‘Hilarius’ (as we have always called the book) was written first as a
shorter story, a mere sketch, and later filled in and amplified. It was
meant to be a parable, a lesson delicately conveyed to a young painter
of high artistic promise and sincere religious feeling, but prone to
rigid judgements and the use of an inflexible and all too simple moral
standard—in fact, Hilarius himself.
So, in her story, Michael Fairless sends this young man—boy indeed he
was, even in years—forth from an arranged and sheltered life in the
cloister, and from a benumbing established scheme of thought and things,
to the rude world, the many-coloured, confused, everchanging world of
men and women and children, of transforming values, of sin that is not
sinful and condemnation that does not condemn—a real world where God is
and works, joins in the strife of men, treads with them the dust of the
highway, is known by them who seek him not, and in fashions very strange
to those righteous who need neither repentance nor redeeming love.
Tracts (this tale was avowedly written as a tract) do not always pierce
their mark; but the arrow of a tract is not often so sharply pointed or
feathered with such grace. I incline to think that this one has found
the joints of many a man’s armour besides his at which it was aimed.
Assuming, for the moment, the attitude of the critic, I am bound to
admit—the writer herself would be the first to admit—that she is an
author of one book, as we say; the book of her life and death, written
in a fine disinterestedness and from the fullness and with the candour
of her heart. But that is the one book which for any author would either
crown his work or cast everything else into the shade. Moreover, this
author wrote under disabilities that for most people would have made
writing out of any question; and these disabilities chiefly affected
work done ‘for a purpose’—not welling, as it were, from her creative
soul. In a sense, Hilarius is made, not born like the roadmender; and
you will think the book skilfully or unskilfully made according to the
standard of your taste. But if you choose you may enjoy it well and find
in it beautiful things—the singular grace of style its author seemed to
possess as a natural gift; her real mind; her vision too; and something
of the wit and gaiety in which we who knew her found continual delight,
and for which there was no place when she wrote at the White Gate and
from the Valley of the Shadow.
You will find, too, reminders, echoes, of ‘The Roadmender.’ When she
speaks of ‘this peace of prayerful service, where the clang of the
blacksmith’s hammer smote the sound of the Office bell,’ you have the
roadmender spirit:—‘After all, what do we ask of life, here or indeed
hereafter, but leave to serve, to live, to commune with our fellow-men
and with ourselves; and from the lap of earth to look up into the face
of God?’
There is the same rejoicing in ‘fair colours,’ in music and the fragrant
incense of the earth; the happy knowledge of little children and their
transparency to God; the eye that sees the great sacrament of life. And
here, as in ‘The Roadmender,’ the divine sacrament includes, as life
includes, our misshapen world and the sinful men and women in it.
Hilarius is blind; his eyes shall be opened to the meaning of love and
of the craving needs of men, his good will roused to new accomplishment,
both head and heart stirred to a widening range. “Blind eyes!” are the
parting words of the dancer in the forest, who sows in him the seed of
promise, yet is ‘a sight for gods, but not for monks; above all, not for
untutored novices’ like him:—‘“Blind eyes, the very forest could teach
thee these things an thou would’st learn. Farewell, good novice, back to
thy Saints and thy nursery; for me the wide wide world; hunger and
love—love—love!”’
Hunger and love will tutor Hilarius, tell him secrets of the world, of
himself, of those other strange selves, and of God whom he knows too
easily under a false name. ‘“Hast thou ever loved?”’ asks the ‘flower
incarnate’ when he found her dancing in the wind of the woods. Then,
answering his shocked surprise:—‘“Why, boy, the world is full of love,
and not all for the Saints and the Brethren, and it is good—good—good!
’Tis the devil and the monks who call it evil. Hast thou never seen the
birds mate in the springtime, nor heard the nightingale sing?”’ ‘“Did’st
thou ever hunger, master?”’ the dancer’s brother asks, rebuked by
Hilarius out of the Ten Commandments for stealing ‘the Convent’s hens.’
Hunger and love in body and soul, coming to man from earth his mother
and from the earthly creatures who are all his kin; the nature he shares
with them as the ground of his sin and also of his holiness—these
Hilarius shall learn. He shall learn that without knowledge and interior
acceptance of a law of the spirit there is neither holiness nor sin.
This is to learn of the charity and justice of God; to learn to see that
only the writing scored by a man on the roll of his self-created
character makes or mars him. Nature waits in every man, from the first
fathers of us all to the last of our sons, for the conversion of spirit.
It is as the earth, this unconverted nature of ours; it is turned
neither one way nor the other, is neither virtuous nor vile, until we
make it so. But without the ground of nature there would be no standing
for the spirit, no place from which it could either soar or sink.
Hilarius must learn of nature and of spirit too. He must learn of the
slow learning of the law and of man’s slow growth into even a
possibility of sin. But above all he must learn of the infinite humility
of the love of God as he stoops to find a way into the human heart.
Meanwhile ‘he plucked aside his skirts and walked in judgement,’
calling, blind-eyed, on the judgement of God to ratify his poor
decisions. ‘“’Tis an evil, evil world,” quoth young Hilarius.’
The judgement of God he finds easily enough, as when we are blind we do.
‘London, that light-minded city, was a heap of graves’ filled by the
great reaper of the wrath of God with the plague-smitten corpses of the
judged. Wherefore Hilarius, ‘having seen much evil and the justice of
the Almighty,’ turns his back on it and will learn to be a great
painter, and then return to his monastery in peace. He had watched the
falling of a Tower of Siloam that had crushed the evil-doers and
confirmed the faith of the righteous. And then the true judgement of
God, which is new light in the soul of him who is judged, smote him on
the way he had chosen; and he learnt to steal that he might have food
for the child of a woman taken in adultery. ‘“See,” said the dancer,
“thou hast learnt to hunger and to love.”’
Myself, I would have had the story stop there; where, as my memory
serves, it stopped in the original version, the painter’s tract. But it
would never have been published if it had; and that, of course, its
author soon discovered. Mr John Murray kindly hastened on the
preparation of proofs, and they came just in time for her to read some
herself and have others read to her when she could no longer see. The
book appeared shortly after her death, some months earlier than ‘The
Roadmender,’ in book form. Mr Murray has recently added to his many
kindnesses by allowing it to be produced by Messrs Duckworth uniform
with the rest of her work. He has also produced it himself in a new and
cheaper edition.