You share not with us, and exceed us so,
Perhaps, by what you’re mulcted in, your hearts
Being starved to make your heads.
—Elizabeth B. Browning.
It was Elsworth’s third year at the hospital. He had taken several gold medals and scholarships; and so, to outward appearance, had done well. But he was not as he was when he entered. He was sowing what he called his “wild oats,” forgetting the reaping of the crop that one day would have to be considered. He had not abandoned his faith, but it had ceased to influence his life. The thing he came for he had not won. He defended Christianity still when he heard it attacked; but this was because he thought it honourable to take the side of the weakest in every argument, and partly because the set who were so severe upon it were a perky, superficial, insincere lot of folk, that, above all things, wanted taking down. Christianity might be false, he argued, but it could not be such a tissue of absurdities as these people maintained.
One summer’s night, about this time, the society was assembled to hear an address by a well known atheist propagandist, on marriage. Mr. Edgar Adams he was called. He was a singular-looking man; he was tall, lean, and hungry-looking, with long, dank, black hair, and a complexion such as poor people get who work in lead factories, and let it impregnate their systems. His dress was untidy, not to say greasy; his vast display of shirt front looked as if it had done duty in gas-light more than once before. Altogether, he was an unwholesome looking object, and, as a seafaring youth present declared, “it seemed as if a good holystoning down was what he wanted.” It did not surprise you the least when he advocated the destruction of Czars and despots generally, and talked with enthusiasm of the great French Revolution, with his starting eye-balls, and his thin, claw-like hands nervously twitching, expressing his eagerness to assist in the work of another Robespierre. He declared he would “abolish all property, especially that in a wife. The origin of the marriage superstition was pagan and suicidal, for marriage is the suicide of love. When the law no longer supplies husband or wife with a cage, each will take care of holding what has been won. Chastity and modesty are merely conventional ideas, having their origin in utility.” He declared that till Christianity was finally abolished, the real progress of the world could not be continued. “What is called the virtue of humility was never known—not even the word for it—by the Greeks and Romans; that is the great barrier in the path of modern man. Humility was invented by priests to hold man in slavery.” He ended by reciting a poem of Shelley’s denouncing tyrants and despots, and was much applauded.
The rooms of the society are well-filled to-night, and all the chief attractions in force. The people who could lead conversation, and who had strong opinions, and were able to put them cleverly, had assembled. The habitués had all some distinguishing trait, some particular socialistic or anti-religious fad; no two exactly agreed on anything, except that it was of the first importance to smash up existing beliefs. Hinduism, Confucianism, Judaism, Buddhism, were all held to be much better than Christianity as systems of religious thought, but that was because they were all impossible for our age; the one thing that was possible, that had established itself by renovating society and redeeming the world, must be crushed and cast out, because it was not the outcome of the age of steam and the electric light. There was scarcely anybody in the room who did not owe his or her character and virtuous environment entirely to a Christian training, which had made them decent members of society, and which they were anxious to requite by proving its incapacity to be any longer a suitable moral system for our age. A curious and a priggish set of imperfectly educated and vain people; mostly young, impracticable, and unversed in the wants and remedies of a work-a-day world. It is worth while to be introduced to these typical folk, who are bent on substituting some of their nostrums to take the place of the old religion when it dies of age.
There was a tall, dark-eyed girl on the lounge in the corner—Miss Mardall. She was a designer of high art tapestry; was lean, sallow, handsome in the æsthetic sense, not more than twenty-five, and a disciple of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. She grouped her wild flowers to make the most delightfully artistic patterns for her fabrics; but in their forms, their colours, their odours, she recognised nothing but the grossest and most material adaptation to the necessities of their existence and diffusion. Their colours meant nothing but distinguishing characteristics to aid in their fertilisation; their odours served to attract insects to brush so much pollen from their stamens and their pistils; their exquisite forms and intricacies of structure meant so many difficult passages the bees would have to knock against, and so disseminate so much fructifying material. And thus all the floral gems of the fields and woods were, in this nineteenth-century girl’s eyes, so many machines for making so much vegetable material for the furtherance of the animal world; and if they had any of the qualities one chose to term beauty, it was simply the beauty of adaptation of means to end. She was much too clever to be a poet, and was utilitarian and material to the last degree. Adelaide Rowland, her friend, sitting next to her, under the picture of the storming of the Bastille, went even further. Her pessimism was so pronounced that she thought it a mistake to continue to exist. She had no desire that the human or any other race should continue to exist; did not in the least see anything in the world worth working for, except to get food, lodging, and warmth; and declared that at the very first great reverse in her life she would decline to exist any more. As she immediately, however, demanded some tea, and took a wedge of very substantial cake, it was evident the great reverse had not as yet overtaken her. She was but nineteen, and was as proud of her pessimism (in an elegant robe just from Paris) as she recently was of her last new doll, with practicable eyes, and power to say “mamma.” Her talk of “declining to exist” was only alarming to one at the first introduction to her; “when you came to know her well, and love her,” you knew how to discount this sort of talk, and you simply asked her to have a little more cake and another cup of tea. That gentleman on her left in a brown velvet coat, with long hair, is a poet. He admires Nihilism, and thinks all authority wants dynamiting. Sounds dreadful to hear him, but he is really extremely harmless. His father is high in the General Post Office, and this young man is reading for the Bar. He will be all right when he is called; at present he is a supporter of Mr. Parnell. By-and-bye he will come into a row of little weekly properties in the suburb of Stratford-by-Bow, and he will collect the rents and neglect the sanitary arrangements with most landlord-like regularity. His sister is that pretty little fair girl in the corner by the grand piano. She writes stories about despotism and the dawn of freedom’s day. She looks kind, but is a terror to her younger sisters and her sick brother, who often wish that freedom’s day was really just going to begin, and who know a great deal more about the practical working of despotism in an eight-roomed villa than she does, despite the strongly flavoured literature she devours.
That tall, grave, reverend-looking party who has just entered is the socialist leader, James D’Arcy. Humanity in the abstract is all he lives and works for. No concrete embodiment of the mammal, genus Homo, was ever the better in the smallest degree for knowing him, many specimens were very much the worse; but that is neither here nor there. He never wrote “humanity” with a little h, and always spelled “man” with a big M. What more could be expected of him? His was the work of a reformer, a leader of progress; petty details were for petty men. James D’Arcy had to live for the age, and live well too. It was such an unworthy, priest-ridden age withal, and “so dressed up in the tattered shreds of creeds outworn” (as he loved to express it at a Sunday morning Progress Club Lecture to “boot finishers” down Hoxton way), that the age ought to consider itself honoured by giving its best to support him in his journey through it right comfortably, or it would not even be worthy to be spelled by him with a capital A. And, as the age did want to be so distinguished from still more besotted and priest-ridden times, it rose to the occasion, and Mr. D’Arcy lived in clover. He entered the room accompanied by a little, unwholesome, saturnine, beetle-browed friend, Professor Melton. Tho professor looked as if he agreed with Isabella the Catholic, who set a penalty on bathing after the conquest of the Moors in Spain. Mr. Melton was lecturer on physiology at the Institute of Natural Science, and his laboratory was close by. It was seldom he permitted himself much relaxation, but felt it incumbent on him to aid in every scheme for liberating the minds of young people from reverence for the sacredness of days or devotion to religious exercises. So he had consented to promote the interests of this little society by his occasional presence. He was soon the centre of a group of talkers, and his talk was on the extinction of pauperism.
“In a renovated society,” he said, “it will be recognised that there is no greater sin than almsgiving. By relieving distressed persons, by giving bread to the hungry, you defeat Nature, thwart her efforts to limit the too great increase of the race, and allow the recipient to make the fatal error that he can live without work.”