_Wherein our Hero sets Foot upon the Road to Rome_
Midnight did not see Noll at the tavern of _The Golden Sun_.
He had failed to find deliverance from the tyranny of living in the
contemplation of the Beautiful--in Art for Art’s sake.
Still obsessed with the misery and cruelty of the world, he sat beside
his lamp and opened the fourth book of the wisdom of Schopenhauer,
whose fearless brain had compelled upon him the tragedy of existence;
had promised to show him the way out--two ways. One had failed.
He now turned eagerly to the other and the steeper road. He climbed the
rugged path of Asceticism.
The will urged always to Life, but----
Life was a sordid tragedy.
Why consent to take part in it?
Why indeed? asked scowling Schopenhauer. No man who has seen through
the torment of existence, who has grasped the fact of the eternal
unsatisfied Want, who has realized the brutalities and the cruelties
that are the very conditions of Life, can desire anything but
Quiescence--and complete quiescence only comes with Death. The Buddhist
and the primitive Christian had done right--both of them. The Buddhist
had looked to Nirvana, a state of Nothingness, of eternal calm--the
primitive Christian, with the lure of a vague future bliss before his
eyes, finding life on earth a designed brutality, had looked on the
life of this world as a pitiful thing, and fixed his hopes on the
gateway of Death to bring him into the garden of eternal peace. The
pessimism of the East had had the seeing eye.
Death is the eternal sleep. And it may be met half way, in bouts of
contemplation upon Art. But--better--it may be met almost the whole
way. Until the will wholly cease in death, its eager impulses, its
insistent urgings to self-preservation, self-aggrandisement, may
be baulked and rendered futile by deliberately opposing them. In
asceticism the eager desires of life could be almost wholly baulked.
Through asceticism alone could one refuse to be an accomplice in this
designed crime of living--this preying of life upon life. No wonder the
medieval churches had gripped the imagination of man! The child need
not be born to continue the brutal struggle for life. The ascetic monk
and virginal nun sternly refuse to hand on this miserable heritage to
further generations. Across the design of life stood the monk and nun;
their stern order--thou shalt not.
Through a great and profound pity for the suffering and the weak and
the losers in the brutal struggle for life, one could oppose one’s self
to the cruel order of things. In this sympathy and pity alone could
we raise a foundation of ethics that could demand justice against the
design--which opposed itself to the triumphant brutality of the life’s
struggle. In this great human pity for the down-trodden could one not
only find alleviation for the misery of the world, but in it also could
we find some balm for the criminal fact of our very existence.
The road came out upon the pilgrim’s way. The pessimistic conception of
life led to the very gates of Rome.
For days Noll haunted the great aisles of the cathedral of Notre
Dame--sat within the beautiful interiors of the old medieval churches
of Paris--dreamed--brooded over the problem of the Refuge from
Life--was thrilled with the thought that the lowly and the meek should
inherit the earth....
Amidst the fragrant scent of the swinging incense, to the pathetic sob
of the haunting chant, in the emotional atmosphere of prayer, the great
pity for all created things welled in his heart and roused in him a
passionate desire to be at grips with the cruelty of life.
The mystic rites, the emblems, the symbolism of every act of this
splendid church--these things held the youth fascinated, drew him,
called to him.
That a vague, all-seeing, all-creating, all-powerful God, sitting apart
somewhere in the blue, had created the worlds out of His omnipotence,
had designed this scheme of life that the religious condemned, had
designed it from the beginning, and was carrying out phase by phase
every detail of it, and was angry with much of the result of His
own handiwork--all this was thoroughly atune with the pessimistic
conception of things. All these brutalities, were they of God’s
deliberate design? Well, there they were. If there had been design,
then they were a part.
And this being so, the churches had done right to set aside the wrath
of this Being, and, instead, to appeal to a redeemer--one who had put
himself against the brutalities of this design--who had flung down
his life to mitigate the brutalities. It was clear that the salvation
from such life was thus to oppose that life--was to be found only in
asceticism.
The big-browed scowling German had led the brooding youth into the
great mysterious precincts of the medieval church, and left him
there--it was his last word. And the youth, his ears ecstatically
alert to catch the whispers in the reverberant gloom of its sonorous
architecture, was overwhelmed with the majesty of the great denial that
is the heart of this ancient church.
And everything in his temperament urged thereto.
Art moved him thitherwards--what he conceived to be art.
The Papist faith is that subtlest, most fascinating form of art
for art’s sake--religion for religion’s sake. From the years it
has taken boldly all symbolism that rouses the emotions of its own
significance--from its pagan altars to the saying of prayers by rote.
Whatever of outward pomp and majesty all other worship has known,
whatever of mysticism and of craftsmanship and of artistry all other
worship has known, this splendid church has taken into itself. It had
seized the great pessimistic solace that is a passing refuge from life
in the contemplation of works of art. And now, here, too, was a church
built to its foundations on the rock of asceticism--on the bold denial
of the majesty of life--on the pessimistic, final, and only refuge from
the desire for that fulness of experience, from that life that its God
had thrust upon it.
And it was so well-bred--everything in its place--everything foreseen.
It had an air. The music was sonorous, significant, eloquent, mystic.
The arts had given of their best. The pathos of the voices that chanted
the sad litanies that condemned life filled him with a sense of the
sorrow of the world. He lingered in this atmosphere until he was worn
out--he came home late at night, weary and famished with his ecstatic
fastings, and, having eaten the meanest food, he would seat himself by
the lamp and pore over the mystic volumes. He steeped himself in the
books of Saint Teresa and others to which he had heard reference made.
Slowly the monastic spell cast its glamour over his intellect. Once
he had accepted the world as a place of suffering and a punishment,
the ascetics filled his imagination--the nuns and priests “athirst for
sorrow, drunk with self-sacrifice,” who bury themselves in cloisters
or go into life-banishment beyond the outermost pales of civilization.
His great pity for the suffering of the world drew his bowed regard
to the cloistered orders, the Carmelites and the poor Clares who are
chosen by the Christ as victims of expiation, who unite together and
gladly accept for their agony the expiation of the temptations of the
world outside--who go to the deepest suffering, the prevention of
sin by “substitution,” taking the place of them that are too weak to
withstand the passions, and taking that place only by going through the
full urgings of such passions. Saint Teresa who took the temptations of
the soul of a priest who had not the strength to endure them; Sister
Catherine Emmerich who took the bodily pains of the sick; Ludwine who
“lusted for bodily suffering and was greedy for wounds,” the “reaper of
punishments,” he brooded with envy upon the self-inflicted tortures of
the Benedictine nuns of the Blessed Sacrament, their austere day, their
rising at two in the night to chant, summer and winter, their turns
before the tapers of reparation and the altar. He thought of all these
orders vowed to obedience, absolute and without reserve--the complete
surrender to the superior, of their life, their movements, their
actions, their will, their judgment, their bodies, their instincts,
their emotions. And when he dwelt upon the contemplative orders, buried
alive in their monasteries and convents, he was overwhelmed. These
people had mastered the whole gamut of the conquest over the desires of
life....
The monastic orders passed before him in sombre pageant. The black
robe of Saint Benedict--had not his order kept learning alive? until
learning was become dangerous. These men, clad in sombre sable,
had been amongst the gentlemen of the world--and its scholars.
The contemplative Carthusian, the ascetic Cistercian, the gentle
Franciscan. The Jesuit, byword of subtlety and finesse and trickery--it
is true he had walked in crooked ways to his goal, but he had had this
wondrous church for goal.... The Dominican--no, he shrank back from
the accursed white robe of him that had stood before the inquisitorial
fires and the like tortures of his hellish devising, holding the
sullied crucifix of the great-souled Christ to the agonized eyes of
the writhing victims of his foul lust for cruelties. To save from the
brutalities of life by inflicting harsher brutalities--this had been to
plumb the criminal deeps of filthiness....
Yes, he had his hesitations, the youth.
His mind misgave him a little at the conceits and fooleries and the
indifferent yawnings of the choristers, at the absent-minded recital
of prayers uttered by the often weary priesthood, at the beadles’
sharp eye on the fees. It misgave him still more when he thought upon
the death in life which the nuns of the contemplative orders set
themselves--when he learnt that the age of twenty-nine was a terrible
period for the young woman to pass, that their worst punishment was
endured in those hours of agony in the passionate regret for maternity
when the barren womb revolts--when he learnt that some nuns, killed
by the torpor of the cloisters, languish and die suddenly like the
flames of candles blown out by the wind. Nay, he clutched his throat
in sudden loathing and disgust and anger as he read Saint Teresa’s
order in her _Way of Perfection_, that the nun who shall be guilty of
insubordination should at once and for life be imprisoned in her cell.
Yet----
Contemplation, prayer, pity, self-repression, asceticism! The strenuous
urging of life did not find a loophole there through which to enter in,
with disturbing energetic breath and organic instincts and the jumping
blood of adventure. And if these things secured the refuge from the
cruel struggle of living, why not accept the whole of the rest, the
formalities, the etiquette, the infallibility of its pontiffs, the
real presence in the wafer in the priest’s mouth, the confession to
the priesthood, the surrender of the body and of the intellect and of
the will and the conscience to the Church that “orders the body to be
silent and the soul to suffer,” and holds that “true life begins not at
birth but at death”?