'COME YE OUT AND BE YE SEPARATE.'
Arthur Berkeley's London lodgings were wonderfully snug and
comfortable for the second floor of a second-rate house in a small
retired side street near the Embankment at Chelsea. He had made
the most of the four modest little rooms, with his quick taste and
his deft, cunning fingers:--four rooms, or rather boxes, one might
almost call them; a bedroom each for himself and the Progenitor;
a wee sitting-room for meals and music--the two Berkeleys would
doubtless as soon have gone without the one as the other; and a tiny
study where Arthur might work undisturbed at his own desk upon his
new and original magnum opus, destined to form the great attraction
of the coming season at the lately-opened Ambiguities Theatre. Things
had prospered well with the former Oxford curate during the last
twelve-month. His cantata at Leeds had proved a wonderful success,
and had finally induced him to remove to London, and take to
composing as a regular profession. He had his qualms about it, to
be sure, as one who had put his hand to the plough and then turned
back; he did not feel quite certain in his own mind how far he
was justified in giving up the more spiritual for the more worldly
calling; but natures like Arthur Berkeley's move rather upon passing
feeling than upon deeper sentiment; and had he not ample ground, he
asked himself, for this reconsideration of the monetary position?
He had the Progenitor's happiness to insure before thinking of the
possible injury to his non-existent parishioners. If he was doing
Whippingham Parva or Norton-cum-Sutton out of an eloquent and
valuable potential rector, if he was depriving the Church in the
next half-century of a dignified and portly prospective archdeacon,
he is at least making his father's last days brighter and more
comfortable than his early ones had ever been. And then, was not
music, too, in its own way, a service, a liturgy, a worship? Surely
he could do higher good to men's souls--as they call them--to
whatever little spark of nobler and better fire there might lurk
within those dull clods of common clay he saw all around him--by
writing such a work as his Leeds cantata, than by stringing together
for ever those pretty centos of seventeenth-century conceits and
nineteenth-century doubts or hesitations which he was accustomed
to call his sermons! Whatever came of it, he must give up the
miserable pittance of a curacy, and embrace the career open to the
musical talents.
So he fitted up his little Chelsea rooms in his own economically
sumptuous fashion with some bits of wall paper, a few jugs and vases,
and an etching or two after Meissonier; planted the Progenitor down
comfortably in a large easy-chair, with a melodious fiddle before
him; and set to work himself to do what he could towards elevating
the British stage and pocketing a reasonable profit on his own
account from that familiar and ever-rejuvenescent process. He was
quite in earnest, now, about producing a totally new effect of his
own; and believing in his work, as a good workman ought to do,
he wrought at it indefatigably and well in the retirement of a
second-pair back, overlooking a yardful of fluttering clothes, and
a fine skyline vista of bare, yellowish brick chimneys.
'What part are you working at to-day, Artie?' said the old shoemaker,
looking over his son's shoulder at the blank music paper before
him. 'Quartette of Biological Professors, eh?'
'Yes, father,' Berkeley answered with a smile. 'How do you think
it runs now?' and he hummed over a few lines of his own words, set
with a quaint lilt to his own inimitable and irresistible music:--
And though in unanimous chorus
We mourn that from ages before us
No single enaliosaurus
To-day should survive,
Yet joyfully may we bethink us,
With the earliest mammal to link us,
We still have the ornithorhyncus
Extant and alive!
'How do you think the score does for that, father, eh? Catching
air rather, isn't it?'
'Not a better air in the whole piece, Artie; but, my boy, who do
you think will ever understand the meaning of the words. The gods
themselves won't know what you're driving at.'
'But I'm going to strike out a new line, Daddie dear. I'm not going
to play to the gallery; I mean to play to the stalls and boxes.'
'Was there ever such a born aristocrat as this young parson is!' cried
the old man, lifting up both his hands with a playful gesture of
mock-deprecation. 'He's hopeless! He's terrible! He's incorrigible!
Why, you unworthy son of a respectable Paddington shoemaker, if even
the intelligent British artizans in the gallery don't understand
you, how the dickens do you suppose the oiled and curled Assyrian
bulls in the stalls and boxes will have a glimmering idea of what
you're driving at? The supposition's an insult to the popular
intelligence--in other words, to me, sir, your Progenitor.'
Berkeley laughed. 'I don't know about that, father,' he said, holding
up the page of manuscript music at arm's length admiringly before
him; 'but I do know one thing: this comic opera of mine is going
to be a triumphant success.'
'So I've thought ever since you began it, Artie. You see, my boy,
there's a great many points in its favour. In the first place you
can write your own libretto, or whatever you call it; and you know
I've always held that though that Wagner man was wrong in practice--a
most inflated thunder-bomb, his Lohengrin--yet he was right in
theory, right in theory, Artie; every composer ought to be his own
poet. Well, then, again, you've got a certain peculiar vein of
humour of your own, a kind of delicate semi-serious burlesque turn
about you that's quite original, both in writing and in composing;
you're a humourist in verse and a humourist in music, that's the
long and the short of it. Now, you've hit upon a fresh lode of
dramatic ore in this opera of yours, and if my judgment goes for
anything, it'll bring the house down the first evening. I'm a bit
of a critic, Artie; by hook or by crook, you know, paper or money,
I've heard every good opera, comic or serious, that's been given
in London these last thirty years, and I flatter myself I know
something by this time about operatic criticism.'
'You're wrong about Wagner, father,' said Arthur, still glancing
with paternal partiality at his sheet of manuscript: 'Lohengrin's
a very fine work, a grand work, I assure you. I won't let you run
it down. But, barring that, I think you're pretty nearly right in
your main judgment. I'm not modest, and it strikes me somehow that
I've invented a genre. That's about what it comes to.'
'If you'd confine yourself to your native tongue, Mr. Parson,
your ignorant old father might have some chance of agreeing or
disagreeing with you; but as he doesn't even know what the thingumbob
you say you've invented may happen to be, he can't profitably
continue the discussion of that subject. However, my only fear is
that you may perhaps be writing above the heads of the audience.
Not in the music, Artie; they can't fail to catch that; it rings
in one's head like the song of a hedge warbler--tirree, tirree,
lu-lu-lu, la-la, tirree, tu-whit, tu-whoo, tra-la-la--but in the
words and the action. I'm half afraid that'll be over their heads,
even in the gallery. What do you think you'll finally call it?'
'I'm hesitating, Daddy, between "Evolution" and "The Primate of
Fiji." Which do you recommend--tell me?'
'The Primate, by all means,' said the old man gaily. 'And you
still mean to open with the debate in the Fijian Parliament on the
Deceased Grandmother's Second Cousin Bill?'
'No, I don't, Daddy. I've written a new first scene this week, in
which the President of the Board of Trade remonstrates with the
mermaids on their remissness in sending their little ones to the
Fijian Board Schools, in order to receive primary instruction in the
art of swimming. I've got a capital chorus of mermaids to balance
the other chorus of Biological Professors on the Challenger Expedition.
I consider it's a happy cross between Ariosto and Aristophanes.
If you like, I'll give you the score, and read over the words to
you.' 'Do,' said the old man, settling himself down in comfort in
his son's easy-chair, and assuming the sternest air of an impartial
critic. Arthur Berkeley read on dramatically, in his own clever
airy fashion, suiting accent and gesture to the subject matter
through the whole first three acts of that exquisitely humorous
opera, the Primate of Fiji. Sometimes he hummed the tune over to
himself as he went; sometimes he played a few notes upon his flute
by way of striking the key-note; sometimes he rose from his seat in
his animation, and half acted the part he was reading with almost
unconscious and spontaneous mimicry. He read through the famous
song of the President of the Local Government Board, that everybody
has since heard played by every German band at the street corners;
through the marvellously catching chorus of the superannuated
tide-waiters; through the culminating dialogue between the London
Missionary Society's Agent and the Hereditary Grand Sacrificer to
the King of Fiji. Of course the recital lacked everything of the
scenery and dresses that give it so much vogue upon the stage; but
it had at least the charmingly suggestive music, the wonderful
linking of sound to sense, the droll and inimitable intermixture
of the plausible and the impossible which everybody has admired
and laughed at in the acted piece.
The old shoemaker listened in breathless silence, keeping his eye
fixed steadily all the time upon the clean copy of the score. Only
once he made a wry face to himself, and that was in the chorus to
the debate in the Fijian Parliament on the proposal to leave off
the practice of obligatory cannibalism. The conservative party
were of opinion that if you began by burying instead of eating your
deceased wife, you might end by the atrocious practice of marrying
your deceased wife's sister; and they opposed the revolutionary
measure in that well known refrain:--
Of change like this we're naturally chary,
Nolumus leges Fijiae mutari.
That passage evidently gave the Progenitor deep pain.
'Stick to your own language, my boy,' he murmured; 'stick to your
own language. The Latin may be very fine, but the gallery wil never
understand it.' However, when Arthur finished at last, he drew a
long breath, and laid down the roll of manuscript with an involuntary
little cry of half-stifled applause.
'Artie,' he said rising from the chair slowly, 'Artie, that's not
so bad for a parson, I can tell you. I hope the Archbishop won't
be tempted to cite you for displaying an amount of originality
unworthy of your cloth.'
'Father,' said Arthur, suddenly, after a short pause, with a tinge
of pensiveness in his tone that was not usual with him, in speaking
at least; 'Father, I often think I ought never to have become a
parson at all.'
'Well, my boy,' said the old man, looking up at him sharply with
his keen eyes, 'I knew that long ago. You've never really believed
in the thing, and you oughtn't to have gone in for it from the very
beginning. It was the music, and the dresses, and the decorations
that enticed you, Artie, and not the doctrine.'
Arthur turned towards him with a pained expression. 'Father,' he
said, half reproachfully, 'Father, dear father, don't talk to me
like that. Don't think I'm so shallow or so dishonest as to subscribe
to opinions I don't believe in. It's a curious thing to say, a
curious thing in this unbelieving age, and I'm half ashamed to say
it, even to you; but do you know, father, I really do believe it:
in my very heart of hearts, I fancy I believe every word of it.'
The old man listened to him compassionately and tenderly, as
a woman listens to the fears and troubles of a little child. To
him, that plain confession of faith was, in truth, a wonder and a
stumbling-block. Good, simple-hearted, easy-going, logical-minded,
sceptical shoemaker that he was, with his head all stuffed full of
Malthus, and John Stuart Mill, and political economy, and the hard
facts of life and science, how could he hope to understand the
complex labyrinth of metaphysical thinking, and childlike faith,
and aesthetic attraction, and historical authority, which made a
sensitive man like Arthur Berkeley, in his wayward, half-serious,
emotional fashion, turn back lovingly and regretfully to the fair
old creed that his father had so long deserted? How strange that
Artie, a full-grown male person, with all the learning of the schools
behind him, should relapse at last into these childish and exploded
mediaeval superstitions! How incredible that, after having been
brought up from his babyhood upward on the strong meat of the agnostic
philosophers, he should fall back in his manhood on the milk for
babes administered to him by orthodox theology! The simple-minded
old sceptic could hardly credit it, now that Arthur told him so
with his own lips, though he had more than once suspected it when he
heard him playing sacred music with that last touch of earnestness
in his execution which only the sincerest conviction and most intimate
realisation of its import can ever give. Ah well, ah well, good
sceptical old shoemaker; there are perhaps more things in heaven
and earth and in the deep soul of man than are dreamt of in your
philosophy.
Still, though the avowal shocked and disappointed him a little, the
old man could not find it in his heart to say one word of sorrow
or disapproval, far less of ridicule or banter, to his dearly loved
boy. He felt instinctively, what Herbert Le Breton could not feel,
that this sentimental tendency of his son's, as he thought it,
lay far too deep and seemed far too sacred for mere argument or
common discussion. 'Perhaps,' he said to himself softly, 'Artie's
emotional side has got the better of his intellectual. I brought
him up without telling him any thing of these things, except
negatively, and by way of warning against superstitious tendencies;
and when he went to Oxford, and saw the doctrines tricked out in
all the authority of a great hierarchy, with its cathedrals, and
chapels, and choirs, and altars, and robes, and fal-lal finery,
it got the better of him; got the better of him, very naturally.
Artie's a cleverer fellow than his old father--had more education,
and so on; and I'm fond of him, very fond of him; but his logical
faculty isn't quite straight, somehow: he lets his feelings have
too much weight and prominence against his calmer reason! I can
easily understand how, with his tastes and leanings, the clericals
should have managed to get a hold over him. The clericals are such
insinuating cunning fellows. A very impressionable boy Artie was,
always; the poetical temperament and the artistic temperament
always is impressionable, I suppose; but shoemaking certainly does
develop the logical faculties. Seems as though the logical faculties
were situated in the fore-part of the brain, as they mark them
out on the phrenological heads; and the leaning forward that gives
us the shoemaker's forehead must tend to enlarge them--give them
plenty of room to expand and develop!' Saying which thing to himself
musingly, the father took his son's hand gently in his, and only
smoothed it quietly as he looked deep into Arthur's eyes, without
uttering a single word.
As for Arthur Berkeley, he sat silent, too, half averting his face
from his father's gaze, and feeling a little blush of shame upon his
cheek at having been surprised unexpectedly into such an unwonted
avowal. How could he ever expect his father to understand the nature
of his feelings! To him, good old man that he was, all these things
were just matters of priestcraft and obscurantism--fables invented
by the ecclesiastical mind as a means of getting fat livings and
comfortable deaneries out of the public pocket. And, indeed, Arthur
was well accustomed at Oxford to keeping his own opinions to himself
on such subjects. What chance of sympathy or response was there for
such a man as he in that coldly critical and calmly deliberative
learned society? Not, of course, that all Oxford was wholly given
over even then to extreme agnosticism. There were High Churchmen,
and Low Churchmen, and Broad Churchmen enough, to be sure: men
learned in the Fathers, and the Canons, and the Acts of the General
Councils; men ready to argue on the intermediate state, or on the
three witnesses, or on the heretical nature of the Old Catholic
schism; men prepared with minute dogmatic opinions upon every
conceivable or inconceivable point of abstract theology. There were
people who could trace the Apostolic succession of the old Cornish
bishops, and people who could pronounce authoritatively upon the
exact distinction between justification and remission of sins. But
for all these things Arthur Berkeley cared nothing. Where, then,
among those learned exegetical theologians, was there room for one
whose belief was a matter, not of reason and argument, but of feeling
and of sympathy? He did not want to learn what the Council of Trent
had said about such and such a dogma; he wanted to be conscious
of an inner truth, to find the world permeated by an informing
righteousness, to know himself at one with the inner essence of
the entire universe. And though he could never feel sure whether
it was all illusion or not, he had hungered and thirsted after
believing it, till, as he told his father timidly that day, he
actually did believe it somehow in his heart of hearts. Let us not
seek to probe too deeply into those inner recesses, whose abysmal
secrets are never perfectly clear even to the introspective eyes
of the conscious self-dissector himself.
After a pause Arthur spoke again. He spoke this time in a very low
voice, as one afraid to open his soul too much, even to his father.
'Dear, dear father,' he said, releasing his hand softly, 'you don't
quite understand what I mean about it. It isn't because I don't
believe, or try to believe, or hope I believe, that I think I ought
never to have become a parson. In my way, as in a glass, darkly,
I do strive my best to believe, though perhaps my belief is hardly
more in its way than Ernest Le Breton's unbelieving. I do want to
think that this great universe we see around us isn't all a mistake
and an abortion. I want to find a mind and an order and a purpose
in it; and, perhaps because I want it, I make myself believe that
I have really found it. In that hope and belief, with the ultimate
object of helping on whatever is best and truest in the world, I
took orders. But I feel now that it was an error for me. I'm not
the right man to make a parson. There are men who are born for that
rôle; men who know how to conduct themselves in it decently and
in seemly fashion; men who can quietly endure all its restraints,
and can fairly rise to the height of all its duties. But I can't.
I was intended for something lighter and less onerous than that.
If I stop in the Church I shall do no good to myself or to it; if
I come out of it, I shall make both parties freer, and shall be able
to do more good in my own generation. And so, father, for the very
same reasons that made me go into it, I mean to come out again. Not
in any quarrel with it, nor as turning my back upon it, but just
as the simple acknowledgment of a mistaken calling. It wouldn't
be seemly, for example, for a parson to write comic operas. But
I feel I can do more good by writing comic operas than by talking
dogmatically about things I hardly understand to people who hardly
understand me. So before I get this opera acted I mean to leave off
my white tie, and be known in future, henceforth and for ever, as
plain Arthur Berkeley.'
The old shoemaker listened in respectful silence. 'It isn't for me,
Artie,' he said, as his son finished, 'to stand between a man and
his conscience. As John Stuart Mill says in his essay on "Liberty,"
we must allow full play to every man's individuality. Wonderful
man, John Stuart Mill; I understand his grandfather was a shoemaker.
Well, I won't talk with you about the matter of conviction; but I
never wanted you to be a parson, and I shall feel all the happier
myself when you've ceased to be one.'
'And I,' said Arthur, 'shall feel all the freer; but if I had been
able to remain where I was, I should have felt all the worthier,
for all that.'