Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, March 1885

The Evangelical School, with all its merits, had conceived of Christianity rather as something superadded the highest life of humanity than as the perfect development of that life; as a scheme for human salvation authenticated by miracles, and, so to speak, interpolated into human history rather than a divine philosophy, witnessing to itself from the beginning in all the higher phases of that history. And so Philosophy, and no less Literature, and Art, and Science, were conceived apart from religion. The world and the Church were not only antagonistic in the Biblical sense, as the embodiments of the Carnal and the Divine Spirit – which they must ever be; but they were, so to speak, severed portions of life divided by outward signs and badges: and those who joined the one or the other were supposed to be clearly marked off. All who know the writings of the Evangelical School of the eighteenth and earlier part of the nineteenth century, from the poetry of Cowper and the letters of his friend Newton, to the writings of Romaine, John Forster, and Wilberforce, and even Chalmers, will know how such commonplaces everywhere reappear in them. That they were associated with the most devout and beautiful lives, that they even served to foster a peculiar ardor of Christian feeling and love of God, cannot be disputed. But they were essentially narrow and false. They destroyed the largeness and unity of human experience. They not merely separated religion from art and philosophy, but they tended to separate it from morality.

Coleridge's most distinctive work was to restore the broken harmony between reason and religion, by enlarging the conception of both, but of the latter especially, – by showing how man is essentially a religious being having a definite spiritual constitution, apart from which the very idea of religion becomes impossible. Religion is not, therefore, something brought to man, it is his highest education. Religion, he says, was designed “to improve the nature and the faculties of man, in order to the right governing of our actions, to the securing the peace and progress, eternal and internal, of individuals and communities.” Christianity is in the highest degree adapted to this end; and nothing can be a part of it that is not duly proportioned thereto. In thus vindicating the rationality of religion, Coleridge had a twofold task before him, as every such thinker has. He had to assert against the Epicurean and Empirical School the spiritual constitution of human nature, and against the fanatical or hyper-evangelical school the reasonable working of spiritual influence. He had to maintain, on the one hand, the essential divinity of man, that “there is more in him than can be rationally referred to the life of nature and the mechanism of organisation,” and on the other hand to show that this higher life of the spirit is throughout rational – that it is superstition and not true religion which professes to resolve “men's faith and practice” into the illumination of such a spirit as they can give no account of, – such as does not enlighten their reason or enable them to render their doctrine intelligible to others. He fights, in short, alike against materialistic negation and credulous enthusiasm.

The former he meets with the assertion of “a spirituality in man,” a self-power or Will at the root of all his being. “If there be aught spiritual in man, the will must be such. If there be a will, there must be a spirituality in man.” He assumes both positions, seeing clearly – what all who radically deal with such a question must see – that it becomes in the end an alternative postulate on one side and the other. The theologian cannot prove his case, because the very terms in which it must be proved are already denied ab initio by the materialist. But no more can the materialist, for the same reason, refute the spiritual thinker. There can be no argument where no common premiss is granted. Coleridge was quite alive to this, yet he validly appeals to common experience. “I assume,” he says, “a something the proof which no man can give to another, yet every man may find for himself. If any man assert that he has no such experience, I am bound to disbelieve him, I cannot do otherwise without unsettling the foundation of my own moral nature. For I either find it as an essential of the humanity common to him and to me, or I have not found it at all… All the significant objections of the materialist and necessitarian,” he adds, “are contained in the term morality, and all the objections of the infidel in the term religion. These very terms imply something granted, which the objector in each case supposes not granted. A moral philosophy is only such because it assumes a principle of morality, a will in man, and so a Christian philosophy or theology has its own assumptions resting on three ultimate facts, namely, the reality of the law of conscience; the existence of a responsible will as the subject of that law; and lastly, the existence of God… The first is a fact of consciousness; the second, a fact of reason necessarily concluded from the first; and the third, a fact of history interpreted by both.”

These were the radical data of the religious philosophy of Coleridge. They imply a general conception of religion which was revolutionary for his age, simple and ancient as the principles are. The evangelical tradition brought religion to man from the outside. It took no concern of man's spiritual constitution beyond the fact that he was a sinner and in danger of hell. Coleridge started from a similar but larger experience, including not only sin, but the whole spiritual basis on which sin rests. “I profess a deep conviction,” he says, “that man is a fallen creature,” “not by accident of bodily constitution or any other cause, but as diseased in his will – in that will which is the true and only strict synonyme of the word I, or the intelligent Self.” This “intelligent Self” is a fundamental conception lying at the root of his system of thought. Sin is an attribute of it, and cannot be conceived apart for it, and conscience, or the original sense of right and wrong governing the will. Apart from these internal realities there is no religion, and the function of the Christian Revelation is to build up the spiritual life out of these realities – to remedy the evil, to enlighten the conscience, to educate the will. This effective power of religion comes directly from God in Christ. Here Coleridge joins the Evangelical School, as indeed every school of living Christian Faith. This was the element of Truth he found in the doctrine of Election as handled “practically, morally, humanly,” by Leighton. Every true Christian, he argues, must attribute his distinction not in any degree to himself – “his own resolves and strivings,” “his own will and understanding,” still less to “his own comparative excellence,” – but to God, “the being in whom the promise of life originated, and on whom its fulfilment depends.” Election so far is a truth of experience. “This the conscience requires; this the highest interests of morality demand.” So far it is a question of facts with which the speculative reason has nothing to do. But when the theological reasoner abandons the ground of fact and “the safe circle of religion and practical reason for the shifting sand-wastes and mirages of speculative theology,” then he uses words without meaning. He can have no insight into the workings or plans of a Being who is neither an object of his senses nor a part of his self-consciousness.

Nothing can show better than this brief exposition how closely Coleridge in his theology clung to a base of spiritual experience, and sought to measure even the most abstruse Christian mysteries by facts. The same thing may be shown by referring to his doctrine of the Trinity, which has been supposed the most transcendental and, so to speak, “Neo-Platonist” of all his doctrines. But truly speaking his Trinitarianism, like his doctrine of Election, is a moral rather than a speculative truth. The Trinitarian idea was, indeed, true to him notionally. The full analysis of the notion “God” seemed to him to involve it. “I find a certain notion in my mind, and say that is what I understand by the term God. From books and conversation I find that the learned generally connect the same notion with the same word. I then apply the rules laid down by the masters of logic for the involution and evolution of terms, and prove (to as many as agree with my premisses) that the notion 'God' involves the notion 'Trinity,'” So he argued, and many times recurred to the same Transcendental analysis. But the truer and more urgent spiritual basis of the doctrine of the Trinity, even to his own mind, was not its notional but its moral necessity. Christ could only be a Saviour as being Divine. Salvation is a Divine work. “The idea of redemption involves belief in the Divinity of our Lord. And our Lord's Divinity again involves the Trinitarian idea, because in and through this idea alone the Divinity of Christ can be received without breach of faith in the Unity of the Godhead.” In other words, the best evidence of the doctrine of the Trinity, is the compulsion of the spiritual conscience which demands a Divine Saviour; and only in and through the great idea of Trinity in Unity does this demand become consistent with Christian Monotheism.[8 - This was a favorite thought with Coleridge, as for example, in his Literary Remains (vol. i. p. 393-4): “The Trinity of Persons in the Unity of the Godhead would have been a necessary idea of my speculative reason. God must have had co-eternally an adequate idea of Himself in and through which He created all things. But this would only have been a speculative idea. Solely in consequence of our redemption does the Trinity become a doctrine, the belief of which as real is commanded by conscience.”]

These doctrines are merely used in illustration, as they are by Coleridge himself in his Aids to Reflection. But nothing can show in a stronger light the general character of the change which he wrought in the conception of Christianity. From being a mere traditional creed, with Anglican and Evangelical, and it may be added Unitarian alike, it became a living expression of the spiritual consciousness. In a sense, of course, it had always been so. The Evangelical made much of its living power, but only in a practical and not in a rational sense. It is the distinction of Coleridge to have once more in his age made Christian doctrine alive to the reason as well as the conscience – tenable as a philosophy as well as an evangel. And this he did by interpreting Christianity in the light of our moral and spiritual life. There are aspects of Christian truth beyond us —Exeunt in mysteria. But all Christian truth must have vital touch with our spiritual being, and be so far at least capable of being rendered in its terms, or, in other words, be conformable to reason.

There was nothing absolutely new in this luminous conception, but it marked a revolution of religious thought in the earlier part of our century. The great principle of the Evangelical theology was that theological dogmas were true or false without any reference to a subjective standard of judgment. They were true as pure data of revelation, or as the propositions of an authorised creed settled long ago. Reason had, so far, nothing to do with them. Christian truth, it was supposed, lay at had in the Bible, an appeal to which settled everything. Coleridge did not undervalue the Bible. He gave it an intelligent reverence. But he no less reverenced the spiritual consciousness or divine light in man; and to put out this light, as the Evangelical had gone far to do, was to destroy all reasonable faith. This must rest not merely on objective data, but on internal experience. It must have not merely authority without, but rationale within. It must answer to the highest aspiration of human reason, as well as the most urgent necessities of human life. It must interpret reason and find expression in the voice of our higher humanity, and so enlarge itself as to meet all its needs.

If we turn for a moment to the special exposition of the doctrines of sin and redemption which Coleridge has given in the Aids to Reflection, it is still mainly with the view of bringing out more clearly his general conception of Christianity as a living movement of thought rather than a mere series of articles or a traditionary creed.

In dealing first with the question of sin, he shows how its very idea is only tenable on the ground of such a spiritual constitution in man as he has already asserted. It is only the recognition of a true will in man – a spirit or supernatural in man, although “not necessarily miraculous” – which renders sin possible. “These views of the spirit and of the will as spiritual,” he says more than once, “are the groundwork of my scheme.” There was nothing more significant or fundamental in all his theology. If there is not always a supernatural element in man in the shape of spirit and will, no miracles or anything else can ever authenticate the supernatural to him. A mere formal orthodoxy, therefore, hanging upon the evidence of miracles, is a suspension bridge without any real support. So all questions between infidelity and Christianity are questions here, at the root, and not what are called “critical” questions as to whether this or that view of the Bible be right, or this or that traditionary dogma be true. Such questions are, truly speaking, inter-Christian questions, the freest views of which all Churches must learn to tolerate. The really vital question is whether there is a divine root in man at all – a spiritual centre, answering to a higher spiritual centre in the universe. All controversies of any importance come back to this. Coleridge would have been a great Christian thinker if for no other reason than this, that he brought all theological problems back to this living centre, and showed how they diverged from it. Apart from this postulate, sin was inconceivable to him; and in the same manner all sin was to him sin of origin or “original sin.” It is the essential property of the will that it can originate. The phrase original sin is therefore “a pleonasm.” If sin was not original, or from within the will itself, it would not deserve the name. “A state or act that has not its origin in the will may be a calamity, deformity, disease, or mischief, but a sin it cannot be.”

Again he says: “That there is an evil common to all is a fact, and this evil must, therefore, have a common ground. Now this evil ground cannot originate in the Divine will; it must, therefore, be referred to the will of man. And this evil ground we call original sin. It is a mystery, that is, a fact which we see, but cannot explain; and the doctrine a truth which we apprehend, but can neither comprehend nor communicate. And such by the quality of the subject (namely, a responsible will) it must be, if it be truth at all.”

This inwardness is no less characteristic of Coleridge's treatment of the doctrine of atonement or redemption. It is intelligible so far as it comes within the range of spiritual experience. So far its nature and effects are amply described or figured in the New Testament, especially by St. Paul. And the apostle's language, as might be expected, “takes its predominant colors from his own experience, and the experience of those whom he addressed.” “His figures, images, analogies, and references,” are all more or less borrowed from this source. He describes the Atonement of Christ under four principal metaphors: 1. Sin-offering, sacrificial expiation. 2. Reconciliation, atonement, καταλλάγη. 3. Redemption, or ransom from slavery. 4. Satisfaction, payment of a debt. These phrases are not designed to convey to us all the Divine meaning of the atonement, for no phrases or figures can do this; but they set forth its general aspect and design. One and all they have an intelligible relation to our spiritual life, and so clothe the doctrine for us with a concrete living and practical meaning. But there are other relations and aspects of the doctrine of atonement that transcend experience, and consequently our powers of understanding. And all that can be said here is, “exit in mysteria.” The rationalism of Coleridge is at least a modest and self-limiting rationalism. It clears the ground within the range of spiritual experience, and floods this ground with the light of reason. There is no true doctrine can contradict this light, or shelter itself from its penetration. But there are aspects of Christian doctrine that outreach all grasp of reason, and before which reason must simply be silent. For example, the Divine act in redemption is “a causative act – a spiritual and transcendent mystery that passeth all understanding. 'Who knoweth the mind of the Lord, or being his councillor who hath instructed him?' Factum est.” This is all that can be said of the mystery of redemption, or of the doctrine of atonement on its Divine side.

And here emerges another important principle of the Coleridgian theology. While so great an advocate of the rights of reason in theology, of the necessity, in other words, of moulding all its facts in a synthesis intelligible to the higher reason he recognises strongly that there is a province of Divine truth beyond all such construction. We can never understand the fulness of Divine mystery, and it is hopeless to attempt to do so. While no mind was less agnostic in the modern sense of the term, he was yet with all his vivid and large intuition, a Christian agnostic. Just because Christianity was Divine, a revelation, and not a mere human tradition, all its higher doctrines ended in a region beyond our clear knowledge. As he himself said, “If the doctrine is more than a hyperbolical phrase it must do so.” There was great pregnancy in this as in his other conceptions; and probably no more significant change awaits the theology of the future, than the determination of this province of the unknown, and the cessation of controversy, as to matters which come within it, and therefore admit of no dogmatic settlement.

(2.) But it is more than time to turn to the second aspect, in which Coleridge appears as a religious leader of the thought of the nineteenth century. The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit was not published till six years after his death, in 1840; and it is curious to notice their accidental connection with the Confessions of a Beautiful Soul, which had been translated by Carlyle some years before.[9 - In his well-known translation of Wilhelm Meister.] These Confessions, in the shape of seven letters to a friend, gather together all that is valuable in the Biblical criticism of the author scattered through his various writings; and although it may be doubtful whether the volume has ever attained the circulation of the Aids to Reflection, it is eminently deserving – small as it is, nay, because of its very brevity – of a place beside the larger work. It is eminently readable, terse and nervous, as well as eloquent in style. In none of his writings does Coleridge appear to greater advantage, or touch a more elevating strain, rising at times into solemn music.

The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit were of course merely one indication of the rise of a true spirit of criticism in English theology. Arnold, Whately, Thirlwall, and others, it will be seen, were all astir in the same direction, even before the Confessions were published. The notion of verbal inspiration, or the infallible dictation of Holy Scripture, could not possibly continue after the modern spirit of historical inquiry had begun. As soon as men plainly recognised the organic growth of all great facts, literary as well as others, it was inevitable that they should see the Scriptures in a new light, as a product of many phases of thought in course of more or less perfect development. A larger and more intelligent sense of the conditions attending the origin and progress of all civilisation, and of the immaturities through which religious as well as moral and social ideas advance, necessarily carried with it a changed perception of the characteristics of Scriptural revelation. The old Rabbinical notion of an infallible text was sure to disappear. The new critical method besides is, in Coleridge's hands, rather an idea – a happy and germinant thought – than a well-evolved system. Still to him belongs the honor of having first plainly and boldly announced that the Scriptures were to be read and studied, like any other literature, in the light of their continuous growth, and the adaptation of their parts to one another.

The divinity of Scripture appears all the more brightly, when thus freely handled. “I take up the work,” he says, “with the purpose to read it as I should read any other work – so far as I can or dare. For I neither can nor dare throw off a strong and awful prepossession in its favor, certain as I am that a large part of the light and life in and by which I see, love, and embrace the truths and the strengths organised into a living body of faith and knowledge have been directly or indirectly derived to me from the sacred volume.” All the more reason why we should not make a fetish of the Bible, as the Turk does of the Koran. Poor as reason may be in comparison with “the power and splendor of the Scriptures,” yet it is and must be for him a true light. “While there is a Light higher than all, even the Word that was in the beginning; – the Light of which light itself is but the Schechinah and cloudy tabernacle; – there is also a 'Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world;' and the spirit of man is declared to be 'the candle of the Lord,'” “If between this Word,” he says, “and the written letter I shall anywhere seem to myself to find a discrepance, I will not conclude that such there actually is. Nor, on the other hand, will I fall under the condemnation of those that would lie for God, but, seek as I may, be thankful for what I have and wait.”

Such is the keynote of the volume. The supremacy of the Bible as a divinely inspired literature is plainly recognised from the first. Obviously it is a book above all other books in which deep answers to deep, and our inmost thoughts and most hidden griefs find not merely response, but guidance and assuagement. And whatever there finds us “bears witness for itself that it has proceeded from the Holy Spirit.” “In the Bible,” he says again, “there is more that finds me than I have experienced in all other books put together; the words of the Bible find me at greater depths of my being, and whatever finds me brings with it an irresistible evidence of its having proceeded from the Holy Spirit.”

But there is much in the Bible that not only does not find us in the Coleridgian sense, but that seems full of contradictions, both moral and historical; the psalms in which David curses his enemies; the obviously exaggerated ages attributed to the patriarchs; and the incredible number of the armies said to be collected by Abijah and Jeroboam (2 Chron. xiii. 3), and other incidents familiar to all students of Scripture. What is to be made of such features of the Bible? According to the old notion of its infallibility such parts of Scripture, no less than its most elevating utterances of “lovely hymn and choral song and accepted prayer of saint and prophet,” were to be received as dictated by the Holy Spirit. They were stamped with the same Divine authority. Coleridge rightly enough emphasises this view as that of the fathers and reformers alike; but he no less rightly points out that not one of them is consistent in holding to their general doctrine. Their treatment of the Scriptures in detail constantly implies the fallacy of the Rabbinical tradition to which they yet clung. He no less forcibly points out that the Scriptures themselves make no such pretension to infallibility, “explicitly or by implication.” “On the contrary, they refer to older documents, and on all points express themselves as sober-minded and veracious writers under ordinary circumstances are known to do.” The usual texts quoted, such as 2 Tim. iii. 16, have no real bearing on the subject. The little we know as to the origin and history of many of the books of the Bible, of “the time of the formation and closing of the canon,” of its selectors and compilers, is all opposed to such a theory. Moreover, the very nature of the claim stultifies itself when examined. For “how can infallible truth be infallibly conveyed in defective and fallible expression?”

But if the tenet of verbal inspiration has been so long received and acted on “by Jew and Christian, Greek, Roman, and Protestant, why can it not now be received?” “For every reason,” answered Coleridge, “that makes me prize and revere these Scriptures; – prize them, love them, revere them beyond all other books.” Because such a tenet “falsifies at once the whole body of holy writ, with all its harmonious and symmetrical gradations.” It turns “the breathing organism into a colossal Memnon's head, a hollow passage for a voice,” which no man hath uttered, and no human heart hath conceived. It evacuates of all sense and efficacy the fact that the Bible is a Divine literature of many books, “composed in different and widely distant ages under the greatest diversity of circumstances and degrees of light and information.” So he argues in language I have partly quoted and partly summarised. And then he breaks forth into a magnificent passage about the song of Deborah, a passage of rare eloquence with all its desultoriness, but which will hardly bear separation from the context. The wail of the Jewish heroine's maternal and patriotic love is heard under all her cursing and individualism – mercy rejoicing against judgment. In the very intensity of her primary affections is found the rare strength of her womanhood; and sweetness lies near to fierceness. Such passages probably give us a far better idea of the occasional glory of the old man's talk as “he sat on the brow of Highgate Hill,” than any poor fragments of it that have been preserved. Direct and to the point it may never have been, but at times it rose into an organ swell with snatches of unutterable melody and power.

(3.) But Coleridge contributed still another factor to the impulsion of religious thought in his time. He did much to revive the historic idea of the Church as an intellectual as well as a spiritual commonwealth. Like many other ideas of our older national life this had been depressed and lost sight of during the eighteenth century. The Evangelical party, deficient in learning generally, was especially deficient in breadth of historical knowledge. Milner's History, if nothing else, serves to point this conclusion. The idea of the Church as the mother of philosophy and arts and learning, as well as the nurse of faith and piety, was unknown. It was a part of the Evangelical creed, moreover, to leave aside as far as possible mere political and intellectual interests. These belonged to the world, and the main business of the religious man was with religion as a personal affair, of vast moment, but outside all other affairs. Coleridge helped once more to bring the Church as he did the gospel into larger room as a great spiritual power of manifold influence.

This volume On the Constitution of Church and State according to the idea of each was published in 1830, and was the last volume which the author himself published. The Catholic Emancipation question had greatly excited the public mind, and some friend had appealed to Coleridge expressing astonishment that he should be in opposition to the proposed measure. He replied that he is by no means unfriendly to Catholic emancipation, while yet “scrupling the means proposed for its attainment.” And in order to explain his difficulties he composed a long letter to his friend which is really an essay or treatise, beginning with the fundamental principles of his philosophy and ending with a description of antichrist. The essay is one of the least satisfactory of his compositions from a mere literary point of view, and is not even mentioned by Mr. Traill in his recent monograph. But amidst all its involutions and ramblings it is stimulating and full of thought on a subject which almost more than any other is liable to be degraded by unworthy and sectarian treatment. Here, as everywhere in Coleridge's writings, we are brought in contact with certain large conceptions which far more than cover the immediate subject in hand.

It has been sometimes supposed that Coleridge's theory of the Church merely revived the old theory of the Elizabethan age so powerfully advocated by Hooker and specially espoused by Dr. Arnold in later times. According to this theory the Church and State are really identical, the Church being merely the State in its educational and religious aspect and organisation. But Coleridge's special theory is different from this, although allied to it. He distinguishes the Christian Church as such from any national church. The former is spiritual and catholic, the latter institutional and local. The former is opposed to the “world,” the latter is an estate of the realm. The former has nothing to do with states and kingdoms. It is in this respect identical with the “spiritual and invisible church known only to the Father of Spirits,” and the compensating counterpoise of all that is of the world. It is, in short, the Divine aggregate of what is really Divine in all Christian communities, and more or less ideally represented “in every true church.” A national church again is the incorporation of all the learning and knowledge – intellectual and spiritual – in a country. Every nation in order to its true health and civilisation requires not only a land-owning or permanent class along with a commercial, industrial, and progressive class, but moreover, an educative class to represent all higher knowledge, “to guard the treasures of past civilisation,” to bind the national life together in its past, present, and future, and to communicate to all citizens a clear understanding of their rights and duties. This third estate of the realm Coleridge denominated the “Clerisy,” and included not merely the clergy, but, in his own language, “the learned of all denominations.” The knowledge, which it was their function to cultivate and diffuse, embraced not only theology, although this pre-eminently as the head of all other knowledge, but law, music, mathematics, the physical sciences, “all the so-called liberal arts and sciences, the possession and cultivation of which constitute the civilisation of a country.”

This is at any rate a large conception of a national church. It is put forth by its author with all earnestness, although he admitted that it had never been anywhere realised. But it was his object “to present the Idea of a national church as the only safe criterion by which we can judge of existing things.” It was only when “we are in full and clear possession of the ultimate aim of an institution” that we can ascertain how far “this aim has ever been attained in other ways.”

These, very briefly explained, are the main lines along which Coleridge moved the national mind in the third decade of this century. They may seem to some rather impalpable lines, and hardly calculated to touch the general mind. But they were influential, as the course of Christian literature has since proved. Like his own genius, they were diffusive rather than concentrative. The Coleridgian ideas permeated the general intellectual atmosphere, modifying old conceptions in criticism as well as theology, deepening if not always clarifying the channels of thought in many directions, but especially in the direction of Christian philosophy. They acted in this way as a new circulation of spiritual air all around, rather than in conveying any new body of truth. The very ridicule of Carlyle testifies to the influence which they exercised over aspiring and younger minds. The very emphasis with which he repudiates the Coleridgian metaphysic probably indicates that he had felt some echo of it in his own heart. —Fortnightly Review.

THE PORTRAIT

A Story of the Seen and the Unseen

At the period when the following incidents occurred I was living with my father at The Grove, a large old house in the immediate neighborhood of a little town. This had been his home for a number of years; and I believe I was born in it. It was a kind of house which, notwithstanding all the red and white architecture, known at present by the name of Queen Anne, builders nowadays have forgotten how to build. It was straggling and irregular, with wide passages, wide staircases, broad landings; the rooms large but not very lofty; the arrangements leaving much to be desired, with no economy of space; a house belonging to a period when land was cheap, and, so far as that was concerned, there was no occasion to economise. Though it was so near the town, the clump of trees in which it was environed was a veritable grove. In the grounds in spring the primroses grew as thickly as in the forest. We had a few fields for the cows, and an excellent walled garden. The place is being pulled down at this moment to make room for more streets of mean little houses, – the kind of thing, and not a dull house of faded gentry, which perhaps the neighborhood requires. The house was dull, and so were we, its last inhabitants; and the furniture was faded, even a little dingy, – nothing to brag of. I do not, however, intend to convey a suggestion that we were faded gentry, for that was not the case. My father, indeed, was rich, and had no need to spare any expense in making his life and his house bright if he pleased; but he did not please, and I had not been long enough at home to exercise any special influence of my own. It was the only home I had ever known; but except in my earliest childhood, and in my holidays as a schoolboy, I had in reality known but little of it. My mother had died at my birth, or shortly after, and I had grown up in the gravity and silence of a house without women. In my infancy, I believe, a sister of my father's had lived with us, and taken charge of the household and of me; but she, too, had died long, long ago, my mourning for her being one of the first things I could recollect. And she had no successor. There was, indeed, a housekeeper and some maids, – the latter of whom I only saw disappearing at the end of a passage, or whisking out of a room when one of “the gentlemen” appeared. Mrs. Weir, indeed, I saw nearly every day; but a curtsey, a smile, a pair of nice round arms which she caressed while folding them across her ample waist, and a large white apron, were all I knew of her. This was the only female influence in the house. The drawing-room I was aware of only as a place of deadly good order, into which nobody ever entered. It had three long windows opening on the lawn, and communicated at the upper end, which was rounded like a great bay, with the conservatory. Sometimes I gazed into it as a child from without, wondering at the needlework on the chairs, the screens, the looking-glasses which never reflected any living face. My father did not like the room, which probably was not wonderful, though it never occurred to me in those early days to inquire why.

I may say here, though it will probably be disappointing to those who form a sentimental idea of the capabilities of children, that it did not occur to me either, in these early days, to make any inquiry about my mother. There was no room in life, as I knew it, for any such person; nothing suggested to my mind either the fact that she must have existed, or that there was need of her in the house. I accepted, as I believe most children do, the facts of existence, on the basis with which I had first made acquaintance with them, without question or remark. As a matter of fact, I was aware that it was rather dull at home; but neither by comparison with the books I read, nor by the communications received from my school-fellows, did this seem to me anything remarkable. And I was possibly somewhat dull too by nature, for I did not mind. I was fond of reading, and for that there was unbounded opportunity. I had a little ambition in respect to work, and that too could be prosecuted undisturbed. When I went to the university, my society lay almost entirely among men; but by that time and afterwards, matters had of course greatly changed with me, and though I recognised women as part of the economy of nature, and did not indeed by any means dislike or avoid them, yet the idea of connecting them at all with my own home never entered into my head. That continued to be as it had always been, when at intervals I descended upon the cool, grave, colorless place, in the midst of my traffic with the world; always very still, well-ordered, serious – the cooking very good, the comfort perfect – old Morphew, the butler, a little older (but very little older, perhaps on the whole less old, since in my childhood I had thought him a kind of Methuselah), and Mrs. Weir, less active, covering up her arms in sleeves, but folding and caressing them just as always. I remember looking in from the lawn through the windows upon that deadly-orderly drawing-room, with a humorous recollection of my childish admiration and wonder, and feeling that it must be kept so forever and ever, and that to go into it would break some sort of amusing mock mystery, some pleasantly ridiculous spell.

But it was only at rare intervals that I went home. In the long vacation, as in my school holidays, my father often went abroad with me, so that we had gone over a great deal of the Continent together very pleasantly. He was old in proportion to the age of his son, being a man of sixty when I was twenty, but that did not disturb the pleasure of the relations between us. I don't know that they were ever very confidential. On my side there was but little to communicate, for I did not get into scrapes nor fall in love, the two predicaments which demand sympathy and confidences. And as for my father himself, I was never aware what there could be to communicate on his side. I knew his life exactly – what he did almost at every hour of the day; under what circumstances of the temperature he would ride and when walk; how often and with what guests he would indulge in the occasional break of a dinner-party, a serious pleasure – perhaps, indeed, less a pleasure than a duty. All this I knew as well as he did, and also his views on public matters, his political opinions, which naturally were different from mine. What ground, then, remained for confidence? I did not know any. We were both of us of a reserved nature, not apt to enter into our religious feelings, for instance. There are many people who think reticence on such subjects a sign of the most reverential way of contemplating them. Of this I am far from being sure; but, at all events, it was the practice most congenial to my own mind.

And then I was for a long time absent, making my own way in the world. I did not make it very successfully. I accomplished the natural fate of an Englishman, and went out to the Colonies; then to India in a semi-diplomatic position; but returned home after seven or eight years, invalided, in bad health and not much better spirits, tired and disappointed with my first trial of life. I had, as people say, “no occasion” to insist on making my way. My father was rich, and had never given me the slightest reason to believe that he did not intend me to be his heir. His allowance to me was not illiberal, and though he did not oppose the carrying out of my own plans, he by no means urged me to exertion. When I came home he received me very affectionately, and expressed his satisfaction in my return. “Of course,” he said, “I am not glad that you are disappointed, Philip, or that your health is broken; but otherwise it is an ill wind, you know, that blows nobody good – and I am very glad to have you at home. I am growing an old man – ”

“I don't see any difference, sir,” said I; “everything here seems exactly the same as when I went away – ”

He smiled, and shook his head. “It is true enough,” he said, “after we have reached a certain age we seem to go on for a long time on a plane, and feel no great difference from year to year; but it is an inclined plane – and the longer we go on, the more sudden will be the fall at the end. But at all events it will be a great comfort to me to have you here.”

“If I had known that,” I said, “and that you wanted me, I should have come in any circumstances. As there are only two of us in the world – ”

“Yes,” he said, “there are only two of us in the world; but still I should not have sent for you, Phil, to interrupt your career.”

“It is as well, then, that it has interrupted itself,” I said, rather bitterly; for disappointment is hard to hear.

He patted me on the shoulder and repeated, “It is an ill wind that blows nobody good,” with a look of real pleasure which gave me a certain gratification too; for, after all, he was an old man, and the only one in all the world to whom I owed any duty. I had not been without dreams of warmer affections, but they had come to nothing – not tragically, but in the ordinary way. I might perhaps have had love which I did not want, but not that which I did want, – which was not a thing to make any unmanly moan about, but in the ordinary course of events. Such disappointments happen every day; indeed, they are more common than anything else, and sometimes it is apparent afterward that it is better it was so.

However, here I was at thirty stranded – yet wanting for nothing, in a position to call forth rather envy than pity from the greater part of my contemporaries, – for I had an assured and comfortable existence, as much money as I wanted, and the prospect of an excellent fortune for the future. On the other hand, my health was still low, and I had no occupation. The neighborhood of the town was a drawback rather than an advantage. I felt myself tempted, instead of taking the long walk into the country which my doctor recommended, to take a much shorter one through the High Street, across the river, and back again, which was not a walk but a lounge. The country was silent and full of thoughts – thoughts not always very agreeable – whereas there were always the humors of the little urban population to glance at, the news to be heard, all those petty matters which so often make up life in a very impoverished version for the idle man. I did not like it, but I felt myself yielding to it, not having energy enough to make a stand. The rector and the leading lawyer of the place asked me to dinner. I might have glided into the society, such as it was, had I been disposed for that – everything about me began to close over me as if I had been fifty, and fully contented with my lot.

It was possibly my own want of occupation which made me observe with surprise, after a while, how much occupied my father was. He had expressed himself glad of my return; but now that I had returned, I saw very little of him. Most of his time was spent in his library, as had always been the case. But on the few visits I paid him there, I could not but perceive that the aspect of the library was much changed. It had acquired the look of a business-room, almost an office. There were large business-like books on the table, which I could not associate with anything he could naturally have to do; and his correspondence was very large. I thought he closed one of those books hurriedly as I came in, and pushed it away, as if he did not wish me to see it. This surprised me at the moment, without arousing any other feeling; but afterward I remembered it with a clearer sense of what it meant. He was more absorbed altogether than I had been used to see him. He was visited by men sometimes not of very prepossessing appearance. Surprise grew in my mind without any very distinct idea of the reason of it; and it was not till after a chance conversation with Morphew that my vague uneasiness began to take definite shape. It was begun without any special intention on my part. Morphew had informed me that master was very busy, on some occasion when I wanted to see him. And I was a little annoyed to be thus put off. “It appears to me that my father is always busy,” I said, hastily. Morphew then began very oracularly to nod his head in assent.

“A deal too busy, sir, if you take my opinion,” he said.

This startled me much, and I asked hurriedly, “What do you mean?” without reflecting that to ask for private information from a servant about my father's habits was as bad as investigating into a stranger's affairs. It did not strike me in the same light.

“Mr. Philip,” said Morphew, “a thing 'as 'appened as 'appens more often than it ought to. Master has got awful keen about money in his old age.”

“That's a new thing for him,” I said.

“No, sir, begging your pardon, it ain't a new thing. He was once broke of it, and that wasn't easy done; but it's come back, if you'll excuse me saying so. And I don't know as he'll ever be broke of it again at his age.”

I felt more disposed to be angry than disturbed by this. “You must be making some ridiculous mistake,” I said. “And if you were not so old a friend as you are, Morphew, I should not have allowed my father to be so spoken of to me.”

The old man gave me a half-astonished, half-contemptuous look. “He's been my master a deal longer than he's been your father,” he said, turning on his heel. The assumption was so comical that my anger could not stand in face of it. I went out, having been on my way to the door when this conversation occurred, and took my usual lounge about, which was not a satisfactory sort of amusement. Its vanity and emptiness appeared to be more evident than usual to-day. I met half a dozen people I knew, and had as many pieces of news confided to me. I went up and down the length of the High Street. I made a small purchase or two. And then I turned homeward – despising myself, yet finding no alternative within my reach. Would a long country walk have been more virtuous? – it would at least have been more wholesome – but that was all that could be said. My mind did not dwell on Morphew's communication. It seemed without sense or meaning to me; and after the excellent joke about his superior interest in his master to mine in my father, was dismissed lightly enough from my mind. I tried to invent some way of telling this to my father without letting him perceive that Morphew had been finding faults in him, or I listening; for it seemed a pity to lose so good a joke. However, as I returned home, something happened which put the joke entirely out of my head. It is curious when a new subject of trouble or anxiety has been suggested to the mind in an unexpected way, how often a second advertisement follows immediately after the first, and gives to that a potency which in itself it had not possessed.

I was approaching our own door, wondering whether my father had gone, and whether, on my return, I should find him at leisure – for I had several little things to say to him – when I noticed a poor woman lingering about the closed gates. She had a baby sleeping in her arms. It was a spring night, the stars shining in the twilight, and everything soft and dim; and the woman's figure was like a shadow, flitting about, now here, now there, on one side or another of the gate. She stopped when she saw me approaching, and hesitated for a moment, then seemed to take a sudden resolution. I watched her without knowing, with a prevision that she was going to address me, though with no sort of idea as to the subject of her address. She came up to me doubtfully, it seemed, yet certainly, as I felt, and when she was close to me, dropped a sort of hesitating curtsey, and said, “It's Mr. Philip?” in a low voice.

“What do you want with me?” I said.

Then she poured forth suddenly, without warning or preparation, her long speech – a flood of words which must have been all ready and waiting at the doors of her lips for utterance. “Oh, sir, I want to speak to you! I can't believe you'll be so hard, for you're young; and I can't believe he'll be so hard if so be as his own son, as I've always heard he had but one, 'll speak up for us. Oh, gentleman, it is easy for the likes of you, that, if you ain't comfortable in one room, can just walk into another; but if one room is all you have, and every bit of furniture you have taken out of it, and nothing but the four walls left – not so much as the cradle for the child, or a chair for your man to sit down upon when he comes from his work, or a saucepan to cook him his supper – ”

“My good woman,” I said, “who can have taken all that from you? surely nobody can be so cruel?”

“You say it's cruel!” she cried with a sort of triumph. “Oh, I knowed you would, or any true gentleman that don't hold with screwing poor folks. Just go and say that to him inside there, for the love of God. Tell him to think what he's doing, driving poor creatures to despair. Summer's coming, the Lord be praised, but yet it's bitter cold at night with your counterpane gone; and when you've been working hard all day, and nothing but four bare walls to come home to, and all your poor little sticks of furniture that you've saved up for, and got together one by one, all gone – and you no better than when you started, or rather worse, for then you was young. Oh, sir!” the woman's voice rose into a sort of passionate wail. And then she added, beseechingly, recovering herself – “Oh, speak for us – he'll not refuse his own son – ”

“To whom am I to speak? who is it that has done this to you?” I said.