Robert Elsmere
and that they had come dismally down to a second best. But after all
they were young, and the autumn was beautiful--and though they hurt each
other, they were alone together and constantly, passionately, interested
in each other. Italy, too, softened all things--even Catherine's English
tone and temper. As long as the delicious luxury of the Italian autumn,
with all its primitive pagan suggestiveness, was still round them; as
long as they were still among the cities of the Lombard plain--that
battle-ground and highway of nations, which roused all Robert's
historical enthusiasm, and set him reading, discussing, thinking, in his
old impetuous way, about something else than minute problems of
Christian evidence,--the new-born friction between them was necessarily
reduced to a minimum.
* * * * *
But with their return home, with their plunge into London life, the
difficulties of the situation began to define themselves more sharply.
In after years, one of Catherine's dreariest memories was the memory of
their first instalment in the Bedford Square house. Robert's anxiety to
make it pleasant and homelike was pitiful to watch. He had none of the
modern passion for upholstery, and probably the vaguest notions of what
was aesthetically correct. But during their furnishing days he was never
tired of wandering about in search of pretty things--a rug, a screen, an
engraving--which might brighten the rooms in which Catherine was to
live. He would put everything in its place with a restless eagerness,
and then Catherine would be called in, and would play her part bravely.
She would smile and ask questions, and admire, and then when Robert had
gone, she would move slowly to the window and look out at the great mass
of the British Museum frowning beyond the little dingy strip of garden,
with a sick longing in her heart for the Murewell cornfield, the
wood-path, the village, the free air-bathed spaces of heath and common.
Oh! this huge London, with its unfathomable poverty and its heartless
wealth--how it oppressed and bewildered her! Its mere grime and squalor,
its murky poisoned atmosphere, were a perpetual trial to the
countrywoman brought up amid the dash of mountain streams and the scents
of mountain pastures. She drooped physically for a time, as did the
child.
But morally? With Catherine everything really depended on the moral
state. She could have followed Robert to a London living with a joy and
hope which would have completely deadened all these repulsions of the
senses now so active in her. But without this inner glow, in the
presence of the profound spiritual difference circumstance had developed
between her and the man she loved, everything was a burden. Even her
religion, though she clung to it with an ever-increasing tenacity,
failed at this period to bring her much comfort. Every night it seemed
to her that the day had been one long and dreary struggle to make
something out of nothing; and in the morning the night, too, seemed to
have been alive with conflict--_All Thy waves and Thy storms have gone
over me!_
Robert guessed it all, and whatever remorseful love could do to soften
such a strain and burden he tried to do. He encouraged her to find work
among the poor; he tried in the tenderest ways to interest her in the
great spectacle of London life which was already, in spite of yearning
and regret, beginning to fascinate and absorb himself. But their
standards were now so different that she was constantly shrinking from
what attracted him, or painfully judging what was to him merely curious
and interesting. He was really more and more oppressed by her
intellectual limitations, though never consciously would he have allowed
himself to admit them, and she was more and more bewildered by what
constantly seemed to her a breaking up of principle, a relaxation of
moral fibre.
And the work among the poor was difficult. Robert instinctively felt
that for him to offer his services in charitable work to the narrow
Evangelical, whose church Catherine had joined, would have been merely
to invite rebuff. So that even in the love and care of the unfortunate
they were separated. For he had not yet found a sphere of work, and, if
he had, Catherine's invincible impulse in these matters was always to
attach herself to the authorities and powers that be. He could only
acquiesce when she suggested applying to Mr. Clarendon for some
charitable occupation for herself.
After her letter to him, Catherine had an interview with the vicar at
his home. She was puzzled by the start and sudden pause for recollection
with which he received her name, the tone of compassion which crept into
his talk with her, the pitying look and grasp of the hand with which he
dismissed her. Then, as she walked home, it flashed upon her that she
had seen a copy, some weeks old, of the _Record_ lying on the good man's
table, the very copy which contained Robert's name among the list of men
who during the last ten years had thrown up the Anglican ministry. The
delicate face flushed miserably from brow to chin. Pitied for being
Robert's wife! Oh, monstrous!--incredible!
Meanwhile Robert, man-like, in spite of all the griefs and sorenesses of
the position, had immeasurably the best of it. In the first place such
incessant activity of mind as his is in itself both tonic and narcotic.
It was constantly generating in him fresh purposes and hopes, constantly
deadening regret, and pushing the old things out of sight. He was full
of many projects, literary and social, but they were all in truth the
fruits of one long experimental process, the passionate attempt of the
reason to justify to itself the God in whom the heart believed. Abstract
thought, as Mr. Grey saw, had had comparatively little to do with
Elsmere's relinquishment of the Church of England. But as soon as the
Christian bases of faith were overthrown, that faith had naturally to
find for itself other supports and attachments. For faith itself--in God
and a spiritual order--had been so wrought into the nature by years of
reverent and adoring living that nothing could destroy it. With Elsmere,
as with all men of religious temperament, belief in Christianity and
faith in God had not at the outset been a matter of reasoning at all,
but of sympathy, feeling, association, daily experience. Then the
intellect had broken in, and destroyed or transformed the belief in
Christianity. But after the crash, _faith_ emerged as strong as ever,
only craving and eager to make a fresh peace, a fresh compact with the
reason.
Elsmere had heard Grey say long ago in one of the few moments of real
intimacy he had enjoyed with him at Oxford, 'My interest in philosophy
springs solely from the chance it offers me of knowing something more of
God!' Driven by the same thirst he too threw himself into the same
quest, pushing his way laboriously through the philosophical borderlands
of science, through the ethical speculation of the day, through the
history of man's moral and religious past. And while on the one hand the
intellect was able to contribute an ever stronger support to the faith
which was the man, on the other the sphere in him of a patient ignorance
which abstains from all attempts at knowing what man cannot know, and
substitutes trust for either knowledge or despair, was perpetually
widening. 'I take my stand on conscience and the moral life!' was the
upshot of it all. 'In them I find my God! As for all these various
problems, ethical and scientific, which you press upon me, my pessimist
friend, I, too, am bewildered; I, too, have no explanation to offer. But
I trust and wait. In spite of them--beyond them--I have abundantly
enough for faith--for hope--for action!'
We may quote a passage or two from some letters of his written at this
time to that young Armitstead who had taken his place at Murewell, and
was still there till Mowbray Elsmere should appoint a new man.
Armitstead had been a college friend of Elsmere's. He was a High
Churchman of a singularly gentle and delicate type, and the manner in
which he had received Elsmere's story on the day of his arrival at
Murewell had permanently endeared him to the teller of it. At the same
time the defection from Christianity of a man who at Oxford had been to
him the object of much hero-worship, and, since Oxford, an example of
pastoral efficiency, had painfully affected young Armitstead, and he
began a correspondence with Robert which was in many ways a relief to
both. In Switzerland and Italy, when his wife's gentle inexorable
silence became too oppressive to him, Robert would pour himself out in
letters to Armitstead, and the correspondence did not altogether cease
with his return to London. To the squire during the same period Elsmere
also wrote frequently, but rarely or never on religious matters.
On one occasion Armitstead had been pressing the favourite Christian
dilemma--Christianity or nothing. Inside Christianity, light and
certainty; outside it, chaos. 'If it were not for the Gospels and the
Church I should be a Positivist to-morrow. Your Theism is a mere
arbitrary hypothesis, at the mercy of any rival philosophical theory.
How, regarding our position as precarious, you should come to regard
your own as stable, is to me incomprehensible!'
'What I conceive to be the vital difference between Theism and
Christianity,' wrote Elsmere in reply, 'is that as an explanation of
things _Theism can never be disproved_. At the worst it must always
remain in the position of an alternative hypothesis, which the hostile
man of science cannot destroy, though he is under no obligation to adopt
it. Broadly speaking, it is not the facts which are in dispute, but the
inference to be drawn from them.
'Now, considering the enormous complication of the facts, the Theistic
inference will, to put it at the lowest, always have its place, always
command respect. The man of science may not adopt it, but by no advance
of science that I, at any rate, can foresee, can it be driven out of the
field.
'Christianity is in a totally different position. Its grounds are not
philosophical but literary and historical. It rests not upon all fact,
but upon a special group of facts. It is, and will always remain, a
great literary and historical problem, a _question of documents and
testimony_. Hence, the Christian explanation is vulnerable in a way in
which the Theistic explanation can never be vulnerable. The contention,
at any rate, of persons in my position is: That to the man who has had
the special training required, and in whom this training has not been
neutralised by any overwhelming bias of temperament, it can be as
clearly demonstrated that the miraculous Christian story rests on a
tissue of mistake, as it can be demonstrated that the Isidorian
Decretals were a forgery, or the correspondence of Paul and Seneca a
pious fraud, or that the mediaeval belief in witchcraft was the product
of physical ignorance and superstition.'
'You say,' he wrote again, in another connection, to Armitstead from
Milan, 'you say you think my later letters have been far too aggressive
and positive. I, too, am astonished at myself. I do not know my own
mood, it is so clear, so sharp, so combative. Is it the spectacle of
Italy, I wonder--of a country practically without religion--the
spectacle in fact of Latin Europe as a whole, and the practical Atheism
in which it is ingulfed? My dear friend, the problem of the world at
this moment is--_how to find a religion?_--some great conception which
shall be once more capable, as the old were capable, of welding
societies, and keeping man's brutish elements in check. Surely
Christianity of the traditional sort is failing everywhere--less
obviously with us, and in Teutonic Europe generally, but egregiously,