The parson (and parsons were not lacking in Pentonville) was not so
insidiously repellent as the blue-cheeked, blue-chinned Passy priest;
but he was by no means to me a picturesque or sympathetic apparition,
with his weddedness, his whiskers, his black trousers, his frock-coat,
his tall hat, his little white tie, his consciousness of being a
"gentleman" by profession. Most unattractive, also, were the cheap,
brand-new churches wherein he spoke the word to his dreary-looking,
Sunday-clad flock, with scarcely one of whom his wife would have sat
down to dinner--especially if she had been chosen from among them.
[Illustration: SUNDAY IN PENTONVILLE.]
To watch that flock pouring in of a Sunday morning, or afternoon, or
evening, at the summons of those bells, and pouring out again after the
long service, and banal, perfunctory sermon, was depressing. Weekdays,
in Pentonville, were depressing enough; but Sundays were depressing
beyond words, though nobody seemed to think so but myself. Early
training had acclimatized them.
I have outlived those physical antipathies of my salad days; even the
sight of an Anglican bishop is no longer displeasing to me, on the
contrary; and I could absolutely rejoice in the beauty of a cardinal.
Indeed, I am now friends with both a parson and a priest, and do not
know which of the two I love and respect the most. They ought to hate
me, but they do not; they pity me too much, I suppose. I am too negative
to rouse in either the deep theological hate; and all the little hate
that the practice of love and charity has left in their kind hearts is
reserved for each other--an unquenchable hate in which they seem to
glory, and which rages all the more that it has to be concealed. It
saddens me to think that I am a bone of contention between them.
And yet, for all my unbelief, the Bible was my favorite book, and the
Psalms my adoration; and most truly can I affirm that my mental attitude
has ever been one of reverence and humility.
But every argument that has ever been advanced against Christianity (and
I think I know them all by this time) had risen spontaneously and
unprompted within me, and they have all seemed to me unanswerable, and
indeed, as yet, unanswered. Nor had any creed of which I ever heard
appeared to me either credible or attractive or even sensible, but for
the central figure of the Deity--a Deity that in no case could ever
be mine.
The awe-inspiring and unalterable conception that had wrought itself
into my consciousness, whether I would or no, was that of a Being
infinitely more abstract, remote, and inaccessible than any the genius
of mankind has ever evolved after its own image and out of the needs of
its own heart--inscrutable, unthinkable, unspeakable; above all human
passions, beyond the reach of any human appeal; One upon whose
attributes it was futile to speculate--One whose name was _It_,
not _He_.
The thought of total annihilation was uncongenial, but had no terror.
Even as a child I had shrewdly suspected that hell was no more than a
vulgar threat for naughty little boys and girls, and heaven than a
vulgar bribe, from the casual way in which either was meted out to me as
my probable portion, by servants and such people, according to the way I
behaved. Such things were never mentioned to me by either my father or
mother, or M. le Major, or the Seraskiers--the only people in whom
I trusted.
But for the bias against the priest, I was left unbiassed at that tender
and susceptible age. I had learned my catechism and read my Bible, and
used to say the Lord's Prayer as I went to bed, and "God bless papa and
mamma" and the rest, in the usual perfunctory manner.
Never a word against religion was said in my hearing by those few on
whom I had pinned my childish faith; on the other hand, no such
importance was attached to it, apparently, as was attached to the
virtues of truthfulness, courage, generosity, self-denial, politeness,
and especially consideration for others, high or low, human and
animal alike.
I imagine that my parents must have compromised the matter between them,
and settled that I should work out all the graver problems of existence
for myself, when I came to a thinking age, out of my own conscience,
and such knowledge of life as I should acquire, and such help as they
would no doubt have given me, according to their lights, had
they survived.
I did so, and made myself a code of morals to live by, in which religion
had but a small part.
For me there was but one sin, and that was cruelty, because I hated it;
though Nature, for inscrutable purposes of her own, almost teaches it as
a virtue. All sins that did not include cruelty were merely sins against
health, or taste, or common-sense, or public expediency.
Free-will was impossible. We could only _seem_ to will freely, and that
only within the limits of a small triangle, whose sides were heredity,
education, and circumstance--a little geometrical arrangement of my own,
of which I felt not a little proud, although it does not quite go on
all-fours--perhaps because it is only a triangle.
That is, we could will fast enough--_too_ fast; but could not will _how_
to will--fortunately, for we were not fit as yet, and for a long time to
come, to be trusted, constituted as we are!
Even the characters of a novel must act according to the nature,
training, and motives their creator the novelist has supplied them with,
or we put the novel down and read something else; for human nature must
be consistent with itself in fiction as well as in fact. Even in its
madness there must be a method, so how could the will be free?
To pray for any personal boon or remission of evil--to bend the knee, or
lift one's voice in praise or thanksgiving for any earthly good that had
befallen one, either through inheritance, or chance, or one's own
successful endeavor--was in my eyes simply futile; but, putting its
futility aside, it was an act of servile presumption, of wheedling
impertinence, not without suspicion of a lively sense of favors to come.
It seemed to me as though the Jews--a superstitious and business-like
people, who know what they want and do not care how they get it--must
have taught us to pray like that.
It was not the sweet, simple child innocently beseeching that to-morrow
might be fine for its holiday, or that Santa Claus would be generous; it
was the cunning trader, fawning, flattering, propitiating, bribing with
fulsome, sycophantic praise (an insult in itself), as well as
burnt-offerings, working for his own success here and hereafter, and his
enemy's confounding.
It was the grovelling of the dog, without the dog's single-hearted love,
stronger than even its fear or its sense of self-interest.
What an attitude for one whom God had made after His own image--even
towards his Maker!
* * * * *
The only permissible prayer was a prayer for courage or resignation; for
that was a prayer turned inward, an appeal to what is best in
ourselves--our honor, our stoicism, our self-respect.
And for a small detail, grace before and after meals seemed to me
especially self-complacent and iniquitous, when there were so many with
scarcely ever a meal to say grace for. The only decent and proper grace
was to give half of one's meal away--not, indeed, that I was in the
habit of doing so! But at least I had the grace to reproach myself for
my want of charity, and that was my only grace.
* * * * *
Fortunately, since we had no free-will of our own, the tendency that
impelled us was upward, like the sparks, and bore us with it
willy-nilly--the good and the bad, and the worst and the best.
By seeing this clearly, and laying it well to heart, the motive was
supplied to us for doing all we could in furtherance of that upward
tendency--_pour aider le bon Dieu_--that we might rise the faster and
reach Him the sooner, if He were! And when once the human will has been
set going, like a rocket or a clock or a steam-engine, and in the right
direction, what can it not achieve?
We should in time control circumstance instead of being controlled
thereby; education would day by day become more adapted to one
consistent end; and, finally, conscience-stricken, we should guide
heredity with our own hands instead of leaving it to blind chance;
unless, indeed, a well-instructed paternal government wisely took the
reins, and only sanctioned the union of people who were thoroughly in
love with each other, after due and careful elimination of the unfit.
Thus, cruelty should at least be put into harness, and none of its
valuable energy wasted on wanton experiments, as it is by Nature.
And thus, as the boy is father to the man, should the human race one
day be father to--what?
That is just where my speculations would arrest themselves; that was the
X of a sum in rule of three, not to be worked out by Peter Ibbetson,
Architect and Surveyor, Wharton Street, Pentonville.
As the orang-outang is to Shakespeare, so is Shakespeare to ... X?
As the female chimpanzee is to the Venus of Milo, so is the Venus of
Milo to ... X?
Finally, multiply these two X's by each other, and try to conceive the
result!
* * * * *
Such was, crudely, the simple creed I held at this time; and, such as it
was, I had worked it all out for myself, with no help from outside--a
poor thing, but mine own; or, as I expressed it in the words of De
Musset, "Mon verre n'est pas grand--mais je bois dans mon verre."
For though such ideas were in the air, like wholesome clouds, they had
not yet condensed themselves into printed words for the million. People
did not dare to write about these things, as they do at present, in
popular novels and cheap magazines, that all who run may read, and learn
to think a little for themselves, and honestly say what they think,
without having to dread a howl of execration, clerical and lay.
And it was not only that I thought like this and could not think
otherwise; it was that I felt like this and could not feel otherwise;
and I should have appeared to myself as wicked, weak, and base had I
ever even _desired_ to think or feel otherwise, however personally
despairing of this life--a traitor to what I jealously guarded as my
best instincts.
And yet to me the faith of others, if but unaggressive, humble, and
sincere, had often seemed touching and pathetic, and sometimes even
beautiful, as childish things seem sometimes beautiful, even in those
who are no longer children, and should have put them away. It had caused
many heroic lives, and rendered many obscure lives blameless and happy;
and then its fervor and passion seemed to burn with a lasting flame.
At brief moments now and then, and especially in the young, unfaith can
be as fervent and as passionate as faith, and just as narrow and
unreasonable, as _I_ found; but alas! its flame was intermittent, and
its light was not a kindly light.
It had no food for babes; it could not comfort the sick or sorry, nor
resolve into submissive harmony the inner discords of the soul; nor
compensate us for our own failures and shortcomings, nor make up to us
in any way for the success and prosperity of others who did not choose
to think as we did.
It was without balm for wounded pride, or stay for weak despondency, or
consolation for bereavement; its steep and rugged thoroughfares led to
no promised land of beatitude, and there were no soft resting-places
by the way.
Its only weapon was steadfastness; its only shield, endurance; its
earthly hope, the common weal; its earthly prize, the opening of all
roads to knowledge, and the release from a craven inheritance of fear;
its final guerdon--sleep? Who knows?
Sleep was not bad.
So that simple, sincere, humble, devout, earnest, fervent, passionate,
and over-conscientious young unbelievers like myself had to be very
strong and brave and self-reliant (which I was not), and very much in
love with what they conceived to be the naked Truth (a figure of
doubtful personal attractions at first sight), to tread the ways of life
with that unvarying cheerfulness, confidence, and serenity which the
believer claims as his own special and particular appanage.
So much for my profession of unfaith, shared (had I but known it) by
many much older and wiser and better educated than I, and only reached
by them after great sacrifice of long-cherished illusions, and terrible
pangs of soul-questioning--a struggle and a wrench that I was spared
through my kind parents' thoughtfulness when I was a little boy.
* * * * *
It thus behooved me to make the most of this life; since, for all I
knew, or believed, or even hoped to the contrary, to-morrow we must die.
Not, indeed, that I might eat and drink and be merry; heredity and
education had not inclined me that way, I suppose, and circumstances did
not allow it; but that I might try and live up to the best ideal I could
frame out of my own conscience and the past teaching of mankind. And
man, whose conception of the Infinite and divine has been so inadequate,
has furnished us with such human examples (ancient and modern, Hebrew,
Pagan, Buddhist, Christian, Agnostic, and what not) as the best of us
can only hope to follow at a distance.
I would sometimes go to my morning's work, my heart elate with lofty
hope and high resolve.
How easy and simple it seemed to lead a life without fear, or reproach,
or self-seeking, or any sordid hope of personal reward, either here or
hereafter!--a life of stoical endurance, invincible patience and
meekness, indomitable cheerfulness and self-denial!
After all, it was only for another forty or fifty years at the most, and
what was that? And after that--_que sçais-je?_
The thought was inspiring indeed!
By luncheon-time (and luncheon consisted of an Abernethy biscuit and a
glass of water, and several pipes of shag tobacco, cheap and rank) some
subtle change would come over the spirit of my dream.
Other people did not have high resolves. Some people had very bad
tempers, and rubbed one very much the wrong way.
What a hideous place was Pentonville to slave away one's life in! ...
What a grind it was to be forever making designs for little new shops in
Rosoman Street, and not making them well, it seemed! ...
Why should a squinting, pock-marked, bowlegged, hunch-backed little
Judkins (a sight to make a recruiting-sergeant shudder) forever taunt
one with having enlisted as a private soldier? ...
And then why should one be sneeringly told to "hit a fellow one's own
size," merely because, provoked beyond endurance, one just grabbed him
by the slack of his trousers and gently shook him out of them onto the
floor, terrified but quite unhurt? ...
And so on, and so on; constant little pin-pricks, sordid humiliations,
ugliness, meannesses, and dirt, that called forth in resistance all that
was lowest and least commendable in one's self.
One has attuned one's nerves to the leading of a forlorn hope, and a
gnat gets into one's eye, or a little cinder grit, and there it sticks;
and there is no question of leading any forlorn hope, after all, and
never will be; all _that_ was in the imagination only: it is always
gnats and cinder grits, gnats and cinder grits.
By the evening I had ignominiously broken down, and was plunged in the
depths of an exasperated pessimism too deep even for tears, and would
have believed myself the meanest and most miserable of mankind, but that
everybody else, without exception, was even meaner and miserabler
than myself.
They could still eat and drink and be merry. I could not, and did not
even want to.
* * * * *
And so on, day after day, week after week, for months and years....
Thus I grew weary in time of my palling individuality, ever the same
through all these uncontrollable variations of mood.
Oh, that alternate ebb and flow of the spirits! It is a disease, and,
what is most distressing, it is no real change; it is more sickeningly
monotonous than absolute stagnation itself. And from that dreary seesaw
I could never escape, except through the gates of dreamless sleep, the
death in life; for even in our dreams we are still ourselves. There
was no rest!
I loathed the very sight of myself in the shop-windows as I went by; and
yet I always looked for it there, in the forlorn hope of at least
finding some alteration, even for the worse. I passionately longed to be
somebody else; and yet I never met anybody else I could have borne to be
for a moment.
And then the loneliness of us!
Each separate unit of our helpless race is inexorably bounded by the
inner surface of his own mental periphery, a jointless armor in which
there is no weak place, never a fault, never a single gap of egress for
ourselves, of ingress for the nearest and dearest of our fellow-units.
At only five points can we just touch each other, and all that is--and
that only by the function of our poor senses--from the outside. In vain
we rack them that we may get a little closer to the best beloved and
most implicitly trusted; ever in vain, from the cradle to the grave.
Why should so fantastic a thought have persecuted me so cruelly? I knew
nobody with whom I should have felt such a transfusion of soul even
tolerable for a second. I cannot tell! But it was like a gadfly which
drove me to fatigue my body that I should have by day the stolid peace
of mind that comes of healthy physical exhaustion; that I should sleep
at night the dreamless sleep--the death in life!
"Of such materials wretched men are made!" Especially wretched young
men; and the wretcheder one is, the more one smokes; and the more one
smokes, the wretcheder one gets--a vicious circle!
Such was my case. I grew to long for the hour of my release (as I
expressed it pathetically to myself), and caressed the idea of suicide.
I even composed for myself a little rhymed epitaph in French which I
thought very neat--
Je n'étais point. Je fus.
Je ne suis plus.
* * * * *
Oh, to perish in some noble cause--to die saving another's life, even
another's worthless life, to which he clung!
I remember formulating this wish, in all sincerity, one moonlit night as
I walked up Frith Street, Soho. I came upon a little group of excited
people gathered together at the foot of a house built over a shop. From
a broken window-pane on the second floor an ominous cloud of smoke rose
like a column into the windless sky. An ordinary ladder was placed
against the house, which, they said, was densely inhabited; but no
fire-engine or fire-escape had arrived as yet, and it appeared useless
to try and rouse the inmates by kicking and beating at the door
any longer.
A brave man was wanted--a very brave man, who would climb the ladder,
and make his way into the house through the broken window. Here was a
forlorn hope to lead at last!
Such a man was found. To my lasting shame and contrition, it was not I.
He was short and thick and middle-aged, and had a very jolly red face
and immense whiskers--quite a common sort of man, who seemed by no means
tired of life.
His heroism was wasted, as it happened; for the house was an empty one,
as we all heard, to our immense relief, before he had managed to force a
passage into the burning room. His whiskers were not even singed!
Nevertheless, I slunk home, and gave up all thoughts of
self-destruction--even in a noble cause; and there, in penance, I
somewhat hastily committed to flame the plodding labor of many
midnights--an elaborate copy in pen and ink, line for line, of Retel's
immortal wood-engraving "Der Tod als Freund," which Mrs. Lintot had been
kind enough to lend me--and under which I had written, in beautiful
black Gothic letters and red capitals (and without the slightest sense
of either humor or irreverence), the following poem, which had cost me
infinite pains: