handiest implement available to literary genius, namely, the novel, or
fictional history, and by consummate critical and constructive skill,
showing the disintegration of the old faiths and the building up of the
new in the life of some representative man or woman. There is much
more in such a novel than appears. First, there is the work of the
scholar, of the man of research. He is like the miner who works
underground and digs out of the hard earth that "gem of purest ray
serene," the truth. Then comes the artist, just as cultured as the
scholar, and only less learned, who polishes the gem and gives it its
setting in pages of brilliant writing, and what is more important
still, weaves it subtly into the daily life of some human being to whom
it has been slowly and always painfully introduced. Or, to vary the
metaphor, this new controversy is an inoculation performed by one who
possesses a masterly acquaintance with the circulatory system of the
spiritual anatomy, and is enabled thereby to describe with unerring
accuracy the precise effects of the new ideal at every stage of its
progress through the soul. You see before you the experiment of a new
ideal, at first only suggested, then partially welcomed and even loved.
Then the awful struggle in which no quarter can be given on either
side, and the final victory of the truth. Such is the new controversy,
the world of truth brought down to the world of life, the fertilising
streams of knowledge turned by some strong, wise hand, into the narrow
channel of an individual existence for the purification and recreation
of life.
Naturally, the distinguished authoress turned her attention first to
the Anglican Church, the most cultured and liberal of the Christian
communities. Evangelical dissent cannot at present be said to be
interesting, at any rate from the point of view we are considering
to-day. It is destitute of the historic associations of Anglicanism,
and has been, until very recently, identified with ideals little
suggestive of the intellectual or the beautiful. It can scarcely be
said to lend itself to effective dramatic or artistic treatment. I am
by no means forgetful of George Eliot, but every one will see at a
glance that the handling of the religious question by that incomparable
genius is entirely different from that of Mrs. Ward in the books we are
noticing. _Robert Elsmere_ stands for a system of theology and faith.
_Dinah Morris_ speaks for herself; out of the abundance of a pure and
beautiful heart her mouth speaks words of wondrous grace and truth.
Hence, having held up the mirror to the face of Anglicanism, our
authoress has turned her attention to that older Church, so rich in
memories of the past, with so unequalled a record in the service of
humanity, and able even to-day to command the allegiance, the nominal
allegiance at all events, of more than two hundred million beings. In
_Helbeck of Bannisdale_ we have the world and life of Roman Catholicism
displayed with a minuteness and a precision which I should have thought
scarcely possible to one not "of the household of the faith". It is,
indeed, an ideal world, a world that belongs to the past, for the
Helbecks have all but passed away. The _Time-Spirit_ has been too much
for them, and that beautiful old-world courtesy, that silent, shrinking
piety which was nurtured on memories of martyr-ancestors who were
broken on the rack for the ancient faith, and long years of isolation
and the proud contempt of the world, is now, as some Catholics
regretfully deplore, a thing of the past.
No one knows this better than Mrs. Ward, and she has, I conceive it,
purposely chosen a type such as Helbeck, almost an impossible survival
in our time, because she could not otherwise have made Catholicism
interesting.[1] Nor could she have succeeded in pressing home her own
rooted conviction of the hopelessness of any attempt at compromise
between the new spirit of reason and life and that of the faith of
saints and martyrs. The modern Catholic, who stultifies himself and
vilifies his faith by apologetic articles in this or that secular
review, in which he attempts to show that the Church which taught the
inspiration of Genesis and condemned Galileo was all the time not
untrue to the scientific conceptions of Copernicus and Darwin, is a
very poor person in the eyes of many of us; and one thing is abundantly
certain, that by no possibility could even Mrs. Ward have made him the
hero of a novel. For a Helbeck, who has reckoned up the chances of
life, and deliberately made his choice, casting in his lot wholly with
an idealism for which the modern world has absolutely no sympathy, we
can and do feel a deep respect. But for your ambidextrous apologist or
theologian, the fellow who can make words bear double meanings, and
even infallible oracles tell contradictory stories, we have nothing but
contempt, because he is a trifler with truth.
And, now, we may turn to the book.
Mrs. Humphry Ward has long taught us to expect excellence, and in
_Helbeck of Bannisdale_ we are not disappointed. She does not work,
indeed, on so large a canvas as in _Robert Elsmere_, nor do her
materials allow her to be quite so interesting as in that masterpiece.
At all events, that is my individual opinion. The atmosphere is very
close throughout the book, and one has a feeling that the windows of
that old, old house of Bannisdale have not been opened for centuries.
One breathes a stifling air. Light and freedom come alone through that
delightful creation, Laura Fountain, a creature you do not easily
forget, with an instinct, rather than a reasoned conviction, of
rational truth and liberty, a being of almost wild impulse, clever,
though partially educated, but good to the heart's core. Altogether, a
winsome, lovable girl, and tragic as was her end, one scarcely knows
whether she was not happier in her fate, hurried hence on the swift
waters of the river she had grown to love, than she ever could have
been in her projected marriage with one to whom religion meant almost
unmixed gloom. Doubtless Helbeck found consolation in it, but it was
such as he was unable to allow others to share. Noble as we
instinctively feel the man to be, tender as is the passion wherewith he
envelops the object of his love, the shadow of the Cross is ever there.
Forgotten in the first sweet hours of their mutual avowal, it soon
reveals its sorrowful presence, and gradually deepens into such
unutterable gloom that the broken-hearted girl is forced to surrender
first love and then life to the inexorable exigencies of his old-world
creed.
This, then, is the issue of the dramatic interest of the story, that
the attempt to unite the living with the dead ends in the destruction
of the living, in the breaking of hearts, in one case, even unto death.
For the lives and loves of Helbeck and Laura must be regarded as
allegories of the eternal truths which encompass us. It may seem a
harsh, a needless thing to cloud the closing page with such sudden and
unutterable woe. Why should not these two pass out of each other's
lives, as do numberless others who realise the mistake of their
projected union? There is no reason whatsoever save this, that all
things whatsoever are written in _Helbeck of Bannisdale_ are, like the
history of Isaac and Ishmael, told as in an allegory. They are symbols
of the gulf which separates the new life from the old, and they serve
to convey the reasoned conviction of the distinguished authoress that
the inspiration of the "Ages of Faith" is inadequate to the complex
needs of the larger life of to-day.
These two unhappy beings illustrate that law of growth and progress
which forbids the youth to indulge in the pleasures of the child, or
the man to find his recreation in the pastimes of youth. And as with
man, so with the race. There was a time when the world was full of
Helbecks, an age when the religion of the Cross was the highest,
holiest, known. But man, in his maturer years, has outgrown that, just
as the Cross supplanted an idealism more imperfect than itself: and the
proof of its inadequacy is seen to-day in the blaze of evidence
supplied by the slow and inevitable decay of those peoples who were
once its steadiest champions. Spain and Portugal are being numbered
among the dead. Italy and France are making violent endeavours to
escape their doom, by restricting the liberties of the official
representatives of their legally established Church, because they
instinctively feel that their dogmatics mean death to the peoples who
live by them. Hence, the cry, _le cléricalisme, voila l'enemi!_ in
France, and the _libera chiesa in libero stato!_ in Italy. The modern
state, the modern man cannot live by the old ideals: the dead would
strangle the living. And, therefore, Laura Fountain, the modern
maiden, must die.
For, look at Alan Helbeck. He is a man who felt, who knew, himself to
be an anachronism, a man who had realised so fully the genius of his
religion, that he was thoroughly uncomfortable in the society of any
who were alien to it. He saw none of his neighbours; once only he had
been induced to attend a hunt ball. The doctrine, _Extra Ecclesiam
nulla salus_, he adopted in all its rigidity. He fulfilled Newman's
ideal to the very letter: he was "anxious about his soul". He never
gave anything else a serious thought. To escape hell--that nameless
terror which stirs the soul of man to its very depths, as Mrs. Ward
very aptly quotes from Virgil on her title page--this was the purpose
for which Helbeck of Bannisdale conceived he had been placed here by a
beneficent God. And on the supposition that "Acheron" is a reality,
Helbeck was absolutely right. If hell is indeed "open to Christians,"
and if the path to life be exceeding strait and narrow, our bounden
duty, as men of common sense, would be to "go sell all we had and give
to" orphanages, like the Squire of Bannisdale, and appease this gloomy
God by a life of austerity and utter renunciation.
Why, then, do not all Christians turn Helbecks? Simply because for the
very life of them they cannot believe in their own inspired
eschatology. Verbally, of course, they assent to the whole code of
immoralities connected with future retribution, but "a certain
obstinate rationality" in them prevents their translating their faith
into practice. Hence, the Catholics we meet are no more Helbecks than
ourselves. They do not believe in emptying their houses for the sake
of orphanages, fasting rigorously in Lent, abstaining from intercourse
with their fellow-beings, or going about chanting, "Outside the Church
no salvation". Quite the contrary. But the truth remains that Helbeck
was true to the ideal, and because he was, it is possible to see a
romance and a dignity in his life, not always observable in his modern
co-religionists. Nobody has anything to say against _their_ "version"
of Christianity, because it is, to all intents and purposes, identical
with the sane ideals supplied by modern thought. No French or Italian
statesman would have one word to say against them, but they have a
morbid dread of Helbecks. If the Helbeck ideal were multiplied
indefinitely, it requires very little foresight to pronounce the
gradual extinction of the commonwealth. A nation of men who were
simply and seriously living so as to escape Hades would make a speedy
end of the most prosperous community.
And yet this man had once lived, aye and loved. But his love was
lawless, and when all was over, he is taken by a church dignitary in
Belgium to witness the death of a bishop. The prelate, weak in body,
but strong in faith, is vested in his pontifical robes, and makes an
extraordinary impression upon the young layman by the fervour with
which he makes his final profession of faith. While in the exaltation
of spirit produced by this solemn scene, he is induced to attend a
"retreat," or series of spiritual exercises, to be conducted by a
Jesuit in a house of their Order. "Grace" had apparently not finally
triumphed, because he was within measurable distance of expulsion owing
to the indifference of his behaviour. However, the preacher took him
seriously in hand, and after one more stirring appeal to absolute
self-surrender to the Cross, or, in plain language, to turn his back on
the common human life of men, Helbeck's conversion is finally effected,
and from that day to the close of his life at Bannisdale, his one
thought was the Cross and the safety of his soul.
He had been living this melancholy existence for a number of years,
when Laura Fountain, the daughter of a Cambridge professor, and a
member of the Ethical Society there (so we are told), broke in upon his
life. Her father, as much for pity as for love, had married as his
second wife the sister of Alan Helbeck, and during his life had
apparently succeeded in teaching her something of the gospel of reason,
because Augustina practically abandoned her creed. But on the death of
her husband, it revived, and she experienced a longing to return to her
old home. Of course, there was joy before the angels and her brother
Alan at the penitent's return. Being absolutely dependent for her
creature comforts on her step-daughter, there was nothing for it but
for Laura to accompany the invalid, and prepare to spend some of her
time in the house of a rigid professor of a religion which her father
had taught her to despise.
The utmost skill is shown in the gradual transformation of their
feeling, from one of pitiful condescension on the one side and
undisguised revolt on the other, to sentiments of growing esteem and
respect which ripen at length into a love which is tender and deep.
The love scene which ensues on that early summer morning when Helbeck
discovers the "wild pagan" girl, as he thought her, in a state
bordering on exhaustion, after her long walk across country through
half the night, is a very beautiful and touching one, and reveals all
the mastery which the authoress commands of the language and mystery of
the emotions. The image of the infidel child had stolen into the
strong, stern man's heart, and, next to the master passion of his life,
his sombre religion, completely dominated him. They become engaged, to
the almost inexpressible scandal of the household, from the sour old
housekeeper up to Father Bowles, with his "purring inanities"--a
wonderful creation--and the courtly Father Leadham, a Jesuit and a
Cambridge "convert". But Helbeck holds out, trusts bravely to "the
intercession of saints" and the attractiveness of Catholic worship, and
thus some days of unclouded sunshine enter into his dark and troublous
life. Like the gentleman he is, he makes no attempt at proselytism,
and gives his word that by no speech or act of others shall his future
wife be molested.
They spend a few weeks at the sea, where Bannisdale and all it
represents is forgotten. Laura has grown to love and lean upon this
strong, resolute man. She enjoys an almost unique experience in
triumphing over a life which had been believed to be inaccessible to
woman's influence. But the sunshine is soon overcast. They are back
again in that atmosphere of depression which Bannisdale exhales, and
the agony begins. The poor girl sees the life from the inside, so to
speak, and the hopelessness of it all dawns upon her like a desolation.
Never could she bring herself to say and do the things she sees and
hears about her; a voice she cannot still seems to rise from the depths
of her being, defying her to go back on her past and forget the life
and example of her father. "You dare not, you dare not," it kept
saying to her. No, the system would hang like a pall of death between
her and her love: she could never possess his heart. Half of it, more
than half, would be given to that ideal of gloom he worshipped as the
Cross, which he correctly interpreted as the essence of the Catholic
teaching. When, finally, Helbeck stands by the account given of the
life of the Jesuit saint, Francis Borgia, who cheerfully surrenders his
wife, disposes of his eight little children and then goes off to Rome
"to save his soul" by becoming a Jesuit, the cup is full. Her lover
tells her the story of his own life, how he had been brought to his
present ideals--a story of exceeding great pathos, which utterly
overcomes the sensitive, shrinking girl by his side--but it was the
end. Half-hysterically she falls into his arms, and Helbeck almost
believes the great renunciation is to follow. "His heart beat with a
happiness he had never known before." But he was never farther from
the truth. "It would be a crime--a _crime_ to marry him," the
heart-broken girl sobbed, when she reached the privacy of her own room.
And so she turns her back on Bannisdale. But fate compels her to
return. Her step-mother is dying, and Laura's presence is
indispensable. Once again the old battle is renewed 'twixt love and
creed, and in her anguish this child of the modern world resolves to
force herself to submit that she may save her love. Father Leadham
can, he _must_, convince her. Has he not convinced Protestant
clergymen and other learned people? Why not a poor, untutored girl
such as her? But it was never to be. She was afraid to lose her love,
but there was something in her which conquered fear, and it reasserted
itself at the last. "I told you to make me afraid," she had once said
to Helbeck in one of their sweet moments of reconciliation, "but you
can't! There is something in me that fears nothing, not even the
breaking of both our hearts."
And so, with the awful inevitableness of a Greek tragedy, the action
moves towards the closing doom. It is sad beyond words, and we are
grateful for Mrs. Ward's noble reticence. "The tyrant river that she
loved had received her, had taken life, and then had borne her on its
swirl of waters, straight for that little creek where, once before, it
had tossed a human prey upon the beach. There, beating against the
gravelly bank, in a soft helplessness, her bright hair tangled among
the drift of branch and leaf brought down by the storm, Helbeck found
her."
He carried her home upon his breast, and at the last they laid her
amongst the Westmoreland rocks and trees, in sight of the Bannisdale
woods, in a sweet graveyard, high in the hills. The country folk came
in great numbers, and Helbeck, more estranged than ever now, watched
the mournful scene from afar.
Such is the tragedy of faith and love, which bequeathed to the already
lonely and sorrowful man memories so unspeakably sad, and led this new
Antigone to immolate herself in so awful a manner--"a blind witness to
august things".
For us there remains but one question. Helbeck, it is plain, can never
win Laura, but can Laura ever hope to win Helbeck?
One would have to answer with many distinctions. In the first place,
much has been done already. The true Helbeck type is fast
disappearing, buried or lost in inaccessible places like the fells of
Westmoreland, or Breton castles, far from the highway of humanity's
daily life. Had not Mrs. Ward reminded us of him, we should have
almost forgotten his existence. The modern spirit, of which Laura is
the type, has steadily eliminated the species.
Next, though Roman Catholicism occupies a far different position from
that it held in the days when Yorkshire and Lancashire were plentifully
studded with houses and homes such as Bannisdale, it must be remembered
that the successors of the sixteenth century Helbecks are only _magni
nomines umbra_. To the modern Catholic, religion is less than ever a
life to be lived, a distinct type to be created; it is increasingly
recognised merely as a creed to be believed. Helbeck of Bannisdale you
could pick out of a crowd, but a congregation at the Oratory or Farm
Street differs in nothing from one at St. Peter's, Eaton Square, or the
smartest Congregational chapel. They all mingle indistinguishably in
the "church parade" and are lost.
It is the victory of the "world" overcoming "faith".
The modern Catholic believes with the Church as against the world, in
the importance of "orders" or the truth of transubstantiation and
infallibility, but his life is with the world. Emphatically, his
_conversation_ is not in heaven. He is one of us. He is like
Nicodemus, a disciple in secret, for various reasons, of which he is
probably utterly unconscious. His Catholicism no more alienates him
from modern life than Wallace's profound belief in phrenology puts him
beyond the pale of science. His differences with the modern world are
purely speculative, having little or no bearing on practical life, and
therefore the world is content to take Catholicism at its own
valuation. How far this is from Helbeck one can easily divine, but
Laura has brought them leagues from that Westmoreland home of
impossible ideals and all it symbolises.
At the same time, no one need look for the disappearance of that
speculative system known as modern Catholicism. The type, the life
indeed has gone, and gone for ever; but there will always be a "crowd
which no man can number," who prefer to sit and submit to being up and
doing for themselves. Reason and authority must ever continue to be
the watchwords of the two great sections into which humanity is divided
on the religious question. They must ever be contrasted as habits of
mind, as sources whence faith arises. But it needs no exceptional
discernment to see that the religion of the strenuous and progressive,
the peoples who move the world and make its history, cannot by any
possibility known to us be a religion of undiluted authority. As a man
is, so are the gods he worships, for the gods are the ideal. Therefore
the progressive nations who find it impossible to stand still, not to
speak of looking back, will more and more recede from even the remnant
of the Helbeck ideal which remains to us to-day, and find their
inspiration in a religion which is advancing like themselves. What!
science grow, knowledge increase, freedom advance, and religion only
stagnate! Perish the thought! Our religion, like our knowledge, grows
from day to day, because it is only through the deepening knowledge of
the universe and of himself that man is enabled to rise to a
proportionate knowledge of That of which all things are but transitory
symbols. Creeds and systems, prisons of the infinite spirit of man,
never can they befit the age in which the ideal of progress has
entered, like an intoxication, into the soul. "The snare is broken and
we are delivered." Woe to the man, woe to the people, who are content
to sit or stand! Woe to them whose hope is in the dead past, and not
in their living selves! Woe to the faith that has no better message
for the eager, palpitating generations of to-day, than a bundle of
parchments from the third or fourth century, or the impossible
practices of an age when the life of the world stood still! They shall
never inherit the earth. The new heaven, the better land, is reserved
for the strenuous and the progressive alone, for "the kingdom of heaven
suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away".
[1] The Rev. Father Clarke, of the Jesuit Society, in the _Nineteenth
Century_ of September, 1898, refuses to recognise Helbeck as true to
the Catholic type. Certainly, he is not a modern Roman Catholic, and
probably Mrs. Ward knows this as well as her critic. The question is,
which conforms to type, the old or the modern English Catholic? Mr.
Mivart's "liberal catholic" criticisms of Father Clarke in the October
number of the same review are good, very good, reading.
XIV.
THE RELIGION OF TENNYSON.
Prophecy and poetry are the embodiment in artistic form of the abstract
conceptions of the philosopher. As the philosopher thinks, so the
prophet preaches, so the poet sings. Thinking, speaking, singing, are
the three acts in the ascending scale of the soul's self-manifestation.
Generally speaking, these high functions are not found in their
perfection in one and the same soul; rarely do you meet with the spirit
of the philosopher, prophet and poet incarnate in one mortal frame.
Such enterprise is too great for all but the greatest, and amongst
these may possibly be classed the poet-prophet of Israel, Isaiah, the
writers of some of the Vedic hymns and Hebrew psalms, and Jesus of
Nazara, whose soul was full of music, and whose thinking and preaching
will probably fill the thoughts of man throughout all time.
The significance of philosophical and prophetic teaching in religion is
a frequent subject of thought in our circles, and now the recent
publication of Tennyson's life enables us to say something of the
_Religio Poetae_--the idealism which inspired the soul of a nineteenth
century poet.