Give me thy hand, terrestrial; so! Give me thy hand, celestial;
so!--_Merry Wives of Windsor._
It was the close of a bright sunshiny day in the spring of 18--. The
sun was setting crimson on the lonely peak of the Zugspitz in the heart
of the Bavarian Highlands, and the shadows of the pine woods which
fringed the melancholy gorges beneath were lengthening towards the
valleys.
Through one of these mountain gorges, following a rocky footpath, a man
was rapidly walking. He was roughly, almost rudely, dressed in a sort of
tourist suit. On his head he wore a broadbrimmed felt hat of the shape
frequently worn by clergymen, and in his hand he carried a staff like a
shepherd’s crook.
Scarcely looking to left or right, but hastening with impatient paces
he hurried onward, less like a man hastening to some eagerly-sought
shelter, than like one flying from some hated thing behind his back. His
cheeks were pale and sunken, his eyes wild and sad. From time to time he
slackened his speed, and looked wearily around him--up to the desolate
sunlit peaks, down the darkening valley with its green pastures, belts
of woodland, and fields of growing corn.
But whichever way he looked, he seemed to find no joy in the prospect,
indeed hardly to behold the thing he looked on, but to gaze through it
and beyond it on some sorrowful portent.
Sometimes where the path became unusually steep and dangerous, he sprang
from rock to rock with reckless haste, or when its thread was broken,
as frequently happened by some brawling mountain stream, he entered the
torrent without hesitation, and passed recklessly across. Indeed, the
man seemed utterly indifferent to physical conditions, but labouring
rather under some spiritual possession, completely and literally
realising in his person the words of the poet:
His own mind did like a tempest strong
Come to him thus, and drave the weary wight along.
The wild scene was in complete harmony with his condition. It was still
and desolate, no sound seeming to break its solemn silence; but pausing
and listening intently, one would in reality have become conscious of
many sounds--the deep under-murmur of the mountain streams, the ‘sough’
of the wind in the pine woods, the faint tinkling of goat-bells from the
distant valleys, the solitary cry of rock doves from the mountain caves.
The man was Ambrose Bradley.
Nearly a year had elapsed since his sad experience in Rome. Since that
time he had wandered hither and thither like another Ahasuerus; wishing
for death, yet unable to die; burthened with the terrible weight of
his own sin and self-reproach, and finding no resting-place in all the
world.
Long before, as the reader well knows, the man’s faith in the
supernatural had faded, he had refined away his creed till it had wasted
away of its own inanition, and when the hour of trial came and he could
have called upon it for consolation, he was horrified to find that
it was a corpse, instead of a living thing. Then, in his horror and
despair, he had clutched at the straw of spiritualism, only to sink
lower and lower in the bitter waters of Marah. He found no hope for his
soul, no foothold for his feet. He had, to use his own expression, lost
the world.
It was now close upon night-time, and every moment the gorges along
which he was passing grew darker and darker.
Through the red smokes of sunset one lustrous star was just becoming
visible on the extremest peak of the mountain chain. But instead of
walking faster, Bradley began to linger, and presently, coming to
a gloomy chasm which seemed to make further progress dangerous,
impossible, he halted and looked down. The trunk of an uprooted
pine-tree lay close to the chasm’s brink. After looking quietly round
him, he sat down, pulled out a common wooden pipe, and began to smoke.
Presently he pulled out a letter bearing the Munich post-mark, and with
a face as dark as night began to look it through. It was dated from
London, and ran as follows:
‘Reform Club, March 5, 18-.
‘My dear Bradley,--Your brief note duly reached me, and I have duly
carried out your wishes with regard to the affairs of the new church. I
have also seen Sir George Craik, and found him more amenable to
reason than I expected. Though he still regards you with the intensest
animosity, he has sense enough to perceive that you are not directly
responsible for the unhappy affair at Rome. His thoughts seem now
chiefly bent on recovering his niece’s property from the clutches of the
Italian Jesuits, and in exposing the method by which they acquired such
dominion over the unhappy lady’s mind.
‘But I will not speak of this further at present, knowing the anguish it
must bring you. I will turn rather to the mere abstract matter of your
letter, and frankly open my mind to you on the subject.
‘What you say is very brief, but, from the manner in which it recurs in
your correspondence, I am sure it represents the absorbing topic of your
thoughts. Summed up in a few words, it affirms your conclusion that all
human effort is impossible to a man in your position, where the belief
in personal immortality is gone.
‘Now I need not go over the old ground, with which you are quite
as familiar as myself. I will not remind you of the folly and the
selfishness (from one point of view) of formulating a moral creed out
of what, in reality, is merely the hereditary instinct of
self-preservation. I will not repeat to you that it is nobler, after
all, to live impersonally in the beautiful future of Humanity than to
exist personally in a heaven of introspective dreams. But I should like,
if you will permit me, to point out that this Death, this cessation
of consciousness, which you dread so much, is not in itself an unmixed
evil. True, just at present, in the sharpness of your bereavement, you
see nothing but the shadow, and would eagerly follow into its oblivion
the shape of her you mourn. But as every day passes, this desire to die
will grow less keen; and ten years hence, perhaps, or twenty years,
you will look back upon to-day’s anguish with a calm, sweet sense of
spiritual gain, and with a peaceful sense of the sufficiency of life.
Then, perhaps, embracing a creed akin to ours, and having reached a
period when the physical frame begins slowly, and without pain, to melt
away, you will be quite content to accept--what shall I say?--Nirwâna.
‘What I mean, my dear friend, is this, simply: that Death is only evil
when it comes painfully or prematurely; coming in the natural order of
things, in the inevitable decay of Nature, it is by no means evil. And
so much is this the case that, if you were to discover the consensus of
opinion among the old, who are on the threshold of the grave, you would
find the majority quite content that life should end for ever. Tired out
with eighty or a hundred years of living, they gladly welcome sleep.
It is otherwise, of course, with the victims of accidental disease or
premature decay. But in the happy world to which we Positivists look
forward, these victims would not exist.
‘Day by day Science, which you despise too much, is enlarging the area
of human health. Think what has been done, even within the last decade,
to abolish both physical and social disease! Think what has yet to be
done to make life freer, purer, safer, happier!
I grant you the millennium of the Grand Être is still far off; but it
is most surely coming, and we can all aid, more or less, that blessed
consummation--not by idle wailing, by useless dreams, or by selfish
striving after an impossible personal reward, but by duty punctually
performed, by self-sacrifice cheerfully undergone, by daily and nightly
endeavours to ameliorate the condition of Man.
‘Men perish; Man is imperishable. Personal forms change; the great
living personality abides. And the time must come at last when Man shall
be as God, certain of his destiny, and knowing good and evil.
‘“A Job’s comforter!” I seem to hear you cry. Well, after all, you must
be your own physician.
No man can save another’s soul,
Or pay another’s debt!
But I wish that you, in your distracted wandering after certainty,
would turn your thoughts _our_ way, and try to understand what the great
Founder of our system has done, and will do, for the human race. I am
sure that the study would bring you comfort, late or soon.
‘I am, as ever, my dear Bradley,
‘Your friend and well-wisher,
‘John Cholmondeley.
‘P.S.--What are you doing in Munich? I hear of curious doings this year
at Ober-Ammergau, where that ghastly business, the Passion Play, is once
more in course of preparation.’
Bradley read this characteristic epistle with a gloomy frown, which
changed before he had finished to a look of bitter contempt; and, as he
read, he seemed once more conscious of the babble of literary club-land,
and the affected jargon of the new creeds of the future. Returning the
letter to his pocket, he continued to smoke till it was almost too dark
to see the wreaths of fume from his own pipe.
The night had completely fallen before he rose and proceeded on his way.