Part 4
If I had nursed in my mind any sentiment of romance in connection with ecclesiastical affairs, it was soon expelled by these experiences. A peep behind the scenes was enough. The deadly Philistinism of a little provincial congregation; the tradesmen and shopkeepers in their sleek Sunday best; the petty vulgarities and hypocrisies; the discordant music of the choir; the ignoble scenes in the vestry and the resumed saintly expression on returning into the church; the hollow ring and the sour edge of the incumbent’s voice; and the fatuous faces upturned to receive the communion at the altar steps—all these were worse, considerably worse, than the undisguised heathenism of the chapel performance.
It was not long before I began to have serious misgivings about the step I had taken. Still I did not torment myself; and when in the following June (1870) the time arrived for my ordination as a priest, I prepared myself quite philosophically to go through the ceremony.
But here an interesting hitch occurred. In the Bishop’s examination preparatory to the ordination, the candidates had among other things to write a Life of Abraham; and such was my optimistic confidence in the breadth of the episcopal mind that I quite candidly and without any particular misgiving committed to paper the view which I had picked up, I think from Bunsen the historian, and which is also adopted by Dean Stanley in his _Jewish Church_—that Abraham’s intended immolation of Isaac was a relic of Moloch-worship, and of the old practice of human sacrifices, and that the “voice of God” which bade him substitute the ram did indeed figure the evolution of the human conscience to a higher ideal of worship than that in vogue among savage nations. This paper, containing so dreadful a heresy, I sent up without a qualm! But on arriving myself some days later at the Palace at Ely, the Bishop (Harold Browne) soon after the first greetings called me into his study and confronted me with the offending passage. At first I had some difficulty in understanding what the trouble was, but when the Bishop in grave tones began to remind me that the sacrifice of Isaac was a type—a type and a prefigurement of that greater sacrifice of Jesus, and that the whole Biblical scheme of salvation rested four-square upon this incident (not forgetting the ram), I immediately saw that the fat was in the fire, and that there was now no escaping a solemn discussion on the Atonement.
And to that it came. Our conversation, interrupted by dinner, was resumed again late in the evening; and when all the other clerics and candidates had gone to bed the reverend Father-in-God and I sat up till past twelve discussing all the main and side issues of Theology! On the latter he was easy enough. I told him plainly that I did not believe in the historical accuracy of the Old Testament; and he admitted that there were gaps! Even the Thirty-nine Articles were to be swallowed in the lump, and not in detail, so to speak. But on the Atonement the discussion narrowed. Here was a vital point. My views were woolly in outline, sadly blurred by the Broad Church mysticism of F. D. Maurice, and I confess I had some difficulty in formulating them. The Bishop merely shook his head, asked me to “say that again,” and declared that he could not understand. It ended by his requesting me to _write out_ my doctrine; and going to bed himself he left me sitting up for a couple of hours more for this purpose! In the morning I handed him, before breakfast, my mystic script. After breakfast he once more called me into his study, said he had read the paper, that it was thoughtful and all that, but that he could not say that he really followed it, and that he was sure it was _not_ the doctrine of the Church of England.
We were then within a few minutes of the commencement of the service. I took for granted that he would not ordain me; but after a pause he said “I cannot refuse to ordain you; but I do not think your views are those of the Church.” I think he hoped that _I_ should then retire of my own accord. However I said nothing but took it all as settled in my favour, and in less than an hour the apostolic hands were on my head.
After luncheon the good old man, not without a certain anxiety and _épanchement_, put his arm in mine and walked with me round the garden. I remember there was a chaffinch hopping about, and a longish discourse followed on creation and suffering and vicarious sacrifice, which I listened to with due deference; but it did not seem to me to lead to any conclusion; and soon the time came for us to leave the palace, and I saw him no more.
It may be imagined that I did not find my profession any more satisfactory after being made priest than before. He of the sour knife-edge, my superincumbent, left St. Edward’s, being translated into a canon of Carlisle, and was succeeded, curiously enough, by Maurice himself. That was I think early in 1871.
Of this transaction, by which F. D. Maurice became incumbent of St. Edward’s, it may be worth while to say a few words. Maurice had lately come to Cambridge as Professor of Moral Philosophy. As far as his moral worth was concerned, the choice was a good one. There was an ineffable personal charm about him, of moral earnestness and deep feeling, connecting itself somehow with his lofty venerable head and extraordinary modesty. But of his philosophy perhaps the less said the better. He saw facts which doubtless it is impossible adequately to translate into language. Certainly it was impossible for him. To see him struggling with the root-ideas which he was always trying, and vainly, to express, to see him perspiring with effort, tapping his forehead with his fingers, shutting his eyes, and still only framing broken sentences, was really touching. The net result among the students was, as I have hinted, one of personal devotion to him, but of utter bafflement as to his teaching. It is said that one student hearing that the great man was giving a course of lectures on the “I” (as he was), made his way down to the _Physiological_ schools and after many inquiries finding that no lectures were being given on the _Eye_, came back again with the conclusion that the whole affair was a myth!
Well, Maurice having expressed a wish to take some practical “duty” in Cambridge, and the living of St. Edward’s falling vacant at that time, a movement was got up in the College to offer the living to him. The living was in the gift of the Fellows of Trinity Hall, and most of the Fellows were favorable to the proposal. But an unexpected difficulty arose in the person of the Master (Dr. Geldart). Not that the Master himself (who was an old sporting man, more than anything else) cared a button about the matter, but because his wife, Mrs. Geldart, was accustomed to attend St. Edward’s and fuss round the parson there, and _she_ strongly disapproved of any one so heretical as Maurice occupying the pulpit!
I was a Fellow of the College at the time, and the scenes round the table as we discussed the knotty question were most amusing. The obvious embarrassment of the old Master when the question arose as to _why_ he thought Maurice so dangerous; his mysterious references to the opinions of other people (his wife) and his candid disavowal of any knowledge on these subjects himself; the guffaws of Henry Fawcett (then Professor of Political Economy and afterwards Postmaster-General) as he called for his chop and settled himself down to enjoy a scene to which his blindness was little drawback; the quips of H. D. Warr, one of the Fellows; the muttered blasphemies of our Dean (Hopkins), who couldn’t think why we wasted time “over such blasted nonsense”; the ingenious surmises of the barrister fellows generally as to what Maurice’s opinions might conceivably be; and the politic expediencies of the Tutor (Latham) who at last silenced the Master and his Missus by producing a letter from the Bishop of Carlisle (Goodwin) endorsing Maurice with a friendly pat on the back: all this was as good as a play.
Maurice was installed in the living early in 1871, and thenceforth read the services and prayed and preached, with that profundity of earnest innocence which was so characteristic of him, and which contrasted strangely with the manner of his election, and more strangely still with the cheap commercialism of his congregation.
Maurice had no great ear for music. The organist and choir of flat-singing shop-girls revelled in florid hymns about the “blood-of-the-Lamb.” Maurice besought me to alter this and induce them to sing again those fine old hymns like the “Old Hundredth.” A nice task for an amiable curate!
It was curious that after having been brought up in and adopted Maurice’s views, I should now, having become his curate, feel so uncomfortable as I did. But so it was. I had had experience in the short space of a year and a half, of three spiritual superiors—each in a sense more favorable than the last; and yet my sense of aggravation continually increased. I saw a good deal of Maurice. He was kindness itself. I opened out my difficulties to him; and he was I think troubled to find I could not reconcile myself to the position which _he_ occupied apparently without difficulty. But to me his attitude was a growing wonder. I could quite understand his historical-philosophical view of the Creeds and the Old Testament, and that he could read into them a deep and necessary meaning, satisfactory to his own mind; I had in fact been already, long before, initiated into this Broad Church attitude by my father. But when it came to standing up oneself in church and reciting these documents to a congregation who (as one knew perfectly well) did not understand a word of them, and practically received them in their grossest sense and in a spirit of mere superstition, then I felt it _was_ necessary to draw the line somewhere! It was not that I then, or at any time, made a trouble of the conformity of my own _views_ with those of the Church; for I thought and I think now, that if a man feels he can do useful work, and congenial to himself, in that connection, he had better remain where he is until he is kicked out; and that seeing the variety of interpretations that Church doctrines are capable of, it is rather for the Church to decide whether _his_ interpretations are within its pale, or not, than for him to do so. But the trouble to me was a practical one—namely the insuperable _feeling_ of falsity and dislocation which I experienced, and which accompanied all my professional work from the reading of the services to the visiting of old women in their almshouses—who were, one could see, goaded on to hypocrisy by the position in which they were placed—and who would hastily shuffle a Bible or prayer-book on to the table, when they saw the parson coming. This sense of falsity grew on me more and more till I felt the situation to be intolerable.
It is remarkable—certainly I have found it so in my own life—how little its greater changes are one’s own choice, and in a sense, how much they are forced upon one by necessity—sometimes by an outward necessity, sometimes by an inner and necessary, though perhaps unconscious evolution of one’s own nature. No doubt I _thought_ about this matter a great deal, argued to myself the question of my conformity to the Church, and the pros and cons of remaining in it—worried myself, passed sleepless nights—and felt generally unhinged over it; but all this conscious argument brought me no nearer to a decision. Deep below I felt that some sort of sheer necessity was driving me on. Sometimes when I was occupied with, and thinking about, quite other things, a kind of shiver would run down my back: “You’ve got to go, you’ve got to go,” and I felt as if I was being pushed to the edge of a steep place.
For it was not altogether easy to face the situation. I was doing very well, in a pecuniary sense, at Cambridge, making with my Fellowship and small offices as lecturer, librarian, etc., £500 or £600 a year, and prospects good for the future; the abandonment of my Orders would probably mean the loss of my Fellowship, and possibly also that I should have to leave Cambridge altogether. And it did not seem quite reasonable to risk all this for what might after all be only a Quixotic fancy.
But blessed is Necessity which cuts all arguments short! By the middle of May 1871 I felt so ill and wretched that I _could_ not stay on even a few weeks to the end of the term. I begged off my lectures, left Maurice to find another curate, and ran away!
Meanwhile other threads and clues of life were developing. Up to my degree (January ’68) I had lived singularly apart from any intellectual or literary circles. As an undergraduate my companions had mostly been boating men. After my degree however I came naturally into a more literary society, consisting partly of the younger Fellows of Colleges and partly of the more go-ahead students who had not yet taken their degrees. One or two of the more thoughtful undergrads of my own College also leaned towards me. I belonged to one or two little societies which used to meet and discuss literary or other topics. To one of these, which W. K. Clifford organized, I used, after I became a curate, to rush round on Sunday evenings after church—in time to take part in the reading of Mazzini’s _Duty of Man_; illustrated by a plentiful accompaniment of claret-cup and smoke! Clifford was a kind of Socratic presiding genius at these meetings—with his Satyr-like face, tender heart, wonderfully suggestive, paradoxical manner of conversation, and blasphemous treatment of the existing gods. He invented just at that time a kind of inverted Doxology which ran:—
O Father, Son and Holy Ghost— We wonder which we hate the most. Be Hell, which they prepared before, Their dwelling now and evermore!
and his influence, combined with that of Mazzini, was certainly part of my education at that period. If it had by any chance come to the Bishop’s ears that I attended these meetings there is little wonder about his hesitation to ordain me!
There was another Cambridge heretic with whom I not unfrequently consorted—Lock of King’s—who certainly by his attainments and ability ought to have been made a Fellow of his College, but his views and the audacity with which he ventilated them proved a fatal obstacle. Having to write a ’Varsity prize-poem he sat up all the preceding night to do it, worked himself up into a kind of prophetic frenzy and managed under cover of a forecast of republican utopianism to introduce the lines:—
Since they traded in holy things, and treated the people like beasts, The priests shall be slain and the kings shall be drowned in the blood of the priests.
I don’t feel so certain of the exact words of the first line as I do of the second, but I hope the author of both (who was then, of course, an undergraduate) will forgive my quotation of them. It is hardly to be wondered at that in those days he was _not_ made a Fellow!
One of the undergraduates of my own College with whom I made quite a friendship at this time was Edward Anthony Beck. He came up to Cambridge, a poor student from the country district of Castle Rising in Norfolk, on the shores of the Wash—he also with his head full of rhymes and verses, which he had written since he was a boy of eight or ten, to the wonderment and delight of his widower father, who prophesied in no uncertain tone, a nook in Westminster Abbey for his poet son. Beck was a bright, capable fellow, with a slight stoop, and a stammer, and a good-humoured way of laughing at his own oddities. He took the University by surprise by carrying off, in his first year, the prize poem on Dante—having been fain, it is said, to work up the subject by reading Cary’s translation (which he could not afford to buy) on the bookstalls. Then he wrote another prize poem on Runnymede, which delighted him chiefly I think on account of a misprint which occurred in the printed copy. There was an eloquent passage in the poem, describing the sunrise of freedom in England, and something about the clouds heralding the approach of morning:—
Streaks rosy-tinted vanward of the sun—
which the printer, in a materialistic mood, altered into:—
_Steaks_ rosy-tinted vanward of the sun.
These rosy-tinted steaks gave Beck, I believe, as much pleasure as he got from all the _kudos_ of his poetic success. He worked away at Classics, took a good first-class, and ultimately became a fellow and tutor of the College. But his vein of poetic feeling and romance, possibly too soon ripe, ran itself out, and he never carried on this line of production or published anything. His mind, perhaps from the same cause, took on a slightly cynical cast; he lapsed into the ordinary channels of lecturing and coaching, then married and had a large family, and so gave himself up to the work-a-day routine of College life.
At the time I mention he and I chummed together a good deal—indeed there was a touch of romance in our attachment—we compared literary notes, went abroad together once or twice, and after he was made a Fellow, had rooms adjoining each other, and spent many and many an evening in common. He became a favorite in the general society of the younger dons and B.A.’s, on account of his brightness, naturalness and frankly avowed enjoyment of the good things of life.
As for myself, for a couple of years or so after my degree I entered with great zest into this academically intellectual existence—these chit-chat societies, these little supper parties, these lingerings over the wine in combination-room after dinner—where every subject in Heaven and Earth was discussed, with the university man’s perfect freedom of thought and utterance, but also with his perfect absence of practical knowledge or of intention to apply his theories to any practical issue. It was helpful no doubt especially as a solvent of old ideas and prejudices; but after a time it began to pall upon me and bore me. There was a vein of what might be called painful earnestness in my character. These talking machines were, many of them, very obnoxious to me. And then of what avail was the brain, when the heart demanded so much, and demanding was still unsatisfied?
Looking back, I think with regard to this last-mentioned matter, that the fault was probably a good deal on my own side. Strong as had been two or three attachments of this and my earlier undergraduate period, and deeply as they had moved me (to a degree indeed which I should be almost ashamed to confess); yet for the most part, owing to my reserved habits, and the self-repressive education I had received—combined with the fatuities of public opinion—I consumed my own smoke, and did not give myself the utterance I ought to have given. By concealing myself I was unfair to my friends, and at the same time suffered torments which I need not have suffered.
As I have already said, during the time shortly after my degree I scribbled a great deal in verse form merely as an outlet to my own feelings, and without much attention to conventionalities of style and rhythms—though of course along the ordinary lines of versification. But now came my introduction to the poet who was destined so deeply to influence my life. It was in the summer of ’68, I believe (though it may have been ’69), that one day H. D. Warr—one of the Fellows of Trinity Hall, and a very brilliant and amusing man—came into my room with a blue-covered book in his hands (William Rossetti’s edition of Whitman’s poems) only lately published, and said:—
“Carpenter, what do you think of this?”
I took it from him, looked at it, was puzzled, and asked him what he thought of it.
“Well,” he said, “I thought a good deal of it at first, but I don’t think I can stand any more of it.”
With those words he left me; and I remember lying down then and there on the floor and for half an hour poring, pausing, wondering. I could not make the book out, but I knew at the end of that time that I intended to go on reading it. In a short time I bought a copy for myself, then I got _Democratic Vistas_, and later on (after three or four years) _Leaves of Grass_ complete.
From that time forward a profound change set in within me. I remember the long and beautiful summer nights, sometimes in the College garden by the riverside, sometimes sitting at my own window which itself overlooked a little old-fashioned garden enclosed by grey and crumbling walls; sometimes watching the silent and untroubled dawn; and feeling all the time that my life deep down was flowing out and away from the surroundings and traditions amid which I lived—a current of sympathy carrying it westward, across the Atlantic. I wrote to Whitman, obtained his books from him, and occasional postcardial responses. But outwardly, and on the surface, my life went on as usual.
What made me cling to the little blue book from the beginning was largely the poems which celebrate comradeship. That thought, so near and personal to me, I had never before seen or heard fairly expressed; even in Plato and the Greek authors there had been something wanting (so I thought). If there had only been those few poems they would have been sufficient to hold me; but there were other pieces: there was “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Rocked Cradle,” “President Lincoln’s Funeral Hymn,” and the prose Preface[3]—and then afterwards _Democratic Vistas_.
On the whole at that time I thought most, I believe, of the prose writings. _Democratic Vistas_ was a mine of new thought. Both this and the little blue book I read over and over again, and still they were new. I had read a great deal of Wordsworth about the time of my degree; then Shelley captivated and held me for a long time; portions of Plato and of Shakespeare I had read repeatedly; but never had I found anything approaching these writings of Whitman’s for their inexhaustible quality and power of making one return to them.
Yet all this time, or for three or four years, I believe my interest in them was mainly intellectual—that is, they were producing an intellectual ferment in me, but I had not distinctly come into touch with the dominant individuality behind them, nor felt that they were reshaping my moral and artistic ideals. This is partly shown by the fact that I continued all these years, and up to ’74 or so, writing verse along the usual lines and upon the usual subjects. Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Shelley’s “Adonais” and “Prometheus” still ruled my artistic and emotional conceptions; and withal, living as I was in an atmosphere of literary criticism and finesse, mere academic technique seemed to me a great matter, and I made great struggles to attain to it.
Though I was not particularly successful in these efforts towards the conventional in literature, yet I have no doubt they were very helpful in giving me some sort of training in the power of handling words and rhythmical forms—and it was a true instinct which led me through this instead of urging me to leap at once into the ocean of metrical freedom, so difficult to navigate with success. Anyhow so it was that while (in other things as well as in literature) my inner scarcely conscious nature was setting outwards in a swift current from the shores of conventionality, under the influence of its new genius, into deeps it little divined, my external self was still busy in a kind of backwater, and working hard if by any means it might attain to a creditable or even a possible existence in these channels!