“Mr. Mallock,” said Gildea, “was a young man who wrote a charming book called ‘The New Republic,’ one of the most charming books that had been written for several years, and then took to polemics, and has been logically agonizing there ever since. For this too we all ought to owe this religio-intellectual pedantry called Positivism a grudge. And, when we remember what Positivism did for George Eliot,—reduced a good quarter of herself and her characters into edificatory machines—I think that all of us, to whom Nature and Art are precious, should look upon Positivism as the contemporary accursèd thing.” Gildea spoke with a certain exaggerativeness of tone and manner that to Maddock, observing and listening to everything with humour, was somewhat puzzling. Maddock with average profundity suspected that here was a case of some personal memory of a more or less disagreeable character; but average profundity, when it has to deal with that which is out of the range of the average, nearly always makes mistakes. Gildea was subject to sudden losses of interest in what he was saying or doing, spiritual twinges of that terrible wound from which he suffered: to those to whom “the endless emptiness of all things” is a reality, moments of acute weariness and disgust are ever lying in wait, and then the harness of life and living is often resumed with impatience or even pettishness. It had been so just now with Gildea. He had looked forward to his meeting with Miss Medwin, and heard those beautiful lips open and sounds come forth that showed that, however fine the harp, its strings were unattuned. The sense of his intense and perpetual loneliness had rushed upon him, and he had gone back again into his surroundings with an irritation that in a few moments amused him at himself.
The talk passed onwards, Maddock for the first time taking his share in it. And yet again it came round to the People. It was clear that the strongest impression that had been given to the party was that of Hawkesbury’s Socialism.
“If I had been speaking of it some five or six years ago,” said Fitzgerald, “I should have certainly said that I thought the Secularists had made most impression on the People of late years. But, in the face of the American Revivalist meetings and the Salvation Army, I have had to modify my views.”
“These movements or rather this movement,” said Gildea, “strikes me as reactionary. British Middle-class Liberalism and Secularism have been at work, with much cry, and the egregious littleness of the wool has disgusted the People who have rushed off into the opposite extreme. The workmen, the skilled workmen, are I think secular. I remember hearing a lecturer on art who had been on a tour in America say, that the American workmen all asked him if he knew Darwin or Huxley or Tyndall, and expressed little or no care about anyone else, which seemed to surprise him.”
“Cardinal Manning,” Fitzgerald remarked, “said well, then, that ‘the spiritual desolation of London alone would make the Salvation Army possible’—‘this zealous but defiant movement.’ Are we right in our supposition, do you think, Mr. Hawkesbury?”
Hawkesbury assented.
“There are three movements,” he said, “at present going on among the People—the Socialistic, the Religious, and the Secular. They are all strong. In Ireland I have seen the two first clash, and the first was almost invariably victorious. If the priests will not go with the People in their socialistic views, (For of course the Irish Question is really a socialistic one, although it is not spoken of as such), then the priests are given up. Usually, however, the priests, being themselves of the People, are in full sympathy with them. The Socialists are by no means necessarily Atheists, but they are not Christians. ‘The sooner,’ I heard one of them say once, when pressed on the point, ‘the sooner Christ is made a thing of the past and Jesus a thing of the present, the better it will be for all of us.’ That expresses them excellently. The same idea lies at bottom in the popular Religious movement.—We Socialists,” he added with a touch of bright humour, “like the Booths better than we like the Bradlaughs, but we recognise that both are in earnest and working for the People.”
“And what, religiously speaking,” asked Fitzgerald, “do you believe is to be the future state of the People, and of us all?”
Hawkesbury had another touch of bright humour.