THE DAWN.
All places were alike to me now--for the universe was but one dreary
chasm whence I could not escape. One evening I sat by the open window
of my chamber, which looked towards those trees and that fatal Moldwarp
Hall. My suffering had now grown dull by its own excess, and I had
moments of restless vacuity, the nearest approach to peace I had yet
experienced. It was a fair evening of early summer--but I was utterly
careless of nature as of all beyond it. The sky was nothing to me--and
the earth was all unlovely. There I sat, heavy, but free from torture;
a kind of quiet had stolen over me. I was roused by the tiniest breath
of wind on my cheek, as if the passing wing of some butterfly had
fanned me; and on that faintest motion came a scent as from
long-forgotten fields, a scent like as of sweet-peas or wild roses, but
of neither: flowers were none nearer me than the gardens of the Hall. I
started with a cry. It was the scent of the garments of my Athanasia,
as I had dreamed it in my dream! Whence that wind had borne it, who
could tell? but in the husk that had overgrown my being it had found a
cranny, and through that cranny, with the scent, Nature entered. I
looked up to the blue sky, wept, and for the first time fell on my
knees. ‘O God!’ I cried, and that was all. But what are the prayers of
the whole universe more than expansions of that one cry? It is not what
God can give us, but God that we want. Call the whole thing fancy if
you will; it was at least no fancy that the next feeling of which I was
conscious was compassion: from that moment I began to search heaven and
earth and the soul of man and woman for excuses wherewith to clothe the
idea of Mary Osborne. For weeks and weeks I pondered, and by degrees
the following conclusions wrought themselves out in my brain:--
That she had never seen life as a whole; that her religious theories
had ever been eating away and absorbing her life, so preventing her
religion from interpenetrating and glorifying it; that in regard to
certain facts and consequences she had been left to an ignorance which
her innocence rendered profound; that, attracted by the worldly
splendour of the offer, her father and mother had urged her compliance,
and broken in spirit by the fate of Charley, and having always been
taught that self-denial was in itself a virtue, she had taken the
worldly desires of her parents for the will of God, and blindly
yielded; that Brotherton was capable, for his ends, of representing
himself as possessed of religion enough to satisfy the scruples of her
parents, and, such being satisfied, she had resisted her own as evil
things.
Whether his hatred of me had had any share in his desire to possess
her, I hardly thought of inquiring.
Of course I did not for a single moment believe that Mary had had the
slightest notion of the bitterness, the torture, the temptation of
Satan it would be to me. Doubtless the feeling of her father concerning
the death of Charley had seemed to hollow an impassable gulf between
us. Worn and weak, and not knowing what she did, my dearest friend had
yielded herself to the embrace of my deadliest foe. If he was such as I
had too good reason for believing him, she was far more to be pitied
than I. Lonely she must be--lonely as I--for who was there to
understand and love her? Bitterly too by this time she must have
suffered, for the dove can never be at peace in the bosom of the
vulture, or cease to hate the carrion of which he must ever carry about
with him at least the disgusting memorials. Alas! I too had been her
enemy, and had cried out against her; but now I would love her more and
better than ever! Oh! if I knew but something I could do for her, some
service which on the bended knees of my spirit I might offer her! I
clomb the heights of my grief, and looked around, but alas! I was such
a poor creature! A dabbler in the ways of the world, a writer of tales
which even those who cared to read them counted fantastic and Utopian,
who was I to weave a single silken thread into the web of her life? How
could I bear her one poorest service? Never in this world could I
approach her near enough to touch yet once again the hem of her
garment. All I could do was to love her. No--I could and did suffer for
her. Alas! that suffering was only for myself, and could do nothing,
for her! It was indeed some consolation to me that my misery came from
her hand; but if she knew it, it would but add to her pain. In my heart
I could only pray her pardon for my wicked and selfish thoughts
concerning her, and vow again and ever to regard her as my
Athanasia.--But yes! there was one thing I _could_ do for her: I would
be a true man for her sake; she should have some satisfaction in me; I
would once more arise and go to my Father.
The instant the thought arose in my mind, I fell down before the
possible God in an agony of weeping. All complaint of my own doom had
vanished, now that I began to do her the justice of love. Why should
_I_ be blessed--here and now at least--according to my notions of
blessedness? Let the great heart of the universe do with me as it
pleased! Let the Supreme take his own time to justify himself to the
heart that sought to love him! I gave up myself, was willing to suffer,
to be a living pain, so long as he pleased; and the moment I yielded
half the pain was gone; I gave my Athanasia yet again to God, and all
_might_ yet, in some nigh, far-off, better-world-way, be well. I could
wait and endure. If only God was, and was God, then it was, or would
be, well with Mary--well with me!
But, as I still sat, a flow of sweet sad repentant thought passing
gently through my bosom, all at once the self to which, unable to
confide it to the care of its own very life, the God conscious of
himself and in himself conscious of it, I had been for months offering
the sacrifices of despair and indignation, arose in spectral
hideousness before me. I saw that I, a child of the infinite, had been
worshipping the finite--and therein dragging down the infinite towards
the fate of the finite. I do not mean that in Mary Osborne I had been
worshipping the finite. It was the eternal, the lovely, the true that
in her I had been worshipping: in myself I had been worshipping the
mean, the selfish, the finite, the god of spiritual greed. Only in
himself _can_ a man find the finite to worship; only in turning back
upon himself does he create the finite for and by his worship. All the
works of God are everlasting; the only perishable are some of the works
of man. All love is a worship of the infinite: what is called a man’s
love for himself, is not love; it is but a phantastic resemblance of
love; it is a creating of the finite, a creation of death. A man
_cannot_ love himself. If all love be not creation--as I think it
is--it is at least the only thing in harmony with creation, and the
love of oneself is its absolute opposite. I sickened at the sight of
myself: how should I ever get rid of the demon? The same instant I saw
the one escape: I must offer it back to its source--commit it to him
who had made it. I must live no more from it, but from the source of
it; seek to know nothing more of it than he gave me to know by his
presence therein. Thus might I become one with the Eternal in such an
absorption as Buddha had never dreamed; thus might I draw life ever
fresh from its fountain. And in that fountain alone would I contemplate
its reflex. What flashes of self-consciousness might cross me, should
be God’s gift, not of my seeking, and offered again to him in ever new
self-sacrifice. Alas! alas! this I saw then, and this I yet see; but
oh, how far am I still from that divine annihilation! The only comfort
is, God is, and I am his, else I should not be at all.
I saw too that thus God also lives--in his higher way. I saw, shadowed
out in the absolute devotion of Jesus to men, that the very life of God
by which we live is an everlasting eternal giving of himself away. He
asserts himself, only, solely, altogether, in an infinite sacrifice of
devotion. So must we live; the child must be as the father; live he
cannot on any other plan, struggle as he may. The father requires of
him nothing that he is not or does not himself, who is the one prime
unconditioned sacrificer and sacrifice. I threw myself on the ground,
and offered back my poor wretched self to its owner, to be taken and
kept, purified and made divine.
The same moment a sense of reviving health began to possess me. With
many fluctuations, it has possessed me, has grown, and is now, if not
a persistent cheerfulness, yet an unyielding hope. The world bloomed
again around me. The sunrise again grew gloriously dear; and the
sadness of the moon was lighted from a higher sun than that which
returns with the morning.
My relation to Mary resolved and re-formed itself in my mind into
something I can explain only by the following--call it dream: it was
not a dream; call it vision: it was not a vision; and yet I will tell
it as if it were either, being far truer than either.
I lay like a child on one of God’s arms. I could not see his face, and
the arm that held me was a great cloudy arm. I knew that on his other
arm lay Mary. But between us were forests and plains, mountains and
great seas; and, unspeakably worse than all, a gulf with which words
had nothing to do, a gulf of pure separation, of impassable
nothingness, across which no device, I say not of human skill, but of
human imagination, could cast a single connecting cord. There lay Mary,
and here lay I--both in God’s arms--utterly parted. As in a swoon I
lay, through which suddenly came the words: ‘What God hath joined, man
cannot sunder.’ I lay thinking what they could mean. All at once I
thought I knew. Straightway I rose on the cloudy arm, looked down on a
measureless darkness beneath me, and up on a great, dreary,
world-filled eternity above me, and crept along the arm towards the
bosom of God.
In telling my--neither vision nor dream nor ecstasy, I cannot help it
that the forms grow so much plainer and more definite in the words than
they were in the revelation. Words always give either too much or too
little shape: when you want to be definite, you find your words clumsy
and blunt; when you want them for a vague shadowy image, you
straightway find them give a sharp and impertinent outline, refusing to
lend themselves to your undefined though vivid thought. Forms
themselves are hard enough to manage, but words are unmanageable. I
must therefore trust to the heart of my reader.
I crept into the bosom of God, and along a great cloudy peace, which I
could not understand, for it did not yet enter into me. At length I
came to the heart of God, and through that my journey lay. The moment I
entered it, the great peace appeared to enter mine, and I began to
understand it. Something melted in my heart, and for a moment I thought
I was dying, but I found I was being born again. My heart was empty of
its old selfishness, and I loved Mary tenfold--no longer in the least
for my own sake, but all for her loveliness. The same moment I knew
that the heart of God was a bridge, along which I was crossing the
unspeakable eternal gulf that divided Mary and me. At length, somehow,
I know not how, somewhere, I know not where, I was where she was. She
knew nothing of my presence, turned neither face nor eye to meet me,
stretched out no hand to give me the welcome of even a friend, and yet
I not only knew, but felt that she was mine. I wanted nothing from her;
desired the presence of her loveliness only that I might know it; hung
about her life as a butterfly over the flower he loves; was satisfied
that she could _be_. I had left my self behind in the heart of God, and
now I was a pure essence, fit to rejoice in the essential. But alas! my
whole being was not yet subject to its best. I began to long to be able
to do something for her besides--I foolishly said _beyond_ loving her.
Back rushed my old self in the selfish thought: Some day--will she not
know--and at least--? That moment the vision vanished. I was
tossed--ah! let me hope, only to the other arm of God--but I lay in
torture yet again. For a man may see visions manifold, and believe them
all; and yet his faith shall not save him; something more is needed--he
must have that presence of God in his soul, of which the Son of Man
spoke, saying: ‘If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father
will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.’
God in him, he will be able to love for very love’s sake; God not in
him, his best love will die into selfishness.