A Modern Zoroastrian

by S. Laing

With ravine shrieks against the creed;

or again in his later work, ‘The Ancient Sage,’ he says—

Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son!

For nothing worthy proving can be proven,

Nor yet disproven.

In like manner in the works of art which embrace a wider range, and hold up the mirror to human nature, as in Shakespeare’s plays, and the novels of Walter Scott and other great authors, the interest arises mainly from the polarity of the various characters. We care little for the goody-good heroes or vulgar villains, but we recognise a touch of that nature which makes all the world akin in a Macbeth drawn by metaphysical suggestion to wade through a sea of blood; in Othello’s noble nature caught like a lion in the toils by the net of circumstances woven by a wily hunter; in Falstaff, a rogue, a liar, and a glutton, yet made almost likeable by his ready wit, imperturbable good-humour, and fertile resources. Shakespeare is, in fact, the greatest of artists, because he is the most multipolar. He has poles of sympathy in him which, as the poles of carbon attract so many elements and form so many combinations, enable him to take into his own nature, assimilate, and reproduce every varied shade of character from a Miranda to a Caliban, from an Imogen to a Lady Macbeth, from a Falstaff to an Othello. Sir Walter Scott and all our great novelists have the same faculty, though in a less degree, and are great in exact proportion as they have many poles in their nature, and as those are poles of powerful polarity. The characters and incidents which affect us strongly and dwell in the memory are those in which the clash and conflict of opposites are most vividly represented. We feel infinite pity for a Maggie Tulliver dashing her young life, like a prisoned wild bird, against the bars of trivial and prosaic environment which hem her in; or for a Colonel Newcome opposing the patience of a gentle nature to the buffets of such a fate as meets us in the everyday world of modern life, the failure of his bank and the naggings of the Old Campaigner. On a higher level of art we sympathise with a Lancelot and a Guinevere because they are types of what we may meet in many a London drawing-room, noble natures drawn by some fatal fairy fascination into ignoble acts, but still retaining something of their original nobility, and while

Their honour rooted in dishonour stands,

appearing to ordinary mortals little less than ‘archangels ruined.’ Or even if we descend to the lowest level of the penny dreadful or suburban drama, we find that the polarity between vice and virtue, however coarsely delineated, is that which mostly fascinates the uncultured mind.

The affinity between Zoroastrianism and art is easily explained when we consider that in one respect it has a manifest advantage over most Christian forms of religion. Christianity in its early origins received a taint of Oriental asceticism which it never shook off, and which in the declining centuries of the Roman empire, and in the barbarism and superstition of the Middle Ages, developed into what may be almost called a devil-worship of the ugly and repulsive. The antithesis between the flesh and the spirit was carried to such an extreme and false extent, that everything that was pleasant and beautiful came to be regarded as sinful, and the odour of sanctity was an odour which the passer-by would do well to keep on the windward side of. This leaven of asceticism is the rock upon which Puritanism, monasticism, and many of the highest forms of Christian life have invariably split. It is contrary to human nature, and directly opposed to the spirit of the life and doctrines of the Founder of the religion. Jesus, who was ‘a Jew living among Jews and speaking to Jews,’ adopted the true Jewish point of view of making religion amiable and attractive, and denouncing, as all the best Jewish doctors of the Talmud did, the pharisaical strictness which insisted on ritualistic observances and arbitrary restrictions. In no passages of his life does the ‘sweet reasonableness’ of his character appear more conspicuous than where we find him strolling through the fields with his disciples and plucking ears of corn on the Sabbath, and replying to the formalists who were scandalised, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.’ The ascetic bias subsequently introduced may have been a necessary element in counteracting the corruption of Rome; but the pendulum in its reaction swung much too far, and when organised in the celibacy of the clergy and monastic institutions asceticism became the source of great evils. Even at a late period we can see in the reaction of the reign of Charles II. how antagonistic the puritanical creed, even of men like Cromwell and Milton, proved to the healthy natural instinct of the great mass of the English nation. And at the present day it remains one of the main causes of the indifference or hostility to religion which is so widely spreading among the mass of the population. Children are brought up to consider Sunday as a day of penance, and church-going as a disagreeable necessity; while grown-up men, especially those of the working classes, resent being told that a walk in the country, a cricket-match, or a visit to a library or museum on their only holiday, is sinful.