III.
Gildea led the way upstairs and ushered Maddock into the sitting-room. It was in reality two rooms joined together by a large folding-door, which was now thrown open and draped with four looped-up curtains, two of some dark-red material behind two of delicately-wrought muslin. The two rooms were of the whole depth of the house, the large bay-windows, open and with a glass-door in the middle of them open also, at one end looking out over the city, at the other over the harbour. A grass-slope, and a garden with flower-beds and rustling trees, spread all round and down to the water’s edge; while, a little way out, the “Petrel” rode at peaceful anchorage, her boat behind her. Maddock was for the moment so taken up with the beauty of the place within and without—the room with all its harmonies of form and colour, the garden and harbour scene—that he did not notice that someone was standing, half hidden by the curtains, in the next room on the hearth-rug. Then Gildea passed through and greeted this person whom he brought forward and introduced to Maddock as Mr. Hawkesbury.
Hawkesbury was a small but well-made man with a tendency to muscular leanness. His face was striking and interesting, and betrayed a strongly-defined individuality. At one moment he might have been called handsome, and his manner frank, free, and open: at another his features took such a contracted intensified look, and his movements were so nervously acute, that the whole man seemed to have suffered distortion. It seemed as if he were suddenly seized by some keen pain, spiritual and physical, and was being racked by it. When Gildea entered, there was for a moment a trace of this latter manner in Hawkesbury: his sensitive pride found something antagonistic in, what seemed to him, the consummate luxury which surrounded him and even in the consummate culture of its owner: he was almost asking himself what right this man had to spend so much money and care in decorating a few rooms for a few months, this man whose life was so radically selfish? Hawkesbury’s was, he might have said, the feeling of one who was a socialist and worker by intense conviction, finding himself opposed to one who was an aristocrat and hedonist by the mere chance of birth and fortune. But, when Gildea met and greeted him with the frank sweet unconscious cordiality of an equal whose acquaintance is pleasant, the dark look passed from Hawkesbury’s face and he gave himself up to the simple pleasure of the situation. His unexpected introduction to Maddock, who represented to him the more or less sumptuous aristocrat of religion, for a moment, it is true, threatened to bring back the evil spirit to him; but Maddock, with his fine social tact, almost divining the state of affairs, was equally frank, sweet, unconscious and cordial in his manner, and Hawkesbury was at his ease.
The three men stood talking together, Maddock in the middle, in the bay-window that looked out over the harbour.
“Why, Sir Horace,” said Maddock, “you will never be able to get away from this enchanting place again! Are you sure you do not intend to make it into a home? You did not honour your Melbourne rooms with such care—such choice of furniture, and....” (He raised his arm and outspread hand, smiling humorously).
“‘Man delights not me,’” answered Gildea, “‘No, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.’” The smile broke out on Hawkesbury’s face too. It was soothing and very pleasant to find these two talking in his presence of such an intimate matter as that alluded to here: he was not accustomed, in the company of, what in Australia and even England goes by the name of, ladies and gentlemen to this complete absence of social and individual constraint.
Then Edgar, Gildea’s valet, ushered in someone else, Mr. Fitzgerald, and there was a movement and introductions between Maddock, Hawkesbury, and the new-comer, the three being left alone for a moment while Gildea was giving some directions to Edgar about domestic arrangements.
Maddock and Fitzgerald fell almost immediately into a conversation, Hawkesbury playing the part of silent member. The Doctor was interested in finding out what the impressions of a cultured Roman Catholic were of Australia and more particularly of Victoria and New South Wales. He asked a few questions, the answer to which, he thought, would show him whether Fitzgerald had observed things with care and sympathy, and was answered with a gentle readiness that pleased and satisfied him. The two men felt themselves to a certain extent on common ground, and, Fitzgerald touching incidentally on the education question, they began to parallelise each other’s views with cordiality.
“We quite recognise,” said Fitzgerald, “all the difficulties of the case—the danger of the unfair influence of catholic teaching over protestant children, or vice versa, just as each happens to be stronger in the particular place and school. But we would accept this danger—accept it, even supposing we were the losers by it—rather than have the present state of things continue. As our Archbishop said only the other day at Leichardt: ‘Besides the faculties of intellect and of reason, there are certain passions of the soul,’ and to develop the former and wholly neglect the latter is to send a boy out into the world with only one eye. You have prepared him for the temporary business of life, and unfitted him for the glorious service of eternity: you have given his ship fine sails, and forgotten to add a rudder! He may be an acute man of business, but he will be a bad citizen; for, in taking away from him his sense of religion, you will take away from him his sense of morality, of honesty, of integrity! We can, at the present stage, see for Australia no future save that of corruption—a corrupt political life, a corrupt national life, the unlimited worship of Mammon!”
“I agree with you to a large extent,” said Maddock, “and we all know that, practically speaking, the talk about ‘religious education at home’ is mere verbiage. If the education of a child is secular, his spiritual lungs, so to speak, end in being able to inhale no other air and thrive on it.”
“And,” Fitzgerald said, “the education is secular! Every effort is being made to drive the voluntary schools out of the field. Their state aid here in New South Wales is withdrawn: in England it is reduced to a pittance and hedged about with annoyance. And this, although the educational reports, drawn up by a secular commission, show that, at any rate the catholic schools educate on the average both better and more cheaply than the state-schools do! We only ask for fair play, and now it has come to this pass that we cannot get it! All over England the protestant voluntary schools are failing and disappearing. But we, we Catholics, who cannot, as Protestants do, console ourselves with the reflection that the atmosphere of the state-schools, if secular, will be tempered by that of our own beliefs—we will not fail and disappear! We are the poorest of all religious bodies in England; but I will venture to say, that not a single case can be found of a catholic school which has surrendered itself up, as these others did, into the hands of the Secularists. Our educating priests and laymen have to suffer much privation: I know, shall I say hundreds, of them who deny themselves all but the bare necessities of life; but—we stand our ground!... You see,” he added smiling gently, “we Catholics cannot labour under any delusion here. We recognize that this is a stupendous crisis in the world’s history. We will have no compromise and secular tempering of the wind to the shorn Christian. We will stand to our guns, and, if we must perish, perish there!”
Maddock was impressed, and so even was Hawkesbury. This man’s enthusiasm was so quiet, so clear, and yet so radiant. Gildea returned and joined them.
“We were speaking of the popular education,” said Fitzgerald, turning to him, “and I would persuade Dr. Maddock that his cause and ours are here identic.”
“I need no persuading,” said Maddock, “I have for some time been persuading myself!”
“And yet,” Fitzgerald put in gently, “the alliance between us and you seems farther off than between us and the Dissenters.”
“And that, I think,” Gildea said, “is because you have more in common. You are afraid of one another. In the one case, you know that the frontier of your alliance will be observed, in the other there is a chance that it may not. At present the most dangerous opponents of Catholicism in England are, what they call, the High Churchmen. The Church of England is a compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism; hence its adaptiveness, hence its strength! It more nearly, in my opinion, approaches ideal Christianity than any other sect in existence. It unites the Faith, the Poetry, of Catholicism, with the Freedom, the Prose, of Protestantism.”
“We thank you,” said Maddock.
“Logically speaking, however,” added Gildea, “it is an absurdity.”
They all began to laugh.
“Ah,” said Maddock, “I was right when, even while thanking you, Sir Horace, I thought to myself: Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes.”
“The Christianity of the Future,” Gildea proceeded gravely, “lies, I believe, in two transformations—in Catholicism learning that its kingdom is not of this world, that it no longer requires a Pope, a Rome, as a Palladium whereby it may fight; in a word, in learning the lesson of Protestantism, of Freedom: and in Protestantism doing the converse, and absorbing into itself the catholic Faith, the catholic Poetry!”
“And what are the Secularists going to do in your Future?” asked Hawkesbury, “are Messrs. Arnold and Huxley to be put up on a shelf in your spiritual Museum, in two large spirit bottles, labelled respectively ‘Culture’ and ‘Science?’”
“Culture,” answered Gildea, “is, after all, but Secular Catholicism, just as Science is but Secular Protestantism. They too will each learn their lesson of the other.”
“Humph!” said Maddock, who again had a faint suspicion that Gildea was mocking, “and so, after all, Sir Horace is an optimist.”
“We do not lay stress,” Fitzgerald said gently, “on the temporal power of the Holy Father. As Sir Horace implied, this temporal power was once the one shining light in a chaotic world, and it was well that it should be set on a hill. But now the light is diffusing itself. It is our wish that, as the Vatican Œcumenical Council declared: ‘Intelligence, Knowledge, and Wisdom may grow and perfect themselves—as much with the mass as with individuals, with one man as with the whole church!’ We are no foes to Freedom. What we are foes to, is Anarchy! At the Reformation you gave the right of deciding on the deepest religious questions to every ignorant man that chose to discuss them, and the seamless robe of Christianity was rent into a hundred pieces! Look at all these miserable little protestant sects and sub-sects, Plymouth Brethren, Primitive Methodists, Ana-baptists, and I know not what noisy, ignorant fanatics. At the Revolution, you did the same for social questions, and what is the result? The Dynamiters of Russia, of Germany, of Ireland, initiated by what you, Dr. Maddock, so well call ‘such gentleness as was revealed in the diabolical deeds of the Commune,’—to say nothing of those of the Reign of Terror.”
Maddock half-deprecated, half-approved by a gesture and an inarticulate sound.
“Yes, but,” said Hawkesbury with the thrilled voice of suppressed passion, “has not history justified the Reformation? and how can you say that it will not justify the Revolution? These, as it seems to me, are the two fiery portals which lead to Religious and Social Liberty. But you are right to depreciate them: they knew nothing of the poetry of Culture and Catholicism, or of the prose of Protestantism and Science. They were volcanic eruptions of the People. Heine says well, when he talks of ‘the divine brutality’ of Luther, and we do not shrink from the same phrase for Hugo or Whitman. Sir Horace has painted us a Future which is indeed heavenly. It is thronged with sweet-singing angels, and there is not a shadow in its perfect light. But what has become of the men, and what, O what, has become of the devils? They have no place in this Future. You do not care for the People, I say, except as you care for your dog which, if he is quiet and docile, shall have a kennel and the bones and scraps from your table; or, if he is surly, shall be chained up; or, if he goes mad, shall be shot! Ah believe me, gentlemen, the People has a place in the Future, for the People, and none other, is the Future! ‘All for the modern,’ cries Whitman, ‘all for the average man of to-day.’ But you—you only care for the Upper and the Middle-class. Your scheme of civilization does not reach to the People. The Upper-class is exhausted: it needs invigorating. ‘Cultivate the Middle-class,’ is the cry, ‘Give us Higher Education for the Middle-class!’ This is the whole social teaching of the best representative man you have, Matthew Arnold. Now we, we Socialists as you call us, love the People, and (you will pardon me) hate the Middle-class;—the dispossessed, the sufferers, not the possessors, the usurpers! The People is the Prodigal Son. What sympathy have we, then, with a man like Arnold who has devoted himself to the edification of the Elder Brother? Arnold says once that he has evolved that perfect style of his which we know so well—that style which encloses a minimum of ideas in a maximum of catch-words—or, as he likes to call it, ‘plain popular exposition’—for the especial benefit of the British Philistine, the divine Middle-class, who otherwise could not be got to read him! He would have done better, perhaps, if he had not turned to the setting, but to the rising sun. The People are the masters of the Future, and the People’s great men will be the great men of the Future.”
There was a pause. Then:
“There is much truth in what Mr. Hawkesbury says,” says Gildea, “Just at present we think too much of the ultimate Culture of the Middle-class and too little of that of the People. But the fact is, that the question of the Middle-class is pressing: they are, as you say, Hawkesbury, the possessors; they are the Present! And this, I think, is why men like Arnold, who believe that, in the organization of the Present, lies the only hope of the success of the Future, are so anxious about it. It is a case, as he believes, of ‘Culture or Anarchy’—Culture now or Anarchy then. And Carlyle, a disciple of whom Mr. Hawkesbury has, in the admirable Preface to his second book of Poems, declared himself to be; Carlyle too, who laid much stress on what he calls ‘the radical element’ in himself, yet mocks at ‘Mill and Co.’ as he says, in whom he declares the opposite element was ‘so miserably lacking.’ Carlyle had no respect for ‘Rousseau fanaticisms,’ even in a man like Mazzini: he saw that, if the Middle-class were purblind and slow, the Socialists were only purblind and quick. Supposing that we grant that the Dynamiters of Russia are justified in meeting an absolutely dense despotism with violence, what excuse but impatience can we find for the Dynamiters of Ireland? The first have no means of free agitation, the second have every means. Ireland has been wronged: no one denies it; and never, in the whole course of her history, has England shown such alacrity as she is doing now to right the wrong; never, not even for herself. But the Irish Socialists are impatient: their cry is for everything to-day, this very hour! To grant it them would be the greatest unkindness possible. Well, they too have taken to dynamite as a hypochondriac takes to opium. The Russian Nihilists are noble people, none nobler, but they taught fools and knaves an appalling lesson when they inaugurated the reign of terror in Petersburg. At the present moment, as Heine clearly foresaw, the Civilization, not of Europe, but of the whole world is in danger.”
“You speak well, Sir Horace,” said Maddock, “and express my opinions better than I could myself, but—Timeo.”
He, Gildea, and Fitzgerald smiled. Hawkesbury was grave. There was a pause. Then:
“I think,” he said, “that you do the People wrong. These extreme Socialists, the Nihilists as they are called, are not from the People, but from the Middle-class. They are, as a rule, men who have received the best education of the time, and who yet find themselves unrecognized and unrewarded. Most of them are journalists. It would astonish you, I think, to see the amount of really first-rate talent that is being flogged to death in the shafts of the modern Press. These men cannot work in shops and banks: the narrow material life has been made impossible to them. The only opening for the life they would—nay, that they must live, or perish, is that of Literature. Literature caters for the Middle-class, the ruling class. These men, then, are the slaves of the great caterers, the newspaper editors. One of the most thorough Socialists I ever knew, Holden, in fact, was on the regular staff of the English Spectator, the organ of the enlightened portion of the Middle-class; and there, as he said to me, he went as near Socialism as he could for threepence! (Threepence is the price of the paper.) This same man wrote, too, political articles for a distinguished radical politician, and I have seen the proof-sheets of these hacked and mauled by the patron to suit the palates of the Radicals. It was this man who once seriously contemplated dropping a bomb in the House of Lords, to show that herd of hereditary liars, as he put it, that there was such a thing as justice in the world! He loved the People: he hated the Middle-class, but the People cared nothing for him. It is, then, I think, a mistake to lay the paternity of Nihilism to the charge of any but the over-fed tyrannous Middle-class.”
“What you say,” Maddock said slowly and courteously, “is very interesting and instructive, Mr. Hawkesbury, and I perceive that the ground which you, and I think I may say Mr. Fitzgerald,” (Fitzgerald smiled and bowed), “and myself have in common is large enough to admit of our working—at any rate not in opposition to one another. Is not our mutual object the enlightenment of the unintelligent mass of the People and of the Middle-class? I am, I am sure, grateful to you, sir, for the manner in which you have brought this home to me. I always felt that underneath all our differences—I mean, the differences of our beliefs, religious or social—we had a common ground, the advancement of a really good and true Civilization, and now, I think, I know this. He renders us a great service who makes our feelings self-conscious, who turns them into the articulate thought of words.”
There was a slight pause.
“And now,” said Gildea, in his half-amused way, “we will, if you please, go down to lunch. Mr. Alcock particularly asked me not to wait for him, and we have waited, it seems unconsciously, for over half-an-hour.”
They went down together into the dining-room, chatting lightly and pleasantly.