_From Mr. Paul Rondelet to the Very Rev. Dean Maitland_. {139}
That Dean Maitland should have taken the political line indicated in Mr.
Rondelet’s letter will amaze no reader of ‘The Silence of Dean Maitland.’
That Mr. Paul Rondelet flew from his penny paper to a Paradise meet for
him is a matter of congratulation to all but his creditors. He really is
now in the only true Monastery of Thelema, and is simply dressed in an
eye-glass and a cincture of pandanus flowers. The natives worship him,
and he is the First Æsthetic Beach-comber.
Te-a-Iti, The Pacific.
DEAR MAITLAND,—As my old friend and tutor at Lothian, you ask me to join
the Oxford Home Rule Association. Excuse my delay in answering. Your
letter was sent to that detested and long-deserted newspaper office in
Fleet Street, and from Fleet Street to Te-a-Iti; thank Heaven! it is a
long way. Were I at home, and still endeavouring to sway the masses, I
might possibly accept your invitation. I dislike crowds, and I dislike
shouting; but if shout I must, like you I would choose to chime in with
the dingier and the larger and the more violent assembly. But, having
perceived that the masses were very perceptibly learning to sway
themselves, I have retired to Te-a-Iti. You have read “Epipsychidion,”
my dear Dean? And, in your time, no doubt you have loved? {140} Well,
this is the Isle of Love, described, as in a dream, by the rapt fancy of
Shelley. Urged, perhaps, by a reminiscence of the Great Aryan wave of
migration, I have moved westward to this Paradise. Like Obermann, I hide
my head “from the wild tempest of the age,” but in a much dearer place
than “chalets near the Alpine snow.” Long ago I said, to one who would
not listen, that “all the religions of the world are based on false
foundations, resting on the Family, and fatally unsound.” Here the
Family, in our sense, has not been developed. Here no rules trammel the
best and therefore the most evanescent of our affections. And as for
Religion, it is based upon Me, on Rondelet of Lothian. Here nobody asks
me why or how I am “superior.” The artless natives at once perceived the
fact, recognised me as a god, and worship me (do not shudder, my good
Dean) with floral services. In Te-a-Iti (vain to look for it on the
map!) I have found my place—a place far from the babel of your brutal
politics, a place where I am addressed in liquid accents of adoration.
You may ask whether I endeavour to raise the islanders to my own level?
It is the last thing that I would attempt. Culture they do not need:
their dainty hieratic precisions of ritual are a sufficient culture in
themselves. As I said once before, “it is an absurdity to speak of
married people being one.” Here we are an indefinite number; and no
jealousy, no ambitious exclusiveness, mars the happiness of all. This is
the Higher Life about which we used ignorantly to talk. Here the gross
temporal necessities are satisfied with a breadfruit, a roasted fish, and
a few pandanus flowers. The rest is all climate and the affections.
Conceive, my dear Dean, the undisturbed felicity of life without
newspapers! Empires may fall, perhaps have fallen, since I left Fleet
Street; Alan Dunlop may be a ditcher in good earnest on an estate no
longer his; but here we fleet the time carelessly, as in the golden
world. And you ask me to join a raucous political association for an
object you detest in your heart, merely because you want to swim with the
turbid democratic current! You are an historian, Maitland: did you ever
know this policy succeed? Did you ever know the respectables prosper
when they allied themselves with the vulgar? Ah, keep out of your
second-hand revolutions. Keep your hands clean, whether you keep your
head on your shoulders or not. You will never, I fear, be Bishop of
Winkum, with all your historical handbooks and all your Oxford
Liberalism.
But I am losing my temper, for the first time since I discovered
Te-a-Iti. This must not be.—Yours regretfully,