A SOUL DISEASED.
“Papa is very ill to-day, Simmons tells me,” said Davie, as Donal
entered the schoolroom. “He says he has never seen him so ill. Oh, Mr.
Grant, I hope he is not going to die!”
“I hope not,” returned Donal--not very sure, he saw when he thought
about it, what he meant; for if there was so little hope of his
becoming a true man on this side of some awful doom, why should he hope
for his life here?
“I wish you would talk to him as you do to me, Mr. Grant!” resumed
Davie, who thought what had been good for himself must be good for
everybody.
Of late the boy had been more than usual with his father, and he may
have dropped some word that turned his father’s thoughts toward Donal
and his ways of thinking: however weak the earl’s will, and however
dull his conscience, his mind was far from being inactive. In the
afternoon the butler brought a message that his lordship would be glad
to see Mr. Grant when school was over.
Donal found the earl very weak, but more like a live man, he thought,
than he had yet seen him. He pointed to a seat, and began to talk in a
way that considerably astonished the tutor.
“Mr. Grant,” he began, with not a little formality, “I have known you
long enough to believe I know you really. Now I find myself, partly
from the peculiarity of my constitution, partly from the state of my
health, partly from the fact that my views do not coincide with those
of the church of Scotland, and there is no episcopal clergyman within
reach of the castle--I find myself, I say, for these reasons, desirous
of some conversation with you, more for the sake of identifying my own
opinions, than in the hope of receiving from you what it would be
unreasonable to expect from one of your years.”
Donal held his peace; the very power of speech seemed taken from him:
he had no confidence in the man, and nothing so quenches speech as lack
of faith. But the earl had no idea of this distrust, never a doubt of
his listener’s readiness to take any position he required him to take.
Experience had taught him as little about Donal as about his own real
self.
“I have long been troubled,” continued his lordship after a momentary
pause, “with a question of which one might think the world must by this
time be weary--which yet has, and always will have, extraordinary
fascination for minds of a certain sort--of which my own is one: it is
the question of the freedom of the will:--how far is the will free? or
how far can it be called free, consistently with the notion of a God
over all?”
He paused, and Donal sat silent--so long that his lordship opened the
eyes which, the better to enjoy the process of sentence-making, he had
kept shut, and half turned his head towards him: he had begun to doubt
whether he was really by his bedside, or but one of his many visions
undistinguishable by him from realities. Re-assured by the glance, he
resumed.
“I cannot, of course, expect from you such an exhaustive and formed
opinion as from an older man who had made metaphysics his business, and
acquainted himself with all that had been said upon the subject; at the
same time you must have expended a considerable amount of thought on
these matters!”
He talked in a quiet, level manner, almost without inflection, and with
his eyes again closed--very much as if he were reading a book inside
him.
“I have had a good deal,” he went on, “to shake my belief in the common
ideas on such points.--Do you believe there is such a thing as free
will?”
He ceased, awaiting the answer which Donal felt far from prepared to
give him.
“My lord,” he said at length, “what I believe, I do not feel capable,
at a moment’s notice, of setting forth; neither do I think, however
unavoidable such discussions may be in the forum of one’s own thoughts,
that they are profitable between men. I think such questions, if they
are to be treated at all between man and man, and not between God and
man only, had better be discussed in print, where what is said is in
some measure fixed, and can with a glance be considered afresh. But not
so either do I think they can be discussed to any profit.”
“What do you mean? Surely this question is of the first importance to
humanity!”
“I grant it, my lord, if by _humanity_ you mean the human individual.
But my meaning is, that there are many questions, and this one, that can
be tested better than argued.”
“You seem fond of paradox!”
“I will speak as directly as I can: such questions are to be answered
only by the moral nature, which first and almost only they concern; and
the moral nature operates in action, not discussion.”
“Do I not then,” said his lordship, the faintest shadow of indignation
in his tone, “bring my moral nature to bear on a question which I
consider from the ground of duty?”
“No, my lord,” answered Donal, with decision; “you bring nothing but
your intellectual nature to bear on it so; the moral nature, I repeat,
operates only in action. To come to the point in hand: the sole way for
a man to know he has freedom is to do something he ought to do, which he
would rather not do. He may strive to acquaint himself with the facts
concerning will, and spend himself imagining its mode of working, yet
all the time not know whether he has any will.”
“But how am I to put a force in operation, while I do not know whether I
possess it or not?”
“By putting it in operation--that alone; by being alive; by doing the
next thing you ought to do, or abstaining from the next thing you are
tempted to, knowing you ought not to do it. It sounds childish; and most
people set action aside as what will do any time, and try first to
settle questions which never can be settled but in just this divinely
childish way. For not merely is it the only way in which a man can know
whether he has a free will, but the man has in fact no will at all
unless it comes into being in such action.”
“Suppose he found he had no will, for he could not do what he wished?”
“What he ought, I said, my lord.”
“Well, what he ought,” yielded the earl almost angrily.
“He could not find it proved that he had no faculty for generating a
free will. He might indeed doubt it the more; but the positive only,
not the negative, can be proved.”
“Where would be the satisfaction if he _could_ only prove the one thing
and not the other?”
“The truth alone can be proved, my lord; how should a lie be proved?
The man that wanted to prove he had no freedom of will, would find no
satisfaction from his test--and the less the more honest he was; but
the man anxious about the dignity of the nature given him, would find
every needful satisfaction in the progress of his obedience.”
“How can there be free will where the first thing demanded for its
existence or knowledge of itself is obedience?”
“There is no free will save in resisting what one would like, and doing
what the Truth would have him do. It is true the man’s liking and the
truth may coincide, but therein he will not _learn_ his freedom, though
in such coincidence he will always thereafter _find_ it, and in such
coincidence alone--for freedom is harmony with the originating law of
one’s existence.”
“That’s dreary doctrine.”
“My lord, I have spent no little time and thought on the subject, and
the result is some sort of practical clearness to myself; but, were it
possible, I should not care to make it clear to another save by
persuading him to arrive at the same conviction by the same path--that,
namely, of doing the thing required of him.”
“Required of him by what?”
“By any one, any thing, any thought, with which can go the word
_required by_--anything that carries right in its demand. If a man does
not do the thing which the very notion of a free will requires, what in
earth, heaven, or hell, would be the use of his knowing all about the
will? But it is impossible he should know anything.”
“You are a bold preacher!” said the earl. “--Suppose now a man was
unconscious of any ability to do the thing required of him?”
“I should say there was the more need he should do the thing.”
“That is nonsense.”
“If it be nonsense, the nonsense lies in the supposition that a man can
be conscious of not possessing a power; he can only be not conscious of
possessing it, and that is a very different thing. How is a power to be
known but by being a power, and how is it to be a power but in its own
exercise of itself? There is more in man than he can at any given
moment be conscious of; there is life, the power of the eternal behind
his consciousness, which only in action can he make his own; of which,
therefore, only in action, that is obedience, can he become conscious,
for then only is it his.”
“You are splitting a hair!”
“If the only way to life lay through a hair, what must you do but split
it? The fact, however, is, that he who takes the live sphere of truth
for a flat intellectual disc, may well take the disc’s edge for a hair.”
“Come, come! how does all this apply to me--a man who would really like
to make up his mind about the thing, and is not at the moment aware of
any very pressing duty that he is neglecting to do?”
“Is your lordship not aware of some not very pressing duty that you are
neglecting to do? Some duties need but to be acknowledged by the
smallest amount of action, to become paramount in their demands upon
us.”
“That is the worst of it!” murmured the earl. “I refuse, I avoid such
acknowledgment! Who knows whither it might carry me, or what it might
not go on to demand of me!”
He spoke like one unaware that he spoke.
“Yes, my lord,” said Donal, “that is how most men treat the greatest
things! The devil blinds us that he may guide us!”
“The devil!--bah!” cried his lordship, glad to turn at right angles
from the path of the conversation; “you don’t surely believe in that
legendary personage?”
“He who does what the devil would have him do, is the man who believes
in him, not he who does not care whether he is or not, so long as he
avoids doing his works. If there be such a one, his last thought must
be to persuade men of his existence! He is a subject I do not care to
discuss; he is not very interesting to me. But if your lordship now
would but overcome the habit of depending on medicine, you would soon
find out that you had a free will.”
His lordship scowled like a thunder-cloud.
“I am certain, my lord,” added Donal, “that the least question asked by
the will itself, will bring an answer; a thousand asked by the
intellect, will bring nothing.”
“I did not send for you to act the part of father confessor, Mr.
Grant,” said his lordship, in a tone which rather perplexed Donal; “but
as you have taken upon you the office, I may as well allow you keep it;
the matter to which you refer, that of my medical treatment of myself,
is precisely what has brought me into my present difficulty. It would
be too long a story to tell you how, like poor Coleridge, I was first
decoyed, then enticed from one stage to another; the desire to escape
from pain is a natural instinct; and that, and the necessity also for
escaping my past self, especially in its relations to certain others,
have brought me by degrees into far too great a dependence on the use
of drugs. And now that, from certain symptoms, I have ground to fear a
change of some kind not so far off--I do not of course mean to-morrow,
or next year, but somewhere nearer than it was this time, I won’t say
last year, but say ten years ago--why, then, one begins to think about
things one has been too ready to forget. I suppose, however, if the
will be a natural possession of the human being, and if a man should,
through actions on the tissue of his brain, have ceased to be conscious
of any will, it must return to him the moment he is free from the body,
that is, from the dilapidated brain!”
“My lord, I would not have you count too much upon that. We know very
little about these things; but what if the brain give the opportunity
for the action which is to result in freedom? What if there should,
without the brain, be no means of working our liberty? What if we are
here like birds in a cage, with wings, able to fly but not flying about
the cage; and what if, when we are dead, we shall indeed be out of the
cage, but without wings, having never made use of such as we had while
we had them? Think for a moment what we should be without the senses!”
“We shall be able at least to see and hear, else where were the use of
believing in another world?”
“I suspect, my lord, the other world does not need our believing in it
to make a fact of it. But if a man were never to teach his soul to see,
if he were obstinately to close his eyes upon this world, and look at
nothing all the time he was in it, I should be very doubtful whether
the mere fact of going a little more dead, would make him see. The soul
never having learned to see, its sense of seeing, correspondent to and
higher than that of the body, never having been developed, how should
it expand and impower itself by mere deliverance from the one best
schoolmaster to whom it would give no heed? The senses are, I suspect,
only the husks under which are ripening the deeper, keener, better
senses belonging to the next stage of our life; and so, my lord, I
cannot think that, if the will has not been developed through the means
and occasions given it, the mere passing into another condition will
set it free. For freedom is the unclosing of the idea which lies at our
root, and is the vital power of our existence. The rose is the freedom
of the rose tree. I should think, having lost his brain, and got
nothing instead, a man would find himself a mere centre of unanswerable
questions.”
“You go too far for me,” said his lordship, looking a little
uncomfortable, “but I think it is time to try and break myself a little
of the habit--or almost time. By degrees one might, you know,--eh?”
“I have little faith in doing things by degrees, my lord--except such
indeed as by their very nature cannot be done at once. It is true a bad
habit can only be contracted by degrees; and I will not say, because I
do not know, whether anyone has ever cured himself of one by degrees;
but it cannot be the best way. What is bad ought to be got rid of at
once.”
“Ah, but, don’t you know? that might cost you your life!”
“What of that, my lord! Life, the life you mean, is not the first
thing.”
“Not the first thing! Why, the Bible says, ‘All that a man hath will he
give for his life’!”
“That is in the Bible; but whether the Bible says it, is another thing.”
“I do not understand silly distinctions.”
“Why, my lord, who said that?”
“What does it matter who said it?”
“Much always; everything sometimes.”
“Who said it then?”
“The devil.”
“The devil he did! And who ought to know better, I should like to ask!”
“Every man ought to know better. And besides, it is not what a man will
or will not do, but what a man ought or ought not to do!”
“Ah, there you have me, I suppose! But there are some things so damned
difficult, that a man must be very sure of his danger before he can
bring himself to do them!”
“That may be, my lord: in the present case, however, you must be aware
that the danger is not to the bodily health alone; these drugs
undermine the moral nature as well!”
“I know it: I cannot be counted guilty of many things; they were done
under the influence of hellish concoctions. It was not I, but these
things working in me--on my brain, making me see things in a false
light! This will be taken into account when I come to be judged--if
there be such a thing as a day of judgment.”
“One thing I am sure of,” said Donal, “that your lordship will have
fair play. At first, not quite knowing what you were about, you may not
have been much to blame; but afterwards, when you knew that you were
putting yourself in danger of doing you did not know what, you were as
much to blame as if you made a Frankenstein-demon, and turned him loose
on the earth, knowing yourself utterly unable to control him.”
“And is not that what the God you believe in does every day?”
“My lord, the God I believe in has _not_ lost his control over either of
us.”
“Then let him set the thing right! Why should we draw his plough?”
“He will set it right, my lord,--but probably in a way your lordship
will not like. He is compelled to do terrible things sometimes.”
“Compelled!--what should compel him?”
“The love that is in him, the love that he is. He cannot let us have
our own way to the ruin of everything in us he cares for!”
Then the spirit awoke in Donal--or came upon him--and he spoke.
“My lord,” he said, “if you would ever again be able to thank God; if
there be one in the other world to whom you would go; if you would make
up for any wrong you have ever done; if you would ever feel in your
soul once more the innocence of a child; if you care to call God your
father; if you would fall asleep in peace and wake to a new life; I
conjure you to resist the devil, to give up the evil habit that is
dragging you lower and lower every hour. It will be very hard, I know!
Anything I can do, watching with you night and day, giving myself to
help you, I am ready for. I will do all that lies in me to deliver you
from the weariness and sickness of the endeavour. I will give my life
to strengthen yours, and count it well spent and myself honoured: I
shall then have lived a life worth living! Resolve, my lord--in God’s
name resolve at once to be free. Then you shall know you have a free
will, for your will will have made itself free by doing the will of God
against all disinclination of your own. It will be a glorious victory,
and will set you high on the hill whose peak is the throne of God.”
“I will begin to-morrow,” said the earl feebly, and with a strange look
in his eyes. “--But now you must leave me. I need solitude to
strengthen my resolve. Come to me again to-morrow. I am weary, and must
rest awhile. Send Simmons.”
Donal was nowise misled by the easy, postponed consent, but he could
not prolong the interview. He rose and went. In the act of shutting the
door behind him, something, he did not know what, made him turn his
head: the earl was leaning over the little table by his bedside, and
pouring something from a bottle into a glass. Donal stood transfixed.
The earl turned and saw him, cast on him a look of almost demoniacal
hate, put the glass to his lips and drank off its contents, then threw
himself back on his pillows. Donal shut the door--not so softly as he
intended, for he was agitated; a loud curse at the noise came after
him. He went down the stair not only with a sense of failure, but with
an exhaustion such as he had never before felt.
There are men of natures so inactive that they cannot even enjoy the
sight of activity around them: men with schemes and desires are in
their presence intrusive. Their existence is a sleepy lake, which would
not be troubled even with the wind of far-off labour. Such lord Morven
was not by nature; up to manhood he had led even a stormy life. But
when his passions began to yield, his self-indulgence began to take the
form of laziness; and it was not many years before he lay with never a
struggle in the chains of the evil power which had now reduced him to
moral poltroonery. The tyranny of this last wickedness grew worse after
the death of his wife. The one object of his life, if life it could be
called, was only and ever to make it a life of his own, not the life
which God had meant it to be, and had made possible to him. On first
acquaintance with the moral phenomenon, it had seemed to Donal an
inhuman and strangely exceptional one; but reflecting, he came
presently to see that it was only a more pronounced form of the
universal human disease--a disease so deep-seated that he who has it
worst, least knows or can believe that he has any disease, attributing
all his discomfort to the condition of things outside him; whereas his
refusal to accept them as they are, is one most prominent symptom of
the disease. Whether by stimulants or narcotics, whether by company or
ambition, whether by grasping or study, whether by self-indulgence, by
art, by books, by religion, by love, by benevolence, we endeavour after
another life than that which God means for us--a life of truth, namely,
of obedience, humility, and self-forgetfulness, we walk equally in a
vain show. For God alone _is_, and without him we are not. This is not
the mere clang of a tinkling metaphysical cymbal; he that endeavours to
live apart from God must at length find--not merely that he has been
walking in a vain show, but that he has been himself but the phantom of
a dream. But for the life of the living God, making him be, and keeping
him being, he must fade even out of the limbo of vanities!
He more and more seldom went out of the house, more and more seldom
left his apartment. At times he would read a great deal, then for days
would not open a book, but seem absorbed in meditation--a meditation
which had nothing in it worthy of the name. In his communications with
Donal, he did not seem in the least aware that he had made him the
holder of a secret by which he could frustrate his plans for his
family. These plans he clung to, partly from paternity, partly from
contempt for society, and partly in the fancy of repairing the wrong he
had done his children’s mother. The morally diseased will atone for
wrong by fresh wrong--in its turn to demand like reparation! He would
do anything now to secure his sons in the position of which in law he
had deprived them by the wrong he had done the woman whom all had
believed his wife. Through the marriage of the eldest with the heiress,
he would make him the head of the house in power as in dignity, and
this was now almost the only tie that bound him to the reality of
things. He cared little enough about Forgue, but his conscience was
haunted with his cruelties to the youth’s mother. These were often such
as I dare not put on record: they came all of the pride of self-love
and self-worship--as evil demons as ever raged in the fiercest fire of
Moloch. In the madness with which they possessed him, he had inflicted
upon her not only sorest humiliations, but bodily tortures: he would
see, he said, what she would bear for his sake! In the horrible
presentments of his drug-procured dreams they returned upon him in
terrible forms of righteous retaliation. And now, though to himself he
was constantly denying a life beyond, the conviction had begun to visit
and overwhelm him that he must one day meet her again: fain then would
he be armed with something which for her sake he had done for her
children! One of the horrible laws of the false existence he led was
that, for the deadening of the mind to any evil, there was no necessity
it should be done and done again; it had but to be presented in the
form of a thing done, or a thing going to be done, to seem a thing
reasonable and doable. In his being, a world of false appearances had
taken the place of reality; a creation of his own had displaced the
creation of the essential Life, by whose power alone he himself falsely
created; and in this world he was the dupe of his own home-born
phantoms. Out of this conspiracy of marsh and mirage, what vile things
might not issue! Over such a chaos the devil has power all but
creative. He cannot in truth create, but he can, with the degenerate
created, work moral horrors too hideous to be analogized by any of the
horrors of the unperfected animal world. Such are being constantly
produced in human society; many of them die in the darkness in which
they are generated; now and then one issues, blasting the public day
with its hideous glare. Because they are seldom seen, many deny they
exist, or need be spoken of if they do. But to terrify a man at the
possibilities of his neglected nature, is to do something towards the
redemption of that nature.
School-hours were over, but Davie was seated where he had left him,
still working. At sight of him Donal, feeling as if he had just come
from the presence of the damned, almost burst into tears. A moment more
and Arctura entered: it was as if the roof of hell gave way, and the
blue sky of the eternal came pouring in heavenly deluge through the
ruined vault.
“I have been to call upon Sophia,” she said.
“I am glad to hear it,” answered Donal: any news from an outer world of
yet salvable humanity was welcome as summer to a land of ice.
“Yes,” she said; “I am able to go and see her now, because I am no
longer afraid of her--partly, I think, because I no longer care what
she thinks of me. Her power over me is gone.”
“And will never return,” said Donal, “while you keep close to the
master. With him you need no human being to set you right, and will
allow no human being to set you wrong; you will need neither friend nor
minister nor church, though all will help you. I am very glad, for
something seems to tell me I shall not be long here.”
Arctura dropped on a chair--pale as rosy before.
“Has anything fresh happened?” she asked, in a low voice that did not
sound like hers. “Surely you will not leave me while--.--I thought--I
thought--.--What is it?”
“It is only a feeling I have,” he answered. “I believe I am out of
spirits.”
“I never saw you so before!” said Arctura. “I hope you are not going to
be ill.”
“Oh, no; it is not that! I will tell you some day, but I cannot now.
All is in God’s hands!”
She looked anxiously at him, but did not ask him any question more. She
proposed they should take a turn in the park, and his gloom wore
gradually off.