And indeed, when I look at him, I have to admire what a scramble of a man he was!—how the yolk and the white of it, the good and the evil, the thick and the thin of his character did mix, ‘yea, meet and mingle,’ as he would have said himself when his platform sense of poetry got the better of him. And so, in the exercise of those contradictory agilities of soul and brain which made him so mixed yet so divided a character, he skipped through life like a flea to Abraham’s bosom, and there—after so many an alias hastily assumed and as hastily discarded—lies waiting to answer to his true name when true names are called.
What kind of a name, one wonders, did he finally make for himself in the Book of Life? In that desperate saving of his own face which constitutes his career, he put out of countenance many that were his betters; but it was himself that, in the process, he put out of countenance most of all. Yet in the end revelation came to him; and when, in that ghastly moment of self-discovery, he stood fully charged with the truth, who shall say what miraculous, what fundamental change it may not have wrought in him? When he followed the upward rope which led him so expeditiously Elsewhere, it may have been with the equipment of a new self capable of much better and more honest things that he finally entered Heaven. I cannot believe that such a genius for self-adaptation has incontinently missed its mark. But, in that forward aim, it may well be that he and his tribal deity have parted company; for it is to be noted that, at the last gasp, the god loses sight—does not know what has become of him: thinks, perhaps, that he has gone irretrievably and abysmally—Down. I, on the contrary, have a suspicion and a hope that his tendency may have been—UP.
L. H.
CHAPTER ONE
Deus Loquitur
OF course when I made Mr. Trimblerigg, though I had shaped him—I will not say to my liking, but at least to my satisfaction—I did not foresee how he would turn out. It is not my custom to look ahead. I can, to be sure, do so when I please: but that makes the dénouement so dull. I prefer, therefore—and have now made it a rule—that my creations shall, in what they do, come upon me as a surprise—pleasant or the reverse. For since I have given them free-will, let me also have the benefit of it: let them make their own plans, their own careers,—attributing to me, if they must, those features of both for which they do not feel themselves responsible; and let me (in the moment when they think to have fulfilled themselves) experience that small stimulus of novelty which the infinite variety and individuality of my creatures is always capable of providing.
For it is this spice of novelty alone which keeps me from being unutterably disinterested in the workings of what theologians are pleased to call ‘the moral purpose of the universe.’
So it was that, having shaped Mr. Trimblerigg to my satisfaction, I let him go. And as, with his future in his own very confident hands, he went, I did not for the moment trouble to look after him.
When I say that I shaped him to my satisfaction, I am speaking merely as a craftsman. I knew that I had made a very clever man. As to liking him, that had nothing to do with craftsmanship, but would depend entirely on what he did with himself—how he appealed to me as a student of life, when—laying aside my rôle of maker, I became merely the observer.
It is always an interesting experiment whether I shall be drawn to my creations before they become drawn to me. Sometimes I find that they interest me enormously, even while denying me with their last breath. But the unrequited affections of a god have always an element of comedy; for though, in the spiritual direction, one’s creations may take a way of their own, they are never as quit of us as they suppose; and when they know it least they come back to us for inspection and renovation. Even the soul that thinks itself lost is not so lost as to leave one unaware of its condition; though it may have ceased to call, its address is still known.
In Mr. Trimblerigg’s case it was all the other way—from the moment that he discovered me he never let me alone; though I had cast him forth like bread upon the waters, not expecting to see him again for many days, he came back to me early, and from that time on gave me the advantage of his intimate and varying acquaintance to the very end.