Part 3

Old Doctor Jewett said to Margot Asquith, “You must believe in God in spite of what the clergy say.” And truly I don’t think that any man who has worked in downtown New York can be much of an atheist. In that great jungle of violent life, under the glittering spires of such steep cathedrals, he must inevitably be a trifle mad. Even Manhattan, supposed to be most material of cities, is best known for the fantastic figure she cuts against the sky. The loveliest picture I ever saw of her profile was a photograph given me by an amateur lensman who caught it by accident. It shows that uneven scarp of buildings in soft masses of dark and shadow, looming on a queerly pebbled and fuscous twilight, like an eclipse. And this, as my astonished friend learned from his film-dealer, was an accident, due to mildew on the gelatin. So some of the most lovely visions of reality are printed on minds that are mildewed. The madman and the nincompoop often see more beauty than the sane and solid cit. The only possible suggestion that one might humbly venture to offer to the authoritative officers of Holy Church is that they are too sane and too businesslike. They ask us to believe not things that are too hard, but too easy. They are too eager to lock the stable door after the Messiah has been stolen. They have learned the tricks of our world of flesh so glibly that they seem sometimes to forget the manners of that world of spirit they are commissioned to represent.

For the world is fascinating and painful beyond human power of testimony. The best of every life is unprintable. If one were given five minutes’ warning before sudden death, five minutes to say what it had all meant to us, every telephone-booth would be occupied by people trying to call up other people to stammer that they loved them. You would want to tell a whole lot of people that you love them, but had been too clumsy and too shy to admit it. And the newspaper man himself, who both loves and hates his queer trade, would be the first to remember that one always is severest with what one adores. Every movement is set in some strange turning of wonder. As a man will suddenly discover in himself some miserable petty trick of behaviour which, he painfully realizes, is a true microcosm and characteristic of his life as a whole, so now and then with the world at large. We are aware of lights and shadows and moments of millennium that seem a part of some vast consistency. You know the thrill of a letter or parcel that comes from some one you are fond of, far away. As you undo the string, you say, foolishly, but with a genuine quaver of sentiment, “When that was tied up, So-and-so handled it!” Well, there are instants of preposterous happiness, clear insight, that are just like that--little packages of reality, tied up in the twine of our time sense, that come to us direct, intact, from the eternity and infinity we call God. It matters little how you explain that great word to yourself. Perhaps you mean by it the sum total of all human awarenesses of beauty. In that sense of prevailing loveliness we are all obscurely united. In those moments, moments of heavenly farce and unredeemable tragedy, we can forgive ourselves for being only human.

But in these matters silence is the final eloquence. One does not argue with moonlight. Men talk of “finding God,” but no wonder it is difficult; He is hidden in that darkest of hiding-places, your own heart. You yourself are a part of Him. The chief danger is to be too prosaic. Any one who has ever done proof-reading knows the delicious fidelity and strict zeal and maddening literalness with which the professional corrector marks a galley-proof. How he construes the text according to his own rote and rigid scheme; how he resents any unusual use of words; how he is so busy querying things that look odd to him that he misses many of the downright errors. That is precisely the attitude of man toward the universe, which he is so daringly anxious to interpret in some comforting sense. The journalist, whatever his sins and stupidities, would hope to enjoy the text of life in the spirit of a collaborating author rather than presume to correct it. And he will not do any great poet, such as Christ, the dishonour of taking him too literally.

We cannot hope until we have learned to despair. Let me remind you of some great lines by Andrew Marvell:

My love is of a birth as rare As ’tis for object strange and high: It was begotten by Despair Upon Impossibility.

As lines, so loves oblique, may well Themselves in every angle greet: But ours, so truly parallel, Though infinite, can never meet.

THE END

FOOTNOTES:

[A] Mr. C. E. Montague writes as follows of the origin of his novel _A Hind Let Loose_, a witty satire of newspaper life: “It arose from much study--in the course of my daily work--of the editorial articles of the best-reputed English papers. I found that they consisted, to a wonderfully large percentage, of certain stock expressions of positiveness, dislike and contempt. These, I noticed, were so general that they constantly recurred in all sorts of discussions on various subjects, and the fancy took me that their use could be carried further and further until all reference to any particular topic vanished and nothing but quite general positiveness remained, the Olympian mentality and temper just going on asserting themselves for assertion’s sake.”

[B] There is a very able book called _The Gospel According to Judas_, written by a professor at a Western college, which has circulated in MS. among publishers for ten years, without yet finding one who is willing to take a chance on its very remarkable wit and uniquely original conception of the New Testament story. I have often wondered whether it will ever get printed.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been standardized.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.