NEW LAMPS FOR OLD
DURING the next few days a thing happened that surprised everyone. Sir
Bernard Vanbrugh and Lord Alistair became great friends.
Alistair had motives that were plain enough to three members of the
little party for his goodwill towards Hero’s father. But it puzzled the
two women to account for the pleasure which Sir Bernard evidently found
in the society of the young man.
To the Duchess the development did not bring unmixed satisfaction.
Her own acquaintance with the scientist had begun with some secret
trepidation on her part. She knew that Vanbrugh held opinions which
she had been accustomed to hear described in the venomous language of
her creed as infidelity, and which she had been taught to attribute to
moral perversity rather than to mental aberration. Such a man was not
the father-in-law she would have chosen for her son, though she had
resigned herself to the relationship as an inevitable evil, the flaw
inseparable from all human arrangements. While it pleased her to see
that he liked Alistair, she watched with secret uneasiness Alistair’s
unaffected liking for him.
To Vanbrugh the young man presented himself as an intelligent
companion, a rare exception among the crowd of contemporary youths with
minds ranging from bridge to polo, and from horses to ballet-girls. It
could not have occurred to him in any case that the Duke of Trent’s
brother was a probable aspirant to the prize which the Duke had failed
to gain, and, in fact, his mind was so thoroughly armed against the
possibility of Lord Alistair as a son-in-law that he never thought of
him in any such connection.
He spoke of him freely to Hero, as he might have spoken of a character
in some play which they had both seen.
“I like that scapegrace because he is so sincere,” he confided to
her one evening after Stuart had left them. “He never seems to have
acquired the habit of hypocrisy. I suppose it is because he has always
had the world at his feet. If he had ever had to earn his living he
would have had to pretend like the rest.”
Vanbrugh’s brow contracted as he added:
“The Queen said to me once: ‘I like you, Sir Bernard, because you
always tell me the exact truth.’ I replied to her: ‘That is the reason,
Madam, why it has taken me forty years to come into your presence.’”
The physician’s long and stern fight with society, as represented
by his own profession, had qualified him to sympathize with another
Ishmael, though one of a very different order. His indulgence for Lord
Alistair did not spring from any flexibility in his own standard of
conduct; but for the shams of European morality, for the decorum which
consists in keeping one’s wife in London, and one’s concubines in
Paris, he had as strong a contempt as Alistair’s own. The proprieties
of the cupboard-door were equally loathsome to both; the hackneyed
dance of society, for ever whirling giddily round on the skirts of the
Divorce Court maelstrom, was equally repellent.
The attitude of the scientist contained an enigma for Alistair, whose
intellect, wavering and searching like a flame in the wind, contrasted
with Vanbrugh’s as the strength of fire contrasts with the strength of
steel. To him there appeared something stubborn and unreasonable in the
scientist’s morality, which substituted collective Teutonic instinct
for the voice of God. The Haeckelian vision of a world of Unitarian
ministers and their wives leading uniform lives in a Prussian barrack
struck cold on his imagination. In the new ethics he found the Puritan
prison-house without the window.
There was one difference, however, for which he could only be grateful.
His new friend appeared to reverse the common practice, and to be
strict with himself only that he might be merciful with others. His
programme did not include the conversion of the sinner, and for the
first time in his life Alistair found himself associating with a
righteous man who did not want to do him good.
This unique toleration would have refreshed him under any other
circumstances. But at such a moment, and in such a quarter, it
disconcerted him. When, with some idea of softening the judgment of
Hero’s father, Alistair attempted a plea that he had sown his wild
oats, he was taken aback by the answer:
“The evil is sometimes not in sowing wild oats, but in sowing tame oats
among them. Mixed oatmeal is good for neither horse nor man.”
“I am not sure that I understand you,” Stuart faltered.
“I mean that it is a dangerous idea that the really diseased can become
good members of society. In my experience a man who tries to change his
nature often changes it for the worse. The reformed drunkard is apt to
become an insane teetotaller, and the reformed rake makes the worst
possible father.”
Alistair dared not pursue the subject. He had some ground for hoping
that Sir Bernard’s practice might be less inexorable than his
principles.
Soon after their meeting, the Duchess, overcoming her dread of the
scientist for Alistair’s sake, ventured to ask him what he thought of
her boy. Vanbrugh, with his habitual bluntness, had terrified her by
responding:
“I think he drinks too much. You ought to try to stop him.”
The poor mother had already noticed, and tried to shut her eyes to,
this weakness of Alistair’s, new in her experience of him. It was due,
she told herself, to the influence of Molly Finucane, and would pass
away now that he had escaped from that evil atmosphere.
Something of this she tried to plead to Sir Bernard.
“He never used to take too much,” she said. “But he is easily
influenced by his companions. He needs someone to watch over and
strengthen him.”
“Yes.” Even Vanbrugh shrank from speaking his whole mind about Lord
Alistair to the trembling mother. “If you can persuade him to stay with
you it may check him.”
The Duchess was afraid to carry her soundings further. For the first
time it dawned upon her that Sir Bernard was capable of taking a
critical view of such a son-in-law.
She had conveyed the physician’s judgment to Alistair, and Alistair
had rejoiced her by a promise of amendment which had so far been kept.
To help him, the Duchess had insisted on sacrificing her own glass of
wine, and as both the Vanbrughs were water-drinkers, all intoxicants
had silently disappeared from the tables of both households.
Alistair was touched by his mother’s self-denial on his behalf, and
cheered by Hero’s delicate sympathy. In the first flush of his new
resolution, amid the distractions of his changed life, and buoyed up by
the inspiration of his love, the path of reformation was made smooth
for him. The gloomy feelings that had haunted him in London returned
into the remote recesses of consciousness. The bright constellation of
Ormuzd rose beckoning before him, and the dark Sign of the Suffering
One sank below the horizon of life.
The only reminders he had of the past were the letters that reached him
from Molly Finucane.
At first the letters had come every day, passionate, reproachful,
entreating him to return to her. Molly protested that she had seen
no more of Mendes; that she was selling everything in the house
at Chelsea; that they would still have enough to go on with till
Alistair’s allowance from his brother became due; that she would follow
him and live with him where and how he would. When Alistair wrote back
what he intended for a final farewell, and sent a banknote given him by
his mother, Molly returned the note torn into a dozen pieces. Then the
letters became fewer and more pleading and pitiful. At last there came
one telling him that Molly had taken refuge with her brother, whose
address she gave him, in some Lambeth slum. After that there were no
more letters. The little woman had sunk in despair.
Alistair tried hard to forget Molly Finucane, and for a time it seemed
to him that he had succeeded. His love, if the passion she had aroused
in him deserved that name, had died out of itself, his compassion had
been put to sleep by the influences brought to bear upon him. If these
good women, if one so filled with the spirit of Christian charity
as his mother, could see nothing blameworthy in his desertion of
Molly--indeed, nothing that was not wholly praiseworthy--surely it was
absurd for him, the prodigal and the bankrupt, the unbeliever and the
misanthrope, to let himself be tormented by misgivings. To ruin what
was left of his own life for the sake of one whom no human sacrifice
could redeem--surely this were madness rather than heroism.
In this mood he became a ready listener to the philosophy of Sir
Bernard Vanbrugh; and Sir Bernard expounded his philosophy with some of
that proselytizing zeal which marked the last generation of scientists,
the Huxleys and the Tyndalls, before Science had laid down her arms
at the feet of the great Sphynx, and confessed that she had found no
better symbol to replace the old.
It would have surprised and alarmed the Duchess if she had been told
that the topic most frequently discussed between Sir Bernard Vanbrugh
and her son was religion. It would have more than surprised her, it
would have found her utterly incredulous, if anyone had told her that
Alistair had an intensely religious nature.
To her unnaturally stunted mind the word “religion” had only one
meaning, and unbelief only one excuse. Alistair had heard the Gospel.
In his boyhood he had shown signs of yielding to its influence; it
followed, therefore, that his later rejection of it was a deliberate
surrender to Satan. Everything in his troubled life that had resulted
from his having been violently robbed of his own religion she
attributed to his wilful and wicked refusal to embrace hers.
In reality, ever since the evangelical tutors employed by the Duchess
had succeeded in convincing Alistair that the Catholic creed was false,
without convincing him that their own creed was true, he had been
groping in a spiritual twilight. The religious instinct, though wounded
and defaced, was not dead.
He still cherished a more kindly feeling for the Roman Church than
for any other, as the one which he had found most indulgent to the
sinner, or, at all events, most intelligent and tactful in dealing
with himself. To his intellect the language of both creeds sounded
incredible. But whereas the teachers of his mother’s confession
seemed to share the darkness of their most ignorant disciples, he had
found among the priests of Rome some whom he could listen to without
impatience.
“Our Church,” they declared, “has never claimed that her formulas
should be taken literally like mathematical propositions. The Catholic
word for ‘creed’ is ‘symbol.’ We offer our dogma, not as the truth
itself, but as a symbol of the truth--an allegory, if you will. It is
the best statement of the relations between the Unseen and man that the
human mind is capable of receiving, and we offer it as nothing more.”
This comfortable language would have gone far to satisfy Alistair
if he had not observed on the part of his Catholic friends a
certain reticence and subservience to authority which alarmed his
liberty-loving instincts.
The answer to his demand for freedom was the answer of all priesthoods.
“Only a few minds are strong enough to stand alone. Our Church does
not forbid inquiry. She does not punish freethought. What she forbids
and punishes is the attempt to disturb the ignorant, to rob them of
the faith which is the best for them, without giving them anything
in exchange. You may persuade the peasant-woman to give up her
Christian Catechism, but you will not persuade her to replace it by the
Synthetical Philosophy.”
Alistair felt that this was still the old situation. He was to be
silenced lest others might be shocked. He was to be bound that they
might be free--to suffer that they might be strong.
While he thus found himself cut off from the communion of the orthodox,
the Christian religion continued to fascinate him. His spirit felt the
presence of a living truth concealed in these formulas which his mind
could not accommodate, like a beautiful face hidden beneath an ugly
mask.
Sir Bernard Vanbrugh’s theology was of the new scientific kind which
calls itself anthropology. The analysis of myths and the genesis of
beliefs had formed his favourite study, outside the range of his
profession, and he found a missionary’s satisfaction in imparting his
lore to Alistair Stuart.
“Christianity,” Vanbrugh proclaimed, “is a synthesis of all the ancient
beliefs of the Mediterranean, some of them comparatively enlightened,
others purely barbarous. We are now able to trace every one of its
rites and dogmas to an origin in some older state of society. Its
evolution has been as entirely natural as that of man himself.”
“Is not that rather in its favour than against it?” Alistair suggested.
“Is it not possible to view the primitive beliefs as the gradual
unfolding of a great truth?”
Vanbrugh frowned. This was not language that he liked to hear.
“That is what the orthodox would say, no doubt. But I am not concerned
with apologetics. No serious thinker will ever again waste his time in
controversy with that class of person.”
“I am afraid the orthodox would not think one view any better than
the other,” replied Alistair, thinking of his mother. “Isn’t it the
orthodox view that all the resemblances to Christianity found in other
religions are blasphemous parodies contrived by the devil in order to
discredit the true faith?”
Sir Bernard smiled, reassured of his pupil.
“Yes, I suppose that is the sound explanation. But there is a school
of reconcilers abroad, men who want to retain positions in the Church
without wholly forfeiting the respect of educated men, and their
favourite cry just now is the evolution of religion.”
“But the religious instinct itself? How do you account for that?”
“In the beginning it was nothing but the savage’s fear of
Nature, as Lucretius observed. In our days it is an atavistic
survival--practically a disease.”
Alistair trembled.
“Is it a disease that can be cured?”
“Every disease can be cured as soon as it is understood, or if not
cured in the individual it can be eliminated in the race. Where
religion is due to a mere obstruction in the brain, we shall in time be
able to remove it by trepanning; but where it is a hysterical symptom,
the only remedy will be to isolate the sufferers, as we now isolate the
insane, and allow them to die out.”
A strange light broke on Alistair.
“Is not that what the Catholic Church does?” he said eagerly. “Her
monks and nuns--are they not really hysterical patients who are
voluntarily adopting the very course that science would prescribe for
them?”
The scientist grudgingly conceded that this was so.
“Unfortunately the convents soon became mere refuges for the idle,” he
observed. “And healthy girls were forced into them by selfish parents
in order to save their dower. Still, no doubt the Protestants made
a mistake in shutting up the monasteries altogether and condemning
celibacy as a vice. There are plenty of cases in which it ought to be
compulsory.”
“Why compulsory?” Alistair pleaded. “Surely it is far better that they
should take a vow of their own accord, inspired by the thought that
they are helping to save the race?”
The scientist shrugged his shoulders.
“All that is sentiment,” he said--“one of the things for which the
healthy have no use.”
Alistair sighed.
“How monotonous the world will be when everyone is perfect! You will
have to preserve a few criminals as curiosities, like the lions and
tigers in the Zoological Gardens.”
Sir Bernard smiled good-humouredly.
“That won’t be necessary. We shall preserve some of the savage tribes
instead. They are documents of priceless value to the anthropologist.”
“When does a man cease to be a priceless document, and become a
criminal?” Stuart asked, with secret bitterness.
The other reflected for a moment.
“I suppose the answer is given by Johnson’s definition of dirt: When he
is in the wrong place.”
It was the answer which Alistair had given to himself that night on
Westminster Bridge. He was in the wrong place. But was there any right
place in the world for him?
He lifted his eyes and looked away. They were sitting on the verandah
of Vanbrugh’s house in the Malounine, facing eastward. The sun was just
leaving the sky, and the red glow of the western horizon, caught full
on the white walls and windows of St. Malo, bathed the city in fire.
Alistair’s heart beat painfully as he strained his eyes on the flaming
town. There was his world, there the vision that called to his soul.
O, not in dingy lanes, not on the cold, grey pavements of reality, but
amid those vermilion glories, his spirit should have dwelt and burned
itself away.
He was an exile. Not from the Island of Oig, nor any other island of an
earthly sea, but from that far-off sphere of which the sunset-smitten
town reminded him. He was an exile from some world of which love, and
not hate, was the keynote, banished for what fault he could not tell,
condemned to mortal life as to a penance, but tormented and consoled by
intimations from that happier state.
The soul has her imperial moments when she exercises a prerogative that
reason cannot take away; when the toilsome knowledge gathered together
by the senses falls into shards under her feet, and she enters into
possession of herself, freed from the bonds and trammels cast about her
by the material brain. In that moment Alistair did not think--he knew,
knew well, more surely than if a voice from the beyond had spoken it in
his ear, that he was an immortal spirit inhabiting eternity.
When his attention returned to the voice beside him, he found that the
agnostic was expounding the folklore of the crucifixion.
“The whole subject has been illuminated by Dr. Frazer’s book ‘The
Golden Bough,’” he was saying. “The sacrifice of a human victim in the
spring, at the time of the seed-sowing, is one of the oldest rites in
the world. The victim was originally conceived of as the corn-god, and
was put to death in order that his spirit might enter into the seed.
His body was buried in the field, and he was supposed to rise again in
the form of the harvest. In that way the dogma of Transubstantiation
had once a reasonable meaning--the bread was the flesh of the slain god
in his new avatar.”
Alistair listened like one awakening from sleep who has not yet caught
the sense of what is going on around him.
“Christianity, in short, is the old Adonis worship, adapted according
to Jewish ideas. The Old Testament is full of allusions to this
cult--‘women weeping for Tammuz,’ and so on.”
“You were speaking of a human victim,” murmured Alistair.
“Yes; it was customary to select a man at Easter, usually in later
times a condemned criminal, who was sacrificed as a scapegoat for the
sins of the people. The Jewish mob appear to have claimed a victim
in accordance with this custom. Two were released, in fact, one to
be sacrificed, and the other to be honoured as the representative of
spring.”
Alistair felt there was some confusion in this statement.
“For the sins of the people,” he repeated thoughtfully. “You say the
victim was sacrificed for the sins of the people?”
“That was one form of the cult,” the scientist assented. “The idea of
the sin-bearer is a very ancient superstition. Even the details of the
New Testament narrative follow the lines of what we know to have been
the customary ceremonial in Babylon and elsewhere. The scourging and
the crown of thorns were both familiar practices. They are alluded to
in Isaiah--‘He was wounded for our transgressions.’”
“‘With his stripes we are healed.’” Alistair finished the sentence with
a start of surprise. They were the words he had tried and failed to
remember on the night of his disgrace.
“At an earlier stage in the history of the cult the king of the tribe
had been sacrificed,” Vanbrugh went on, “So, when a criminal was
substituted, he was still called the king for the occasion.”
“It was a fine end for the criminal,” was Alistair’s comment.
His mind presented him with two contrasted pictures--the felon of
civilization, in his dreadful garb, numbered and branded like a
chattel, drudging in the stone quarries under the warder’s eye; and
that sufferer of the antique world, drawn out of some fetid Eastern
gaol, clad in the royal robe and crown, and marched in solemn
priest-led procession to the top of a Syrian hill to be put to death
for the salvation of the people. The sin-bearer, the redeemer--surely
every criminal was such! “Don’t you see,” he said suddenly to the
astonished anthropologist, “that they were right? They were simply
saying what modern science is saying, only they said it far more
beautifully. The criminal is the sin-bearer; he _is_ crucified for the
good of the people even to-day. He is imprisoned and hanged that our
lives and purses may be safe. By his stripes we are healed.”
Sir Bernard Vanbrugh told his daughter that night that he was a little
disappointed in Lord Alistair.
“He is brilliant enough in his own way,” was the scientist’s verdict,
“but not practical. I am afraid he is a dreamer.”
It was the dreamer that Hero loved.