UPON A CHURCH BENCH.
Much Ado about Nothing; iii.--3.
When Fenton went to the club that night he left Helen Greyson and Mr.
Candish, both of whom were sufficiently familiar to excuse the
informality. The combination of the clergyman and the sculptor might
seem likely to be incongruous, but the two had much more in common than
at first sight appeared. Fenton had been right in declaring that Helen
was by instinct a Puritan. It was true that she had shaken herself free
from all the fetters of old creeds and that her religious beliefs were
of the most liberal. The essence of Puritanism, however, was not its
dogmas, but its strenuous earnestness, its exaltation of self-denial,
and its distrust of the guidance of the senses.
The original Puritans made their religion satisfy their aesthetic
sense, even while they were insisting upon the virtue of starving that
part of their nature. To believe literally and with a realizing sense
of its meaning the creed of Calvin, would have been impossible without
madness to any nature short of the incarnate inhumanity of a Jonathan
Edwards. The aesthetic sense of humanity demands that the imagination
shall be nourished; and the imagination is fed by receiving things as
only ideally true. The Puritans were right in declaring that art was
hostile to religion as they conceived it; but they failed to perceive
that this hostility arose from the fact that the acceptance of their
theology was only possible in virtue of the very faculties to which art
appealed. They were obliged to deprive the imagination of its natural
food, in order that it should be forced to feed upon that the
assimilation of which they conceived to be a moral obligation. It may,
at first sight, seem a bold assertion that our Puritan ancestors
believed their creed, however unconsciously, simply in the sense in
which we believe in the bravery of the heroes of Homer or in the loves
and sorrows of the heroines of Shakespeare. It is to be reflected,
however, that those unhappy creatures who attempted to receive
Calvinism literally and absolutely paid for their mistake with madness;
and that it did not enter into the minds of generations of Puritans,
who lived and died in the error that they believed with their
understanding what they really received only with the imagination, to
take this view, in no way affects its truth.
Helen's position differed from that of her Puritan grandmothers from
the fact of her having turned her imagination back to art; but she
shared with them the temperament which made Puritanism possible. The
aesthetic sense, which is as universal in mankind as the passions,
clung in her case to sensuous beauty, while that of Mr. Candish clung
to what he considered beauty moral and spiritual; but the controlling
force in the life of both was the stinging inspiration of a fixed idea
of duty. They were thus able, although rather as a matter of
unconscious sympathy than of deliberate understanding, to comprehend
each other; and if Helen had the broader sight, Mr. Candish possessed
the greater power of ignoring self.
Edith stood on a middle ground between the two. At the time of her
marriage she had been much nearer to the position occupied by the
clergyman; and she would have been startled and shocked had she
realized how much her views had been modified during the six years of
her life with Fenton. She had certainly been led into no toleration of
moral laxity, and indeed the effect of her husband's cynical Paganism
had been to make her dread more acutely any infringement upon moral
laws. She had been constantly learning, however, the enjoyment and
appreciation of beauty, not merely in a conventional and Philistine
sense, but as a pure Pagan aestheticism. The change showed itself
chiefly in her increased tolerance of views less rigid than her own,
which made possible the perfecting of the intimacy with Helen, which
had begun simply from her sense of pity for the sadness of the other's
life.
"Isn't it charming," Edith said to-night, as the three sat before the
fire after Arthur had gone out, "to see Mr. and Mrs. Hubbard together.
It's not only that they are so fond of each other, but they are so
perfectly in accord. It seems to me an ideal marriage."
Helen looked at her with an inward sigh.
"It is much the fashion, nowadays," she said, "to insist that the ideal
marriage is no marriage at all."
Mr. Candish looked at her inquiringly.
"Or, in other words," she explained, with a passing thought of his want
of quickness of apprehension, "that no marriage can be ideal."
"Or anything else, for that matter," put in Edith quickly. "The
iconoclasts of this generation will spare absolutely nothing."
"These objectors don't take into account," observed Mr. Candish, "that
if we once begin to give up things because their possibilities are not
realized, we shall soon end by having nothing left. Plenty of people do
not live up to the possibilities of marriage, but the fact is that the
trouble is with themselves. The blame that they lay on the institution
really belongs on their own shoulders."
"Yes," agreed Edith; "like everything else it comes back to a question
of egotism." "And egotism," added Helen, smiling, yet wistfully, "is
the supreme evil."
Mr. Candish nodded approvingly.
"I don't know," he said, "that a bachelor like myself has any right to
discuss marriage, except on general principles; but certainly, even
without taking the religious view of it, one can see that the very
objections brought against wedlock are reasons in its favor."
"Yes," Edith returned, but she moved uneasily in her chair, and Helen
divined that the subject was painful to her.
"The difficulty is," she said, with an air of dismissing the whole
subject, "that most people marry for the honeymoon and very few for the
whole life."
She fell to thinking in an absorbed mood which was not wholly free from
irritation, how constantly this question of marriage met one at every
turn, as if the whole fabric of life, social and ethical, depended
entirely upon this institution. She sighed a little impatiently,
looking into the fire with mournful eyes. She thought of the marriages
with which her destiny had been most intimately connected, her own
ill-starred mating, the union of Herman and Ninitta, that of Fenton and
Edith. She had long ago settled in her own mind that wedlock was not
only the mainstay of society, but that it was largely a concession to
the weakness of her sex; and yet instinctively she protested; that
revolt against being a woman which few of her sex have failed at one
time or another to experience taking the form of a revolt against
matrimony.
"Indeed," she broke out, half humorously and half pathetically, "the
most joyful promise for the Christians hereafter is that they shall
neither marry nor be given in marriage."