Alma.
III.
From Ambrose Bradley to Alma Craik.
Dearest Alma,—Just a few lines to say that I am going on to Germany; I will write to you again directly I come to an anchorage in that brave land. For I am sick of France and Frenchmen; sick of a people that have not been lessoned by misfortune, but still hunger for aggression and revenge; sick of the Dead Sea fruit of Parisian pleasure, poisoned and heart-eaten by the canker-worm of unbelief. Our English poetess is virtuously indignant (you remember) with those who underrate this nation.
The English have a scornful insular way
Of calling the French light, &c.
And it is true they are not light, but with the weight of their own blind vanity, heavy as lead. The curse of spiritual dulness is upon them. They talk rhodomontade and believe in nothing. How I burn for the pure intellectual air of that nobler people which, in the name of the God of Justice, recently taught France so terrible a lesson! Here, in France, every man is a free agent, despising everything, the government which he supports! the ideas which he fulminates, despising most his own free, frivolous, miserable self: there, in Germany, each man is a patriot and a pillar of the state, his only dream to uphold the political fabric of a great nation. To efface one’s selfish interest is the first step to becoming a good citizen; to believe in the government of God, follows as a natural consequence.
What you say about our spiritual union, touches me to the soul, though it is but the echo of my own fervent belief. But I am not so sure that all earthly unions, even when founded in affection and good faith, are indissoluble. Surely also, there are marriages which it is righteous to shatter and destroy?
You are a pure woman, to whom even a thought of impurity is impossible; but alas! all women are not made in the same angelic mould, and we see every day the spectacle of men linked to partners in every respect unworthy. Surely you would not hold that the union of a true man with a false woman, a woman who (for example) was untrue to her husband in thought and deed, is to last for ever? I know that is the Catholic teaching, that marriage is a permanent sacrament, and that no act of the parties, however abominable, can render either of them free to marry again; and we find even such half-hearted Liberals as Gladstone upholding it (see his ‘Ecclesiastical Essays’), and flinging mud in the blind face of Milton, because (out of the bitterness of his own cruel experience) he argued the contrary. Divorce is recognised in our own country and countenanced by our own religion; and I believe it to be necessary for the guarantee of human happiness. What is most hideous in our England is the horrible institution of the civil Court, where causes that should be heard in camerâ are exposed shamefully to the light of day; so that men would rather bear their life-long torture than submit to the ordeal of a degrading publicity, and only shameless men and women dare to claim their freedom at so terrible a price.
I intended to write only a few lines, and here am I arguing with you on paper, just as we used to argue in the old times viva voce, on a quite indifferent question. Forgive me! And yet writing so seems like having one of our nice, long, cosy, serious talks. Discussions of this kind are like emptying one’s pocket to find what they contain; I never thought I had any ideas on the subject till I began, schoolboy-like, to turn them out!