HOW ELSWORTH CAME TO HIMSELF.
Oh, then, if Reason waver at thy side,
Let humbler Memory be thy gentle guide;
Go to thy birthplace, and, if Faith was there,
Repeat thy father’s creed, thy mother’s prayer.
—_Oliver Wendell Holmes._
A dream is o’er,
And the suspended life begins anew;
Quiet those throbbing temples, then, subdue
That cheek’s distortion!
His forehead pressed the moonlit shelf
Beside the youngest marble maid awhile;
Then, raising it, he thought, with a long smile,
“I shall be king again!” as he withdrew
The envied scarf; into the font he threw
His crown.
—_Browning_ (“_Sordello_”).
When the scrimmage and riot was at the highest point, Elsworth suddenly
found himself separated from his companions, and involved in a rush of
people who were making for the street. These persons were anxious to
escape from the violence that had suddenly come upon them, and taking
rapid stock of affairs, thought it best to be outside. So, in a very
few moments, Elsworth was in Oxford Street, with no chance of getting
back to the scenes which he had just so unwillingly left. He turned
down the Seven Dials, and as he walked towards the Strand had time to
feel heartily ashamed of himself and that night’s work. Had he not had
nearly enough of this sort of thing? Was it for this he had read and
worked, earned honours, learned many and great things, profited by the
labours of the past, which surely could not have come to him through
such channels as he was likely to prove? For several days past he had
been immersed in the study of Browning’s “Paracelsus.” He had seen how
that hero of medicine had torn himself away from home and friends, and
all his loved surroundings, to go far into the distant world to gather,
with enormous difficulty, hints and scraps of medical learning which
were but the veriest crumbs compared to the loaded tables now set
before the student of the healing art; how, with poor means, great
hardships, and the scantiest help, in opposition to the teaching of its
appointed professors, doing violence to the received notions of his
time, he had struck out a path for himself, through the trackless
forest to the unexplored country where lay, he felt and knew by the
inner light that guided him, the key to the true treatment of the hurts
and troubles of men’s bodies—all this against tears and entreaties
such as often hold a man back from attempting new and great things. And
how, after many wanderings and contentions, much violence, and
opposition, he had seized, Prometheus like, Divine gifts for men, all
by his own great soul, fortified by faith in God and love to man: and
had dowered the human race with gifts greater than kings and captains
ever won for it, and blessings for which the art of medicine yet sings
his praises. While he, Elsworth, standing as it were high on the
shoulders of the discoverers of the past, had been using his time at
best to acquire a mere means of livelihood, his predecessors, who had
helped him to all this knowledge, had been glad to win from nature, by
years of work, one by one those secrets he was using so lightly. He was
overcome by shame and the sense of his unfitness for such a work as he
had dared to undertake.
Paracelsus,—the Paracelsus made known to this age, not by the false
portraits limned by his contemporaries and enemies but as drawn by the
master hand of Browning,—seemed to step out from the dark past and
forbid his progress on a path he had traversed. A horrible sense of
degradation took possession of him. He had once held a lofty ideal.
When at Oxford, when his faith in God was a real working faith, he had
often vowed himself to the service of humanity. That the saints of the
Church, the fathers of the faith, the apostles, the prophets,
the teachers of the past should have all worked to hand down to
him—Elsworth—this noble, Divine light of Christian faith, which alike
impelled his adhesion and claimed his co-operation; and for him to
receive all, and then hesitate to give in his turn his best years
and his whole heart to the world’s needs, was surely but to be
repelled on its suggestion. But faith was gone, intellect had
usurped the place of will, the will was unsanctified, and the man
in brain and heart a chariot whose steeds rushed uncontrolled along the
beaten track of habit, and were carrying him—whither? If there _were_ no
hereafter—nothing beyond this life—was it worth while to go on with
this devilry, this riot, this attempt to drag the better part, the
reason, into the mire, with the swine? Why not forsake it all, and now
while there was time for repentance? The man was pulled up short:
thrown back like a horse on his haunches. A great gulf in these few
minutes was opened between him and the past; and not Paul when smitten
down on Damascus road was blinder as to the future than Elsworth on
this night in Seven Dials, amongst the suspicious men and bedraggled
women, who passed him as he moved listlessly along, arrested by the
scream of a conscience that would be heard at least once more, and
whose voice had unspeakable terrors for him. For he was made for better
things—that he always had felt; he was not vile, debauched, debased,
as some of his companions were. He had fought against light; he had
struggled not to believe, not that he might give the reins to his
passions, but that he might deify intellect. He thought it was cowardly
to leave those poor lads in the fight, but it was useless to go back;
and even if he could have saved them from arrest, he dare not engage in
any more of that work—away with that at least; it was too horrible to
think of any more. So on he went, scolding himself, calling himself by
every opprobrious epithet, and berating himself back into manhood
again. He had reached Chelsea; it was almost too late to get a lodging,
but he would try; for the conviction began to dawn upon him that he
should not go back one single step into the past, but there and then
break with it all, and be a man, and live a man’s life. He prayed—once
more repeated, “Our Father, which art in heaven;” it seemed very
unphilosophical, very unscientific. He had often sent out aspirations
to “the Power not ourselves which makes for righteousness,” to “the one
Consensus of the whole,” to “the Eternal Verity,” but it was long since
Elsworth had said “Our Father;” he felt that in doing so he had
reopened that long closed “window towards the Infinite,” and had once
more let in the light of the Divine and supernatural wisdom without
which he had been groping along. He found a clean, but mean lodging in
a little eating-house down by the river, and went to bed. Surely a
voice out of heaven had called him that night. Not clearer was Paul’s
arrest—not plainer Loyola’s, “Hitherto, but no farther”—than this to
him to-night. So, ever, when there is a work for a man that he must do,
that he is sealed and set apart for, when the full time comes he shall
hear the call; if not in the still small voice and the whispering wind,
then in the fire and thunders of Sinai.
Elsworth felt that night, as he lay restlessly tossing on the rough
bed, that he had gone about his whole work at the hospital the wrong
way. Thus had not Paracelsus done! How he cried at the outset of his
career:
“I can abjure so well the idle arts
These pedants strive to learn and teach; black arts,
Great works, the secret and sublime, forsooth—
Let others prize; too intimate a tie
Connects me with our God! A sullen fiend
To do my bidding, fallen and hateful sprites
To help me—what are these, at best, beside
God helping, God directing everwhere,
So that the earth shall yield her secrets up,
And every object there be charged to strike,
Teach, gratify, her master God appoints?”
His black arts were neither secret nor sublime, but the openly belauded
methods of investigation, involving the tortures of sentient beings for
the sake of learning the idle arts these pedants taught at the schools.
He, too, had invoked the aid of the sullen forces of Nature, from which
he had thrust Nature’s God, and they had done his bidding in a way—and
the way was hopeless and dark. He had long felt this reckoning-day with
himself must come; he was too honest to go on much longer leaving the
question of his responsibility unsettled; he was too healthy-brained to
give way to despair, till he had found a _modus vivendi_ with his
better nature impossible. Early bereft of a mother’s care, his father,
wholly absorbed in his literary pursuits, and keeping up merely the
slightest correspondence with his son, whom he had apparently almost
forgotten, Elsworth had very few family ties, and was perfectly master
of his own position. He had no fear of his father’s withdrawing his
allowance of £300 a year. As it happened, he had the day before been
paid a sum of rather over £100 by his agents; he was not in debt, save
in a small sum to his landlady, and the hospital beadle, with some
trifling amounts in the neighbourhood of St. Bernard’s which his man of
business would pay. Why not cut the old familiar scenes? The wilderness
period has to be gone through by every man with a work to do; the
retreat is salutary for the stricken soul. Why not enter into it
at once? He was a man of resolute will, possessed by a strong
determination when the right and proper thing to be done confronted
him. He had true stuff in his composition; originality, firm purpose.
Boldness to do and dare came to him from his father, who had won his
promotion in Indian warfare through a grandly conceived and brilliantly
original movement, which had insured the enemy’s defeat at the moment
his own seemed imminent. It should be done; he would go away early in
the morning light. “Let him that is on the house-top not come down to
take anything out of the house.” And he went not down, nor took
anything of his old life, but made straight for Paris that same day,
for, like his father when he made his brilliant move, he had formed a
plan and carried it out.
He gave directions to his lawyer to discharge all claims upon him, to
say that he had gone abroad, and would not return for some time, but
begged him not to disclose his whereabouts to any one without first
communicating with him at the address he should forward, when he had
chosen his headquarters.
Now he began to enter into himself. He must seek some hallowed place of
prayer to consecrate his remaining years to God, and renew his
baptismal vows, to drink a deep draught of the Divine Spirit as he
entered on his new work.
He turned into Notre Dame, to see the place again, and investigate some
details of the architecture. He sat down on a bench before the high
altar; they were singing the vesper service. A sense of heavenly calm
pervaded his soul, his turbulent thoughts were quelled; his disquiet,
his vague apprehensions, his disgust with life, all seemed to melt away
as the influence of prayer lulled his troubled soul on the breast of
God. The organ ceased to peal, the monotone of the priests and the
clear young voices of the choir had died away. He peacefully slept in
the house of prayer, and angels seemed to whisper sweet words to him,
and glorified saints from out the storied panes to counsel him. He was
aroused by a _Suisse_, who, noting him as a tourist, and having an eye
to a douceur, invited him to come and see the relics, and the treasures
in the sacristy and chapels. He declined, and moved away—moved to a
less conspicuous place, and again sat down to muse on the great things
the sacred fane had witnessed in the past. How many and great events of
human history had been enacted under its shadow and beneath its roof!
Here, and on that very altar, had been enthroned a vile woman to be
worshipped as Goddess of Reason, a visible presentment of what a nation
or a single human soul meant when it had cast out God. Could anything,
had anything kept the intellect of man from madness when bereft of the
idea of essential goodness outside the mean world of man? All history,
he must confess, answered “No.” And “No” was thunder-pealed from that
desecrated altar, where the idea of God had been openly crucified amid
the highest civilization of modern Europe, by the lusts and madness of
the age of science. Dethroned and cast out for what? When all was gone,
and the last traces of the faith stamped out, as far as might be, what
was to come in its place? What for that market woman kneeling by his
side rapt by devotion at least to an idea more exalted than her
business or her pleasures could have suggested? Surely something
ennobling her small surroundings, if only by its poetry and sentiment.
And that workman there under the sculpture of the Cross-bearer? Not
altogether waste of time for him to meditate a few moments on sacrifice
of self for good of other men. It might help him perhaps to bear a hand
at a neighbour’s overpressing burden. And those little children before
the picture of the Infant Saviour? At least for them such idealism must
be a factor in their mental development which could ill be spared.
Philosophy was good for men, the wisdom of the sages had often balanced
a wavering mind, and strengthened the fibre of men to dare and do great
things; but it was not possible for the masses of mankind to be so
sustained any more than it was possible they could be all fed and
housed like princes. Was not this contemned Christian religion which he
had been helping to push aside, philosophy made easy for simple folk,
unlearned and without culture? Would it not still further belittle
their poor lives to take their faith from them? For them Plato, Dante,
and Shakespeare were not horn-books. Was it so very wise to take away
their gospels, and their psalms, and leave them nothing to elevate the
daily round of life’s task above the muddy floor of their miserable
dwellings?
And so he mused on all these things, and the worshippers came and went,
knelt in prayer, and laid their poor burdens at the feet of God; took
in from the infinite a draught of the water of life, wept their tears,
sighed up to the throne of the Heavenly their anxieties; asked
direction from the Wisest they knew of, wandered a little out of
themselves a while; felt that bread and meat were not alone the
sustenance of man, and went on their way. And as he thought and
pondered in his heart, the sinking sun gloaming through the great west
window scattered a thousand jewels over the floor around him, and he
rose and knew that religion brightens life, and colours with rose and
gold the dark shadow brooding over the soul of man. Not altogether was
it a fact that man had been wholly wrong in his faith, and had done
nothing but “build him fanes of fruitless prayer,” or had reaped from
them nothing but the opportunities to “roll the psalm to wintry skies.”
As he rose from his long meditation, and went into the gay, busy world
without, he felt how inconsistent with his previous mental attitude
were the thoughts he had entertained. How often had he not dedicated
himself to the overthrow of superstition, and pledged his energies to
do what he could to erase its traces from the minds of his friends! It
was but a few weeks since he had angrily tossed a crucifix from a
patient’s couch, who he had directed should not be bothered by religion
or priests. Had he not scoffed openly at a poor old woman’s simple
assurance that God was helping her in her sickness, and that to her
ears came often “songs in the night season?” At St. Bernard’s how many
times had he not endeavoured to laugh or reason young freshmen out of
the religion of their mothers, unworthy of belief now that facts, and
facts only, were to be the study of their lives! There was a little
band of true Christian men at the hospital, who met for prayer and
Bible reading from time to time. He could not deny that they did their
work in the wards conscientiously—did it more faithfully than the
ardent young Comtists and Secularists, who made so much noise about
Humanity and its claims. They were so cheerful, too, and helpful in
their attitude towards the afflicted and poor who sought their aid,
that they were a constant reproach to him for not living up to the
faith with which, in his secret thoughts, he had never really broken.