XIII.
THE OLD FAITH AND THE NEW
AS SEEN IN HELBECK OF BANNISDALE.
Cynical observers of the tendencies of the age tell us that, like the Athenians of Paul's days, we are "lovers of new things". Doubtless we are, for this century, this "wonderful century," as it has recently been described, is a new age or there never was one. Hence, just as Spinoza saw everything sub specie aeternitatis, we may very well have a tendency to see many things sub specie novi. New things, astonishingly new things, in every imaginable department of life have been witnessed by men who saw the opening years of the century, and fin-de-siècle as we are, the capacities of man are apparently as inexhaustible as ever.
It would indeed be passing strange were religion an exception to the uniform progress everywhere in operation. Doubtless the aspect of that supreme concern of life does change less rapidly, but change it does and must: eppur si muove. And it is significant, as one of the most striking results of the beneficent movements of our time, that, in the English-speaking countries at least, one of the most powerful, because the most far-reaching, stimuli to religious progress has been supplied by the hand of a woman.
It has always seemed to me that Mrs. Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere was the making of an epoch, and when so shrewd an observer of the times, so enthusiastic an admirer of "the old ways" as Mr. Gladstone, thought the book worth criticising and censuring, he bore eloquent testimony to the effect it was evidently destined to produce. Its influence has unquestionably been great. There are many people who owe to it their first acquaintance with modern religious thought. Numbers of the younger clergymen of the Establishment must have been profoundly moved by it, because the faith of an Anglican is a comparatively elastic thing compared with the rigidity of supernatural conceptions which distinguishes the Roman Catholic communion. It may even be true that these sporadic outbreaks of Ritualism, which are so seriously threatening to "trouble Israel's peace," owe no little of their force to the far-reaching effects of the new religious controversy. The Newcomes of to-day, like their prototype in the novel, may very well have come to the belief that there is no salvation from that besetting demon of reason and "intellectual pride," but in a religion of sensuousness and externalism which Sydney Smith, himself, of course, a clergyman, once contemptuously designated as "painted jackets and sanctified watering-pots". Panem et Circenses! Bread and games! Give them fumes of incense, blare and blaze of sounds and lights, and they may learn to forget that there ever was such a thing as a school of biblical criticism which has turned orthodoxy into a heresy against reason by telling the truth about the Bible.
Biblical inspiration being attenuated to almost vanishing point, there is nothing left but to appeal to the Church—not, indeed, to the Church of to-day, lost amid the mazes and intricacies of sects and schisms, but to that venerable fiction, "the undivided Church" of the first few centuries of our era, and thus brand religion with the stigma of retrogression by proclaiming it the only thing which is incapable of progress.
Not infrequently is a progressive movement attended at first by a partial reaction, and it is not at all unlikely that Ritualistic clergymen have been terrified into an increased reliance upon forms and rites by the disastrous effects produced upon many of their followers or fellow-churchmen by the new controversial methods of Mrs. Humphry Ward.
Now, what is this new controversy? It consists in the adoption of the handiest implement available to literary genius, namely, the novel, or fictional history, and by consummate critical and constructive skill, showing the disintegration of the old faiths and the building up of the new in the life of some representative man or woman. There is much more in such a novel than appears. First, there is the work of the scholar, of the man of research. He is like the miner who works underground and digs out of the hard earth that "gem of purest ray serene," the truth. Then comes the artist, just as cultured as the scholar, and only less learned, who polishes the gem and gives it its setting in pages of brilliant writing, and what is more important still, weaves it subtly into the daily life of some human being to whom it has been slowly and always painfully introduced. Or, to vary the metaphor, this new controversy is an inoculation performed by one who possesses a masterly acquaintance with the circulatory system of the spiritual anatomy, and is enabled thereby to describe with unerring accuracy the precise effects of the new ideal at every stage of its progress through the soul. You see before you the experiment of a new ideal, at first only suggested, then partially welcomed and even loved. Then the awful struggle in which no quarter can be given on either side, and the final victory of the truth. Such is the new controversy, the world of truth brought down to the world of life, the fertilising streams of knowledge turned by some strong, wise hand, into the narrow channel of an individual existence for the purification and recreation of life.
Naturally, the distinguished authoress turned her attention first to the Anglican Church, the most cultured and liberal of the Christian communities. Evangelical dissent cannot at present be said to be interesting, at any rate from the point of view we are considering to-day. It is destitute of the historic associations of Anglicanism, and has been, until very recently, identified with ideals little suggestive of the intellectual or the beautiful. It can scarcely be said to lend itself to effective dramatic or artistic treatment. I am by no means forgetful of George Eliot, but every one will see at a glance that the handling of the religious question by that incomparable genius is entirely different from that of Mrs. Ward in the books we are noticing. Robert Elsmere stands for a system of theology and faith. Dinah Morris speaks for herself; out of the abundance of a pure and beautiful heart her mouth speaks words of wondrous grace and truth.
Hence, having held up the mirror to the face of Anglicanism, our authoress has turned her attention to that older Church, so rich in memories of the past, with so unequalled a record in the service of humanity, and able even to-day to command the allegiance, the nominal allegiance at all events, of more than two hundred million beings. In Helbeck of Bannisdale we have the world and life of Roman Catholicism displayed with a minuteness and a precision which I should have thought scarcely possible to one not "of the household of the faith". It is, indeed, an ideal world, a world that belongs to the past, for the Helbecks have all but passed away. The Time-Spirit has been too much for them, and that beautiful old-world courtesy, that silent, shrinking piety which was nurtured on memories of martyr-ancestors who were broken on the rack for the ancient faith, and long years of isolation and the proud contempt of the world, is now, as some Catholics regretfully deplore, a thing of the past.
No one knows this better than Mrs. Ward, and she has, I conceive it, purposely chosen a type such as Helbeck, almost an impossible survival in our time, because she could not otherwise have made Catholicism interesting.[1] Nor could she have succeeded in pressing home her own rooted conviction of the hopelessness of any attempt at compromise between the new spirit of reason and life and that of the faith of saints and martyrs. The modern Catholic, who stultifies himself and vilifies his faith by apologetic articles in this or that secular review, in which he attempts to show that the Church which taught the inspiration of Genesis and condemned Galileo was all the time not untrue to the scientific conceptions of Copernicus and Darwin, is a very poor person in the eyes of many of us; and one thing is abundantly certain, that by no possibility could even Mrs. Ward have made him the hero of a novel. For a Helbeck, who has reckoned up the chances of life, and deliberately made his choice, casting in his lot wholly with an idealism for which the modern world has absolutely no sympathy, we can and do feel a deep respect. But for your ambidextrous apologist or theologian, the fellow who can make words bear double meanings, and even infallible oracles tell contradictory stories, we have nothing but contempt, because he is a trifler with truth.
And, now, we may turn to the book.
Mrs. Humphry Ward has long taught us to expect excellence, and in Helbeck of Bannisdale we are not disappointed. She does not work, indeed, on so large a canvas as in Robert Elsmere, nor do her materials allow her to be quite so interesting as in that masterpiece. At all events, that is my individual opinion. The atmosphere is very close throughout the book, and one has a feeling that the windows of that old, old house of Bannisdale have not been opened for centuries. One breathes a stifling air. Light and freedom come alone through that delightful creation, Laura Fountain, a creature you do not easily forget, with an instinct, rather than a reasoned conviction, of rational truth and liberty, a being of almost wild impulse, clever, though partially educated, but good to the heart's core. Altogether, a winsome, lovable girl, and tragic as was her end, one scarcely knows whether she was not happier in her fate, hurried hence on the swift waters of the river she had grown to love, than she ever could have been in her projected marriage with one to whom religion meant almost unmixed gloom. Doubtless Helbeck found consolation in it, but it was such as he was unable to allow others to share. Noble as we instinctively feel the man to be, tender as is the passion wherewith he envelops the object of his love, the shadow of the Cross is ever there. Forgotten in the first sweet hours of their mutual avowal, it soon reveals its sorrowful presence, and gradually deepens into such unutterable gloom that the broken-hearted girl is forced to surrender first love and then life to the inexorable exigencies of his old-world creed.
This, then, is the issue of the dramatic interest of the story, that the attempt to unite the living with the dead ends in the destruction of the living, in the breaking of hearts, in one case, even unto death. For the lives and loves of Helbeck and Laura must be regarded as allegories of the eternal truths which encompass us. It may seem a harsh, a needless thing to cloud the closing page with such sudden and unutterable woe. Why should not these two pass out of each other's lives, as do numberless others who realise the mistake of their projected union? There is no reason whatsoever save this, that all things whatsoever are written in Helbeck of Bannisdale are, like the history of Isaac and Ishmael, told as in an allegory. They are symbols of the gulf which separates the new life from the old, and they serve to convey the reasoned conviction of the distinguished authoress that the inspiration of the "Ages of Faith" is inadequate to the complex needs of the larger life of to-day.
These two unhappy beings illustrate that law of growth and progress which forbids the youth to indulge in the pleasures of the child, or the man to find his recreation in the pastimes of youth. And as with man, so with the race. There was a time when the world was full of Helbecks, an age when the religion of the Cross was the highest, holiest, known. But man, in his maturer years, has outgrown that, just as the Cross supplanted an idealism more imperfect than itself: and the proof of its inadequacy is seen to-day in the blaze of evidence supplied by the slow and inevitable decay of those peoples who were once its steadiest champions. Spain and Portugal are being numbered among the dead. Italy and France are making violent endeavours to escape their doom, by restricting the liberties of the official representatives of their legally established Church, because they instinctively feel that their dogmatics mean death to the peoples who live by them. Hence, the cry, le cléricalisme, voila l'enemi! in France, and the libera chiesa in libero stato! in Italy. The modern state, the modern man cannot live by the old ideals: the dead would strangle the living. And, therefore, Laura Fountain, the modern maiden, must die.
For, look at Alan Helbeck. He is a man who felt, who knew, himself to be an anachronism, a man who had realised so fully the genius of his religion, that he was thoroughly uncomfortable in the society of any who were alien to it. He saw none of his neighbours; once only he had been induced to attend a hunt ball. The doctrine, Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, he adopted in all its rigidity. He fulfilled Newman's ideal to the very letter: he was "anxious about his soul". He never gave anything else a serious thought. To escape hell—that nameless terror which stirs the soul of man to its very depths, as Mrs. Ward very aptly quotes from Virgil on her title page—this was the purpose for which Helbeck of Bannisdale conceived he had been placed here by a beneficent God. And on the supposition that "Acheron" is a reality, Helbeck was absolutely right. If hell is indeed "open to Christians," and if the path to life be exceeding strait and narrow, our bounden duty, as men of common sense, would be to "go sell all we had and give to" orphanages, like the Squire of Bannisdale, and appease this gloomy God by a life of austerity and utter renunciation.
Why, then, do not all Christians turn Helbecks? Simply because for the very life of them they cannot believe in their own inspired eschatology. Verbally, of course, they assent to the whole code of immoralities connected with future retribution, but "a certain obstinate rationality" in them prevents their translating their faith into practice. Hence, the Catholics we meet are no more Helbecks than ourselves. They do not believe in emptying their houses for the sake of orphanages, fasting rigorously in Lent, abstaining from intercourse with their fellow-beings, or going about chanting, "Outside the Church no salvation". Quite the contrary. But the truth remains that Helbeck was true to the ideal, and because he was, it is possible to see a romance and a dignity in his life, not always observable in his modern co-religionists. Nobody has anything to say against their "version" of Christianity, because it is, to all intents and purposes, identical with the sane ideals supplied by modern thought. No French or Italian statesman would have one word to say against them, but they have a morbid dread of Helbecks. If the Helbeck ideal were multiplied indefinitely, it requires very little foresight to pronounce the gradual extinction of the commonwealth. A nation of men who were simply and seriously living so as to escape Hades would make a speedy end of the most prosperous community.
And yet this man had once lived, aye and loved. But his love was lawless, and when all was over, he is taken by a church dignitary in Belgium to witness the death of a bishop. The prelate, weak in body, but strong in faith, is vested in his pontifical robes, and makes an extraordinary impression upon the young layman by the fervour with which he makes his final profession of faith. While in the exaltation of spirit produced by this solemn scene, he is induced to attend a "retreat," or series of spiritual exercises, to be conducted by a Jesuit in a house of their Order. "Grace" had apparently not finally triumphed, because he was within measurable distance of expulsion owing to the indifference of his behaviour. However, the preacher took him seriously in hand, and after one more stirring appeal to absolute self-surrender to the Cross, or, in plain language, to turn his back on the common human life of men, Helbeck's conversion is finally effected, and from that day to the close of his life at Bannisdale, his one thought was the Cross and the safety of his soul.
He had been living this melancholy existence for a number of years, when Laura Fountain, the daughter of a Cambridge professor, and a member of the Ethical Society there (so we are told), broke in upon his life. Her father, as much for pity as for love, had married as his second wife the sister of Alan Helbeck, and during his life had apparently succeeded in teaching her something of the gospel of reason, because Augustina practically abandoned her creed. But on the death of her husband, it revived, and she experienced a longing to return to her old home. Of course, there was joy before the angels and her brother Alan at the penitent's return. Being absolutely dependent for her creature comforts on her step-daughter, there was nothing for it but for Laura to accompany the invalid, and prepare to spend some of her time in the house of a rigid professor of a religion which her father had taught her to despise.
The utmost skill is shown in the gradual transformation of their feeling, from one of pitiful condescension on the one side and undisguised revolt on the other, to sentiments of growing esteem and respect which ripen at length into a love which is tender and deep. The love scene which ensues on that early summer morning when Helbeck discovers the "wild pagan" girl, as he thought her, in a state bordering on exhaustion, after her long walk across country through half the night, is a very beautiful and touching one, and reveals all the mastery which the authoress commands of the language and mystery of the emotions. The image of the infidel child had stolen into the strong, stern man's heart, and, next to the master passion of his life, his sombre religion, completely dominated him. They become engaged, to the almost inexpressible scandal of the household, from the sour old housekeeper up to Father Bowles, with his "purring inanities"—a wonderful creation—and the courtly Father Leadham, a Jesuit and a Cambridge "convert". But Helbeck holds out, trusts bravely to "the intercession of saints" and the attractiveness of Catholic worship, and thus some days of unclouded sunshine enter into his dark and troublous life. Like the gentleman he is, he makes no attempt at proselytism, and gives his word that by no speech or act of others shall his future wife be molested.
They spend a few weeks at the sea, where Bannisdale and all it represents is forgotten. Laura has grown to love and lean upon this strong, resolute man. She enjoys an almost unique experience in triumphing over a life which had been believed to be inaccessible to woman's influence. But the sunshine is soon overcast. They are back again in that atmosphere of depression which Bannisdale exhales, and the agony begins. The poor girl sees the life from the inside, so to speak, and the hopelessness of it all dawns upon her like a desolation. Never could she bring herself to say and do the things she sees and hears about her; a voice she cannot still seems to rise from the depths of her being, defying her to go back on her past and forget the life and example of her father. "You dare not, you dare not," it kept saying to her. No, the system would hang like a pall of death between her and her love: she could never possess his heart. Half of it, more than half, would be given to that ideal of gloom he worshipped as the Cross, which he correctly interpreted as the essence of the Catholic teaching. When, finally, Helbeck stands by the account given of the life of the Jesuit saint, Francis Borgia, who cheerfully surrenders his wife, disposes of his eight little children and then goes off to Rome "to save his soul" by becoming a Jesuit, the cup is full. Her lover tells her the story of his own life, how he had been brought to his present ideals—a story of exceeding great pathos, which utterly overcomes the sensitive, shrinking girl by his side—but it was the end. Half-hysterically she falls into his arms, and Helbeck almost believes the great renunciation is to follow. "His heart beat with a happiness he had never known before." But he was never farther from the truth. "It would be a crime—a crime to marry him," the heart-broken girl sobbed, when she reached the privacy of her own room.
And so she turns her back on Bannisdale. But fate compels her to return. Her step-mother is dying, and Laura's presence is indispensable. Once again the old battle is renewed 'twixt love and creed, and in her anguish this child of the modern world resolves to force herself to submit that she may save her love. Father Leadham can, he must, convince her. Has he not convinced Protestant clergymen and other learned people? Why not a poor, untutored girl such as her? But it was never to be. She was afraid to lose her love, but there was something in her which conquered fear, and it reasserted itself at the last. "I told you to make me afraid," she had once said to Helbeck in one of their sweet moments of reconciliation, "but you can't! There is something in me that fears nothing, not even the breaking of both our hearts."
And so, with the awful inevitableness of a Greek tragedy, the action moves towards the closing doom. It is sad beyond words, and we are grateful for Mrs. Ward's noble reticence. "The tyrant river that she loved had received her, had taken life, and then had borne her on its swirl of waters, straight for that little creek where, once before, it had tossed a human prey upon the beach. There, beating against the gravelly bank, in a soft helplessness, her bright hair tangled among the drift of branch and leaf brought down by the storm, Helbeck found her."
He carried her home upon his breast, and at the last they laid her amongst the Westmoreland rocks and trees, in sight of the Bannisdale woods, in a sweet graveyard, high in the hills. The country folk came in great numbers, and Helbeck, more estranged than ever now, watched the mournful scene from afar.
Such is the tragedy of faith and love, which bequeathed to the already lonely and sorrowful man memories so unspeakably sad, and led this new Antigone to immolate herself in so awful a manner—"a blind witness to august things".
For us there remains but one question. Helbeck, it is plain, can never win Laura, but can Laura ever hope to win Helbeck?
One would have to answer with many distinctions. In the first place, much has been done already. The true Helbeck type is fast disappearing, buried or lost in inaccessible places like the fells of Westmoreland, or Breton castles, far from the highway of humanity's daily life. Had not Mrs. Ward reminded us of him, we should have almost forgotten his existence. The modern spirit, of which Laura is the type, has steadily eliminated the species.
Next, though Roman Catholicism occupies a far different position from that it held in the days when Yorkshire and Lancashire were plentifully studded with houses and homes such as Bannisdale, it must be remembered that the successors of the sixteenth century Helbecks are only magni nomines umbra. To the modern Catholic, religion is less than ever a life to be lived, a distinct type to be created; it is increasingly recognised merely as a creed to be believed. Helbeck of Bannisdale you could pick out of a crowd, but a congregation at the Oratory or Farm Street differs in nothing from one at St. Peter's, Eaton Square, or the smartest Congregational chapel. They all mingle indistinguishably in the "church parade" and are lost.
It is the victory of the "world" overcoming "faith".
The modern Catholic believes with the Church as against the world, in the importance of "orders" or the truth of transubstantiation and infallibility, but his life is with the world. Emphatically, his conversation is not in heaven. He is one of us. He is like Nicodemus, a disciple in secret, for various reasons, of which he is probably utterly unconscious. His Catholicism no more alienates him from modern life than Wallace's profound belief in phrenology puts him beyond the pale of science. His differences with the modern world are purely speculative, having little or no bearing on practical life, and therefore the world is content to take Catholicism at its own valuation. How far this is from Helbeck one can easily divine, but Laura has brought them leagues from that Westmoreland home of impossible ideals and all it symbolises.
At the same time, no one need look for the disappearance of that speculative system known as modern Catholicism. The type, the life indeed has gone, and gone for ever; but there will always be a "crowd which no man can number," who prefer to sit and submit to being up and doing for themselves. Reason and authority must ever continue to be the watchwords of the two great sections into which humanity is divided on the religious question. They must ever be contrasted as habits of mind, as sources whence faith arises. But it needs no exceptional discernment to see that the religion of the strenuous and progressive, the peoples who move the world and make its history, cannot by any possibility known to us be a religion of undiluted authority. As a man is, so are the gods he worships, for the gods are the ideal. Therefore the progressive nations who find it impossible to stand still, not to speak of looking back, will more and more recede from even the remnant of the Helbeck ideal which remains to us to-day, and find their inspiration in a religion which is advancing like themselves. What! science grow, knowledge increase, freedom advance, and religion only stagnate! Perish the thought! Our religion, like our knowledge, grows from day to day, because it is only through the deepening knowledge of the universe and of himself that man is enabled to rise to a proportionate knowledge of That of which all things are but transitory symbols. Creeds and systems, prisons of the infinite spirit of man, never can they befit the age in which the ideal of progress has entered, like an intoxication, into the soul. "The snare is broken and we are delivered." Woe to the man, woe to the people, who are content to sit or stand! Woe to them whose hope is in the dead past, and not in their living selves! Woe to the faith that has no better message for the eager, palpitating generations of to-day, than a bundle of parchments from the third or fourth century, or the impossible practices of an age when the life of the world stood still! They shall never inherit the earth. The new heaven, the better land, is reserved for the strenuous and the progressive alone, for "the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away".
[1] The Rev. Father Clarke, of the Jesuit Society, in the Nineteenth Century of September, 1898, refuses to recognise Helbeck as true to the Catholic type. Certainly, he is not a modern Roman Catholic, and probably Mrs. Ward knows this as well as her critic. The question is, which conforms to type, the old or the modern English Catholic? Mr. Mivart's "liberal catholic" criticisms of Father Clarke in the October number of the same review are good, very good, reading.