Chapter 8

Then, again, the Veiled Being is entirely unpretentious. There is no bluster and no cant about him. He does not claim our gratitude for the doubtful boon of life. He does not pretend to be just, while he is committing, or winking at, the most intolerable injustices. He does not set up to be long-suffering, while in fact he is childishly touchy. He does not profess to be merciful, while the incurable ward, the battlefield--nay, even the maternity home and the dentist's parlor--are there to give him the lie. (Here, of course, I am not contrasting him with the Invisible King, but with more ancient and still more Asian divinities.) It is the moral pretensions tagged on by the theologians to metaphysical Godhead that revolt and estrange reasonable men--Mr. Wells among the rest. If you tell us that behind the Veil we shall find a good-natured, indulgent old man, who chastens us only for our good, is pleased by our flatteries (with or without music), and is not more than suitably vexed at our naughtinesses in the Garden of Eden and elsewhere--we reply that this is a nursery tale which has been riddled, time out of mind, not by wicked sceptics, but by the spontaneous, irrepressible criticism of babes and sucklings. But if you divest the Veiled Being of all ethical--or in other words of all human--attributes, then there is no difficulty whatever in admiring, and even adoring, the marvels he has wrought. Tennyson went deeper than he realized into the nature of things when he wrote--

"For merit lives from man to man, But not from man, O Lord, to thee."

Once put aside all question of merit and demerit, of praise and blame, and more especially (but this will shock Mr. Wells) of salvation and damnation--and nothing can be easier than to pay to the works of the Veiled Being the meed of an illimitable wonder. When we think of the roaring vortices of flame that spangle the heavens night by night, at distances that beggar conception: when we think of our tiny earth, wrapped in its little film of atmosphere, spinning safely for ages untold amid all these appalling immensities: and when we think, on the other hand, of the battles of claw and maw going on, beneath the starry vault, in that most miraculous of jewels, a drop of water: we cannot but own that the Power which set all this whirl of atoms agoing is worthy of all admiration. And approbation? Ah, that is another matter; for there the moral element comes in. It is possible (and here lies the interest of the enigma) that the Veiled Being may one day justify himself even morally. Perhaps he is all the time doing so behind the veil. But on that it is absolutely useless to speculate. Light may one day come to us, but it will come through patient investigation, not through idle pondering and guessing. In the meantime, poised between the macrocosm and the microcosm, ourselves including both extremes, and being, perhaps, the most stupendous miracle of all, we cannot deny to this amazing frame of things the tribute of an unutterable awe. If that be religion, I profess myself as religious as Mr. Wells. I am even willing to join him in some outward, ceremonial expression of that sentiment, if he can suggest one that shall not be ridiculously inadequate. What about kneeling through the C Minor Symphony? That seems to me about as near as we can get. Or I will go with him to Primrose Hill some fine morning (like the Persian Ambassador fabled by Charles Lamb) and worship the Sun, chanting to him William Watson's magnificent hymn:--

"To thee as our Father we bow, Forbidden thy Father to see, Who is older and greater than thou, as thou Art greater and older than we."

The sun, at any rate, is not a figure of speech, and is a symbol which runs no risk of being mistaken for a portrait. If Mr. Wells would be content with some such "bright sciential idolatry," I would willingly declare myself a co-idolater. But alas! he is the hierophant of the Invisible King, and prayer to that impotent potentate is to me a moral impossibility. I would rather face damnation, especially in the mild form threatened by Mr. Wells, which consists (pp. 148-149) in not knowing that you are damned.

And if Mr. Wells maintains that in the worship of the non-moral Veiled Being there is no practical, pragmatic comfort, I reply that I am not so sure of that. When all is said and done, is there not more hope, more solace, in an enigma than in a _façon de parler_? I should be quite willing to accept the test of the reeling aeroplane. The aviator can say to his soul: "Here am I, one of the most amazing births of time, the culmination of an endless series of miracles. Perhaps I am on the verge of extinction--if so, what does it all matter? But perhaps, on the contrary, I am about to plunge into some new adventure, as marvellous as this. More marvellous it cannot be, but it may perhaps be more agreeable. At all events, there is something fascinating in this leap in the dark. Good bye, my soul! Good-bye, my memory!

'If we should meet again, why, we shall smile; If not, why then this parting was well made.'"

I cannot but think that there is as much religion and as much solace in such a shaking-off of "the bur o' the world" as in the thought that the last new patent God is going to die with you, and that you, unconsciously and indistinguishably merged in him, are going to live for ever.

THE NEWEST BORZOI BOOKS

LUSTRA _By Ezra Pound_

DANDELIONS _By Coulson T. Cade_

A CHASTE MAN _By Louis Wilkinson_

GOD AND MR. WELLS _By William Archer_

MARTIN RIVAS _By Alberto Blest-Gana_

BEATING 'EM TO IT _By Chester Cornish_

A BOOK OF PREFACES _By H. L. Mencken_

THE THREE BLACK PENNYS _By Joseph Hergesheimer_

INTERPRETERS AND INTERPRETATIONS _By Carl Van Vechten_

MR. GEORGE JEAN NATHAN PRESENTS _By George Jean Nathan_

OTHERS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF THE NEW VERSE _Edited by Alfred Kreymborg_ 1917 Issue

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

1. Passages in italics are surrounded by _underscores_.

2. The words amoeba, mythopoeic and prosopopoeia use "oe" ligature in the original text.

3. The following misprints have been corrected: "blackslides" corrected to "backslides" (page 40) "annhilated" corrected to "annihilated" (page 119)

4. Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, hyphenation, and ligature usage have been retained.