Horace Gildea was the grandson of one of those self-reliant energetic men of the English upper Middle-class, who at an early period of life conceive a particular ambition, and devote themselves wholly to the successful achievement of it. Edward Gildea, the man in question, desired, or we may even say intended, to possess both wealth and position, and he was, as the expression goes, still young (between forty and fifty years of age, that is) when his intentions were fulfilled. A baronetcy was conferred on him by a grateful Conservative government: his marriage with the only daughter of Lord Mainwaring had already brought him a considerable amount of landed property; and now, having bought more, he retired from the troublous and busy world to the “easeful dignity” of the life of a rich and respected English country magnate. Our Aristocracy is adaptive (here, indeed, lies its strength, as compared, for instance, with that of France): it will enrol among its members of to-day an outgrowth of the Middle-class, upper and lower, professional or trading, with the same ready complacency with which it enrolled among its members of yesterday the offspring of some poor royal amour or other; and this is not surprising, when we perceive how little difference there is, intellectually speaking, between the three classes. The aristocratic ideal in England does not, or did not, soar much higher than grouse to shoot, land to shoot them on, and savoury cooking to eat them with; and the aristocratic ideal is, with slight modifications, the ideal of the country at large. In one generation the Gildeas were counted among, what is called, the best people. The two sons of Sir Edward were educated at public schools and Oxford and Cambridge, and passed, the one into parliament, the other into the Diplomatic-service, where neither distinguished themselves. Horace Gildea, too, an only child, was sent to a public school and Oxford, and with the same result. At Oxford, however, although he did nothing more, educationally, than take his degree, he did not spend his time in mere amusement. Thanks to the friendship of Sir James Gwatkin, the well-known æsthetic critic, Gildea learned to appreciate the delights of that wonderful modern production which we call Culture. He had sufficient knowledge of Greek and Latin to enter into the spirit of their art and poetry, and he learned French, German, and Italian in the pleasant sexual manner prescribed by Byron. He travelled more or less all over Europe, “living and loving largely,” but (unlike Byron) saved from that excess whose inevitable fruit is satiety, by the talisman with which Sir James had dowered him. Gildea had, too, what the Romans called curiositas. The merely physical ideal of the English viveur did not satisfy him: he used to say that, if he was to be a blackguard, he should like to be a fine blackguard, and how can you be a fine blackguard if you know nothing but what can be known by any fool that can pay for it?
Several years after the death of his father, Gildea, living a life of considerable enjoyment between the pleasures of the countries and the capitals of Europe, began to perceive that, after all, his talisman was not omnipotent: it could not lay, it could only distance, that ancient spectre which he now for the first time learned to face, if not to dread, Satiety. At this point, however, Fortune, whose child he seemed, came to the rescue: he fell in love. The best definition of love is, perhaps, the care of someone else more than yourself, and (the passionate would add) than anything. Gildea, then, did indeed fall in love; but as his care for himself or for anything was not very great, it cannot be said that he fell in love deeply. But Fortune, having given him a spell with which to once more distance the ancient spectre, now deserted him. The lady he loved did not love him in return: her friendship—and friendship from so sweet and passionate a nature as hers was of a somewhat intense character, partaking more of the warm sunlight than the clear moonlight—her friendship she eagerly gave to him, but her love was, past recall, given to someone else. On the day on which he first realized this, Gildea, who had hoped otherwise, left England in his little yacht the “Petrel,” alone. He had intended visiting the east with her, returning by Naples, Rome, and Paris, with many sweet years, nomadic or otherwise, in the radiant future. Now he was quite careless where he went: for the first time in his life he knew what it was to feel miserable. The loss of this woman was a loss from himself. He felt a void in his soul, in his future. “And yet,” he used to tell himself, “she was not ‘the twin soul that halved my own:’ we should not have made perfect lovers, passionate, deep, abiding! None the less do I—or did I—long for her. She is the most beautiful soul I have yet seen, or probably shall ever see. Who would not straightway go and sell all that he had to possess her?—and willingly chance the rest!”
A violent storm caught the “Petrel” as she was about halfway down the Bay of Biscay, and hurried her past Gibraltar. When Gildea perceived this, and was asked by his skipper if they should put back, he kept silence for a moment. Then, looking up with an amused smile, said:
“No, Barry. We’ll go straight on to Madeira for provisions—from thence to St. Helena, and then double the Cape and make for Australia.”
Gildea had not been to Australia: it was one of the few places in the world to which he had not been. He might, he thought now, as well go there as anywhere. Several things in Australia interested him, and this was enough reason to make him, in his present state, care to go.
One bright, showery november afternoon, then, the “Petrel” passed Port Phillip Heads: was piloted up the harbour to Port Melbourne pier, and Gildea disembarked. He knew one person in Melbourne, and only one, Charles Maddock. Maddock, and his father before him, had been friends of the Gildea family. Maddock was some fifteen years older than Gildea, whom he had known well as a boy at Katharinasbury, he himself at that time being in the midst of his brilliant scholastic career at Cambridge. Almost immediately after his ordination, Maddock came out to a high ecclesiastical position in Australia. It had been the wish of his life to work in one of the Pacific Colonies, and now his wish was fulfilled. The appointment of one so young to the post he had at first held, had caused a little murmuring both at home and in the Colony, it being known that he was possessed of the highest influence; but the murmuring had soon passed into pleasant greeting, and was now swelled to a regular chorus of applause from friends, foes, and indifferent alike. Maddock had great charm of manner: he was a more or less refined scholar, yet was not lacking in that spiritual robustness which goes so far to make up what is called a personality. It would not be too much to say that he was the most popular man in the colony. Society delighted in the gentleman: the outer world in the man, and both were right, for (here was the secret!) he sympathized with both.
Gildea on his arrival took up his abode at an hotel until he saw rooms that pleased him, and began, after his fashion, to examine the city and its inhabitants. He went everywhere and saw everything, happy to find that his curiositas was not after all dead in him. Pleasure, in the sense of living, is in Melbourne but, what Tennyson says of the pleasure of London, “gross mud-honey,” and had not much attraction to one who had been through the best specimens thereof in London, Paris, New York, and Vienna. Gildea, however, if he did not go through it here, mingled with it as an amused half-spectator half-actor, seeking out its meaning as regards this dawning civilization which was interesting him just at present. He fell in with Sydney Medwin, a squatter’s son and ex-Cambridge undergraduate, whom he had known by repute as an inter-university runner and would-be rake, and they spent some pleasant days together. Medwin’s father wished him to take to station work, but Medwin, having tasted the “gross mud-honey” of London, Paris, and the Continent generally, was doggedly determined to do no such thing.
“Damn it all,” he said once in his half-acute way to Gildea, “there’s quite enough money made already in the family, and now it’s time to spend it. If my governor had wanted me to look after sheep, he shouldn’t have sent me to Europe.”
Europe was to Medwin—to Medwin held down by his inexorable “governor” to an allowance and a place in the home establishment—a sort of far-off beautiful dream which had once to a certain extent been his and, he feared, would never be his again. His life was reckless: he was knowingly doing his best to spoil a fine constitution by his excesses, and looked forward to death within ten or fifteen years with stupid stoicism.
After a little Gildea thought that he would like to see something of colonial society, social and intellectual, and presented himself to Maddock. Maddock knew the Medwins well, and even Sydney Medwin who, in his unreflective way, had a great respect for him.
“The governor,” Medwin said once to Gildea, “the governor has ruined my life! I had an ambition—I was ambitious; yes, I was ambitious! But I had to keep it dark! I can’t argue about it, you know: I haven’t thought for years, and now I can’t. But if Christianity’s good enough for Maddock, it’s good enough for me. I believe in Maddock.”
Accordingly, whenever Maddock was to be met at the Medwins’, Sydney Medwin was to be seen listening attentively to everything the Doctor said, trying to think, trying to understand, the look of intelligence varying on his face with the look of puzzlement.
“A fuddled intelligence,” said Gildea once, smiling and laughing; “now he’ll be off and get drunk with one of his girls at Dicks’.” (Dicks’ was a private hotel where “the set,” as Medwin and his friends called themselves, often met for the purposes of recreation.)
Maddock was very pleased to meet Gildea again, and during the next month they saw much of each other. Gildea mingled with the Colonial society as he had mingled with the outer world, but with less interest. The Colonial outer world is at any rate original: it does not imitate, it is. Colonial society, on the other hand, imitates and imitates badly. It is a case of the new wine in the old bottles. The young people wish to break away from all the old social convenances and bien-séances: they have almost a contempt for the old people; but the old people rule, and their rule is as yet too strong to be openly disobeyed. The young people, therefore, lack social self-reliance: they have no distinctive “style” of their own as in America. “Indeed,” as Medwin used to say, “no one has any style out here, except the people at Government House.—And they,” he would add, admiringly, “look down upon us all as louts.” The young people, then, feel their ideas of happiness to be frail, immature: pleasure is not, as in the European capitals, provided for them; they must provide it for themselves. Pleasure, however, is their aim, and pleasure, so soon as they rule in their turn, they will have. The question is whether this pleasure is to be “mud-honey”—“mud-honey” with its grossness drained somewhat, but still “mud-honey”—or whether that wonderful modern production which we call Culture is going to intervene and complicate matters.
Gildea soon wearied of a society in such a painful state of transition. Having arrived at these conclusions on its tendencies, or what he took to be its tendencies, the painfulness of it began to afflict him. At the same time his interest in the problem of this small social hot-house did not, somewhat to his surprise, show signs of leaving him.
One evening, at a large ball, he had been dancing and talking with a singularly bright and intelligent girl, who had pleased him by herself expressing her consciousness of this state of social transition of theirs, and ascribing the true reasons for it. They sat out several dances together, he enjoying her talk as that of a clever child, she with her woman’s vanity pleased to be monopolizing the most distinguished man in the room, and also glad of his mental appreciation of her. He half lay in a low chair beside her, looking at her with smiling eyes and smiling lips, amused. She was a little excited, just enough to give extra brilliance to her words and acts. She was not speaking to him alone: she was aware of the audience of guests, all of whom, she felt, were noticing her, and some catching parts of the conversation. He, who read her soul as if it were transparent, became more and more amused as she proceeded, and by an occasional movement helped her out with the impression he saw she wished to give her friends, namely, that he was more or less entranced by her. The thought of taking her to Paris and introducing her to its society, of watching her intense capacities of social pleasure expanding there in their natural atmosphere, occurred to him and pleased him. He had arrived at that spiritual state when much of our pleasure is in watching the pleasure of other people.
“Well,” he said at last, “and do you not find yourself lonely here, with all these wonderful ideas of yours, Miss Shepherd? All the other Melbourne young ladies do not, surely, participate in them?”
She was not quite sure for a moment whether he was mocking at her or not; but, looking at his face, decided in the negative.
“Yes,” she said, “I am lonely—rather. The other girls want to see things. They want to go to Europe—London, Paris, and all that. But they say it’s such a bother, and they’ve no memory. They don’t know what they want: they only know that they don’t want what they’ve got.—But I—,” she added, turning to him, and catching her lower lip lightly with her pretty visible teeth, one hand on her knee closing slightly.
“But you?”
“I want to—live!”
A pause.
“Ah,” he said, “that means that some day you will want to die.”
“I daresay! But I shall have lived first!—This Melbourne is just waking up. I wish, O I wish I had not come into it till it was awake!”
“You would like to go to Paris, then?”
“Paris!” (She stopped breathing.)—“O that,” she said, looking at him again, “is simply heaven!”
“How do you know that, Miss Shepherd?”
“Oh, I have read it! I have read all Alphonse Daudet’s novels, and a lot of Balzac’s.”
As Gildea strolled through the warm night streets, smoking a cigar, he thought of her again for a moment, and laughed to himself.
“The one Parisienne I have met out of Paris,” he said to himself, “She is of the tribe of the fine steel-pearl mangeuses who rend life with their dear little white teeth for the pleasure of rending. She should have been born in a concierge’s lodge, with a future in ermine—and the Morgue. And yet she is better than the mere mangeuse: she has intelligence. She has to thank Australia for that. For a month, or even two, she would be supportable—but the “Petrel” would take three to get her to Naples, perhaps, and it would be more trouble to loose her and let her go then than now.”
He had been strolling about the streets for more than an hour. He was not quite sure where he was. He stopped for a moment to look about him. A short well-moulded figure in a close dress and a poke bonnet passed him and turned down a narrow street ten or twelve yards ahead. He threw away his cigar.
“Janet,” he said to himself, “sweet child! And she recognized me and went on.”
Janet, a Salvation Army “lass,” going down into the Little Bourke Street slums had indeed recognised him. The figure of a man, in a light overcoat open in front showing that he was in evening dress, was remarkable enough, to have attracted anyone’s attention there. She had looked up for a moment: caught a glimpse of his face and, with a wild throbbing heart and quivering lips, hurried by, and on, and away. Gildea’s investigations into the social condition of the place had made him many unexpected friends. Here was one who was something more than a friend, a lover, and he knew it.
“I am sick of it,” he said to himself, almost bitterly, “I will go away. I want change.”
At about five o’clock that morning Sir Horace Gildea was rowed aboard of the “Petrel,” which passed out of the Heads a little after one, and turned to the east, making for Sydney.
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning of a day late in april. The sun shone with bright warmth, a fresh breeze blowing in from the sea. Great deep masses of cloud, luminous-white or here and there shaded with that slaty black which denotes incipient rain, were moving in the blue vault of the heavens. Gildea was descending the steps of the entrance to St. Mary’s Cathedral, accompanied by a young man of about his own age. At the foot of the steps they both paused.
“Well,” said Gildea with a look, “You will be at my rooms in time for lunch, you say?”
The other nodded, and, in a few moments, saluting one another with a movement of the hand, they parted. The young man went with a quick firm step in the direction of St. James’ Church, while Gildea sauntered across the road into the Domain. He was thinking of the young man, Francis Fitzgerald, a young Jesuit whom he had met years ago at a seaside place in the south of France, and who, as he said, for the sake of his health, had come out on a voyage to Australia.
“It is wonderful,” said Gildea to himself, “how quickly and thoroughly the religious bodies are waking up to the intellectual necessities of the time. Romans—Anglicans—Lutherans, and even Calvinists are sucking lustily at the two paps of the Modern Spirit which we call Science and Culture. It is the instinct of self-preservation. If they do not suck they will starve. But ah, how many of us are cross-tempered enough to prefer to starve rather than imbibe the milk of a cross-tempered mother!” He looked up with a fine smile, suddenly realizing his humour of thought. “I am quite serious,” he said to himself, the smile deepening and broadening, lighting up his face with amusement, “which shows how adaptive I am. Really now, I listened to Fitzgerald’s hopes and beliefs in the future of Romanism with quite as much interest as if I were a Romanist myself. I can quite conceive of myself taking very considerable pains to forward a cause in which somebody else believed. This surely was the central idea of my attachment to Olivia Bruce? I used to think I should be quite satisfied to live the life of a poet in that of my poetess? So far, this power of living your own life in the life of one you love has been a female gift. And indeed I have often thought that I should have been better as a woman. I can quite imagine myself as Lady Bellfield or d’Israeli’s delightful Berengaria; whereas now, I am but an aimless wanderer on the face of an aimless planet, a pilgrim without a shrine.”
He walked on half-thoughtful half-amused, till he had crossed the Domain and found himself opposite the Picture Gallery and the Botanical Gardens. He entered the gardens, and was proceeding down one of the walks when, some fifteen yards before him, he beheld a well-known figure. It was Maddock, Maddock standing at the side of the walk, observing a plant through his pince-nez with serene interest. Gildea came up to him with pleasure.
“Ah, Doctor,” he said, “you here! This is a surprise!”
They shook hands: greeted one another, and exchanged health notes both of themselves and Mrs. Maddock, as they went on down the walk together, the Doctor rubbing his glasses with his silk handkerchief and keeping step.
“The truth is, my dear fellow,” he said, his head up and moving from side to side as he drew into himself the enjoyment of the fine morning air and scene, “the truth is, I am here for a holiday—or rather, for half a holiday. Sydney is a favourite place of mine.—But,” he added in his humorous confidential way, “you know I don’t care for the people! They are not in earnest enough! I would sooner, I believe, have an earnest atheist than a lukewarm orthodox man. Isn’t it your friend Renan who says somewhere, that the atheist has an idea of things, a quite inadequate idea, it is true, but still an idea, whereas ‘the average sensual man’ has none?—or something to that effect.”
“Yes,” said Gildea, “he says so; and he adds elsewhere that ‘atheism is one sense the grossest of anthropomorphisms. The atheist sees justly that God does not act in this world after the manner of man; hence he concludes that he does not exist; he would believe if he beheld a miracle—in other words, if God acted as a finite force with a determinate object in view.’”
“That is good,” said Maddock, “I did not give Renan credit for saying such a thing.”
“No,” said Gildea, “you have never got much further in Biblical criticism than the Germans. Strauss satisfies you as the great Against, and poor Westcott as the gigantic For!”
They both laughed.
“Come, come,” said Maddock, “you must not poke fun at me!”
“It is impossible,” Gildea answered, “to poke fun at an ecclesiastic who calls Heine ‘a great poet and brilliant philosopher.’”
“Ah, you have been reading my last polemic, I see?—Yes, you must have been reading it; for no newspaper man would ever think of quoting an opinion like that.”
“I have been reading it with admiration and wonder: admiration at its excellence as polemical work, and wonder that you should take the trouble to castigate a production which you yourself declare to be, as a contribution to theological knowledge, utterly useless.”
“Yes, but did I not explain myself? The book is fundamentally vicious. It confirms the shallow heterodox in their heterodoxy, the shallow orthodox in their orthodoxy. It gives forth light to no one and darkness to everyone. Progress in foolishness and stupidity, that is all that it signalises; the foolishness of ‘go-aheadism,’ the stupidity of re-action. I have no patience with a man of presumable intelligence who could write such a book.”
“But do you not think that your attack on it will only, by bringing it into public notice, increase its powers of mischief?”
“I hope not. I hope that I have sufficiently laid bare its gross ignorance of the subject of which it treats to bring it into that contempt whose fruit is oblivion.”
“In England—in London or in any country or capital where there is a large intellectual life—this might be so. But am I not right, Doctor, in believing that this Victorian Melbourne of yours is a place where pure intellectual life scarcely exists? You have the mass of intelligent money-makers who care, or who do not care, for things (I will not say religious but) sectarian. Then there are those who care for things political; but where will you find any number of men who aim at making their life the purely intellectual life? They are all partizans here. When, therefore, you attack a Rationalist like Judge Parker, all the Rationalists rally round him, just as the orthodox rally round you; and the result is, as the Argus says, a boxing match, wherein the great thing is to at all price shout down their man and shout up your own. Truth turns away in disgust from such an exhibition of blind deaf bawling partizanary. These men are not of the sort that are open to reason: you cannot lay bare to such as these the gross ignorance or perfect science of their champion; they will only hiss or applaud as you blame or praise him. I may be wrong: my observation of your so-called intelligent public, is, you know, necessarily but small.”
Maddock kept silence with rumpled brows. At last:
“I do not know,” he said, “that you are not, after all, to a large degree right. We are very narrow here. A thing done in the street is done in the city, and indeed in the whole country!”
“And am I not right in thinking that the only two native subjects, which are capable of arousing public interest and curiosity here, are those which appeal to the two portions of your mass of intelligent money-makers—things pertaining to business, and things sectarian?”
The Doctor suddenly regained his humour.
“Are,” he said, the deep humorous smile playing about his mouth, “are all the fashionable young men who come out here in yachts as acute observers as you, Sir Horace?—But I object to your word sectarian: you should say religious. I am quite ready to admit that (to put it as a Melbourne printer put it to me the other day) the only subject that will pay for book-printing here is Religion, and Religion, alas, in its polemical aspect. But I cannot look upon this, as you seem to do, as a great misfortune. I—I ... well, I may say candidly, that I rather like a bit of polemics now and then, and the shouts of the men round the ropes do not altogether disgust me, as of course” (his eyebrows went up) “they ought to do! No, I do not look upon that purely intellectual life of yours as by any means the ideal for us to aim at. It smacks too much of dilettantism for me!”
Gildea smiled.
“Dear Doctor,” he said, “we all know that you prefer a climate where the sky is not always a cloudless vault of blue insipidity. The sound and feel of a buffeting wind is pleasant to you. As I said just now, you prefer Strauss to Renan, and the good secular Saint Matthew Arnold finds small favour in your eyes. Now too that you are taking to science, I expect every day to hear you tell us Cuvier was a greater man than Darwin, and that Huxley is an impudent young amphioxus that has no place beside the dignity of our dear old behemoth, Owen.”
“Now I really won’t let you poke fun at me,” said the Doctor, “I really won’t! The next thing is, that you will be saying something rude about Professor Mosley and his “Ruling Ideas in Early Ages,” and scoffing at my idea of having some of his essays reproduced in our Daily Telegraph.”
“Oh no, Doctor, I will not do that. Even Mosley’s essays are better than the sermons of the local ecclesiastics.”
“You are very impudent,” said Maddock, his face all beaming, “to call me a local ecclesiastic! I shall have to get you to write a pamphlet on my review of ‘Religionless Religion,’ so as to be able to denounce you ex cathedra!”
“Well, I should very much like to do so, only ... you know my cowardice: I cannot write——”
“Even letters to your best friends, to explain that you have only gone off to sea at an hour’s notice, and are not, as they anxiously expected, drowned, or murdered and secreted in some hole in the slums.”
“I prostrated myself in apology to Mrs. Maddock.”
“Yes, in over a week! As for Dr. Maddock, of course such a casual acquaintance as he could not expect.... Ah, you are a quite too eccentric young man, Sir Horace! I wish you were well married, with a definite aim in life. Someday one of your wild freaks will end you, and then, what, what will have been the result of those great abilities with which God has gifted you?—Now,” proceeded the Doctor, “this is not an extract from the Daily Telegraph sermon corner, but only the expression of the affectionate anxiety of one who hopes you will allow him to call himself your true friend.”
Gildea kept silence for a moment. Talk of this sort only served to show him how completely his real inner view of things was unknown to his companion, and so the idea of making an answer did not occur to him: he felt how useless it would be. Then he genially thanked the Doctor for his friendship and its kind wishes, and added lightly:
“You ask what will be the result of, as you are pleased to say, those great abilities with which God has gifted me. The result (you perceive it) will be nothing; but, Doctor, what, let me ask you, in a hundred years will be the result of those great abilities with which God has gifted you? In the hundred and first year we shall start equal; and I, who have not a belief in a personal God and a personal immortality as you have, find the whole matter, I confess, rather absurd! This would not probably have been so always. If I had lived in the days when action indeed contained the highest stakes of life, I should have played for them; but, as it is, the highest stakes now belong to the thinker, the writer, and I—I cannot write ... even letters! I, like all my contemporaries, am more or less under the sad dominion of the perception of, what Leopardi calls, the ‘infinita vanità del tutto,’ but, unlike the best of them, I have no care for the only immortality we have left, the immortality of Art or Science. I think of the hundred, or thousand, or million and first year, and find myself smiling.”
Gildea was soliloquising, Maddock forgotten. He had, then, after all, drifted into making the answer, the idea of making which had, by reason of its clear uselessness, not occurred to him; and yet he had not made it to Maddock, but to himself. Maddock, indeed, did not altogether understand it, but the feeling of it, the belief that inspired it, he felt and hastened to reply to. He laid his hand gently on Gildea’s arm, bringing him to a pause, and said simply:
“Look!”
They had come down as far as Farm Cove—skirted it, turning off along Lady Macquarie’s Walk—then mounted up onto the drive, and, having passed by the Chair, were now standing on the brow of the slope with an open view of Garden Island (Clark Island being hidden), the harbour, and the woody hills behind it. Great deep masses of cloud, luminous-white or here and there shaded with that slaty black which denotes incipient rain, were moving in the blue vault of the heavens. Light and shade lay everywhere in alternate streaks or patches. One round piece of water to the left was like a burnished blazing mirror of steel. Other parts were blue, gray, or dark, reflecting the cloud-colours above them. The anchored ships rose and fell gently, their flags fluttering. A steamer came stealing out of one of the harbour arms into the open. The only sounds of life were the far-off hammer-strokes of the builders, the occasional cry of the white fleeting sea-gulls, the striking of a ship’s bells, the cricket humming at their feet.
“And,” Maddock said, in his deep voice of earnestness, “in the face of such a scene as this—the free glory of nature so great and so glad, the wonderful toil and effort and happiness of mankind—you will say to yourself: ‘There is no soul in me, for there is no God to give it!’ Ah, my dear Sir Horace, you surprise and grieve me! Are you not—you, oh heavens, you!—at heart an atheist? are you not guilty of that grossest of anthropomorphisms yourself?”
Gildea smiled, a fine sweet smile of sadness that made even the strong steady heart of his companion turn faint for a moment and sick. There was something so absolutely inevitably hopeless, as it seemed to Maddock, in this strange soul that he saw before him, now for the first time laid bare. Here was a patient for which the physician felt he had no power of healing or even alleviation. What view of christian faith and hope and love did not this strange soul know? Maddock, for the first time in his life, felt himself in the presence of one, the breadth and depth and height of whose spiritual experience encompassed him like an ocean. The words of remonstrance died on his lips: exhortation lay lifeless in him: silence and sorrow possessed him. He turned away with a heavy sigh, a sigh which was the unconscious acknowledgment to himself that life and death, time and eternity, man and God, could indeed be read in two diametrically different ways. For the first time in his life he realized the truth of “the Everlasting No” in a human soul greater than his own.
They walked on together for a little in silence. Then Gildea said as simply and naturally as if nothing unusual had happened:
“Now, Doctor, tell me will you come and have lunch with me? Mrs. Maddock, you say, has shaken you off for the sake of a long morning with Lady Whitfield, and why should you not retort on her spinster’s déjeuner with a bachelor’s lunch? I ought to have thought of it before.”
The Doctor again suddenly regained his humour.
“Thank you,” he said, “I shall be charmed.”
“Nay,” said Gildea, smiling, “but I must bid you pause a moment, aimless dreamer that I am, and tell you who you will meet there. Perhaps you will want your assent back again.”
“Speak on,” said Maddock, “and, provided it is not some one who will object to my smoking afterwards, I ... I don’t think I shall!”
“The guests, then, are three in number. Firstly, James Alcock, who, they tell me, is the most secular and scientific member of all the Australian Legislative Assemblies——”
“Go on,” said Maddock.
“Doctor,” Gildea said, “he reads Haeckel and swears by no other prophet of Science. Pause before it is too late. They say too that he sleeps every saturday and sunday with Mill “On Liberty” under his pillow, and all Spencer’s “Principles” strewed about the counterpane. He knew my father years ago in England, and his heart warms towards me as towards an incipient disciple.”
“Secondly—”
“Secondly, Francis Fitzgerald, a young man learned with all the learning of the Egyptians; a pilgrim and devotee at that simple west-England shrine which holds the Catholic pearl beyond all price, John Henry Newman; a scholar of the Parisian seminaries; a pupil of the inner Jesuit circle—”
“Thirdly—”
“Frank Hawkesbury, the young Australian poet; a Socialist, delighting in Trades-Unions, Religious Revivals (the Salvation Army is a hobby of his), and Secular Organizations with a grand impartiality! Nay, it is even whispered that he had dealings with Holden and the Irish and Continental Nihilists two years ago in London. Our friend Mrs. Medwin almost fainted when Sydney Medwin asked her if she would care to know him.”
“I have looked through one of the young man’s books of poems,” Maddock said, serenely, “and rather liked them. He is in earnest. Your lunch will be amusing.—It smacks to me,” he added, with a touch of grimness in his humour, “a little of those shows one sees now and then at the street-corners. They call them, I believe, happy families.”
Gildea laughed.
“Yes, Doctor,” he said, “but what if the animals should take to fighting? Alas, then, for the canaries and the mice, who will be worried and eaten by the dogs and the cats.”
“Which are who, or who are which?”
“Let us say that Alcock is a dog, and Fitzgerald a canary.”
“Then you, I suppose, are the mouse and I the cat? But what is your young Australian poet to be? You have left him out.”
“Oh, he will be a rabbit. You will see that he can burrow. It is the forte of Socialists, burrowing.—Now,” he proceeded, “we must go this way if we are to get to my rooms in time. And as we go, will you let me first express some tentative thoughts of mine, and then ask you a few questions about your friend Mr. Parker and yourself?”
“Ask on,” said Maddock, getting into step, “and I will do my best to answer you.”
“It is about this little book of his,” Gildea said, with slow reflectiveness, “‘Religionless Religion.’ I found it interesting.”
“Indeed?” said Maddock, “As interesting as the production of your dear continental sceptics?”
“Well now,” Gildea said, in a tone that implied a certain amount of candour, “to tell, what the French call, the true truth, I was struck by several things both in it and in your reply to it. I thought that it would have been difficult to have found a more typical example of the average intelligent secular view of theological Christianity than that of our good Judge.”
“I agree with you, and that was one of the reasons that made me decide to attack it. It is typical.”
“And, therefore, to anyone who is, though only as an amateur, an observer of things contemporary, it is interesting. Its very deficiencies will be instructive. Well, what I want you to do, Doctor, if you will be so good, is to help me with your superior knowledge of the things treated of to arrive at the spiritual condition of the treater. Perhaps you will not find the attempt too uninteresting, or....” He paused with a movement of courtesy.
Maddock, who had a faint suspicion that Gildea was mocking, half grumbled out humorously:
“Go on, then! Qualify yourself as a psychologist, my dear fellow, and then we will have a plunge into social metaphysics. It is refreshing in a country where they are all partizans, and Matthew Arnold and the purely intellectual life are not appreciated. Sic itur ad astra. In the name of all the lucidities, forward!”
“In the first place, then, we have to notice, have we not, that the little book is polemical, which, at any rate to the amateur observer of things contemporary, detracts somewhat from its historical value; for, after all, is not a polemist, to a large extent a man who defends the delusions of his friends against the delusions of his enemies, and leaves Truth, like the proverbial pounds, to look after herself? But, if we always remember to take off a percentage for the polemics, we need not miss what it is that the polemist really means and feels?”
“Πως γαρ οὐ?” said Maddock.
“And the more easily, as our Parker is in earnest about, what he calls, ‘his most serious and difficult task.’”
“Forensic flourishes!”
“—In earnest as far as suits the disposition of a theistic polemist.”
“—Microscopically, that is to say. The lawyer’s, and especially the successful lawyer’s, habit of thought tends towards earnestness as the sparks fly downwards.”
“For the average lawyer’s habit of thought is perhaps the most typical example of the average intelligent secular view of things. Is it not the final fruit of what is called common-sense, that is to say of the sense of common people? Our good Judge more than once speaks of himself and his audience as “persons of ordinary common-sense,” as opposed to “metaphysicians,” and especially “ecclesiastical metaphysicians.” He wants clear solid statements which his mind can see, and as it were, touch and handle. He scoffs at all statements other than these, looking upon them as at bottom sophistical. It follows that, when he comes to criticise the Bible, he claims the right to criticise it, not only with the same spirit, but with the same manner, as he would criticise any other book. He will not only look at it straight, fearlessly, logically, but he will demand of its statements that they be clear and solid, that they bear the ordinary interpretation of ordinary statements. He will apply the same principles of examination to Moses and Jesus as he would do to Blackstone or Chitty. And all the secular persons of ordinary common-sense cry out: ‘Hear, hear!’”
“With the Judge,” said Maddock, “a metaphysician is a man who examines the Bible by the aid of principles other than those of one who is ignorant of all contemporary history save that which the Bible gives him.”
“The consequence of which is, that he is capable of such a statement as, that ‘without question early Christianity was far more free from paganism and from the taint of superstition than the Christianity of our own time,’ and others of a like force.”
“He has no notion whatever of the philosophy of history—of, what I call, the development of divine Truth.”
“And yet he is contradictory enough, while asserting the degradation of the Christian ideal, to lay much stress on the development of Divine truth in a civilization that has, till comparatively lately, been Christianic. Yes, he sees the development of divine Truth, but he does not understand the forms which that development has taken in Christianity. The Trinity—the Atonement—the Deity of Christ—are to him ‘mere crude superstitions which disfigure and obscure pure and true religion.’ It never seems to have occurred to him that, although these doctrines may be empty formulæ to him, they were and are passionate realities to others.”
“That is very true.”
“He will talk with the same ignorance of what he would call Jesuolatry as a Protestant will of what he calls Mariolatry, neither he nor the Protestant understanding any more of a deep spiritual truth than its cut-and-dried dogmatical letter.” The Doctor assented, though with a movement of slight qualification.
“We agree at starting, then, that his criticism as that of an historical Bible student does not exist. The authorities he quotes are, as you point out in your Reply, ludicrous. They culminate in his poor little some ‘celebrated Unitarian minister’ or other, than whom the habit of thought of the legal Biblical critic can, it is to be hoped, no further go! He is too, we agree, careless and superficial even in his own style, but we must not lay too much stress on individual cases of this in the face of his request for ‘indulgence’ for his ‘doubtless many imperfections here.’”
“When a man speaks publicly of such a grave matter as religion,” said Maddock, “he should not be careless, he should not be superficial! We have a right to demand of those who make explosives, that they, at any rate, do not smoke in the magazine.”
“True; but, if we all got our deserts, who, you know, should escape whipping? Certainly not the producers of orthodox religious literature.”—(The Doctor, after a pause, assented as before).—“Well, we will proceed further against our good Judge, and say that his appreciation of what is, as he says, ‘good and ennobling’ is ludicrously inadequate. What can be said of a man who seriously speaks of Jesus, ‘when, in the garden of Gethsemane, he went apart and prayed, three times over, the same prayer to God, within a short period,’—of Jesus thus ‘doing that which he told his disciples not to do—“use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do,” for the reason that your heavenly Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask Him.’ Habemus confitentem asinum! We can only burst out laughing: a reply to such a statement is impossible! The lawyer’s habit of thought is at its apogee, and (as Heine says) ‘Gegen die Dummheit kämpfen wir Götter selbst vergebens.’—Against stupidity the very gods themselves struggle in vain.” The Doctor assented smiling.
“And statements similar to this are not scarce here. Our good Judge, then, has not, it is clear, much experience of the spiritual life, of those who live in the spirit. The ‘sudden conversion of Paul,’ for instance, strikes him as one of the (it is supposed) ‘improbabilities so forcible that no sane thinking man or woman can accept’ the inspiration of the Scriptures which relate them. Now, any one who knows anything of human nature other than that of ‘persons of ordinary common-sense,’ knows that such ‘sudden conversions’ are not only not improbable, but passably frequent. In some cases, as in that of Staniforth, quoted by Arnold in his ‘St. Paul and Protestantism,’ the circumstances approach so closely to those of Paul’s that we are enabled to assign to them a definite place in the science of psychology. Nor are our good Judge’s ‘errors,’ as you say, exhausted yet. We have still to bring against him the charge of, what Celsus calls, κουφοτης, and Arnold translates ‘want of intellectual seriousness.’ So confused and incoherent is his knowledge of the real position that the secular biblical critic takes up, that he absolutely calls the position taken up by the orthodox biblical critic (that is to say, biblical critics who are orthodox; as, for instance, you yourself, my dear Doctor): he absolutely calls this position critically ‘untenable,’ not perceiving that it is his own only differing in degree!—This is simply appalling! The κουφοτης of the Secularists is not a whit better, after all, than that of the Christians!”
“Yes,” said Maddock, disregarding the last remark, “but then you must remember that the Judge ‘does not intend to resort to any process of subtle argument, nor to make any display of scholastic knowledge, nor to indulge in learned disquisitions.’ He merely writes ‘popular, clear, and simple’ nonsense for ‘the doubter who is trying to grope his way to the light, but cannot; to the Atheist who believes in nothing, neither in a Supreme Power, nor in a future life.’ And your secular ingratitude to him, Sir Horace, strikes me, I must confess, as keener-toothed than the winter wind of orthodoxy!”
“Doctor,” said Sir Horace, “you are poking fun at me! But I, who am, as Shelley said of himself ‘rather serious’—I proceed in my examination, whose sole confirmation as truth I find in your words or gestures of approval. You will, I hope, forgive me for any repetition I may make of your own criticism, as a master should a humble disciple? It is only a proof of attention and admiration.”
“Go on,” said Maddock, “mocker!”
“All these faults, then, which we have remarked in our good Judge—his polemically; his ignorance of the grammar (or, perhaps, as your Reply says, the alphabet) of historical criticism; his ludicrously inadequate conception of the good and the ennobling, of the spiritual calibre of such men as, for instance, St. Paul; his superficial acquaintance with the data of the subject of which it is treating; and, finally, his κουφοτης, his want of intellectual seriousness—all these faults, are we not agreed, are the faults of the average intelligent secular view, in its negative consideration of Christian Theology? The question that now arises is, has this view nothing but faults?—has it no excellencies? Does there remain, after the attack on it of so admirable a theological polemist as Dr. Maddock is, no residuum of real and vital truth? Let us try and see.—To begin with, did we not find that, despite a contradiction, our good Judge perceived the reality of, what you so finely call, the development of divine Truth?—