Wilfrid Cumbermede

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A TALK WITH CHARLEY.

The following Monday, in the evening, Charley arrived, in great spirits, more excited indeed than I liked to see him. There was a restlessness in his eye which made me especially anxious, for it raised a doubt whether the appearance of good spirits was not the result merely of resistance to some anxiety. But I hoped my companionship, with the air and exercise of the country, would help to quiet him again. In the late twilight we took a walk together up and down my field.

'I suppose you let your mother know you were coming, Charley?' I said.

'I did not,' he answered. 'My father must have nothing to lay to their charge in case he should hear of our meeting.'

'But he has not forbidden you to go home, has he?'

'No, certainly. But he as good as told me I was not to go home while he was away. He does not wish me to be there without his presence to counteract my evil influences. He seems to regard my mere proximity as dangerous. I sometimes wonder whether the severity of his religion may not have affected his mind. Almost all madness, you know, turns either upon love or religion.'

'So I have heard. I doubt it--with men. It may be with women.--But you won't surprise them? It might startle your mother too much. She is not strong, you say. Hadn't I better tell Clara Coningham? She can let them know you are here.'

'It would be better.'

'What do you say to going there with me to-morrow? I will send my man with a note in the morning.'

He looked a little puzzled and undetermined, but said at length,

'I dare say your plan is the best. How long has Miss Coningham been here?'

'About ten days, I think.'

He looked thoughtful and made no answer.

'I see, you are afraid of my falling in love with her again,' I said. 'I confess I like her much better than I did, but I am not quite sure about her yet. She is very bewitching anyhow, and a little more might make me lose my heart to her. The evident dislike she has to Brotherton would of itself recommend her to any friend of yours or mine.'

He turned his face away.

'Do not be anxious about me,' I went on. 'The first shadowy conviction of any untruthfulness in her, if not sufficient to change my feelings at once, would at once initiate a backward movement in them.'

He kept his face turned away, and I was perplexed. After a few moments of silence, he turned it towards me again, as if relieved by some resolution suddenly formed, and said with a smile under a still clouded brow,

'Well, old fellow, we'll see. It'll all come right, I dare say. Write your note early, and we'll follow it. How glad I shall be to have a glimpse of that blessed mother of mine without her attendant dragon!'

'For God's sake don't talk of your father so! Surely, after all, he is a good man!'

'Then I want a new reading of the word.'

'He loves God, at least.'

'I won't stop to inquire--' said Charley, plunging at once into argument--'what influence for good it might or might not have to love a non-existence: I will only ask--Is it a good God he loves or a bad one? If the latter, he can hardly be called good for loving him.'

'But if there be a God at all, he must be a good God.'

'Suppose the true God to be the good God, it does not follow that my father worships him. There is such a thing as worshipping a false God. At least the Bible recognizes it. For my part, I find myself compelled to say--either that the true God is not a good God, or that my father does not worship the true God. If you say he worships the God of the Bible, I either admit or dispute the assertion, but set it aside as altering nothing; for if I admit it, the argument lies thus: my father worships a bad God; my father worships the God of the Bible: therefore the God of the Bible is a bad God; and if I admit the authority of the Bible, then the true God is a bad God. If, however, I dispute the assertion that he worships the God of the Bible, I am left to show, if I can, that the God of the Bible is a good God, and, if I admit the authority of the Bible, to worship another than my father's God. If I do not admit the authority of the Bible, there may, for all that, be a good God, or, which is next best to a perfectly good God, there may be no God at all.'

'Put like a lawyer, Charley: and yet I would venture to join issue with your first assertion--on which the whole argument is founded--that your father worships a bad God.'

'Assuredly what he asserts concerning his God is bad.'

'Admitted; but does he assert only bad things of his God?'

'I daren't say that. But God is one. You will hardly dare the proposition that an infinite being may be partly good and partly bad.'

'No. I heartily hold that God must be one--a proposition far more essential than that there is one God--so far, at least, as my understanding can judge. It is only in the limited human nature that good and evil can co-exist. But there is just the point: we are not speaking of the absolute God, but of the idea of a man concerning that God. You could suppose yourself utterly convinced of a good God long before your ideas of goodness were so correct as to render you incapable of attributing anything wrong to that God. Supposing such to be the case, and that you came afterwards to find that you had been thinking something wrong about him, do you think you would therefore grant that you had been believing either in a wicked or in a false God?'

'Certainly not.'

'Then you must give your father the same scope. He attributes what we are absolutely certain are bad things to his God--and yet he may believe in a good God, for the good in his idea of God is that alone in virtue of which he is able to believe in him. No mortal can believe in the bad.'

'He puts the evil foremost in his creed and exhortations.'

'That may be. Few people know their own deeper minds. The more potent a power in us, I suspect it is the more hidden from our scrutiny.'

'If there be a God, then, Wilfrid, he is very indifferent to what his creatures think of him.'

'Perhaps very patient and hopeful, Charley--who knows? Perhaps he will not force himself upon them, but help them to grow into the true knowledge of him. Your father may worship the true God, and yet have only a little of that knowledge.'

A silence followed. At length--'Thank you for my father,' said Charley.

'Thank my uncle,' I said.

'For not being like my father?--I do,' he returned.

It was the loveliest evening that brooded round us as we walked. The moon had emerged from a rippled sea of grey cloud, over which she cast her dull opaline halo. Great masses and banks of cloud lay about the rest of the heavens, and, in the dark rifts between, a star or two were visible, gazing from the awful distance.

'I wish I could let it into me, Wilfrid,' said Charley, after we had been walking in silence for some time along the grass.

'Let what into you, Charley?'

'The night and the blue and the stars.'

'Why don't you, then?'

'I hate being taken in. The more pleasant a self-deception, the less I choose to submit to it.'

'That is reasonable. But where lies the deception?'

'I don't say it's a deception. I only don't know that it isn't.'

'Please explain.'

'I mean what you call the beauty of the night.'

'Surely there can be little question of that?'

'Ever so little is enough. Suppose I asked you wherein its beauty consisted: would you be satisfied if I said--In the arrangement of the blue and the white, with the sparkles of yellow, and the colours about the scarce visible moon?'

'Certainly not. I should reply that it lay in the gracious peace of the whole--troubled only with the sense of some lovely secret behind, of which itself was but the half-modelled representation, and therefore the reluctant outcome.'

'Suppose I rejected the latter half of what you say, admitting the former, but judging it only the fortuitous result of the half-necessary, half-fortuitous concurrences of nature. Suppose I said:--The air which is necessary to our life, happens to be blue; the stars can't help shining through it and making it look deep; and the clouds are just there because they must be somewhere till they fall again; all which is more agreeable to us than fog because we feel more comfortable in weather of the sort, whence, through complacency and habit, we have got to call it beautiful:--suppose I said this, would you accept it?'

'Such a theory would destroy my delight in nature altogether.'

'Well, isn't it the truth?'

'It would be easy to show that the sense of beauty does not spring from any amount of comfort; but I do not care to pursue the argument from that starting-point.--I confess when you have once waked the questioning spirit, and I look up at the clouds and the stars with what I may call sharpened eyes--eyes, that is, which assert their seeing, and so render themselves incapable for the time of submitting to impressions, I am as blind as any Sadducee could desire. I see blue, and white, and gold, and, in short, a tent-roof somewhat ornate. I dare say if I were in a miserable mood, having been deceived and disappointed like Hamlet, I should with him see there nothing but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. But I know that when I am passive to its powers, I am aware of a presence altogether different--of a something at once soothing and elevating, powerful to move shame--even contrition and the desire of amendment.'

'Yes, yes,' said Charley hastily. 'But let me suppose further--and, perhaps you will allow, better--that this blueness--I take a part for the whole--belongs essentially and of necessity to the atmosphere, itself so essential to our physical life; suppose also that this blue has essential relation to our spiritual nature--taking for the moment our spiritual nature for granted--suppose, in a word, all nature so related, not only to our physical but to our spiritual nature, that it and we form an organic whole full of action and reaction between the parts--would that satisfy you? Would it enable you to look on the sky this night with absolute pleasure? would you want nothing more?'

I thought for a little before I answered.

'No, Charley,' I said at last--'it would not satisfy me. For it would indicate that beauty might be, after all, but the projection of my own mind--the name I gave to a harmony between that around me and that within me. There would then be nothing absolute in beauty. There would be no such thing in itself. It would exist only as a phase of me when I was in a certain mood; and when I was earthly-minded, passionate, or troubled, it would be _no_where. But in my best moods I feel that in nature lies the form and fashion of a peace and grandeur so much beyond anything in me, that they rouse the sense of poverty and incompleteness and blame in the want of them.'

'Do you perceive whither you are leading yourself?'

'I would rather hear you say.'

'To this then--that the peace and grandeur of which you speak must be a mere accident, therefore an unreality and pure appearance, or the outcome and representation of a peace and grandeur which, not to be found in us, yet exist, and make use of this frame of things to set forth and manifest themselves in order that we may recognize and desire them.'

'Granted--heartily.'

'In other words--you lead yourself inevitably to a God manifest in nature--not as a powerful being--that is a theme absolutely without interest to me--but as possessed in himself of the original pre-existent beauty, the counterpart of which in us we call art, and who has fashioned us so that we must fall down and worship the image of himself which he has set up.'

'That's good, Charley. I'm so glad you've worked that out!'

'It doesn't in the least follow that I believe it. I cannot even say I wish I did:--for what I know, that might be to wish to be deceived. Of all miseries--to believe in a lovely thing and find it not true--that must be the worst.'

'You might never find it out, though,' I said. 'You might be able to comfort yourself with it all your life.'

'I was wrong,' he cried fiercely. 'Never to find it out would be the hell of all hells. Wilfrid, I am ashamed of you!'

'So should I be, Charley, if I had meant it. I only wanted to make you speak. I agree with you entirely. But I do wish we could be quite sure of it; for I don't believe any man can ever be sure of a thing that is not true.'

'My father is sure that the love of nature is not only a delusion, but a snare. I should have no right to object, were he not equally sure of the existence of a God who created and rules it. By the way, if I believed in a God, I should say _create_s not _create_d. I told him once, not long ago, when he fell out upon nature--he had laid hands on a copy of Endymion belonging to me--I don't know how the devil he got it--I asked him whether he thought the devil made the world. You should have seen the white wrath he went into at the question! I told him it was generally believed one or the other did make the world. He told me God made the world, but sin had unmade it. I asked him if it was sin that made it so beautiful. He said it was sin that made me think it so beautiful. I remarked how very ugly it must have looked when God had just finished it! He called me a blasphemer, and walked to the door. I stopped him for a moment by saying that I thought, after all, he must be right, for according to geologists the world must have been a horrible place, and full of the most hideous creatures, before sin came and made it lovely. When he saw my drift, he strode up to me like--well, very like his own God, I should think--and was going to strike me. I looked him in the eyes without moving, as if he had been a madman. He turned and left the room. I left the house, and went back to London the same night.'

'Oh! Charley, Charley, that was too bad!'

'I knew it, Wilfrid, and yet I did it! But if your father had made a downright coward of you, afraid to speak the truth, or show what you were thinking, you also might find that, when anger gave you a fictitious courage, you could not help breaking out. It's only another form of cowardice, I know; and I am as much ashamed of it as you could wish me to be.'

'Have you made it up with him since?'

'I've never seen him since.'

'Haven't you written, then?'

'No. Where's the use? He never would understand me. He knows no more of the condition of my mind than he does of the other side of the moon. If I offered such, he would put aside all apology for my behaviour to him--repudiating himself, and telling me it was the wrath of an offended God, not of an earthly parent, I had to deprecate. If I told him I had only spoken against his false God--how far would that go to mend the matter, do you think?'

'Not far, I must allow. But I am very sorry.'

'I wouldn't care if I could be sure of anything--or even sure that, if I were sure, I shouldn't be mistaken.'

'I'm afraid you're very morbid, Charley.'

'Perhaps. But you cannot deny that my father is sure of things that you believe utterly false.'

'I suspect, however, that, if we were able to get a bird's-eye view of his mind and all its workings, we should discover that what he called assurance was not the condition you would call such. You would find it was not the certainty you covet.'

'I have thought of that, and it is my only comfort. But I am sick of the whole subject. See that cloud! Isn't it like Death on the pale horse? What fun it must be for the cherubs, on such a night as this, to go blowing the clouds into fantastic shapes with their trumpet cheeks!'

Assurance was ever what Charley wanted, and unhappily the sense of intellectual insecurity weakened his moral action.

Once more I reveal a haunting uneasiness in the expression of a hope that the ordered character of the conversation I have just set down may not render it incredible to my reader. I record the result alone. The talk itself was far more desultory, and in consequence of questions, objections, and explanations, divaricated much from the comparatively direct line I have endeavoured to give it here. In the hope of making my reader understand both Charley and myself, I have sought to make the winding and rough path straight and smooth.

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