"We do not expect impossibilities; and we do not blame you when you
have not accomplished what is beyond your strength. Only those who are
themselves perfect can do anything perfectly. Human beings are born
ignorant and helpless. They bring into the world with them a
disposition to seek what is pleasant to themselves, and what is
pleasant is not always right. They learn to live as they learn
everything else. At first they cannot do rightly at all. They improve
under teaching and practice. The best only arrive at excellence. We do
not find fault with the painter on account of his first bad copies, if
they were as good as could be looked for at his age. Every craftsman
acquires his art by degrees. He begins badly; he cannot help it; and
it is the same with life. You learn to walk by falling down. You learn
to live by going wrong and experiencing the consequences of it. We do
not record against a man 'the sins of his youth' if he has been
honestly trying to improve himself. We do not require the same
self-control in a child as in a man. We do not require the same
attainments from all. Some are well taught, some are ill taught, some
are not taught at all. Some have naturally good dispositions, some
have naturally bad dispositions. Not one has had power 'to fulfill the
law,' as you call it, completely. Therefore it is no crime in him if
he fails. We reckon as faults those only which arise from idleness,
willfulness, selfishness, and deliberate preference of evil to good.
Each is judged according to what he has received."
I was amused to observe how pleased the archbishop looked while the
examiner was speaking. He had himself been engaged in controversy with
this gentleman on the share of "good works" in justifying a man; and
if the examiner had not taken his side in the discussion, he had at
least demolished his adversary. The archbishop had been the more
disinterested in the line which he had taken, as his own "works,"
though in several large folios, weighed extremely little; and indeed,
had it not been for passages in his early life,--he had starved
himself at college that he might not be a burden upon his widowed
mother,--I do not know but that he might have been sent back into the
world to serve as a parish clerk.
For myself, there were questions which I was longing to ask, and I was
trying to collect my courage to speak. I wanted chiefly to know what
the examiner meant by "natural disposition." Was it that a man might
be born with a natural capacity for becoming a saint, as another man
with a capacity to become a great artist or musician, and that each of
us could only grow to the limits of his natural powers? And again,
were idleness, willfulness, selfishness, etc., etc., natural
dispositions? for in that case--
But at the moment the bell rang again, and my own name was called.
There was no occasion to ask who I was. In every instance the identity
of the person, his history, small or large, and all that he had said
or done, was placed before the court so clearly that there was no need
for extorting a confession. There stood the catalogue inexorably
impartial, the bad actions in a schedule painfully large, the few good
actions veined with personal motives which spoilt the best of them. In
the way of work there was nothing to be shown but certain books and
other writings, and these were spread out to be tested. A fluid was
poured on the pages, the effect of which was to obliterate entirely
every untrue proposition, and to make every partially true proposition
grow faint in proportion to the false element which entered into it.
Alas! chapter after chapter vanished away, leaving the paper clean, as
if no compositor had ever labored in setting type for it. Pale and
illegible became the fine-sounding paragraphs on which I had secretly
prided myself. A few passages, however, survived here and there at
long intervals. They were those on which I had labored least, and had
almost forgotten; or those, as I observed in one or two instances,
which had been selected for special reprobation in the weekly
journals. Something stood to my credit, and the worst charge, of
willfully and intentionally setting down what I did not believe to be
true, was not alleged against me. Ignorance, prejudice, carelessness;
sins of infirmity,--culpable indeed, but not culpable in the last
degree; the water in the ink, the commonplaces, the ineffectual
sentiments--these, to my unspeakable comfort, I perceived were my
heaviest crimes. Had I been accused of absolute worthlessness, I
should have pleaded guilty in the state of humiliation to which I was
reduced; but things were better than they might have been. I was
flattering myself that when it came to the wages question, the balance
would be in my favor: so many years of labor--such and such cheques
received from my publisher. Here at least I held myself safe, and I
was in good hope that I might scrape through.
The examiner was good-natured in his manner. A reviewer who had been
listening for my condemnation was beginning to look disgusted, when
suddenly one of the walls of the court became transparent, and there
appeared an interminable vista of creatures--creatures of all kinds
from land and water, reaching away into the extreme distance. They
were those which in the course of my life I had devoured, either in
part or whole, to sustain my unconscionable carcass. There they stood
in lines with solemn and reproachful faces,--oxen and calves, sheep
and lambs, deer, hares, rabbits, turkeys, ducks, chickens, pheasants,
grouse, and partridges, down to the larks and sparrows and blackbirds
which I had shot when a boy and made into puddings. Every one of them
had come up to bear witness against their murderer; out of sea and
river had come the trout and salmon, the soles and turbots, the ling
and cod, the whiting and mackerel, the smelts and whitebait, the
oysters, the crabs, the lobsters, the shrimps. They seemed literally
to be in millions, and I had eaten them all. I talked of wages. These
had been my wages. At this enormous cost had my existence been
maintained. A stag spoke for the rest: "We all," he said, "were
sacrificed to keep this cormorant in being, and to enable him to
produce the miserable bits of printed paper which are all that he has
to show for himself. Our lives were dear to us. In meadow and wood, in
air and water, we wandered harmless and innocent, enjoying the
pleasant sunlight, the light of heaven and the sparkling waves. We
were not worth much; we have no pretensions to high qualities. If the
person who stands here to answer for himself can affirm that his value
in the universe was equivalent to the value of all of us who were
sacrificed to feed him, we have no more to say. Let it be so
pronounced. We shall look at our numbers, and we shall wonder at the
judgment, though we shall withdraw our complaint. But for ourselves
we say freely that we have long watched him,--him and his
fellows,--and we have failed to see in what the superiority of the
human creature lies. We know him only as the most cunning, the most
destructive, and unhappily the longest lived of all carnivorous
beasts. His delight is in killing. Even when his hunger is satisfied,
he kills us for his mere amusement."
The oxen lowed approval, the sheep bleated, the birds screamed, the
fishes flapped their tails. I, for myself, stood mute and
self-condemned. What answer but one was possible? Had I been myself on
the bench I could not have hesitated. The fatal sentence of
condemnation was evidently about to be uttered, when the scene became
indistinct, there was a confused noise, a change of condition, a sound
of running feet and of many voices. I awoke. I was again in the
railway carriage; the door was thrown open; porters entered to take
our things. We stepped out upon the platform. We were at the terminus
for which we had been originally destined. Carriages and cabs were
waiting; tall powdered footmen flew to the assistance of the duke and
duchess. The station-master was standing hat in hand, and obsequiously
bowing; the minister's private secretary had come to meet his right
honorable chief with the red dispatch box, knowing the impatience with
which it was waited for. The duke shook hands with the archbishop
before he drove away. "Dine with us to-morrow?" he said. "I have had a
very singular dream. You shall be my Daniel and interpret it for me."
The archbishop regretted infinitely that he must deny himself the
honor; his presence was required at the Conference. "I too have
dreamt," he said; "but with your Grace and me the realities of this
world are too serious to leave us leisure for the freaks of
imagination."