There & Back

In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune;”

Barbara uttered a prolonged “Oh!” and again was silent, listening to the talk of the elemental spirits, feeling the very wind of home that blew on the mariner, seeing the lighthouse, and the hill, and the weathercock on the church-spire, and the white bay, and the shining seraphs with the crimson shadows, and the sinking ship, and the hermit that made the mariner tell his story as he was telling it now.

But when Richard came to the words—

“He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small,
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all,”

she clapped her hands together; and when he ended them, she cried out—

“I was sure of it! I knew something would come to tie it all up together into one bundle! That’s it! That’s it! The love of everything is the garden-bed out of which grow the roses of prayer!—But what am I saying!” she added, checking herself; “I love everything, at least everything that comes near me, and I never pray!”

“Of course not! Why should you?” said Richard.

“Why should I not?”

“You would if it were reasonable!”

“I will, then! To love all the creatures and not have a word to say to the God that made them for loving them before-hand—is that reasonable?”

“No, if a God did make them.”

“They could not make themselves!”

“No; nothing could make itself.”

“Then somebody must have made them!”

“Who?”

“Why, the one that could and did—who else?”

“We know nothing about such a somebody. All we know is, that there they are, and we have got to love them!”

“Ah!” she said, and looked up into the wide sky, where now the “wandering moon” was alone,

Like one that had been led astray
Through the heaven’s wide pathless way,

and gazed as if she searched for the Somebody. “I should like to see the one that made that!” she said at last. “Think of knowing the very person that made that poor pigeon, and has got it now!—and made Miss Brown—and the wind! I must find him! He can’t have made me and not care when I ask him to speak to me! You say he is nowhere! I don’t believe there is any nowhere, so he can’t be there! Some people may be content with things; I shall get tired of them, I know, if I don’t get behind them! A thing is nothing without what things it! A gift is nothing without what gives it! Oh, dear! I know what I mean, but I can’t say it!”

“You don’t know what you mean, but you do say it!” thought Richard.

He was nowise repelled by her enthusiasm, for there was in it nothing assailant, nothing too absurdly superstitious. He did not care to answer her.

They went walking toward the house and were silent. The moon went on with her silentness: she never stops being silent. When they felt near the house, they fell to walking slower, but neither knew it. Barbara spoke again:

“Just fancy!” she said, “—if God were all the time at our backs, giving us one lovely thing after another, trying to make us look round and see who it was that was so good to us! Imagine him standing there, and wondering when his little one would look round, and see him, and burst out laughing—no, not laughing—yes, laughing—laughing with delight—or crying, I don’t know which! If I had him to love as I should love one like that, I think I should break my heart with loving him—I should love him to the killing of me! What! all the colours and all the shapes, and all the lights, and all the shadows, and the moon, and the wind, and the water!—and all the creatures—and the people that one would love so if they would let you!—and all—”

“And all the pain, and the dying, and the disease, and the wrongs, and the cruelty!” interposed Richard.

She was silent. After a moment or two she said—

“I think I will go in now. I feel rather cold. I think there must be a fog, though I can’t see it.”

She gave a little shiver. He looked in her face. Was it the moon, or was it something in her thoughts that made the sweet countenance look so gray? Could his mere suggestion of the reverse, the wrong side of the web of creation, have done it? Surely not!

“I think I want some one to say must to me!” she said, after another pause. “I feel as if—”

There she stopped. Richard said nothing. Some instinct told him he might blunder.

He stood still. Barbara went on a few steps, then turned and said—

“Are you not going in?”

“Not just yet,” he answered. “Please to remember that if I can do anything for you,—”

“You are very kind. I am much obliged to you. If you know another rime,—But I think I shall have to give up poetry.”

“It will be hard to find another so good,” returned Richard.

“Good-night,” she said.

“Good-night, miss!” answered Richard, and walked away, with a loss at his heart. The poem has already ceased to please her! He had made the lovely lady more thoughtful, and less happy than before!

“She has been taught to believe in a God,” he said to himself. “She is afraid he will be angry with her, because, in her company, I dared question his existence! A generous God—isn’t he! If he be anywhere, why don’t he let us see him? How can he expect us to believe in him, if he never shows himself? But if he did, why should I worship him for being, or for making me? If I didn’t want him, and I don’t, I certainly shouldn’t worship him because I saw him. I couldn’t. If Nature is cruel, as she certainly is, and he made her, then he is cruel too! There cannot be such a God, or, if there be, it cannot be right to worship him!”

He did not reflect that if he had wanted him, he would not have waited to see him before he worshipped him.

But Barbara was saying to herself—

“What if he has shown himself to me some time—one of those nights, perhaps, when I was out till the sun rose—and I didn’t know him!—How frightful if there should be nobody at all up there—nobody anywhere all round!”

She stared into the milky, star-sapphire-like blue, as if, out of the sweetly veiled terror-gulf, she would, by very gazing, draw the living face of God.

Verily the God that knows how not to reveal himself, must also know how best to reveal himself! If there be a calling child, there must be an answering father!

CHAPTER XXIII. A HUMAN GADFLY

From so early an age had Richard been accustomed to despise a certain form he called God, which stood in the gallery of his imagination, carved at by the hands of successive generations of sculptors, some hard, some feeble, some clever, some stupid, all conventional and devoid of prophetic imagination, that his antagonism had long taken the shape of an angry hostility to the notion of any God whatever. Richard could see a thing to be false, that is, he could deny, but he was not yet capable either of discovering or receiving what was true, because he had not yet set himself to know the truth. To oppose, to refuse, to deny, is not to know the truth, is not to be true any more than it is to be false. Whatever good may lie in the destroying of the false, the best hammer of the iconoclast will not serve withal to carve the celestial form of the Real; and when the iconoclast becomes the bigot of negation, and declares the non-existence of any form worthy of worship, because he has destroyed so many unworthy, he passes into a fool. That he has never conceived a deity such as he could worship, is a poor ground to any but the man himself for saying such cannot exist; and to him it is but a ground lightly vaulted over the vacuity self-importance. Such a divine form may yet stand in the adytum of this or that man whom he and the world count an idiot.

Into the workshop of Richard’s mind was now introduced, by this one disclosure of the mind of Barbara, a new idea of divinity, vague indeed as new, but one with which he found himself compelled to have some dealing. One of the best services true man can do a neighbour, is to persuade him—I speak in a parable—to house his children for a while, that he may know what they are: the children of another may be the saving of his children and his whole house. Alas for the man the children of whose brain are the curse of the household into which they are received! But from Barbara’s house Richard had taken into his a vital protoplasmic idea that must work, and would never cease to work until the house itself was all divine—the idea, namely, of a being to call God, who was a delight to think of, a being concerning whom the great negation was that of everything Richard had hitherto associated with the word God. The one door to admit this formal notion was hard to open; and when admitted, the figure was not easy to set up so that it could be looked at. The human niche where the idea of a God must stand, was in Richard’s house occupied by the most hideous falsity. On the pedestal crouched the goblin of a Japanese teapot.