their calling--past-masters in their craft. Neither
ever betrayed his trust to his proprietors, and neither ever offended even
the most susceptible of his unsuccessful contributors. Of one--my dear
friend, whose loss we still deplore--it used to be said that it
was pleasanter to be rejected by him than accepted by many others. For there are editors and editors; and not all are pleasant to deal with. Some bully you, even when you do your best and your article has the place of honour. They think it due to their own dignity, and a useful check on your vanity, to keep your soul low like a weaned child; to cut down your presumptuous imagining that you are necessary to the paper; to make you understand that they could find a dozen as good as you, and half-a-dozen better, to take your place an hour after you had vacated it. Others are dumb dogs who neither growl nor caress. They say nothing of praise nor blame, and let you know you suit only by silent acceptance. Others again, give you heartening words of encouragement when you fail, and the reward of commendation when you do well. They keep the whole thing alive and healthy by their own vitality, and their contributors add personal zeal to their intel-
lectual efforts. These are the best editors. They get by far the most out of their staff; and when they go their place is not readily filled--if indeed it ever is!
But editors are a long-suffering race too, and have their trials like
meaner mortals. Not all their young lions roar fitly and in tune; and
sometimes, when most wanted, they skulk and do not roar at all. Or they
launch the paper into hot water by rash utterances, and the editor has to
pay in his own person for the debt of libel incurred by them. That large
crowd of ungrammatical folk who believe in private influence rather than in
the worth of the work done--who write silly books, then tout for
favourable notices--who think that any rubbish whatsoever can be
floated by a liberal supply of champagne given to editors and
reviewers--and who trust to every reed but good English and something
to say for their staff of literary fame--they make one of the many
nuisances besetting the editorial chair.
Another is that analogous crowd of incapables who ask for undesignated work without giving the flimsiest rag of performance to certify capacity. They think that a publisher's office is like a charitable kitchen, where are always to be found baskets full of broken meat, and where no other qualification than need is necessary for a share of what is going; or that publishers and editors are so many Michael Scotts, who have to supply their demons with work, to save themselves from being torn to pieces. If either idea were true, there might be some sense in the quest. But, seeing that for every loaf there are two claimants, and far more ropes twisted out of sea-sand than any wizard can stow away in his columns, these uncovenanted outsiders have but a poor claim. And were even the editorial business conducted in this centrifugal way, which it is not, their chances would not be worth betting on. As things are, where I pray you is their peg?
people on the faith of a will to be made in their favour, wherein she promised to leave sundry Cashmere shawls and rare old laces worth thrice the value of the loan; or to put down the name of their child for double the amount in money. I do not know how many of these wills she had not made, unknown to her husband. After her death, they turned up like stereotyped copies of a bad joke; and who got the initial bequest, or if anyone got anything at all, is also unknown to me.
The sum she borrowed was generally three hundred pounds. This lasted her
for a year or two and went in the purchase of the presents--or, if we
give things their right names and call spades spades--these bribes for
social consideration. She showered them right and left. They were chiefly
bits of embroidery very beautifully done, such as handkerchiefs,
shirt-fronts, waist-coats, blotting-books and the like, which she said she
herself worked in the solitude
of her own room on those off-days when she did not receive. Our then greatest living novelist came in for a fine flowered waistcoat, which she presented to him as her own work and a tribute of admiration. She had paid for it at a shop; and I saw the entry in her book, which one day she showed me. Again, a favourite gift was a bit of her old inherited lace, of which she had a goodly store on the back shelves of the bric-à-brac shops.
As her husband objected to this crazy application of their income, and
would not give her an allowance to cover this quite unnecessary margin, she
raised the necessary funds in the way I have said. And only when she died
did her several victims find out the practical joke that had been played on
them, and learn the true value of the legacy which was to have been rich
enough to go twice round the original loan.
This lady was monstrously proud of her birth. She, Spanish--her
husband Arabian
--both were of the tribe of Judah, she used to say, stiffening her small person. All the English and German Jews were her inferiors, being of the tribe of Benjamin; and she looked down on them with the traditional contempt of the elder branch for the cadet.
Her drawing-room was filled with the literary and artistic celebrities
of the day. She might have been the model for Mrs. Leo Hunter, had the
portrait not been taken before her time from that poor lady whose husband,
not content with being well, wished to be better and came to ruin as the
consequence. Had our small daughter of Judah been a social circumstance
before Pickwick put on his gaiters, the cap would have fitted to a nicety;
and her luxuriant shining black hair, of which she was not unreasonably
proud, would have received its deserved aureole.
She forbade her step-daughters, whom she frankly disliked, to come down
to her
parties. As she would not have allowed them to marry Gentiles, she said, she thought it her duty to keep them out of harm's way. Yet one of these step-daughters was a widow with children; and so far one would have thought able to judge for herself, as well as entitled to the run of the society assembled in her father's house, where also she lived. But my friend did not keep well with her family. Neither her husband nor his daughters, neither the grandchildren nor the governess pleased her; and her details concerning the various thorns which bestrewed her conjugal pillow were embarrassing to hear.
They were pleasant evenings which the little woman made; and she was
both a generous and an attentive hostess. Her suppers, where was always
cold fish cooked Jewish fashion, were models of good taste and liberality;
and there was that evident desire to give pleasure which makes its mark and
sets people at
their ease. Her company was certainly on the whole somewhat of a 'scratch lot;' not so odd as Mrs. Hulme's queer menagerie had been, but undoubtedly a little mixed. And people did wild things in her house, as they do in places where the rule is relaxed and they feel themselves delivered from social restraints. But we all felt it was going beyond the broadest line of the loosest social stepper when a certain editor--a man whom nothing daunted, and to whom notoriety was fame and singularity distinction--came late into her rooms, on one of her most brilliant evenings, in a frock coat, a crumpled shirt, a black neck-tie rather awry, and muddy boots.
We did not meet many of her own nation at my friend's house, and
only those of good birth, remarkable gifts, or exceptional position.
Against the ordinary Jew of large wealth and small beginnings, superb
diamonds and defective grammar, she was as exclusive as the most exclusive
Christian
could have been. She would never allow those she liked to be called Jews in her presence; only 'Israelites,' or the 'Nation.' Those whom she did not like, she herself stigmatized as 'low Jews.' Notwithstanding her social infidelity, she was a strict conformist, and, when the Feast of Tabernacles was about, she and her family lived in green-covered huts built up in the back-garden. She would have thought it a sin to have eaten other than 'cosher' meat; but between the two she would not have preferred martyrdom to pork nor even shrimps.
This 'cosher' meat, by the way, beyond its undoubted merit
of superior wholesomeness, still remains as a sign and symbol of true
godliness among the Nation. Or perhaps it were better to say as a fact
which in itself is godliness. I know of one worldly old fellow who,
thinking how he could best make his peace with Jehovah, whom he imagined he
had offended because
his health and strength had decayed, found nothing more pleasing as an act of submission and holiness than the vow never to eat ordinary meat again, but to be strict and faithful to the cosher butcher and the cosher beef. This little instance shows how deep-rooted in human nature is that mental state we call fetishism.
After our kind little hostess, this black-haired daughter of Judah, had
gone to her rest, I got to know more members of the great Semitic family;
some of whom I dropped because I did not care for them, while others I
count still as among my dearest friends, and love with enthusiasm. There
are people whose personality over-shadows their nationality. When with them
you never ask whether they are Jews or Christians, English or German. You
only know that they are clever, brilliant, trustworthy, high-minded,
beautiful; that you would trust your fair fame and fortune in his
hands--your happiness and self-respect
in hers; that their society is a lovely charm, their friendship a great gift; and that you have to live beyond your follies if you would be worthy of their virtues. Such as these I have known for some time now; also others who are not up to this height, but are just on a level with the current idea of ordinary Jews; but the quiet, home-staying, Gentile-renouncing Jew was a new experience which came to me at a time when the ferment was again beginning in my mind, and which helped on that ferment to a subsidence very different from what was intended.
In admitting me into their home these religious Jews did me signal
honour. Unlike those whose great social aim is to be received by Christians
of good standing and old family, these shrink from us still, as Gentiles to
whom has been given truly the power of dominion, as was of old time given
to the Egyptians, but who are ever outside the courts of Jehovah; while His
sons, whom He chasteneth, are His own, even while He punishes and afflicts. And His punishments are mercies in disguise--means of holding them to the truth and of confirming them in faithfulness and righteousness.
I have always done my best to put myself on the outside of things, and
to judge of my own standpoint as it would appear to others. If this weakens
tenacity it strengthens liberality; and the thinking world knows now that
the latter is better than the former in all matters of unprovable
speculation, inasmuch as it is the result of that wider knowledge of men
and things which makes the whole difference between cosmopolitanism and
parochialism. But I confess it startled me as much as if I had received a
blow in my face when I first talked with one of these religious
Jews--a man as learned as he was pious--and heard him say:
'We are in truth a living
miracle--pre-
served by God as a perpetual protest against your idolatry.'
'Idolatry!'
I cried out against the word with a strange sense of pain and
desecration. I had long ceased to believe in the Divinity of Christ, but I
had that kind of tender reverence for the faith of my childhood, that kind
of theological patriotism, so to speak, which made me shrink as if touched
with hot iron, when an alien, an outsider, laid a rude hand on its
mysteries.
'What is it but idolatry?' asked my friend quietly.
'What else can you call the religion of you Christians, which makes a
human being of that Incommunicable God--that Supreme Deity--the
Great Spirit of the universe, Jehovah our Lord, whom we Jews worship in
spirit and in truth? You pray to a man who, you say, was God Incarnate. You
worship one who lived and died a man like yourselves, and who is still a
man to you now in Heaven--specially
moved to listen to human prayers because of His own human experiences on earth. But we hold that no one has seen God at any time, and that He to whom we pray is beyond all sense. God has been incarnate in man no more than in the Egyptian bull; and your worship of Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph and Mary, is as pure idolatry--that is, the worship of a created and finite being--as was ever the faith which made Apis a divine Incarnation and Dagon a God in whom were light and life and power.'
I repeat these words because of the new view they may give to others who
have not thought out the matter for themselves. It is always useful to see
ourselves as others see us, and Christians never realize the
anthropomorphism of their religion, nor remember that the universal Saviour
was but a man, subject to all the limitations of humanity, and that even
now He is but the Divine Man deified. Nor do they ever
reason out their belief in the Trinity--in those Three Persons and One God; nor ask: Was it always so?--was, as I asked Henry Grahame, that part of the Godhead which afterwards became Christ, always the Divine Man He is now?--or was the essence split and made tripartite when Mary conceived?
To say these things are mysteries is to give no answer at all. Things
which come to us through human media, are, I repeat it, to be justly judged
of by human reason; and when they are unreasonable they are as justly
rejected.
My friend also predicted the persecution against his people which had
not then begun, but of which he saw the certainty, as God's way of
rebuking the pride, ostentation, laxity and luxury, which had crept in
among them. These vices had to be scourged out of them, he said, if they
were still to be the Chosen People. He did not speak from political
foresight; but only on religious
grounds and in faith--believing that the Israelites were, and are, in very truth the Chosen People, and that all which happens to them comes directly from God. When the German Juden-Hetze began, followed as it has been by the still more shameful barbarities of Russia and the late disgraceful trial in Hungary, I remembered what my friend had said.
But I was none the more convinced of the Presidential Authority of God
in these matters than in some others. Natural causes, arising from racial,
ceremonial and religious separation--from anti-national tribalism, so
that a man is first an Israelite and then a German or an
Englishman--from those classes of business which gather in and do not
produce, taking from the hoards of others but not adding to the general
store--from a specialized financial faculty, so that they get the
better of the slower European intellect--these natural causes are
sufficient to account for all that
has been of late, without calling in the aid of the Divine Hand.
For their earlier persecutions we want only the reasons that (1) The
Jews amassed portable wealth by the very same methods as those by which
they amass it now, namely, that specialized financial faculty already
spoken of, which takes advantage of the duller brains and profits by the
more wasteful habits of Christians. (2) They had no country, with
ambassadors to represent them and an army to retaliate when they were
evilly entreated. They were the orphans of the world. And that brutal,
blustering, ferocious world treated them as undefended orphans have ever
been treated.
Between their own self-consecration, however, and the repudiation of
Christendom, the poor Jews are in a state of very unstable equilibrium.
Held by themselves as miraculously preserved to be the unflinching
witnesses of the truth and worshippers of the one God--by Christians
they are
looked on as a standing miracle evidencing the wrath of God, who has hardened their hearts so that they shall neither repent nor believe. Thus they shall be always (righteously) punished for the sins of those few who, nearly two thousand years ago, shouted 'Release unto us Barabbas'--the sins of the fathers being visited on the children, according to the Mosaic word. What would have become of the world if this predestined Atonement had not been consummated never troubles those who believe and do not reason. Nor does it come into the order of Christian logic to prove that, far from persecuting, we ought to honour and reward, those by whom this salvation of the world came about.
If only all these theological fantasies could be abolished on both
sides, and the whole question treated on its merits!--if only men
would cease to be theosophists and learn to be brothers! Ah, then we should
have the true millennium, wherein the spirits of Intolerance, Spiritual
Pride and
Ignorance pranking itself as knowledge, would be effectually and for ever chained!
The first Friday night supper--which is the Judaic Sabbath first
meal--to which I was invited by my new friend, also greatly interested
me because of the initial ceremony, when the master of the house, in his
quality of head of the family and consequently domestic priest, blessed the
bread and wine, which then he distributed to those who 'sat at
meat' about the table. The prayer of blessing was said in
Hebrew--all sitting--the men covered, the women as they were.
Here was the origin of the Lord's Supper in the Christian
Church--the rite which had been practised by the Israelites long
before the birth of Christ and for ever after--the homely and familiar
'blessing of the elements' which Christians have adopted, and
in their adoption have forgotten the source and claimed the sole monopoly
of usage.
Who, in reading the account of the last Supper, ever realizes that Jesus
was only
doing that which every master of a house was doing at the same time throughout Judea?--which every Jew has always done, from the time of the Babylonian captivity onward, and still does in every house all over the world where the master is a faithful believer and not a back-slider? Who, among ordinary Christians, does not imagine the whole thing to have been specially ordered and ordained--from the verbal blessing to the esoteric meaning and mystic grace still preserved in the observance? It was a strange bit of enlightenment to me. It had for me the same effect in a minor degree, as I imagine the bodily presence of Christ, just as He lived and thought and talked in those early days of pre-scientific ignorance, would have on the cultured Englishman of the present day. It was bringing the mystic ideal, the symbolic grace, down to the hard and fast lines of realism; and when imagination runs dry at the source, enthusiasm fails at
the outfall. It took from the celebration of the Lord's Supper all its eucharistic character, and replaced it among the simple everyday human events of which we know the whole genesis, and in which is neither mystery nor sanctity. It was seeing the future King as a new-born naked babe, for whom only a woman's care and a flannel blanket are needed, and before whom the obeisance of sages and philosophers is a farce.
Knowing my new friends ever more intimately, I saw ever more clearly the
greater strictness of parental authority and the more dlignified tone of
their domestic life, as compared with our own looser code. The sons had
none of the familiar slang common to our boys. The father was
'father' or 'sir,' not 'the governor,'
nor 'the pater,' nor 'the old man,' nor 'the
boss.' The girls, in their turn, were more obedient to the mother,
less fast, less emancipated, more domestic and more retiring than ours. The
whole tone struck me as--unhappily--archaic, with a
little dash of Quaker quietism to intensify the disciplinary spirit. I liked it.
In my own person I had become more than tolerant of all failings which
are temperamental rather than deliberate and intentional vices. I never
reached the cynical indifference of my old friend Mrs. Hulme, who forgave
all things base and bad, because human nature was such a corrupt concern
from ground-plan to summit, she expected nothing better. Deceit, treachery,
moral cowardice, cruelty, lying, dishonour in money-matters, I held in
horror as I have always done. But faults of passion, the ebullition of a
strong nature, the excesses of large vitality, seemed and seem to me to
belong to another category; and the overpowering force of the physical
conditions, of which they are the result, takes from them the evil of
deliberate and conscious intention. All the same, I reverenced and admired
the gentle and self-restraining virtues when I found them--
those sweet domestic graces which make all the value of home; and I bear willing testimony to the fact that I found these in more abounding perfection in the homes of the religious Jews than elsewhere.
'A Jewish wife seldom troubles her husband's house,'
said one of my friends to me one day, unconsciously using a pure
Orientalism of speech when discussing the comparative fidelity of
wives--Jewish and Christian. And:--
'Unchastity before marriage is a thing almost unknown among Jewish
girls of good education,' said another, discussing the strange
phenomenon of those emancipated women who demand equal rights with men, and
discard all the duties of women; who desire knowledge without its
consequences, pleasure without its penalties, privileges without their
obligations, love without the restraints of matrimony or the self-sacrifice
of maternity; and who make no distinction between the sexes--
seeing no difference between that which is allowed by nature to the one and denied by the best arrangements of society to the other.
Most of us know something of the close solidarity of national feeling
among the Jews, proved, inter alia, by the magnificence of their charities,
their boundless kindness to their own poor, and the care with which the
powerful watch over the interests of the humble. The zealous endeavour to
secure a liberal secular education, as well as good religious instruction,
for all their poor, and to redeem their young waifs and strays from
perdition, is a marked feature of Jewish tribal life everywhere. We also
know how learned are their learned men--how to the forefront
everywhere is the Jew. In art, science, philosophy, literature,
finance--of itself a science--we have to acknowledge the value of
the bright Semitic intellect. No hewers of wood nor drawers of water are
they; no helots nor serfs; but quick, bril-
liant, irrepressible, they overcome all hostile circumstances and rise to the top in spite of every effort to destroy them.
And we must always remember that these people dwell among us, and know
us.
When we think of all this, we may understand a little better than some
blind enthusiasts will or can, the mingled folly and impertinence of our
costly 'Missions to the Jews,' our 'Societies for the
Conversion of Jews,' and the like. The Jews live in the midst of
Christian communities, and have ample means of judging the working results
of Christian doctrines in the