THE COUSINS.
George Bascombe was a peculiar development of the present century,
almost of the present generation. In the last century, beyond a
doubt, the description of such a man would have been incredible. I
do not mean that he was the worse or the better for that. There are
types both of good and of evil which to the past would have been
incredible because unintelligible.
It is very hard sometimes for a tolerably honest man, as we have
just seen in the case of Wingfold, to say what he believes, and it
ought to be yet harder to say what another man does not believe;
therefore I shall presume no farther concerning Bascombe in this
respect than to say that the thing he SEEMED most to believe was
that he had a mission to destroy the beliefs of everybody else.
Whence he derived this mission he would not have thought a
reasonable question--would have answered that, if any man knew any
truth unknown to another, understood any truth better, or could
present it more clearly than another, the truth itself was his
commission of apostleship. And his stand was indubitably a firm one.
Only there was the question--whether his presumed commission was
verily truth or no. It must be allowed that a good deal turns upon
that.
According to the judgment of some men who thought they knew him,
Bascombe was as yet--I will not say incapable of distinguishing,
but careless of the distinction between--not a fact and a law,
perhaps, but a law and a truth. They said also that he inveighed
against the beliefs of other people, without having ever seen more
than a distorted shadow of those beliefs--some of them he was not
capable of seeing, they said--only capable of denying. Now while he
would have been perfectly justified, they said, in asserting that he
saw no truth in the things he denied, was he justifiable in
concluding that his not seeing a thing was a proof of its
non-existence--anything more, in fact, than a presumption against
its existence? or in denouncing every man who said he believed this
or that which Bascombe did not believe, as either a knave or a fool,
if not both in one? He would, they said, judge anybody--a
Shakespeare, a Bacon, a Milton--without a moment's hesitation or a
quiver of reverence--judge men who, beside him, were as the living
ocean to a rose-diamond. If he was armed in honesty, the rivets were
of self-satisfaction. The suit, they allowed, was adamantine,
unpierceable.
That region of a man's nature which has to do with the unknown was
in Bascombe shut off by a wall without chink or cranny; he was
unaware of its existence. He had come out of the darkness, and was
going back into the darkness; all that lay between, plain and clear,
he had to do with--nothing more. He could not present to himself the
idea of a man who found it impossible to live without some dealings
with the supernal. To him a man's imagination was of no higher
calling than to amuse him with its vagaries. He did not know,
apparently, that Imagination had been the guide to all the physical
discoveries which he worshipped, therefore could not reason that
perhaps she might be able to carry a glimmering light even into the
forest of the supersensible.
How far he was original in the views he propounded, will, to those
who understand the times of which I write, be plain enough. The
lively reception of another man's doctrine, especially if it comes
over water or across a few ages of semi-oblivion, and has to be
gathered with occasional help from a dictionary, raises many a man,
in his own esteem, to the same rank with its first propounder; after
which he will propound it so heartily himself as to forget the
difference, and love it as his own child.
It may seem strange that the son of a clergyman should take such a
part in the world's affairs, but one who observes will discover
that, at college at least, the behaviour of sons of clergymen
resembles in general as little as that of any, and less than that of
most, the behaviour enjoined by the doctrines their fathers have to
teach. The cause of this is matter of consideration for those
fathers. In Bascombe's case, it must be mentioned also that, instead
of taking freedom from prejudice as a portion of the natural
accomplishment of a gentleman, he prided himself upon it, and
THEREFORE would often go dead against the things presumed to be held
by THE CLOTH, long before he had begun to take his position as an
iconoclast.
Lest I should, however, tire my reader with the delineations of a
character not of the most interesting, I shall, for the present,
only add that Bascombe had persuaded himself, and without much
difficulty, that he was one of the prophets of a new order of
things. At Cambridge he had been so regarded by a few who had lauded
him as a mighty foe to humbug--and in some true measure he deserved
the praise. Since then he had found a larger circle, and had even
radiated of his light, such, as it was, from the centres of London
editorial offices. But all I have to do with now is the fact that he
had grown desirous to add his cousin, Helen Lingard, to the number
of those who believed in him, and over whom, therefore, he exercised
a prophet's influence.
No doubt it added much to the attractiveness of the intellectual
game that the hunt was on the home grounds of such a proprietress as
Helen--a handsome, a gifted, and, above all, a ladylike young woman.
To do Bascombe justice, the fact that she was an heiress also had
very little weight in the matter. If he had ever had any thought of
marrying her, that thought was not consciously present to him when
first he became aware of his wish to convert her to his views of
life. But, although he was not in love with her, he admired her, and
believed he saw in her one that resembled himself.
As to Helen, although she was no more conscious of cause of
self-dissatisfaction than her cousin, she was not therefore
positively self-satisfied like him. For that her mind was not active
enough.
If it seem, as it may, to some of my readers, difficult to believe
that she should have come to her years without encountering any
questions, giving life to any aspirations, or even forming any
opinions that could rightly be called her own, I would remind them
that she had always had good health, and that her intellectual
faculties had been kept in full and healthy exercise, nor had once
afforded the suspicion of a tendency towards artistic utterance in
any direction. She was no mere dabbler in anything: in music, for
instance, she had studied thorough bass, and studied it well; yet
her playing was such as I have already described it. She understood
perspective, and could copy an etching, in pen and ink, to a
hair's-breadth, yet her drawing was hard and mechanical. She was
pretty much at home in Euclid, and thoroughly enjoyed a geometric
relation, but had never yet shown her English master the slightest
pleasure in an analogy, or the smallest sympathy with any poetry
higher than such as very properly delights schoolboys. Ten thousand
things she knew without wondering at one of them. Any attempt to
rouse her admiration, she invariably received with quiet
intelligence but no response. Yet her drawing-master was convinced
there lay a large soul asleep somewhere below the calm grey morning
of that wide-awake yet reposeful intelligence.
As far as she knew--only she had never thought anything about
it--she was in harmony with creation animate and inanimate, and for
what might or might not be above creation, or at the back, or the
heart, or the mere root of it, how could she think about a something
the idea of which had never yet been presented to her by love or
philosophy, or even curiosity? As for any influence from the public
offices of religion, a contented soul may glide through them all for
a long life, unstruck to the last, buoyant and evasive as a bee
amongst hailstones. And now her cousin, unsolicited, was about to
assume, if she should permit him, the unspiritual direction of her
being, so that she need never be troubled from the quarter of the
unknown.
Mrs. Ramshorn's house had formerly been the manor-house, and,
although it now stood in an old street, with only a few yards of
ground between it and the road, it had a large and ancient garden
behind it. A large garden of any sort is valuable, but an ancient
garden is invaluable, and this one had retained a very antique
loveliness. The quaint memorials of its history lived on into the
new, changed, unsympathetic time, and stood there, aged, modest, and
unabashed. Yet not one of the family had ever cared for it on the
ground of its old-fashionedness; its preservation was owing merely
to the fact that their gardener was blessed with a wholesome
stupidity rendering him incapable of unlearning what his father, who
had been gardener there before him, had had marvellous difficulty in
teaching him. We do not half appreciate the benefits to the race
that spring from honest dulness. The CLEVER people are the ruin of
everything.
Into this garden, Bascombe walked the next morning, after breakfast,
and Helen, who, next to the smell of a fir-wood fire, honestly liked
the odour of a good cigar, spying him from her balcony, which was
the roof of the veranda, where she was trimming the few remaining
chrysanthemums that stood outside the window of her room, ran down
the little wooden stair that led from it to the garden, and joined
him. Nothing could just at present have been more to his mind.