He seems to say—and this boldness does not displease in a man of talent—“We want liberty. Free our hands; give us permission to produce masterpieces, and the masterpieces will not be delayed.”
What Mr. Jones satirised in Saints and Sinners, was the money-making spirit that went hand in hand with bigotry. This combination is incarnated by Hoggard and Prabble, the two deacons of the dissenting congregation of Steepleford. Hoggard is a business man on a small scale, and in a small town; Prabble is an easy-going grocer. The one is repulsive, the other merely comic; but, at bottom, they represent the same spirit, in different degrees, and after different fashions. Hoggard is fully aware of his rascality, and there is nothing sincere about him except his pride. He is convinced that there is a special moral code for clever men of his own stamp.
Prabble, on the other hand, is of opinion that the minister would be doing no more than his duty were he to denounce from the pulpit the co-operative stores by which his shop is being ruined. “I keep up his chapel. He ought to keep up my custom.” Even in the last scene, in the midst of the tragic emotions of the dénouement, when he wishes to express to the minister they have driven away the remorse of his ungrateful congregation, his one fixed idea comes out again. If only Mr. Fletcher could manage, without inconvenience, to slip in a word on Sunday—just one word about the co-operative stores!
Does this grocer, who would prop up his shop against his chapel, reason and act otherwise at bottom, than did the great king when he allied his throne with the pulpit of Bossuet? In both cases the policy proved successful—at least, for a time.
“You know, my dear Prabble,” Hoggard says to his friend, “it is we who are the greatness of England; it is we who have made her what she is.” And what is so terrible about it is, that he is not wholly wrong. Hoggard and Prabble represent one of the various types of that Puritan democracy, which accomplished great things in former days, but which has learnt nothing for two centuries, except to make money. They belong to what is called the middle class, and the middle class, so different from our Classe Moyenne, is regarded with real contempt by superior intelligences. Matthew Arnold congratulated Mr. Jones ten years ago on having given it, in his admirable picture of these two deacons, one of the hardest blows it had yet received. What neither Mr. Arnold nor Mr. Jones took the trouble to point out is, that in ordinary life the minister cannot belong to a different race of men from those who of their own accord have placed him at their head. Like flock, like pastor, and—I shall venture to add—like creed.
In default of prudence, an artistic consideration (which I can understand) would have strongly impelled Mr. Jones to offer us a pastor differing from his flock, as the suave tenderness of the New Testament differs from the harshness of the Old. This minister, who allows himself to be robbed by a poulterer, and who says such sublime things, has not been taken from real life, but from The Vicar of Wakefield,—Goldsmith’s irrational, delightful work. At times he rises to the height of Myriel, the bishop in Les Miserables, and it is not at these times I like him best. I acknowledge that he has tried my temper by his blindness, that I have been aggravated by his meekness, have lost all patience with his patience. He is very human, very virile, when before his assembled congregation he makes the confession which is so cruel to him, of his daughter’s sin, and relinquishes the spiritual functions which have been his livelihood. There is real grandeur in this self-abasement—a dignity full of impressiveness in this confession of shame. The words are at once plain and delicate, they come from the depths of his nature, and go straight to the soul of his hearers. But when he hides his mortal enemy, in order to shield him from the vengeance he has earned, and shares with him his last piece of bread, I feel that he is going too far, and that pity, as sometimes happens, is clashing with justice. Then, when he cries out, “Christians, will you never learn to forgive?”—the words thrill me, and I change my mind again—I tell myself that one must sometimes exaggerate beyond the bounds of reason to bring even a little goodness into the souls of the pitiless.
Mr. Jones’s talent achieved a fresh advance in Judah, produced on May 21, 1890. There is no longer any trace of melodrama, either in the situations or in the characters. The nobility of mind, and the need of spontaneous confession, which mark the finest scene in Saints and Sinners, are used as motives again in Judah, with great power, and form, so to speak, the mainspring of the play. A young girl named Vashti Dethic, has been brought up by her father to the rôle of clairvoyante and miracle-worker. Extreme poverty, extreme youth, moral force carried perhaps to the point of terrorising,—she has abundant excuses for adopting this horrible career. Now, her interests, her pride, the enthusiam of her stupid devotees, constrain her to persevere in an imposture which she loathes.
We pity her, and are grateful to the author for diverting our scorn to the wretched Dethic. We are even willing to believe that a high-strung, nervous girl may imagine herself to be the subject of miraculous influences. When Vashti is subjected to a fast of three weeks, and when, by the merciless vigilance of her watchers, this fast threatens to become too real, the young girl’s heroism touches us, in spite of ourselves, as much as though it were devoted to a better cause. We form the absurd wish that her father may succeed in smuggling some food to her—we are all for the miracle against science, for charlatanism against the truth; which is going as far as can be gone! Or rather, we have developed an interest in a poor human creature in serious peril, and, without reflecting upon her character, we hope she may escape. How would it be if we were passionately in love with her? Thus it is with Judah Llewellyn.
These two names are noteworthy; the author calls our attention by them to the dual origin of his hero, Celtic and Jewish. This mixed ancestry explains, doubtless, both the fanatic and the impulsive side of his nature, and the mastery of the religious instinct in its conflict with the ardours and passions of the imagination. Judah is endowed with a burning eloquence, the secret of which he gives in the simple statement, “I believe what I say.” This faith, which carries away the uncultured, inspires the respect of men of the world. One listens to him without a smile, when he talks of the voices which have called upon him in the night; some may not believe that the voices did so call upon him, but all believe that he heard them calling. Thus his church becomes too small for the multitudes who come to seek nourishment, or rather intoxication, in his words.
This man has to pass through various phases of mind before our eyes. At first, he loves Vashti with a humble, ecstatic love, in which religious enthusiasm seems to enter more than human passion. In his eyes she is a superior being—privileged, the elect of God. He dares not defile her with a carnal thought; it is enough for him to kiss the hem of her robe. But it chances one evening that he is an involuntary witness of the desperate efforts of Vashti’s father to get some food to her during her fast. At once, almost without transition, by the force of circumstances that permit no time for deliberation, he becomes her accomplice, he saves her by a lie, and a lie which carries the more weight in that his veracity has never been called in question. A vulgar writer would not have failed to show us Judah raising himself to his full height, and invoking curses upon the woman he had protected, and fleeing afterwards to a solitude where he would be tortured by the visions of lost happiness. Mr. Jones has done just the opposite. Judah’s first sensation is a burst of wholly human joy. Vashti is not an angel or a saint, but a woman, a frail creature, like to himself, whom he may love without thought of sacrilege! It is not until later that remorse makes itself felt in his soul, and that his conscience, terrible and tempestuous like passion, asserts its rights.