SARTLIFF.
Bart had been introduced to Sartliff, who was an object of universal
curiosity, even where he was best known, and coming out of the
court-room one delicious afternoon, he asked the young students to
walk away from the squabbles of men to more quiet and cleaner scenes.
They took their way out of the town towards a beech forest, whose
tender, orange-tinted, green young leaves were just shaping out, and
relieving the hard skeleton lines of trunks and naked limbs. Passing
the rude and rotting fences, by which rank herbage, young elders and
briars were springing up:
"See," said Sartliff, "how kindly nature comes to cover over the
faults and failures of men. These rotting unsightly 'improvements,'
as we call them, will soon be covered over and hidden with beautiful
foliage."
"With weeds, and nettles, and elders," said Case, contemptuously.
"Weeds and nettles!" repeated Sartliff; "and why weeds and nettles?
Was there ever such arrogance! Man in his boundless conceit and
ignorance, after having ruined his powers, snuffs and picks about, and
finds the use of a few insignificant things, which he pronounces good;
all the rest he pushes off in a mass as weeds and nettles. Thus the
great bulk of the universe is to him useless or hurtful, because
he will not, or cannot, learn its secrets. These unknown things are
standing reproaches to his ignorance and sloth."
"Poisons, for instance, might become sanitary," said Case.
"If man lived in accord with nature," said Sartliff, "she would not
harm him. It is a baby's notion that everything is made to eat, and
that all must go into the mouth. Men should have got beyond this
universal alimentiveness, ere this. Find the uses of things, and
poisons and nettles fall into their places in harmony, and are no
longer poisons and nettles."
"And accidents would help us on, instead of off," suggested Case.
"They help as often one way as the other now," replied Sartliff. "But
there are really no accidents; everything is produced by law."
"There must be two or three systems then," suggested Case. "Things
collide, while each obeys its law. Your systems clash."
"Not a bit. This is apparent only; man acts abnormally under evil
influences; he will not observe law; he turns upon nature and says
he will subvert her laws, and compel her to obey his. Of course
confusion, disorder, and death are the consequences, and always will
be, till he puts himself in harmony with her."
"It seems to me, Mr. Sartliff, that in your effort to get back
individually, you have encountered more difficulties, collisions, and
ills, than the most of us do, who keep on the old orthodox civilized
way to the devil."
"That may be; I am one, looking alone; nobody helps me."
"And like the younger Mr. Weller, you find it a pursuit of knowledge
under difficulties."
"Precisely; I inherited an artificial constitution, and tastes, and
needs. I began perverted and corrupted, and when I go back to Nature,
she teaches me less than she does the beasts and birds. Before I can
understand, or even hear her voice, I must recover the original purity
and strength of organs and faculties which I might have had. I may
perish in the attempt to reach a point at which I can learn. The earth
chills and hurts my feet, the sun burns my skin, the winds shrivel me,
and the snows and frosts would kill me, while many of the fruits
good for food are indigestible to me. See to what the perversions of
civilization have reduced me."
"Do you propose in thus getting back to nature, to go back to what we
call savagery?" asked Bart.
"Not a bit of it. It was the wants and needs of the race that whipped
it into what we call civilization. When once men got a start they
went, and went in one direction alone, and completely away from
Nature, instead of keeping with her and with an unvarying result;
an endless series of common catastrophes has overtaken all civilized
nations alike, while the savage tribes have alone been perpetual. I
don't say that savage life is at all preferable, only that it alone
has been capable of perpetuating races. In going back to Nature, I
propose to take what of good we have derived from civilization."
"As historic verity," said Bart, "I am not quite prepared to admit
that savage races are perpetual. We know little of them, and what
little we do know is that tribes appear and disappear. General
savagery may reign, like perpetual night, over a given region, but
who can say how many races of savages have destroyed and devoured each
other in its darkness?"
They had reached the forest, and Sartliff placed himself in an easy
position at the foot of an old beech, extending his limbs and bare
feet over the dry leaves, in such a way as not to injure any springing
herb. "Mr. Ridgeley," said he, "I would like to know more of you.
You young men are fresher, see, and what is better, feel quicker and
clearer than the older and more hackneyed. Are you already shelled
over with accepted dogmas, and without the power of receiving new
ideas?"
"I hardly know; I fear I am not very reverent. I was born of a
question-asking time, like that Galilean boy, whose, mother, after
long search, found him in the Temple, disputing with the doctors, and
asking them questions."
"Good! good! that is it; my great mother will find me in her Temple,
asking questions of her doctors and ministers!" exclaimed Sartliff.
"And what do you ask, and what response do you get?" asked Bart.
"I lay myself on the earth's bosom in holy solitudes, with fasting and
great prayer, and send my soul forth in one great mute, hungry demand
for light. I, a man, with some of the Father God stirring the awful
mysteries of my nature, go yearningly naked, empty, and alone, and
clamor to know the way. And sometimes deep, sweet, hollow voices
answer in murmurs, which I feel rather than hear; but I cannot
interpret them, I cannot compass their sounds. And sometimes gigantic
formless shadows overcloud me. I know they have forms of wondrous
symmetry and beauty, but they are so grand that my vision does not
reach their outline, and I cannot comprehend them. I know that I am
dominant of the physical creation on this earth, but at those times I
feel that these great and mighty essences, whose world in which they
live and move, envelopes ours and us, and to whom our matter is as
impalpable air--I know that they and we, theirs and ours, are involved
in higher and yet higher conditions and elements, that in some
mysterious way we mutually and blindly contribute and minister to each
other."
"And what profit do you find in such communication?" asked Bart.
"It is but preparatory to try the powers, clear the vision and senses,
train and discipline the essential faculties for a communion with
this essence that may be fully revealed, and aid in the workings and
immediate government of our gross material world, and the spirits that
pertain to it more immediately, if such there are."
"And you are in doubt about that?"
"Somewhat; and yet through some such agencies came the givings forth
of the Prophets."
"You believe in the Prophets?" asked Case.
"Assuredly. The many generations which inherited from each other the
seer faculty, developed and improved, living the secluded, severe, and
simple lives of the anchorite, amid the grand and solemn silence of
mountain and desert, were enabled, by wondrous and protracted effort,
to wear through the filament--impenetrable as adamant to common
men--that screened from them the invisible future, and they told What
they saw."
"Yet they never told it so that any mortal ever understood what they
said, or could apply their visions to any passing events, and the same
givings out of these half-crazed old bards, for such they were,
have been applied to fifty different things by as many different
generations of men," said Case.
"That may have arisen, in part," said Bart, "from the dim sight of the
seer, and the difficulty of clothing extraordinary visions in the garb
of ordinary things. It is not easy, however, for the common mind
to see why, if God had a special message for His children of such
importance that He would provide a special messenger to communicate
it, and had a choice of messengers, it should reach them finally, in
a form that nobody could interpret. With God every thing is in the
present, all that has happened, and all that will, is as the now is
to us. If a man can reach the power or faculty of getting a glimpse of
things as God sees them, he would make some utterance, if he survived,
and it would be very incoherent. Besides, human events repeat
themselves, and a good general description of great human calamities
would truthfully apply to several, and so might be fulfilled your half
hundred times, Mr. Case."
"That isn't a bad theory of prophecy," said Case approvingly; "but all
these marvels were in the old time; how came the faculty to be lost?"
"Is it?" asked Bart. "Don't you hear of it in barbarous and savage
conditions of men, now? Our friend Sartliff would say that the faculty
was lost, through the corruptions and clogs of civilization; and he
proposes to restore it."
"No, I don't propose to restore that exactly. I want to find a way
back to Nature for myself, and then teach it to others, when the
power of prophecy will be restored. I want to see man restored to his
rightful position, as the head of this lower universe. There are ills
and powers of mischief now at large, and operative, that would find
their master in a perfect man. One such, under favorable auspices, was
once born into this world; and we know that it is possible. He took
His natural place at the head; and all minor powers and agencies
acknowledged Him at once. I have never been quite able to understand
why He, with His power of clear discernment, should have precipitated
Himself upon the Jewish and Roman power, and so perished, and at so
early a day in His life."
"So that the prophets might be fulfilled," said Case.
"It may have been," resumed Sartliff.
"Upon the merely human theory of the thing," said Bart, "He could
foresee that this was the only logical conclusion of his teachings,
and best, perhaps only means of fixing his messages and doctrines in
the hearts of men. I may not venture a suggestion, Mr. Sartliff," Bart
continued; "but it seems to me, that your search back will necessarily
fail. In searching back, as you call it, for the happy point when the
strength and purity and the inspiration of nature can be united with
all that is good in Christian civilization, if your theory is correct,
your civilized eyes will never discern the place. You will have passed
it before you have re-acquired the power to find it, and your life
will be spent in a vain running to and fro, in search of it. Miracles
have ceased to be wonders, for we work them by ordinary means
now-a-days, and we don't know them when we meet them."
Sartliff arose; he had been for sometime silent. His face was sad.
"It may be. I like you, Barton; you have a good deal of your brother's
common sense, uncommon as that is, and I shall come and see you
often."
And without another word he strode off deeper into the woods, and was
lost to the eyes of the young men.
"Is it possible," said Bart, "that this was an educated, strong, and
brilliant mind, capable of dealing with difficult questions of law?
I fear that he has worn or torn through the filament that divides the
workings of the healthy mind from the visions of the dreamer--wrecked
on the everlasting old rocks that jut out all about our shores, and
always challenging us to dash upon them. Shall we know when we die?
Shall we die when we know? After all, are not these things to be
known? Why place them under our eyes so that a child of five years
will ask questions that no mortal, or immortal, has yet solved? Have
we lost the clue to this knowledge? Do we overlook it? Do we stumble
over it, perish, wanting it, with it in our hands without the power to
see or feel it? Has some rift opened to a hidden store of truth, and
has a gleam of it come to the eyes of this man, filling him with
a hunger of which he is to die? When the man arises to whom these
mysteries shall reveal themselves, as he assuredly will, the old
gospels will be supplemented."
"Or superseded," said Case. "And is it not about time? Have not the
old done for us about all they can? Do we not need, as well as wish
for, a new?"
"A man may doubtless so abuse and deprave his powers, that old healthy
food ceases to be endurable, and yields to him no nutrition; of course
he must perish," answered Bart. "He will demand new food."