But Richard soon began to recover both from the separation and from his
disappointment in regard to his letter. He was satisfied that whatever
might be the cause of her silence, it came from no fault in Barbara.
Nothing ever shook his faith in her.
And soon he found that he looked now upon the world with eyes from
which a veil had been withdrawn. Barbara gone, mother Earth came nigh
to comfort her child. He had always delighted in the beauty of the
world--in what shows of earth and air were to be seen in London. The
sunset that filled as with a glowing curtain the end of some street
where he walked, would go on glowing in his heart when it left the
street. Even in winter he would now and then go out to see the sunrise,
and see it; and from the street might now and then, at rare times, he
beheld a dappling and streaking, a mottling and massing of clouds on
the blue. The fog of the London valley, and the smoke of the London
chimneys, did not _always_, any more than the cares and sorrows and
sins of its souls, blot out its heaven as if it had never looked on the
earth. But he had learned much since he went to the country; he had gone
nearer to Nature, and seen that in her lap she carried many more things
than he knew of; and now that Barbara was gone, the memories of Nature
came nearer to him: he remembered her and was glad. Soon he began to
find that, both as regards Nature and those whom we love, absence is,
for very nearness, often better than presence itself. He had been
used to think and talk of Nature either as an abstraction, or as the
personification of a force that knew nothing, and cared for nothing, was
nobody, was nothing; now it gradually came to him, and gained upon him
ere he knew, first that the things about him wore meanings, and held
them up to him, then that something was thinking, something was meaning
the things themselves, and so moving thoughts in him, that came and went
unforeseen, unbidden. Thoughts clothed in things were everywhere about
him, over his head, under his feet, and in his heart; and as often
as anything brought him pleasure, either through memory or in present
vision, it brought Barbara too; and she seemed their maker, when she was
but one of the fair company, the lady of the land. Everything beautiful
turned his face to the more beautiful, more precious, diviner Barbara.
With each new sense of loveliness, she floated up from where she lay,
ever ready to rise, in the ocean of his heart. She was the dweller of
his everywhere!
He knew that Barbara did not make these things; it only seemed as if she
made them because she was the better joy of them: did not the fact show
how the fiction of a God might have sprung up in the minds that had no
Barbara to look like the maker of the loveliness? But Barbara was there
already, known and loved. The mind did not invent Barbara. And again,
why should the mind want anyone to look like a maker, an indweller, an
_ingeniuer_--to use a word of Shakespeare's invention? Yet again, why
should the thought of Barbara _suggest_ a soul, that is, a causing,
informing presence, to these things? Was there a meaning in them? How
did they come to have that meaning? Could it be that, having come out of
nothing--the mind of man, and all the things, out of the same nothing,
they responded enough to each other for the man to find his own reflex
wherever he pleased to look for it? Only, if man and Nature came both
out of nothing, why should they not be nothing to each other? why
should not man be nothing to himself? As it was, one nothing, having no
thought, meant the same the other nothing meant, having thought!--and
hence came all the beauty of the world! And once again, if these things
meant nothing but what the mind put into them--its own thought, namely,
of them--they did not really mean anything, they were only imagined to
mean it; and why should he, if but for a moment, imagine Barbara at the
root of nothing? And why should he not, seeing she was herself nothing?
Or was he to consent to be fooled, and act as if there was something
where he knew there was nothing?
The truth of Richard's love appeared in this that he was more able now
to see the other side of a thing, to start objection to his own idea
from the side of one who thought differently.
“If I feel,” he would say to himself, “as if these things meant
something, and conclude that they only mean _me,_ being the body to me,
who am the soul of them; and still more if I conclude that the sum of
them is the blind cause of me; then, when I grow sick of myself, finding
no comfort, no stay in myself for myself, and know that I need another,
say _another self,_ then the seeming sympathy that Nature offers me,
is the merest mockery! It is only my own self--myself gone behind and
peeping round a corner, grinning back sympathy at me from its sickening
death-mask! Why should man need another if he came from nothing? But
he came from a father and mother: man needed the woman: will not
that explain the thing? No; for even the relation itself needs to be
comforted and sustained and defended!”
Why was there so much, and most of all in himself, for which, as Richard
was beginning to understand, even a Barbara could not suffice? Why also
did her sufficiency depend so much on her faith in an all-sufficient?
And why was there so often such a gulf betwixt the two that seemed made
for each other? Ah! they were made for each other only in the general!
For the individual, Nature did not care; she had no time! Then how
was it that he cared for Nature? If Nature meant anything, was an
intelligence, a sort of God, why should he, the individual, who loved as
an individual, was a blessing or curse to himself as an individual--why
should he care anything for one who loved only in the general? Could
a man love in general? Yes; he himself loved his kind and sought to
deliver them from superstition. But that was because he could think
of them as a multitude of individuals. If he had never loved father,
mother, or friend, would he have loved in the general? Would crowds of
men and women have _awaked_ love in him? If so, then the bigger crowd
must always move the greater love! No; it is from the individual we
go to the many. Love that was only in the general, that cared for the
nation, the race, and let the individual perish, could not be love. He
would be no God who cared only for a world or a race. The live conscious
individual man could not love or worship him! And if no individual
worshipped, where would be the worship of the crowd? Still less could a
vague creator of masses, that knew nothing of individuals, being himself
not individual, be worthy to be called God! Demon be might be--never
God! But if God were a person, an individual, and so loved the
individual!--ah, then indeed!--Barbara believed that such a God lived
all about and in us! Mr. Wingfold said he was too great to prove, too
near to see, but the greater and the nearer, the more fit to be loved!
There were things against it! Nature herself seemed against it, for,
lovely us she was, she did awful things! Could Nature have come from one
source, and God be another source from which came man? He was too near
Nature, too much at home with her, to believe it. Could it be one Nature
that made all the lovely things, and another Nature that decreed their
fate? That also he could not believe: they and their fate must be from
one hand, or heart, or will! He could but hope there might be some way
of reconciling the terrible dissonance between Nature and Barbara's God!
If there was such a way, if their contradiction was only in seeming,
then the very depth of their unity might be the cause of their seeming
discord!
Something in this way the mind of Richard felt and thought and saw and
doubted and speculated. Then he would turn to the ancient story--still
because “Barbara said.”
The God Barbara believed in was like Jesus Christ!--not at all like the
God his mother believed in! Jesus was one that could be loved: he
could not have come to reveal such a God as his mother's, for he was
no revelation of that kind of a God! He was gentle, and cared for the
individual! And he said he loved the Father! But he was his son, and a
good son might love a bad father. Yes, but could a bad God have a good
son? No; the son of God must be the revelation of his father; such as
the Son is, just such and no other must the Father be; there cannot but
be harmony between the beings of the two!
In very truth there must appear schism in Nature, yea schism in God
himself, until we see that the ruling Father and the suffering Son are
of one mind, one love, one purpose; that in the Father the Son rules,
in the Son the Father suffers; that with the Son the other children must
suffer and rise to rule. To Richard's eyes there was schism everywhere;
no harmony, no right, no concord, no peace! And yet all science pointed
to harmony, all imagination thirsted for it, all conscience commanded
it! all music asserted and prophesied it! all progress was built on the
notion of it! all love, the only thing yielding worth to existence, was
a partial realization of it! So that the schism came even to this, that
harmony itself was divided against itself, asserting that the thing that
was not, and could not be, yet ought to be! Nothing but harmony has a
real, a true, an essential being; yet here were thousands of undeniable
things which seemed to exist in very virtue of their lack of harmony!
There were shocks and recoils in every part of every thinking soul,
in every part of the object-world! And yet in certain blissful pauses,
unlooked for, uncaused by man, certain sudden silences of the world, an
eternal harmony would for one moment manifest itself behind the seething
conflicting discords that fill the atmosphere of the soul--straightway
to vanish again, it is true, but into the heart of Hope that saves
men. If harmony was not at one with itself in its harmony, neither was
discord at one with itself in its discordancy! Now and then all nature
seemed on the point of breaking into a smile, and saying, “Ah, children!
if you but knew what I know!” Why did she not say what she knew? Why
should she hide the thing that would make her children blessed?
The thought, half way to an answer, did not come to Richard then: What
if we are not yet able to understand her secret--therefore not able to
see it although it lies open before us? What if the difficulty lies in
us! What if Nature is doing her best to reveal! What if God is working
to make us know--if we would but let him--as fast as ever he can!
There is one thing that will not be pictured, cannot be made notionally
present to the mind by any effort of the imagination--one thing that
requires the purest faith: a man's own ignorance and incapacity. It is
impossible to think of the object of our ignorance, how then realize the
ignorance whose very centre is a blank, a negation! When a man knows,
then first he gets a glimpse of his ignorance as it vanishes. Ignorance,
I say, cannot be the object of knowledge. We must _believe_ ourselves
ignorant. And for that we must be humble of heart. When our world seems
clear to the horizon, when the constellations beyond look plainest, when
we seem to be understanding all within our scope, then have we yet to
believe that, unseen, formally unsuspected, beyond, lies that which may
wither up many forms of our belief, and must modify every true form
in which we hold the truth. For God is infinite, and we are his little
ones, and his truth is eternally better than the best shape in which we
see it. Jesus is perfect, but is our idea of him perfect? One thing only
is changeless truth in us, and that is--obedient faith in him and his
father. Even that has to grow--but with a growth which is not change.
That there is a greater life than that we feel--yea, a life that causes
us, and is absolutely and primarily essential to us--of this truth we
have a glimpse; but no man will arrive at the peace of it by struggling
with the roots of his nature to understand them, for those roots go down
and out, out and down infinitely into the infinite. It is by acting upon
what he sees and knows, hearkening to every whisper, obeying every hint
of the good, following whatever seems light, that the man will at length
arrive. Thus obedient, instead of burying himself in the darkness about
its roots, he climbs to the tree-top of his being; and looking out
thence on the eternal world in which its roots vanish and from which it
draws its nourishment, he will behold and understand at least enough to
give him rest--and how much more, let his Hope of the glory of God stand
at its window and tell him. For in his climbing, the man will, somewhere
in his progress upward, the progress of obedience, of accordance to the
law of things, awake to know that the same spirit is in him that is
in the things he beholds; and that his will, his individuality, his
consciousness, as it infolds, so it must find the spirit, that root of
himself, which is infinitely more than himself, that “one God and Father
of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.” When He is
known, then all is well. Then is being, and in it the growth of being,
laid open to him. God is the world, the atmosphere, the element, the
substance, the essence of his life. In him he lives and moves and has
his being. Now he lives indeed; for his Origin is his, and this rounds
his being to eternity. God himself is his, as nothing else could be his.
The serpent of doubt is gagged with his own tail, and becomes the symbol
of the eternal.
Dissatisfaction is but the reverse of the medal of life. So long as a
man is satisfied, he seeks nothing; when a fresh gulf is opened in his
being, he must rise and find wherewithal to fill it. Our history is the
opening of such gulfs, and the search for what will fill them.
But Richard was far yet from having his head above the cloudy region of
moods and in the blue air of the unchangeable. As the days went by and
brought him no word from Barbara, the darkness again began to gather
around him. There are as many changes in a lover's weather as in that
of England. The sad consolations of nature by degrees forsook him;
they grew all sadness and no consolation. The winter of his soul wept
steadily upon him, laden with frost and death. He went back to his stern
denial of a God. He thought he had no need of any God, because he had no
hope in any.
Strangely, but in accordance with his nature, while he denied God, he
denied him resentfully. “If there were a God,” he said, “why should I
pray to him? He has taken from me the one good his world held for me!”
Not an hour would he postpone judgment of him; not one century would he
give the God of patience to justify himself to his impatient child!
He lost his love of reading. A book was to him like a grinning
death's-head. He ministered to it no longer with his mind, but only with
his hands. He hated the very look of poetry. The straggling lines of it
were loathsome to his eyes. Where, in such a world as he now lived
in, could live a God worth being? Where indeed? Richard made his own
weather, and it was bad enough. Happily, there is no law compelling a
man to keep up the weather or the world he has made. Never will any man
devise or develop mood or world fit to dwell in. He must inhabit a world
that inhabits him, a world that envelops and informs every thought and
imagination of his heart.
In Richard's world, the one true, the one divine thing was its misery,
for its misery was its need of God.