CHAPTER X.—FROM THE POST-BAG.
I.
Ambrose Bradley to Alma Craik.
Versailles,—, 18—.
Dearest Alma,—I came here from Rouen this day week, and have more than once sat down to write to you; but my heart was too full, and the words would not come, until to-day. Since we parted—since at your loving intercession I consented to wander abroad for a year, and to write you the record of my doings from time to time—I have been like a man in the Inferno, miserable, despairing, thinking only of the Paradise from which he has fallen; in other words, my sole thought has been of the heavenly days now past, and of you.
Well, I must not talk of that; I must conquer my passionate words and try to write coldly, dispassionately, according to promise, of the things that I have seen. That I can do so at all, will be a proof to you, my darling, that I am already much better. Another proof is that I am almost able (as you will see when you read on) to resume my old British prerogative of self-satisfied superiority over everything foreign, especially over everything French. It is extraordinary how thoroughly national even a cold-blooded cosmopolite becomes when he finds himself daily confronted by habits of thought he does not understand.
I am staying at a small hotel on the Paris side of Versailles, within easy reach of the gay city either by train or tram. I have exchanged my white neckcloth for a black necktie, and there is nothing in my dress or manner to mark me out for that most disagreeable of fishes out of water—a Parson in Paris! I see my clerical brethren sometimes, white-tied, black-coated, broad-brim’d-hatted, striding along the boulevards defiantly, or creeping down bye-streets furtively, or peeping like guilty things into the windows of the photograph shops in the Rue Rivoli. As I pass them by in my rough tourist’s suit, they doubtless take me for some bagman out for a holiday; and I—I smile in my sleeve, thinking how out of place they seem, here in Lutetia of the Parisians.
But my heart goes out most to those other brethren of mine, who draw their light from Rome. One pities them deeply now, in the time of their tribulation, as they crawl, forlorn and despised, about their weary work. The public prints are full of cruel things concerning them, hideous lampoons, unclean caricatures; what the Communist left surviving the journalist daily hacks and stabs. And indeed, the whole of this city presents the peculiar spectacle of a people without religion, without any sort of spiritual aspiration. Even that vague effluence of transcendental liberalism, which is preached by some of their leading poets and thinkers, is pretty generally despised, Talking with a leading bookseller the other day concerning your idol, Victor Hugo, and discussing his recent utterances on religious subjects, I found the good bourgeois to be of opinion that the great poet’s brain was softening through old age and personal vanity! The true hero of the hour, now all the tinsel of the Empire is rubbed away, is a writer named Zola, originally a printer’s devil, who is to modern light literature what Schopenhauer is to philosophy—a dirty, muddy, gutter-searching pessimist, who translates the ‘anarchy’ of the ancients into the bestial argot of the Quarties Latin.
It has been very well said by a wit of this nation that if on any fine day the news arrived in Paris that ‘God was dead,’ it would not cause the slightest astonishment or interest in a single salon; indeed, to all political intents and purposes the Divinity is regarded as extinct. A few old-fashioned people go to church, and here and there in the streets you see little girls in white going to confirmation; but the majority of the people are entirely without the religious sentiment in any form. A loathsome publication, with hideous illustrations, called the Bible pour Rire, is just now being issued in penny numbers; and the character of its humour may be guessed when I tell you that one of the pictures represents the ‘bon Dieu,’ dressed like an old clothesman, striking a lucifer on the sole of his boot, while underneath are the words, ‘And God said, Let there be Light!’ The same want of good taste, to put reverence aside as out of the question, is quite as manifest in the higher literature, as where Hugo himself, in a recent poem, thus describes the Tout-Puissant, or All-Powerful:-
Pris d’un vieux rhumatisme incurable à l’échine,
Après avoir créé le monde, et la machine
Des astres pêle-mêle au fond des horizons,
La vie et l’engrenage énorme des saisons,
La fleur, l’oiseau, la femme, et l’abîme, et la terre,
Dieu s’est laissé tomber dans son fauteuil-Voltaire!
Is it any wonder that a few simple souls, who still cherish a certain reverence for the obsolete orthodox terminology should go over in despair to Rome?
One of the great questions of the day, discussed in a spirit of the most brutal secularity, is Divorce. I know your exalted views on this subject, your love of the beautiful old fashion which made marriage eternal, a sacrament of souls, not to be abolished even by death itself. Well, our French neighbours wish to render it a simple contract, to be dissolved at the whim of the contracting-parties. Their own social life, they think, is a living satire on the old dispensation.
But I sat down to write you a letter about myself, and here I am prosing about the idle topics of the day, from religion to the matrimonial musical glasses. I am wonderfully well in body; in fact, never better. But oh, my Alma, I am still miserably sick of soul! More than ever do I perceive that the world wants a creed. When the idea of God is effaced from society, it becomes—this Paris—a death’s head with a mask of pleasure:—
The time is out of joint—ah cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
All my foolish plans have fallen like a house of cards. I myself seem strangling in the evils of the modern snake of Pessimism. If it were not for you, my guardian angel, my star of comfort, I think I should try euthanasia. Write to me! Tell me of yourself, of Fensea; no news that comes from my heaven on earth will fail to interest and soothe me. What do you think of my successor? and what does the local Inquisition think of him? Next to the music of your voice will be the melody of your written words. And forgive this long rambling letter. I write of trifles light as air, because I cannot write of what is deepest in my heart.—Yours always,
Ambrose Bradley.
II.
From Alma Craik to Ambrose Bradley.
Thanks, dearest Ambrose, for your long and loving letter. It came to me in good season, when I was weary and anxious on your account, and I am grateful for its good tidings and its tone of growing cheerfulness. You see my prescription is already working wonders, for you wrote like your old self—almost! I am so glad that you are well in health, so thankful you are beginning to forget your trouble. If such a cure is possible in a few short weeks, what will time not do in a year?
There is no news, that is, none worth telling.
Your successor (since you ask concerning him) is a mild old gentleman with the most happy faith in all the articles of the Athanasian creed—particularly that of eternal punishment, which he expounds with the most benevolent of smiles. I should say he will be a favourite; indeed, he is a favourite already, though he has the disadvantage, from the spinster point of view, of being a very, very married man. He has a wife and seven children, all girls, and is far too poor in this world’s goods to think much of his vested interest in those of the next world. I have heard him preach once, which has sufficed.
What you say of life in France interests me exceedingly, and my heart bleeds for those poor priests of the despised yet divine creed. If you had not taught me a purer and a better faith, I think I should be a Roman Catholic, and even as it is, I can feel nothing but sympathy for the Church which, after all, possesses more than all others the form of the Christian tradition.
Agatha Combe has returned to London. She is still full of that beautiful idea (was it yours or mine, or does it belong to both of us?) of the New Church, in which Religion, Science, and Art should all meet together in one temple, as the handmaids of God. I hope you have not dismissed it from your mind, or forgotten that, at a word from you, it may be realised. Agatha’s conception of it was, I fear, a little too secular; her Temple of worship would bear too close a resemblance to her brother’s dingy Hall of Science. She has just finished a treatise, or essay, to be published in one of the eclectic magazines, the subject, ‘Is growth possible to a dogmatic religion?’ Her answer is in the negative, and she is dreadfully severe on what she calls the ‘tinkering’ fraternity, particularly her bête noire, young Mr. Mallock. Poor Agatha! She should have been a man by rights, but cruel fate, by just a movement of the balance, made her the dearest of old maids, and a Blue! Under happier conditions, with just a little less of the intellectual leaven, she would have made a capital wife for such a parson as your successor; for in spite of her cleverness, and what they call her infidelity, she is horribly superstitious—won’t pass a pin in the road without lifting it up, throws salt over her shoulder if she happens to spill a morsel, and can tell your fortune by the cards! Besides all this, she is a born humanitarian; her thoughts for ever running on the poor, and flannel, and soup-kitchens, and (not to leave the lower animals out of her large heart) the woes of the vivisected dogs and rabbits. And yet, when the pen is in her hand and her controversial vein is open, she hurls her argumentative thunderbolts about like a positive Demon!
There, I am trying to rattle on, as if I were a giddy girl of eighteen. But my heart, like yours, is very full. Sometimes I feel as if you were lost to me for ever; as if you were gone into a great darkness, and would never come back. Dearest, you think of me sometimes—nay, often?—and when your wound is healed, you will come back to me, better and stronger and happier than ever, will you not? For am I not your Rachel, who still follows you in soul wherever you go? I sit here for hours together, thinking of the happy days that are fled for ever; then I wander out to the churchyard, and look at the dear old vicarage, and wherever I go I find some traces of him I love. Yesterday I went over to the abbey. Do you remember, dear, when we last met there, and swore our troth in the moonlight, with our ears full of the solemn murmuring of the sea?
That reminds me of what you say concerning the French agitation on the subject of Divorce. I read some time ago an abstract of M. Naquet’s famous discourse—it was published in the English newspapers—and I felt ashamed and sad beyond measure. How low must a nation have fallen when one of its politicians dares to measure with a social foot-rule the holiest of human covenants! If marriage is a bond to be worn or abandoned at pleasure, if there is nothing more sacred between man and woman than the mere union of the body, God help us women, and me most of all! For has not God already united my soul to yours, not as yet by the sacrament of the Church, but by that sacrament of Love which is also eternal; and if we were spiritually sundered, should I not die; and if I thought that Death could break our sacrament of Love, should I not become even as those outcast ones who believe there is no God? I have never loved another man; you have never loved (how often have you not sworn it to me!) another woman. Well, then, can man ever separate what God has so joined together? Even if we were never man and wife in the conventional sense, even if we never stand together at the earthly altar, in the eyes of Heaven we are man and wife, and we have been united at the altar of God. This, at least, is my conception of Marriage.
Between those that love, Divorce (as these hucksters call it) is impossible.
Alas! I write wildly, and my Abelard will smile at his handmaid’s eager words. ‘Me-thinks the lady doth protest too much,’ I hear him exclaim with Shakespeare. But I know that you hold with me that those things are holy beyond vulgar conception.
Write to me again soon. All my joy in life is hearing from you.—Ever your own,
Alma.
III.
From Ambrose Bradley to Alma Craik.
Dearest Alma,—Just a few lines to say that I am going on to Germany; I will write to you again directly I come to an anchorage in that brave land. For I am sick of France and Frenchmen; sick of a people that have not been lessoned by misfortune, but still hunger for aggression and revenge; sick of the Dead Sea fruit of Parisian pleasure, poisoned and heart-eaten by the canker-worm of unbelief. Our English poetess is virtuously indignant (you remember) with those who underrate this nation.
The English have a scornful insular way
Of calling the French light, &c.
And it is true they are not light, but with the weight of their own blind vanity, heavy as lead. The curse of spiritual dulness is upon them. They talk rhodomontade and believe in nothing. How I burn for the pure intellectual air of that nobler people which, in the name of the God of Justice, recently taught France so terrible a lesson! Here, in France, every man is a free agent, despising everything, the government which he supports! the ideas which he fulminates, despising most his own free, frivolous, miserable self: there, in Germany, each man is a patriot and a pillar of the state, his only dream to uphold the political fabric of a great nation. To efface one’s selfish interest is the first step to becoming a good citizen; to believe in the government of God, follows as a natural consequence.
What you say about our spiritual union, touches me to the soul, though it is but the echo of my own fervent belief. But I am not so sure that all earthly unions, even when founded in affection and good faith, are indissoluble. Surely also, there are marriages which it is righteous to shatter and destroy?
You are a pure woman, to whom even a thought of impurity is impossible; but alas! all women are not made in the same angelic mould, and we see every day the spectacle of men linked to partners in every respect unworthy. Surely you would not hold that the union of a true man with a false woman, a woman who (for example) was untrue to her husband in thought and deed, is to last for ever? I know that is the Catholic teaching, that marriage is a permanent sacrament, and that no act of the parties, however abominable, can render either of them free to marry again; and we find even such half-hearted Liberals as Gladstone upholding it (see his ‘Ecclesiastical Essays’), and flinging mud in the blind face of Milton, because (out of the bitterness of his own cruel experience) he argued the contrary. Divorce is recognised in our own country and countenanced by our own religion; and I believe it to be necessary for the guarantee of human happiness. What is most hideous in our England is the horrible institution of the civil Court, where causes that should be heard in camerâ are exposed shamefully to the light of day; so that men would rather bear their life-long torture than submit to the ordeal of a degrading publicity, and only shameless men and women dare to claim their freedom at so terrible a price.
I intended to write only a few lines, and here am I arguing with you on paper, just as we used to argue in the old times viva voce, on a quite indifferent question. Forgive me! And yet writing so seems like having one of our nice, long, cosy, serious talks. Discussions of this kind are like emptying one’s pocket to find what they contain; I never thought I had any ideas on the subject till I began, schoolboy-like, to turn them out!
God bless you, my darling! When you hear from me next, I shall be in the land ol the ‘ich’ and the ‘nicht ich,’ of beer and philosophy, of Deutschthum and Strasbourg pies.
Ambrose Bradley.
IV.
The Same to the Same.
Dearest,—I wrote to you the other day from Berlin—merely a line to say that my movements were uncertain, and asking you to address your next letter care of Gradener the banker, here at Frankfort. I suppose there must have been some delay in the transmission, or the letter must have gone astray: at all events, here I am, and grievously disappointed to find you have not written. Darling, do not keep me in suspense; but answer this by return, and then you shall have a long prosy letter descriptive of my recent experiences. Write! write!
Ambrose Bradley.
V.
Alma Craik to Ambrose Bradley.
Dearest Ambrose,—You are right in supposing that your letter from Berlin went astray; it has certainly never reached me, and you can imagine my impatience in consequence. However, all’s well that ends well; and the sight of your dear handwriting is like spring sunshine.
Since I last wrote to you I have been reading-in a French translation those wonderful letters of Héloïse to the great Abelard, and his to her; and somehow they seemed to bring you close to me, to recall your dear face, the very sound of your beautiful voice. Dearest, what would you have said if I had addressed this letter to you in the old sweet terms used by my prototype—not for the world to see, but for your loving eyes alone? ‘A son maître, ou plutôt à son père; à son époux, ou plutôt à son frère: sa servante, ou plutôt sa fille; son épouse, ou plutôt sa sour; à Ambrose, Alma.’ All these and more are you to me, my master and my father, my husband and my brother; while I am at once your servant and your daughter, your sister and your spouse. Do you believe, did you ever feel inclined to believe, in the transmigration of souls? As I read these letters, I seem to have lived before, in a stranger, stormier time; and every word she wrote seemed to be the very echo of my burning heart. Ah! but our lot is happier, is it not? There is no shadow of sin upon us to darken our loving dream: we have nothing to undo, nothing to regret; and surely our spiritual union is blest by God. For myself, I want only one thing yet to complete my happiness—to see you raised as he was raised to a crown of honour and glory in the world. What I think of you, all mankind must think of you, when they know you as I know you, my apostle of all that is great and good. Ah, dearest, I would gladly die, if by so doing I could win you the honour you deserve.
But I must stop now. When I begin to write to you, I scarcely know when to cease. Adieu, tout mon bien!
Alma.
VI.
Ambrose Bradley to Alma Craik
‘A Alma, sa bien-aimée épouse et sour en Jésus-Christ, Ambrose son époux et frère en Jésus-Christ!’ Shall I begin thus, dearest, in the very words of the great man to whom, despite my undeserving, you have lovingly compared me? You see I remember them well. But alas! Abelard was thrown on different days, when at least faith was possible. What would he have become, I wonder, had he been born when the faith was shipwrecked, and when the trumpet of Euroclydon was sounding the destruction of all the creeds? Yonder, in France, one began to doubt everything, even the divinity of love; so I fled from the Parisian Sodom, trusting to find hope and comfort among the conquerors of Sedan. Alas! I begin to think that I am a sort of modern Diogenes, seeking in vain for a people with a Soul. I went first to Berlin, and found there all the vice of Paris without its beauty, all the infidelity of Frenchmen without their fitful enthusiasm in forlorn causes. The people of Germany, it appears to me, put God and Bismarck in the same category; they accept both as a solution of the political difficulty, but they truly reverence neither. The typical German is a monstrosity, a living-contradiction: intellectually an atheist, he assents to the conventional uses of Deity; politically a freethinker, he is a slave to the idea of nationality and a staunch upholder of the divine right of kings. Long ago, the philosophers, armed with the jargon of an insincere idealism, demolished Deism with one hand and set it up with the other; what they proved by elaborate treatises not to exist, they established as the only order of things worth believing; till at last the culmination of philosophic inconsistency was reached in Hegel, who began by the destruction of all religion and ended in the totem-worship of second childhood. In the course of a very short experience, I have learned cordially to dislike the Germans, and to perceive that, in spite of their tall talk and their splendid organisation, they are completely without ideas. In proportion as they have advanced politically, they have retrograded intellectually. They have no literature now and no philosophy; in one word, no spiritual zeal. They have stuck up as their leader a man with the moral outlook of Brander in ‘Faust,’ a swashbuckler politician, who swaggers up and down Europe and frowns down liberalism wherever it appears. Upon my word, I even preferred the Sullen Talent which he defeated at Sedan.
I think I see you smiling at my seeming anger; but I am not angry at all—only woefully disenchanted.
This muddy nation stupefies me like its own beer. Its morality is a sham, oscillating between female slavery in the kitchen and male drunkenness in the beer-garden. The horrible military element predominates everywhere; every shopkeeper is a martinet, every philosopher a dull sergeant. And just in time to reap the fruit of the predominant materialism or realism, has arisen the new Buddha Gautama without his beneficence, his beauty, his tenderness, or his love for the species.
Here in Frankfort (which I came to eagerly, thinking of its famous Judenstrasse, and eager to find the idea of the ‘one God’ at least among the Jews), I walk in the new Buddha’s footsteps wherever I go.
His name was Arthur Schopenhauer, a German of Germans, with the one non-national merit, that he threw aside the mask of religion and morality. He was a piggish, selfish, conceited, honest scoundrel, fond of gormandising, in love with his own shadow, miserable, and a money-grubber like all his race. One anecdote they tell of him is worth a thousand, as expressing the character of the man. Seated at the table d’hôte here one day, and observing a stranger’s astonishment at the amount he was consuming, Schopenhauer said, ‘I see you are astonished, sir, that I eat twice as much as you, but the explanation is simple—I have twice as much brains!’
The idea of this Heliogabalus of pessimism was that life is altogether an unmixed evil; that all things are miserable of necessity, even the birds when they sing on the green boughs, and the babes when they crow upon the breast; and that the only happiness, to be secured by every man as soon as possible, and the sooner the better, was in Nirwâna, or total extinction. A cheerful creed, without a God of any kind—nay, without a single godlike sentiment! There are pessimists and pessimists. Gautama Buddha himself, facile princeps, based his creed upon infinite pity; his sense of the sorrows of his fellow-creatures was so terrible as to make existence practically unbearable. John Calvin was a Christian pessimist; his whole nature was warped by the sense of infinite sin and overclouded by the shadow of infinite justice. But this Buddha of the Teutons is a different being; neither love nor pity, only a predominating selfishness complicated with constitutional suspicion.
And yet, poor man, he was happy enough when his disciples hailed him as the greatest philosopher of the age, the clearest intellect on the planet; and nothing is more touching than to witness how, as his influence grew, and he emerged from neglect, his faith in human nature brightened. Had he lived a little longer and risen still higher in esteem—had the powers that be crowned him, and the world applauded him, he too, like Hegel, would doubtless have added to his creed a corollary that, though there is no God, religion is an excellent thing; that though there is no goodness, virtue is the only living truth!
Be that as it may, I am thoroughly convinced that there is no via media between Christ’s Christianity and Schopenhauer’s pessimism; and these two religions, like the gods of good and evil, are just now preparing for a final struggle on the battle-field of European thought. Just at present I feel almost a pessimist myself, and inclined to laugh more than ever at poor Kingsley’s feeble twaddle about this ‘singularly well-constructed world.’ Every face I see, whether of Jew or Gentile, is scribbled like the ledger with figures of addition and subtraction; every eye is crowsfooted with tables of compound interest; and the moneybags waddle up and down the streets, and look out of the country house windows, like things without a soul. But across the river, at Sachsenhausen, there are trees, in which the birds sing, and pretty children, and lovers talking in the summer shade. I go there in the summer afternoons and smoke my pipe, and think over the problem of the time. Think you, dearest, that Schopenhauer was right, and that there is no gladness or goodness in the world? Is the deathblow of foolish supernaturalism the destruction also of heavenly love and hope? Nay, God forbid! But this hideous pessimism is the natural revolt of the human heart, after centuries of optimistic lies. Perhaps, when another century has fled, mankind may thank God for Schopenhauer, who proved the potency of materialistic Will, and for Strauss, who has shown the fallacy of human judgment. The Germans have given us these two men as types of their own degradation; and when we have thoroughly digested their bitter gospel, we shall know how little hope for humanity lies that way. Meantime, the Divine Ideal, the spiritual Christ survives—the master of the secret of sorrow, the lord of the shadowy land of hope. He turns his back upon the temple erected in his name; he averts his sweet eyes from those who deny He is, or ever was. He is patient, knowing that his kingdom must some day come.
More than ever now do I feel what a power the Church might be if it would only reconstruct itself by the light of the new knowledge. Without it, both France and Germany are plunged into darkness and spiritual death. As if man, constituted as he is, can exist without religion! As if the creed of cakes and ale, or the gospel of Deutschthum and Sauer-kraut were in any true sense of the word religion at all! No, the hope and salvation of the human race lies now, as it lay eighteen hundred years ago, in the Christian promise. If this life were all, if this world were the play and not the prelude, then the new Buddha would have conquered, and nothing be left us but Nirwâna. But the Spirit of Man, which has created Christ and imagined God, knows better. It trusts its own deathless instinct, and by the same law through which the swallow wings its way, it prepares for flight to a sunnier zone.
Pray, my Alma, that even this holy instinct is not merely a dream! Pray that God may keep us together till the time comes to follow the summer of our love to its bright and heavenly home!—Yours till death, and after death,
Ambrose Bradley.
VII.
Alma Craik to Ambrose Bradley.
Your last letter, dearest Ambrose, has reached me here in London, where I am staying for a short time with Agatha Combe. Everybody is out of town, and even the Grosvenor Club (where I am writing this letter) is quite deserted.
I never like London so much as when it is empty of everybody that one knows.
And so you find the Germans as shallow as the French, and as far away from the living truth it is your dream to preach? For my own part, I think they must be rather a stupid people, in spite of their philosophic airs. Agatha has persuaded me lately to read a book by a man called Haeckel, who is constructing the whole history of Evolution as children make drawings, out of his own head; and when the silly man is at a loss for a link in the chain, he invents one, and calls it by a Latin name! I suppose Evolution is true (and I know you believe in it), but if I may trust my poor woman’s wit, it proves nothing whatever. The mystery of life remains just the same when all is said and done; and I see as great a miracle in a drop of albumen passing through endless progressions till it flowers in sense and soul, as in the creation of all things at the fiat of an omnipotent personal God and Father. The poor purblind German abolishes God altogether!
Agatha has read your Schopenhauer, and thinks him a wonderful man; I believe, too, he has many disciples in this country. To me, judging from what I hear of him, and also from your description of him, he seems another stupid giant—a Fee-fo-fi-fum full of self-conceit and hasty pudding, and sure to fall a victim, some day, to Little Jack Horner. But every word you write (it seems always like your own dear voice speaking!) makes me think of yourself, of your quarrel with the Church, and of your justification before the world. If purblind men like these can persuade the world to listen to them, why should your ‘one talent, which is death to lose,’ be wasted or thrown away? When you have wandered a little longer, you must return and take your place as a teacher and a preacher in the land, You must not continue to be an exile. You are my hero, my Abelard, my teacher of all that is great and good to a perverse generation, and I shall never be happy until you reach the summit of your spiritual ambition and are recognised as a modern apostle. You must not leave the ministry; you must not abandon your vocation; or if you do so, it must be only to change the scene of your labours. Agatha Combe tells me that there is a great field for a man like you in London; that the cultivated people here are sick of the old dogmas, and yet equally sick of mere materialism; that what they want is a leader such as you, who would take his stand upon the laws of’ reason, and preach a purified and exalted Christian ideal. Well, since the English Establishment has rejected you, why not, in the greatest city of the world, form a Church of your own? I have often thought of this, but never so much as lately. There you are tongue-tied and hand-tied, at the mercy of the ignorant who could never comprehend you; here you could speak with a free voice, as the great Abelard did when he defied the thunders of the Vatican. Remember, I am rich. You have only to say the word, and your handmaid (am I not still that, and your spouse and your sister?) will upbuild you a Temple! Ah, how proudly!
Yes, think of this, think of the great work of your life, not of its trivial disappointments. Be worthy of my dream of you, my Abelard.
When I see you wear your crown of honour with all the world worshipping the new teaching, I shall be blest indeed.
Alma.
VIII.
Ambrose Bradley to Alma Craik.
Dearest Alma,—How good you are! How tenderly do you touch the core of my own secret thought, making my whole spirit vibrate to the old ambition, and my memory tremble with the enthusiasm of my first youth. Oh, to be a modern Apostle, as you say! to sway the multitude with words of power, to overthrow at once the tables of the money-changers of materialism, and the dollish idols of the Old Church.
But I know too well my own incapacity, as compared with the magnitude of that mighty task. I believe at once too little and too much; I should shock the priests of Christ, and to the priests of Antichrist I should be a standing jest; neither Montague nor Capidet would spare me, and I should lose my spiritual life in some miserable polemical brawl.
It is so good of you, so like you, to think of it, and to offer out of your own store to build me a church; but I am not so lost, so unworthy, as to take advantage of your loving charity, and to secure my own success—or rather, my almost certain failure—on such a foundation.
And that reminds me, dearest, of what in my mad vanity I had nearly forgotten—the difference between our positions in the world. You are a rich woman; I, as you know, am very poor. It was different, perhaps, when I was an honoured member of the Church, with all its prizes and honours before me; I certainly felt it to be different, though the disparity always existed. But now! I am an outcast, a ruined man, without property of any kind. It would be base beyond measure to think of dragging you down to my present level; and, remember, I have now no opportunity to rise. If you linked your lot with mine, all the world would think that I loved you, not for your dear self, but for your gold; they would despise me, and think you were insane. No, dearest, I have thought it sadly over, again and again, and I see that it is hopeless. I have lost you for ever.
When you receive this, I shall be on my way to Rome.
How the very writing of that word thrills me, as if there were still magic in the name that witched the world! Rome! the City of the Martyrs! the City of the Church! the City of the Dead! Her glory is laid low, her pride is dust and ashes, her voice is senile and old, and yet... the name, the mighty deathless name, one to conjure with yet. Sometimes, in my spiritual despair, I hear a voice whispering in my ear that one word ‘Rome’; and I seem to hear a mighty music, and a cry of rejoicing, and to see a veiled Figure arising with the keys of all the creeds,—behind her on the right her handmaid Science, behind her on the left her handmaid Art, and over her the effulgence of the new-risen sun of Christ.
And if such a dream were real, were it not possible, my Alma, that you and I might enter the new Temple, not as man and wife, but as sister and brother? There was something after all in that old idea of the consecrated priest and the vestal virgin. I often think with St. Paul that there is too much marrying and giving in marriage. ‘Brother and sister’ sounds sweetly, does it not?
Forgive my wild words. I hardly know what I am writing. Your loving letter has stirred all the fountains of my spirit, your kindness has made me ashamed.
You shall hear from me again, from the very heart of the Seven Hills! Meantime, God bless you!—Ever your faithful and devoted,
Ambrose Bradley.
IX.
Alma Cram to Ambrose Bradley.
Be true to your old dream, dearest Ambrose, and remember that in its fruition lies my only chance of happiness. Do not talk of unworthiness or unfitness; you are cruel to me when you distrust yourself. Will you be very angry if I tell you a secret? Will you forgive me if I say to you that even now the place where you shall preach the good tidings is rising from the ground, and that in a little while, when you return, it will be ready to welcome its master? But there, I have said too much. If there is anything more you would know, you must guess it, dearest! Enough to say that you have friends who love you, and who are not idle.
If I thought you meant what you said in your last I should indeed despair; but it was the shadow of that abominable Schopenhauer who spoke, and not my Abelard. To tell me that I am rich, and you are poor—as if even a mountain of money, high as Ararat, could separate those whom God has joined! To talk of the world’s opinion, the people’s misconception—as if the poor things who crawl on the ground could alter the lives of those who soar with living thoughts to heaven! Get thee behind me, Schopenhauer! When any voice, however like his own, talks of the overthrow of the man I love, I only smile. I know better than to be deceived by a trick of the ventriloquist. You and I know, my Ambrose, that you have not been overthrown at all—that you have not fallen, but risen—how high, the world shall know in a very little while.
Meantime, gather up strength, both of the body and the mind. Drink strength from the air of the holy city, and come back to wear your priestly robes. Your dream will be realised, be sure of that!
Do you think to daunt me when you say that I must not be your wife? Do you think your handmaid cares so long as she may serve at your feet? Call her by what name you please, spouse or sister, is it not all the same? Your hope is my hope, your country my country, your God my God—now and for ever. Only let us labour together earnestly, truthfully, patiently, and all will be well.—Yours always faithfully and affectionately,
Alma.