Trimblerigg

by Laurence Housman

And so my business here is to express an utter disbelief (which I hope readers will bear in mind) that Mr. Trimblerigg’s deity was one about whom it is possible to entertain the larger hope, even in the faint degree suggested by Tennyson,—or that he was anything except a tribal survival to whom Mr. Trimblerigg and others gave names which did not properly belong to him.

What finally laid Mr. Trimblerigg by the heels was the fact that having picked up this god as he went along (finding him favourable to the main chance) it was the main chance—idealized as ‘the larger hope’—which he really worshipped without knowing it. Upon the strength of that inspiration environment intoxicated him, and he drew his spiritual life from the atmosphere around him. Then he was like a bottle of seltzer, which at the first touch of the outer air begins almost explosively to expand; whereas, for the bulk of us, we unbottle to it like still wine without sound or foam, accepting it as the natural element for which we were born. To Mr. Trimblerigg, on the other hand, it came as a thing direct from God: at the first touch of the herd-instinct he bubbled, and felt himself divine. And in the rush of pentecostal tongues amid which he lost his head, he forgot that atmosphere and environment are but small local conditions, and that, outside these, vacuum and interstellar space hold the true balances of Heaven more surely and correctively than do the brief and shifting lives of men.

This spiritual adventurer, with his alert vision so curiously reduced in scale to seize the opportunities of day and hour, missed the march of time from listening too acutely to the ticks of the clock. And if he offers us an example for our better learning, it is mainly as showing what belittling results the herd-instinct and tribal-deism may produce in a mercurial and magnetic temperament,—making him imagine himself something quite other from what he really is, and his god a person far removed from that category in which he has been placed.

My own interpretation of this ‘Revelation,’ which has made me its involuntary mouthpiece, is that it shows the beginning—but the beginning only—of mental change in a god who has become tired of deceiving himself about the work of his creation; and that it has begun to dawn upon his mind—though he denies it in words—that, in making Mr. Trimblerigg, he has made another little mistake, and that his creation was really stuffed as full of them as a plum-pudding is stuffed with plums. And I have a hope that when tribal deity becomes properly apologetic for its many misshapings of a divided world, humanity will begin to come by its own, and acquire a theology which is not an organized hypocrisy for the bolstering up of nationalities and peoples.

For here we have a world full of mistakes, which is governed, according to the theologians, by a God who makes none. And what between predestination and free-will, and grace abounding mixed up with original sin, and orthodoxy and heterodoxy at such universal dash throughout the world that not one honest soul in a million has an even chance of being really right,—when that is the spectacle presented to us in the life of the human race, it becomes something of a mockery to minds of intelligence to be told that their gods have never made mistakes.

Those who have been blessed with good parents, do not like them less because of certain failings and limitations which go to the shaping of their characters; and when, arrived at the age of discretion, they have to withstand their failings and recognize their limitations, they do so with a certain amount of deference and with undiminished affection; but they do not, if they are wise, or if they have the well-being of their parents really at heart,—they do not let it be thought that they regard them either as immaculate or infallible.

I have come to the conclusion that a like duty towards its tribal deities belongs to the human race; and that man has made many mistakes simply by regarding these tribal emanations as immune from error, all-seeing, all-wise, all-loving—which they certainly are not. And I believe that Mr. Trimblerigg would have been a very much better and more useful man if he could have conceived his tribal deity as one liable to error like himself. The terrible Nemesis which seized the soul of Mr. Trimblerigg and hurled it to destruction was a very limited and one-sided conception of what was good and right, embodied in the form of a personal deity who could do no wrong.

So here, as I read it, we have the revelation of the detriment done to a human soul by an embodied belief in itself under cover of a religious creed. And the record of that process has been handed over to me, I suppose, because the tribal deity responsible for the results has got a little tired of the abject flattery of his worshippers, and a little doubtful whether that relation between the human and the divine is really the right one. He is suffering in fact, as I read him, from a slight attack of creative indigestion, and is anxious to get rid of certain by-products which his system cannot properly assimilate: he is anxious, amongst other things, to get rid of responsibility for Mr. Trimblerigg. But the responsibility is there; and I allow myself this foreword in order to declare it in spite of the things which hereafter I am made to say.

‘You cannot unscramble eggs,’ is a dictum as applicable to gods as to mortals. And if people would remember that in their prayers, prayers would be less foolish and fatuous than they often are.

You cannot unscramble eggs. And so, having scrambled Mr. Trimblerigg in the making, his god was attempting a vain thing in trying to unscramble him; and when Mr. Trimblerigg went on his knees and prayed, as he occasionally did, to be unscrambled, he was only scrambling himself yet more in the fry-pan of his tribal theology.