Part 15

But he separated himself from the Broad Church in making religion a culture of individual holiness rather than a message for the "unlovely masses of people," in caring more for the guidance of the Inner Voice than for the brotherhood of charity or the association of men in good works. In his idea of worship he was near to the High Church, but he differed from that body in ranking sacerdotalism and dissent together as the equal foes of religion. The efficacy of the sacrament came from its historic symbolism and its national acceptance, and needed not, or scarcely needed, the ministration of the priest. He thus extended the meaning of the word far beyond the narrow range of ecclesiasticism. "This sunshine upon the grass," he wrote, "is a sacrament of remembrance and of love." When, in his early days, Newman visited Hurrell Froude's lovely Devonshire home, there arose in his mind a poignant strife between his loyalty to created and to uncreated beauty. In a stanza composed for a lady's autograph album he gave this expression to his hesitancy:

There strayed awhile, amid the woods of Dart, One who could love them, but who durst not love; A vow had bound him ne'er to give his heart To streamlet bright, or soft secluded grove. 'T was a hard humbling task, onward to move His easy-captured eye from each fair spot, With unattached and lonely step to rove O'er happy meads which soon its print forgot. Yet kept he safe his pledge, prizing his pilgrim lot.

No such note is to be found in the letters written by Mr. Shorthouse during his holidays among the Welsh hills; he looked upon the inherited Church as the instrument chosen by many generations of men for their approach to God, but he was not afraid to see the communion service on the ocean waters when the heavenly light poured upon them, even as he saw it at the altar table.

If he differed from the Broad Church mainly in his loyalty to Quaker mysticism, it was Platonism which made the bounds of the High Church too narrow for his faith. He did not hesitate at one time to say that Plato possessed a truer spiritual insight than St. Paul, and it was in reality a mere extension of the sphere of Platonism when, in what appears to be the last letter he ever wrote (or dictated rather, for his hands were already clasped in those of beneficent Death), he avowed his creed: "That Image after which we were created--the Divine Intellect--must surely be able to respond to the Divine call. The greatest advance which has ever been made was the teaching, originally by Aristotle, of the receptivity of matter.... I should be very glad to see this idea of _John Inglesant_ worked out by an intelligent critic." Beauty was for him a kind of transfiguration in which the world, in its response to the indwelling Power, was lifted into something no longer worldly, but divine; and he could speak of our existence on this earth as lighted by "the immeasurable glory of the drama of God in which we are actors." It was not that he, like certain poets of the past century, attempted to give to the crude passions of men or the transient pomp of earth a power intrinsically equivalent to the spirit; but he believed that these might be made by faith to become as it were an illusory and transparent veil through which the visionary eye could penetrate to the mystic reality.

For the particular act in this drama, which he was to write out in his religious novel, he went back to the seventeenth century, when, as it seemed to him, the same problem as that of the nineteenth arose to trouble the hearts of Englishmen, but in nobler and more romantic forms. There was, in fact, a certain note of reality about the earlier struggle of Puritan, Churchman, and Roman Catholic, which was lacking to the quarrel of his own day. John Inglesant is the younger of twin sons born in a family of Catholic sympathies. A Jesuit, Father Hall, who reminds one not a little of Father Holt in _Henry Esmond_, is put in charge of the boy and trains him up to be an intermediary between the Church of England and the Church of Rome. To this end his Mentor keeps his mind in a state of suspense between the faiths, and the inner and real drama of the book is the contest in Inglesant's own mind, after his immediate debt to Rome has been fulfilled, between the two forms of worship.

In part the actual narrative is well conducted. Johnnie's relations to Charles I., and especially his share in that strange adventure when the King was terrified by a vision of the dead Strafford, are told with a good deal of dramatic skill. So, too, his own trial, the murder of his brother by the Italian, his visits to the household of the Ferrars at Little Gidding, and some of the events in Italy--these in themselves are sufficient to make a novel of unusual interest. On the human side, where the emotions are of a dreamy, half-mystical sort, the work is equally successful; in its own kind the love of Inglesant and Mary Collet is beautiful beyond the common love of man and woman. But the novel fails, it must be acknowledged, in the expression of the more ordinary motives of human activity. Johnnie's ingrained obedience to the Jesuit is one of the mainsprings of the plot, yet there is nothing in the story to make this exaggerated devotion seem natural. In the same way Johnnie's attachment to his worldly brother is unexplained by the author, and sounds fantastic. A considerable portion of the book is taken up with Inglesant's search for his brother's murderer, and here again the vacillating desire of vengeance is a false note which no amount of exposition on the part of the author makes convincing. Mr. Shorthouse's hero burns for revenge one day, and on the next is oblivious of his passion, in a way that simply leaves the reader in a state of bewilderment. Curiously enough, it was one of the incidents in this hide-and-seek portion of the story, found by Mr. Shorthouse in "a well-known guide-book," that actually suggested the novel to him. For my own part, the sustained charm of the language, a style midway, as it were, between that of Thackeray and that of Hawthorne, not quite so negligently graceful as the former nor quite so deliberate as the latter, yet mingling the elements of both in a happy compound--the language alone, I say, would be sufficient to carry me through these inadequately conceived parts of the story. But I can understand, nevertheless, how in the course of time this feebleness of the purely human motives may gradually deprive the book of readers, for it is the human that abides unchanged, after all, and the divine that alters in form with the passing ages. Hawthorne, in this respect, is better equipped for the future; his novels are not concerned with phases of religion, but with the moral consciousness and the feeling of guilt, which are eternally the same.

And yet it will be a real loss to letters if this nearest approach in English to a religious novel of universal significance should lose its vitality and be forgotten. Almost, but not quite, Mr. Shorthouse has gone below the shifting of forms and formulæ to the instinct that lies buried in the heart of each man, seeking and awaiting the light. I have already referred to those early chapters, the most perfect in the book I think, wherein is told how Johnnie, a grown boy now, visits his childhood's masters and questions them about the Divine Light which he would behold and follow amid the wandering lights of this world. Mr. Shorthouse believed, as he had been taught at his mother's knee, that such a Guide dwelt in the breasts of all men, and that we need only to hearken to its admonition to attain holiness and peace. He thought that it had spoken more clearly to certain of the poets and philosophers of Greece than to any others, and that "the ideal of the Greeks--the godlike and the beautiful in one"--was still the lesson to be practised to-day. "What we want," he said, "is to apply it to real life. We all understand that art should be religious, but it is more difficult to understand how religion may be an art." And this, as he avows again and again in his letters, was the purpose of his book; "one of many failures to reconcile the artistic with the spiritual aspect of life," he once calls it.

But if, intellectually, the vision of the Divine Light was vouchsafed to Plato more than to any other man, historically it had been presented to the gross, unpurged eyes of the world in the life and death of Jesus. The precision of dogma, even the Bible, meant relatively little to Mr. Shorthouse. "I do not advocate belief in the Bible," he wrote; "I advocate belief in Christ." Somehow, in some way beyond the scope of logic, the idea which Plato had beheld, the divine ideal which all men know and doubt, became a personality that one time, and henceforth the sacraments that recalled the drama of that holy life were the surest means of obtaining the silence of the world through which the Inner Voice speaks and is heard.

To some, of course, this will appear the one flaw in the author's logic--this step from the vague notion of the Platonic ideas dwelling in the world of matter, and shaping it to their own beautiful forms, to the belief in the actual Christian drama as the realisation of the Divine Nature in human life. Yet the step was easy, was almost necessary, for one who held at the same time the doctrines of the Friends and of Plato; their union might be called the wedding of pure religion and pure philosophy, wherein the more bigoted and inhuman character of the former was surrendered, while to the latter was added the power to touch the universal heart of man. As Mr. Shorthouse held them, and as Inglesant came to view them, the sacraments might be called a memorial of that mystic wedding. They brought to it the historic consciousness and the traditional brotherhood of mankind; they were the symbolism through which men sought to introduce the light into their own lives as a religious art. Now an art is a matter to be perceived and to be felt, whereas a science, as Newman and others held religion to be, is a subject for demonstration and argument. How much religion in England suffered from the attempt to prove what could not be caught in the mesh of logic, and from the endeavour to make words take the place of ideas, we have already seen. You may reason about abstract truth, you cannot reason about a symbolism or a form of worship. The strength of _John Inglesant_ lies in its avoidance of rationalism or the appeal to precedent, and in its frank search for the human and the artistic.

It was in this sense that Mr. Shorthouse could speak of his book as above all an attempt "to promote culture at the expense of fanaticism, including the fanaticism of work": but we shall miss the full meaning of his intention if we omit the corollary of those words, viz.: "to exalt the unpopular doctrine that the end of existence is not the good of one's neighbour, but one's own culture." I do not know, indeed, but this exaltation of the old theory that the chief purpose of religion is the worship and beatitude of the individual soul, in opposition to the humanitarian notions which were even then springing into prominence, is the central theme of the story. Certainly with many readers the scene that remains most deeply impressed in their memory is that which shows Inglesant coming to Serenus de Cressy at the House of the Benedictines in Paris, and, like the young man who came to Jesus, asking what he shall do to make clear the guidance of the Inner Light. There, in those marvellous pages, Cressy points out the divergence of the ways before him: "On the one hand, you have the delights of reason and of intellect, the beauty of that wonderful creation which God made, yet did not keep; the charms of Divine philosophy, and the enticements of the poet's art; on the other side, Jesus." And then as the old man, who had himself turned from the gardens of Oxford to the discipline of a monastery, sees the hesitation of his listener, he breaks forth into this eloquent appeal:

I put before you your life, with no false colouring, no tampering with the truth. Come with me to Douay; you shall enter our house according to the strictest rule; you shall engage in no study that is any delight or effort to the intellect; but you shall teach the smallest children in the schools, and visit the poorest people, and perform the duties of the household--and all for Christ. I promise you on the faith of a gentleman and a priest--I promise you, for I have no shade of doubt--that in this path you shall find the satisfaction of the heavenly walk; you shall walk with Jesus day by day, growing ever more and more like to Him; and your path, without the least fall or deviation, shall lead more and more into the light, until you come unto the perfect day; and on your death-bed--the death-bed of a saint--the vision of the smile of God shall sustain you, and Jesus Himself shall meet you at the gates of eternal life.

We are told that every word went straight to Inglesant's conviction, and that no single note jarred upon his taste. He implicitly believed that what the Benedictine offered him he should find. But he also knew that this was not the only way of service--nor even, perhaps, the highest. He turned away from the monastery sadly, but firmly, and continued his search for the light in that direction whither the culture of his own nature led him; he showed--though this neither he nor Mr. Shorthouse, perhaps, would acknowledge--that at the bottom of his heart Plato and not Christ was his master, and that to him practical Christianity was only one of the many historic forms which the so-called Platonic insight assumes among men. To some, no doubt, this attempt to make of religion an art will savour of that peculiar form of hedonism, or bastard Platonism, which Walter Pater introduced into England, and _John Inglesant_ will be classed with _Marius the Epicurean_ as a blossom of æsthetic romanticism. There is a certain show of justification in the comparison, and the work of Mr. Shorthouse quite possibly grants too much to the enervating acquiescence in the lovely and the decorous; it lacks a little in virility. But the difference between the two books is still more radical than the likeness. Though absolute truth may not be within the reach of man, nevertheless the life of John Inglesant is a discipline and a growth toward a verity that emanates from acknowledged powers and calls him out of himself. The senses have no validity in themselves. He aims to make an art of religion, not a religion of art; the distinction is deeper than words. The true parentage of the work goes back, in some ways, to Shaftesbury, with whom an interesting parallel might be drawn.

In the end Inglesant returns to England, after years spent in France and Italy among Roman Catholics, and accepts frankly the religious forms of his own land. His character had been strengthened by experience, and in following the higher instincts of his own nature he had attained the assurance and the sanctity of one who has not quailed before a great sacrifice. The last scene in the book, the letter which relates the conversation with Inglesant in the Cathedral Church at Worcester, should be read as a complement to the earlier chapters which describe his boyish search for what he was not to find save through the lesson of years; the whole book may be regarded as a link between these two presentations of the hero's life. It would require too many words to repeat Inglesant's confession even in outline. "The Church of England," says the writer of the letter, "is no doubt a compromise, and is powerless to exert its discipline.... If there be absolute truth revealed, there must be an inspired exponent of it, else from age to age it could not get itself revealed to mankind." And Inglesant replies: "This is the Papist argument, there is only one answer to it--Absolute truth is not revealed. There were certain dangers which Christianity could not, as it would seem, escape. As it brought down the sublimest teaching of Platonism to the humblest understanding, so it was compelled, by this very action, to reduce spiritual and abstract truth to hard and inadequate dogma. As it inculcated a sublime indifference to the things of this life, and a steadfast gaze upon the future, so, by this very means, it encouraged the growth of a wild unreasoning superstition."

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that those words, taken with the plea which follows, express the finest wisdom struck out of the long and for the most part futile Battle of the Churches; they were the creed of Mr. Shorthouse, as they were the experience of the hero of his book. I would end with that image of life as a sacred game with which Inglesant himself closed his confession of faith at the Cathedral door:

The ways are dark and foul, and the grey years bring a mysterious future which we cannot see. We are like children, or men in a tennis court, and before our conquest is half won the dim twilight comes and stops the game; nevertheless, let us keep our places, and above all things hold fast by the law of life we feel within. This was the method which Christ followed, and He won the world by placing Himself in harmony with that law of gradual development which the Divine Wisdom has planned. Let us follow in His steps and we shall attain to the ideal life; and, without waiting for our "mortal passage," tread the free and spacious streets of that Jerusalem which is above.

THE QUEST OF A CENTURY

[The scientific part of this essay, indeed the central idea which makes it anything more than a philosophic vagary, is borrowed from an unpublished lecture of my brother, Prof. Louis T. More, who holds the chair of Physics in the University of Cincinnati. If I have printed the paper under my name rather than his, this is because he, as a scientist, might not wish to be held responsible for the general drift of the thought.]

The story is told of Dante that in one of his peregrinations through Italy he stopped at a certain convent, moved either by the religion of the place or by some other feeling, and was there questioned by the monks concerning what he came to seek. At first the poet did not reply, but stood silently contemplating the columns and arches of the cloister. Again they asked him what he desired; and then slowly turning his head and looking at the friars, he answered, "Peace!" The anecdote is altogether too significant to escape suspicion; yet as _The Divine Comedy_ is supposed to contain symbolically the history of the human spirit in its upward growth and striving, so this fable of the divine poet may be held to sum up in a single word the aim and desire of the spirit's endless quest. So clearly is the object of our inner search this "peace" which Dante is said to have sought, and so close has the spirit come again and again to attaining this goal, that it should seem as if some warring principle within ourselves turned us back ever when the hoped-for consummation was just within reach. As Vaughan says in his quaint way:

Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest And passage through these looms God ordered motion, but ordained no rest.

It is possible, I believe, to view the ceaseless intellectual fluctuations of mankind backward and forward as the varying fortunes of the contest between these two hostile members of our being,--between the deep-lying principle that impels us to seek rest and the principle that drags us back into the region of change and motion and forever forbids us to acquiesce in what is found. And I believe further that the moral disposition of a nation or of an individual may be best characterised by the predominance of the one or the other of these two elements. We may find a people, such as the ancient Hindus, in whom the longing after peace was so intense as to make insignificant every other concern of life, and among whom the aim of saint and philosopher alike was to close the eyes upon the theatre of this world's shifting scenes and to look only upon that changeless vision of

central peace subsisting at the heart Of endless agitation.

The spectacle of division and mutation became to them at last a mere phantasmagoria, like the morning mists that melt away beneath the upspringing day-star.

Again, we may find a race, like the Greeks, in whom the imperturbable stillness of the Orient and the restless activity of the Occident meet together in intimate union and produce that peculiar repose in action, that unity in variety, which we call harmony or beauty and which is the special field of art. But if this harmonious union was a source of the artistic sense among the Greeks, their logicians, like logicians everywhere, were not content until the divergent tendencies were drawn out to the extreme; and nowhere is the conflict between the two principles more vividly displayed than in that battle between the followers of Xenophanes, who sought to adapt the world of change to their haunting desire for peace by denying motion altogether, and the disciples of Heraclitus, who saw only motion and mutation in all things and nowhere rest. "All things flow and nothing abides," said the Ephesian, and looked upon man in the midst of the universe as upon one who stands in the current of a ceaselessly gliding river. The brood of Sophists, carrying this law into human consciousness, disclaimed the possibility of truth altogether; and it is no wonder that Plato, while avoiding the other extreme of motionless pantheism, regarded the sophistic acceptance of this law of universal flux as the last irreconcilable enemy of philosophy and morality alike. "The war over this point is indeed no trivial matter and many are concerned therein," said he, not without bitterness.

It is, when rightly considered, this same question that lends dramatic unity and human value to the long debate of the mediæval schoolmen. Their dispute may be regarded from more than one point of view,--as a struggle of the reason against the bondage of authority, as an attempt to lay bare the foundation of philosophy, as a contest between science and mysticism; but above all it seems to me a long conflict in words between these two warring members within us. The desire of infinite peace was the impulse, I think, which drove on the realists to that "abyss of pantheism," from the brink of which the vision of most men recoils as from the horror of shoreless vacuity. In this way Erigena, the greatest of realists, spoke of God as that which neither acts nor is acted upon, neither loves nor is loved; and then, as if frightened by these blank words, avowed that God though he does not love is in a way Love itself, defining love as the _finis quietaque statio_ of the natural motion of all things that move. On the other hand it was the impulse toward unresting activity which led the nominalists to deny reality to the stationary ideas of genera and species, and to fix the mind upon the shifting combinations of individual objects. In this direction lay the labour of accurate observation and experimental classification, and it is with prefect justice that Hauréau, the historian of scholastic philosophy, closes his chapter on William of Occam, the last of the schoolmen, with these words: "It is then in truth on this soil so well prepared by the prince of the nominalists that Francis Bacon founded his eternal monument,"--and that monument is the scientific method as we see it developed in the nineteenth century.