Robert Elsmere
artist's eye kindling. 'Did you hear it? It was the last chorus in the
St. Matthew Passion music.'
'I did not distinguish it,' he said--'but their music is famous.'
His tone was distant; there was no friendliness in it. It would have
been pleasant to her if he would have taken up her little remark and let
bygones be bygones. But he showed no readiness to do so. The subject
dropped, and presently he moved back to his former seat and Lady
Charlotte and he resumed their talk. Rose could not but see that his
manner towards her was much changed. She herself had compelled it, but
all the same she saw him leave her with a capricious little pang of
regret, and afterwards the drive seemed to her more tedious and the
dismal streets more dismal than before.
She tried to forget her companions altogether. Oh! what would Robert
have to say? She was unhappy, restless. In her trouble lately it had
often pleased her to go quite alone to strange churches, where for a
moment the burden of the self had seemed lightened. But the old things
were not always congenial to her, and there were modern ferments at work
in her. No one of her family, unless it were Agnes, suspected what was
going on. But in truth the rich crude nature had been touched at last,
as Robert's had been long ago in Mr. Grey's lecture-room, by the
piercing under-voices of things--the moral message of the world. 'What
will he have to say?' she asked herself again feverishly, and as she
looked across to Mr. Flaxman she felt a childish wish to be friends
again with him, with everybody. Life was too difficult as it was,
without quarrels and misunderstandings to make it worse.
CHAPTER XL
A long street of warehouses--and at the end of it the horses slackened.
'I saw the president of the club yesterday,' said Flaxman, looking out.
'He is an old friend of mine--a most intelligent fanatic--met him on a
Mansion House Fund committee last winter. He promised we should be
looked after. But we shall only get back seats, and you'll have to put
up with the smoking. They don't want ladies, and we shall only be there
on sufferance.'
The carriage stopped. Mr. Flaxman guided his charges with some
difficulty through the crowd about the steps, who inspected them and
their vehicle with a frank and not over-friendly curiosity. At the door
they found a man who had been sent to look for them, and were
immediately taken possession of. He ushered them into the back of a
large bare hall, glaringly lit, lined with white brick, and hung at
intervals with political portraits and a few cheap engravings of famous
men, Jesus of Nazareth taking his turn with Buddha, Socrates, Moses,
Shakespeare, and Paul of Tarsus.
'Can't put you any forrarder, I'm afraid,' said their guide, with a
shrug of the shoulders. 'The committee don't like strangers coming, and
Mr. Collett, he got hauled over the coals for letting you in this
evening.'
It was a new position for Lady Charlotte to be anywhere on sufferance.
However, in the presence of three hundred smoking men, who might all of
them be political assassins in disguise for anything she knew, she
accepted her fate with meekness; and she and Rose settled themselves
into their back seat under a rough sort of gallery, glad of their veils,
and nearly blinded with the smoke.
The hall was nearly full, and Mr. Flaxman looked curiously round upon
its occupants. The majority of them were clearly artisans--a spare,
stooping, sharp-featured race. Here and there were a knot of stalwart
dock-labourers, strongly marked out in physique from the watchmakers and
the potters, or an occasional seaman out of work, ship-steward,
boatswain, or what not, generally bronzed, quick-eyed, and comely, save
where the film of excess had already deadened colour and expression.
Almost every one had a pot of beer before him, standing on long wooden
flaps attached to the benches. The room was full of noise, coming
apparently from the farther end, where some political bravo seemed to be
provoking his neighbours. In their own vicinity the men scattered about
were for the most part tugging silently at their pipes, alternately
eyeing the clock and the new-comers.
There was a stir of feet round the door.
'There he is,' said Mr. Flaxman, craning round to see, and Robert
entered.
He started as he saw them, flashed a smile to Rose, shook his head at
Mr. Flaxman, and passed up the room.
'He looks pale and nervous,' said Lady Charlotte grimly, pouncing at
once on the unpromising side of things. 'If he breaks down are you
prepared, Hugh, to play Elisha?'
Flaxman was far too much interested in the beginnings of the performance
to answer.
Robert was standing forward on the platform, the chairman of the meeting
at his side, members of the committee sitting behind on either hand. A
good many men put down their pipes, and the hubbub of talk ceased.
Others smoked on stolidly.
The chairman introduced the lecturer. The subject of the address would
be, as they already knew, 'The Claim of Jesus upon Modern Life.' It was
not very likely, he imagined, that Mr. Elsmere's opinions would square
with those dominant in the club; but, whether or no, he claimed for him,
as for everybody, a patient hearing, and the Englishman's privilege of
fair play.
The speaker, a cabinetmaker dressed in a decent brown suit, spoke with
fluency, and at the same time with that accent of moderation and _savoir
faire_ which some Englishmen in all classes have obviously inherited
from centuries of government by discussion. Lady Charlotte, whose
Liberalism was the mere varnish of an essentially aristocratic temper,
was conscious of a certain dismay at the culture of the democracy as the
man sat down. Mr. Flaxman, glancing to the right, saw a group of men
standing, and amongst them a slight sharp-featured thread-paper of a
man, with a taller companion, whom he identified as the pair he had
noticed on the night of the story-telling. The little gasfitter was
clearly all nervous fidget and expectation; the other, large and gaunt
in figure, with a square impassive face, and close-shut lips that had a
perpetual mocking twist in the corners, stood beside him like some
clumsy modern version, in a commoner clay, of Goethe's 'spirit that
denies.'
Robert came forward with a roll of papers in his hand.
His first words were hardly audible. Rose felt her colour rising, Lady
Charlotte glanced at her nephew, the standing group of men cried, 'Speak
up!' The voice in the distance rose at once, braced by the touch of
difficulty, and what it said came firmly down to them.
In after days Flaxman could not often be got to talk of the experience
of this evening. When he did he would generally say, briefly, that as an
_intellectual_ effort he had never been inclined to rank this first
public utterance very high among Elsmere's performances. The speaker's
own emotion had stood somewhat in his way. A man argues better, perhaps,
when he feels less.
'I have often heard him put his case, as I thought, more cogently in
conversation,' Flaxman would say--though only to his most intimate
friends--'but what I never saw before or since was such an _effect of
personality_ as he produced that night. From that moment, at any rate, I
loved him, and I understood his secret!'
Elsmere began with a few words of courteous thanks to the club for the
hearing they had promised him.
Then he passed on to the occasion of his address--the vogue in the
district of 'certain newspapers which, I understand, are specially
relished and patronised by your association.'
And he laid down on a table beside him the copies of the _Freethinker_
and of _Faith and Fools_ which he had brought with him, and faced his
audience again, his hands on his sides.
'Well! I am not here to-night to attack those newspapers. I want to
reach your sympathies if I can in another way. If there is anybody here
who takes pleasure in them, who thinks that such writing and such
witticisms as he gets purveyed to him in these sheets do really help the
cause of truth and intellectual freedom, I shall not attack his position
from the front. I shall try to undermine it. I shall aim at rousing in
him such a state of feeling as may suddenly convince him that what is
injured by writing of this sort is not the orthodox Christian, or the
Church, or Jesus of Nazareth, but always and inevitably the man who
writes it and the man who loves it! His mind is possessed of an
inflaming and hateful image, which drives him to mockery and violence. I
want to replace it, if I can, by one of calm, of beauty and tenderness,
which may drive him to humility and sympathy. And this, indeed, is the
only way in which opinion is ever really altered--by the substitution of
one mental picture for another.
'But in the first place,' resumed the speaker, after a moment's pause,
changing his note a little, 'a word about myself. I am not here to-night
quite in the position of the casual stranger, coming down to your
district for the first time. As some of you know, I am endeavouring to
make what is practically a settlement among you, asking you working-men
to teach me, if you will, what you have to teach as to the wants and
prospects of your order, and offering you in return whatever there is in
me which may be worth your taking. Well, I imagine I should look at a
man who preferred a claim of that sort with some closeness! You may well
ask me for "antecedents," and I should like, if I may, to give them to
you very shortly.
'Well, then, though I came down to this place under the wing of Mr.
Edwardes' (some cheering) 'who is so greatly liked and respected here, I
am not a Unitarian, nor am I an English Churchman. A year ago I was the
vicar of an English country parish, where I should have been proud, so
far as personal happiness went, to spend my life. Last autumn I left it
and resigned my orders because I could no longer accept the creed of the
English Church.' Unconsciously the thin dignified figure drew itself up,
the voice took a certain dryness. All this was distasteful, but the
orator's instinct was imperious.
As he spoke about a score of pipes which had till now been active in
Flaxman's neighbourhood went down. The silence in the room became
suddenly of a perceptibly different quality.
'Since then I have joined no other religious association. But it is
not--God forbid!--because there is nothing left me to believe, but
because in this transition England it is well for a man who has broken
with the old things, to be very _patient_. No good can come of forcing
opinion or agreement prematurely. A generation, nay, more, may have to
spend itself in mere waiting and preparing for those new leaders and
those new forms of corporate action which any great revolution of
opinion, such as that we are now living through, has always produced in
the past, and will, we are justified in believing, produce again. But
the hour and the men will come, and "they also serve who only stand and
wait!"'
Voice and look had kindled into fire. The consciousness of his audience
was passing from him--the world of ideas was growing clearer.
'So much, then, for personalities of one sort. There are some of
another, however, which I must touch upon for a moment. I am to speak to
you to-night of the Jesus of history, but not only as an historian.
History is good, but religion is better!--and if Jesus of Nazareth
concerned me, and, in my belief, concerned you, only as an historical
figure, I should not be here to-night.
'But if I am to talk religion to you, and I have begun by telling you I
am not this and not that, it seems to me that for mere clearness' sake,
for the sake of that round and whole image of thought which I want to
present to you, you must let me run through a preliminary confession of