His intellect and his emotions were in a strange thrill—leaping with a new and pulsing energy. Dawning manhood plucked at his sleeve, pointing to life, staring inquisitive glances, rousing him with restless innuendo—took him by the shoulder and said: “Awake, thou hast done with drifting, thou must live, and guide thy life, and choose thy ways.”
He began to regard life as a drama in which he was now a player, an important player. He was no longer of the audience—he was compelled on to the stage. He suddenly became aware of this. No matter how ill-dressed for the part, no matter how slip-shod, no matter how stammering his tongue, how dull his art, how ill-prepared to speak his lines, he must answer the call, must play that part. He roused to the fear that he did not know his part—did not know his cues, did not know even what was expected of him. He must search out the book of the play. What a strange tragi-comedy it was!
Tshah! pessimism’s refuges from life were but coward’s shrinkings from the exultant thunders of the universe.
Life is life, whether it be lived in the full, with the full breath of the heavens in the nostrils, and facing the dangers foot to foot and striving and overcoming, or whether its energy be spent in a vast labour to avoid it through exquisite evasions. Life cannot be avoided, whether a man take all the risks and fall in the risk, or, like the contemplative Grey, stand midst the whispering grasses of a graveyard and sigh the years away.
The august and splendid old cathedral loomed out of the murk.
And yonder towers that thus rose above the flood! The medieval church that builded them had founded itself on this pessimistic denial of the fulness of life: contemning, spurning the present; yearning for a vague, fantastic immortality. Its litanies, its prayers, its services sounded the misery of life. To the medieval churches this strenuous world was to produce for its highest ideal the barren man and woman, scowling on life in a narrow cell, shutting out the splendour of living, denying it wholly, apologizing to its God that others dared to live the life He had given, praying passionately that the sin of this life that God had given might be taken upon their own poor shoulders! The free air of heaven, and love, and the joy of life, were things to be looked upon askance and with caution, as a part of God’s bungling; yet so vast their faith they chanted their misereres all unwitting of the thing they said, all unwitting of the fear lest the future life, to which yearned their distorted hopes, might not be as sorry a world of blunders as that which they branded with their disapproval as God’s failure in this present seeming!
And where does the medieval church stand?
The master peoples pass its gates.
They preached the humble and the lowly; they preached the prince of peace—their hands, their doors, their traditions, their magnificent altars are bespattered with blood. With sonorous chant and opulent prayer and incense and significant symbolism of the worship of non-resistance, they blest the standards of battle. They tortured kings of thought, banned the demi-gods of the imagination, robbing woman of her parallel dignity with man, benumbing her wits, sapping her vitality, stultifying her will, made her a gaping hypocrisy—such women cannot be the mothers of the Masterfolk.
Pah! these very stones reeked with the blood of that Eve of St. Bartholomew. The doors of this church were scarlet with crime. Up yonder in the haze across the river hung the bell that had sounded in Christ’s name the cut-throat command to slay all such as worshipped not after her fashion.